The title is from the 12/18/2006 editorial in US News & World Reports by Ed-in-Chief Mort Zuckerman and he closes with,
"What has been done to date - border controls, intensity of interrogation, even airport searches - has not diminished most citizens' "feel of freedom." But if we were to experience a major attack that could have been thwarted by effective countermeasures, the public outcry for action would make the present restrictions seem a mere bagatelle. So the greatest threat to civil liberties today is not preventive measures, but failing to take them."
I kid you not, this is an exact quote of the final paragraph of USN&WP, not a wingnut Blog, but MSM.
I'll start with the closing sentence, broken down to its simplest element it is: lose civil liberties to not lose civil liberties. If you can make this work without your head exploding there is no reason to read further.
Still here? Well I kind of like the juxtaposition of border controls, intensity of interrogation, and airport searches. Throw that border control in there as though we're actually doing anything in that arena. When you're being propagandized it's important to note the little things, this is the same numb skull that awhile ago advocated ceding construction to illegal immigrants because they're there. Take that one from there on your own.
There are complicated constructions that replace simple words when you try to minimize or hide what you're saying, there is a very simple word that means intensity of interrogation - torture. Yes a noun exists that covers an awkward three word construction that the Chief Editor used. The Chief Editor is the person who sets the content of a magazine, its context and its tone. Someone with access to a dictionary and a Thesaurus and probably able to read them.
The real meaning of this mess is indicated when you connect "even airport searches" and " "feel of freedom" " (" " is necessary). Airport searches are, to the ordinary citizen, the most obtrusive of the security elements he's willing to bring up and most impinge on the quote modified feel of freedom, a thing that the sentence indicates is non-existent by that structural element.
Thus we arrive at what he's actually writing on the last page, #80, of U.S. News & World Reports, Volume 141, Number 23, December 18, 2006 : We take away your civil liberties so you'll feel like you have the civil liberties that you don't actually have. He's used the entire last page's volume of words to convince the readers that the terrorists in the US are the threat. I agree, and they work for USN&WR.
2 comments:
amazing isn't it, that after publications such as USN&WR failed to do their job and sufficiently question a president who, hijacking our post 9/11 hysteria, led us to war based on a false link and supposed WMD's, and after the same president blatantly violates the constitution he swore to uphold, admitting to warrantless surveillance, that now the Editor of a major publication decides we need to trust this man with more authority at a point when we're not even sure how far he's taken the authority he's been given or that he imagines he's given as a "unitary chief executive."
Amazing that now such a mainstream publication asks us to surrender our civil liberties to save them.
I was alarmed at the level of hatred in this country, but even more stunning is the level of incompetence found in the institutions that were specifically given rights within the bill of rights to ensure that citizens of a free nation received the information they needed to vote properly. He doesn't even call for any limits in this wartime power, despite the fact that we are in a war of the president's making in which American lives and money are being thrown away into a situation that is making us less safe and inciting more violence that may be used against us.
This article is truly frightening.
Scared the spit out of me. I'm totally enamored of the "feeling of freedom" crack.
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