Selective Outrage

Arlene Getz asks in an Internet piece for Newsweek, "Where's the Outrage?"

It's right here.

I'm outraged that Newsweek continues to promote its transparent anti-Bush campaign by giving Getz a forum for her drivel.

She writes:


Back in the 1980s, when I was living in Johannesburg and reporting on apartheid South Africa, a white neighbor proffered a tasteless confession. She was "quite relieved," she told me, that new media restrictions prohibited our reporting on government repression. No matter that Pretoria was detaining tens of thousands of people without real evidence of wrongdoing. No matter that many of them, including children, were being tortured—sometimes to death. No matter that government hit squads were killing political opponents. No matter that police were shooting into crowds of black civilians protesting against their disenfranchisement. "It's so nice," confided my neighbor, "not to open the papers and read all that bad news."

I thought about that neighbor this week, as reports dribbled out about President George W. Bush's sanctioning of warrantless eavesdropping on American conversations. For anyone who has lived under an authoritarian regime, phone tapping—or at least the threat of it—is always a given. But U.S. citizens have always been lucky enough to believe themselves protected from such government intrusion. So why have they reacted so insipidly to yet another post-9/11 erosion of U.S. civil liberties?

Maybe Americans have reacted "insipidly" because they understand the post-9/11 world, an understanding that the Left seems to lack. If liberals do understand the realities of wartime, then they have made a conscious decision to pursue personal political gain by risking national security.

Getz's comparison of life in the U.S. today with apartheid South Africa is disgraceful.

Such ridiculous assertions are the ramblings of an obviously confused person, someone incapable of grasping the issues, let alone reality.

Can you imagine discussing counterterrorism with Getz, listening to her goofy rant, nodding politely, and all the while thinking, "That poor befuddled woman"?
I'm sure there are many well-meaning Americans who agree with their president's explanation that it's all a necessary evil (and that patriotic citizens will not be spied on unless they dial up Osama bin Laden). But the nasty echoes of apartheid South Africa should at least give them pause. While Bush uses the rhetoric of "evildoers" and the "global war on terror," Pretoria talked of "total onslaught." This was the catchphrase of P. W. Botha, South Africa's head of state from 1978 to 1989. Botha was hardly the first white South African leader to ride roughshod over civil liberties for all races, but he did it more effectively than many of his predecessors. Botha liked to tell South Africans that the country was under "total onslaught" from forces both within and without, and that this global assault was his rationale for allowing opponents to be jailed, beaten or killed. Likewise, the Bush administration has adopted the argument that anything is justified in the name of national security.

"Anything is justified in the name of national security."

Unbelievable!
Where was Getz on September 11, 2001?

Did she see people jumping from the upper floors of the burning World Trade Center towers, preferring to plunge to their deaths rather than be consumed by the flames?

Did she hear the heart-wrenching final messages of love left by victims of the attacks on the answering machines of their family members?

Did she attend funeral after funeral of the firefighters murdered when the towers collapsed? Did she look into the eyes of the widows and the children of the fallen?

How can she compare a government that jailed, beat, and killed its own citizens with life in post 9/11 America?

It is absurd.

No connection can be made with eavesdropping to prevent a reoccurrence of the horror of 9/11 and the abuses of apartheid South Africa.

President Bush is not the leader of a repressive regime. There is no systematic effort to strip away our freedoms. The fact that Newsweek and other liberal rags are free to publish their lies proves that.
Botha was right about South Africa being under attack. Internally, blacks and a few whites were waging a low-level guerrilla war to topple the government. Externally, activists across the globe were mobilizing economic sanctions and campaigns to ostracize Pretoria. By the same token, we all know that Bush is right about the United States facing a very real threat of further terror. Yet should Americans really be willing to accept that autocratic end-justifies-the-means argument?

For so many around the world, the United States is as much a symbol as a nation. Outsiders may scoff at American naiveté in thinking that their conversations are private, but they envy them for growing up in a society so sheltered that it made such a belief possible. Among those who feel this way is Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the South African Anglican leader who won a Nobel Peace Prize for his principled fight for justice in his native country. "It's unbelievable," he told me in an interview, "that a country that many of us have looked to as the bastion of true freedom could now have eroded so many of the liberties we believed were upheld almost religiously."

