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19 December 2005

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nanook

The precipice has already been crossed.

Re-reading the history of our Constitution today, a point that struck me was the fragility of our country after the Revolutionary war and the real threats to the young nation. Yet the framers believed to form a more just union and to prevent tyranny of the executive that it was necessary to amend the Constitution and enshrine the Bill of Rights. The 4th amendment could not be more clear in its purpose.

George Bush has just admitted that he has authorized the warantless spying on American citizens to ostensibly protect the citizens.

First, it seems that he has violated the Constitution and lawful Congressional statute. Second, tyranny of the executive has always been justified under the rubric of national security and citizen safety.

Are we at a watershed moment in the history of the republic?

Eric

Larry, I am glad you think Mr. Bush is "amiable"; my word describing him begins with "a" and ends with "e", also, and is always preceded by the word "utter".


Since the failure to accomplish anything at Tora Bora, Afghanstan, in Nov/Dec 2001, the War on Terra has devolved into a police/intelligence operation. At Tora Bora, a decisive result militarily, if it could have been achieved at all(and I think it could have), would have required a brigade or less of light infantry. The War on Terra is hardly of Stalingrad or Kursk magnitude, although Mr. Bush attempts to fill our kool-aid goblets with that vintage at every opportunity.


In the time that Mr. Bush has diddled with the WOT and his Iraq Clown Show, the US was in and out of WWII, and the German and Japanese malefactors were well on their way to the gallows.


The past four years have been surreal.


The thing that amazes me most, I guess, is that most Americans do not realize how many times in the last 5000 years, 2000+ innocent civilians have died in a day, at the hand of zealots or war mongers.


We are, as a nation, I think, "exceptional", in the sense of being historically ignorant.

BadTux

Eric, you are assuming that Americans would view those 2000+ civilians as being human beings. I do not believe they would. To most Americans, anybody who is outside the border of the United States and not a citizen of the United States is untermenshen, other, not truly human, just flat two-dimensional caricatures on a television screen. They aren't HUMAN, not in any way that the typical American understands "human" as being (i.e., as American). Everything on television and radio, everything they've seen and heard and know in their lives, supports this notion of "other" as "untermenschen", drawing on the most primitive of instincts of the naked ape that was our forefathers -- i.e., that "other" is to be feared and hated and hooted at and feces flung at. Like two bands of howler monkeys hooting and howling and screeching to mark off their territory against the "enemy" (anybody who isn't part of the band of howler monkeys), that same base instinct of the American public is being very carefully massaged by the masters of message...

Why do you think Americans care more about 2100 dead American GI's than about 40,000 dead Iraqi civilians? It's because they really don't view those Iraqi civilians as human, even if they claim to do so, even the most liberal of Americans...

- Badtux the Orwellian Cynic

O de Potomac

Thanks especially for this post. Yourt fan, O

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