Entries this day: Dream Marcel_debate

Dream

10:35am JST Monday 18 October 2004

I just woke up, but here's what I remember from my 7am dream (that I thought I would remember easily):

I was with a group including Frank who challenged the group, "give me *any* name [of any famous person and I will have a link to that person in this super fantastic database (and I'll know something about that person).]"

I challenged him back, "why [do you just have links from your website to the content of someone else's website (and no content of your own)?]"

I persisted in asking why until he gave me the circumlocuted answer that ultimatly meant that although their website has all the content, they benefitted from having Frank's website link to it all. Very egotistical. Very Frank.

- - - -

I was in a bathtub room with Louise while we were hiding from everyone in this big house. I was like, "let's get down, make love" and she was like, "no way; I just wanted to clean the bathtub."

damn.

Marcel debate

12:14pm JST Monday 18 October 2004

This is long and politicky, but it's taken up a lot of my morning, so I'll post it...

I sent an email to Marcel with subject: Please read this. I actually sent it to several people, but he's the only one who replied.

The text I sent is at the end of this entry. Here is Marcel's reply:

Sorry, Rob, I couldn't continue reading this misleading piece,
although I did read a significant portion. But, I don't believe Robert
George!  Firstly, any self-respecting conservative (as Robert claims
to be) would not elect Kerry (the most liberal senator bar none) over
Bush, no matter how fiscally imprudent Bush appears to be.

But also, I couldn't continue reading it because many of the items
that I did read were taken out of context, such as the comment about
the War on Terror "not being winnable."  The point was, you can't get
to a "cease fire" with terrorists.  Terrorists don't honor cease
fires, and you can't negotiate with them--something President Reagan
knew!  The only way to solve this problem is to make terrorism an
unattractive option--by spreading liberty.

But Robert continues taking things out of context by comparing
terrorism to poverty, drugs, and pregnancy.  And then claims Bush used
a vague authorization to go to war.  Just what about the Congressional
authorization for the use of force does Robert find vague?  I mean,
that would be persuasive to know!  What does that say about his
candidate who *authorized* said vague authorization?  And then to
paint the Patriot Act as an attack on civil liberties?  The Patriot
Act granted to law enforcement the same powers they already had for
fighting organized crime!  The wall between the FBI and CIA, erected
by the Clinton administration, was an eerily consistent contributing
factor to 9/11!

I'm often surprised at people who say the War on Terror is not moral.
For some reason, they feel liberating the people of Afghanistan and
Iraq is evil, yet somehow their murderous dictators were more
appealing.  Or that attacking terrorist regimes is evil, but murdering
American civilians, including women and children, is not.  Clearly,
these people never lived in Afghanistan or Iraq!  I would bet, these
people have utterly forgotten what happened on September 11, 2001.

President Bush correctly states that we can no longer allow murderous
regimes to fester for the mere sake of stability because that's a pipe
dream, especially in a world possessing nuclear weapons.  The fact
that, after President Bush followed through in Iraq, Iran came clean
with their nuclear weapons program--which they had developed under the
nose of UN inspectors--led to the discovery of a previously unknown
nuclear proliferation underground should be enough to convince any
"Doubting Thomases" or "Doubting Roberts", as it were, that we did the
right thing.

All of the above notwithstanding, the alternative is John Kerry and an
executive branch that will treat terrorism as a law enforcement
problem as did the Clinton administration.  Just because you say
something doesn't make it so.  Robert George claims to be
conservative, but his distortions and rhetoric belie his real
position.  He is a wolf in sheep's clothing.

I am sure that, being outside the US, you get all of the negative
press about America, and how eeevil we are.  We get that here in the
States, too, thanks in large part to the bias media and people like
George Soros, who alone pumps tens of millions of dollars into
anti-American groups such as moveon.org to attempt to paint the Bush
administration as evil.

The good news is, Americans know the morality of liberating Iraq and
Afghanistan, and see these attacks for what they are: politically
motivated attacks.  The American media monopoly here in the States is
starting to crumble, and proving themselves to be, not news outlets,
but pushing their own anti-conservative agendas.  Dan Rather is only
the latest scam in the 'news' manufacturing business.  Outed not just
by his peers, but by bloggers and the Internet--the New Media.

