[percy-l] Percy-L Digest, Vol 59, Issue 2

Beck, David A dabeck at iupui.edu
Mon Nov 3 23:16:53 EST 2008


Wade,

I agree. But since we are veering further away from Percy, I am 
cautious about my reply. But one question bothers me: if we can hold 
impeachment hearings for a guy getting a ...well, I don't want to 
offend anyone, but someone providing his lollipop to an intern, why 
can't we have impeachment hearings on an administration that has 
thumbed its nose at the Geneva conventions and our very own 
Constitution?

What's happened to our outrage? Is the fluoride dumbing us down to the 
point that we are too complacent to respond? I don't understand where 
the outrage has gone? The sometime righteous outrage that sparked the 
civil rights movement or the protests about the Viet Nam war...what 
happened?

I ask my students (who are big Obama fans), why their generation 
produces mind-numbing songs like "My humps, my humps, my humps, my lady 
lumps." Or something like that. Or the groups who ask such pertinent 
questions as "Don't you wish your girlfriend was hot like me. Don't 
'cha?" Where is today's Bob Dylan? (Sorry, I know I'm sounding like the 
old fart that I knew (30 years ago) that I'd never become. But, in the 
words of another great prophet, "I'm  a stranger in a strange land" 
(Leon Russell, for those under forty).

I sometimes think that we are living in a culture where, not Nero, but 
the entire population is playing the violin while Rome burns.

Sorry for the diatribe (and, yes, I'm accepting contributions for my 
children's therapy fund).

-David

Quoting Wade Riddick <wriddick at usa.net>:

>> I agree with Marcus. Forced reconciliation? What a joke. I don't want
>> to be unsympathetic with anyone in the military, but we can't paint
>> this invasion in a good light. Bush told us that Saddam had WMD. That
>> was a lie. Moreover, he lied about the uranium that was supposedly
>> coming from Niger (the so-called yellow cake documents).
>
> What was most disgusting about this lie is that Hussein already had tons of
> yellowcake uranium in Iraq under U.N. seal.  He had purchased it years
> earlier.  Bush went to the U.N. and lied and said Hussein hadn't allowed
> the weapons inspectors back into Iraq when he had in fact done exactly.  So
> we had to pull those inspectors out of Iraq so we could bomb the Iraqis for
> not letting the inspectors into Iraq.
>
> Follow?
>
> Pulling inspectors out of Iraq left that uranium depot unsupervised.  Bush
> was so concerned about that uranium that for months after the invasion, he
> left it unguarded like so many weapons depots that terrorists just walked
> into and stole supplies from to make the bombs that killed our troops.
> Those of us who pointed out you had to invade Iraq with at least half a
> million men to do it right, those of us who pointed out the country should
> be partitioned1 - we were denounced as weak or socialists or atheists or
> American-hating terrorist sympathizers.
>
> Bush might have denounced will-to-power in his post-9/11 speech but it's
> the sword by which his political career lived and died.
>
> Know thyself.
>
> Remember Benjamin Franklin.  Our critics are our friends.  They show us our
> faults so we can improve ourselves.
>
> Or as I heard some woman on TV relay from her grandmother, "Being a
> Christian means fixing yourself and helping others.  It doesn't mean
> helping yourself and fixing others."
>
> I told this list eight years ago that if we allowed Bush to get into office
> by breaking the law2, he would hardly be deterred from law-breaking in the
> future and that's exactly what happened.  He unilaterally broke half a
> dozen major treaties his first year in office.  He's violated the Geneva
> Conventions and ordered the torture of detainees in U.S. custody (Clinton
> at least tried to keep his hands clean via "rendition").  He's committed
> millions of felonies by wiretapping American phone conversations without a
> warrant (read the FISA statute if you don't believe me).  Then there are
> the Hatch Act violations in the hiring and firing or prosecutors and
> Justice Department officials.  What's stunning is how there is no real
> major disagreement on the basic facts.  The Republican leadership just
> thinks they should be able to do and justify whatever they want.
>
> It reminds me of that line in "Murder in the Cathedral."  If the laws were
> trees, would you chop down every tree to get at the Devil until there was
> none left to hide behind when he finally turned on you?
>
> I know politics isn't easy.  I know nobody's perfect and campaigns take
> their tolls on the families involved.  Politicians have always been lucky
> to get into office if a third of the electorate doesn't hate their guts.
>
> Life is complicated.  Whether we intend to or not, we all sin and we all
> break laws whether it's jay walking, pot, copyrights or something worse.
> We all need forgiveness.
>
> But there's bad and there's worse.  Government can't deliver utopia but it
> can make it easier to behave better and harder to behave poorly.
>
> What have our leaders been doing lately?
>
> The Republican Party has confused ethics with self-interest.  Anything it
> wanted to do was by definition right.  There was no doubt.  There was no
> debate.  It's not for no reason that Republican operatives hung posters of
> Lenin in their offices and talked about character the way Goebells did
> ("Intellectual activity is a danger to the building of character").  When
> Watergate broke, you had plenty of horrified Republicans.  To invoke Bob
> Dole, where's the outrage lately?
>
> George Bush is like this drunk who's been your buddy all your life.  He
> finally sobers up and finds real life isn't nearly as fun without the bear
> goggles on.
>
> So he gets depressed.  To cheer him up, one Saturday you take him target
> shooting in the country - but his hands are kind of shaky from the D.T.'s
> so you give him a shotgun and to make sure he hits the target you line him
> up in front of the side of a barn.  He takes aim at the bullseye you
> painted, pulls the trigger and - BLAM! - promptly proceeds to blow his own
> foot off.
>
> While he's hopping around on his remaining foot, you criticize his aim.
> "George, that it the worst shooting I've ever seen."
>
> George turns to you and says, "Why do you hate my freedom?  Why do you
> support the terrorists?"
>
> I think that sums up the last eight years.
>
> 1.  Which is why we have peace today.  Iraq *has* partitioned itself -
> neighborhood by neighborhood instead of region by region, as Biden
> suggested years ago.  You have no more neighborhood violence because you
> have no more heterogeneous neighborhoods.  The successful parts of the
> "surge" has been nothing more than bribery to sop Sunni disenchantment
> combined with a Sunni/Shia rejection of nihilistic extremism.  That hardly
> precludes an all-out civil war in the future.
>
> 2.  It's against the ethics clause of the bar oath for judges to rule in a
> case where one of the parties has paid one of judge's kids or will pay as a
> result of the ruling.  Bush hired two law firms to represent him in front
> of the Supreme Court.  Those firms, in turn, paid two of Scalia's sons as
> their employees.  Bush then turned around and appointed Eugene Scalia and
> Janet Rhenquist, children of justices, to high office.  Eugene Scalia was a
> pocket appointment, never approved by congress.
>      If you think that's an unfair characterization of the situation, ask
> yourself what you would have thought if the most recent judge in the last
> O.J. Simpson case had dismissed all the charges against Simpson with
> prejudice and then four of the judge's kids had turned up six months later
> on the Simpson payroll.
>
>
> --
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>
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>






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