Posted on 02/06/2002 5:05:45 AM PST by francisandbeans
When Attorney General John Ashcroft told the nation, "To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists," he wasn't blazing any new trails. He was merely doing what despots and would-be despots always do: attempting to intimidate into silence those who dare to question him.
Ashcroft's statement is one of the most astounding things to be said by a U.S. official in many years. To read it carefully — letting its full message sink in — is to be overtaken by a sense of horror that is otherwise hard to imagine. Every American should be offended to hear the government's chief law enforcement officer equate public expressions of concern about the threats to liberty from drastic "anti-terrorism" measures with joining al-Qaeda. Does Ashcroft have such a low estimate of the American people's intelligence?
Perhaps he needs to become acquainted with Thomas Jefferson. It was Jefferson who said, "The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground." That's true in the best of times. It's doubly true during war — especially an Orwellian undeclared, open-ended crusade against an enemy as nebulous as "international terrorism." Ashcroft is a perfect Orwellian character. In 1984, Big Brother told his people that "freedom is slavery." It follows that slavery is freedom. Ashcroft refuses to concede that the Bush administration is seeking to curtail liberty in the least. Those who see diminished liberty must be hallucinating, seeing "phantoms of lost liberty."
So when the president unilaterally abolishes due process for noncitizens, we are only imaging an erosion of liberty. And when Congress passes, without even reading, the administration's alleged anti-terrorism bill, which expands the government's powers of surveillance, permits secret searches of homes, and weakens judicial oversight of law enforcement, again, we are deluded if we think freedom is evaporating. I write "alleged anti-terrorism bill" because the new law does not restrict the expanded powers to suspected terrorists, but applies them to any criminal activity. This is a classic power grab under the cover of an emergency. September 11 has given policymakers a chance to bring down from the shelf every new police power they have wanted for years. They assume no one will question the need for such broad powers, and if anyone does, they can shut him up by portraying him as an ally of the terrorists. The game is rigged in favor of power.
It is no comfort that the erosion of liberty in the name of fighting terrorism has a bipartisan cast to it. Democratic Senator Charles Schumer of New York has given his blessing to oppressive government with an op-ed in the Washington Post titled "Big Government Looks Better Now." As Schumer puts it, barely concealing his glee, "For the foreseeable future, the federal government will have to grow... The era of a shrinking federal government has come to a close." Of course, the senator was trying to enlarge it long before September 11.
Schumer insists that only the federal government "has the breadth, strength and resources" to keep us secure. Forgive me for asking, but did we not have a federal government on September 11? Was it not in charge of our security on that date? Then what is the senator talking about? And if it isn't impolite to ask, just where does the federal government get all those resources? Last time I checked, it didn't produce anything. It simply took resources from the people who did produce them.
Once we understand that all government possesses is the power of legal plunder our whole perspective changes. Schumer insists that "the notion of letting a thousand different ideas compete and flourish — which works so well to create goods and services — does not work at all in the face of a national security emergency. Unity of action and purpose is required, and only the federal government can provide it." But he’s got it wrong. Security is a service. Competition and innovation are valuable in the effort to keep ourselves safe. The last thing we need is central planning. That’s what we had on September 11.
It has made my days so much more pleasant, as when I see his postings I can automatically ignore them!
Ooopsy. See what happens when your phone rings when you're posting? Add "Republic" at the end.
Obviously, in order to save the Constitution, we have to destroy it!
For the children, and for our security.
Yes. She was previously arrested for stealing merchandise from a J.C. Pennies. I'm sure she has committed many other crimes and hadn't been caught.
It's important to note these aren't just victimless drug crimes. These are crimes of theft and fraud with a victim.
Florida authorities determined that she lied to them when asked if she had any previous arrests, ANOTHER CRIME, but she was not charged with it.
And I'll respond to you every single time I see you now. (BTW, you have NEVER told me not to respond to you that I recall. For some reason you have a THANG for me, don't know why, couldn't care less, but if you don't like me, I consider that a sure sign of MY intelligence.)
You may not think I'm smart, but at least I am not the one who picked LOOPY as a screen name; but at least we can put you down under the TRUTH IN ADVERTISING column, eh?
And since you think everybody who doesn't agree with you is ignorant, that includes some people on here who I think are pretty smart. I'm glad to be in that group!
AAAAAIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!
There I go, howlin' in my office again! STOP THAT!!! < g >
Maybe you should think before you post, eh?
Presidents, Cabinet Chiefs, Generals, Supreme Court Justices and CEOs don't have "mere" opinions. Their words cause things to happen.
____A week on the rack.
____A month in the iron maiden
____Boiling oil
____Burning pine slivers beneath the fingernails
____Magneto wired to the genitals
____3 months forced to read Blake#1's insipid and idiotic posts.
Thats your interpretation, an unsupportable one. Apparently the only way Ashcroft can satisfy your standards is to not make public statements.
As far as I'm concerned (for example) Ashcroft was more likely talking about the ACLU types who made such a fuss about the conditions in Camp Xray that some moslim fanatics felt compelled to kidnap a WSJ reporter hostage to offer in exchange for better conditions for the prisoners.
BTW, are all these threads like this? If so, no wonder nobody votes for them..........eeekkkkkkk.
Those were the days, eh? Ummm, minutes, I mean.
When you invoke names in a post and go on to discuss what those names "think", insult one of them directly without addressing it directly, and then come back to whine about how you're all misunderstood and are avoiding those names...you acknowledge that you are irrelevant.
Agreed.
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