Bob Kuttner, columnist for the Boston Globe, has a list some things we should watch for in Bush's State of Union speech.Here's one:
Bush will demand that Congress extend the so-called USA Patriot Act, even though he insists that he doesn't need it in order to spy on Americans and conduct searches without warrants. Which is it, Mr. President? Bad law, or bad lawlessness?
That's a good point but Kuttner forgot the column he wrote on December 8, 2004:
AS A CARD-CARRYING member of the American Civil Liberties Union, I'd like to have one more card in my wallet. The card I want, contrary to the views of most civil liberties activists, is a national ID card.
Privacy advocates have always resisted this idea, for fear of government snooping on citizens. But that cat is out of the bag. Nearly all of us have driver's licenses, Social Security cards, passports. And corporations, credit agencies, and HMOs keep dossiers, too -- often more extensive than what government maintains.
For civil libertarians, the real issue is not whether government and business collect databases on citizens, but whether there are adequate protections against abuses.
Those protections have come under particular assault in the era of George W. Bush and the USA Patriot Act. But we will not solve the privacy problem by pretending that we are back in a pre-computer era. For that matter, Hitler did not need computers to abuse citizens.
There are several good reasons to support a national ID card. The first has to do with voter registration and democracy.
Tens of millions of Americans don't vote because we make voters go through a two-step process of registering and then voting.
George Bush is a big government man and as you can see so is Bob Kuttner.Kuttner should just admit that George Bush is his kind of guy.Kuttner assumes if only the "correct people" run big government it's just fine.
