The Left Is What It Once Loathed
American Greatness,
by
Victor Davis Hanson
Original Article
Posted By: earlybird,
5/18/2020 11:17:38 AM
Compare the current progressive view about civil liberties against the old liberal positions of the past.
Surveillance and spying on U.S. citizens? Remember liberal Senator Frank Church of Idaho and his 1975 post-Watergate select Senate investigative committee? It found the CIA, FBI, and NSA improperly over three decades had tapped into the phones of Americans, opened their mail, and worked with telecommunications companies to monitor the data of supposedly suspect politicians, actors, celebrities, and political activists. “Collusion” with the communists and the Russians was often the pretense to surveil American citizens.
(Snip) the Left’s position had once mostly been that the government’s unelected deep-state intelligence officers simply had too much power
Reply 1 - Posted by:
earlybird 5/18/2020 11:18:59 AM (No. 414664)
And so the Russia paranoia was a ploy:
Russia is no longer a global Communist superpower rival. Yet the Obama Administration’s CIA, NSA, and FBI were every bit as obsessed with Vladimir Putin as had the old Right worried about Leonid Brezhnev—as if a contemporary kleptocratic thug lording over a failed and shrinking state posed the same existential dangers as a Communist dictator reigning over a huge postwar empire dedicated to destroying the free world.
Actually, at the behest of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the U.S. earlier had reached out to Putin in a naïve, flawed “reset” appeasement that failed. So, the Obama Administration’s about-face obsession with Putin the monster always was largely a convenient gambit of wanting to destroy the Trump campaign, transition, and presidency.
8 people like this.
Reply 2 - Posted by:
Jesuslover54 5/18/2020 11:20:47 AM (No. 414666)
The elite left has never lived in a crappy apartment, or doesn't want to remember.
11 people like this.
Reply 3 - Posted by:
Clinger 5/18/2020 11:24:49 AM (No. 414674)
Did they loath the abuse of power or did they loath the fact that they weren't the ones with the power at the time?
This is like the French revolution; lop off the heads of the monarchs to put an emperor in their place.
What was America was really quite exceptional. Thank you George Washington.
13 people like this.
Reply 4 - Posted by:
smsnod 5/18/2020 12:46:56 PM (No. 414781)
obama was obsessed with Putin because Putin is everything barry is not & Putin has control over his country that obama coveted for himself here.
9 people like this.
Here's an easy question I'd like to pose to VDH and others...
Do you believe that our political leadership is divided by honest ideological differences that are able to be reconciled. Or, are they united by such as motive to reward special interests and profit from the American public's trust of the system by mere portrayal of the differences?
Whether it's Pelosi coming up with crazy bills that are "dead on arrival" in the Senate, or McConnell who somehow orchestrates an imperfect compromise and finally gathers up a sufficient number of votes to underscore the Republican reluctance to go along...but they do anyway, wholly in the national interest, promising to clean up the mess afterwards. Meanwhile TRILLIONS are out the door...because the public demands Congress do something...
And all this while the Republicans holding a majority in either/both chambers twiddle thumbs while loudly threatening to get to the bottom of ___(fill in your favorite scandal/crisis)___.
Vince McMahon should sue for plagiarism.
4 people like this.
Reply 6 - Posted by:
Fireball27 5/18/2020 1:33:32 PM (No. 414834)
Remember when the libs were so against the "Patriot Act"? I was for it. We needed it to go after terrorists right after 9/11. And now I have to admit what they said at the time was right. Too much room for government overreach. Little did I know how the Obama gang would corrupt the system. Now you hear about "FISA" abuse. Most people never heard of FISA and don't realize that it is the Patriot Act, and how Obama corrupted it. We have to refer to the FISA abuse as Patriot Act violations. Maybe then the regular people will know just what happened. They will begin to see how the Obama administration did exactly what the libs were worried about when the Patriot Act was voted in. Calling it FISA is letting the libs get away with hiding what they did.
8 people like this.
Reply 7 - Posted by:
edgar 5/18/2020 1:34:10 PM (No. 414837)
I heard Jackson Brown's "Redneck Friend" the other day and times have changed. That song is an uncanny description of today's unhinged left wingers.
2 people like this.
Reply 8 - Posted by:
stablemoney 5/18/2020 1:41:54 PM (No. 414841)
The citizens have been spied on throughout history. In the snail mail era, the governments sent their agents to the post office to open and read their targets mail, then resealed it, and returned it to the postman for delivery. It doesn't matter which government you have, it cannot be trusted.
2 people like this.
Reply 9 - Posted by:
bpl40 5/18/2020 1:44:27 PM (No. 414845)
I have a slightly different view. They have ALWAYS been what they pretended to hate.
9 people like this.
Reply 10 - Posted by:
john56 5/18/2020 2:12:48 PM (No. 414876)
George Orwell was way ahead of his time.
But I'm not sure on which book he was most correct -- Animal Farm or 1984. Maybe both.
3 people like this.
Reply 11 - Posted by:
BarryNo 5/18/2020 3:00:11 PM (No. 414930)
Victor, the left NEVER loathed what it has become. It simply has become careless. Where they lived to the public about their plans, their actions said it all. From the founding of the country, the 'Party of Jefferson' has plotted the enslavement of their fellow Americans, "for their own good".
Which translates to, "for my benefit and increasing power."
2 people like this.
Reply 12 - Posted by:
BarryNo 5/18/2020 3:02:00 PM (No. 414932)
Lied. Not lived. Damn spell check, I swear, attempts to sabotage ant criticism of Liberals.
1 person likes this.
Reply 13 - Posted by:
DVC 5/18/2020 3:29:59 PM (No. 414951)
The Left only loathed it because they didn't control it. Once they controlled it, they LOVE IT.
2 people like this.
Reply 14 - Posted by:
doctorfixit 5/18/2020 3:37:41 PM (No. 414956)
The left has always been totalitarian, fascist, and communist. Total government control by an elite oligarchy is where they have always been.
3 people like this.
Reply 15 - Posted by:
RuckusTom 5/18/2020 8:29:59 PM (No. 415186)
The right and conservatism is today's counter culture.
1 person likes this.
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