I would much rather err on the side of prematurity and ring the bell with a never ending goal to keep our minds open to the dangers of presidential power unchecked, than to wait until the bell tower is locked in the name of "national security."
Be my guest and maintain your vigil, good sentinel. But take care to not sound the alarm prematurely. p.s. "Presidential power unchecked" - wasn't that LBJ (Big Clyde)?
Germany In 1933: The Easy Slide Into Fascism Bernard Weiner Co-Editor, The Crisis Papers June 9, 2003 If my email is any indication, a goodly number of folks wonder if they're living in America in 2003 or Germany in 1933. All this emphasis on nationalism, the militarization of society, identifying The Leader as the nation, a constant state of fear and anxiety heightened by the authorities, repressive laws that shred constitutional guarantees of due process, wars of aggression launched on weaker nations, the desire to assume global hegemony, the merging of corporate and governmental interests, vast mass-media propaganda campaigns, a populace that tends to believe the slogans and lies it's fed without asking too many questions, a timid opposition that barely contests the administration's reckless adventurism abroad and police-state policies at home, etc. etc. The parallels are not exact, of course; America in 2003 and Germany seventy years earlier are not the same, and Bush certainly is not Adolf Hitler. But there are enough disquieting similarities in the two periods at least to see what we can learn -- cautionary tales, as it were -- and then figure out what to do with our knowledge. http://www.crisispapers.org/Editorials/germany-1933.htm
truly pathetic response. First off where did you see me posting this anywhere before. Hell it wasn't even mine. Second it is you who have been ejaculating the same rant countless times with no facts or references to back it up. And finally, it's a tough choice really, is it your stupidity exceeded by you ignorance or the other way around? Your posts are puffed up bull$shit meaningless repeat of what fox news shoved down your throat. You were asked to go and read some Iraq Iran US involvement history, before you spew your garbage. It's obvious facts have to be constantly repeated to you, and maybe just maybe they would get through your thick skull. gggg man give it a rest. We got your point. You know it all, and everything the thugs on top say is the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth.. wow!! Bush Official: Iraqi "Intellectual Capacity" Justified War The Bush Administration is backtracking -- hard -- from their pre-war claims that Iraq had stockpiles of biological and chemical arms. It doesn't matter whether or not Iraq actually had any of the toxins in their possession, Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs John Bolton said today. What counts is that Iraq had the "intellectual capacity" to build these uncoventional weapons. As Global Security Newswire notes, this directly contradicts statements made by the president during the build-up to war. In his March 17 televised address, Bush said, "Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised." (emphasis mine) Posted by noahmax at May 23, 2003 04:19 PM http://www.defensetech.org/archives/000433.html ok ok ok, leme get this straight,: it's knowing about the weapons the reason to invade and kill? Why don't just kill every person on earth? you know they may look up how to build a nuke bomb on the net. Hey we don't need evidence. Who's gonna stops us? Yep I posted this once before, funny how no response of yours ever materialized. No problemo man. Go read up on Tonkin Gulf and Vietnam.. Part II of http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?threadid=18798 should provide you some hints. All your rhetoric can neither bring back the dead nor justify the atrocities of war. As a bonus you could learn something about "they hate us".. This is not dems against reps, this is questioning the bull$shit that OilShrubMafia and company is trying to shove down our throats, resulting in thousands upon thousands of innocent dead.
AAAinthebeltway. What ploy are you ranting about? It's not even about WMD's. you are making a choice. a. Is it the end that justifies the means? or b. The means Justify the ends? We are and must stand by the second choice. We live in the land of law don't we? We have a due process and democracy right? YOU and your cronies want choice a. Choise a. IS Fascism, totalitarianism, you might as well slap a communism label on our nation and call it day! sad man very sad.
