9/18/2001 A Day To Live In Infamy!
[BREAK]
IF you think you're reading too much in the blogosphere about the "Path To 9/11", you're not paying attention.
Remember, Bush has suddenly requested a live 15-20 minute interruption of the film's final hour (Eastern Time) to give a speech to the nation.
The Repugnants are really scared . . . scared that voters will come out against them in numbers that may be hard to overcome just by corrupting the ballot count in certain areas.
Well, if you don't realize how your neighbor can still be swayed by irrational fear, Karl Rove does.
So, they have a movie that blames Dems come out, sans commercials, just prior to primaries across the nation and weeks before a big election.
Blaming Dems for letting attacks take place (during Bush's presidency?) helps make that neighbor fill a Republican ballot. He'd rather live under a trult fascist regime, rather than chance death defending the Constitution under a Democrat who seems to be in the party at fault for the 9/11 ataacks.
Sounds crazy, I know. But with the country divided, just a few confused voters can bring the Repugs close enough to steal another election.
Remember, the Dems need a real landslide if they want to be sure of winning; the Repugs are well satisfied with a fairly close [but easily turned] loss.
Which brings us to how that same fear can lead to the granting of powers, powers that make the Constitution moot, to someone who promises to keep the bogeyman out of your closet.
Let's hope we're rid of our own bogeyman, and get back our country, real soon!!
As this writer for the UK Independant reports, we started on a fear/revenge road to America's ruin just a week after 9/11. His whole piece, portions of which I cut into the "Continue reading" part of this entry (below), is well worth a read. While it points to the mess we Americans have managed to make of the planet in the last 6 years, his final paragraph highlights what, to me, is the hope and dream of every patriotic American - to be rid of a President who puts the Constitution in the drawer while he allows America's power to be misused around the globe and her troops to be abused in order to maintain corporate profits of his buds!
Of course, it's rather bittersweet, reading what you've known to be sad but true
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[/BREAK]
IF you think you're reading too much in the blogosphere about the "Path To 9/11", you're not paying attention.
Remember, Bush has suddenly requested a live 15-20 minute interruption of the film's final hour (Eastern Time) to give a speech to the nation.
The Repugnants are really scared . . . scared that voters will come out against them in numbers that may be hard to overcome just by corrupting the ballot count in certain areas.
Well, if you don't realize how your neighbor can still be swayed by irrational fear, Karl Rove does.
So, they have a movie that blames Dems come out, sans commercials, just prior to primaries across the nation and weeks before a big election.
Blaming Dems for letting attacks take place (during Bush's presidency?) helps make that neighbor fill a Republican ballot. He'd rather live under a trult fascist regime, rather than chance death defending the Constitution under a Democrat who seems to be in the party at fault for the 9/11 ataacks.
Sounds crazy, I know. But with the country divided, just a few confused voters can bring the Repugs close enough to steal another election.
Remember, the Dems need a real landslide if they want to be sure of winning; the Repugs are well satisfied with a fairly close [but easily turned] loss.
Which brings us to how that same fear can lead to the granting of powers, powers that make the Constitution moot, to someone who promises to keep the bogeyman out of your closet.
Let's hope we're rid of our own bogeyman, and get back our country, real soon!!
As this writer for the UK Independant reports, we started on a fear/revenge road to America's ruin just a week after 9/11. His whole piece, portions of which I cut into the "Continue reading" part of this entry (below), is well worth a read. While it points to the mess we Americans have managed to make of the planet in the last 6 years, his final paragraph highlights what, to me, is the hope and dream of every patriotic American - to be rid of a President who puts the Constitution in the drawer while he allows America's power to be misused around the globe and her troops to be abused in order to maintain corporate profits of his buds!
- - - - - - - - SNIP Were the Democrats to gain control of the House of Representatives and/or the Senate in the November mid-term elections (not very likely but certainly possible), that would at least restore the separation of powers, allowing a Democratic legislative branch to check and balance the Republican executive. Unless and until that happens, the Bush administration is likely to go on using the images and memories of September 11 to reinforce and justify the enormous boost of power it received on September 18. What further discord this turbocharged presidency may engineer here and in the larger world between now and January 2009 is the stuff of international bad dreams.
Of course, it's rather bittersweet, reading what you've known to be sad but true
. . . and then finding that only the foreign mainstream media publishes/gets it!
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Independent Online Edition > Americas
- - - SNIP
On the evening of the 11th, the President of the United States - last seen in a second-grade class at a Florida elementary school, staring numbly at The Pet Goat in Reading Mastery II: Storybook I - read haltingly to camera from a script: "These acts of mass murder were intended to frighten our nation into chaos and retreat, but they have failed. Our country is strong. A great people has been moved to defend a great nation."
