Letters to the Editor
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Null and Void
The court's decision seems to me to be the perfect basis for impeachment!
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Bush II, the benefactor of his country
He actually did us a service. If we survive this, his defective reign will be seen as a case study in the limits of the Presidency, and as a sad warning to those who would further abuse it.
And spare a moment of compassion for Bush I, evil and ineffective as he was. When he broke into tears at the ceremony commemorating his son Jeb's tenure as Governor of Florida, it was all too apparent what he was thinking: "If only he had been President, instead of the crazy one!"
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second northern bluto
It's all just whispering in the back room. Figure out how to tell it to the workingman driving his pickup to work at 5am. Figure out how to tell it to the frazzeled commuters who spend 4 hours on the road and 8 hours at work everyday and never listen to the news unless there is an "event" that causes stir enough to get them to sit in front of their tv at 10 pm instead of reading to their children. The masters of war have conjured up the ultimate horror and broadcast dramatic footage of terrorists in Russian schools. They fly their warplanes low over American cities every day to remind us of the terror in the skies. They conspire to control our passions by manipulating the music and the entertainment industries. They exploit every of our weaknesses to harness we weary citizens into the toil that only they can purportedly understand or define. I see a lot of wimp journalists making big profit by writing in this obscure media and I hear a lot of anonymous braying from the cowards who write in this select blogoshere, but like bluto says, "nothing happens". Salon wants to find a a slip of the tongue by a Republican and to put it into a headline or work the profitable political gossip angle, or to feed the latest scandolous thinking to the liberal masses who huddle together on this site grimacing and shrugging and my god, not believing that anyone could see things that they might not. Meanwhile the fascist machine just rolls along, sending our children to war and barely mourning them when they "come home in a box," forgetting them as they try to adjust to their new limblessness, denying them therapy as they must have already been crazy to have agreed (volunteered) to go off to war in the first place. It isn't the trauma of the roadside bomb that is keeping them up at night, it's thoughts of mom and dad back in indiana on that lonely farm where they grew up. Mom and Dad should foot the bill.
I'm just a guy who occasionally reads this blather on the internet and I have no power to inform or influence outside of the small social realm in which I live so I wonder, who in the media, who with some influence, will step out of the all too profitable realm of the "established liberal media" and try to get to the guy in the pick up truck. I see too many George Stephanopolous's out there and I'm sick.
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Deluded cult of power
GeeJay is right about the polarisation and hatred that have arisen in the US electorate.
What is necessary for hatred and war to end and for peace to ensue? Can we even speak nowadays of values like peace? Trust? Happiness?
We cannot; refer to your gut as you read those idealistic words for the answer. Those values have been left far behind, and politicians who dare to mention them will be laughed offstage. Instead of peace, trust, happiness, now we hear of power, accountability, security. This results from a lust for power in the nation's leaders, and that results from fear (or, at least, delusion) in the nation itself.
American democracy is plainly a farce. The electorate is powerless; their options are the devil they know or the one they don't. Even Obama, the campaign's brightest star, said that no US President should hesitate to use force where America's interests are threatened. What unreflecting violence is sanctioned here as a matter of course merely for the preservation of hegemony?
Give up the faulty idea of "America's interests"! Were we able for a moment to stop running around like headless chickens, trying to get in this life whatever we can defend before we die; were we able to get even a glimpse of sanity we would see that "US interests" are identical with the interests of humanity and the world: in a word, peace.
Both the US electoral system and the US media lack the courage for this sort of thinking, because of its strangeness and because of its radical consequences. They lack the courage to speak plainly and radically to each other, let alone to the electorate, but the fact is that a radically new discourse is required in this environment where divergence of political opinion is measured in small, expedient, utterly ineffective increments.
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Our place in history
There are laws, and then there is the will and integrity necessary to enforce those laws. Without the latter, the former declines into merely selective suggestions.
On that matter Mr. Blumenthal has aptly described our place in the history of the United States of America...
..."And yet, nothing changes."
We should be quite proud of ourselves, don't you think?
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Where shall we put him?
Sidney Blumenthal has clearly shown that Bush's concept "of a presidency operating...above the rule of law...is a mortal threat to the Constitution." Is it not incumbent upon us, then, to declare him an "enemy combatant," by definition an unlawful one, and proceed accordingly?
I invite creative suggestions about where we might best confine him, and what we might do to him there.
Pindenh
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Where shall we put him?
Sidney Blumenthal has clearly shown that Bush's concept "of a presidency operating...above the rule of law...is a mortal threat to the Constitution." Is it not incumbent upon us, then, to declare him an "enemy combatant," by definition an unlawful one, and proceed accordingly?
I invite creative suggestions about where we might best confine him, and what we might do to him there.