This interview with Naomi Wolf gives a good overview of the real problems with the police state that has arisen from the terror war. Read it here. Wolf is actually a pretty good antidote to the histrionics of the Glenn Beck and/or Alex Jones crowd. She actually provides solid intellectual arguments, firmly supported by evidence, as to how the police state continues to grow and expand, rather than relying on conspiracy theories and over the top rhetoric based on assertions from questionable sources.
The only problem I have with Wolf is that, from what I can tell, she doesn’t give much of a back story on how the modern American police state actually began to develop long before the terror war. It really has its roots in the FBI’s COINTELPRO program in the late 1960s, and was further expanded by Nixon’s initiation of the drug war. The drug war was later intensified by Reagan, and his successors expanded the drug war to a war on “crime” generally. The culmination of all this was the terror war that began after September 11. As Wolf points out, Obama is now institutionalizing the provisions of Bush’s terror war and making them into permanent features of American political life.
Also, this analysis of Obama by Pat Buchanan is right on target. Buchanan debunks the hysteria of the FOX Newsians who insist Obama is an American Hugo Chavez or Robert Mugabe. Rather, he’s more comparable to an ambitious corporate executive who finally makes it to the CEO’s chair and is more interested in protecting his own position rather than imposing some far-reaching ideological agenda. His personal opinions are obviously left of center, and he’s arguably the most liberal president the US has ever had, but the claim of the Glenn Beckians that he’s a Marxist revolutionary is insanity.
