They can see (and hear) clearly now

 

My country does the hanky-panky.

Of all the scandals that have come to light (or semi-darkness) in the second consulship of Hussein -- the IRS used as a hit squad against Hussein's opponents (or "enemies" in Obamamind), the weird unexplained background to the killing of four Americans at the Benghazi consulate, "Fast and Furious" -- the most worrying by far is the revelation of eavesdropping on a gigunda scale. First we thought it involved a few journos -- ironically including some in the Associated Press, the most shameless politically correct, Hussein toe-kisser in the media -- and now we find the eyes and ears of the National Security Agency are on ... all of us.

Let's not be hysterical. The country is not a police state -- anyone who has actually lived in one will tell you there is a big difference, although perhaps of degree. (A former girlfriend, who lived in Czechoslovakia when it was a Soviet satellite, clued me in on what went down there.) We still have freedom of speech that is only a memory in, for instance, the United Kingdom.

But we (Americans) live in a Surveillance State. That is, unless you're also a Muslim, since our beyond-sensitive security hounds are prohibited by law from electronic scrutiny of mosques. In our advanced dementia, the Watchers can sift through the lives of anyone, any time, anywhere -- except the most probable source of the conspiracies they are protecting us against. Right now, this posting is doubtless stored in a computer database at NSA to be analyzed for no-no keywords. 

And massively scaled surveillance is a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for tyranny.

I have nothing more to say. But I will turn the microphone over to Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who is still revered in some circles as our greatest jurist. He wrote:

A strong public desire to improve the public condition is not enough to warrant achieving the desire by a shorter cut than the constitutional way of paying for the change.

How fortunate he was to live in a time when such antics could be presumed a genuine desire to improve the public condition.