Padilla

Justin Schwartz jkschw at hotmail.com
Thu Jun 13 20:15:32 PDT 2002



>
>At 08:15 PM 6/13/02 +0000, Justin Schwartz wrote:
>
>>Sounds like you have made up your mind. You trsut Ashcrodt, think he;s
>>publically accountable. I guess your original question wasn't really a
>>question at all.
>
>oh puh-lease. you regularly uphold representative democracy and its
>institutions. he was making a pragmatic claim... given the choice ....
>

I'm the house pragmatist ;), and I don't think that W's claim is "pragmatic." It's a classic false dilemma, EITHER al Quaida or Ashcroft. How 'bout neither? How 'bout the rule of law? Which involves rejecting both of them. W's claim is essentially Bush's: you arew ith us or against us. I'm agin both of them. W still has said nothing whatsoever, I mean literally nothing, not a word, to indicate that empowering Ashcroft and his Secutitat to detain and intern at will, to spy and to peep, will do a damn thing to make us whit more secure.


>
>>But I am not saying that Ashcroft will overthrow the Constitutiona and
>>establish a new fascism. It is you who raised that red herring. Kelly is,
>>as usual, dead wrong about who is deliberately misinterpreting whom.
>
>
>as usual? trot out the rest of the occasions, pal. i look above and i see a
>man denouncing representative democracy, as if he's never defended liberal
>institutions on this list before. no, i'm sorry, Wojtek made it pretty
>clear that he wasn't a defender of the administration in the typical sense,
>but you trotted out arguments to suggest that he could only be.
>

But he's defending the admin's policies, however reluctantly.

And for wilful misinterpretation, where do you rada me as denouncing representative institutions as such? What have I said that remotely implies that? I am denouncing unrepresentative unaccountable police state tactics, notably, here, detaining a United States citizen as an unlawful combatant, without any evidence that anyone knows of, denying him his constitutional rights, and announcing that he's not to be tried, just held and interrogated indefinitely. This criticism is a denunciation of representative institutions? Plu-leeze, as someone one said.

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