Brandon hasn't been following the issue very closely. If he listened to the President's speech regarding moving the fourteen detainees from the secret CIA prisons to Guantanamo last week he would understand what the administration's problem is. They've
already violated the Geneva Conventions, by using the CIA to interrogate the prisoners using methods such as water boarding and other coercive, now they want the Congress to say that's okay. First, so they can keep on doing it and second, to protect the CIA operatives from being nailed by some international tribunal.
(It's kind of the same argument going on regarding the eavesdropping on American citizens. Yeah, says the Bush Administration, we're breaking the FISA law but we don't care and we want Congress not to care and give us cover to keep going. OR else.) What is the "or else" part?
It's the either/or, my way or the highway, up/down stance of all authoritarians. Bush only see in two dimensions. His and whatever else there is. His is always right, whatever else is always wrong. That's not the thinking of President of a democratic republic, is it?
Here's the New York Times today,
Quote:Editorial
Bush Untethered
Published: September 17, 2006
Watching the president on Friday in the Rose Garden as he threatened to quit interrogating terrorists if Congress did not approve his detainee bill, we were struck by how often he acts as though there were not two sides to a debate. We have lost count of the number of times he has said Americans have to choose between protecting the nation precisely the way he wants, and not protecting it at all.
On Friday, President Bush posed a choice between ignoring the law on wiretaps, and simply not keeping tabs on terrorists. Then he said the United States could rewrite the Geneva Conventions, or just stop questioning terrorists. To some degree, he is following a script for the elections: terrify Americans into voting Republican. But behind that seems to be a deeply seated conviction that under his leadership, America is right and does not need the discipline of rules. He does not seem to understand that the rules are what makes this nation as good as it can be.
The debate over prisoners is not about whether some field agent can dunk Osama bin Laden's head to learn the location of the ticking bomb, as one senator suggested last week. It is about whether the United States can confront terrorism without shredding our democratic heritage. This nation is built on the notion that the rules restrain our behavior, because we know we're fallible.they might just require Mr. Bush to recognize that he is subject to the same restraints that applied to every other president of this nation of laws.
emphasis mine
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Somewhere along the line, George got the idea that he is above all that and that this war, however odd it is, is somehow completely different from all the other conflicts this nation has faced. He's not and it's not. If we are going to succeed as a democratic nation we must first uphold the laws and moral principles which brought us this far in history, else we defame that history and lose the very freedoms we seek to export to the world.
George doesn't understand that and that's what makes him the worst President in history.
Joe(No surprise there)Nation
