Posted on 12/31/2002 6:05:24 AM PST by LibertyBelt
Bush Policy's Newest Critics - Conservatives
It's not the left that is sounding some of the harshest criticism against the president's tactics in fighting the war on terrorism, it's many of the nation's most solid Republican conservatives.
So says Michelle Goldberg, writing for Salon.com, claiming that "rock-ribbed" Republican conservatives are the "newest, most outspoken critics of the war on terrorism and Iraq."
While the administration isn't surprised when it's being assailed by left-wingers for what liberals claim are increasingly draconian assaults on civil liberties, it has been surprised by a similar chorus from more and more members of the traditional right wing.
Goldberg cites such prominent conservatives as former Georgia Congressman Bob Barr, who has joined liberal American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) as a consultant - and former House Minority Leader Dick Armey now negotiating with the ACLU - as two of the top GOP critics of what they see as the administration's dangerous slide toward big brotherism.
Also among those expressing similar concerns are such staunch Republican conservatives as Eagle Forum founder Phyllis Schlafly, who Goldberg reports is worried that some of the Pentagon programs are dragging the U.S. toward "Big Brother government as imagined by George Orwell.
"We don't want the government to monitor our daily activities," says Schlafly. "Technology is moving so fast. When they're able to combine our medical records, travel records, education records, gun purchases, credit card records, this is total information that I don't think the government should have about law-abiding citizens if we value freedom."
Goldberg counts Lisa Dean, director of the center for technology policy at conservative Republican activist Paul Weyrich's Free Congress Foundation, as another conservative critic. Dean, she reports, warns that the administration's expansion of domestic surveillance programs is "antithetical to everything we stand for.
"I never thought I'd see conservatives running to the government to solve problems like they do now. That's just not conservatism to me," she says. "People look at Homeland Security, the USA PATRIOT Act, national I.D. cards and say, if that protects us, we'll go ahead. I never would have thought I'd hear conservatives say that," she says.
Had Clinton been president, Dean told Goldberg, conservatives would have "pulled together and fought" these initiatives, even after 9/11. Dean explained that many conservatives accept Bush's incursions on civil liberties as a matter of personality, not principle.
"Conservatives trust Bush," she said. "They think he wouldn't do anything to harm them, that everything he's doing is for a noble cause," she says. This personal affinity for Bush, she says, blinds her fellow conservatives to the massive structural changes taking place in government.
"The groundwork we're laying now, we're laying for the next administration and one after that and one after that. At the same time, we're raising a generation of citizens on the belief that it's OK to give up all of our liberties in exchange for security. That's un-American."
Also in the anti-big-brother camp is New York Times columnist William Safire, long known as a fervent hawk in foreign policy, who now warns that "This is not some far-out Orwellian scenario. It is what will happen to your personal freedom in the next few weeks if [Iran Contra scandal figure] John Poindexter, who now heads the Defense Department's Information Awareness Office, "gets the unprecedented power he seeks."
One of the harshest conservative critics is Phil Gold, a hard-nosed ex-Marine and long a right-wing stalwart. Gold, who Goldberg describes as a "former Georgetown professor who campaigned for Barry Goldwater, worked on Steve Forbes' presidential run, and has written for publications like the Weekly Standard and the American Spectator," complains that the new direction of the conservative movement is so disturbing that he recently quit his job as a senior fellow in National Security Affairs at Seattle's conservative Discovery Institute because of his opposition to the war with Iraq. Moreover, he said goodbye to the right in general in a Seattle Weekly article, "Goodbye to All That."
"Over the last several years," he wrote, "I've become sadly convinced that American conservatism has grown, for lack of a better word, malign." That movement to which he has given most of his life, he says, "has gained the government, trashed its soul, and now bestrides the planet."
"We no longer have a commitment to limited government," he says. "I no longer recognize the movement. What I started out with isn't there anymore. The fact that mainstream conservatives are going along with [Poindexter's so-called TIA program - Total Information Awareness] and with TIPS indicates that these principles are no longer resonant in the movement."
"Power corrupts," he writes. "It corrupts especially when you've got it, but can't seem to accomplish what you set out to do, and you've jettisoned your ideals somewhere along the way but can't quite face the fact."
