Last might, Josh Marshall wrote:
Reading through our email — or, okay, in this case, it’s more the hate mail — it’s clear that a growing number of base conservatives believe that the Obama White House is collecting their anti-health care reform emails and compiling them in a master White House database to surveil these people, keep tabs on them and so forth.
One: That’s dumb.
Two: It used to be that in this country we actually had formal legal constraints that would make it impossible for a president to behave in this manner. Then came George W. Bush, illegal surveillance, massive conservative mobilization in favor of the principle that illegal surveillance must go unpunished, eventual “centrist” accommodation to the view that illegal surveillance must go unpunished, and then the administration of Barack Obama. And now the right-wing is spreading scare stories about illegitimate surveillance.
It’s like 10,000 spoons when all you need is a knife, but I would have been a lot happier if we’d just stuck with the rule of law in the first place.
Update:
As pointed out in comments “the good advice that you just didn’t take” might have been the better line from the song to reference.