Pour decourager les autres

Amendment IV

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath and affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized.

That seems clear enough, doesn't it?

Edward Snowden did the nation a service by exposing the clear violation of American rights. The government has no right to listen to my phone calls, to find out who I called, or when I called. There is no "probable cause" to seize this information. And who has sworn an oath or affirmed that this information was needed in a warrant? We are not given those names.

But then why the fury and ever increasing anger of government officials as Snowden eludes them? First, of course, the NSA and the other spooks have nearly become unmanned by Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden -their secrets, so assiduously kept from the American people, have been partially, I emphasize partially, exposed. And so our government must punish these miscreants, these "whistleblowers", lest they provide a model. Manning and Snowden must be punished "pour décourager les autres," to paraphrase Voltaire. And yet, the intensity of the chase gives rise to another suspicion: that Snowden may have evidence of even more egregiously illegal government snooping - after all, if NSA can intercept simple telephone information, it can certainly intercept the calls themselves. Those giant computers (they may be located in Fort Huachuca, Arizona) capable of millions of calculations per second can certainly "listen" to a phone call and determine, by voice print, who called and who was called. It is but a short step to recording the calls themselves. Then too, he may have evidence that the government has used the U.S. Census or other privileged information for its own purposes, whatever they may be.

George again

June 24, 2013

George Again

Sigh. George F. Will is at it again. His bromides against Obama, that, that, black man in the White House, (emphasis on WHITE), have become frissons of rage and frustration. I'm surprised that George and his ilk even recognize Obama as a human being, let alone a political leader. But, as has always been true, George forgets or distorts recent history,

From his June 23, 2013 article, "Obama Hits a Wall in Berlin."

"Napoleon said: "If you start to take Vienna - take Vienna." Douglas MacArthur said that all military disasters can be explained by two words: "Too late."¹

Well, George, with your true and tested military acumen...ah, you DID support the Iraq war, did you not...and with the above strictures in mind, how do you rate the political and military leadership of our Doofus-in-Chief, George W., in reference to the aforementioned Iraq war? How does "take Vienna" or "too late" fit in when discussing the horrible mistakes of that war? What was the result of that conflict? Billions spent, thousands of American soldiers dead, a fractured country, immense debt, and for what?

 

Our Prussian Feldherr from upstate Illinois prefers not to answer this question.

That finished, G.F. commented on Obama's speech in Berlin:

""As I've [President Barack Obama, ed.] said, Angela and I don't exactly look like previous German and American leaders." He has indeed said that too, before, at least about himself. It was mildly amusing in Berlin in 2008, but hardly a Noel Coward-like witticism worth recycling."

Even a Obama's mild jokes are redundant, low-quality, and silly. Compared to Noel Coward I suppose that Obama and his speechwriters aren't that witty or amusing, but then...has George looked at questions and remarks of Generalissimo Flubya - they weren't exactly Noel Coward-like, in fact, they sometimes didn't even make sense.

What a Beltway world George lives in!

¹ Did General Douglas MacArthur, darling of the Right, say this before, during, or after the November/December 1951 disaster in North Korea?

Anno Mirabile!!!!!!!!!!!!

ANNO MIRABILE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Year of miracles! 

On February 8, 2013, George F. Will wrote a long column advocating the breakup of the nation's largest banks. Just imagine the stomach-churning at the Republican National Committee! Break up the big banks!! Why, that damned Socialist!

At the beginning of paragraph 4, George actually commits apostasy, criticizing that saint, the very essence of the living God, Ronald Reagan!

"In a sense, TBTF [To Big To Fail. Ed.] began under Ronald Reagan with the 1984 rescue of Continental Illinois,then the seventh largest bank.

Gasp! Blasphemer! Profane Scribbler! Writer of Lies! Blaming the Holy Reagan! Why, why, why, that sentence could have been written by a liberal!!!!! Choke, cough, gasp!

Then another apopletic sentence:

"There is no convincing consensus about a correlation between a bank's size and supposed efficiencies of scale, and any efficiencies must be weighed against management inefficiencies associated with complexity and opacity."

My GOD! This sentence says that giant companies, like giant banks, may not be good for the American economy!!! And that, that, that, it hints that binges of greed in the private sector do not of necessity contribute to the well-being of the American community.

Last paragraph:

"By breaking up the biggest banks, conservatives will not be putting asunder what the free market has joined together. Government nurtured these behemoths by weaving an improvident safety net and by practicing crony capitalism. Dismantling them would be a blow against government that has become too big not to fail. Aux barricades!"

Gulp! Choke! Wheeze!! Holy Ronald along with George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush "...practic[ed] crony capitalism"!! We already know that the execrable Bill Clinton and the unmentionable Barack Obama were guilty, but these righteous and godly Republicans, paragons of virtue and sinlessness, they too????? Is there no justice, no love of morality, no standard of truth in this our land?????

I must say it: George F. Will is advocating ideas that the infamous Occupy Wall Street espoused. Of all things! It looks like the New Republicanism starts with this article. They lost bad and they lost big in the last election - echoes of 1948 reverberate across America. Yes, this is the first evidence of change. Let's see what a few more months produce.

Underperformed!

"Underperformed" I'll Say!!!

The Solicitor General of the United States reported this month that the 206 billion dollars allocated to rebuild Iraq in the ten years since the war have "underperformed."

Duh.

With that amazing statement one is forced to ask, just what did that war accomplish, what war aim was attained? Why did over 4,400 Americans give their lives to, uh, "free" that country?

And on Facebook, we see George W.'s smiling face with the caption, "Miss Me Yet?" And former Vice President Cheney says that he regrets nothing and would do the same again.

Don't these people have any sense at all?

AT LAST!

AT LAST!

"...realism about the sociology of government and the logic of collective action. The theory’s explanatory and predictive power, Buchanan wrote, derives from its “ presumption that persons do not readily become economic eunuchs as they shift from market to political participation.”

From George F. Will, Balanced Budget Amendment, February 7, 2013

Ah, at last we have an explanation of Republicans in office. They merely exchange one form of aggrandizement for another.

Thank you, George.

JOHN YOO LIVES!

from the New York Times:

"Memo justifying the targeted killing by drone, of United States citizens overseas..."

JOHN YOO LIVES!!

George, the Movies, and Terrorism

George, the Movies, and Terrorism

Emperor Marcus Aurelius in Meditations:

"If you wish to know a thing, look to its origins."

The term, "enhanced techniques" or "enhanced interrogation techniques", meaning torture, is actually a Gestapo term, "verschaerfte Vernehmung." This term indicates Gestapo practices.

To explore the topic of American use of torture, George F. Will uses two Hollywood productions: Code Red and Zero Dark Thirty. It is unclear whether he believes that the scriptwriters had unique insights or unique access to information or whether he believed, and wants us to believe, their stories. But a scriptwriters job, we must remember, is not to explain or elucidate or illustrate, their job is to sell movie tickets. Boring truth or ambiguous moralities have little influence on them.

He tells us that Michael Hayden, former CIA chief, claimed that half of our knowledge about al-Qaeda came from the use of "enhanced techniques." However, this is just a claim, not truth. Michael Hayden was head of the CIA when it used waterboarding and other techniques on prisoners. (1) That claim is just another example of CYA, or "cover your ass", in case Congress looks into the matter. (2) The "knowledge" so gained may have been useless, such as the fact that Osama bin Laden was a disaffected Muslim, that he was in hiding, that he had couriers bring him information, and the like. If the information had been truly priceless and valuable, then the CIA could have tracked him down earlier instead of ten years after his triumph.

I have deep doubts about Mr. Hayden's assertions.

Lastly, we have George's glaring lack of historical knowledge. On July 20, 1944, a group of Army officers and civilians tried to assassinate Adolf Hitler with a bomb. The Gestapo rapidly arrested most of the conspirators. They were interrogated using standard police methods, not torture, and the Gestapo quickly learned the extent of the plot. Later, some were tortured, but for the most important information, standard police techniques of questioning and cross-referencing information was sufficient. What does this tell us? That not even the Gestapo thought that torture worked. IT DOESN'T WORK, George, maybe in the movies, yes, but not in real life.

I must also note that the plot of Code Red came from the Melville novel, Billy Budd, which explores the moral ambiguity of our guardians, who must act for good by less than moral means. The movie has a schmaltzy, idealistic ending, quite in keeping with Hollywood. All this escapes George.

You know, if the Republican Party, our incarnations of selfishness, ever came out against the Cruxifixion, George would publish an article praising Pontius Pilate and executioners.