Tuesday, November 06, 2007

Outrage fatigue

I've reached some sort of nadir of outrage today
First, it looks as though the Saskatchewan [ie Conservative] Party will win big in the provincial election on Wednesday, which will be ballyhooed as a victory for the right wing and which actually will be nothing of the kind. Saskatchewan isn't turning to the right, but too many of us are just tired of a government that can't seem to come up with any exciting or even mildly interesting ideas anymore. The NDP delivered a flyer to our house today showing the disembodied head of Brad Wall floating over the prairie next to the disembodied head of Grant Devine, the Great Pumpkin meets the Wizard of Oz.
Then I read Dave's You are now entering the Reform Agenda, about why we should be outraged at Harper's decision that he can't be bothered going to bat for Canadians he doesn't like:
...the moral relativism now being employed by Harper and Day ... not only violates the rule of Canadian law, but makes Canadians expendable if the circumstances do not fit with the Harper/Day agenda - an agenda which, under a Conservative Party banner, they have been trying to camouflage.
So we'll all be waving bye-bye to Mark Emery, Michelle Rainey, Greg Williams,Omar Khadr, and anybody else of whom our new moral overlords disapprove.
Then I read Glenn Greenwald summing up the most recent Bush Administration outrages:
. . . we're at the point where a belief in due process, press freedoms and basic restraints on government and military power demonstrate a hatred for America and its freedoms. A belief in those principles constitutes "siding with the enemy." Only by joyously affirming the power of the Government to detain people for life with no charges, to break laws enacted by Congress, to spy on Americans with no warrants, to torture detainees, and to arrest war journalists and hold them for years can one prove one's loyalty to the country.
And finally I read a terrible story at Sadly, No! about how a bunch of Free Republic posters stalked a dying voting rights activist -- and turns out this was only one of several stalking incidents of this type.
All I can ask is this: what kind of people are they?
Or perhaps Winston Churchill's question is a better one:
What kind of people do they think we are?
Because Churchill continued:
Is it possible they do not realize that we shall never cease to preserve against them until they have been taught a lesson which they and the world will never forget?

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