The echo of jackboots on your street

Remember this much-echoed lamentation from Jack Cafferty last week?

We all hope nothing happens to Arlen Specter, the Republican head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, cause he might be all that stands between us and a full blown dictatorship in this country.

By that token, it's time to shine up those goosesteppin' Guccis in the back of the closet. Glenn Greenwald reports that Specter and other Republicans have rolled over on any substantive concerns over the NSA's warrantless eavesdropping scheme by making the program essentially FISA-proof. Greenwald quotes from The Hill:

Specter has mollified conservative opposition to his bill by agreeing to drop the requirement that the Bush administration seek a legal judgment on the program from a special court set up by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978.

Instead, Specter agreed to allow the administration to retain an important legal defense by allowing the court, which holds its hearings in secret, to review the program only by hearing a challenge from a plaintiff with legal standing, said a person familiar with the text of language agreed to by Specter and committee conservatives.

The rubbishing of privacy rights under this program is now signed, sealed, and all-but-delivered. How do you bring the government to task for intruding on your privacy when, as Greenwald says, "nobody knows whose conversations have been eavesdropped on, nobody could ever make the showing necessary to maintain such a lawsuit, and since the administration claims that all such information is highly classified, the evidence necessary to make that showing can never be obtained"? From this day forward, any challenge to warrantless wiretaps is crippled before it even begins. Judicial review has become a joke, and the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee is culpable.

Last week, the Washington Post called Specter "Congress's most outspoken GOP critic of warrantless wiretaps of Americans." George Bush must pray daily for even more "critics" like Specter, who reliably caves in at each heavy-treaded step of the Bush administration's assault on individual liberties.

(Via Atrios, and cross-posted.)