Peeping Barry
By MAUREEN DOWD
WASHINGTON — THE acid that corroded George W. Bush’s presidency was fear — spreading it and succumbing to it.
You could see the fear in his eyes, the fear that froze him in place,
after Andy Card whispered to W. in that Florida classroom that a second
plane had crashed into the twin towers.
The blood-dimmed tragedy of 9/11 was chilling. But instead of rising
above the fear, W. let it overwhelm his better instincts. He and Dick
Cheney crumpled the Constitution, manipulated intelligence to go to war
against a country that hadn’t attacked us, and implemented warrantless
eavesdropping — all in the name of keeping us safe from terrorists.
Americans want to be protected, but not at the cost of vitiating the
values that make us Americans.
That is why Barack Obama was so stirring
in 2007 with his spirited denunciations of W.’s toxic trade-offs. The
up-and-coming senator and former constitutional law professor railed
against the Bush administration’s “false choice, between the liberties
we cherish and the security we provide.”
Now that we are envisioning some guy in a National Security Agency
warehouse in Fort Meade, Md., going through billions of cat videos and
drunk-dialing records of teenagers, can the Ministries of Love and Truth
be far behind?
“There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at
any given moment,” George Orwell wrote in “1984.” “How often, or on
what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was
guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the
time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted
to.”
It was quaint to think we had any privacy left, once Google, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram braided themselves into our days and nights.
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