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.
As for putting your faith in the lord, you are free to do so. I prefer to remember that "God helps them that helps themselves."
As to God helping those who help themselves, I just can't seem to find that in my bible...which version do you have? The pc version, or the liberal "Truth is Relative" version?
~the Mayor's wife
Some Chinese general said roughly the same thing about bombing LA and we in the US went nuts over it, because we took him seriously.
That is absolutely incorrect. The PLA threats were not offhand remarks by some careless general. Those threats to nuke an American city, as well as a clearly stated strategy of war against the U.S., were made in a regularly published journal distributed to all PLA commanders and publicly disseminated. I read one such journal, an exact unedited translation into English. It was circulated by various news scources. In the last three years of the Clinton admistration the PRC published the threat to nuke an American city, unless we backed off of Taiwan, through their communiques to PLA commanders no less than six times. In them they clearly stated that war with the U.S. is inevitable and sooner would be preferable to later.
Ashcroft may not have meant what he said and he may be too naive to realize that his words will definitely set the tone of LEO's around the nation but the Chinese (PRC) were being clear and unequivocal in their threats by sending them to all their army commanders in a long and detailed strategy outline and simultaneously releasing it publicly. Chinese generals don't shoot from the lip. I can just imagine what happens to those who do.
You do the security of this nation an injustice when you revise history like that. (But hey! Our last Pres. sold 'em the means to nuke us so don't feel too bad.)
For the one doing the telling try hrc.
How does she get ashcroft's ear? fbi file.
When he did not contest his defeat in an election that was so illegal that even Stevie Wonder could see through it, it was not because he is a gentleman. He was told not to.
Then he was neurted [sp?] and emasculated during the confirmation hearings.
Is that the new standard now? All a President has to be is better than Clintoon? All an Atty. Gen. has to be is better than Reno? The bar is so low now that no one can possibly get under it. By your reasoning we would have no reason to complain if Skippy the Chimp were Atty. Gen.. He'd be more competent than Reno, who could complain about that?
In response to your remarks, the bar was at its lowest with people like Clinton and Reno. Anyone who is above that bar is better, in my opinion.
As I pointed out, if you consider Ashcroft's past record, he has supported conservative causes often, because he believes that the American people ARE intelligent (despite the Clinton administration's best efforts at dumbing us all down).
So in essence you are confirming what I said. Which was a tongue-in-cheek insult designed to knock you off your pedestal of ignorance but you choose to take it as a validation of your intelligence. Alrighty then!
ROTFLMAO
ps: Smarter brainiacs than you have tried to knock me from my pedestal. It's venus envy.
I don't know if anyone saw an interview with one of the heads of the BATF when he said we won't come after someone's gun unless it is illegal, meaning that if bb guns suddenly become illegal they will come after them with no consideration given to it being a moral action or Constitutional action, just wheather or not there is a new law on the books.
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.
I couldn't have said it better. Thanks. Your words are worth repeating.
Absolutely! I fear the enemies of freedom from within our government more than I fear foreign terrorists. The feds relentlessly seek to deprive the American people of their freedoms and rights and to destroy our Constitution. Why? Wish I knew.
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