Ahoy! Bullshit Telcom Immunity Compromise Ahead!

Congressional democrats are about to cave in again, and this time it’s serious. They’ve apparently come to a “compromise” on the telecom amnesty bill, which gives the telecommunications companies who have been spying on us for the last six years — listening to our calls, reading our emails, monitoring our browsing, all at the government’s behest — complete immunity from prosecution. In exchange we, the American people, will get absolutely nothing.

It’s pretty clear that political reality has evolved beyond the old, tired, definition of the word “compromise”. Time for a new one:

Compromise (com-pro-MIZE): See capitulation.

Just to be absolutely clear: this is a congressionally-approved get out of jail free card, which not only absolves these criminals of all wrong-doing, but also clears the way for future privacy-killing accords between government and industry. They’ve apparently installed some sort of pathetic speedbump on this road to amnesty, a rubberstamp from a district court, but I doubt that the machinery of the police state will even slow down when they hit it. There are rights to be trampled, by god!

This approaches terrifying. The one thing that we really need to be afraid of in this country is collusion between the corporations that have been quietly, steadily insinuating themselves into our lives and the government that’s supposed to be protecting us from them. They’re not in bed yet, but they’re sitting together on the porch swing, holding hands, gazing dreamily into each others eyes.

Time to pry these monstrous lovers apart. Call your representative.

Update: Glen Greenwald:

So all the Attorney General has to do is recite those magic words — the President requested this eavesdropping and did it in order to save us from the Terrorists — and the minute he utters those words, the courts are required to dismiss the lawsuits against the telecoms, no matter how illegal their behavior was.

That’s the “compromise” Steny Hoyer negotiated and which he is now — according to very credible reports — pressuring every member of the Democratic caucus to support. It’s full-scale, unconditional amnesty with no inquiry into whether anyone broke the law. In the U.S. now, thanks to the Democratic Congress, we’ll have a new law based on the premise that the President has the power to order private actors to break the law, and when he issues such an order, the private actors will be protected from liability of any kind on the ground that the Leader told them to do it — the very theory that the Nuremberg Trial rejected.

Update 2: Well, it happened. A bill negotiated in secrecy, revealed in a sideshow magician’s cloud of euphemism and outright lies, then hastily rammed through the next day. This stuff makes a mockery of the whole notion of democracy.

Update 3: Obama weighs in, at last, with his own carefully-parsed, mushy-mouthed capitulation. This this gets sadder and sadder.