- - - End of SNIPPET
- - - SNIP
On the 16th, when Bush spoke of "this crusade, this war on terrorism", the alarming and foolishly inflated language chilled much of the listening world even as, perhaps, it stirred his electoral base of fundamentalist Christians to heroic thoughts of sword and cross, liberating the holy places from Muslim occupation. Presumably unintentionally (unless a Swiftian ironist was at work in some back room in the White House), the phrase echoed Osama bin Laden, who had been calling Americans "Crusaders" in repeated fatwas and speeches since 1998.
- - - End of SNIPPET
- - - SNIP
But September 18 is the real date to circle. That day, Congress rushed through its Authorisation For Use of Military Force (AUMF), entitling the President, as the nation's commander in chief, to "use all necessary and appropriate force" against "those nations, organisations, or persons" that "he determines" were responsible for the September 11 atrocities, "...in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organisations, or persons." It's the "such" that's the key, the inclusion of nations, organisations, or persons "of that sort", which nicely covers, for instance, the invasion of Iraq, the arrest and detention of most of the prisoners now languishing in Guantanamo Bay, possible future military action against Iran, or Syria, or both, and heaven knows what else, since "such" is a term of potentially limitless capacity to make hitherto unguessed-at likenesses and connections.
The sloppily-worded AUMF endowed the administration with unique and wide-ranging powers. It has become the licence for the executive branch to wave at Congress and the judiciary whenever its actions are questioned or censured. On September 18 2001, the delicate balance between the three branches of government, as laid out in the American constitution, was thrown severely out of whack; since that day, one branch, the presidency, has enjoyed an unprecedented primacy over the others, and we've been living with the consequences of AUMF ever since.
On the same day that Bush talked of the coming "crusade", Vice-President Dick Cheney told the host of Meet The Press how the new war was going to function. "We... have to work sort of the dark side... We're going to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussions... It is a mean, nasty, dangerous, dirty business out there, and we have to operate in that arena."
- - - End of SNIPPET
More Here
- - - SNIP
On the evening of the 11th, the President of the United States - last seen in a second-grade class at a Florida elementary school, staring numbly at The Pet Goat in Reading Mastery II: Storybook I - read haltingly to camera from a script: "These acts of mass murder were intended to frighten our nation into chaos and retreat, but they have failed. Our country is strong. A great people has been moved to defend a great nation."
- - - End of SNIPPET
- - - SNIP
On the 16th, when Bush spoke of "this crusade, this war on terrorism", the alarming and foolishly inflated language chilled much of the listening world even as, perhaps, it stirred his electoral base of fundamentalist Christians to heroic thoughts of sword and cross, liberating the holy places from Muslim occupation. Presumably unintentionally (unless a Swiftian ironist was at work in some back room in the White House), the phrase echoed Osama bin Laden, who had been calling Americans "Crusaders" in repeated fatwas and speeches since 1998.
- - - End of SNIPPET
- - - SNIP
But September 18 is the real date to circle. That day, Congress rushed through its Authorisation For Use of Military Force (AUMF), entitling the President, as the nation's commander in chief, to "use all necessary and appropriate force" against "those nations, organisations, or persons" that "he determines" were responsible for the September 11 atrocities, "...in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organisations, or persons." It's the "such" that's the key, the inclusion of nations, organisations, or persons "of that sort", which nicely covers, for instance, the invasion of Iraq, the arrest and detention of most of the prisoners now languishing in Guantanamo Bay, possible future military action against Iran, or Syria, or both, and heaven knows what else, since "such" is a term of potentially limitless capacity to make hitherto unguessed-at likenesses and connections.
The sloppily-worded AUMF endowed the administration with unique and wide-ranging powers. It has become the licence for the executive branch to wave at Congress and the judiciary whenever its actions are questioned or censured. On September 18 2001, the delicate balance between the three branches of government, as laid out in the American constitution, was thrown severely out of whack; since that day, one branch, the presidency, has enjoyed an unprecedented primacy over the others, and we've been living with the consequences of AUMF ever since.
On the same day that Bush talked of the coming "crusade", Vice-President Dick Cheney told the host of Meet The Press how the new war was going to function. "We... have to work sort of the dark side... We're going to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussions... It is a mean, nasty, dangerous, dirty business out there, and we have to operate in that arena."
- - - End of SNIPPET
More Here
