First, as a dopey anglophile who earned his Ph.D. in the UK, I have to say fuck the spineless British elites who cave to this blackmail. Fuck the "special relationship." It's a code word for America shoving a stick up Britain's ass and laughing when dickheads like Blair and Brown yell "higher!"

Second, if I hear one more idiot tell me about what a great guy our President is, they can go straight to hell. This man is a product of a corrupt system, and a smiling sociopath if this is the kind of behavior he engages in. I am so angry, so outraged, I can harldy write coherently.

Third, I see no way out of this. Glenn G. is doing yeoman's work, but the boat left the dock and the ship of state has set sail for imperial terrorland. I'd love some of the Obama fans to explain to the relatives of the dead civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan what a kinder, gentler man he is than Bush II. The worst thing is that Obama is smart enough to know better, which makes him more mendacious than Emperor Bush the Moron. It's all terrifying.

And these ain't them. Scotty never went to Star Fleet Academy. Chekov would have been nine years old when Kirk graduated from the Academy. Spock is years older than Kirk and served under Christopher Pike (who was not the first captain of the Enterprise, Robert April was) for over 11 years. Need I go on? For this aging Trekkie, these people mean too much to screw around with their stories. I don't need those stories "reinvented". I would like to see them told, in interesting ways that involve drama and ideas. This movie does not, as far as I can tell, do that.

If defedning the indefensible upsets me, sorry. If having a moral compass is old fashioned, excuse me. But this is not some parlour game or intellectual exercise, which you bloodlessly wish to make it, while excoriating your opponents and insulting them and their intelligence because they think you are full of shit, which you are. Hey, what can I say, if you prick me, do I not bleed?

It was you, sir, who threw the first "fuck you", so taking the intellectual high ground is a bit absurd.

Just read that Pew poll and have gotten really down lately. I think we should have seen massive demonstrations in the streets of every town and villiage, with flags flying upside down as a symbol of our collective distress once the first glimmer of how bad it got (and I harldy think that what Obama released was the worst of what was going on) under Bush and Company. The fact that so many Mainstream Media types are giving us the old cop's bum's rush ("nothing to see, here, folk, move along") and that organized opposition to these outrages seems not to be emerging makes me fear that the Fool and the Krauthammers and the Friedmans are convincing huge swaths of the population to pretend either it wasn't as bad as it was, or to just hustle by and sink it all down the memory hole.

And the fact the Protestand American seems totally unfamiliar with the Sermon on the Mount is also a devasting blow to any chance of righting these wrongs.

Keeping the Faith,

James Levy

How about you break the law via torturing someone, which is illegal, to save all those lives (and as a military historian I can tell you point-blank that there are no extant nuclear weapons or population centers with densities high enough to take out 15 million people in one go) and then ACCEPT THE PUNISHMENT FOR BREAKING THE LAW. If you've done the right thing in your heart, can't you then live with the consequences of breaking the law for what you thought was a good reason? How about having the courage of your convictions? And if you guessed wrong and the person was not a ticking time bomb, maybe you should feel guilt and remorse for torturing the wrong man, and then give yourself up for punishment? You know, act nobly? Oh, I'm sorry, self-sacrifice and nobility are too much to ask for these days. We just need to be sly, gutless wonders out to save our own asses no matter how much depravity we have to engage in. Sorry I asked.

This is why they want so desperately to save the ticking time bomb defense. Then they can torture at will and hide behind a "good faith" defense that they "thought" the person "might" be a ticking time bomb or have some other absolutley essential bit of information locked in thier brains, so you can't hold us accountable for toruturing them, now can you? Right, we all agreed that in the ticking time bomb scenario, it may be necessary to torutre, and since we weren't sure, the only prudent thing we could do was to protect the American people was torturing the living shit out of some Ay-rab darky who means us ill anyone. You gotta problem with that, pussy? Then go live in Iran where they'll cut your tongue out for being a stinking liberal!

That's the true dialogue going on underneath the endless crazy scenarios and bizzare justifications. That's the mentality we are fighting, and I fear we are losing to it.