Seriously, can you name any one part of those policies that have affected you directly? As for airlines not allowing passengers to carry certain intems, I would put that blame solely on the terrorist elements, not the Govt. Let me ask, what if the Patriot Act never passed and we went on plodding the same as before 9/11? Do you believe a major terrorist incident in the States would NOT have occurred?
This is what is wrong with America. It's okay to have the rights afforded to you by the constitution completely shredded as long as the government promises to protect you from the boogeyman! It's okay for the government to completely disregard its own laws as long as it's done in the name of "The War on Terror"!
This is how dictatorships start. You cannot allow the governing body to become more powerful than the people it governs. You cannot give control of your life away to a select few stuffy old men who lied and bribed their way into positions of power. You have to stand firm, even if it means you have to face that terrifying thing called Life without the government throwing a cloak over your eyes.
I mean, seriously? "Name one of those policies that have affected you directly"? I'll bet the jews were happy to hear their fellow Germans consoling each other in the same way. No, that's not a Godwin, and the American government isn't close to Nazi Germany yet. But if you don't protest ethically wrong things simply because they don't affect you personally, if you allow such injustices to happen, you are betraying your fellow man.
Stop blaming the terrorists. People are responsible for their own decisions. Airlines and their paranoid security is not a function of the government; they're what I was talking about when I said that the paranoia gripping this country over TEH TERRORISTS was ruining it. The objective of a terrorist, by definition, is to induce change via fear. Well, when we're so scared ****less of people on planes that we'll harass people with metal knees at airport security, I'd say they've accomplished their goals. We have allowed one event to completely and totally alter our society into something very closely approaching a police state. Do you remember McVeigh and Oklahoma City? Did we suddenly have every driver in the country submitting their cars to checkpoints on the road for bomb materials? No, because we were a stronger country at that time and didn't allow it to paralyze us with fear.
As for the Patriot Act? Stop being stupid. Not giving government unlimited license to spy on its own people and evade the established legal process -- a process that was set up for a reason -- doesn't mean we would have just pretended 9/11 didn't happen. 9/11 happened because of lax security in already-established processes. Because some flight controller watched a plane fly nearly halfway across the country, then turn around and come all the way back without a single call, and didn't think to inform somebody there was a rogue plane about. There were lessons to learn, to be sure -- at the time they thought it might have just been a kidnapping, and now we know that if a plane goes wildly off course and doesn't call in, you give them a chance to affirm it's a kidnapping or blow them out of the sky.
What makes you think a terrorist attack would have occured? You think your government can save you? What makes you think people wouldn't plan something outside the government's jurisdiction, come in and be completely silent until whatever it was they were planning went down? You cannot prevent things like that by just giving them license to do whatever they want in the name of counter-terrorism. If the war in Iraq should have taught us anything, it is that the US government is not prepared to deal with non-central, disorganized groups. It cannot be. Intelligence is nothing more than glorified pattern matching, and if there's no pattern you have nothing to match. Remember the Maryland car snipers? Lot of good all our government powers did there, yeah? Virginia Tech? Any of a long list of events that were no different in basic premise than the Twin Towers, they just didn't have some brown guys in turbans halfway across the world claiming credit. If the Patriot Act doesn't stop those, then what good is it? It accomplishes nothing except giving government power that is dangerous for it to have.
It is foolish to grant them powers to stop threats they cannot possibly stop, especially when our government has a rather sordid history of abusing its powers -- if we go to war with Iran, we will be fighting the very weapons
we gave them.
Crotale said:
The ban on gay marriage I could give two craps about
Again, just because it doesn't affect you doesn't make it unimportant.
Crotale said:
but the Bush Administration is not solely responsible for all failures regarding NCLBA. In fact, each state set its own requirements and if they fail to meet those requirements, how the f*ck is that the fault of the Bush Administration? Yeah, NCLBA isn't a perfect solution, but I'll tell you this much, I have heard about few school districts come up with their own solutions. How about you put blame on all parties involved, not just one person, huh?
Because the Bush Administration came up with the overall idea, and established the concept of cutting funding for schools that were failing to meet those goals. What a marvelous concept; if an institution is failing at something, just cut back their funding to make them try to do it with even less. You can argue the competence of the public school system, but with something as important as education you cannot just go around cutting funding. These aren't car manufacturers making bad cars, these are people trying to educate the next generation.
Crotale said:
I never said the Bush Administration was my ideal form of running the country, but when I see other folks here whining about a select few dissing Obama, I had to remind some that Bush received a hell of a lot more hate than what I'm seeing against Obama so far. To be honest, I can sorta understand some resentment towards Bush by some who felt he did not rightfully win the election in 2000. But you know what, some of those same people are now telling the Obama-dissers to suck it up and embrace the new President, something they themselves refused to do with the previous guy. That is my issue.
Bush caught flak after he screwed up. Obama has not screwed up yet. When he does screw up (as he is most assured to do), then he will catch just as much hell. People are 'whining' because the anti-Obama attitude is aimed at lambasting his ideas before they're even tried -- but boy howdy, the previous policies worked
great, didn't they?
Whoops. Terrorism still happens and the economy is in the crapper.
?
