I Was Fooled by DU [View All]

I joined DU a bit over two years ago. I thought I had found a message board full of folks who shared my views on civil liberties and the rule of law - a bastion of small d democracy and all that. It sure seemed like a majority did.

But so much changed after Obama won. These issues seem to matter so much less now. In recent months I've come to realize that I'm in the minority here on issues like government accountability and free speech. Few seem to worry about such things under our new administration. And now the insistence that right-wing pundits are complicit in the murder of Dr. Tiller have driven this point home yet again.

I realize now that many of the people howling about civil liberties, torture, rendition, secret wiretapping, unitary executive, etc for the last eight years were in fact not doing so out of some deeply held belief in the underlying principles of freedom. They were instead simply hopping on the civil liberties bandwagon out of Party loyalty and hate for Bush/Cheney. The underlying necessity of the Bill of Rights to a functioning democracy does not appear to be widely grasped.

Kind of disappointing. But we soldier on. Maybe this all provides a "teaching moment?" Or whatever.