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Old timer Garrison Keillor had something to say about that:
Garrison Keillor on Habeas Corpus, 10/4/06
Congress' shameful retreat from American values
http://www.truthout.org/article/garrison-keillor-congresss-shameful-retreat-from-american-values
This was passed by 65 senators and will now be signed by President Bush, put into effect, and in due course be thrown out by the courts.
It's good that Barry Goldwater is dead because this would have killed him. Go back to the Senate of 1964--Goldwater, Dirksen, Russell, McCarthy, Javits, Morse, Fulbright--and you won't find more than 10 votes for it.
None of the men and women who voted for this bill has any right to speak in public about the rule of law anymore, or to take a high moral view of the Third Reich, or to wax poetic about the American Ideal. Mark their names [...]"
He mentions Fulbright.
In April 1966, “Senator J. William Fulbright delivered a speech at Johns Hopkins University on “the arrogance of power.” He said, “The question I find intriguing is whether a nation so extraordinarily endowed as the United States can overcome that arrogance of power which has afflicted, weakened, and, in some cases, destroyed great nations in the past. […] No one challenges the importance of national consensus, but consensus can be understood in two ways. If it is interpreted to mean unquestioning support of existing policies, its effects can only be pernicious and undemocratic, serving to suppress differences rather than to reconcile them.”
At the time, Senator Fulbright (D) was in the majority party, with a Democratic President (LBJ), and a war which did not loose popular support until spring of 1968. Francis Wilkinson wrote about this, and compared it to our situation in April of 2006. Towards the end of his essay [“Silence of the Lambs”], Wilkinson writes: “At the time Fulbright first tried to put the brake on war in Vietnam, the number of American dead was close to the body count from Iraq today. It took another nine years -- and more than 50,000 more U.S. dead -- before the arrogance Fulbright had identified in 1966 was exhausted.”
Read the essay at: http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=silence_of_the_lambs
