We are unrepentant supporters of the US Constitution here at The Sands Institute. On that basis alone we have entered into all sorts of analyses (and started fights) over what we consider to be threats not only to the Constitution, but to the culture engendered by it.
     But this is one of the few subjects we can be totally and completely objective about, for understanding spying requires absolutely no partisan political position whatsoever. In fact, it does not even require a political viewpoint.
     For you see, spying operates entirely against the backdrop of an immutable, I repeat, IMMUTABLE law:
     "An organization, or government, will spy on anything that can do it harm."
     
      In this I did not mention whether the organization or government is purported to be good, for it always is in its own eyes. That is a given, no matter what later history may say. I also did not say "they will want to" spy. I said they WILL spy.
      Because this law is so concrete I can then direct my analysis to three (3) different factions, or voices, that have risen in the past eight years over the issue of domestic spying.
      First, there are those of you who have cried bloody murder about domestic spying since Bush took office, about it's purported illegality or unconstitutionality, but really because you feared it might (once again) be directed at you, and not because you have any special dislike for the general practice of a government spying on its citizens. All you care about is "which citizens". Those of us who know you are neither offended or dismayed. We don't get mad at dogs for being dogs.
      Far more numerous are you over-fed, under-worked little naifs who have m-f'd this, and g-dm'd that all over the internet from Portland to Portland the past 8 years because you have the genuine belief that this practice is 1) illegal, 2) unconstitutional, and 3) morally reprehensible. You have been screwed.
      Since, as a rule, none of you can define any of those terms with any clarity, you were largely ignored on the substance of this issue from the very beginning. It was the ruckus you raised that brought you to the table. Your style and tone-setting, shall we say, could not be ignored and was instrumental in forging one leg of the stool we call here the Bush Lied-Bush Spied-Bush Tortured nexus of impeachable offenses, which several city governments and state democrat parties voted to suggest. In this regard you were very "inspirational" to the cause of socialism...up to Nov 4th, at least. But just remember Lenin's Law on the Usefuls. What happens to you next remains to be revealed...for if you hold onto this silly notion of a genuine right from being spied upon by government any further...and I'm speaking as a Category One socialist here...you will find yourselves in the cross hairs of this very same sort of spying. READ THE LAW! IT'S IMMUTABLE! (Look that word up, too.) Jerk'em off and they will be looking in on you. The guys you helped elect are far more fearful of you than the guy you hated. Kinda sucks, doesn't it?
     Third, and more numerous than the first two combined (So tell me, how do you manage to lose elections, again and again? Is is a gift?) are those Americans who believe that the practices announced by the Bush Administration as to what it may lawfully do, and could do technically, does not amount to spying on citizens if it is deemed lawful by competent courts (so far that has been the case) and is limited to phone calls from outside the country from people known or suspected to be related to terrorists in some way.
     (My purpose is not to analyze the Bush Spied accusation here, since so far, it has withstood legal scrutiny, despite all the caterwauling. We do that analysis it at GreatAmericanZeroes.com where St George Frederick is in the process of "hanging" every liar involved in perpetrating this fraud, which means a lot of law school faculties, in toto, alongside the sonnenkinder.)
    For ordinary citizens, even more than those youthful scat armies of the Left, domestic spying will be turned on you in a big way, and in ways you hadn't imagined; cell phones, internet, key holes and transoms, school snitches. What the FBI did to anti-war radicals in the 60s will pale by comparison. Remember we told you we're keeping out land lines? Call the phone company. It's coming.
    For you see, there is a corollary to the Law of Spying (above): "Spying increases by a multiple of 10 when the people who can do a government harm are domestic rather than foreign."
    When governments see their greatest prospective enemies as their own people, they create internal measures to not only monitor, but guard, and eventually interdict "fearful" activity that might upset their applecart.
    With socialism (and here I will get partisan), from its very beginning, except for maybe 20 months between the forming of Soviet Union and the death of Lenin, there is a built-in paranoia, of constantly looking over one's shoulder. Republican democracy, on the other hand, usually gets it in the end because it doesn't look near enough, but that's another matter.
