AMERICA CANNOT BE SAID TO BE GOOD

[babylonsister]

http://icga.blogspot.com/2007/11/america-cannot-be-said-to-be-good.html

AMERICA CANNOT BE SAID TO BE GOOD

BY PHILIP J CUNNINGHAM

George W. Bush may indeed be the worst president ever, and Dick Cheney the worst vice-president imaginable but that does not exonerate the American people because Americans have the constitutional right and responsibility to remove miscreants from office.

The Bush-Cheney administration has not just given freedom a hollow ring, they have not just made a mockery of American democracy and human rights in the present, and they have not just put future generations at risk with reckless deficit spending, environmental degradation and the burden of war without end, but they have effectively caused the past to be rewritten as well. America is beginning to understand what it’s like to be on the wrong side of history.

snip//

America has been diminished to such an extent under the Bush-Cheney “unitary presidency” that a crime like torture -- once comfortably seen as beyond the pale because it was only associated with the most despicable of enemies-- suddenly resonates in an uncomfortably familiar way.

Just as it should be acknowledged that the people of Japan share a certain culpability in Tokyo’s terrible war, a war that ravaged Asia and eventually Japan itself, Americans have to own up to Iraq. But it can also be said in defense of the average Japanese in the days after Pearl Harbor that there was much they didn’t know and couldn’t talk about; --the media was completely censored and the Kempeitai dealt brutally with domestic opposition.

When the day of reckoning comes for ordinary Americans to assess their culpability in the debacle of Iraq, a hideous and heinous war fought in view of a free media and in the context of relatively unfettered freedom to protest, what will the excuse be?

If Bush is unjust, if he is, as they say, the worst ever, then the free people who support, tolerate and enable him cannot be said to be good.

[Solly Mack]

1. Yeppers

Americans can like it or not, whine about it or not, scream "not me!" or not - because everyone else in the world is shaking their heads and saying, "Yes, you"

Yeah, I know...who cares what foreigners think? (blah blah blah and all the rest of that conditioned response known as American exceptionalism that leads to self exoneration of the most heinous of actions because "we're different","we're special"

[Joanne98]

2. K&R!

[DCKit]

3. Keep recommending these articles folks.

The MSM, other sites, politicians and our own need to be reminded over and over again that this shit matters.

[Faryn Balyncd]

4. We have allowed ourselves to become, in the words of Patrick Henry, "lost & undone". . .

Debate in Virginia Ratifying Convention

16 June 1788

Patrick Henry:

. . . Congress, from their general powers, may fully go into business of human legislation. They may legislate, in criminal cases, from treason to the lowest offence--petty larceny. They may define crimes and prescribe punishments. In the definition of crimes, I trust they will be directed by what wise representatives ought to be governed by. But when we come to punishments, no latitude ought to be left, nor dependence put on the virtue of representatives. What says our bill of rights?--"that excessive bail ought not to be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted." Are you not, therefore, now calling on those gentlemen who are to compose Congress, to . . . define punishments without this control? Will they find sentiments there similar to this bill of rights? You let them loose; you do more--you depart from the genius of your country. . . .

In this business of legislation, your members of Congress will loose the restriction of not imposing excessive fines, demanding excessive bail, and inflicting cruel and unusual punishments. These are prohibited by your declaration of rights. What has distinguished our ancestors?--That they would not admit of tortures, or cruel and barbarous punishment.

But Congress may introduce the practice of the civil law, in preference to that of the common law. They may introduce the practice of France, Spain, and Germany--of torturing, to extort a confession of the crime. They will say that they might as well draw examples from those countries as from Great Britain, and they will tell you that there is such a necessity of strengthening the arm of government, that they must have a criminal equity, and extort confession by torture, in order to punish with still more relentless severity. We are then lost and undone.

That we are now on the verge of approving, as Attorney General, a nominee who will not make an unequivocal stand regarding a practice we have long acknowledged to be torture, is a measure of how far we have descended from the vision of our founders.

[The Traveler]

5. Karma ... it's not just for breakfast anymore. (n/t)

[indepat]

6. A good people would readily rid themselves of a despot, a tyrant

by whatever constitutional means were available.

[tom_paine]

7. Too true. We are deeply psycholocially related to the Good Germans who helped Hitler to power

So very sad. But Jefferson, Frnklin and Midson all foresaw this in one way or another. I have no doubt many parts of the Constittuion which the Bushies have shredded were designed by those men for this very situation.

[flashl]

8. K

sorry I was too late to rec.