"It may not be wise to have an election in a time of national peril."

[kpete]

Read the whole thing - this is good stuff!!!

Jon Carrol
San Francisco Chronicle


Who has oversight over the actions of the president?

The president oversees his own actions. If at any time he determines that he is a danger to America, he has the right to wiretap himself, name himself an enemy combatant and spirit himself away to a secret prison in Egypt.


So there are no guarantees that the president will act in the best interests of the country?


The president was elected by the people. They chose him; therefore he represents the will of the people. The people would never act against their own interests; therefore, the president can never act against the best interests of the people. It's a doctrine I like to call "the triumph of the will."



So this policy will be in place right up until the next election?

Election? Let's just say that we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. It may not be wise to have an election in a time of national peril.




http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/01/02/DDG5TG01E31.DTL

[corkhead]

1. I've been thinking this for a while

"I have decided to suspend the elections to keep you safer"

Isn't that what happened in Germany in the early '30s?

Those who trade basic freedoms for temporary safety deserve neither... or something like that.

[malaise]

2. Sorry to be wearing a tin fiol hat

but I have long come to the conclusion that a coup took place in 2000 with the support of SCOTUS. How citizens can remove them will be interesting since anyone who believed those sudden exit poll changes in 2004 is naive beyond belief.

[me b zola]

7. These guys are just evil and nothing is beneath them

GWOT = global war on terror. But everytime I see that acronym used I can't help but think, GWOT = george dubbya overtime.

Perhaps this is locked in my brain because of some of their other uses of acronyms. Before the war was known as Operation Iraqi Freedom, it was known as Operation Iraqi Liberation, OIL.

[endarkenment]

5. Ah -no not really.

The Nazis like to have elections, after all they knew that they were going to win.

Dictators like to keep up a show of having elections and thus popular support. So the elections continue but either there aren't any opposition candidates or the dictatorship always wins the elections. We are in 'the dictatorship always wins the elections' mode.

I rather doubt bushie would suspend elections, although the legal theory he is using would allow him to do so, or to have every tenth person executed in public for that matter. Bullies are cowards. They don't want to make their treason overt and undeniable. They prefer to hide behind the fiction of legality.

[in_cog_ni_to]

3. Oh that's good! Here's some more

<snip>Can the president authorize torture?

No. The president can only authorize appropriate means.

Could those appropriate means include torture?

It's not torture if the president says it's not torture. It's merely appropriate. Remember, America is under constant attack from terrorism. The president must use any means necessary to protect America.

Won't the American people object?

Not if they're scared enough.

What if the Supreme Court rules against the president?

The president has respect for the Supreme Court. We are a nation of laws, not of men. In the unlikely event that the court would rule against the president, he has the right to deny that he was ever doing what he was accused of doing, and to keep further actions secret. He also has the right to rename any practices the court finds repugnant. "Wiretapping" could be called "protective listening." There's nothing the matter with protective listening.

Recently, a White House spokesman defended the wiretaps this way: "This is not about monitoring phone calls designed to arrange Little League practice or what to bring to a potluck dinner. These are designed to monitor calls from very bad people to very bad people who have a history of blowing up commuter trains, weddings and churches." If these very bad people have blown up churches, why not just arrest them?

That information is classified.

Have many weddings been blown up by terrorists?

No, they haven't, which is proof that the system works. The president does reserve the right to blow up gay terrorist weddings -- but only if he determines that the safety of the nation is at stake. The president is also keeping his eye on churches, many of which have become fonts of sedition. I do not believe that the president has any problem with commuter trains, although that could always change.

So this policy will be in place right up until the next election?

Election? Let's just say that we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. It may not be wise to have an election in a time of national peril.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
A brief primer designed to help you understand the workings of our new, streamlined American system of government.

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

4. Lincoln insisted there be elections all during the Civil War

including the Presidential Election of 1864-it was so close that at one point he talked of resigning so that McClellan (his opponant in the election) could take over and broker a peace with the Confederacy.

[gkhouston]

6. Lincoln also expected that he might be called to account one day

for suspending habeas corpus. He knew it was illegal, felt it was necessary in the short term, and did it anyway, but expected that there would be a reckoning. As near as I can figure, Bush doesn't think he should pay the price for breaking the law. Just one of the many differences between the two.

[bowens43]

8. NOt even the republicans would put with that.....

[kpete]

9. Where is America's Ghandi?