One is torn over whether to view Coulter and the staff of the New York Post as harmless idiots, or as the naked face of Bush-era conservatism revealed.
If the latter, then it isn't enough for the government to be granted the power to label pretty much any American citizen seized on American soil as an "enemy combatant" and jailed for life without trial and, if they are successful in fightng this through the courts, without access to a lawyer. No, what they'd really like is for anyone who opposes the government to be shot. (As per the Post.)
More than that: They simply want to kill anyone who disagrees with them. (As per Coulter.)
Ignore for the moment the fact that the Ohio State National Guard pretty much fired blindly into a crowd, their high-powered rifles striking down students who happened to be wallking across the campus in the distance. This, though, is the kind of behavior that a literal-minded Post editorialist would have been not merely condoning but clamoring for.
But, you know, you can't make an omelet without breaking a few innocent bystanders. Conservative pundits imagine that the kind of actions they call for are only going to target whoever they branded as "liberal" that day? (The Taliban, for Christ's sake?) Well, I guess they figure, as long as none of the fallout lands on their particular heads...
"Or the tendency to count Gulf War One as an overwhelmingly bloodless war, with under 200 casualties (and somewhere in the 50-250,000 range on the other side, but they're wogs so they don't matter)."
Lest we forget: The estimated 50,000 who disappeared from the greater metropolitan Basra area after the revolt which Bush the Elder repeatedly called for during the Gulf War finally happened, but Hussein having withdrawn his troops from Kuwait by that time, we stood by until the uprising was mercilessly obliterated, finally instituting no-fly zones after a decent interval...
This whole idea that the bad taste left with the American people by the current administration will banish the GOP from leadership for aeons to come reminds me of...What, exactly? Oh, yes. It all comes back to me now. It reminds me of how the disgrace of the Nixon administration led to an endless sunny utopia of presidencies under Carter and Mondale and their successors. (Surely the extent of the Republicans' scandals could not have let them recoup in a mere four years to give us three terms of Reagan and Bush!)
As many qualms as I had about Gore-Lieberman (and they were plentiful, I assure you), I have to admit that the even greater qualms I had about this Bush doofus still gave me no idea just how bad things were going to be.
Now Bush, spurned by the U.N., has apparently abandoned all pretense of being interested in disarming Iraq. Rather than accede to the world's lack of interest in U.S. wars of world conquest, he's pretty much admitted all he was interested in all along was taking down Hussein, and installing what he apparently hopes will be the first of a string of democracies installed at gunpoint throughout the Middle East.
The Saudis, among others, should be a lot less apprehensive once they appreciate what Bush seems to believe "democracy" is: An unelected monarch able to wield unbridled power.
I thought one of the givens of civil disobedience is that your actions might well run afoul of laws currently on the books and hence land you in jail. That aside, part of me has a certain sneaking fondness for the idea of laws that would jail folks who intentionally overload an e-mail server, not to mention spammers of all stripes, although I concede the thorny free-speech issues that immediately arise.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2003 | 8 |
| 2002 | 1 |
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