Unstated assumptions

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It would be helpful for purposes of coherence for the author to explain the unstated assumptions of this post and this one:

President Obama is "going to Congress" about Syria exclusively as an exercise in political theater. I'm old enough to remember his inspirational, New-Deal-type State of the Union message back in January, in which he made a lot of pretty noises about his intention to act on the wealth gap, climate change, and so on. His speech was to thank all the progressive-leaning suckers (including me) who voted for him in hopes that he would repay us by being a more liberal-minded president than Mitt Romney. For more than 4 years now, however, he has been consolidating a terrifying surveillance state into a permanent feature of our democracy. He has done nothing to keep banks from literally stealing houses and possessions from victims of financial racketeering (because "these cases are very complicated"). He has exercised no meaningful political muscle on behalf of basic liberal causes such as reproductive rights, voting rights, or card-check legislation to give union organizers a fair shake.

President North Star knows that the Congress will authorize any action against Syria that he likes. And he also "knows," as expressed by anonymous administration sources via authorized leaks, that he doesn't need congressional approval as long as Secretary Kerry can rattle off half a dozen justifications for military strikes in the style of former Ubergruppenfuehrer Powell.

Some time ago, US policy and media elites determined that The State need not be bothered by the collective opinion of its citizens in matters of military aggression.

President North Star gets all enigmatic

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In Santa Monica on Friday, in reference to the NSA Prism project, President Obama said that

... if people can't trust not only the executive branch but also don't trust Congress and don't trust federal judges to make sure that we’re abiding by the Constitution, due process and rule of law, then we’re going to have some problems here.

Ten-four.

Will a member of the White House press corps ask the President what the problem is and what he intends to do about it? His words sounded to me like a threat.

Incidentally, when I was searching for a transcript of this quote, the top Google hits were nuthouse sites like teaparty.com and breitbart.com. No progressive media have taken note of the statement, as far as I can tell. Naturally, wingnuts will vomit outrage about three words President North Star lays end to end, so their current reaction is more of the same and not to be taken seriously. But he wasn't talking to them: he was talking to civil libertarians, good-government advocates, and regular people who are sickened by the police state infrastructure Cheney and Bush built here over 10 years ago.

Reactionaries have no problem with a well functioning police state as long as they control it. The Obama administration does not fear them. It fears the rest of us. The President took off the Centrist mask yesterday and threatened everyday Americans. I wonder what he meant by it.

Warrantless wiretapping thought experiment

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It's audience participation time! You are invited to help with my domestic wiretapping thought experiment! Let's get started!

Suppose you are the U.S. Attorney General, in charge of a Justice Department that believes it has the power to conduct warrantless wiretaps of any telephone conversation that takes place in the United States. Suppose further that your department has in the past investigated and prosecuted domestic political enemies for the sole purpose of removing them from elected office. Also suppose that you had spent the previous 20 years as an ultraconservative judge on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, and may or may not harbor feelings of animosity about a flashy, arrogant liberal prosecutor (now the Governor of your state) who in the recent past caused considerable trouble for some of the nice men who toil on Wall Street.

Given those assumptions (here comes the audience participation part), could you think of any reason not to allow the G-men to prosecute Eliot Spitzer on the basis of evidence that may have originated with an illegal wiretap? As a corollary experiment, can you think of any reason why Pat Fitzgerald's investigation of Karl Rove may have gone suddenly, inexplicably limp a coupla years ago?

All this is just the basis for a "hypothetical," of course, not a "conspiracy theory."

Update: Well, dagnab it, Jane Hamsher beat me to the punch with this nice post at FireDogLake that includes other, more wonky, Spitzer-type hypothetical questions for you to ponder. I hope our heroes at TPM Muckraker dig into it.