You mean like the previous administration?

There is too good a likelihood that the present administration has used the cover of national security to spy on and hamstring its political opponents.-- Holly McLachlan

Do you have any evidence, or are you just indulging in wishful thinking that your President is like Putin or Chavez?

There certainly was plenty of evidence around the FBI files and absolutely no repercussions for the Clintons. Assuming there was some sort of evidence shouldn't Bush get the same treatment as the Clintons? Or for that matter feted at the UN like all the other totalitarians?

-- shooter242

Shooter - For once I agree with you. I think Bush should get exactly the same treatment as the Clintons. Please start pushing for the appointment of a special prosecutor today. You can even pick the area in which one should be appointed to investigate, as long as he/she is allowed to expand the scope of the investigation (mission creep) to the same extent that Ken Starr was able. I'll provide you with the beginning of a list of possibilities:

• Intelligence manipulation in the Iraq War lead up
• No bid contracts in the occupation - War Profiteering
• Accounting boondoggles in the CPA
• Use of imported slave labor in the construction of the American Embassy in Iraq
• American business relationships with Saudi families who have supported al Qaeda (Carlyle Group)
• Dick Cheney's Energy Task Force and their secret plan for Iraqi oil(hint: it is not a plan that has anything to do with cheap gas prices)
• Purging of voter rolls/noncounting of votes in FL, OH, AZ, NM, CO, etc during the 2000 and 2008 presidential elections being approximately 10 times more likely if you are a poor person of color than if you are an affluent white person

• and, of course, to return from my little OT excursion there:

• the ongoing invasion of the private communications of Americans by an Administration with nothing but contempt for the Constitution it swore to uphold.

Please feel free to expand the list to include as many other areas of ineptitude and mendacity on the part of this administration as you see fit.

All this talk of being "strong and tough", avoiding "being depicted as weak" strikes me as an intrinsically Republican, neocon, faux-masculine way of framing a discussion about what is, after all, party political legislation, not some WWF cagematch.

While this surely goes back at least to Tories and Whigs, I thoroughly believe that the current vapidity of this language is directly traceable to Kennedy, really. His cynical exploitation of a completely non-existent and fraudulent "missle gap" in the 1960 race vs. Nixon exploited exactly the same types of "weak" and "soft" rhetorical accusations that we see now. And back to the rhetoric of LeMay and the other bomber generals when they were foisting the development and ridiculous expansion of the Nuclear arsenal on Truman and Eisenhower in the 40's and 50's. And back to the idiots who accused Roosevelt of being in Churchill's pocket. And ...

The neo-cons did not invent this type of demagoguery. They use it all the time, admittedly, but let's not give them credit for originality, please.

That being said, I think your overall point is not only well stated, but fundamentally the most important one to be made these days. We desperately need a shift away from this brinksmanship which passes for flourish these days.

"Give War a Chance", my ass.

There is a piece available on YouTube of Hagel in the Senate sometime last year emphatically decrying this type of speech - where it is acceptable to question someone's patriotism based on their suppport for the President or a particular policy. Hagel has a lot to answer for in terms of his ties to voting machine companies and he is somewhat right of attila on many social issues, but I am sorry he is leaving the Senate, based on my belief that he demonstrates the type of strength that Glenn talked about in his reply to your original comment.

But true strength means adhering to your convictions and pursuing your principles even when doing so is difficult, when it's not always the most risk-free course. That is an important trait; it has nothing to do with machismo or anything else; and it is this form of authentic, meaningful strength that Democrats lack almost completely, and everyone can see that.

The Bush administration committed last May to admitting 7000 refugees from Iraq last year. 7000 out of a displaced population over 4 million. And does anyone wanna bet that that figure was not even remotely close to how many were actually admitted?

Someone really ought to remind these idiots about the sad story of Breckenridge Long and the US State Department during the Holocaust.

http://motlc.learningcenter.wiesenthal.org/text/x15/xm1506.html

On the other hand, Bush learned from Vietnam that the US withdrawal caused/enabled the Khmer Rouge's mania.** I guess any lessons from forty years prior to that shouldn't be based on fact or reason, either. Hooray for us! We're great!

What's the quote? "Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it." Or something like that.

We are becoming a nation of idiots, a confederacy of dunces, goddammit.

**Rationally, I would think that our dropping of thousands of tons of bombs, thereby disrupting and displacing the agrarian populace and enabling the communist recruiters, might have been more responsible for that, but that's just me.

The persuasiveness of an argument can often be determined by the willingness of its advocates to confine themselves to the truth when making it.

I am not sure how well this would hold up in a Philosophy 101 course (in a "the Devil can quote Scripture for his own reasons" kind of way), but I certainly like it, and agree with it. Thanks, Glenn.

Oh, and thanks for ruining my Monday.