When You've Lost Eugene Robinson...

I've mentioned Eugene Robinson before, not very flatteringly in this post.  Let the Obama administration go after his kind of people (journalists) and not my kind of people (Tea Partiers) and Robinson finally sees the light:

The Obama administration has no business rummaging through journalists’ phone records, perusing their e-mails and tracking their movements in an attempt to keep them from gathering news. This heavy-handed business isn’t chilling, it’s just plain cold.

It also may well be unconstitutional...

The unwarranted snooping, which was revealed last week, would be troubling enough if it were an isolated incident. But it is part of a pattern that threatens to redefine investigative reporting as criminal behavior...

After discussing the AP story:

The Fox News case is even worse.

Wow, even Fox gets respect from some liberals now.  Too bad it took a direct threat of the loss of 1st Amendment freedoms to make that happen.

If this had been the view of prior administrations, surely Bob Woodward would be a lifer in some federal prison. The cell next door might be occupied by my Post colleague Dana Priest, who disclosed the CIA’s network of secret prisons. Or by the New York Times’ James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, who revealed the National Security Agency’s eavesdropping program.

Robinson sees the threat now. Welcome to the party.

I've heard it said that these current scandals have taken distrust of the government from the "tinfoil hat crowd" to "mainstream America".  I disagree.  I think they've confirmed what the Founders knew about excessive power, what conservatives have always believed about government power, and shown liberals to be flat out wrong.  That they believed these threats to be "tinfoil hat" just shows their own biases and blinders.