By We must remember, November 9 at 10:50 am #
(Unregistered commenter)
How will we know when we are being manipulated and propagandized, and how will we know if someone exposing an iniquity is a nut or a truthteller?  Through vastly expanded wiretapping and who knows what else, the Bush administration put a chill, perhaps a deathly chill in some cases, on truthseeking and dissent.
Task number one for President Obama: Debushification.

Well, on the first part of this question…we don’t know, making this the ultimate $50000 gazillion dollar question which will continued to be studied through infinity.

But, there is NO denying the very serious damage the Dick Bush administration has done to our society by destroying the constitution and the rule of law. In fact, someone else mentions here, (or references) the work of Hannah Arendt in “The Origins of Totalitarianism” and it is right on spot for this, and so much else that has been so destructive to us, collectively and individually, because of the Dick Bush administration.

That said, I think nearly all of us probably agree that task number on for President Obama should be Debushcheneyification. AND…lucky for us, President Obama seems to have the same idea; As we now see from his apparently long ago decision to reverse all of the unconstitutional Executive Orders that the Thug regime has created over the past 8 years.

http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/20081109_obama_in_charge/?ln

(too bad he can’t undo the damage caused by them).

But, to quote Maya Angelou:
“History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.”
- Maya Angelou

Now of course just as any other self-respecting scholar of Law & Society must be to hear this news, I’m delighted.

And yes JohnT, the FBI has been monitoring people in the public eye for longer than I’ve been around, and I’m no spring chicken.

I don’t honestly know, (and I’m not sure who would) how today’s surveillance compares to the cointellpro operations of the 60’s and 70’s, when Hoover was at the peak of his dastardly deeds. That might be an interesting project..just to do a compare and contrast.

Yes, John, the intelligence and police agencies routinely spied on public figures during the Cold War, including John Gailbraith, John Lennon, and Albert Einstein.  Obama just voted for expanding and continuing it.

Why these dirty bastards. Will we EVER see the end of the dastardly deeds of Hoover and his ilk? It doesn’t seem like it. Dick Bush just revved it up about a jillion notches during the past 8 years, and now we’ve got a whole new infection on top of the earlier “America’s Worst Public Servant” that was Hoover. He’s been outvoted at this point, but he’s still a nightmare that won’t go away.

Here’s the part, (from his wife) that I can really relate to:

“..She called the agency’s monitoring of the writer “a terrible waste” of time and taxpayer money.

“David’s life was very much an open book,” she said. “He did not much care about what people who disagreed with him thought about him.”“

That’s what I don’t get with these people, and now it’s not only the FBI. That’s the horror. Because if it was ONLY the FBI, (instead of private sector corporate ‘security people’) they wouldn’t HAVE the resources. But know, they co-opt the corporate entity treating it as a part of the government, because that’s the marriage that has become our so-called Democracy.

So now we’ve got everybody spying on everybody else, even though there’s no reason for it. I despise these people.