Saturday, August 4, 2007

Do we have more to fear than fear itself?

I was looking through the list of Senate Democrats who voted for the surveillance reform bill yesterday. Sixty votes were needed, and 60 votes were obtained. To get to 60, some usually reliably anti-Bush Democratic Senators voted to give Bush everything he wanted for another six months. Among these surprising Bush supporters were Carper of Delaware, Mikulski of Maryland, and our own Jim Webb. Prior to the Democratic cave-in, Sen. Lott had explicitly warned of an imminent terrorist attack and claimed that voting with Bush was necessary to try to prevent the attack. Lott even advised residents to leave town until Sept. 12, the day after the sixth anniversary of the attacks of 9/11/01. Of all the Dems needed to get to 60, is it possible Carper, Mikulski, and Webb signed on, because their own constituents would likely be affected by any such attack? Why Mikulski and not Cardin? Is it because Mikulski's term is up before Cardin's? [Biden still hopes to be nominated, and obviously Warner voted with Bush.] It sure seems like important information about our safety is being kept from us. I hate not knowing whether I'm being paranoid or whether the most rational explanation is that the information is so bad and so imminent that the costs of publishing in terms of panic and damage to our political institutions outweighs the damage of the attack itself.

2 comments:

jsrutstein said...

Full disclosure - I corrected my original post. I had also questioned why Carper and not Whitehouse, before realizing that Biden was the other Delaware Senator, Whitehouse being from Rhode Island.

Anonymous said...

Nose counters vs. nose pickers. The dems want the war to be Bush's war and want the spy program to be Bush's spy program. So, now, in addition to how many more troops and civilians the dems are going to let get killed just to keep their bloody hands appearing clean and how much more of our treasure we're willing to waste making us less safe while our infrastructure literally crumbles beneath us, we now have to ask how much more of our civil liberty and how much more legislative power are they willing to cede just so they can avoid being blamed by the 25% dead enders for any attack Bush's lax homeland security strategy enables. I'm sure the grotesque number of dem senators running for president insisted that enough of their wavering colleagues swallowed Bush's sword before a vote was allowed. What a vile country we've become.