Posted on 09/16/2001 3:59:40 AM PDT by riley1992
Edited on 05/25/2004 3:02:58 PM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
Those limits to liberties are acceptable to Metro Detroiters and most other Americans. A Detroit News poll Thursday found that 88 percent of Metro Detroiters are willing to "accept restrictions on movements such as metal detectors and military personnel in public places" to increase the nation's security from terrorist attacks.
(Excerpt) Read more at detroitnews.com ...
You make for an interesting study in moral-liberal ideology. You come here to FR with chips on your shoulder, slamming Christians and Christianity, conservatives, the U.S. government, you decry laws against drug abuse and drug trafficking. You make excuses for terrorism and mass murder, and then you make homosexual jokes about other people's rectums.
Or don't you want to realize your political heroes have made gigantic mistakes
Please be so kind as to tell me just who my 'politcal heroes' are. I don't seem to remember ever telling you that information so this ought to be good.
ib·er·tar·i·an (lbr-târ-n) n. 1.One who advocates maximizing individual rights and minimizing the role of the state. 2.One who believes in free will.
Yes, I think the US government was too focused on American citizens having guns etc and meanwhile they let the terrorists come and spread throughout the entire US and have access to all kinds of information. They failed to protect us and that must change.
Our government took our freedom and liberty and gave them to our enemies to use against us. They were allowed free entry into the US and given the same freedoms as citizens and now they betrayed us.
Promoting their "ideology" is paramount.
That isn't going to change.
What are the terms of this "war"? How will we know when it is over? How is victory defined?
Very astute questions. We accept all manner of government control and dictatorial interference in nearly everything in time of war, because we are afraid (in theory) of losing the war and suffering worse consequences, and because these measures are understood to be temporary, and that normal civil liberties will return when the war ends and peace returns.
But a "war on terrorism" is not a real war: there is no enemy state to defeat, no armies to rout or navies to sink. There is no way of knowing when we have "won" or when we have "lost", and, like the "war on poverty" or "war on drugs", there are heavy incentives for the State to perpetuate the war indefinitely, since "winning" the war would eliminate the "emergency", return us to a state of civil liberty, and greatly curtail the empire-building of career bureaucrats and the power of those who control the State.
Ergo, alarm bells should be going off in our heads when we hear people say "this was an act of war, not terrorism" and that, therefore, we should have a formal declaration of war "against terrorism". A formal declaration of war would allow, under color of law, the complete repudiation of what remains of our Constitutional liberties. It is a very bad idea.
How the writers of the Constitution must be rolling over in their graves, when it comes to what we have done to the Constitutional power to declare war. We have gone for over 50 years without formally declaring war, instead engaging in nearly constant warfare under cover of "police actions" of various sorts, sometimes with a figleaf from the UN, sometimes without. Now that the "war" has come home to us, we want to blow the dust off of the Constitution, revive the concept of a formal declaration of war, but not, as the Founders intended, against an enemy state, but against a concept ("terrorism") and against an amorphous band of stateless individual enemies.
Since you can't formally defeat a concept and force it to sign a peace treaty, the logical outcome of such a war is a state of permanent war, with all that that implies. Harry Elmer Barnes, the historian, was right when he labeled the post-WWII liberal elite's foreign policy as one of "perpetual war for perpetual peace". We might be headed towards something like George Orwell's "1984", where war is a perpetual state of affairs justifying anything, and is taken as normality. Within twenty years of such "perpetual war normality", no one will remember that a peaceful, Constitutional America ever existed, or what it was like. In fact, few now living remember it.
Thank you for the compliment, and for your excellent articulation of exactly why the alarm bells ARE going off - loud and clear - for some of us.
LOL
What makes you confident of that? It isn't challanged in times of peace and I think it's less likely to be challanged in times of war.
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