|
ace: raison d'etat would cover claims of over-riding "security" interests.
what i mean is straightforward: i think the administration is in significant legal trouble because they chose to ignore fisa.
i think their central claim regarding the law itself is worthless.
but i think they could have a defensible position of "national security" on the basis of the first patriot act--if they pursued the warantless wiretaps after the 2nd, however, they are fucked.
this assuming that a case went to court and received treatment that you or i might get and not the treatment meted out by far right judges who owe their jobs to the administration.
at any rate, that's all hypothetical.
so maybe there are fewer than the 3,000 violations cited in the critique of the bush administration i quoted earlier.
as for your absurd charge that "the left"--what the fuck is that?--takes no stand on principle and only "hates bush"--that, sir, was even less worth the time it took to type than most other elements. you want the principles?
the bush administration has used the general hysteria that followed 9/11/2001 for its own political purposes since the afternoon of that day.
i oppose everything they have done.
all of it.
"principle" style statements:
there is no terrorism.
there is no war on "terrorism".
there is no "nation"
there is no democracy in america to be exported.
what there is is an administration with a dangerously authoritarian outlook presiding over a socio-economic order that is rapidly sliding into decadance, irrelevance, collapse. nothing the bush people have done offers even the beginnings of a coherent assessment of the situation, not to mention a coherent response to that situation.
so there is no place within the discourse were are collectively hobbled with that allows for anything like a "stand on principle."
the stand on principle is the refusal to accept this limited and limiting state of affairs.
so from my viewpoint, ace, your "principled positions" are nothing of the sort.
this is one of the reasons i do not interact with you in general .
i think that a wise position, and i am returning to it now.
__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
|