Althouse on the Bad Faith of Gail Collins
She didn’t quite word it that way, but that’s the gist of this post from Ann Althouse, who notes with accuracy the little games Bush opponents play with their ‘concerns’ over his judicial nominees. Lest you think Althouse is just playing the partisan, though, she raises concerns of her own:
We have every reason to think that Presidents pick nominees who put a high value on executive power, and this President is pushing the limits of executive power and is therefore especially motivated to find judges who will support him. The Senators really do need to defend the legislative branch with some tough questioning here. Listening to the debate this week will give us all a good opportunity to think about what the balance of power between the President and Congress should be.
She’s right – I sense a growing consensus, at least among the audience of this blog, that it is absolutely crucial to put aside partisanship long enough to have a national debate on privacy vs. security and the balance of power in the post-9/11 world. If the Alito hearings contribute to that debate, the more’s the better. We cannot have 100% privacy or 100% security, nor can we tolerate an executive branch that (a) is hamstrung from effective counterterrorism measures, or (b) empowered to the point of no return.
The answer will not be found from listening to the Ted Kennedy/Ralph Neas brickthrowers, nor will we learn much from rabid defenders of the President’s every move. As I’ve noted many times, these questions and problems will long outlive the Bush presidency, and we’ve got to form some sort of consensus, messy though the process will undoubtably be…
Rep. Harman (D – CA) was on Fox this morning, and she tried to strike the same balance: her comments indicated that she felt quite strongly that the leak to the NYT was illegal and quite damaging to the WOT, but also that the White House has to take a defining position on the issue of warrantless security eavesdropping.
Time for a national debate on this, I think we can all agree.
MARINES BLEEDING IN BABYLON: PHANTOM FURY – vol.2
Sunday, January 8 2006
“12 Marines Killed in Helicopter Crash Near Fallujah”
One might recall that Fallujah used to be a peaceable and sleepy provincial town where Sunnis, Christians, and Shiites lived in relative harmony…that was long long time ago, before the US Government decided to teach “Ayyrab terrorists” a lesson they would never forget: In November 2004, George W. Bush launched Operation Al-Fajr (“The Dawn” in Arabic), also known as Operation Phantom Fury, a joint U.S.-Iraqi offensive against “rebel strongholds” in the city of Fallujah. The Pentagon called it “some of the heaviest urban combat Marines have been involved in since Hue City in Vietnam in 1968.”
While listening to the latest wave of robotic Neocon platitudes churned out by the US military’s PR and Information Management Department, I remembered the words of a famous 19th century American philosopher who once said the following of brainwashed pseudo-patriots:
“Now, what are they? Men at all? or small movable forts and magazines, at the service of some unscrupulous man in power?…Visit the Navy Yard, and behold a marine, such a man as an American government can make, or such as it can make a man with its black arts—a mere shadow and reminiscence of humanity, a man laid out alive and standing, and already, as one may say, buried under arms with funeral accompaniments…
…The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailers, constables, posse comitatus etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense”
Truly, Thoreau’s prose was prescient in many ways…
Ummm….’Doctor’, what does that have to do with my post?…
…nothing whatsoever, unless you like to bloviate to the sound of your own voice. Doctor, heal thyelf.
Perhaps he was attempting to offer another example of “bad faith” discussion?
The middle of a war is not the time to initiate a discussion that might have a binding influence on the conduct of the war. If the wrong decision is made then the war is lost. Better to make a plan and persue it, then discuss the results. Lincoln suspended habeus corpus and FDR reigned in the first amendment for their respective conflicts and reinstated them after the fight was over. Some folks didn’t trust Lincoln either, so their message then sounds like the message of today.
All Things Beautiful TrackBack The Ship Of Fools
“”The Democrats sin qua non has become to spend their every waking moment in slowly destroying every single bit of integrity left in the judicial process of electing a Supreme Court Judge, and turning it into a political farse.”