     The irony, of course, is who gets all the blame for excessive, illegal spying most foul? You guessed it. George W Bush.

    With that understood, a little history lesson in circumstantial evidence, the sort, that while you may or may not be able to win in a court of law, you can certainly win arguments, win bets, and generally ascertain who's more practiced at spying. OK, who spies in America? And who spies illegally in America? And who gets away with it in America? Why Democrats of course. Why Leftists, of course.
    Take us back to Woodrow Wilson's era, an icon of liberalism (and fascism it seems), he spied on citizens and threatened to jail them if they disagreed publicly...DISAGREED, not assembled, not wrote, not throw rocks, DISAGREED, with his policies.  Wilson was a Democrat.
    He was followed by Republicans who made no serious mark of the domestic spying fronts as there was no federal criminal laws that enabled them to do so...not until the Lindbergh baby. Speaking of babies, Baby-faced Nelson, Capone, Dillinger, The Barrow Gang also brought about a host of new laws...with the FBI under J Edgar Hoover....that allowed the federal government to begin checking up on citizens.
    They spied after a fashion, I suppose, and history will no doubt be rewritten to prove it.
    Then came FDR, with Hoover at his side, and by 1935, intense spying on what were called "Fifth Columnists" both Communist and the Nazi bunds. By the time Pearl Harbor came around internal spying had become such a chore FDR decided to put some of his headaches in gated communities called "camps" out west. Fifty years later the American people picked up a hefty tab for that little bit of racist oops. Oh, FDR was also a Democrat. And a socialist, sort of.
    In 1945 Roosevelt died, but Hoover stayed on, under Truman, who was also a Democrat, turning the "spying vigor" of government against the Red Scare. To read about it, it must have been a horror. A holocaust, even. So many people smeared in America, while in the USSR and Germany they only died. IT must have been gruesome. Trying to find an objective history of that era is like trying to find a book on Arab-Israeli relations written by a guy named Smith instead of Abd-al-Rahmann or Fishbein. From the executions of the Rosenbergs forward, it has been impossible, sadly even among scholars, to tell the differences between the law "as it is/was" and law "as it should be".
    With the arrival of Eisenhower, the Red Scare abated, some say because of Ike, who had Joe McCarthy fired and who pulled many of the teeth of the House Un-American Activities Committee. (Look for a rise of that group too, only under a different name, and indeed, an opposite mission. My dying wish is to be called before it. Maybe Henry Waxman will still be there, too. One can only hope.) But Hoover was still on the job. Even as the Cold War settled in, this was an era of pulling back in domestic spying. Oh, Eisenhower was a Republican..."and did what was pleasing to God, and ruled eight years. The rest of the acts of Eisenhower, are they not written in the chronicles of the Presidents, and after eight more years did he not rest with Jehovah?"
     Next came JFK, the lamented and soon-to-be-forgotten JFK. (Moses Sands once told me that JFK will be forgotten completely the day after the last person who can remember where they were on Nov 22, 1963 is moved into a nursing home.) Hoover was still there, and possibly because he was getting a little long in the tooth, but also at the insistence of RFK, he began spying on black leaders of the civil rights movement. No public charges, just a collection of raw facts, whispers and innuendo, the sort that also showed up in the White House under the Clintons. Just remember, in those days there actually were charges (crimes on the book) that could be brought for conspiring with organizations dedicated to the overthrow of the government. (There will be again, by the way, only aimed at constitutionalists, not socialists). So while modern Americans might find this sort of spying morally wrong, or even illegal in a cosmic sense, it wasn't against the law as it was known at the time. Oh, the Kennedys were both Democrats.
    Then came LBJ and the war in Vietnam. More important for some, there was the anti-War. I have no doubt that Hoover hated those anti-war hippies with every fiber of his being. For one, they didn't know how to dress well, and that was almost a fetish with the Director.
