Confronting the FBI

For John, BLUF:  Frankly the Security State has gotten a little out of hand and needs to be reigned in.  Normally we would expect the Democrats to do that, but today it isn't politically expedient for them to do so.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Don't Click Here, It Is Just Gossip

While the revelations in the article may be important in helping us understand the limits we wish to place on our intelligence agencies, including the FBI, they do dishonor to some who have gone before us, and whom we have, in the past, honored.

From the [salacious] UK Daily Mail, by Reporter Jack Newman, 26 May 2019.

The actions of the FBI in wiretapping folks like Dr Martin Luther King, Charlie Chaplin, Malcolm X, Ernest Hemingway, Muhammad Ali, Jane Fonda, John Lennon, Paul Robeson, while perhaps important in a few cases, became too wide spread to be supportive of the First Amendment.  What we do in private should be allowed to stay private.  If we are doing wrong in private it is not the job of the police to vet each of us for all possible crime, but for the person harmed to stand up and say so, allowing a legitimate investigation  This goes along with that quaint Common Law belief in "innocent until proven guilty".

The story is that President Nixon was afraid to fire FBI Director J Edgar Hoover, for what Secrets Director Hoover might hold.

But, back to the article, we need to confront the assertion of Lord Acton:

Great men are almost always bad men.

Lord Acton, Letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton, 3 April 1887.

We believe President George Washington was a great man and also a good man.  And we think the same of President Abraham Lincoln.  When I was in Grade School, in the late 1940s and early 1950s we thought the same of Presidents Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D Roosevelt.  Today, President Woodrow Wilson not so much.

Hat tip to Ann Althouse.

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff