1984. G. Orwell only missed it by 24 years.
It's mind-boggling how prescient sci-fi writers like Orwell, Huxley, and Bradbury could be. How the heck were they able to anticipate such government perversion as the following from this month's ACLU email newsletter:
"On July 21st, Bush’s Attorney General, Michael Mukasey, called on Congress to take dramatic steps to subvert the Constitution. Mukasey asked that Congress issue a new declaration of war that would make the entire globe -- including the United States itself -- a “battlefield” where the president decides who will be locked up forever."
That Bush the Texan would ask for this is understandable but that America hasn't stopped him cold preferring to wait for the next president to get it right, is as lamentable as the day Chamberlain appeased Hitler. That was one man. We are millions.
I consider it lamentable because we have always had terrorists and at no time did we think that such draconian measures were necessary for our safety. The Japanese-American internment and the Japanese nuclear Holocaust were misguided but they were perpetrated during a time of war. In such times, it is easy/convenient/acquiescent for the populous to "look the other way." The present administration knows this and is asking for something so ludicrous that Webster's would need to take out "war" from the dictionary or at least tag it as "archaic" because a) there will always be terrorists and b) the battlefield will always exist; therefor, the dichotomies of war and peace merge into a state of "Bush." (I want to be magnanimous and name it after him for everyone should have a trophy saying they succeeded at something)
While the terrorists of 911 raised the bar, can we not see that it was our incompetence that permitted it? These people were not Nobel Prize material. They just had conviction and we gave them the opportunity. Make no mistake about it. We have been safe from such attacks because we implemented safeguards that could have been and should have been in place prior to 911. The safeguards that I'm talking about have nothing to do with waterboarding or perpetual imprisonment or eavesdropping. Instead, it was simple procedures that would have had the FBI responding to red flags raised by foreigners wanting to learn how to take off without learning how to land.
I think things would have gone differently if terrorists had always been our first concern; not drug users or bigamists or gays. I think it's time to set the thermostat back a notch or two and rely on good old Yankee ingenuity to safeguard our shores without sacrificing our freedoms and liberties to the gut reactions of an insecure president.
"On July 21st, Bush’s Attorney General, Michael Mukasey, called on Congress to take dramatic steps to subvert the Constitution. Mukasey asked that Congress issue a new declaration of war that would make the entire globe -- including the United States itself -- a “battlefield” where the president decides who will be locked up forever."
That Bush the Texan would ask for this is understandable but that America hasn't stopped him cold preferring to wait for the next president to get it right, is as lamentable as the day Chamberlain appeased Hitler. That was one man. We are millions.
I consider it lamentable because we have always had terrorists and at no time did we think that such draconian measures were necessary for our safety. The Japanese-American internment and the Japanese nuclear Holocaust were misguided but they were perpetrated during a time of war. In such times, it is easy/convenient/acquiescent for the populous to "look the other way." The present administration knows this and is asking for something so ludicrous that Webster's would need to take out "war" from the dictionary or at least tag it as "archaic" because a) there will always be terrorists and b) the battlefield will always exist; therefor, the dichotomies of war and peace merge into a state of "Bush." (I want to be magnanimous and name it after him for everyone should have a trophy saying they succeeded at something)
While the terrorists of 911 raised the bar, can we not see that it was our incompetence that permitted it? These people were not Nobel Prize material. They just had conviction and we gave them the opportunity. Make no mistake about it. We have been safe from such attacks because we implemented safeguards that could have been and should have been in place prior to 911. The safeguards that I'm talking about have nothing to do with waterboarding or perpetual imprisonment or eavesdropping. Instead, it was simple procedures that would have had the FBI responding to red flags raised by foreigners wanting to learn how to take off without learning how to land.
I think things would have gone differently if terrorists had always been our first concern; not drug users or bigamists or gays. I think it's time to set the thermostat back a notch or two and rely on good old Yankee ingenuity to safeguard our shores without sacrificing our freedoms and liberties to the gut reactions of an insecure president.
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