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.
A quick look at Miss Marple's "Simple Folks" lyric confirms how common I am: I whistle, I sing and down here I'm known as a "Stepper" (I dance). Folks know it's me coming down the hall, in other words, by the whistling alone. I can even whistle like a boy -- stop a cab on a dime in Manhattan. Surely it does not get more common than that.
Even my own Mom knows I'm just a regular sort. Once when I was a grade-schooler, I asked her if I could become a saint and she gently informed me that saints are "extraordinary" folk. So, don't you worry, Howlin. I've never suffered unduly from delusions of grandeur ... or sainthood.
I must admit that your and Amelia's and Miss Marple's dismaying pettiness is precisely the reason I didn't tell anyone but family and close friends I'd be on the show. Far be it from me to join The Sweater or the Opening Montage or The Way He Laughs as fuel for your ill will to burn in lieu of substantive criticism of the show's content.
Regards.
I was just trying to reconcile the difference between your verbose post on here, where you openly mock the "common folk," and your appearance on Alan Keyes' show as one of the "common people."
Does MSNBC know that you guys are handpicked?
Say what you want, but stacking the deck is pretty incindiary, if you ask me. I thought Alan said it was going to be people "just like you out there."
Who said the arrests have to happen immediately upon the conclusion of the speech? Sheesh. You know better than that. I simply quoted two of the things he said and suggested connecting the dots. It's a pretty obvious connection.
And by the way, we don't - and can't - know if anybody's been arrested, because the PATRIOT Act says that they don't need to tell us. All the "detainees" since 911 are incommunicado, and there's no way to know if they're Americans or not or anything else about them. They simply "disappeared." That's what happens to "terrorists" from here on in - didn't you know that?
Huh? I mock the common people? Can you link me to what it is you're talking about?
Alas, I don't dispute your assertion. If the powers that be decree it to be so, then so be it. However, short of death, the only way that I personally can ever be silenced from voicing support for the document that is, without any doubt or question for me, the law of this land, is to cut my tongue from my mouth. I'll be damned if I'll ever be silenced from supporting my, yours, all of ours, Constitution.
That's probably the primary reason you don't see any "Day in the Life of Alan Keyes" threads wherein our hearts skip a Tiger Beat or cause us to moon over him like Judy Garland over Clark Gable.
Believe it not, I do not consider that sort of behavior -- by grown women, no less -- to be "common".
Even in the Democratic party where skank feminists clamour to wear kneepads, it seems an aberration of sorts.
Amelia was making a somewhat snide comment about the way Keyes folks tend to turn and look to the Good Doctor as if to say "Did I do all right, Teacher?"
Made us sound like a bunch of simple-minded sychophants repeating as best we could whatever Keyes had to say.
That seemed especially odd in light of the teeny-bopper sort of idolizing that goes on -- Day in the Life in and Day in the Life out -- here on the forum.
I was drawing a comparison, see? I figure folks who live in perfectly appointed glass houses where they oooh and aaaah over Big Screen Images and soaring Popularity Poll Numbers shouldn't throw stones at those of us out in the fields who, having learned to sow seed from a prophet of sorts, get out there and try our hand at planting.
IMHO these sorts of responses read far too much into Ashcroft's statement.
Using the phrase "phantoms of lost liberty" Ascroft is clearly refering to imagined threats to our liberty that have no real substance.
Nothing about this statement denies the right to free and open debate over what does or doesn't constitute a genuine threat to our liberties.....he is simply stating his opinion that those he was addressing were illusions....and as such were tying the hands of the Gov't to fight terrorism.
Big deal.
It's not like he said substancial threats to liberty should be dismissed in our war on terrorism.
If find the claim that Ascroft's statement constitutes an attempt to "intimidate into silence those who dare to question him" to be irrational, paranoid and silly.
And you never answered my question: does MSNBC know that the "common people" are handpicked by the Keyes folks?
Would you point me to the provision?
By the way Jefferson, are you aware that the Geneva Convention allows for holding "saboteurs", read terrorists, incommunicado should the host country feel it protects its citizens.
Careful, they're watching! LOL
And no, I'm not aiding the terrorists, but Ashcroft is aiding the Fascists if someone like John Edwards gets in power in 2004, and YES IT COULD happen.
This DASSHOLE and Bush led bill is like the Wiemar Republic's gun registration bill. This is what KLINTON was pushing for last year.
Those that trade freedom for security deserve neither...except being thrown out of office. I expected better from Ashcroft. I didn't expect this from him. Maybe Carl Lenin and Debbie Stabusall were right for once for voting against him, although for a different reason.
I'd much rather have someone like Alan Simpson as AG.
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