Perhaps on his own, but at least with the condonance of the Johnson Administration and Congress, Hoover turned his spying efforts toward  the Communist connections with the anti-War movement. This overwhelmed the FBI, and led to his undoing, for virtually all of them were Communist-formed, Communist-led, Communist-inspired, or Communist-infiltrated. Not a Baptist in the bunch. The task was so daunting that Congress did what Congress can always be expected to do during a war with Communism. It declared Communism no longer to be bad, a threat, unnatural, or in any way un-American, and ordered law enforcement to stop looking into it. In the middle of a war against Communism Congress surrendered, just to shut up that damned squeaky wheel, in the hopes those English professors would get back to teaching English and leave foreign affairs to the experts.
    But with the active participation of those English teachers, and the prayerful indifference by Congress, over one million Cambodians were murdered, hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese murdered or set adrift in leaky boats, and one lonely aviator got his arms broke in a prison in Hanoi. Did I mention LBJ and the Congress were Democrats?
    But enough of the little insignificant stuff. In 1968 a genuine paranoid criminal ascended the throne in Washington, and real dangerous and criminal spying occurred, since, you see, Richard M Nixon had enemies. I don't recall that he ever shot one of them, or even arrested one. But he did make a list. And he talked about them...on a phone that was being taped. He said words that made American blanch at just the thought of a President saying them. Vile words like "damn" and "H-e-double toothpicks". Finally, and worst of all, he lied (I think) (but not under oath, I'm sure) in order to protect some of his staff who had been involved in a warrant-less break-in of an apartment of one of those enemies, to gather evidence. He was drummed out of office in disgrace in 1974. This was the crime of the century and it was over domestic spying.
    Now I'm not excusing Nixon here. I'm fairly certain he did commit a crime, and like most of you, I'm also willing to cut a deal with a bank robber in order to catch and convict the getaway driver.
    Did I mentioned Nixon was a Republican? Didn't have to, did I? Half the rain forests in Brazil had been sacrificed reminding us of that fact...and in a subtle sort of a way, keeping those two million dead eyes in southeast Asia from ever entering into our dreams. Maybe Richard Nixon did die for our sins. Democrats should certainly look at it that way.
    Next was Gerald Ford, who backed into his job, and Jimmie Carter, who, it's a shame didn't spy, because at least there would have been something to say about those years other than double-digit inflation, a major recession and pictures of Iranians spitting on Americans in blindfolds. Domestic spying wouldn't have changed any of those things, but would certainly have enhanced his image as having a pair. What did change in those years, only nobody noticed, was all those young English professors the FBI was told not to watch anymore were getting tenure at America's colleges and universities.
    I'll finish here by doing Reagan-Bush I-Clinton-Bush II as a group, covering 1981-2008 (28 years). During twenty of those twenty eight years, there was no, I repeat, NO reports or records of domestic spying. There were accusations aplenty, especially in the last eight, but I'm getting ahead of myself.
    Did I mention that those 20 years were all Republican years?
    It's true. Reagan did so much to annoy the Left it staggers the mind. Placing missiles in Europe. Spitting in the Soviets eyes, and even making jokes about it. Good God, he couldn't go to the bathroom without someone standing outside the door shouting "Stop the Nukes".
     But Lefties knew they were out-matched, for there is nothing that a screaming Leftist hates more than to be ignored. Reagan had a way of conveying to the American people (something Bush II couldn't pull off), simply by his manner and quiet confidence, that these were noisy, cretinous children and nothing more. If you can convey to a microbe that he/she is even more insignificant than a bug, not even worth squishing, you've won. Reagan did that with a smile, not a John Kerry down-the-nose look of disdain. Commies hate that.
     Yes, Ronald Reagan was a Republican, and he was also a conservative, "...and did what was pleasing to God, and ruled eight years. The rest of the acts of Reagan, are they not written in the chronicles of the Presidents, and after sixteen more years did he not rest with Jehovah?"
     But I'll bet Reagan spied. He was aware of the real threat. We just don't know about it. That's what you call "teating your cards." He did that very well.
     Clinton also spied. Big Time. His party spied big Time. But for money and profit. For political gain. Not for national security. Remember that old couple, the Wilson's, snooping on Speaker Gingrich's cell phone calls? Then onto to Jim McDermott? Was he run from Congress in disgrace? Sanctioned? Jail time? None of those things ever happened, and yes, there is a pattern here that extends to Charley Wrangel, only last month.
