Times Op-Ed: Giveth and Taketh Away

Last week was very bad and very good in the New York Times Op-Ed pages.  One day it descended into knee-jerk idiocy, the very next it rallied.

My take on liberalism is that it is the political philosophy which looks out for the little guy; defends the rights of the poor; seeks equality for all against the weight of class and race.  Yet on July 16, 2009, the Op-Page ran a piece entitled "The Right to Arm Public Housing."

The upshot of the opinion piece was that a bipartisan amendment attached to a bill related to expanding Section 8 housing that would allow residents of public housing to keep guns in their homes was doing the bidding of the gun lobby, and that declaring public housing gun free zones has been wise common sense.

This is one of those opinion pieces that someone should have read aloud before publishing, just to make sure it doesn't sound crazy.  Because this opinion isn't fit for toilet paper.

Let's see: poor people, who probably don't have other homes, are not permitted to possess a legal firearm in the home they have, as is their Constitutional right under the Second Amendment.  And the reason: because it is public housing.

This opinion turns liberal ideas and ideals on their head.  Where are these people supposed to keep their legal guns, should they choose to exercise their Constitutional right?  What if someone who lives in Section 8 housing wants to defend themselves, or, gasp, take up hunting?

What if someone with legal firearms in their possession falls on hard times, like in a recession, and is forced to move into public housing?

It's not as if anyone with nefarious purposes in their hearts is going to follow a gun ban, so why come down on the law abiding?

Can we, for expediency sake, suspend other Constitutional rights in public housing?  Perhaps the Fourth and Fifth Amendments have outlived their usefulness when it comes to the inner city poor?  Maybe they don't need a right to an attorney, or to be free from cruel and unusual punishment.

So, there it is, the New York Times making a case to disarm the poor.

I have been a Times reader for over a decade.  In that time I have never read an Op-Ed piece extolling the virtues of legal gun ownership.  It is truly a losing battle for the left, as evidenced by the type of Democrat elected to Congress and the Senate since 2004.  This is something the Times should just drop.

And then, when my faith in the brainpower behind the Time's Op-Ed page was at an big time ebb, the next day restored some of it.  "Illegal and Pointless" was the title of a piece which took our late president to task for the illegal wiretapping and domestic spying which took place after September 11, 2001.  

As I wrote recently, this spying, in addition to being a criminal act, was also without the merit of actually working, as the inspectors' general report released recently has shown.

The Times opined that the two reasons for the Bush Administration's criminality were that they wholesale panicked after 9/11, and also that Dick Cheney, the paragon of moral and legal virtue, "preyed on that panic to advance their agenda" of an unfettered Executive Branch.

Okay, for all those baloney artists running around these days saying that fascism is a a child of the left [Jonah Goldberg, looking at you], THIS IS WHERE FASCISM COMES FROM!  Fascism is the alignment of political, industrial and religious power under a powerful central executive government, usually under a personality cult.  It is what Hitler was, Mussolini before him, and Franco, and of course, Saddam Hussein.

And apparently, so is Dick Cheney, at least in his own mind.

And of course, a central player in giving after the fact legal cover is the eminent legal theoretician John Yoo, recently voted "Most Deserving of Being Disbarred."  If you don't recall, Mr. Yoo is the guy who wrote those memos saying it was alright to torture people, and the laws saying it's a crime don't matter.  And he was also the guy that wrote the memos saying that the Bush Administration could ignore the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act as it was outdated.

Gee, I was unaware of that section in Article II.  But since John Yoo said it, it must be Constitutional.

Can you imagine the level of hem and haw if a Democratic president abrogated such a law?  This is not something small, like receiving fellatio from an intern.  This is the type of law put in place to prevent the already massive powers of the President from being abused domestically in a way which would necessarily transform the very fabric of this nation and the nature which it interacts with its citizens.

And because we cannot trust the powers that be to do the right thing, either at the time the choice to do so is made, or even in the aftermath, when such choices should be investigated and prosecuted after the fact, the Founders of this fine nation, the so called Last Best Hope, saw fit to arm its citizens.

Remember that, New York Times.  

