Hiding our light

Digby has a very unnerving screed about the degree to which we (the populace and the legal community) are becoming ok with the end of "innocent until proven guilty" -- from the dehumanization of detainees to the notion that the President can make or overrule laws as he sees fit.

We are disappearing people, rendering them to friendly governments that aren't afraid to put the electrode to genitals and threaten with dog rape. And we are building our own infrastructure of torture and extra legal imprisonment. It is a law of human nature that if you build it, they will come. This infrastructure will be expanded and bureaucratized. It's already happening. And when they decide, as Professor Yoo has already decided, that an election is a sanctioning of anything the President chooses to do in the War on Terror, it is only a matter of time before internal political enemies become a threat.

And then it will be us.

I certainly share his fears, especially given the increase in eliminationist rhetoric lately. Surely the American public can be wakened and made to care about the nation's onetime core values -- can we do it in time?

Update: This Tom Tomorrow cartoon feels all too accurate to me in the way we lower the bar for dismay ever further...