Take heart, Rob!  We here in the States will elect Bush to a second
term and continue to fight terrorism so that the world will be safer!
I know you and I don't always agree on moral issues, but we should be
able to agree that turning a blind eye to evil, if not as evil as the
evil itself, certainly leads to evil consequences--if not for us, then
for others.  And turning a blind eye is exactly what a Kerry
presidency would do.

Much love,
Marcel

PS- Feel free to ask me for clarification on any of these facts.  I'll
be happy to provide my sources.

Here is my reply to Marcel:

I'm not nearly as articulate as you on this, but basically,

1) I don't enjoy the idea of Bush lying to the world in order to go to
war against Iraq.  In Michael Moore's movie Fahrensheit 9/11 there are
men who are not Michael Moore saying that Bush told them to pin the
Trade Center destruction on Saddam.

2) I don't like how Bush loves the Saudis and flew all of the Bin
Laden family out of the country while the FAA grounded all planes.

Bush feels like a bad person to me.

I'll try to respond to a few points below:


On Fri, 15 Oct 2004 12:17:15 -0500, Marcel wrote:

> no matter how fiscally imprudent Bush appears to be.
Dude, we will pay dearly for this debt.

> only way to solve this problem is to make terrorism an unattractive
> option--by spreading liberty.

What does "spreading liberty" mean?   Liberty is not like peanut
butter; it can't be spread.   It is an idea, a concept.  We can't
expect old people in old cultures to suddenly know how to act
autonomously if they suddenly don't have someone telling them what to
do.  In Japan, I am driven nuts by people who can't make decisions on
their own.   The group-think (*) is beyond outrageous, to the point
that ...I'm losing my point.   My point is that this group-think is
Japanese culture.   I can't get rid of Prime Minister Koizumi and
think everyone will suddenly know how to think for themselves.   It
seems to me that we would have to occupy the nation for 60 years (all
the while teaching kids from grade one, "give me liberty or give me
death!" "freedom of speech" etc), long enough for all the
group-thinkers to die or give up.

(*) group-think = people are afraid to speak up or to speak
differently than the group, so new ideas are slow to come because no
one will offer them for fear that the rest of the people might not
agree.   It's maddening for me.


> a vague authorization to go to war.  Just what about the Congressional
The authorization to go to war was due to fabricated information.   I
cannot prove that it was fabricated as opposed to just plain horribly
inaccurate, but it seems strange that:

1) Bush wanted to go to war with Iraq ("pin 9/11 on Iraq")
2) CIA told Bush "he's got huge horrible bombs"
3) he didn't have huge horrible bombs
4) George Tenet did not get fired.


> The Patriot Act
> granted to law enforcement the same powers they already had for
> fighting organized crime!

I don't understand what you mean.   "Granted them what they already
had.."   Then what is different?
(I know your point is that nothing is different, but then what is
being granted?)

> The wall between the FBI and CIA, erected by
> the Clinton administration, was an eerily consistent contributing
> factor to 9/11!
I will look for articles on this.

> these people never lived in Afghanistan or Iraq!  
Nor have you or I.

> I would bet, these people have utterly forgotten what happened on September 11, 2001.
I doubt that.

> President Bush correctly states that we can no longer allow murderous
> regimes to fester for the mere sake of stability because that's a pipe
> dream, especially in a world possessing nuclear weapons.

> that, after President Bush followed through in Iraq, Iran came clean
> with their nuclear weapons program--which they had developed under the
> nose of UN inspectors--led to the discovery of a previously unknown
> nuclear proliferation underground should be enough to convince any
> "Doubting Thomases" or "Doubting Roberts", as it were, that we did the
> right thing.

North Korea has a weapons program that they aren't dismantling; why
aren't we attacking them?

- - - -

Sorry; my brain is gone.

I will agree that I want to walk around safely.  I won't agree that
the war in Iraq is not monetarily motivated.  I think Bush wants money
for himself and his homies.

Here is the text I sent originally:

WHY I CAN'T VOTE FOR BUSH.
Conscientious Objector
by Robert A. George

Post date 10.14.04 | Issue date 10.25.04

Sixteen years ago, just out of college, I volunteered at the
Republican National Convention as a man named George Bush prepared to
begin a fall campaign that would see him defeat a Democrat from
Massachusetts. The sparkling words of an acceptance speech crafted by
Peggy Noonan--and delivered almost flawlessly--helped him inspire his
party and a country that saw him as an extension of Ronald Reagan. It
fell to that George Bush to "close out" the cold war and launch a
different one in the Persian Gulf.

Now, sixteen years later, after tenures working for the party and a
couple of Republican members on Capitol Hill (including a speaker
named Newt Gingrich) and becoming an earnest fellow traveler of the
conservative movement, I find it impossible to support the current
George Bush--whom his party sees as the ideological extension of
Ronald Reagan--as he faces his own showdown with a Democrat from
Massachusetts and oversees a war centered in the Middle East.

At the Republican National Convention, George W. Bush mocked John
Kerry's claim of having "conservative values." But what are
conservative values? Two of the core principles at the heart of modern
conservatism are a belief in the virtue of smaller government and a
conviction that government must be accountable to the public. Those
principles were enunciated ten years ago in the Contract with America,
which helped Republicans take full control of Congress for the first
time in four decades. That document sought "the end of government that
is too big, too intrusive, and too easy with the public's money." In
this context, Bush's first term has represented a betrayal of
conservative values.

It's not simply a matter of outrageous spending or enlarged government
programs--both offenses of which this administration is guilty, as
manifested in a 25 percent domestic discretionary spending hike, a
half-trillion-dollar Medicare expansion, and the ripping away of
free-market agricultural reforms enacted over the past decade. The
president continues to pursue tax cuts, as any conservative president
would. But a government that cuts taxes and continues to spend
ultimately becomes as amoral as one that raises taxes and spends.

Yet the Bush administration's free-spending fiscal record only hints
at its larger rejection of conservative principles. The more
fundamental betrayal arises from the administration's central focus:
an ill-defined "war on terror" that has no determinable endpoint and
that is used to justify an unprecedented expansion of executive power.
To make matters worse, this administration shows little inclination to
demand accountability from those who serve within it. In turn, the
Republican Congress--ignoring its 1994 vow to "restore the bonds of
trust between the people and their elected representatives"--appears
disinclined to check the powers of the executive. Together, these
factors endanger the long-term health of the republic.

It is a good thing Bush has an idealistic streak that informs his
vision of the world. That idealism leads him to a belief that "freedom
is not America's gift to the world; freedom is the Almighty God's gift
to each man and woman in this world." But, without demanding
accountability from his administration, that messianic zeal is being
corrupted, and his policies are lurching out of control. Without a
defined, limited overall vision of the war on terrorism and a
corresponding commitment to government accountability, Bush can hardly
claim to be the champion of "conservative values."

speaking about the war on terrorism as the GOP convention kicked off,
Bush told Matt Lauer on the "Today" show, "I don't think you can win
it. But I think you can create conditions so that those who use terror
as a tool are less acceptable in parts of the world." The White House
immediately backpedaled from Bush's apparent gaffe, saying this was
just a variation of what the president has always said--that the war
on terrorism is a "different kind of war." But, as a former editor of
this magazine, Michael Kinsley, once stated, "A gaffe is when a
politician tells the truth." And that's just what Bush was doing.

The past four decades have seen "wars" on social conditions
("poverty"), inanimate objects ("drugs"), and physical states
("teenage pregnancy"). (Each has met with limited, if any, success.)
What is different now is that, this time, a president has asserted
that we are in an actual war that must be fought with the full wartime
powers of the presidency. With vague congressional approval, this
assertion grants the president--and, more importantly, the
presidency--powers deeply disturbing from a civil liberties
perspective. Indeed, this expansion of presidential prerogative is
anathema to the conservative belief in limited government.

The dangers of this new, unlimited power were plain to see at a tough
congressional hearing in June. Attorney General John Ashcroft squared
off against the Senate Judiciary Committee as it looked into whether
Ashcroft's office provided legal cover to the Department of Defense on
issues involving torture. The Wall Street Journal and other papers ran
stories based on a heavily redacted 100-page memo, dated March 6,
2003. Written by a Defense Department working group, the memo seemed
to outline ways to justify the use of aggressive interrogation
techniques on detainees at Guantanamo without running afoul of
international treaties forbidding torture. The Journal reported:

"In order to respect the president's inherent constitutional authority
to manage a military campaign ... (the prohibition against torture)
must be construed as inapplicable to interrogations undertaken
pursuant to his commander-in-chief authority," the report asserted.
...