Bush Administration: Manufacturing Fear to Breach the Constitution

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall be issued, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." - 4th Amendment to the Constitution.

The text of the Fourth Amendment is rather plain, unlike some others whose meaning has caused great controversy over the years of our Union.  Yet it is the Fourth Amendment, which arguably limits the power of the government vis a vis the governed more than any other, or at least at its most personal level, has been dealt some mighty blows, perhaps beyond repair. 

Aside from the bevy of terrible caselaw since Prohibition and the War[s] on Drugs, I present to you the most recent, and  outright disturbing news issuing from the intelligence community regarding the and and policies of our late administration.

In addition to manufacturing the threat of Iraq to gain the extra-Constitutional power to wage preemptive war, George W. Bush and friends manufactured threat assessments to gain the extra-Constitutional power to spy on American citizens without seeking a warrant.  And further, it appears that the argument of efficacy, so recently used in defending torture, can't be used this time around because apparently these methods, such as warrantless wiretapping and email interception, did not help very much.

As the Saturday edition of the New York Times, upper right, above the fold, tells: a Congressionally mandated report from the inspectors general of the Department of Justice, the National Security Agency [NSA], the Central Intelligence Agency, Department of Defense and the Office of National Security has been partially released, and it informs us that the secret extrajudicial wiretapping program began shortly after September 11, 2001; it was not handed over to the likes of John Yoo at the Office of Legal Counsel for weeks in order to ascertain its legality; and most damning - the high level officials had difficulty citing specific examples of the wiretapping program contributing to successes against terrorists in the form of either thwarted plots or actual arrests.

In fact, the secrecy surrounding the program was cited as a core reason for its ineffectiveness.

Even more damning, and yet no longer shocking, was the revelation that White House officials had provided paragraphs to analysts working on the terrorist threat assessments, which were then inserted into the threat assessments, in turn used by the White House as justification for its extra legal and extra Constitutional acts.

Of course, seeing that "change" has come to Washington, the article, by Eric Lichtblau and James Risen, was based upon materials which were made available on Friday afternoon - the classic time when material the President wants most people to ignore is made public.

What this means is the the high crimes, the lies, of the Bush White House are even greater than heretofore known.  And the cost to our freedom has yet to come due.

I have, in the recent weeks, seen a lot of material out there on the "con" side of the argument to universal health care, or even against the so-called government option.  A lot of these arguments, hyperbolic or not, seem to center on fear of socialism, and at their worst, that such a thing would be Orwellian in its final form.  I have even heard a resurfaced vinyl record of Ronald Reagan from the '60's say as much.

Yet a lot of the same people would fail to see the very Orwellian ramifications of the overall Bush Administration effort.  I don't think these people actually have read, Orwell, to tell you the truth, because if they did we would have marched in the streets en masse a long time ago.

What the Bush Administration did was secure the ability to make war where it wanted, when it wanted; to be able to seize and imprison anyone sua sponte indefinitely by naming them an enemy combatant, the definition of which it maintained it was the sole arbiter; it could spy on anyone, anywhere, without the very reasonable constraints of the Fourth Amendment; and it successfully politicized the Department of Justice which likely conducted politically motivated prosecutions.

That's terrifying.  

And I am not even bring up the issue of no bid contracts to the firms the Vice President was the former CEO of, or which prominent members of the Executive Branch were shareholders in, or such quaint matters like adherence to The Geneva Conventions, The Convention Against Torture, CIA black sites, and the use of private contractors in the place of either military or intelligence community personnel to perform "enhanced interrogations."

And the real kick in the pants is that these warrantless wiretaps and widespread interception of our emails - that's you and me - added nothing to our national security posture.  In fact, in the words of Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon: "I believe this report shows that their obsession with secrecy and their refusal to accept oversight was actually harmful to U.S. national security, not to mention the privacy rights of law abiding Americans."

And just when you thought the lies and prevarications were over, the Sunday edition of the Times, top right corner, above the fold had this headline:

"CHENEY IS LINKED TO CONCEALMENT OF C.I.A. PROJECT."

