URL: https://amgreatness.com/2018/
AG American Greatness
The Carnivores of Civil Liberties
By Victor Davis Hanson <https://amgreatness.com/
May 31st, 2018
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After a landslide loss in the 1972 presidential election, the Democratic Party
was resuscitated the following year by the Watergate scandal. The destruction of
the Nixon presidency powered the Democrats to make huge political gains in the
1974 elections.
Watergate also birthed (or perhaps rebirthed) modern investigative journalism. A
young generation of maverick reporters supposedly alone had challenged the
establishment in order to uncover the whole truth about abuses of power by the
Nixon Administration.
Liberalism rode high during the Watergate era. It had demanded that civil
liberties be protected from the illegal or unconstitutional overreach of the
Nixon-era FBI, CIA, and other agencies. Liberals alleged that out-of-control
officials had spied on U.S. citizens for political purposes and then tried to
mask their wrongdoing under the cover of "national security" or institutional
"professionalism."
All those legacies are now eroding. The Democratic Party, the investigative
media, and liberalism itself are now weirdly on the side of the reactionary
administrative state. They have either downplayed or excused Watergate-like
abuses of power by the former Barack Obama Administration.
Liberal journalists apparently have few concerns that the FBI apparently used at
least one secret informant to gather information about the 2016 Trump campaign.
Nor are they much bothered that members of the Obama national security team
unmasked the names of U.S. citizens who had been improperly surveilled. Many of
those names then were leaked illegally to the press.
Democrats seem indifferent to the fact that Hillary Clinton's presidential
campaign paid a foreign agent, Christopher Steele, to compile dirt on Republican
candidate Donald Trump-largely by trafficking in unverified rumors from Russian
interests. Obama administration officials leaked details from that dossier.
Civil libertarians appear unconcerned that the Department of Justice sought to
deceive the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, getting it to grant
warrants to allow the surveillance of U.S. citizens based on the suspect and
politically motivated Steele dossier.
Few are upset that former CIA Director John Brennan and former Director of
National Intelligence James Clapper have lied under oath to Congress on matters
pertaining to surveillance. Rather than being investigated by the media, both
are now making frequent media appearances.
The FBI cannot remain credible when its former director, James Comey, leaks
confidential memos about meetings with the president to the media-with the
expressed intent of leveraging the appointment of a special counsel, Robert
Mueller, who turned out to be a longtime friend of Comey's.
Why have the former guardians of civil liberties flipped in the near
half-century since Watergate?
One, both the media and the liberal establishment believed that the outsider
Trump represented an existential danger to themselves and the nation at
large-similar to the way operatives in the Nixon Administration had felt about
far-left presidential challenger George McGovern in 1972.
But this time around, liberals were not out of power as they were in 1972.
Instead, they were the establishment. They held the reins of federal power under
the Obama Administration. And they chose to exercise it in a fashion similar to
how Nixon's team had in 1972.
Second, pollsters and the media were convinced that Hillary Clinton would be
elected. As a result, members of the FBI, CIA, and other federal bureaucracies
apparently assumed that any extralegal efforts to stop the common menace Trump
would be appreciated rather than punished by a soon-to-be President Clinton.
Three, those in the Obama Administration, the Clinton campaign, and the media
formed an echo chamber. All convinced themselves that any means necessary to
achieve the noble ends of precluding a Trump presidency were justified.
The danger of such groupthink continues; even now they are unaware of the
impending bomb that is about to go off.
Public opinion has radically changed. A majority of Americans believe the
Mueller investigation is politically motivated, according to a CBS News poll.
The inspector general's report on the FBI's handling of the Clinton email
scandal is due soon. It will likely detail violations of ethics and laws among
Obama Administration officials and may include criminal referrals.
Already, a few liberals and former Clinton supporters are warning the Left that
it is on the wrong side of history and about to reverse the entire
post-Watergate liberal tradition.
There is a reckoning on the horizon. It has nothing to do with Donald Trump or
Hillary Clinton. Instead, the traditional, self-appointed watchdogs of
government overreach have turned into the carnivores of civil liberties.
(C) 2018 TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.
Photo credit: Le Cuziat/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images
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About the Author: Victor Davis Hanson
<https://amgreatness.com/
Victor Davis Hanson is an American military historian, columnist, former
classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He was a professor of
classics at California State University, Fresno, and is currently the Martin and
Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. He has
been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004. Hanson was awarded
the National Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush. Hanson is
also a farmer (growing raisin grapes on a family farm in Selma, California) and
a critic of social trends related to farming and agrarianism. He is the author
most recently of The Second World Wars - How the First Global Conflict was
Fought and Won <https://amzn.to/2ynsk5N> (Basic Books).
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