Come over to The American Peoples’ Congress if you’re man enough, sissy [women welcome too, it’s a party!]

I love that spying on frigging Greenpeace is fine with these fascists a-holes, and sticking a wand up every Mexican granny’s ass on the way to see her children in Florida is perfectly acceptable in the “War On Terr-uh”.

I think people should wake up and smell the Nazi-odeur that’s wafting from their hide-leather shoes. We are treading dangerously close to a fascist dictatorship. We’re only one good disaster or concurrent “terrorist” attack from total martial law. Bird flu ring a bell? When even Thom Hartmann begins squawking about it for real, you know there’s something to it.

This government is in hock to the corporations, and they are developing their own police forces. Google “Target Security Police” We are infor a world of hurt, my friends, if we don’t put down our hammers and our hot dogs and our magazines and get into the streets, marching for peace. This war will continue sucking blood and tears and stack of millions and even billions of dollars every single day, until we end it through the power of peaceful protest. It’s happened in the past, and it can happen again. The people of Iraq and the people this policy has harmed irrevocably all over the world deserve our support.

Think about it when you’re eating that good steak. Think about it when you’re polishing that shotgun and thinking about how much you love your leader. Think about it when you’re playing with your kids and a car nearby backfires.

Now imagine what it would be like, if that car had exploded. And shrapnel was soaring through the air towards your child? And your neighbors and coworkers and friends had to live in that environment, and see their bank accounts dwindle, and have to watch their children get sick, and have no way of fixing their situation, other than by going into debt, and taking pills, and wishing they could make the war and all their other problems would just go away.

Now imagine you’re that person’s spouse, typing onto a computer screen your frustrations about the suffering you are experiencing. What would you tell the world, when your location is a secret, and you don’t want to let the world know who you are, because you might be in the insurgency, and you may have no idea where your next meal will be coming from, and maybe this is the last time you will communicate with anyone anywhere ever again.

Imagine how you would feel, if being a Leftist meant being a target, a name on a list, an expendable enemy of the state, tried and convicted in absentia for your beliefs, for your commitment to your people and your cause, and for that your country was seized by force and your entire people’s future put on hold.

Would you stay silent? Would you stay home and go about your business, watching your friends and neighbors lose their lives and their businesses, with no aid or hope for recovery?

When an entire market is bombed with depleted uranium cruise missiles, and over fifty people are murdered, in an instant? Would you stay silent then? What would you tell the families of the people who lived in that neighborhood and are irrevocably harmed by that incident, how would you explain to them the danger of the poisonous particles that now reside within their bodies, wreaking havoc inside the cells of unborn babies growing in their mothers’ wombs?

Would you not rise up, and take up the banner of protest? Would you not retain the right to carry a weapon in case your life might be in danger? Would you not ask your friends and neighbors to look out for you, and to work to stick together? Is that what they call an insurgency?

Is this what they taught our citizens to call something bad? Something evil, something icky like Saddamism? That sounds dirty, doesn’t it? Kinda like Satanism, heh heh.

This philosophy, the idea that we are Good and those I-Rack-EEs are ragwearing camel-jockeys is working real well for us. It’s got us into a totally unnecessary and politically advantageous bloody war with a people that just want nothing more than for us to leave their country.

THere is no possible link to any Iraqi National, either connected to the Saddam government or not, ever of committing terrorist acts against this country, the United States of America. Only until we the United States of America made agressive moves within the Middle East, first sanctions against Iraq and then a giant, full-scale military invasion with cowboy boots on, did we ever see full-scale suicide car in the marketplace kind of killings in Iraq.

This sh*t doesn’t just happen, it has to happen. It happens because people refuse to let their country be ripped away from them by dictatorial fascists, and they fight back. Just like we will fight back if they ever take us to prison camps and torture us.

I can’t wait till these neo-fascist Klansmen get to the Pearly Gates and have to stand in the long line watching black people and Puerto Rican people and people of all kinds of other races going to the line way at the front – the express line for oppressed minorities.

God bless Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. for being a better man than me and saying we have got to love our enemies, even at their worst. I wish I could love you, you right-wing wackos. But I can’t. Sorry. You have totally lost my vote. As someone who totally believes in the Democratic process, I think everyone should get a chance to vote before someone is totally written off, but I sure don’t wanna know ya. Maybe God does.

Hope he likes you, cause there’s one red devil who I bet loves to talk about “necessary roughness” and “softening” people “up for questioning”. Are you sure you’re reading the right translation of the Bible, church-goer? What if Isaiah was right, and those who mix church and state are bound to corrupt both? What if the crimes of that era are eclipsed by the crimes of this era, crimes like Enron and Worldcom and Kmart and the Sago Mine disaster? What if the great sin of our age was not religious apathy but religious idolatry? The worship of a false god known as “Freedom”. For you, Freedom is a gift God gave us cause we earned it. Because we were the best at getting it. And Democracy is the way you can earn your Freedom. And if you don’t have Democracy, military dictatorship is almost as good. Enjoy, fellas!

