The Blurred Line

Trey Smith

There is a pervasive myth in America. This myth portrays Democrats and Republicans as altogether different political animals. Supposedly there is a line of demarcation that separates the two with the Democrats occupying the left (liberal) side of the line and the Republicans firmly entrenched on the right (conservative) side of the line.

In truth, the line is very blurry and it often is hard to discern who stands on the right or the left! Glenn Greenwald underscored this point in a recent column.

The supreme Senate defender of state secrecy and the Surveillance State, California Democrat Dianne Feinstein, yesterday issued a statement to Australia’s largest newspaper, The Sydney Morning Herald, demanding (once again) the prosecution of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange. To see how hostile Feinstein is to basic press freedoms, permit me to change “Assange” each time it appears in her statement to “The New York Times“:

The head of the US Senate’s powerful intelligence oversight committee has renewed calls for [The New York Times] to be prosecuted for espionage. . . .

”I believe [The New York Times] has knowingly obtained and disseminated classified information which could cause injury to the United States,” the chairwoman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Dianne Feinstein, said in a written statement provided to the Herald. ”[It] has caused serious harm to US national security, and [] should be prosecuted accordingly.”

As EFF’s Trevor Timm noted, there is no sense in which Feinstein’s denunciation applies to WikiLeaks but not to The New York Times (and, for that matter, senior Obama officials). Indeed, unlike WikiLeaks, which has never done so, The New York Times has repeatedly published Top Secret information. That’s why the prosecution that Feinstein demands for WikiLeaks would be the gravest threat to press freedom and basic transparency in decades.

Now, according to the myth, Democrats are supposed to be big defenders of a free press and yet here is the so-called liberal Feinstein strongly standing against that notion! We see the very same thing at work when Democrats -- the party that supposedly stands up for progressive concepts like the Bill of Rights -- vote in favor of legislation like the Patriot Act. We also see it routinely when Democrats -- who supposedly represent the little guy and gal -- vote for corporate bailouts and increased funding for the military-industrial complex. More recently, the majority of Democratic Party Senators joined with Republicans to defeat an amendment to the Farm Bill to require companies to label GMO foods!

Time and time again, so-called progressives in Congress or the President himself support conservative policies. Ya know, like the power for the president to kill or detain indefinitely American citizens or the privatization of Social Security or drilling for oil in the Arctic or [you fill in the blank here].

What American voters now find themselves faced with too often is choosing between staunch conservatives versus a little less or more conservatives. If you happen to be a moderate, a liberal or a leftist, you no longer can find a pony in the race to bet on.