To protect subordinates should they be charged with torture, the memo
advised that Mr. Bush issue a "presidential directive or other
writing" that could serve as evidence, since authority to set aside
the laws is "inherent in the president."

In essence, the authors of the Defense Department memo were arguing
that, in wartime, getting around inconvenient laws is "inherent in the
president." The memo's existence raised the possibility that the
abuses at Abu Ghraib were, in fact, an extension of official policy.

At the hearing, Ashcroft denied that President Bush approved of
torture. But, in refusing Democratic senators' demands to turn either
the full memo or similar ones written by the Justice Department over
to the Judiciary Committee, he said, "We are at war. And for us to
begin to discuss all the legal ramifications of the war is not in our
best interest and it has never been in times of war." Ashcroft was
essentially asserting that Congress--whose oversight powers give it
authority to demand accountability from the executive--should not be
allowed to inquire about the quality of legal advice being given to
the president. This, even though the apparent result of that advice
"trickled down" to the abuse of prisoners in Guantanamo, Iraq, and
Afghanistan.

If the answer to every legitimate congressional inquiry concerning
presidential powers is that "we are at war" and that legislative
questions concerning executive behavior are inappropriate, it becomes
impossible for Congress to fulfill its constitutional mandate as a
co-equal branch of government. At what point do the American people
ask the obvious: What sort of war is this and exactly how long should
a president have virtually indeterminate powers to wage it?

Yes, it is true that past presidents have taken on extraordinary
wartime powers: In the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas
corpus; in World War II, Franklin D. Roosevelt approved the internment
of Japanese citizens. But, in both cases, there existed a defined foe.
With each, there was a sense of what victory meant and over whom that
victory would be won. The Union would defeat the Confederacy; America
and her allies would defeat the Axis powers. Even in the cold war, the
ideology of communism had a clear home in the Soviet Union. Those
conflicts would end with the defined enemy surrendering, being
defeated, or the motivating ideology collapsing. However long it took,
the American people knew there would be some sort of definite
conclusion.

But, in President Bush's vision, the terrorist enemy remains
amorphous. After September 11, Osama bin Laden was wanted "dead or
alive." Then, as the Iraq war developed, Saddam Hussein became the ace
of spades in the terrorist card deck. Now, Abu Musab Al Zarqawi is the
new face of evil. The war, we are told, will not end with any one of
these men's capture or death. It will continue until ... until ...
until when, exactly? Thus, the comparisons many make to previous U.S.
conflicts are hardly applicable. Neither are the comparisons to
decisions of previous commanders-in-chief who put aside civil
liberties. For the 40 years of the cold war, the United States held
off a Soviet enemy that had the power to destroy the country several
times over--yet civil liberties were never curtailed to the extent
they are now. In the current struggle, which some call World War IV,
Americans are being asked to sacrifice liberties in the face of an
enemy that has less ability to damage us than the Soviets did. This is
not to minimize the threat of Islamist fundamentalism, but it is
essential to put the capabilities of the enemy in perspective.

The Supreme Court gave some shape to these questions in a series of
rulings on the rights of Guantanamo detainees and American "enemy
combatants" Yaser Hamdi and Jose Padilla. What is broadly at stake
could be seen in the vociferous end-of-the-spectrum minority
statements by regular antagonists Justices John Paul Stevens and
Antonin Scalia. Scalia found the detention of Hamdi, captured in
Afghanistan, unconstitutional, but disagreed with how the Court chose
to resolve it--i.e., by saying that the September 13, 2001,
congressional war resolution gave Bush the power to declare
individuals enemy combatants. Scalia asserts that the Constitution
provides only two options--either Congress could vote to suspend
habeas corpus or Hamdi could be charged with a crime, such as treason.
Otherwise, Hamdi couldn't be held indefinitely. "The very core of
liberty secured by our Anglo-Saxon system of separated powers has been
freedom from indefinite imprisonment at the will of the Executive,"
concludes Scalia.

