Silent Blogs Let America Down

Tomorrow, the United States Senate is going to vote on the FISA Amendments Act. The FISA Amendments Act gives the President of the United States the power to conduct spy operations against the American people without the approval of the FISA court or any other court, without proving that the spying is at all related to any suspected crime, and without even proving that the spying was done in accordance with the law. Physical searches of Americans’ homes as well as massive electronic surveillance of Americans’ personal communications takes place without any restraint, and the same person who runs the spy operations – the Attorney General – also is the only person with the power to declare whether the spy operations are legal.

The FISA Amendments Act encourages lawbreaking by the President of the United States and by corporations by granting retroactive legal immunity to the corporations that helped George W. Bush gather private information on millions of Americans in violation of privacy agreements and the Constitution itself.

The FISA Amendments Act is an astoundingly bad law. It will have consequences for American life and government for years.

So why are most progressive blogs falling silent about the proposed law, just a day before its passage?

I just looked at Google’s blog search engine for blog articles that have been written about the FISA Amendments Act. It found only 34 articles containing the phrase “fisa amendments act” published over the last 24 hours. Only a few more – 52 – were found with a search for “h.r. 6304″, the number of the bill.

Keep in mind that many of the same articles were found in both searches. Also, within each search, some of the articles were duplicates, not even written by the bloggers themselves, just cut-and-pasted articles they found somewhere else.

Also a substantial number of these articles were written here at Irregular Times or at one of our partner sites. So, in total, over the last 24 hours, the day before the Senate votes on the FISA Amendments Act, less than 50 Americans other than those of us at Irregular Times bothered to write in protest of the legislation’s devastating attacks on the Constitution.

Why the silence? Why are so many bloggers who have written in the past in protest of George W. Bush’s warrantless wiretapping and other spying against law-abiding Americans now not writing anything about the attempt to make that totalitarian spying regime legal?

My suspicion is that this silence comes because abusive, unconstitutional spying is no longer a partisan issue. Many Democrats in both houses of Congress actually support this terrible law, and prime among them is Barack Obama.

Those bloggers who criticized Bush for engaging in extralegal spying against the American people, but are now silent, are refusing to write because they don’t want to criticize Democratic politicians. They care more about electing Democrats than they do about preserving freedom in the United States of America.

It’s rather inconvenient for these bloggers’ partisan arguments that Barack Obama and many of his Democratic colleagues now support one of George W. Bush’s most outrageous programs, so these bloggers just pretend that it isn’t happening. They just aren’t talking about it. They’re just whistling right on by the FISA Amendments Act, as if it’s not there. They’re looking the other way.

How depressing.

I praise that small, small group of Americans who are taking action to oppose the FISA Amendments Act. As for the rest of America, I can only say this: You make me want to vomit.