Brain Fertilizer

Here's his commentary for today:

Thursday, September 09, 2004 "THE GOVERNMENT'S ASSAULT ON DISSENT"

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In a moment of theological reflection, Woody Allen once declared: "I believe there is something out there watching us. Unfortunately, it's the government."

Woody's little joke has become today's chilling reality as the Bush-Ashcroft regime has imposed measure after measure of new autocratic police power to keep watch over We the People. All of this has been done under the guise of "fighting terrorists" – but the government's focus increasingly is shifting from "them" to "us."

The latest example is the FBI's heavy-handed push to harass, intimidate, and suppress ordinary citizens who seek to protest governmental or corporate policies. Prior to the national conventions of both the Republican and Democratic parties, the so-called "justice" department dispatched federal agents to at least six states to trail and grill potential protesters. As one young protester put it, the government agents were trying "to let us know that, 'hey, we're watching you.'"

This repressive "knock-on-the-door" by authorities is not merely directed at targets known to be plotting criminal activity, but at citizens who were simply planning to attend legitimate protests. Ashcroft himself asserts that these people "might, perhaps, possibly could have the potential to do something criminal – or that they might, perhaps, possibly could know someone who could do so.

The justice department's infamous office of legal policy okayed this vague, Big Brotherish assault on our individual liberty by declaring that any "chilling" of the right to dissent would be outweighed by the need for order.

Of course, throughout our country's history, from the Red Coats forward, bullying autocrats have always donned the dark cloak of "order" to rationalize their repression. The Bush-Ashcroft use of FBI snoops to intimidate today's dissenters is not about preventing crime, but about preventing protest.

To protest their crude attempt to lock down protest, call the ACLU: 212-549-2500.

This is stupid. Really stupid. It reaches "I can't believe anyone gets paid to write this crap" levels of stupidity.

Having someone from the government knock on your door is "repressive"?!??! Is he serious? He must feel horrified every time he uses a credit card and someone asks to see his ID, because the implicit accusation that just maybe he might be engaging in credit card fraud without absolute proof must be impossible for him to take.

Have any of these people been taken into custody? No. So Mr. Hightower demands that the government must wait until it has incontrovertible evidence that someone is going to commit a crime before it can assume anything...but in the absence of any evidence at all, he feels free to assume the government is acting maliciously? It's the sort of logic that is so circular and so steeped in paranoia that it cannot be reasoned with at all, much less disproven.

On a completely different level, these people are worthless. Our forefathers risked death to free the nation from the tyranny of England. Many people in US and world history have undergone torture and abuse and still not been deterred from striving for goals of freedom and democracy and faith. But someone knocks on their door and they feel too scared to even stand on the roadside and chant. I wouldn't want any of these cowardly fools in charge of a lemonade stand, much less anything political or diplomatic.

And I find it amusing and revealing that he feels the need to base an entire screed around this truly minor issue as a significant point in his campaign against the Bush Administration, but can't even find a moment to critique the way Democrats handled protest at their convention: putting all protestors into a walled enclosure, complete with razor wire. Yes, the Democrats made it an implicit threat that if they regain power, all protestors will be put in prison. I think most rational individuals would find such a "free speech zone" to seem so threatening and restrictive as to stifle most free speech.