The Growing Right Wing Paranoia

Glenn Greenwald on the Right's sudden concern about government surveillance:

"When you cheer on a Surveillance State, you have no grounds to complain when it turns its eyes on you. If you create a massive and wildly empowered domestic surveillance apparatus, it's going to monitor and investigate domestic political activity. That's its nature."

You reap what you sow.

Conservatives were not concerned about the scale and scope of the Bush-Cheney surveillance state. "If you have nothing to hide, what are you worried about?", they would say. They loved the Executive Unitary Theory then. Now, a complete 180. With Obama in charge, they now consider the Constitution to be a "subversive manifesto."

Greenwald notes the sudden change from the Right Wing bobble heads:

"I was in Minneapolis and St. Paul during the 2008 GOP Convention and witnessed first-hand massive federal police raids and "preventive" arrests of peaceful, law-abiding protesters and even the violent arrests of journalists, and I don't recall any complaints from Jonah Goldberg or Michelle Malkin. I don't recall Glenn Reynolds or Mark Steyn complaining that the FBI, for virtually the entire Bush administration, was systematically abusing its new National Security Letters authorities under the Patriot Act to collect extremely invasive information, in secret, about Americans who had done nothing wrong."

For eight years you sat on your hands. Your words are hollow.

Source: Glenn Greenwald/Salon