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

To: Bald Eagle who wrote (589903)	7/12/2004 1:15:39 PM
From: sea_biscuit	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 769670

Tired old rhetoric. How do insurgents that are fighting to take back their country from an invading force, threaten our freedom? Unless you are talking about our "freedom" to enslave other people.

To: Bald Eagle who wrote (589903)	7/12/2004 2:02:08 PM
From: DuckTapeSunroof	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

"the terrorists are ruthless in their determination to take our freedom away from us," Dispite the President's rhetoric, I don't think they care a spit about 'our freedoms'. What they want is Islamic Theocracy in all Muslim lands (and, of course, they want Muslims to evangelize the rest of the world... the same as Christian evangelicals want to evangelize the rest of the non-Christian world... but, that's nothing new). It seems that a significant percentage of Americans and American political leaders are willing to toss aside hard-earned American freedoms at the first sign of external threats! (But, of course, there is really nothing new in THAT, either. At nearly every big politico-military crisis throughout our history rights have been rolled-back or abolished by fiat... the Civil War, WW I, WW II, the Cold War, the Drug War, etc., etc., etc., and now the 'War on Terrorism'.) Our founding fathers and luminaries from our history have commented on this regretable tendency quite a bit: It is always the natural tendency of politicians and bureaucrats to seek to exploit temporary crisis, to expand permanently their powers over the public. "The true danger is when liberty is nibbled away, for expedience, and by parts." - Edmund Burke "The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion." - Edmund Burke (1784) "The greatest threats to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding." - Justice Brandeis "Perhaps it is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to provisions against danger, real or pretended, from abroad...." "Of all the enemies of public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, and the executive is the branch most favored by it of all the branches..." - James Madison "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace in a continual state of alarm (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing them with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -H. L. Mencken Plunkitt of Tammany Hall memorably asked: "What's the Constitution among friends?" "They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - Benjamin Franklin "Timid men... prefer the calm of despotism to the boisterous seas of liberty." - Thomas Jefferson "When the people fear the government, you have TYRANNY, when the government fears the people, you have FREEDOM" - Thomas Jefferson "Freedom is a fragile thing and is never more than one generation away from extinction." - Ronald Reagan "The liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil constitution, are worth defending at all hazards; and it is our duty to defend them against all attacks. We have received them as a fair inheritance from our worthy ancestors; they purchased them for us with toil and danger and expense of treasure and blood. It will bring an everlasting mark of infamy on the present generation, enlightened as it is, if we should suffer them to be wrested from us without a struggle, or be cheated out of them by the artifices of false and designing men ." - Samuel Adams Patrick Henry spoke these famous prophetic words, as much to us today as to his fellow patriots in 1775: ‘Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!´ "Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God" – Susan B. Anthony