The Treason Card: By Paul Krugman

[kpete]

The Treason Card
By Paul Krugman
The New York Times
Published: July 7, 2006

The nature of the right-wing attack on The New York Times — an attack not on the newspaper's judgment, but on its motives — seems to have startled many people in the news media. After an editorial in The Wall Street Journal declared that The Times has what amount to treasonous intentions — that it "has as a major goal not winning the war on terror but obstructing it" — The Journal's own political editor pronounced himself "shocked," saying that "I don't know anybody on the news staff of The Wall Street Journal that believes that."

But anyone who was genuinely shocked by The Journal's willingness to play the treason card must not have been paying attention these past five years.

Over the last few months a series of revelations have confirmed what should have been obvious a long time ago: the Bush administration and the movement it leads have been engaged in an authoritarian project, an effort to remove all the checks and balances that have heretofore constrained the executive branch.

Much of this project involves the assertion of unprecedented executive authority — the right to imprison people indefinitely without charges (and torture them if the administration feels like it), the right to wiretap American citizens without court authorization, the right to declare, when signing laws passed by Congress, that the laws don't really mean what they say.

more at:
http://64.226.238.78/PA/pk/pk214.shtml

[Uncle Joe]

1. Paul Krugman hits another one out of the park.

"But now the chuckling has stopped: somehow, nobody seems to find calls to send Bill Keller to the gas chamber funny. And while the White House clearly believes that attacking The Times is a winning political move, it doesn't have to turn out that way — not if enough people realize what's at stake.

For I think that most Americans still believe in the principle that the president isn't a king, that he isn't entitled to operate without checks and balances. And President Bush is especially unworthy of our trust, because on every front — from his refusal to protect chemical plants to his officials' exposure of Valerie Plame, from his toleration of war profiteering to his decision to place the C.I.A. in the hands of an incompetent crony — he has consistently played politics with national security.

And he has done so with the approval and encouragement of the same people now attacking The New York Times for its alleged lack of patriotism."

Kicked and recommended!



:kick:

[cantstandbush]

10. WSJ--another of the Bushbot papers responsible for the Iraq mess. nt

[bloom]

2. The "news staff"

and the editorial board are completely different entities.

There probably are some good people on the news staff.

[spinbaby]

3. A great read

K&R

[leveymg]

4. And that, Mr. Krugman is saying, amounts to Treason.

Call it a conspiracy to violate the constitutional rights of every American, if you want. Call it an organized betrayal of the oath of office to uphold and protect the Constitution of the United States of America. Call it Sedition. Call it High Crimes and Misdemeanors - but, someone needs to prosecute the bastards.

Paul Krugman is right. The Bush-Cheney Administration has committed Treason. It was stupid for them to broach the subject.

Indict them, arrest them, try them, and imprison them all.

[TahitiNut]

7. Agreed. Until that's done, we're an outlaw nation.

Until we indict, prosecute, and imprison those who've committed war crimes, crimes against humanity, anc crimes agasint the Constitution, we have lost any claim on moral rectitude. The corruption in our body politic may be terminal.

[leveymg]

13. Did the Supreme Court know that Hamdan decision would lead to this?

There really doesn't seem to be anywhere for the Bush-Cheney cabal to hide, anymore. The armed services aren't going to protect them from arrest after indictment.

Rumsfeld, Gonzalez, Yoo and others clearly violated the Torture Act of 2000. That law makes it a capital offense, punishable by death, for any American who incites, enables or carries out acts of torture that result in death to the victim outside the U.S. Pardons won't make any difference. See, www.dailykos.com/story/2006/2/24/13644/9576





The responsible officials should all commit suicide. Legally, they already did when they condoned torture. Then, there are the other charges they'll face: violations of the Geneva Convention, waging aggressive war, crimes against humanity . . .

Black capsule or fall on your sword, Rummy? Dick? What about you, Dubya?

[NMDemDist2]

18. but that has always been Rove's MO. attack your opponents at their

strengths (ala the Swiftboaters) and tout Bush's weakness as his greatest strength

classic Rove

[noonwitch]

5. I'm sick of right-wingers screaming "treason" every time they encounter an

opinion they don't like. this isn't even close to treason-everyone knew that the government was doing it, various administration officials stated after 9-11 that this was exactly what they were going to do to fight the war of terror.

