Kristin Rawls has a great piece up at GlobalComment on how the quick, tidy resolution of Ted Nugent’s now-infamous insurrectionist meltdown on behalf of Mittens at this year’s NRA convention stands in stark contrast to serious attention paid on the seemingly innocuous left-ish types that have been or are currently under federal surveillance.
Excerpts cannot do justice, but I think her conclusion deserves highlighting (with a strict caveat to, as they say, read the whole damn thing):
Ultimately, we know that government surveillance has increased tremendously since September 11, 2001 altogether. So, it is hard to make a definitive claim as to whether or not government investigations have a rightwing bias that specifically targets leftist activists. It seems as if the government may simply have stepped up its investigations of us all. But considering the magnitude of rightwing crime in the United States, the infiltration of vegan potlucks and peace groups seems pretty overzealous. Not only that, but the public money poured into such investigations seems, at best, wasteful. And in a time of debt crisis, surely we should be casting a critical gaze on this kind of federal spending. Maybe the question isn’t really: ”œDoes government investigation have a rightwing bias?” Perhaps we should instead be asking, ”œShould the government be investigating today’s almost uniformly non-violent leftwing movements at all?”
Alas, such nagging, all-too inconvenient questions of government surveillance, civil liberties, & homeland (in)security are(still) entirely out-of-step with the noun-verb-9/11 DC zeitgeist — domestically, at least (cough).
if there is a bias in domestic surveillance itself but there most certainly seems to be a bias on the reporting on ‘left’ American extremists over the reporting of ‘right’ extremists.
Always keep an open mind and a compassionate heart. ~ Phil Jackson