P.S. Your jackboots are coming. There was some mix up in Purchasing. The thought Goebbells was spelled Gerbels. I straightened em out. Enjoy!

It’s been fun. Hopefully we can get another good conversation going on another one of your posts sometime in the future.

Liam.

Rick, Liam & Snave- Thanks to you all for a fantastic debate and exchange of ideas/positions. This is what Democracy and freedom is really about.

Rick- Apology accepted. We all try to toss some sticks from time to time, because there really is a lot of writing out there that does not have a lot of depth or thought behind it. To engage in hearty debate takes time, and I am glad you have found your time here well spent. That is all I seek to accomplish. (Well, not all…but a great deal of Common Sense is to make people think through their own points of view with something other than superficial repitition. If after all is said and done we still disagree, then so be it. At least we’ve given ourselves a chance, and others a chance, to view things in more than one light.

As for all the peripheral topics that this post has engendered from Rick, Liam, and Snave, I think we could go on ad infinitum, and still be skirting around the main post topic. That is fine, but I’m going to move on now. Not for lack of things to say, just to move the debate on in another direction. There has been much here to generate new posts and I look forward to hearing from you all again.

Jolly- Your scenario represents the gravest ending for the current path. I agree with others that we are not there yet, nor is that outcome inevitable, but we are tending in that direction. Democracies (and/or federal republics) withstand the test of tyranny by the will of the people to continue to grow, debate, and move forward while accepting that all sides may have valuable things to offer. A unitary executive or autocratic government rejects that premise. I would like to think that Americans will accept the former position and reject the latter, but time will tell.

ZThanks, again, to all for a lively exchange.

However, we aren’t there yet, and except in my most depressed and negative moments, I’m not convinced we’re inevitably bound there (even if sometimes I sound that way on my own blog).

Our system of government is very well set up. The concepts behind our government are well drilled into the populace. In spite of the fact that the neoconservative movement had among its founders those who felt a “Pearl Harbor type event” would be the perfect catalyst for siezing power, the hand still has to be played carefully and delicately.

I don’t believe it will be Bush who sees the benefit. No matter what level of additional attacks may befall us, I think if our civil liberties are curtailed so quickly that Bush could conceivably try to call off the next election or insist he can legally run again, most people would reject that.

I do agree that the wholesale sale of this country’s debt to China is a major problem.

I also feel that the whole Diebold voting machine issue must be dealt with. There is sufficient evidence of hanky-panky in the 2004 election that I don’t think we’ll ever know for sure that Bush won that one. Recent rulings in Alaska and Ohio run counter to the best interests of a democracy, shrouding the results of elections in secrecy and refusing to allow any public oversight of the voting machines.

But if the U.S. is going to become an autocracy, I think the way it will most likely go down is slowly, subtly, over time, with a tweaked election result here and a slow eroding of civil liberties there. I think there are enough people pointing out the issues with the voting systems that in some areas, Diebold and similar voting systems have been rejected.

Sooner or later, someone is going to get wise to the idea that if the exit polls are wildly different from the official results (as had never happened before 2004, note I said “wildly different” not “wrong in a close race”) then maybe someone is tampering with the results.

Regardless, I do think JollyRoger’s end result is a possible one, but far frome a forgone conclusion. That’s why I blog. If we can open people’s eyes to the tricks that seem to be going on, and convince Republicans that Bush is not really one of them (can someone who builds that level of budget deficit really be one of the party of fiscal responsibility), and convince Democrats that replacing Bush with an equally corrupt Democrat is no solution, we may yet avoid this outcome.

Liam.

I would like to see the left chastise Belafonte and Cindy Sheehan for mugging with Hugo Chavez or with leaders who publicly state they are against our country. I wouldn’t even mind seeing Howard Dean get chastised from time to time when he makes comments that might be true but which are not expressed in terms anything but blunt.

When right-wing leaders chastise folks like RevPat, I agree it does at least give them the appearance of trying to keep their problem-children under control. It might also give them the appearance of not having such a big tent as they might like people to think.

Then again, hinting that they don’t have as much tolerance for the “fringe” types is a politically-expedient thing for the GOP to do; as I mentioned in one of my earlier comments (and as Liam helped me say), if the “center” has shifted rightward, so has the boundary at the left end of the spectrum… and this tends to bunch a wide range of left-wing opinions into a narrower and narrower band of the spectrum. I think this then creates a public misperception that someone from a group like Earth Liberation Front, for example, is representative of mainstream Democratic party beliefs, which couldn’t be further from the truth.

