Fear and the Bush administration's style of governing

I'm kind of surprised that most every Democratic-leaning blog doesn't regularly pick up on Gene Lyons' weekly column in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.  Admittedly, that paper is probably not everyone's first choice for their Internet Explorer home page.  Me, either.  I have El Mundo for mine.

But I do check the Democrat-Gazette site weekly for his column, in which this week he asks Have Americans lost the guts for democracy? 01/04/05.

Lyons is not impressed with Bush's recent defense of his warrentless spying on American citizens:

Adopting a pseudo-folksy tone that makes him sound as if he’s reading “My Pet Goat” to third-graders, Bush allowed as how “If somebody from al-Qa’ida is calling you, we’d like to know why.... I think most Americans understand the need to find out what the enemy’s thinking.”

Well, no kidding. No sane person opposes that kind of surveillance. A couple of years ago, I found myself receiving suspect messages emanating somewhere in the Middle East using a hijacked, defunct e-mail address. I went directly to the FBI. Who wouldn’t ? For that matter, I’m pressing the authorities to shut down my own pet stalker, a nameless coward making what he imagines are anonymous threats.

But he goes on to explain that the FISA law regulating such actions allows for such surveillance in situations where there's any kind of indication of Al Qaeda connections.

But, as the title indicates, his point is really about courage versus fear.  In regard to the current state of things in which many Americans are open to crass fear-mongering from the President, he asks:

How can this great nation have been brought to such a pass by a few thousand stateless fanatics hiding in caves ? Have Americans still got the guts for democracy ? Whatever happened, I wonder, to “the land of the free and the home of the brave” ?

And he defines the Presidential fear-mongering like this:

Every time George W. Bush gets caught in a tight spot, he does the same thing : He plays the 9 / 11 fear card, wraps himself in the flag, emits jawdropping falsehoods and all but accuses his critics of treason. So it is with the stunning revelation that the White House has ordered the illegal, warrantless wiretapping of American citizens in brazen defiance of federal law and the U. S. Constitution. If allowed to stand, Bush’s actions will have taken the United States a long way down the road to military dictatorship. Indeed, that’s essentially what his legalistic enablers, starting with Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and Vice President Dick Cheney, argue : that in wartime, the commander-in-chief can take any action he deems appropriate to protect the nation, bypassing Congress and the courts to assert the primacy of the presidency until declaring victory in the “war on terror.” As terrorism is not an enemy, but a tactic - a vile, cowardly tactic, but by definition not subject to being defeated - the metaphorical war against it could last indefinitely. And as long as it lasts, the commander-in-chief rules by fiat. Our constitutional rights exist at his sufferance.

Glenn Greenwald at Digby's Hullabaloo blog also recently posted about Bush's fear-mongering: Attacking Bush's only weapon: Fear 01/05/05.  He writes:

There is no more important goal than exposing and undermining the cowardly and exaggerated fear which lies at the core of the Bush agenda. If, as has been the case, we are bullied into starting from the tacit premise that Islamic terrorism is a unique and unprecedented evil which threatens our very existence -- rather than one of many challenges which we must calmly face and overcome -- then it is a foregone conclusion that whoever advocates the most extreme “anti-terrorist” measures, no matter how excessive and regardless of whether they comport with legal niceties, will prevail.

If that fear-mongering premise is left unchallenged – if we are too afraid to dispute the premise that Islamic terrorism is the “unprecedented” existential threat to the United States which, at any moment, is likely to cause our cities to be in flames and our children to be glowing with radiation and therefore must outweigh every other issue and concern – then we will lose that debate every time, which is what has been happening.