On Padilla, the court declined to hear the case on a
technicality--Padilla's lawyer sued Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
in federal court, rather than the warden of the Louisiana jail in
which Padilla was held. Stevens (who, in a man-bites-dog moment, also
signed onto Scalia's dissent in the Hamdi case) railed against the
Court decision not to hear the case:

At stake in this case is nothing less than the essence of a free
society.... Access to counsel for the purpose of protecting the
citizen from official mistakes and mistreatment is the hallmark of due
process.

Executive detention of subversive citizens ... may sometimes be
justified to prevent persons from launching or becoming missiles of
destruction. It may not, however, be justified by the naked interest
in using unlawful procedures to extract information. Incommunicado
detention for months on end is such a procedure.... For if this Nation
is to remain true to the ideals symbolized by its flag, it must not
wield the tools of tyrants even to resist an assault by the forces of
tyranny.

It is cold comfort that the furthest left and the furthest right
justices on the Court are the ones arguing most vigorously about the
dangers of an unchecked executive. But neither they nor any of their
colleagues appear interested in pondering the hard questions of an
American president with extra-constitutional "wartime" powers that
could continue ad infinitum. Would these powers be automatically
transferred to a hypothetical President John Kerry? President Hillary
Rodham Clinton? President Jeb Bush? Should the American people simply
take on faith the latest commander-in-chief's definition of who is or
is not a terrorist? Would the American people have accepted such a
refined status quo for the 40 years the cold war lasted? Or, in the
formulation of adviser Karl Rove, the 30 years of Great Britain's
conflict with the Irish Republican Army? (Even in that conflict,
bargaining partners eventually emerged to craft an unsteady peace
agreement, whereas Rove has dismissed the idea of ever signing a peace
treaty with Al Qaeda.) How can the American people expect to stay on a
war footing when the commander-in-chief has given them no concept of
what "victory" would eventually look like? And how can they be
expected indefinitely to tolerate an expansion of executive power that
threatens the liberties upon which the nation was founded?

A permanent war would be dangerous enough if the public could be
confident in its execution. But we cannot. That's because President
Bush has failed to live up to the second key tenet of conservative
government: accountability.

Take, for example, the Pentagon's disastrous planning for postwar
Iraq. The lack of troops for the post-invasion period enabled the
insurgency to bloom and put American soldiers at risk. Worse, while
memos from Ashcroft's Justice Department seemingly provided legal
cover for the abuse at Abu Ghraib, the material causes could be found,
again, in the underdeployment of troops: "What went wrong at Abu
Ghraib prison?" asked The New York Post's Ralph Peters, one of the
more earnest supporters of invading Iraq. Pointing to the two
independent reports examining the scandal, he concludes: "Woefully
deficient planning for post-war Iraq, too few troops and inadequate
leadership at the top." Peters is among the conservatives who believe
the Abu Ghraib fiasco should have been the final straw for Rumsfeld.

But it didn't happen. And it won't happen, because accountability is a
foreign word in this administration. To demonstrate how little he has
learned, Rumsfeld observed, "Does [the abuse] rank up there with
chopping off someone's head on television? It doesn't. It doesn't. Was
it done as a matter of policy? No." Forget that the abuse was far more
pervasive than just the handful of servicemen that first popped up in
photographs; when the secretary of defense basically says, "Hey, what
the terrorists do is much worse," the moral foundation upon which
America stands begins to crumble. The president's stated goal was to
try to bring democracy to the Middle East--not to allow us to become
tainted by the barbarism so prevalent in the region we are attempting
to liberate. So Rumsfeld stays on--even as the situation rapidly
deteriorates.

Then again, this shouldn't come as a surprise: George Tenet remained
in his position following the worst intelligence failure in U.S.
history, enabling him to tell the president later that evidence of
weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was a "slam dunk." The first
failure helped lead to the deaths of thousands of Americans; the
second failure led us into a conflict from which there exists no clear
exit strategy and that has rendered the word of the United States
suspect. Yet Tenet stayed on, too.

And no wonder. As Bob Woodward writes in Plan of Attack, "[S]everal
things were clear from the president's demeanor, his style and all
that [Colin] Powell had learned about Bush. The president was not
going to toss anyone over the side.... The president also made it
clear that no one was to jump ship.... They were a team. The larger
message was clear: Circle the wagons." The larger message is that
loyalty is prized above all, regardless of the results and regardless
of the effect on U.S. standing in the world.

