You may be able to shout, but if what you have to say is crap, the volume isn’t much of an asset.
   -Max Sawicky

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There was a sense, as recently as the 1980s, that once the election was over, it was time to govern. Presidents who won elections were entitled to a honeymoon period and preparations for the next election were on the back burner. In recent years, though, the losing party immediately sought to undermine the legitimacy of the winner and brought out all the tools at their disposal to obstruct.

The win at all costs model, which is bipartisan, leads to politics being a sport where you merely root for whoever happens to be wearing the team colors at the moment. Ordinary voters are more likely to be turned off by the rancorous atmosphere and the core electorate will likely be more energized than ever to make sure that the “bad guys” lose.
   -James H. Joyner Jr.

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We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.

That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Prudence indeed, will dictate, that Governments long established, should not be changed for light and transient Causes; and accordingly all Experience hath shewn, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the Forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security.
   -Thomas Jefferson, et al.

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I hear the voices and I read the front page and I know the speculation. But I’m the decider and I decide what’s best.
   -George W. Bush

So…

It has come to this.

I have tried to avoid it, but I’m burned out on this blogging thing.

I’ve done my best, but the return on my efforts is so meagre compared to the amount of energy required for the inputs that I cannot justify continuing.

I had two more entries in my “A War of Definition” series, one on the legacy of Athens as compared to Sparta, and which culture ultimately had a larger influence upon us. A few points from the first draft were:

The Bush administration keeps saying to the courts and other parties, “Do not second-guess the decisions of the Commander in Chief in a time of war.”

For those in the military, that is appropriate. A bright line should be maintained between the actions of citizens and those of soldiers, even if we call then “citizen soldiers” because the very nature of the military requires that the chain of command be respected and orders questioned only in extraordinary circumstances.

However, that bright line needs to be maintained from BOTH sides, with the questioning of the decisions made by our public servants, up to and including the Commander in Chief, absolutely necessary. Otherwise, we will have no citizens, only soldiers. We will have chosen the path of Sparta, whose entire culture was oriented towards military success, and rejected the road taken by Athens, which although it did not have what we call “democracy” today is truly the birthplace of the ideals we claim to hold dear along with the origin of much of our culture.

The legacy of Sparta? Wars.

Which do you choose?

Regardless of anything I might have to add to the discussion, given my extensive study of history, it will get drowned out in the partisan screaming.

My other entry was titled “A nation of cowards” and asked the question, “What happened to the ‘home of the brave’ in our national anthem, since we are trading liberty and freedom for the appearance, not even the reality, of security from terrorist attacks, especially given we were under far more grave a threat during the Cold War?”

I have realized in my recent readings that no one is being convinced, and few are even bothering to question their own beliefs.

Everyone is sticking to their canalized, ossified thinking, regardless of what other evidence comes along, against all reason and sanity.

Insanity is endlessly repeating the same process and hoping for a different result.
   -Albert Einstein

Any writing I do on this weblog trying to persuade people to actually THINK is pointless.

I will be devoting my efforts to things that are more productive, such as the novels and short stories I have neglected in the past three years, works that even if they persuade no one to change how they view the world at the least have some chance at making a bit of income for me.

Any kind of pay-off is preferable to the complete absence of even a small amount emotional satisfaction.

So, there it is.

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It is not necessary to understand things in order to argue about them.
   -Caron de Beaumarchais

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Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.
   -LeoTolstoy

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We know that people are stupid, and hope that we are intelligent individuals, and yet we cling to the idea of equality.
   -Michael Wikoff

Quote of the day:

   On the war I am now slightly to the right of Newt Gingrich. Jesus.
      -Michael Reynolds at The Mighty Middle

I know how he feels…

So what does this mean?

President George W. Bush repeatedly says that he wants to “bring the terrorists to justice,” yet the extra-legal prison at Guantanamo by its very existence denies his statements.

Yes, I am being deliberately provocative, but before you tune out, think for a moment about what constitutes “justice” by any conventionally accepted definition.

Justice is intimately related to the rule of law, and an established order of courts to administer those laws.

If you dispute that the prison at Guantanamo Bay was built specifically to be outside of the jurisdiction of the courts of the United States, your views are not worthy of a serious discussion, so please stop wasting your and my time and cease reading now.

For those of you who acknowledge reality, where exactly is “bringing terrorists to justice” in holding those who have been accused of being terrorists in a prison constructed explicitly to be extra-legal?

