Bush's spying: mistaking Quakers, Unitarians and vegetarians for terrorists

in her own unique way, molly ivins sums up what we already know...

Here is a curious fact about the government of this country spying on its citizens: It always goes wrong immediately. For some reason, it's not as though we start with people anyone would regard as suspicious and then somehow slip gradually into spying on the Girl Scouts. We get it wrong from the beginning every time. Never seem to be able to distinguish between a terrorist and a vegetarian.

The Department of Defense has just proved this yet again with its latest folly of mistaking a flock of Florida Quakers for a threat to overthrow the government. A few months ago, a student at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth tried to check out a copy of Mao's "Little Red Book" and wound up being interviewed by two feds. Cointelpro and all those misbegotten Nixon-era spy programs were always making ludicrous mistakes.

The usual suspects, like that silly congressman Dan Burton, solemnly try to scare us with the dread specter of war, as though they alone are the hard-headed pragmatists, while only woolly minded liberals care about the Constitution. "Don't these people realize we're at war?" Well, yes. Why that justifies treating Unitarians like Islamofascists is beyond me.

and the nyt is not responsible for how badly george, the boy-king, is conducting his war on terror...

Bush just could not resist that especially nasty little fillip at the end: blaming the people who reported the problem. As though the sin were telling the people of this country what is happening, what is being done in our name with our money, as though we have no right to know.

molly ivins has one of the best senses of humor of anyone i know... the terribly sad part of reading her columns these days is that what she is writing about is so terribly un-funny... a lot of her material in the past was driven by political escapades and sleazy personalities that, while often south of the law, at least were humorous in their blatancy... the bushco crowd, however, as engaged as they are in such massive destruction of an entire country, make it fairly hard to point and giggle...

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