Why does the government keep telling us to watch out??

MadMax, I agree with you that this administration is in a "damned if you, damned if you don't" position. But you're really kidding yourself if you think that's unique to this administration. Do you really think Republicans would've laid off Clinton had he never lied about receiving oral sex from Monica? Or put Clinton in this situation...he'd be receiving the same treatment.

 

Not really. This is a UNIQUE time in our history. This threat is unprecedented. Is not some unusual resolution necessary? What's important is survival not dying with our values intact. Be practical, I say.

 

Better a few innocents wrongly convicted than a few thousand innocents murdered and a decade of living in terror. Look, I'm for getting it right just as much as you but at what price? It will never get perfect.

 

OK, let's deport all Arab and European Muslim immigrant male non-citizens, no matter what their age.

Just kidding.

A little. When Ann Coulter starts making sense, is when I need to start increasing my medications or the world has turned upside down.

But listening to some Palestinian Americans talk about how they think anything positive about Israel or Jews is propaganda is pretty sickening. It's exactly the same way Southerners in the 1970's and before talked about blacks and Jews in public. At least now most of them rednecks know better than to speak on the record with such crap. It's pretty analgous to watching the Catholic and Protestant radicals rant and rave and kill innocents in Northern Ireland.

 

No. The Republicans wouldn't have laid off Clinton.

On if Clinton were in this same situation and acted like Bush, true republicans, not necessarily all republican politicians, would fall in line on foreign issues. A wise man once said " Don't ask what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country". Democrats and Republican politicians should both be made to write this on a chalk board a hundred times, without the music thingy with five chalks when they are petty when their country needs them.

On these differing view points

"I, for one, am prepared to live in a country that is less open and just plain safer. "

and Musolini made the trains run on time."

Government is an act of giving up one's rights for safety or because of tyranny. People that want complete freedom are known as anarchists, unabomber, etc, (I don't think anyone on this board falls here) but not liberals (classic definition, not the ersatz definition where democrats are liberals).

On civil liberties...I have always had a wierd view of civil rights. I think that unwillingness to protect civil liberties is a position of being against them.

Can't remember the exact Simpsons qoute, but it was something about guns are to be used in self defense and to keep the King of England out of your face. In this situation, Bin Laden can be substituted for the King of England.

I consider the right to breathe, the right to protection, justice of the masses to be more important civil liberties than say the right of an individual not be hasseled because they're wearing baggy clothes, etc.

A person has the right to swing his fist until he reaches the other person's nose (horribly paraphrased from OWH). I'm against civil liberties of an individual when it puts another individual in harms way. This is why I'm against smoking in enclosed areas.

BTW, I am glad to give up my civil liberty of owning a nuclear arsenal. Government is compromise. Just because someone doesn't want to be blown up by a suicide bomber, he gets referenced to wanting to live under a fascist dictator is a low blow worthy of a politician. Democrats and Republicans are almost identical if you start to compare them to anarchist, dictators, and communists.

 

Joe Joe -- though I'm not exactly sure I agree with everything you just posted, I think that is one of the best posts I've ever read here.

RM95 -- you're absolutely right...i'm just more tuned into it when it's my guy. but i did see it during the Clinton administration, too.

 

Just so it's clear, I don't fault the administration for not giving any warnings before 9/11. I mean, who in the world would've ever imagined something like that happening. I do think they may be going a little overboard with all the warnings this week, but I hope it's because they are geniunely concerned and not being petty.

 

Thanks. As I said, I have a rather wierd view of how I view politics and didn't expect anyone to agree with me. There is a fine line between security and tyranny, but I think the US is currently pretty far from this line except in hopefully rare cases in which enforcement agencies break the law, the legislature oversteps its grounds, and anytime a line item veto is used by the President if he was "granted" this power by Congress.

 

I agree with your premise...my concern is how far do we go in the name of security before rights start getting erased...but I would agree that this is quite the dire situation...particularly if another attack is imminent. If they match or exceed the bloodshed of 9/11, then I think all bets are off and people will begin to think very differently about things. It's one thing to argue in the abstract in the free market place of ideas...quite another to defend your own home..your own city...from terrorist attacks on a regular basis.