Irony in the News

These are, uh, interesting times. I love how the new guy is turning things around, shaking hands with foreign leaders, actually making decisions about the economy, working on health care and the environment and a hundred other things. But there is something, to tell you the truth, that's getting on my nerves a little bit.

Let's talk about torture. It has never been any secret that the United States was torturing people. Nobody is really surprised to find out about that. It's a subject that has been percolating under the surface for years, but, and here's the part that sticks in my craw, the media have treated the issue as if it was unimportant. I remember seeing Chris Matthews a couple of years ago talking about how such-and-such politician wanted to talk about torture and people weren't interested in that, people didn't care about that, what they cared about was the economy. Well, I watched Chris Matthews last night, and he is, all of a sudden, outraged about torture. I guess now "people" care about torture.

People didn't care about it because they didn't know about it, because the media weren't reporting it (because people didn't care about it, a tidy tautology). Now I see we -- and sorry, people, it's first person plural, we elected the clowns who decided to do this -- waterboarded that one guy a hundred eighty times in a month. That's torture, and it's excessive. Seymour Hersh has looked into the issue and written important articles about the American torture machine, and nobody else mentioned it.

Now, all of a sudden, it's news. My Washington Post this morning had at least three stories in the A section, two on the front page, about torture. All of a sudden everybody's outraged.

This isn't a fad, it isn't like a new singing group that all the kids suddenly listen to. The United States has systematically imprisoned people in secret prisons and tortured them for years. Maybe they were all bad people, I don't know one way or the other, but I know that torture is illegal and worse than that, it's wrong. It has always been illegal and wrong, but the media treated it like it was just a minor piece of collateral damage, like a bomb that hits a house next door to an intended military target.

Another thing: the loss of privacy. During the Bush administration, Americans lost a lot of rights, from the guarantee of habeus corpus to the freedom from warrantless searches and wiretaps. The administration didn't destroy those rights by itself, the executive branch doesn't pass laws, they got the complicity of the Congress in all this.

You know where I'm going with this now, right?

Glenn Greenwald writing in Salon has a devastating piece about the hypocrisy of a particular Blue Dog Democratic Congresswoman who has been busted on the basis of wiretaps. These are the "nice" kind, the NSA actually got warrants for these. Jane Harman was one of the most vocal about the need for the government to be able to listen in on citizens' conversations as easily as possible, and now she's been caught doing stuff and all of a sudden she sees that it was not such a good idea.

She expected privacy after she herself helped give away the right to privacy.

Here's a paragraph from Greenwald.

So if I understand this correctly -- and I'm pretty sure I do -- when the U.S. Government eavesdropped for years on American citizens with no warrants and in violation of the law, that was "both legal and necessary" as well as "essential to U.S. national security," and it was the "despicable" whistle-blowers (such as Thomas Tamm) who disclosed that crime and the newspapers which reported it who should have been criminally investigated, but not the lawbreaking government officials.  But when the U.S. Government legally and with warrants eavesdrops on Jane Harman, that is an outrageous invasion of privacy and a violent assault on her rights as an American citizen, and full-scale investigations must be commenced immediately to get to the bottom of this abuse of power.  Behold Jane Harman's overnight transformation from Very Serious Champion of the Lawless Surveillance State to shrill civil liberties extremist. 

Everybody knows it's a bad idea to let the government snoop on the people. Somebody might not be doing anything wrong, but they still deserve to be able to do it with confidence that the thousand eyes of federal government are not watching them. You don't want the government listening to your phone calls, and look what a nice person you are! You never say anything you wouldn't want repeated in a courtroom or in the news, but you wouldn't want some government employee with headphones on listening to your phone calls. Just imagine if you were pulling crooked backroom political strings. Or hey, imagine if the phone calls of every American politician were recorded and published in the newspaper! You and I would get a kick out of it, but you better believe those rights would be restored very quickly.

The Patriot Act was passed without anyone in Congress even reading it. It was a bad idea. The very first thing the Founding Fathers did after writing the Constitution was to amend it with passages guaranteeing American citizens certain rights, the Bill of Rights is the cornerstone of our modern liberal society, but the Bush administration and Congress saw it as an obstacle to their goal of "Total Information Awareness" for the federal government. Anybody who was paying attention was concerned, it is not news that our right to privacy has evaporated.

The word irony is often misused. Ms. Harman's huff about her privacy being violated is a textbook example of the concept. It was a bad idea to make wiretaps easier to get, and it's still a bad idea. All of a sudden the badness of the idea dawns on a victim of her own policy. That's irony. We're seeing a lot of it now, as the chickens come home to roost.