Soapbox

President Bush says that it is actually a good thing that he has secretly been spying on American citizens without warrants for the last three years. Why?

~His crack White House legal team (the ones who said the Geneva Conventions were “Quaint” and that torture is the American way?) assure him it is OK

~Congress passed a bill giving him power to do “whatever is necessary” after 9/11,

~In bypassing the legals ways of wiretapping citizens in favor of illegality, he is keeping us all safer so he will bravely continue to do it, and finally,

~The only wrong committed was in the reporting of the act, not in the DOING of it.

Sound familiar? This is exactly the same ridiculous logic he uses in his speeches on Iraq!

**Bush claims congress “saw the same intelligence” and said he should invade Iraq (though of course they only saw part of the intelligence and actually actually said he could invade IF Iraq didn’t comply with weapons inspections, etc.).

**Knowing what he knows now, he would still do it (sacrifice over 2,000 American lives and an unknown number of Iraqis, make us the pariah of the world and damage our military and economic ability to respond to domestic crises) all again to advance the cause of freedom.

**Those nasty liberals are undermining the war effort and damaging morale of the troops by pointing out that the war is now a sucking quagmire that may never set us free (rather than considering that what undermines the war effort most is that it was a poorly planned boondoggle from the start!)

His supporters ( can anyone support this?) are all quick to point out that other presidents have taken “extreme measures” like this in times of war, for example the Alien and Sedition Acts and the internment of Japanese Americans.

Yes, and how does history look back on those actions? Do we say “Wow, it’s a darn good thing Roosevelt put all those American citizens in prison camps, too because he saved thousands of lives!” or is it a source of shame and embarassment for which later generations feel they should apologize? Surely our grandchildren will surely look back on this act and ask ” Were you all out of your minds?”

Remember this is a government who has spent untold dollars spying and infiltrating the Quakers because they think they may be a threat to national security! The Quakers, whose biggest weapon is oatmeal! Do you really trust these people, when given a blank check, to make a reasonable determination of who is a security threat and act judiciously? Or might they just cast a wide net and see what fish it hauls in? What if one of those mistakenly caught is YOU?

The neo-cons in power today say they’re all about the Founding Fathers, but they forget that one father of American democracy, Thomas Jefferson, said “Governments are instituted among men deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

If we (or our elected representatives) don’t know what the government is doing, how can we consent? And if we don’t consent, then it seems clear that the government must be acting UNjustly.

Consider too, the statement “They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety“.

Woah, what wild-eyed radical came up with THAT one, Mr. President? Michael Moore? Cindy Sheehan?

Nope. It was Ben Franklin.

And American will forget these words to her own peril and lasting shame.