Well, you also have the problem of the boy who cried wolf, or the Leftist who cried Hitler. According to the Left, every Republican President in my lifetime, even Ford for a minute or two, has been Hitler, every Republican Party Convention has been the Nuremberg rallies, and the parallels have always been "intriguing" and "cautionary." Nixon was surely going to use the "Houston Plan" (emergency powers) to take over the entire government, staging a Putsch using Vietnam War protestors as a pretext. Reagan's right wing friends were going to install a paranoid religious extremist American Reich - presuming that the apocalyptic wing didn't win out and persuade Reagan to annihilate the Earth with nuclear weapons. Nicaragua was "just like" Spain in 1936, though El Salvador was also just like Spain, and even was Grenada was just like Spain. Even Bush Sr. was Hitler: He hid his megalomaniacal ambitions behind a bumbling, stuttering facade, but the truth came out after the Gulf War: When he was at 90% approval, he was just like Hitler, and it was a certainty that, just like Hitler, he was going to turn military victory into unchallengeable power: The New World Order was his Thousand Year Reich, of course, and his old CIA connections were going to make it easy for him to install a new American SS. To some, it's always 1933, and every political event is either Nuremberg or a Putsch - though sometimes it's also 1921, 1928, 1933, 1936, and 1940 all at once: and any representative of any minority denied any favor or disagreed with too strenuously is a Jew on the way to the death camps. For some people, even Clinton, whenever he strayed too far to the center or contemplated a foreign military intervention, was getting uncomfortably Hitlerian. And LBJ was almost as much Hitler as the Republicans: Came to power through what Oliver Stone at least was sure was a conspiracy - gave bread and circuses to the people while prosecuting a foreign war: Pure National Socialism. Now Bush is Hitler, though sometimes, when he's not too busy, he's Nixon, too. The same was true of Bush Sr. and Reagan: Every scandal is Watergate - in fact, every whiff of impropriety is usually Watergate. Of course, the broad American public doesn't seem to find this stuff even entertaining. Crying Hitler or crying Nixon too many times has a way of making people ignore you when you cry. Some day, the warnings might really be true. Unless the Left and would-be prophets of catastrophe work a little harder at establishing some minimal credibility, some reputation for basic intellectual honesty, common sense, proportionality, judgment, and trustworthiness, no one will listen to them.
One reason I have trouble with liberal arguments is that liberals tend to turn everything on its head. What is good somehow becomes suspect, but what is bad cannot be called bad because that would be intolerant. So now if the President's national security policy is broadly accepted and seen as reasonable and necessary by most of the electorate, that is not only not good, but it is bad. It means we are only one step from a fascist dictatorship, which would be bad here but for some reason is seen as a good thing for Cuba. In the runup to the war, there were mass demonstrations of over 100,000 protestors in major cities. Many leading politicians were openly dubious, and basically accused the President of orchestrating a war to shore up his popularity. Most of the country's leading newspapers were either negative on the war, or took a dovish nonposition, such as giving the inspectors more time. Now that the war is over, the Democrats are accusing the President of making up intelligence reports to justify war. The Democrats have a nearly even division of power in the congress, and have been able to frustrate the President on many important items. Of the major media outlets, ABC, NBC, CBS and virtually every major newspaper except for the Washington Times and WSJ openly oppose the President and take every opportunity to try to undermine him and his party. I agree that popular passions can boil over and lead to excess in countries without functioning checks and balances. I can't see how that applies here however.
RS, Are you sure you didn't work for Bill Clinton? You sure have his knack of labelling opponents with his own misdeeds. I am not supporting Bush solely because of his party. In fact, I have criticized him repeatedly for not going far enough on policies like tax reform. What I am pointing out is that the opposition to him is almost totally political in nature. The Democrats desperately want the economy to be bad and they desperately want Iraq to look bad, so they can attack the President. Oh yeah, while "supporting the troops." All this gabbering about not finding WMD is a transparent ploy to be able to call the President a liar and thus undermine his legitimacy. First, they totally ignored the nuances in his justification for war, as clearly demonstrated by KF. Then they announce as fact that no WMD have been found and imply that none ever existed, even though the UN reported otherwise. If only they had been as vigilant when we were putting Islamist thugs in power in Kosovo, at the behest of the CNN State Department. Perhaps you can tell me when those troops, who were supposed to come home within a year, will ever be available to deal with our actual interests?