Stay Strong,
Fuzzy122
Posted on 09/01/2004 1:23:46 AM PDT by kattracks
Poor little protesters. Here they are, boldly come into the very heart of Fascist Insect Amerika to be glamorous street-fighting revolutionaries like Fidel and Che and those guys, and they end up getting handled like everyday garden-variety offenders.No hoods, no torture. And they're in and out of the court system in 23 hours, give or take, just like the standard prostitutes, petty pilferers and pill pushers who get processed through Manhattan Criminal Court. Darn hard to get treated like an important political prisoner in this town. This injustice needs to be protested.
Meanwhile, your conscience requires you to cry out against whatever oppressions you've got to work with. In this case, well, these abusive jailhouse conditions are just shocking. No vegan sandwiches, just baloney. Nothing but Dixie cups to drink from. Small wonder they're all calling the holding cell "Guantanamo-on-the-Hudson." Where are the international human-rights monitors, Amnesty International and the like, when you need them?
Boo hoo hoo.
This "Guantanamo" is a Transit Authority bus garage on Pier 57 where protesters are detained and their property collected before they head off to Central Booking. With an oil stain or two on the floor, it admittedly is not the tidiest place in the world. But the Black Hole of Calcutta it isn't. Still, this morning there was scheduled to be a seriously indignant demonstration outside the building to object to all that unendurable barbarism within.
Real police-state abuses, mind you, have been not much in evidence this week. No skulls were cracked Monday night when a detective was pulled from his scooter and pounded unconscious outside Madison Square Garden. The men and women of the NYPD showed similar restraint and professionalism yesterday as self-professed anarchists marched and bellowed around and about the town to celebrate their designated Day of Civil Disobedience.
Some of them did get swept up and arrested - corralled in nets, not beaten bloody by billy clubs - but they'll be out of the tank and into court in the next day or so, and they'll have access to lawyers and they'll be granted appropriate bail according to the charges against them. Los desaparecidos these folks are not exactly.
But, golly. Hours - hours! - they have to spend in the criminal justice system, forced to drink out of nothing but Dixie cups all the while.
Some protesters these people are. Civil disobedience customarily involves a willingness to suffer some measure of discomfort. Ask Gandhi. But this is the bunch that demanded the city provide them with designer bottled water. Cute, aren't they?
W's win-win
Anyone with any sense knew perfectly well what President Bush meant when he remarked that the war on terror is not a war that is going to be won. He meant, obviously, that this epically historic clash of cultures and values will surely continue all the rest of our lives and beyond and will not be conventionally concluded with, for example, a surrender ceremony on the deck of a battleship.
Which is true. We can obliterate the Islamofascist gangsters left and right. We can render them ineffective and we can drive them into holes. But there will always be more of them, somewhere, for a long time to come. Mankind is not soon going to "win" the war on rats and roaches, either.
Thus, it was a sensible and levelheaded thing for Bush to say, a rational acknowledgment of the way things are in the real world. Ah, but here comes the Kerry-Edwards campaign, scenting anything akin to blood and pouncing on such a weak-willed commander-in-chief as this who can't even fight a good war. Mere days ago, they were blistering Bush as some crazed, out-of-control, swaggering macho cowboy, waging bloody battle with insufficient "sensitivity." Now, suddenly, he's a twinkie, devoid of the warrior's hard resolve to take the enemy down to defeat.
Yawn. Rolling his eyes and sighing, the President yesterday assured the American Legion that, yeah, certainly the war on terror will be won - "by spreading liberty," he explained. He probably could have expressed himself more clearly the first time, he conceded. "It didn't need clearing up," noted Sen. John McCain. Exactly.
You can e-mail the Daily News editors at voicers@edit.nydailynews.com. Please include your full name, address and phone number. The Daily News reserves the right to edit letters. The shorter the letter, the better the chance it will be used.
Originally published on September 1, 2004
Stay Strong,
Fuzzy122
Kerry is so focussed on the past he's like Hiroo Onoda, the Japanese soldier who spent thirty years hiding in the Philippine jungle because he couldn't believe WWII was over. President Bush, on the other hand, is fighting today's war, the war on terrorism, and he knows what he's talking about.
This places them rather higher on the societal food chain, really, than close analysis might otherwise warrant.
No hoods, no torture.
Well... no system is perfect, after all.
900 arrested and locked up so far by the NYPD...and still counting.
What do they expect when they break the law? A nice pita sandwich with some sprouts from the local Whole Foods Market and some Dijon mustard?
Sorry dirty hippie. This is jail. You don't get your vegan choice. Deal with it.
Maybe you shouldn't break the law the next time.
Visit my John F. Kerry Timeline.
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From the looks of today's Daily News (not just this article), the folks over there have decided to get off the sinking ship.
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