After all, if you go back 12,000 years ago to when George Washington was torturing the British over here so we wouldn't have to fight them over there, Thomas Jefferson was talkin' about how we needed a "free press" which would work with, maybe even for the Preznit so that the NoozPapers could help the citizens understand that their Preznit just has to do secret stuff, and if they knew about all this secret stuff they might somehow hurt the Preznit's ability to make'em safe.

And they wuz right, too!

After all, look how many people thought that we should go attack and occupy Iraq based on secret evidence of scary Martian space weapons that Saddam Hussein was gonna let loose on the ocean floors, and even Colin Powell waved a bottle of Mrs. Dash at the UN to prove it!

Turned out that yeah, nobody could find no Seasoned Salt II Poisoned Nuclear Robot Missiles anywheres in I-rak, but it sure did help the Preznit gin up a War To Make Us Safe thanks to our willingness to believe in secret stuff we had no bidness knowin'!!!

PS: I have a forthcoming secret law review article based on anonymous administration officials who couldn't tell me classified information, but it proves that Bush Jr's government has been the most successy of any President ever on any planet!!

Clearly the fact that up to 1/2 of foreign insurgents in Iraq, including most suicide bombers, are coming to Iraq from Saudi Arabia, clearly indicate that we better get crackin' and Attack Iran Now!

Those Iranian mullahs must not be allowed to get away with this Saudi treachery!!!

Quick -- somebody get Admiral Joe Lieberman in to plan the war to target those Iranian Saudis!

...until such time as he may ever suggest something which Bush Jr., Cheney, and the neo-Khans do not wish to hear.

If General Petraeus happens to say something not wanted by these party leaders, then it will have turned out retroactively that General Petraeus was never said to be generating U.S. policy, he was merely one policy voice, in fact, he never ever worked for the US military in any official capacity and maybe in fact he was just a fictional character made up out of thin air by deranged Bush Jr. haters.

But now that the president’s arsenal of authority is swollen and consecrated, a few voices of complaint are being heard. Even the New York Times recently condemned the new law for “making martial law easier.”

All very true, but OTOH it is required if the very same people who bemoan the ineffectualness of the Feds during Katrina want action.

- shooter242

Exactly. You've nailed it.

How dare the same people who insist that our federal government act with the huge amounts of infrastructure, personnel, and technologies with which we the citizens have provided it in order to prevent old men and women from drowning and their corpses rotting in the streets of a major U.S. city also claim to not want a set of deluded imperial fascists to declare martial law in the U.S. in order to protect politically motivated, murderous, fraudulent, cowardly, and nation-destroying policies?

It's almost as if the same people who want to be able to send their children to government-administered public schools also demand that they get to keep their Constitution and maybe even the Bill of Rights part of it too.

Ha! Serves them right, eh?

Ask Republicans to do something other than sit on their a**es and let a city drown, and sure enough, what you get instead is a determined drive to burn the Constitution and institute everything just below and maybe someday directly including martial law by a deluded kinglike executive and his teeth-chatteringly crazy Vice President who thinks he occupies powers spanning at least 4 spatial dimensions.

In right wing crazy world, at least.

It's rather like advocating universal health care from the Government while simultaneously bemoaning wiretaps on overseas calls.

Exactly.

It's rather like thinking you can call the police because you think there might be a burglar around your home while simultaneously bemoaning if those cops showed up and started raping you and your children and stealing your belongings and setting fire to your car.

You don't get one without the other in Republican world, right?

I mean, if you're willing to go to a hospital and authorize them to do surgery on you to remove a ruptured spleen, don't you go crying to anyone if you wake up to find that the surgeons have amputated all your arms and legs and then sewed bags of cotton candy on in their place. That's just what you should get for lettin' somebody mess with your body, right?

Another lesson in Values Learned From Right Wing Crazy World.

The gold standard for being considered wise commentary on U.S. foreign policy is that you understand on a very deep level that our establishment is under no responsibility to uphold any of the standards by which we judge our enemies and rivals, and that on an even deeper level such questions about examining what we do versus what we say we do would never occur to you in the first place.

As tooter4x4 points out, in many, many ways the United States could be graded better than various dictatorships and near-tyrannies present and previous.

Therefore the only logical conclusion can be that everything done by our current political leaders is exactly right and moral and anyone who thinks the current government should not do something which tyrannies do Hates America.

All the Good Patriot needs to do is to keep a tally of various things done by nefarious dictatorships, and as long as we keep our percentage of how much we do the same things under 100%, everything's hunky-dory.

Please let this thread not descend into another unending debate about libertarianism, classical liberalism, propertarianism, etc., between 3 or 4 posters.

I know not to whom I pray, but may my prayers be heard.