The problem with Leftists like Getz whining about the erosion of civil liberties is that they act as if American history began the day George W. Bush took the oath of office as the 43rd President of the United States.

Why wasn't there concern about the erosion of civil liberties under other administrations?

Do I need to go into the activities of Clinton's tenure?

Several instances of "erosion" prior to Bush's first term have been highlighted by a number of publications in recent days.

A few examples:
1) Clinton enemies were targeted by IRS audits.

2) The confidential tax returns of Paula Jones were leaked to the media.

3) The Clintons had 1,100 FBI files sent to the White House Counsel's office.

4) Warrantless eavesdropping occurred under the international communications espionage network, codenamed Echelon.

5) One of the most famous examples of warrantless searches in recent years was the investigation of CIA official Aldrich H. Ames, who ultimately pleaded guilty to spying for the former Soviet Union. That case was largely built upon secret searches of Ames' home and office in 1993, conducted without federal warrants.

6) In 1994, President Clinton expanded the use of warrantless searches to entirely domestic situations with no foreign intelligence value whatsoever. In a radio address promoting a crime-fighting bill, Mr. Clinton discussed a new policy to conduct warrantless searches in highly violent public housing projects.

7) In 1978, Attorney General Griffin B. Bell testified before a federal judge about warrantless searches he and President Carter had authorized against two men suspected of spying on behalf of the Vietnam government.

8) In 1978, Congress approved and Mr. Carter signed FISA, which created the secret court and required federal agents to get approval to conduct electronic surveillance in most foreign intelligence cases.

These are just a few recent examples. A quick glance at what FDR or Lincoln did as wartime presidents strenthens the case that Getz and her lib cohorts are being highly selective in their criticism of the Bush Administration.

Furthermore, it appears that Tutu's knowledge of activities by previous administrations is quite limited.
Tutu recalled teaching in Jacksonville, Fla., when Bush won re-election in 2004. "I was shocked," he said, "because I had naively believed all these many years that Americans genuinely believed in freedom of speech. [But I] discovered there that when you made an utterance that was remotely contrary to what the White House was saying, then they attacked you. For a South African the déjà vu was frightening. They behaved exactly the same way that used to happen here—vilifying those who are putting forward a slightly different view." Tutu made these comments to me exactly a year ago next week. I haven't seen any reaction from him about the latest eavesdropping revelations, but I doubt he is remotely surprised at the U.S. president's response: a defense of the tactic, together with a warning that the government would launch an investigation to find out who leaked the news to The New York Times.

This is disgusting.

Tutu's belief that freedom of speech is being squelched under President Bush is embarrassingly misguided.

Those buying into the Left’s propaganda are the naïve ones.

Moreover, why is Getz outraged over President Bush's defense of utilizing the same tactics that other administrations used?

Short answer: She's a propagandist, a partisan hack.

Getz concludes:
It's not fair, of course, to suggest that all citizens are indifferent to violations of their privacy and their rights to free speech. Yet as I've watched this debate play out, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that not enough Americans really care. Like my Johannesburg neighbor, they seem to hope that unpleasant news will disappear if you just ignore it. It didn't then, and it won't now.

I am not indifferent to privacy issues. Believe me, I really care. I am certain that I value my privacy as much as Getz values hers. I share her concern about the importance of protecting our civil liberties. I agree with her that "unpleasantness" won’t go away simply by ignoring it.

However, there is a problem with Getz’s argument: It is not grounded in reality.

She is either being intentionally misleading in order to instill fear in Americans to convince them to lose confidence in Bush; or she is worrying about monsters under the bed.

Comparing America in 2005 to apartheid South Africa is nuts.

She frames the debate as being about an assault on civil liberties, as though the evil “King George” is bent on abusing the American people. She ignores the fact that provisions of the Patriot Act and other tactics are being used to combat TERRORISM, not harass or threaten or trample on the rights of citizens with impunity.
While I believe that we must always focus on upholding our freedoms, it is disingenuous of Getz and others to turn the matter of how to effectively handle the very real terrorist threat into an imaginary war on the civil liberties of Americans, waged by the Bush Administration.
IT'S THE TERRORISTS, STUPID!