Letters to the Editor
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Impeach
Impeach, impeach, impeach. Now, before we lose the ability to protect our country completely.
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@Paul Dirks
But surely your aware that conflating the two is a common tactic to attack those who oppose war. What makes all the more infuriating, is that because as we know the majority of American Jews are both reliably liberal and opposed to the Iraq war, having to explain why these positions are not anti-semetic is just an energy sapping exercise.
Oh, definitely. And you're right, repeatedly explaining where the fallacy is just can't keep up with the meme's replication rate in our highly-optimized Noise Machine.
Lately, I have been taking the tack in political discussions (online and off) of demonstrating open contempt for such asinine propositions as anti-Likud==anti-semite, while trying not to let my disgust for lazy thinking bleed over into criticism of lazy thinkers as people. Lazy thinking may or may not be a character flaw of my conversational partner (I get pretty lazy sometimes, too) but it is definitely criticizable on it's own.
We are talking with grown people. Anyone who spouts off publically with "oh why do the librulmexicrats hate the joos" should be g-d embarrassed to say something so stupid and insulting in public. They should be embarrassed that they care so little for their own minds that they allow this insidious political shorthand to replace their own critical facilities.
I am not always nice or polite when I act this way, but niceness and politeness just don't get through to some folks, it seems.
If you make an ass out of yourself, you should rightly expect everyone to laugh at you. And 99% of Republican talking points these days are laughable on their face.
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On history lessons learned...
(It's not Churchill, but FDR that GWB might look to.)
Chitom
Well, that assumes a lot...namely that a Republican baffoon like Bush would even consider FDR (a Democrat) great enough to look to for advice. Come on, this is the same political party that actually advocates replacing FDR with Reagan's image on the 10 cent dime! Thank Christ Nancy Reagan squashed that idea as soon as she could.
Nevermind the fact that FDR helped us get through the Depression and WW2, when lesser men (i.e. like Bush) would have squandered such opportunities to unite the country when it needed unity the most. Can you imagine how history might have changed with that kind of idiot in the White House?
To that end, I guess I should be thankful that Bush's reign will come to an end sooner, rather than later. That's why I PRAY that Obama wins, because if anybody is going to get our troops home faster, it'll have to be someone like him...someone who opposed the war in the 1st. place...and it looks like history is going to reward folks like him, because this whole Iraq mess cannot be fixed.
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This is a test....right?
Did David send you?
Now, before anyone jumps on me, let me make it clear I realize that very few Jews are really in on the conspiracy
Getting back to the original post, can anyone explain to me what is meant by "ultimate victory"?
I seem to be having trouble getting my mind around the concept.
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back to Carl Schmitt (the John Yoo of the Weimar Republic?)
F.A. Hayek observed in The Road to Serfdom that Hitler's rise to dictator was more or less constitutional, but it was certainly not democratic. Hitler became Fuhrer by invoking Article 48 of the Weimer constitution, which read that in case of national emergency the legislature could allow the Chancellor to abrogate the rule of law indefinitely.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_48_(Weimar_Constitution)
Ok, here's a sampling of the political theory of Schmitt from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Schmitt
For Schmitt, every government capable of decisive action must include a dictatorial element within its constitution. Although the German concept of Ausnahmezustand is best translated as state of emergency, it literally means state of exception, which Schmitt contends frees the executive from any legal restraints to its power that would normally apply. The use of the term "exceptional" has to be underlined here: Schmitt defines sovereignty as the power to decide the instauration of state of exception, as Giorgio Agamben has noted. According to Agamben,[citation needed] Schmitt's conceptualization of the "state of exception" as belonging to the core-concept of sovereignty was a response to Walter Benjamin's concept of a "pure" or "revolutionary" violence, which didn't enter into any relationship whatsoever with right. Through the state of exception, Carl Schmitt included all types of violence under right, linking right & life (zoe) together, and thus transforming the juridical system into a "death machine", creating an Homo sacer.
Schmitt opposed what he called "chief constable dictature", or the declaration of a state of emergency in order to save the legal order (a temporary suspension of law, defined itself by moral or legal right): the state of emergency is limited (even if a posteriori, by law), to "sovereign dictature", in which law was suspended, as in the classical state of exception, not to "save the Constitution", but rather to create another Constitution. This is how he theorized Hitler's continual suspension of the legal constitutional order during the Third Reich (The Weimar Republic's Constitution was never abrogated, underlined Giorgio Agamben[citation needed]; rather, it was "suspended" for four years first at February 28, 1933 Reichstag Fire Decree and the suspension was renewed every four years similar to a - continual - state of emergency)
What is the difference between that and the Yoo Doctrine? As far as I can tell, the Yoo Doctrine has a lower threshold for the abrogation of constitutional rule; the President need not get congressional approval, he need only assert that he perceives a threat to national security to rule above and beyond the law. The Yoo Doctrine is totalitarian legal theory; I say not to insult, but because I think that is what the theory entails.
Schmitt changed universities in 1926, when he became professor for law at the Hochschule für Politik in Berlin, and again in 1932, when he accepted a position in Cologne. It was in Cologne, too, that he wrote his most famous paper, "Der Begriff des Politischen" ("The Concept of the Political"), in which he developed a theory of a specific domain of interest, called "the political". This concept gives the state its own area of predominance, just as churches are predominant in religion or society is predominant in economics. Schmitt, in perhaps his best-known formulation, bases his conceptual realm of state sovereignty and autonomy upon the distinction between friend and enemy. This distinction is to be determined "existentially," which is to say that the enemy is whoever is "in a specially intense way, existentially something different and alien, so that in the extreme case conflicts with him are possible." (Schmitt, 1996, p. 27) Such an enemy need not even be based on nationality: so long as the conflict is potentially intense enough to become a violent one between political entities, the actual substance of enmity may be anything. Although there have been divergent interpretations offered of this work, there is broad agreement that "The Concept of the Political" is an attempt to achieve state unity by defining the content of politics as opposition to the "other" (that is to say, an enemy, a stranger. This applies to any person or entity that represents a serious threat or conflict to one's own interests.) In addition, the prominence of the state stands as a neutral force over potentially fractious civil society, whose various antagonisms must not be allowed to reach the level of the political, lest civil war result
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Banana_Republicans:_The_War_at_Home
Although George W. Bush campaigned for president in 2000 on the pledge that he would be "a uniter, not a divider," [1] he has actually presided over an increasingly polarized nation. [2] The reasons for these deepening divisions include a deeply flawed voting system that brought him into office, an unsteady economy, soaring budget deficits, tax cuts that primarily benefit the wealthy, some of the worst business scandals in U.S. history, a devastating terrorist attack and a warlike foreign policy that has made the United States hated and feared internationally as never before.
These conditions reflect the highly effective political organizing strategy of the conservative coalition that brought the Bush administration to power. The Republican party's hard right views politics as literally a "war by other means." This philosophy has been promoted by figures such as conservative activist David Horowitz [of FrontPage magazine], House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, and Bush advisor Karl Rove. According to Horowitz, "Politics is war conducted by other means. In political warfare you do not fight just to prevail in an argument, but to destroy the enemy's fighting ability. . . . In political wars, the aggressor usually prevails. ... You cannot cripple an opponent by outwitting him in a political debate. You can do it only by following Lenin's injunction: 'In political conflicts, the goal is not to refute your opponent's argument, but to wipe him from the face of the earth.'"