Wednesday, December 16, 2009

Got Exploitation?

The inimitably shameless Sean Hannity prodding family members of 9/11 victims to accuse President Obama of treason....for daring to prosecute Al Qaeda asshole KSK in a court of law.....


What is it that the right winger nutjobs are afraid of? That we cannot trust our legal system or law enforcement institutions to carry out justice? That KSK will spout ludicrous jihad nonsense? That the only recourse when faced with absolute evil is to betray our founding principles? These guys like Hannity love to foment this culture of fear for some reason. The more afraid the American population is, the easier it is to justify torture and other sundry violations of an open democratic society...

7 comments:

tom said...

I am not a dyed in the wool fan of hannity-and accusing Obama of treason over this matter is silly.

I do believe that bringing non-citizens, who have admitted to war crimes, not criminal crimes, to trial in a civilian court is a mistake for several reasons.

If Mr. Holder is convinced these war criminals will be found guilty, then he has violated a basic tenet of our system-innocent until.....not a fair trial?

Exactly who will be the peers doing the judging? Getting 12 unbiased jurors in that venue would seem to be a substantial challenge. Lacking peers is that a fair trial? I predict no First Responders on the jury.

If a procedural error is detemined to have occured, will the accused be set free? I predict an early question about Moranda rights having been explained properly.

Every day criminals are set free (appropriately) for technical violations of their Constitutional rights. The Al Qaeda folks are not citizens of the US and thus have no rights under the Constitution.

I wonder if affording them these rights, by default, makes them citizens?

I seriously doubt that Al Qaeda and others of that ilk see what Mr. Holder has done as a sign of US strength or morality.

Three Navy SEALS are currently being subjected to criminal prosecution for allegedly giving a terrorist a fat lip-he was lucky it was not a "lead ache". It would not surprise me to see our historic good fortune of being able to capture enemy combatants to be eroded significantly in the future because of these charges.

Like it or not, declared or not, we are at war with a people that hate everything the US stands for and we must face up to that and act accordingly.

To quote Pogo, "We have met the enemy and it is us"

Or better yet Winston Churchill, "You can always count on the Yanks to do the right thing...after they have tried everything else

Anonymous said...

Hey Buckeye, no fair beatin up on the Strawman...

Jeffrey Parks MD FACS said...

Frank. That makes no sense. Please make sense.

Anonymous said...

You make sense first...
"Strawman" Argument, umm I'm not really sure, I was never on the debate team, I think its when you state the other persons argument, so that its like your arguing with a straw man??? Hmm maybe not, that didn't make sense either..
Trust the Legal System?? You mean the system that let OJ Walk, and gave Ted Kennedy a slap on the wrist for abandoning a young woman to drown???
Guantanamo's better, that's why Obama will never close it, you wait and see, he'll pass on Git-Mo to whichever Republican wins in 2012...
Y'see if KSM escapes from Git-Mo, he's still in friggin CUBA, and Castro will execute him, cause Castro don't fool around with HIV+, I mean criminals...

Did THAT make sense??

Frank

Jeffrey Parks MD FACS said...

Frankie-
The strawman error is when you concoct a misrepresentation of your opponent's position and then attack that misrepresentation as if your opponent actually thought along those false lines.

So.....where is the strawman in all this? I didn't take debate either. I was too busy playing sports and dating hot chicks. Just kidding. A little.

Anonymous said...

Frank is making the argument that we should not have a court system.

Anonymous said...

The US will cease to be great when it ceases to be good. This country in the last 100 years has always pilaged the smaller countries for their own corporate benefiys. The people of the US have benefited from cheaper food and oil. Our country hasn't been great in the last 100 years and it has been flat out awful in the last ten years. The rule of law doesn't exist I'll leave a passage from Ayn Rand to sum up where the US is because of the concentration of wealth at the upper extremes of high society. If the US goes through a currency devaluation like Argentina in early 2000, even the well paid physician will be protesting in the streets. Ayn Rand passage from Atlas Shrugged: “Then you will see the rise of the double standard—the men who live by force, yet count on those who live by trade to create the value of their looted money—the men who are the hitchhikers of virtue. In a moral society, these are the criminals, and the statutes are written to protect you against them. But when a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law—men who use force to seize the wealth of DISARMED victims—then money becomes its creators’ avenger. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they’ve passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket. And then that society vanishes, in a spread of ruins and slaughter.

“Do you wish to know whether that day is coming? Watch money. Money is the barometer of a society’s virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion— when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing—when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors—when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you—when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice—you may know that your society is doomed. Money is so noble a medium that it does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot.

“Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men’s protection and the base of a moral existence. Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values. Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it becomes, marked: ‘Account overdrawn.’

“When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good. Do not expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for the purpose of becoming the fodder of the immoral. Do not expect them to produce, when production is punished and looting rewarded."

Don't agree with all of Ayn Rand's philosophies but that passage was well written and predicament the US is in today.