The same pattern is evident in the other WMD scandal, a.k.a. the
Wretched Medicare Debacle. As is well-known now, the
prescription-drug-enhanced Medicare "reform" will cost a full quarter
more--at least--than the originally announced $395 billion over ten
years. Within weeks of the president's signing the bill into law, the
measure ballooned to $534 billion. The re-estimation contributes to a
record annual deficit for 2004. The Post reported that the larger
numbers were known for "months" and that "the president's top health
advisers gathered such evidence and shared it with select
lawmakers"--while rank-and-file members of Congress were kept in the
dark.

The deception on the numbers was combined with raw, hard politics that
danced right up to the ethical and legal lines that supposedly govern
the House. The legislation--the largest entitlement expansion in
nearly 40 years--just squeaked by. Republican leaders in the House of
Representatives kept the vote open for an unprecedented three hours in
order to twist the arms of reluctant conservatives. Retiring Michigan
Representative Nick Smith alleged that Republicans threatened the
political future of his son if he didn't support the bill. Smith held
his ground, despite the de facto extortion--actions that sparked an
internal House inquiry that has resulted in House Majority Leader Tom
DeLay having his hand slapped by the Ethics Committee for improperly
trying to influence Smith's vote.

Ultimately, on both foreign and domestic policy, the public's trust
has been betrayed. Why should the public trust its leaders with future
policy if those leaders deceive and manipulate the people's elected
representatives to get a favored policy passed? If the American public
and the world at large now react skeptically to future presidential
claims that the United States faces a foreign threat, who can blame
them?

Similarly, the president's intent to reform Social Security will now
be judged by the still-emerging costs of the Medicare reform--to say
nothing of the political backlash from some seniors incensed at having
to pay 17 percent more in premiums. The mishandling of domestic
spending, of which Medicare is the prime example--whether because of
ignorance, incompetence, or deceit--casts the same pall over Bush's
domestic agenda that the collapse of Iraq does over his foreign
policy. The president who dismisses criticism of the cost of Medicare
is the same one who "miscalculated" the costs for rebuilding Iraq by
at least $100 billion--and submitted a subsequent budget that omitted
even an estimate of spending for the current military campaigns.
Medicare actuary Richard Foster was threatened with firing if he told
the truth about the costs of the reform bill, while his boss who
pushed forward the lower numbers, Thomas Scully, departed quietly to a
cushy health care-related policy job at a Washington, D.C., law firm.
That was, of course, the same pattern we witnessed with the management
of the Iraq war. Individuals who got the prewar details right--either
in terms of troop strength (General Eric Shinseki) or in estimated
fiscal costs (former National Economic Council Director Lawrence
Lindsey)--were publicly rebuked or dismissed. Those who got the prewar
details wrong remain in positions of authority. Conservatives--who
fear unchecked, unaccountable government--should be especially
appalled.

It would be wonderful to believe the president's promise that the war
in Iraq will lead to democracy in a troubled region. An immigrant--I
was born in the West Indies--tends to absorb the earnest, spiritual
myths of his adopted nation even more than those native-born.
Democracy is indeed a human value. But initiating a war to "liberate"
an entire region far from our shores can hardly be called a
conservative cause. It will be impossible to restrain a government
kept on a permanent war footing. And, in liberty's name abroad,
liberty at home will inevitably be compromised. It already has been.

No, a Kerry administration would not be any conservative's ideal. But,
on limited government, a Democratic president would, arguably, force a
Republican Congress to act like a Republican Congress. The last such
combination produced some form of fiscal sanity. And, when it comes to
accountability, one could hardly do worse. Of course, a conservative
can still cast a libertarian vote on principle.

At crucial points before and after the Iraq war, Bush's middle
managers have failed him, and the "brand" called America has suffered
in the world market. In any other corporate structure plagued by this
level of incompetence, the CEO would have a choice: Fire his middle
managers or be held personally accountable by his shareholders.
Because of his own misguided sense of "loyalty," Bush won't dismiss
anyone. That leaves the country's shareholders little choice.

Robert A. George is a New York Post editorial writer.

Source:
http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml%3Fi%3D20041025%26s%3Dgeorge102504