     Clinton had (has) an enemies list that made Nixon's look like a postage stamp. In many ways his use of the FBI files were far more heinous than breaking into the Watergate, for it was for the purpose of extortion. Nixon at least could argue (and maybe some historian will listen some day) that Daniel Ellsberg was a national security risk. And surely history has proven that the Democrat Party of the United States is as close to a communist organization as you can get, and once we've had about thirty years of their legal inspiration, maybe history will go back and revisit that whole Watergate thing...if given the chance. But in 1972 they were both legal, and that's a lamentable fact. We tend to want to spy on those who will do us harm, and Nixon was just paranoid enough to confuse his personal security with the nation's.
      But all Bill Clinton wanted was a leg up. An edge. He wanted to be able to call in so-and-so and show him some 8 x 10 glossies of him and a donkey, or a little boy, or maybe just a cookie jar with his fist lodged in it, who knows? But with that he would secure his obedience, silence, or maybe even raise a few bucks for a new set of sheets in the van. All we know is that spying had been very good for the Clintons.
     You can also see why no one at Berkeley or Harvard would be unduly worried about that kind of domestic spying.
     Oh, did I mention Bill Clinton is a Democrat?
     It was also during Clinton's term that there occurred all those electronic marvels and technologies of electronic eavesdropping that dominates the hate-Bush speech today. That was ten years ago, and it is easy to get the administrations and their political parties confused, but in a day when over 50% of high school students believe that Richard Nixon and those wascally Republicans started the Vietnam War, you can see why it's important to keep the facts assembled as straight as possible. (By the way, I'm doing all this from memory, so feel free to correct any misstatement of fact I've made here, especially as it may effect the analysis. I wasn't alive then but am pretty certain FDR was a Democrat.)
    I recall two box office hits, one with Mel Gibson and whatsername, and one with Will Smith and Gene Hackman, both about Big Government spying at will (not Smith) on its citizens. These were made during the Clinton years not the Bush years, and God knows, we'd already had all sorts of stories about domestic spying rumors in those days. Black helicopter conspiracies arose form the Clinton years. The Y2K hysteria was also his baby. Did Clinton use those technologies domestically? Are you kidding? If Clinton had been Superman he'd have spent the entire day looking at womens' underwear. Of course he used them. Only who knows what he would have used domestic spying for. He has teated his cards well, just like RR. But knowing the type, and his other idiocyncrasies, he certainly would have spied against anyone who could do him harm...which in those days, did not include "big bucks" Chinese Communists or "little fish" Al-Qaida, but it certainly did include Republicans. Your guess is as good as mine. But show me a watchtower guard with his binoculars turned to the bedroom windows of citizens and I'll show you a castle with a lot of break-ins. There is much about those eight years that have yet to be revealed.
    So, Bush II inherited those electronic marvels, and after 9/11 set out to use them. He could have used them against his enemies, or at least those who perceived him as an enemy. (Sadly I don't think GW ever looked at the Left as an enemy...of himself, the State, or even the Constitution. Alas and Alack!) Being a straight shooter, he used them only in accordance with rules established by Congress but like a good horse trader, continued to dicker and bargain for better listening privileges, all in the name of national security, which we will find out shortly, is still  a very real issue. I am quite sure he pushed the envelope. He just wasn't interested in which Democrats in Congress were running up 1-900 tabs.
    The Left of course railed, but raged at what Bush might do or could do, not what he actually did do. They lied. Remember, the Left always accuses the other side of their own conspiracy, and had they that same power (as they will come January 21) they would use it just as they imagined Bush could use it against them. (Is any of this getting through to any of you little naive cussing crumb-crunchers who believe the socialists are going to return this country back to civil liberties? You just helped throw those liberties away.)
    There is not one scintilla of fact that supports the notion that Bush or anyone in his administration spied illegally. Or even wanted to.

    So, our law is intact and valid: Government will spy on those it feels can do it harm, and after January 21st, 2009, the greatest threat to the new administration, the Democrat Party and the government will be the People of the United States.
Vassar Bushmills