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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Published Letters: 289 Editor's Choice: 20
Since you're apparently a CT resident, JetLS, you can always look into voting for a good third-party candidate. It's not as if your vote is likely to tip CT to McCain, after all! If it does, Obama has a much bigger problem to worry about than protest votes.
Obama clearly made a calculation that he could afford to lose a certain percentage of the civil-liberties vote. Why disappoint him?
And when we find that there have been huge abuses of Presidential spying power over Americans in twenty or thirty years, you'll have the pleasure of being able to tell everyone that you didn't vote for him for that very reason.
Actually, JetLS, I was born and raised in CT - so I do know what you mean. That's part of the reason I got out of the state after I graduated, although honesty compels me to admit that the main reason was that CT was so damned boring!
Nonetheless, if Obama's chance to take the state is seriously jeopardized by losing the votes of the small percentage of civil-liberties Democrats (or former Democrats) who can't stomach his change of position...well, then, maybe he shouldn't have decided that the Fourth Amendment was expendable.
But realistically, that's not going to happen; he won't lose CT. Most Democrats, like most Republicans - hell, like most human beings - seem to slavishly follow the "my team/my leader over all" pattern. It amazes me that so many Democrats who claimed to be outraged by Republican crimes against the Bill of Rights are leaping to make excuses when their "own" side does the same thing. That they don't realize that they are displaying the exact same behavior that they bitterly criticized Republicans for is merely a sad commentary on human nature.
Speaking for myself: like you, I have the luxury of being able to vote my conscience. If Obama loses Rhode Island (my current state of residence), he has much bigger problems to worry about than a few angry civil libertarians.
Would I be more worried about casting a protest vote if I lived in a state that mattered? To be honest, I just don't know! But as it is, I'm thinking I might vote for Cynthia McKinney (sp?) of the Green Party. I'll have to do some research on her positions. Yeah, I'm throwing my vote away. But I simply can't stomach the idea of voting for Obama any more. I was going to send money to him next payday, too.
ActBlue or the Greens will make better use of it, I hope.
Bush has made it amply clear that he doesn't regard ANYONE else as a human being. He's a classic sociopath. Giving the finger to the world is exactly the kind of thing he'd enjoy doing.
It's a pity that he'll go to his grave smugly convinced of his own wonderfulness, secure in the "knowledge" that history will pronounce him the greatest President of all time. The real irony is that he has greatly increased the chance that their won't BE a history; our species may not survive the long-term effects of the damage that Bush/Cheney have done.
It's so ironic. For months I was bombarded with charges of misogyny because I wouldn't vote for Hillary. No matter how much I protested that I opposed her because she voted with the Republicans on key issues, her supporters insisted that I must be a gynophobic chauvinist pig.
And now many of them are supporting a man who's now voting like a Republican, and I'm voting for a woman: Cynthia McKinney.
There's been too much irony lately. We Democrats sneered at Republicans for betraying every principle of classic pre-1960s Republicanism in their fervent worship of George W. Bush; we Democrats revered our democratic principles, not our leaders and political power.
But now the vast majority of Democrats are eagerly making excuses for Obama's inexcusable decision to throw the 1st and 4th Amendments under a bus. And in many cases, they're using the exact same arguments as the Republicans did for all those years.
I would like to live in a less ironic world, please.
Don't like the choice between Constitution-f--ker A and Constitution-f--ker B? Wish you could vote for a third-party candidate who might actually respect the Constitution? Tough - your choices are A and B, and that's it.
Otherwise, you're throwing your vote away!
(Where does that line of reasoning end?)
"Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos!"
A new bill before Congress mandates that all passengers and flight personnel will have to fly completely naked, wearing ball gags and padded mittens on their hands and feet, and be shackled into their seats. They will be hooded and fitted with electrodes on their genitalia and tongues for their safety.
Senator Obama has reluctantly announced his support for this measure, but promises that as President he will use his new powers to electrocute all airline passengers at the push of a button sparingly, and with responsibility. "It's an unfortunate necessity in this terror-filled world", he said at a recent press conference, "but you can trust me."
A few radical left-wingers from the ACLU tried to protest at the conference, screaming something incomprehensible about some imaginary document called "the comstitution". They were quickly subdued by helpful Homeland Security officers and flown to an unspecified location to help the government in their investigation of world-wide Terror.
Obama supporters were quick to denounce the leftists as extremists who failed to understand that the important thing was to elect Obama as President no matter what.
"...the real problem is rarely if ever addressed: how do we effect a solution that will guarantee an airplane will never again be flown into a building?"
Robert A. Heinlein wrote an article called "The Billion-Dollar Eye" discussing ongoing plans to create an automated system to control aircraft across the country. This system was being considered in Congress. Unfortunately it was considered too expensive to implement.
Heinlein wrote the article in 1948. He was never able to get it published.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Once seen as a lunatic fringe, reactionary anti-women groups are courting respectability
Salon headlines in your mailbox
