Anything goes?!

[Operacast]

By placing government above the law, openly and brazenly rather than secretly (with denials or papering over as a cover), we in the U.S. have crossed a dangerous and unprecedented line -- unprecedented for the U.S. in its last half-century-to-century of history. The bedrock of republican government has not been under such threat since the Alien and Sedition laws of the notorious John Adams administration.

Now it may be hard for those who are not Americans to appreciate just how basic our reliance on due process has become for those of us born in the middle of the past century and later. It is what ultimately gave us whatever moral strength we could muster in critical moments like the Civil Rights movement, when a Martin Luther King could call on us to "live out the meaning of our nation's creed". Obliterate that creed and you obliterate the strength and ultimate effectiveness of King's call to our better angels. What's the obligation to act better by the black man if there's no tradition for us to act better by everyone? The implications of honoring that in the breach rather than the observance can only be received with a collective yawn today if no tradition or written down mandates have been duly honored and generally accepted previously. Scoff as some may, a sense of shame in the face of injustice is the only avenue to longstanding abuses being redressed. And a sense of shame is only possible with tradition and with shared and long-respected principles previously written down. Those are the only ways in which any sense of needed shame can give strength to the needed reforms that every generation must live through, era by era.

But now, the Bush-Junior administration has openly trashed those shared written-down principles of roughly a century or more -- and done so publicly, not secretly. For 100% of the Americans now living and voting, that is entirely new. And it is a desecration of things we have held sacred and even clung to in the most challenging times of trial, including our treatment of kamikaze prisoners from Japan, a world away from the sanctioned waterboarding of today. Of course, our previous record is hardly free of infractions of these principles. But no previous administration within living memory has openly defended, in broad daylight, such infractions. That's what's new.

And that is what drives a knife right through the heart of many a friend I know here in the States and through the heart of

Yours truly,

Operacast

[Pathless]

Amen, brother. Well said. Thanks for posting this.

[wil]

Oh the way folks spin the issues. The republicans were slamming the dems for not taking on the surviellence deadline and giving the Prez the power to listen at will...

FISA gives them the right to listen at will, without any change in the law. Nothing will be held up, no warrant is needed. What is required is that they file within 15 days wartime (now) or 3 days during peace time for approval, and they only have to cease and desist if the approval is denied.

Our current administration doesn't want to file. And the Republicans act as if someone has to wake the judge up, or it takes weeks to get approval, it is all a scare tactic, and as indicated an opportunity to usurp the courts and the current law.

Leave FISA alone, repeal the patriot acts (if you have to give it a good name to get it passed you know it is hokum), and give us back our rights.