The Bush administration thoroughly attacked the Constitutional rights of all Americans. They virtually killed off the 4th amendment:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

That administration essentially made it legal for the U.S. government to invade your privacy–your person, house, papers, and effects–without a warrant, without probable cause, without even a specific location and without anything more than a general category of what is to be searched for. After stacking the Supreme Court with justices just waiting for an excuse to place their stamp of approval on such practices.

And the Fourth Amendment wasn’t the only one shredded. You can be arrested without being informed of the charges and swept away to a foreign land without counsel–there went the Sixth Amendment–to be held without due process, and you can be tortured so as to testify against yourself–there went the Fifth and Eighth Amendments–and can be locked up for years without a trial, and never get a jury trial–there went the Seventh. That these rights are not violated daily against all citizens is moot; the foot is in the door, the camel’s nose is under the tent flap, and the precedent is set.

So it flabbergasts me when I see right-wingers going berserk about how the Obama administration is somehow responsible for depriving them of their rights, seemingly oblivious as to what went on under Bush, as if his bolstering of the Second Amendment made up for stripping most of the rest. Sure, the Obama administration gets the blame for perpetuating many of these practices, but the Republicans are the ones who did the damage, and the point is that once the damage is done, it almost never gets undone. Even more to the point, the right-wing protesters don’t even seem to be protesting the actual deprivation of Constitutional rights that Bush committed and Obama is being soft about, but instead they are outraged by some imagined theft of rights that Obama hasn’t even come close to perpetrating.

Consider Arizona: Republicans in control of the state senate just passed a bill which would allow police in the state to stop people just for looking like they’re not legal citizens, demand to see one’s “papers” like they were Gestapo or Soviet state police, and if you don’t have them, haul your ass off to jail. This is exactly the kind of crap that the Tea Party crowd imagines Obama is pulling and get outraged about it–but it’s the Republicans in Arizona doing it, along party lines (all Democrats opposed it and only one Republican joined them). The paradox is that the Teabaggers will probably love this because they imagine it will never apply to them–so it’s OK to violate the rights of Americans of color, even as it whittles away at the rights of everyone. It’s “no government-run health care and don’t touch my Medicare” all over again.

The stupidity dazzles, the irony blinds. Welcome to the Tea Party™.