I write “those who have been accused of being terrorists” rather than using the administration-preferred terminology of “those who have been caught in combat against the United States” because it can be easily shown that many (if not most) of those now in the prison at Guantanamo were NOT caught on some battlefield but instead brought to US forces to gain some kind of reward, monetary or otherwise. Note the silence of those on the right-wing who have requested a “blogswarm” to analyze the recently released transcripts of the “tribunals” held to determine the status of the prisoners, proceedings where the accused were not allowed to confront accusers, and often where the accused were not even allowed to know what supposed “evidence” existed against them.

This is justice?

If you agree it is, then I am curious how you yourself would fare in such a system, especially if you had done something to piss off your neighbors.

Wasn’t this kind of governmental arbitrariness when it comes to the rule of law exactly what we were in opposition to in the Cold War? That is what I recall…

I am not arguing some partisan point of view, because if the Democrats were worth anything, they would have pursued this issue (among others) far more vigorously using arguments based upon fundamental principals rather than the weak, partisan attacks they have used to date.

The Democrats are just as morally bankrupt as the party in power, but neither the Democrats nor the Republicans are as impoverished in principles as the administration itself, which has rejected anything associated with what I understood the Republican Party to stand for.

Many who wish to prove a point like to say “we are at war!”

Many who wish to gain some kind of political advantage construct arguments upon foundations of straw (as in straw-men they construct to knock down).

If we are at war, by our actions in this war we define who we are as a culture and a society.

Are you proud of the actions we have taken so far?

Abu Ghirab…

Guantanamo…

Extraordinary rendition to prisons used by the former Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact satellite states…

This is what the rest of the world sees.

Are we truly seeking justice, or vengeance?

Recall the old proverb, if you seek vengeance, first dig two graves.

Who writes the history?

The winners of the conflicts.

Who won the Cold War?

The US, a nation that held to certain standards despite staring in the face of complete annihilation.

Now, we are confronted by forces which are mosquitos in comparison with those we fought in the Second World War, much less those of the former USSR.

Yet we shit in our pants every time a conflict arises between essential liberty and security, quaking in our boots until security wins out over that liberty, proving we deserve neither.

Are we out for justice, or for vengeance?

The answer to that question will help determine who we truly are in this War of Definition.

Technorati Tags: commentary, fundamentals, opinion

As I’ve aged, I’ve learned things I truly did not understand when I was young, when I was full of piss and vinegar thinking that I had all the answers in my head and the energy to put those answers into practice against any opposition.

When I was young, the term “bandwidth” was used only by a very few, and those few didn’t even have a conception of the Internet, towards which the majority who use the term today apply it.

Yet the term itself is so descriptive that it applies to much more than the transmission of data over some kind of connection; it is an apt word to use for our lives, for we have only limited time and attention to devote to any one thing.

I seem to have lost bandwidth somewhere in the furor of blogworld intersecting with my personal life along with what I see as the complete breakdown of the Constitutional limitations on governmental power, and I cannot seem to write about anything at the moment.

My mental bandwidth for disgust has been overwhelmed.

Why?

Read this:

This story makes the smearing of Jill Carroll by certain conservative blogs particularly cruel.

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As far as I know, none of the ugly mudslinging is being done by anyone who has ever been a hostage, much less defied his or her captors’ demands and lived to tell. It’s being done by a bunch of armchair yahoos who have wet dreams about how patriotic and heroic they would be in a situation they have never risked, much less experienced. In your videogames, jerks.

Is the right-wing alone in their reprehensible behavior?

Nope…

But they are the ones in power, aren’t they, with their bud “Dubya” and his cronies, yet they still like to play the victim.

We have gone beyond disgusting.

Technorati Tags: commentary, opinion

I will be blunt, I dislike Associate Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia almost as much as I dislike President George W. Bush, and believe me, I intensely dislike on a deeply visceral level “Dubya”…

However, even with that subtext of dislike, the continuing “reporting” of whether Scalia’s gesture made after he attended a religious service is irrelevant and pointless.

What does this have to do with anything?

Come on, people, let’s argue about substantive issues, not whether a gesture with a hand is supposedly obscene or offensive.

Do you want obscene and offensive???

Look at the photos from Abu Ghirab, and read the transcripts of the flimsy “evidence” we are using to hold people in Guantanamo.

What have we come to as a nation, acting out of fear?

What has happened to the land of the free, and the home of the brave?

Jesus fucking Christ…

Be offended by that, Goddamn it!

Technorati Tags: commentary, opinion

The world tolerates conceit from those who are successful, but not from anybody else.
   -John Blake

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