Thursday, August 17, 2006
Wiretapping Rebuke
The justice system, moving ever so slowly and timidly towards reining in the conservative government, has ruled that the NSA warrantless wiretapping program is illegal, and the Federal judge issued an injunction to halt to the program. Some choice language from the ruling: “There are no hereditary kings in America and no powers not created by the Constitution.”
Of course, this is not enough. This is the stilted system in which we live, that when the government does something blatantly illegal the perpetrators are not immediately arrested but instead citizens have to sue the government as plaintiffs, dodging the “state secrets” dismissal motions, to get the government to stop, much less arrest the people doing the crime. If you or I were caught breaking the law we would be immediately arrested and booked, maybe released on bail, and our arguments as to why the lawbreaking was justified could wait until our court date. To date no one has been arrested in the NSA wiretapping scandal.
So first the justifications for invading Iraq were WMDs and terror links. That didn’t work out so well. The Administration mentioned Iraq’s violations of UN Security Council resolutions, but when the UN wouldn’t authorize an invasion the US invaded anyway. Then the justification became democracy building. Despite the elections in Iraq, though, the violence continues and is increasing. So now the Administration is considering giving up on that, too.
Senator Orrin Hatch: the democrats getting elected is just what the terrorists want. Honestly, how many Joe McCarthy retreads are running the Republican Party?
The Deputy Prime Minister of England on President Bush’s policies: “crap.”
You can always count on Michael Medved to either lie or host a liar on his show. Today Medved has a Bush Administration official on who claimed that “hundreds” of Israelis had died from Hezbollah rockets. It’s a lie. 154 Israelis died in the recent conflict, most of them soldiers in close combat in the south of Lebanon.
National Review editor Rich Lowry is slowly coming to realize that Iraq may be another Vietnam. Amazingly enough, he says it is liberals who have been “serially wrong” about Iraq being another Vietnam, which makes sense if you understand that Iraq will not be another Vietnam until Rich Lowry says it is.
The Pentagon has commissioned a pair of secret studies about military failures in Iraq, the results of which, according to one of the authors, “won’t be pretty.”
My, how the worm has turned. Joe Scarborough, former republican congressman and current conservative host of his own MSNBC show, questions the president’s intelligence and concludes that Bush is not the leader America needs right now. Welcome to the “reality-based community,” Joe.
Tony Snow insists there is no civil war in Iraq right now. As for the thousands of civilians in Iraq that died last month, he insists that there are “A number of sectarian violence operations” going on in Iraq. As to what is the difference between a civil war and “a number of sectarian violence operations” that results in 3,400 dead civilians in one month, only Tony Snow knows. For the sake of comparison, 3,400 dead civilians a month amounts to 40,000 or so dead every year, at the current rate. In the civil war in El Salvador 70,000 or so civilians died in ten years of fighting in the eighties. Half that died in the same ten year civil war in Nicaragua.
Finally, the ever-brilliant James Wolcott delivers a stinging rebuke of the conservative establishment’s pervasive racism. Add to that some choice quotes from Bill Bennett (though it would, of course, be “ridiculous…you could abort every black baby in America and it would reduce the crime rate”) and Dennis Prager and Rush Limbaugh (“the NAACP should have riot rehearsal. They should get a liquor store and practice robberies”) and Conrad Burns (“It’s hard” to live in DC with all those “niggers”) and Trent Lott and Jesse Helms…you get the idea.
# posted by BitterHarvest @ 4:27 PM 