The GOP is better at managing the rightward expansion of the boundary at their end than the Democrats are at managing the rightward expansion of the boundary at the left end. To combat this effectively the Dems definitely have to do a better job advertising their party.

And I also believe that the unitary Executive, combined with things like the coming default of the Federal Government, spells the end of the United States of America.

Let us consider the kind of Government El Shrubbo intends to impose upon all of the country. I do not believe for a second that the Northeast, or the West Coast, will tolerate it. So then the Federal Government will have to enforce its authority on these regions, and it will try to do so using soldiers drawn largely from the ranks of the poor and disadvantaged-the very people the Federal Government is implacably hostile to. This is a recipe for collapse of the Federal authority, and of course that collapse will be greatly hastened the day the Chinese pass on the bond auction.

What will be left? Perhaps a federation of Southern States, with maybe Ohio and Indiana thrown in. The “sagebrush” States will make a grab for the autonomy that they have always cherished, and the West Coast and Northeast will undoubtedly go their own way as well.

This will be the final result of the combination of El Shrubbo’s power grab and El Shrubbo’s bankrupting of the Federal Government. Shrubberals, enjoy the ride you set in motion.

Liam

First, the comparison between Pat Robertson and Michael Moore is specious, because of the difference in what they represent. Michael Moore is an entertainer. A good analogy for him on the other side would be Ted Nugent, who says some pretty inflammatory things on the extremes of the ideology of the right, but no one chastises him.

A good analogy for Pat Robertson would be the church in California which was recently served with notice that it was being investigated for violating the rules with regard to the last election. A sermon by one of the church elders which had fairly negative things to say about both candidates, and which didn’t explicitly endorse either (merely suggested that parishioners decide for themselves which way Jesus would vote and vote that way) is called unreasonably political and possibly worthy of loss of tax-exempt status, but Pat Robertson (and quite a few other religious groups that benefit from the tax-exempt status of churches) make much more explicit endorsements of Republican candidates, and they aren’t investigated. There are a number of mega churches that explicitly supported Bush. There was one whose leader came right out and told his congregation that any of them that voted for Kerry did not belong in his church. In defense of your argument, that church leader was later ousted from his church by the congregation, but in defense of mine, it was only by the congregation, not because of any outside influence speaking out or chastising them.

Another difference between Moore/Belafonte and Robertson is who they speak out against. Moore and Belafonte both speak out against the President. Robertson makes calls for blatantly illegal assassinations, says that the Hurricane in New Orleans was divine retribution and tells the world that God will no longer protect a town in Pennsylvania because they refused to allow Intelligent Design to be taught as a scientific alternative to evolution.

How about the “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth”? Have they been chastised or criticized by anyone in the Republican party for a series of attack ads on Kerry which have more or less proven to be false (or at least, present a story from a batch of people who cannot substantiate having been present that is in direct contradiction to the stories from people who were there)? How about the many Fox News (and other big media) commentators who spent large hours hammering home the issue that Al Gore was a liar, when in fact just about every one of the supposed “lies” is either taken wildly out of context, or turns out to be true? How about the many charges brought by Republicans against Bill Clinton, which turned out to have had so little merit that they had to keep slinging mud against the wall and expanding the investigation well beyond its original scope before they found anything that had any merit?

The difference isn’t that the Right wing is better at self-censuring their extremists, it’s that the Right wing is better at marching in lock step, following a set of party talking points and punishing (as one) anyone from the party who steps away from the party line. (Have you heard the term “RINO”? It means “Republican in Name Only”, and it’s commonly leveled at any Republican who doesn’t toe the party line). Some elements of the party line are fringe, extremist, and downright false. But on the Left, there is no serious organized attempt to say “this is what you will say, this is what you will think, this is Party reality”, so charges against Bush don’t get widely and consistently repeated until they become “common knowledge”. Therefore, I would say that in fact it is the Democratic party whose members are actually MORE willing to decry questionable statements by their fringe members, so those fringe arguments (even some which appear to be true) don’t get the kind of toehold in the public consciousness that the other side’s talking points get.

I think it is this consistent and concerted message that is responsible for the rightward shift in perception we’ve already discussed. It is not that people’s attitudes are any different than they’ve always been, it’s that there’s so much more rote repetition of the Republican talking points (even to the level of “liberal” being a term of derision) than there has of the Democratic.

And if you don’t believe that, watch the various news programs on any given Sunday (Meet the Press, Face the Nation, This Week, etc) and listen to the conservative guests and then listen to the right wing Commentator (Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, etc). Count how many times Rice, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the rest use exactly the same phrase. Sure, you’d expect some of that, but even in the comments presented as though they were off-the-cuff remarks. A few weeks ago, the big issue was the problematic roll-out of the new Medicare drug benefit plan, and a very large number of them referred to “your Aunt Sadie” (it wasn’t Sadie, I forget the name they used. But they all used the same name).

