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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Thomas A Watson who wrote (208017)	12/7/2001 1:35:08 PM
From: JDN	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 769670

Dear Thomas: "you all have a nice day." It's ya'll. When you goin to larn to speak Anglish? JDN

To: Thomas A Watson who wrote (208017)	12/7/2001 4:45:18 PM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 769670

Dearest Thomas, actually I was citing hard 'right wing' commentary (ie: Sovereign Society) about the concerns of foolishly and unnecessarily abandoning our Constitutional protections in the face of an emergency... the 'left wing' seems to have lost whatever ability to reason it ever had under the present circumstances, and has largely been unable to cohesively argue in defense of liberty. The 'lefties' seem to be shell-shocked and berift of meaningful speech at the moment. There has been much discussion by thoughtful conservatives (excepting those of an authoritarian / Fascist / "let's just appoint a King and be done with this squalid little democracy experiment" point-of-view)... about Executive branch power grabs that appear to happen reflexively throughout our nation's history, under the cover of diverting current events.* The Civil War, WWI, and WWII make good examples of this effect (and, no, it is not true that 'all usurped powers' reverted to the people from whence they came, or their Congressional representatives, once the national emergency was over, despite what the history books may say....) During all of these periods of national emergency (as in the present) the general populace was overwhelmingly in favor of the Executive branch's power-grab... but that doesn't necessarily make it proper... or even advisable, if a Democracy is what we intend to remain, with Constitutionally guaranteed individual rights. The spector 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. His 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. It brought back memories of a table-thumping Kruschev, or of old Joe McCarthy in it's exercise of arrogance. 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, and plays right into the hands of our enemies. The press reactions to the Attny. General's appearance exposed the flacidness of American media these days. They have lost whatever capacity they may have had to examine events dispassionately (or even passionately, from multiple points on the political spectrum), in a search for truth. Americans may have lost the ability to clearly see America now. Perhaps only the foreign press still retains the ability to see America now.... * "The greatest threats to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding." Justice Brandeis 1928 "Timid men... prefer the calm of despotism to the boisterous seas of liberty." Thomas Jefferson and finally: Ben Franklin said something that was often repeated during the American Revolutionary War: 'They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.' It is no less true today.