I know what I consider to be treason: selling arms to a nation of terrorists that held your own diplomats and marines hostages a few years before. FOX News has a traitor on their payroll by that standard, the president has a father who is a traitor and the right wants to replace the image on the dime of one the the best presidents we ever had with the boss of the first two traitors that approved the whole plan to harm american interests in order to fund a bunch of nun-killing coke dealers in Nicaragua.

And, gee, when those terrorists then blow up a few hundred of our own Marines, it's just a tragedy that couldn't have been prevented.

We won't even get into the election 1980 allegations of a campaign actively encouraging the hostage takers to keep the hostages through the election, since it hasn't been proven.

[Bandit]

6. It is called Projection..GOP excells at Projection

That's when you project onto others what you are doing. GOP is quite guilty of treasonous behavior. They have sold out America so they can be extremely wealthy while Americans suffer. I can not think of a punishment severe enough for most of them.

[AirAmFan]

22. What Rove himself did was the very definition of treason,

publicizing the identity of a covert CIA agent and endangering all other agents who shared the "cover" she used--a phony corporation. If I remember correctly, revealing the identities of covert agents was the dastardly crime of the comic-book villlain in Tom Cruise's blockbuster movie, "Mission Impossible" Gullible Republican voters can't even connect comic-book "dots."

[Hugin]

8. Because of Paul Krugman... I'll read the NYT one more day.

Keep 'em coming Mr. Krugman.

[Mandate My Ass]

9. Wow!

K & R

[Synnical]

11. Nice Read K&R

:kick:

[lonestarnot]

12. And the Constitution is "just a Goddamned piece of paper."

hmmmmf.

[tblue37]

14. Krugman says:

Much of this project involves the assertion of unprecedented executive authority — the right to imprison people indefinitely without charges (and torture them if the administration feels like it), the right to wiretap American citizens without court authorization, the right to declare, when signing laws passed by Congress, that the laws don't really mean what they say.

In other words, a military dictatorship!

[Martin Eden]

15. Thanks ... K&R

I haven't been getting much of my Krugman fix lately!

[ginnyinWI]

16. thanks, kpete, for pointing me to that website

Somehow I missed finding it, and haven't been able to regularly access those good NYT editorials.

Hard to believe that we may now be living in a time where a journalist might be risking his life to do his job--within the United States.

[Hamlette]

17. my two favorite paragraphs

Those of us who tried to call attention to this authoritarian project years ago have long marveled over the reluctance of many of our colleagues to acknowledge what was going on. For example, for a long time many people in the mainstream media applied a peculiar double standard to political speech, denouncing perfectly normal if forceful political rhetoric from the left as poisonous "Bush hatred," while chuckling indulgently over venom from the right. (That Ann Coulter, she's such a kidder.)

snip

Does anyone remember the editorial that The Wall Street Journal published on Sept. 19, 2001? "So much for Florida," the editorial began, celebrating the way the terrorist attack had pushed aside concerns over the legitimacy of the Supreme Court decision that installed Mr. Bush in the White House. The Journal then warned Mr. Bush not to give in to the "temptation" to "subjugate everything else to the priority of getting bipartisan support for the war on terrorism." Instead, it urged him to use the "political capital" generated by the atrocity to push through tax cuts and right-wing judicial appointments.

I've been bummed out about it all day. Krugman says it like it is. Sad.

[Just Me]

19. I actually used to view Paul as an economist without sense of,....

,...reality. That was some time ago. He's proven himself without tunnel vision into which most economists slip. He has broader vision than most and that makes him a truly incredible advancement towards a better humanity.

Keep talkin' Paul!!! We are listening.

[WiseButAngrySara]

20. Excellent read! Thanks for posting kpete.

:kick: & R!

[Bozita]

21. Malloy's gonna discuss Krugman's column.

[MrSlayer]

23. Excellent.

Dude hits the nail on the head.

[femrap]

24. I love his words of courage and truth. nt

[BelgianMadCow]

25. It is always good to see it spelled out in print : TREASON

I'll be sending this around on this side of the pond.

Krugman, Hersch and Helen Thomas are voices of sanity in a wilderness of deceit and propaganda.

Treason and impeachment are words whose frequency is definitely on the up. Let it be a long hot summer for the treasonous bastards.

[young_at_heart]

26. Authoritarian? Yes, that does indeed describe the Bush administration

Particularly, Dick Cheney.