I am and will always be ambivalent about Clinton.
And I'm none too sure about Bush II either. We'll see. And that's great. Unless we're being hoodwinked by unseen powers in this government, those that are really in control with their fleet of black helicopters, it still seems that we have the power to junk a leader. This is fabulous, altogether unappreciated power the we the people still seem to possess.
And about McCarthy: As right as he was about the evils communism (and here I will always have questions -- Marx did have some good ideas, so were the evils of communism just perversions of communism? Democracy (or should I say 'capitalism'?), too, has had its perversions which have created a certain amount of enmity toward western democratic governments, some of it not entirely undeserved? It's complicated. One thing I've learned: don't put good ideas into the hands of people; they're sure to fuck them up. <-- Boy is that cynical. I really don't mean it) What I do really mean is that McCarthy's ends, however noble they may have been, did not justify the means he used -- which often flew in the face of the very Constitution he swore to protect. But what was scary was that so many jumped on this particular bandwagon, happily, waving the flag and pooping on the constitution as they rolled merrily along, trashing lives. Look at Ollie North, serving his president at the expense of his own oaths. Some people wanted him to run for President for crying out loud.
And so back we go again, worrying about rights and the Constitution in our efforts to deal carefully with the powerful patriots among us, a very few of them only so-called. |
