By Brad on Jan 11, 2009 in America, American Values, Bush Administration, Federal Government, Quoteworthy, The President, Worth Considering | comments(0)
A provocative point worth pondering from Jim Henley:
The United States government has always engaged in war crimes and human rights violations. What’s different this decade is that, under the leadership of a terrible president, our elites have become vociferous advocates of the goodness and rightness of war crimes and human rights violations. After the period from Grant and Sherman’s Indian policies to the aftermath of the Spanish-American War, America’s powerful learned to at least talk a good game. This led to real improvement in people’s lives when proles and poobahs from Portugal to Poland to the Philippines took our rhetoric seriously. Now our rulers and their auxiliaries view their highest calling as insisting on torture, panopticon and aggressive war as the highest ideals. Esthetically, this may represent a gain in frankness. Practically, I don’t expect it to better the world.
By Brad on Jan 8, 2009 in America, American Values, Bush Administration, Government, Hypocrisy, Justice, The President, Worth Considering | comments(0)
From Proverbs:
Differing weights and differing measures—
the LORD detests them both.
From Glenn Greenwald:
That’s America’s justice system in a nutshell: the President who deliberately and knowingly violated our 30-year-old law making it a felony offense to eavesdrop on Americans without warrants has the entire political and media class eagerly defend him against prosecution. Those who enabled him — in both parties — block investigations into what was done. Ruth Marcus and Cass Sunstein and friends offer one excuse after the next to justify this immunity. But the powerless and defenseless — though definitively courageous — public servant who blew the whistle on this lawbreaking is harassed, investigated, and pursued by the DOJ’s Criminal Division to the point of bankruptcy and depression. The high-powered criminals are protected by our political elite while the whistle-blower spends years paying lawyers and devoting his mental energies to trying to fend of the DOJ’s criminal investigation.
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Sad, but true. And this is a practice that is not confined to one side or the other. It happens across the political spectrum. And it seriously undercuts the consistent rhetoric from our nation’s leaders that “no one is above the law.” That’s simply not true. It’s proven again and again that those at the top are indeed above the law because no one ever holds them accountable.
