Conspiring to Commit Democracy

Glenn Greenwald said this a few days ago about the police raids in St. Paul, done at the behest of the Republican Party.

There is clearly an intent on the part of law enforcement authorities here to engage in extreme and highly intimidating raids against those who are planning to protest the Convention. The DNC in Denver was the site of several where law enforcement acted on behalf of Democratic Party officials and the corporate elite that funded the Convention to keep the media and protesters from doing anything remotely off-script. But the massive and plainly excessive preemptive police raids in Minnesota are of a different order altogether. Targeting people with automatic-weapons-carrying SWAT teams and mass raids in their homes, who are suspected of nothing more than planning dissident political protests at a political convention and who have engaged in no illegal activity whatsoever, is about as redolent of the worst tactics of a police state as can be imagined.

This is the Sarah Palin view of America: celebrating the arrest of fellow citizens for no reason whatsoever other than they may dress differently and hold a different political view, and standing around and pointing and guffawing as young people are dragged away. Happily ignorant hockey moms.

This is truly repugnant, extreme police behavior designed to intimidate protesters, police critics and others, and it ought to infuriate anyone and everyone who cares about basic liberties.

It ought to, but it won't. At least not those who partied at the RNC last night, or local conservative bloggers who would blithely dismiss those hauled away as dirty hippies.