Remember When We Still Had Rights?

They aren't wasting any time. From WaPo:

In a notice dated Wednesday, the Justice Department listed 196 pending habeas cases, some of which cover groups of detainees. The new Military Commissions Act (MCA), it said, provides that "no court, justice, or judge" can consider those petitions or other actions related to treatment or imprisonment filed by anyone designated as an enemy combatant, now or in the future.

Glenn Greenwald has one of his normally thoughtful posts on this issue, but I think he's missing something.

Because the threat posed by The Terrorists is so grave and mortal, maximizing protections against it is the paramount, overriding goal. As a result, no other value really competes with that objective in importance, nor can any other objective or value limit our efforts to protect ourselves against The Terrorists. That's what the President is arguing when he said: "Yet, with the distance of history, the questions will be narrowed and few: Did this generation of Americans take the threat seriously, and did we do what it takes to defeat that threat." All that matters is whether we did everything possible to protect ourselves.

We are, in direct succession to the British, a nation of shopkeepers. The middle class is the paradigm. (I actually heard a woman whose apartment in Chicago is worth a million dollars describe herself as "upper middle class." Perhaps she's right -- we don't acknowledge an "upper class" in this country, even though it exists, and even though we fawn over foreign aristocrats.)

Liberty is not a high priority for the middle class. It is a bourgeois virtue only if it is circumscribed: freedom is the freedom to make a good living. (And now Bush has taken that away from most of us.) Ideas are not of particular value, particularly abstractions. "Security" is the overriding requirement, and I have to hand it to the Republican strategists, they nailed that one right on the head.

Bourgeois are necessarily materialists. They are invested in their property, their income, the visible results of their ability to succeed in a mercantile environment. That makes them horribly vulnerable -- all of that can be taken away so easily.

And so morality becomes fluid. I'm not speaking of the "morality" of the Pope and James Dobson, largely concerned with other people's crotches. (Yes, there is lip service toward poverty and injustice, at least from the Pope, but the main thrust and the strongest statements concern other people's sex lives. When the Pope calls the war in Iraq "intrinsically disordered," then I might start to listen to him.) The morality embodied in our constitution, which is the real repository of our values, is something to be approached with distrust. Read Keith Olbrman's comments on what we've just given away.

This is why there is so little public outcry, I think, against the Patriot Act, and the Torture Act, laws which violate everything that makes us America. Ideals have little value in the marketplace, and the middle class is all about the marketplace, and enjoying the fruits thereof.

It leads, apparently inevitably, to a head-in-the-sand attitude, and gives traction to ludicrous statements such as "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about." What about the fact that what goes on in my living room, or bedroom, or any other room in my abode is none of your damned business? We fought a war to establish that fact.

Towleroad came up with this quote:

Jonathan Turley, Professor of Constitutional Laws at George Washington University, lays it all out: "The Congress just gave the President despotic powers and you could hear the yawn across the country as people turned to Dancing With the Stars."

I think the best summation of this whole nightmare was stated quite succinctly in the New York Times letters column:

"It can't happen here."

It did.