Kabuki Theater
Julian Sanchez has an article in The Nation, which begins
We know the rules by now, the strange conventions and stilted Kabuki scripts that govern our cartoon facsimile of a national security debate. The Obama administration makes vague, reassuring noises about constraining executive power and protecting civil liberties, but then merrily adopts whatever appalling policy George W. Bush put in place. Conservatives hit the panic button on the right-wing noise machine anyway, keeping the delicate ecosystem in balance by creating the false impression that something has changed. We’ve watched the formula play out with Guantánamo Bay, torture prosecutions and the invocation of “state secrets.” We appear to be on the verge of doing the same with national security surveillance.
This is a very odd scenario. One possible explanation is that Congress, the President, and the media are all puppets of an elusive but far-reaching shadow government. Another possibility is that this is just the sort of thing that happens when you combine representative democracy with freedom of the press. Personally, I’d like to think it’s the shadow-government thingy.
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