It looks like the former Veep, who was unable to keep his mouth closed before Michael Jackson died, ordered the CIA to withhold the existence of an anti-terrorism program from Congress, and kept at it for 8 years.  What this program did, or was about, is still undisclosed.

Now that's freedom!!

Isn't it refreshing that for once all the bad things we've heard about Speaker Nancy Pelosi are not true?

And keeping Congress in the dark for so long could very well have been a breach of law.  But that's nothing new when speaking of the Bushies.

Speaking of illegalities and accountability: the cat might be out of the bag at Justice, which may be to the consternation of President Obama.  For now President Obama has been stalling or backpedaling from investigating possible criminal acts of his predecessors, to at best stay out of the messy results, and at worst so he can have all that power the Bushes stole.

But Eric Holder is doing his best to be the top law enforcement agent in the nation. It was leaked Friday that he is considering assigning a special counsel to investigate the allegations the United States tortures terrorism suspects after September 1, 2001.

If they do, I just pray they don't stop at the Lindy Englands, and go all the way to the top.  I want to see the real perpetrators frog marched for their crimes.  The ones in suits, the ones who fabricated the legalities and the ones who gave the orders.

George W. Bush: Back In The News & It Ain't Good

Our illustrious former leader, the first President to be known only be an initial, came out of retirement recently, and probably should think better of it. Early on in the Obama Administration, W. demurred and said the newer Commander In Chief deserved his silence. This, of course, ended as of last week.

However, it has now come to light that there was a second Downing Street memo. If you recall, the first Downing Street Memo, which was written by former UK PM Tony Blair's foreign policy adviser, Sir David Manning, said unequivocally that the intelligence and facts were fixed around the policy of invading Iraq.

Translation: President W. was creating out of whole cloth the casus belli to invade Iraq. In other words, the basis for our invasion of Iraq was a fraud. I hate to bring this up again, but hey, it's a goddam war crime.

So the new Downing Street Memo, written January 31, 2003, before the March invasion, indicates that both PM Blair and President Bush were aware that United Nations inspectors were not going to find any illegal weapons [notwithstanding the hyperventilating fear mongery going on daily; see: mushroom clouds; reconstituted weapons programs, etc.]

So, in order to manufacture a casus belli, President Bush put forth a plan to fly U-2 spy planes over Iraq, in the hopes they would be shot down. The memo also said that the invasion was already scheduled for March 10, when the bombing would begin.

If it needed to be any clearer, our former President was in an illegal conspiracy, with knowledge aforethought, to commit a war crime via the illegal invasion of a sovereign, albeit unsavory, nation.


POSSIBLE IRANIAN CONNECTION TO IRAQ WAR!!!

Now for some lighter fair, during the recent weeks, with the compelling news of the protests over the faulty vote in Iran, it has come to my attention that former President George W. Bush might just be Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad!!

First of all, they both have a penchant for claiming presidential victories in obviously faulty elections, and require old men in dark robes to install them into office. But have you ever looked at them closely?


















Do you see what I see? Big ears, dopey mouth, and the same squinty, beady eyes? And considering the animosity that the Iranians had for the Iraqis, there is no question to me that Mahmoud is really just W. in disguise.


Still don't believe me? Well, then why don't you find one single photo of them together. Because you know as well as I do that you cannot!

The Trap of Fallacy

Let it be said here, and said loud: it is no defense to the illegal and immoral actions of the Bush White House in its pursuit of torture, that they briefed Nancy Pelosi.

That Nancy Pelosi, one of 535 legislators, might have been told of secret torture programs is a non sequitur when the issue is whether or not our President, Vice President and their underlings are war criminals for breaching both domestic and international law.

This is the classic logical fallacy of the straw man, or straw madame speaker.  But the ISSUE is the acts of the administration, which actually committed the alleged war crimes of torture.  Perhaps even used torture to create, out of whole cloth, the "intelligence" requisite to frighten the rest of Congress, and some of the world, into invading Iraq.

That Nancy Pelosi might have to pay a price for her knowledge is a different, and wholly separate, issue.

But for now, let's stay out of the fallacy trap, and not get distracted from the peopel who actually did the evil deeds.