So lots of people do care about civil liberties
by digby
I have to say that this surprises me. And I guess it's because the reaction of a majority of the Village media has largely been so negative and so hostile (along with a lot of liberals I erroneously assumed would be opposed to the secret surveillance of American citizens.)
From the commentary I've been reading, I thought for sure that a majority of the country strongly believed that the revelation was the wrong thing to do. Just goes to show, once again, that the Villagers do not accurately reflect majority American values.
I certainly don't blame anyone for being unsure about the rightness and wrongness of this or whether or not it should be prosecuted. It's a complicated topic. I'm just happily surprised to see that most Americans are not reflexively opposed to these revelations in the way I've observed so many of the cognoscenti over the past few weeks. It at least shows a respect for our American traditions of a free press and the Bill of Rights that I'm afraid many of our leaders have either lost --- or never had.
There's hope for us yet.
However:
Another HuffPost/YouGov poll conducted just after Snowden revealed his identity publicly found that 38 percent said Snowden did the right thing and only 35 percent said he did the wrong thing.
Much of the drop in support for Snowden's actions since the earlier poll appears to have taken place among Republicans, who were divided, 37 percent to 37 percent, on whether Snowden did the right thing in the previous poll, but in the latest poll said by a 44 percent to 29 percent margin that he did the wrong thing.
In the new poll, Democrats said that Snowden did the wrong thing by a 46 percent to 26 percent margin, while independents said that he did the right thing by a 40 percent to 28 percent margin. Neither of those margins were significantly changed from the previous poll.
Republicans are no longer seeing this as an Obama scandal since the Noise Machine isn't treating it that way. They are free, therefore, to retreat to their usual more authoritarian stance. Unsurprisingly, it's Democrats who remain in their partisan corner.
Update: This piece by Teacherken at Daily Kos is well worth reading. He begins by highlighting this sentence from Eugene Robinson at the Washington Post:
I don’t believe government officials when they say the National Security Agency’s (NSA) surveillance programs do not invade our privacy. The record suggests that you shouldn’t believe them, either.
That's 100% correct. And love Snowden or hate him, we would not know what we know about that today if it were not for these revelations.
Please read on. It even features key scenes from Three Days of the Condor!
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