statement: "The specter of our Attny. General standing before Congress yesterday and flat-out implying that anyone who disagreed with him was siding with our terrorist enemies, as if no other points-of-view were possible, was particularly bad"
your comment: I saw it yesterday and say he was spot on. The complainers are complaining for the sake of complaining.
answer: Are you saying that you agree that ANY AND ALL CRITICISM OF OUR GOVERNMENT is 'siding with terrorists'? Don't you think that would let our enemies win by totally destroying the freedoms our ancestors had a revolution for?
your further comment: And it DOES give comfort to the enemy for them to see our politicians try to besmirch our President, Attorney General and Secretary of Defense.
answer: Who 'besmirched' anyone? We have a triparte form of government: Executive, Representative, Judicial... operating as a representative democracy. Open debate and free-wheeling constructive criticism is supposed to be part of that. It is certainly an appropriate criticism to say that excluding the Judiciary from trials, Congress from constitutionally mandated oversight, and any and all in the public from speaking up upon pains of being called 'traitorous', is creeping totalitarianism.
statement: "His (Ashcroft's) exploitation of a terrorist training manual (waiving it around as if there were any surprise that there existed violent people in the world, and as if the existence of bad people mandated that the American Constitution should be selectively ignored) was very disturbing"
your comment: He clearly was pointing out that the manual showed how terrorists USED our civil liberties to try to defeat us. Very pertinent as to why SOME liberties for SOME people can lead to harm for our nation. Beautifully presented, and brought up a number of points I had not considered.
answer: Er... none of them "used our civil liberties to try to defeat us"! They relied upon physical attacks perhaps made more possible by lax immigration efforts, sloppy intelligence work, compromised intelligence work, geo-political miopia, a long standing failure to learn the lessons of history, inadequate or inappropriate defense preparations, etc., etc.
Not one of our vaunted constitutional freedoms occasioned this attack... in fact, among the first public statements out of our President's mouth subsequent to the attacks were ones where he claimed the terrorists attacked us because they didn't like our Freedoms. It was an "attack on Freedom", according to the Pres.
Pretty funny way to run a railroad, by shooting yourself in the same foot your enemies want to shoot you in....
statement: "It could be argued with at least equal success, I believe, that subverting our Constitutional freedoms poses an even greater threat to the soul of our nation"
your comment: Then why wasn't it?
answer: Er, because the members of the committee are idiots? (Just guessing :-) |