At the root of this conservative disquiet is the right wing's traditional distrust of government power. They recall Benjamin Franklin's warning that those who sacrifice liberty for safety's sake deserve neither liberty not safety.
Conservatives have genuine fears of out-of-control federal power. They recall Ruby Ridge and Waco, where federal agents killed religious fundamentalists who tried to live outside government's prying eyes. Like Gold, they believe that the Bush administration has betrayed its principles by expanding the federal bureaucracy and authorizing vast new domestic surveillance programs, Goldberg explains, noting that "If big government spying programs are going to be defeated, such conservatives are going to play a major role."
After all, she writes, it was Dick Armey who killed TIPS, the proposed Justice Department program that would have recruited mail carriers, meter readers and other workers with access to private homes to act as government snoops. Armey added language to the Homeland Security Bill specifically outlawing both TIPS and a national ID card.
"The leadership of Congressman Armey was very important," Barry Steinhardt, director of the ACLU's technology and liberty program, told Goldberg.
"Elements of the conservative movement and of the Republican party have held to their principles of limited government."
"Both Ashcroft and President Bush have departed from their earlier emphasis on protecting privacy and have really become statists, who want to impose the power of the state on us to surveil us and also to prevent any dissent," says Steinhardt. "They're certainly not conservatives when it comes to wielding the powers of the state."
In fact, says Steinhardt, the ACLU are now the real conservatives. "We think of ourselves as the most conservative organization in America," he says. "We're dedicated to preserving the values of an 18th century document."
#2. Do you think the USA is in danger of becoming a Big Brother State, or is that lib/conserv hysteria from the fringes?....
Pardon me while I laugh myself sick...
And all three readers agreed.
And what happens when the next Bill Clinton derivative comes along? He or she will not be attracted to using the new structural changes to their own benefit, or will they?
#2. Yes.
As far as "Big Brother"? George Orwell had it right. Big Brother is a camera on you all the time and the software behind the camera is very smart. There is no data processing system capable of such a thing and certainly won't be in out lifetimes.
* We just recived a multi-page questionaire from the U.S. Census Bureau regarding our company. It shocked us in that it wants a lot of information that simply is not any of the governments business. In some ways it collects more information than the IRS collects with a corporate tax return. The forms says that the information must be provided under penalty of law. For "statistical purposes". We just started looking at the forms. I may post more on this later.
If Bush is his son, he SURE doesn't want us to know it.
Either way, for us to escape the grips of the NWO, something really, really BIG is going to have to happen (bigger than BIG BROTHER).
Not this conservative...I do not trust the President.
The average Bush supporter is really no different than those on the left who want more and bigger gooberment.
As long as "their guy" is in office, they don't have a problem with giving up their (and my) liberties and freedoms.
Bush is doing some things that if they had been done by clinton, the so-called conservatives here would blow a gasket.
Now I disagree with you that we have nothing to fear in our lifetimes. Take a drive in a suburban neighborhood and look at the cameras and video equipment hoisted near the traffic signal. This is becoming more and more prevalent. Why do we need this? 'Pod
This whole story is a very good and accurate picture of what we might be getting into.
For example, our Number One threat to national security are the wide-open borders with Canada and Mexico.
Terrorists freely come and go over these vast terrotories with ease and at will.
Now. To even possibly attempt to gain control over this threat, mass placements of federal troops would have to be used for the degree of physical security required to repair the secutiry breach.
We are talking tens of thousands of federal troops stationed on our borders here folks.
It is very, very unlikely this will ever happen.
However, in the awful scenario that the U.S. was attacked again or with WMD, the U.S. has no other choice than to physically secure it's borders with troops.
While that seems a good proposal on the surface, the dangers of these same federal troops being used for purposes other than border patrol are very likely.
Probably, a new military command would have to be established for this force under the central control of a military commander who would report to some high-level beaureaucrat in D.C. - then ultimitely to the President.
The problem I see here is for these troops to be used by a President (not necessarily Bush - back off!) against American civilians in sceanrios such as house-to-house "shakedowns."
Impossible you say? Consider the possibilities is such a force came under the control of the likes of Reno or Hitlery Clinton.
Your close the barn door after the horse is out theory smacks of the type of conservative the article disdains, the security over freedom type, and you shall have neither.
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