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The Bush Administration Ends
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[QUOTE]Originally posted by The Mighty Monkey of Mim: [QB] Wowee. [QUOTE]Originally posted by Guardian 2000: [qb] No word games, please. You know as well as I do that does not make the prisoners we take "prisoners of war" in the legal sense of Geneva any more than Vietnam or Iraq were wars in the legal sense of the Constitution.[/qb][/QUOTE] [QUOTE][b]"Unlawful enemy combatants" . . . you used the term yourself.[/b][/QUOTE] [QUOTE][b]"Gulag" conjures up connotations of harsh Soviet torture-chambers of the last century . . . you seek to equate Gitmo to that connotation by appealing to a denotation.[/QUOTE][/b] Do you really not see the contradiction, here? It doesn't matter what term you call something by, it is what it is. Gitmo is (was?) a place where human beings are (were?) being held indefinitely without due process of law. [QUOTE][b]By that denotation, your local jail is a gulag. Kinda loses the emotional oomph you wanted your "by definition" claim to have, doesn't it?[/b][/QUOTE]A jail cannot hold prisoners for extended periods of time without trial, nor can people even be put in one without legally-determined probable cause being established beforehand. Also, there are public records kept of all of this. [QUOTE][b]I simply don't think they deserve the tender loving care of the American legal system.[/QUOTE][/b] That sort of undermines the fundamental principles of the American legal system, doesn't it? [QUOTE][b]The issue here is that the recession is a Democrat socialist creation,[/QUOTE][/b] Uh, what may I ask are you smoking? The recession is a result of the free market and a lack of oversight and accountability [i]vis à vis[/i] irresponsible banking practices. [QUOTE][b]you're damn right I want him to fail, because if he succeeds we're not America anymore [...] Thing is, at least conservatives have the founders and history on our side to determine what America is. We haven't always lived up to our ideals, but classical liberals (i.e. Founding Fathers, once . . . called conservatives, now) have never had much doubt. [/b][/QUOTE]The United States of America has its roots in socio-religious extremists who came here, cheated and slaughtered the indigenous population of people, and stole from them a land so rich in nearly every resource that it seemed inexhaustable. Over time we expanded and consumed ever-expandingly. Whenever we ran out of room, we stole more and consumed it and pressed on. We held a race of fellow human beings in slavery long after other major powers declared it to be illegal; even though we could not acquire new slaves, we had a sufficient extant population of them that we could sustain and breed them indefinitely. Moral opposition to this practice had long been present, but we chose to compromise and appease slaveholders because they provided food and wealth and exports to the country. Again and again the issue was deffered until a horrible and bloody war resulted, and even then we were mainly concerned with preserving our unified assets, moreso than with the suffering of our fellow human beings. Once we had pushed the frontier all the way from one shining sea to another, we began expanding it into the islands that lay off our shores, overthrowing what governments occupied them and replacing them with ones that would be more responsive to our wishes, chiefly among them: "help us consume more." This story is obviously much bigger and more complex than just what I've outlined here, but there is a clear pattern of behavior that has run through American history and continues up to the present. But the world now is no place for this kind of behavior. Swelling populations and dwindling resources make it an inviable strategy. There are simply too many people and too little world for any country to just do as it pleases and step on or over anyone who doesn't like it. In short, what America has been in the past is not what it can continue to be in the future if we want it to survive, and even then it may not. No government lasts forever, and that's probably not such a bad thing. Think Roman Empire here. Communism and unbridled Capitalism are BOTH systems that have their ideological appeals, but DO NOT WORK in long-term, large-scale practice because their theories fail to account for human factors. Anarchy and Fascism, ditto. The most successful strategies not just for survival but for harmony, sustainability, and quality of life for the greatest number of people probably lie somewhere in between. Some people might call it Socialism and others may call it something else. I don't pretend to have the answers myself, and I certainly don't trust Obama any more than I'd trust any politician, but I also cannot fathom this defense of the Bush administration. -[b]MMoM[/b] :D [/QB][/QUOTE]
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