Mukasey vs The People of The United States

Readers of today's Wall Street Journal were treated to an opinion piece authored by apparent statist, former federal judge and US Attorney General Michael Mukasey. I haven't seen a hit piece like that on conservatives and libertarians in the Journal since the '08 presidential campaign. It was such a tantrum, I thought he might have been channeling Saul Alinsky.

What follows is my response to his op-ed screed.

Where to begin? I neither hear nor see tanks nor black helicopters. Mr. Mukasey follows his scurrilous assertion that all opposed must be conspiracy nuts, with the despot's favored cudgel - that we're all afflicted with a psychiatric malady, namely "delusions of reference".

So we're crazy for being concerned about all these mere perceived violations of propriety, but before and after the diagnosis General Mukasey went on in detail about the ways the government, including and especially this current administration has mishandled confidential information and intelligence assets. At the same time he tried to make the case that it was, and still is all quite lawful (which doesn't make it RIGHT) but we're crazy for being concerned... because the surveillance isn't political. But, everything - EVERYTHING - this administration does is political...

Judge Mukasey ridiculed us for drawing parallels between Orwell's "1984" and Metadatapalooza 2013, but never really denied it. And then there's this. Mr. Mukasey wrote, "Foreign governments spy on us and our citizens. We spy on them and theirs. Welcome to the world."

I fully expect foreign governments to spy on us.
I fully expect this government to do everything in its power to prevent it.
I will not, however, accept that the United States government has any justification to spy on me.

Since Mr. Mukasey mentioned "1984", I wonder what he'd make of this, sent to me by a friend yesterday, from "Nineteen Eighty-four" Part 2, Ch 9, by George Orwell, published June 8, 1949:

"... in the past no government had the power to keep its citizens under constant surveillance. The invention of print, however, made it easier to manipulate public opinion, and the film and the radio carried the process further. With the development of television, and the technical advance which made it possible to receive and transmit simultaneously on the same instrument, private life came to an end...." emphasis mine

Replace television with the internet and wireless communications....

Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty because it's NOT just Mukasey versus the people of the United States.