Signing away our liberties. It does happen here!

75 years ago Herr Hitler came to power. He and his gang of thugs set about to dismantle Weimar Germany's constitutional framework. And we know what that meant if we read even a little history. Upton Sinclair whose 'Oil' is now a top honoured art film, wrote 'It could happen here' in 1936 as a call to order that in the US authoritarism's jack boot could tramp, tramp, tramp down America's main streets. And the popularist Louisiana Huey Long put it blountly, 'if fascism came to America, it would come wrapped in the American flag'. And Nathaniel West in his own way wrote about it in his 'Balso Snell'.
Well, guess what, after much dithering and dickering, the US senate voted to enlarge Herr Bush's power to spy more broadly on US citizens through wire tapping without the courts' permission, and allowed the feckless Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, among other carriers, to escape prosecution for violating a citizen's constitutional right by complying with Herr Bush out of control wiretapping, tampering with the mails under the guise of his misplaced war on terrorism. The vote in the senate saw 16 Democrats cross over to the Republicans to approve of the bill of theirs by a vote of 68 to 29. The hope in making at least the utility companies liable to the power of the law in fines and imprisonment, lies with the house of representatives who thought that these spaghetti spined comanpies deserve the full weight of the law. Yet that remains to be seen. It is bad enough that our mails and e mails and telephone conversation are collected and trolled illegally by the government. It's a sweep like those the US troops carry out in Iraq or used to in Vietnam. Anyone caught in this net is presumed guilty. The object all sublime of government spying on its citizenry and constitutional guarantees be damned! is to fish out of the sea of people the moles of Al Qaeda. Fat chance! If anything it is to control the American citizenry. It takes a leap of faith to believe in the benign intents of mini mouse Bush. His track record rates a triple d minus in respecting rights and telling the truth. As the evidence before us the court of public is definitely a verdict of guilty on all counts in Herr Bush's case. To think otherwise is an exercise in flummery and sanctimonious twaddle.
And if matters were not bad enough, you've that arch Thomist and supreme court judge Antonin Scalia who in one of his pronouncement 'urbi & orbi' does sees a role for physical interrogations. Although he qualifies his arguments with that and that, his mere approval of such physicality in interrogations opens the Pandora Box up and down the line to the torturing of prisoners. Does he not know what happened at Abu Gharib? or at Guantenamo? Well 18Brumaire suggest that he see Alex Gibney's 'Journey to the Dark Side'!
So yes it can and is happening here. Not as brutally or in your face as Herr Hitler's Germany but the erosion of civil liberties is continuing and with the aid and approval of our houses of congress, in fear that one doesn't think them testicle less fops! Few do remember that the law which put American Japanese into internment camps is still on the books, and that that supreme transvestite J. Edgar Hoover had petitioned president Dwight Eisenhower to allow him to round up un Americans during the Korea War and lock them up in such camps and throw the key away! Herr Bush & co. haven't such scruples.