Republicans have become very good at framing any argument and making a coordinated effort to all stick to the same framing, while Democrats still (by and large) react individually. Less coordinated message, less rote memorization in the minds of the populous, less “common knowledge” belief that the Democratic message has any merit.

This is getting long, but let me leave you with one last example: the Republican talking point that Democrats don’t have any ideas. When you ask people why they are hesitant to support a Democratic candidate, even knowing that they disapprove of the Republican one, and one of the first answers you get is “Democrats don’t have any ideas”. It comes out parrot like, as if this were somehow obvious to everyone. And yet…

Last week, George Bush endorsed a plan (which he attributed to the Russians) to provide nuclear fuel to Iran for a civilian power generation nuclear plant. The point of this plan is that someone provides the fuel to Iran and then collects the “garbage” (spent fuel rods) in order to make sure none of it was processed into fissionable, weapons grade material.

Note that Bush doesn’t even claim the idea, he says he is endorsing an idea someone else came up with.

Now go back to August of 2004. The campaigns are in full swing, and John Kerry announces a plan to deal with Iran’s nuclear ambitions. It is met with wide spread derision in the right wing media and by pretty much anyone on that side of the aisle who comments on it. The details of that plan? Pretty much EXACTLY the “Russian” plan President Bush just endorsed. (For more information, read my blog post here).

So the “common knowledge” is that Kerry’s plan was stupid and ill conceived. The “common knowledge” (such as it is) is that Bush is actually DOING something to support a plan to try to limit Iran’s nuclear capabilities. And almost no one is reporting that it’s the same plan, while “common knowledge” still says Democrats have no ideas.

Liam.

P.S. Snave, I honestly didn’t intend to copy your argument. I hadn’t read through yours fully when I wrote this, so similarities between yours and mine were arrived at independently.

First, I want to agree with the comments of mutual admiration which have been going on here. We don’t all agree, but I respect that we’ve each come to our conclusions through thought and analysis, and we have done a much better-than-average job of keeping the discussion polite and not resulting in personal attacks.

I agree about Roe v. Wade, by the way. Regardless of my feelings on the abortion issue, from constitutional grounds, I think Roe is shaky law at best. I’m also not convinced that abortion is an issue in the Federal domain, I think a very good argument can be made for it being a States domain issue.

Understand, I do not have a problem with reading into the Constitution to find implied rights. I think it’s perfectly reasonable to find that the framers intended a certain level of right to privacy, even though it was not specifically spelled out, and I don’t think that it’s judicial activism, nor judicial legislating, to find laws unconstitutional based on their infringing on rights that constitutional scholars find strong implication for in the text.

That’s one of the objections I have to the implication of the popular use of the term “original intent” jurists, the implication that it is only within the purview of judges and justices to rule on constitutionality of things which are explicitly spelled out in the Constitution. Just to pick one hot-button example, the framers didn’t know anything about atomic energy, so they didn’t limit the extent to which the second Amendment applied. And yet surely few people would seriously argue that that Amendment says that U.S. citizens have the right to own and carry a nuclear bomb. And once you make that distinction, you’ve already lost the absolutist argument regarding guns. It’s like the old joke, in which a man asks a woman if she’d sleep with him for ten million dollars, and she says “of course”, so he says “how about for ten dollars” and she says “No, what kind of woman do you think I am?” and he replies “We’ve already settled that, now we’re just haggling over the price.”

The issue, and the point of contention, is where the line is drawn, and we may all have different opinions of where that line is drawn, but it does not make it judicial activism when one judge has a differing opinion than you do over where the limit is on the second Amendment.

Justices can not make laws, they can only strike them down. So by definition, they cannot legislate from the bench. There is nothing preventing Congress from passing a reworded version of the same law which was previously struck down, it just means that if it’s too similar, it will probably be struck down again. A perfect example from the State of the Union speech is the President’s call for the line-item veto. It was passed once, for President Clinton. It was then challenged and ruled unconstitutional on the basis of altering the fundamental balance of powers between the branches. Bush is nevertheless still free to call for it, and this Congress is free to enact it if they so choose, and until or unless someone mounts a legal challenge to it, the law will stand.

So, while we may have differing opinions on what the Constitution says (or would intend) about a given situation, it is absolutely vital that Justices and the courts have the right to interpret both the laws passed by the Congress and the execution of those laws by the Executive branch. Not so that they have legislative authority, but so that they act as a check on what might otherwise be a completely unintended level of power in a small number of hands, which again brings us back to the original piece and concerns over Unitary Executive.

This is getting long, so let me post this one and move on to the next topic in a new comment.

Liam.