Oh oH! Can I play?
Iraq: 500,000~ dead civilians
Iraq: 10,000 dead civilians
WTC: 3,000 dead civilians
Result: Saddam is more evil then Bush.
Saddam took pride in his killings. And I have no doubt that the man actually killed many of those with his bare hands, and loved doing it. Bush however did what he had to do to take this man out of commision, and I’m sure was not proud of it one bit.
North Korea: Perhaps from 710,000 to slightly over 3,500,000 people have been murdered, with a mid-estimate of almost 1,600,000.
We know they have WMDs. We’re pretty sure they’ll sell them. They hate freedom. They hate us. Like Iraq, they had squat to do with 9/11. The only thing missing is oil. Is Fearless Leader afraid to do what’s right for America?
As for the OP, the fact that the people allowed the government to erode our privacy and civil liberties should be enough to keep you awake at night.
As E72 just pointed out, Kim wins that war of evil, but I don’t see Bush dashing to put on the Super President cape and fly to save people.
Please, give me a freaking break. The fact that Saddam killed so many of his own people had nothing to do with Bush’s motivations, and you know it. It was just a happy coincidence that lets him look like more of the bad guy. No Republicans cried during the past 10 years (in fact, most of them screamed bloody murder when Clinton enforced the no-fly zone and took out Iraqi SAM sites), no Republicans gave a flying f* when Reagan was selling Saddam the weapons he used to kill those people, so don’t pull out your kerchief and dab away fake tears about them now. If any of you really had the balls to care about humanitarian issues, there are dozens of other hot spots that you can be shedding your tears over - but you aren’t. Because you don’t give a damn, and you know it.
So until I see you in the street with a sign saying “boycott blood diamonds” and carrying around publications by AI and HRW, stop glorifying Bush’s crusade as a human rights tour de force. It is sickening to seek political profit in the deaths of those people, especially after we (specifcally, Bush’s dear old daddy) helped him do it.
Is Saddam more evil than Bush? Probably, though I bet Bush captured Saddam to get some pointers.
Or, give a toy to 1,000,000 children, find that one child died from choking on said toy, then pronounce the toy “A Danger to our Children” and call the designer an “Evil Baby Killer”. Boy, this is fun!
The number of terrorists is small and the chances of me being hit by them are miniscule. OTOH, the numbers of government employees are staggering and I have to deal with them quite often so I am much more interested in protecting myself from abuse by government employees than from terrorists. The terrorists kill a few people but the government inflicts lesser pain on millions.
Are you talking about terrorists or the U.S. govenrment here?
I’ve heard the anecdote repeated from several credible sources that immediately after the act was passed, the department of homeland security was holding seminars on how to “stretch” the rules and definitions of the act to apply it to people and situations it was never meant for.
Uh… no, we didn’t. Baghdad and most of the surrounding area lost 95% of its grid for two weeks before troops actually entered the capital. Cite and Cite
On the other hand, the Ministry of Irrigation was destroyed, while the Oil Ministry next door was left standing. Ringed with fifty tanks and several hundred infantrymen at the first available opportunity, in fact. Cite for that, too.
The comparison between Bush and Saddam is ludicrous; however, the suggestion that Jose Padilla and “maybe one Arab student in Idaho” are the only victims of the Patriot Act is equally so.
Between the passage of the USAPA and August 2nd, 1,200 people were secretly arrested under its extension of police power. The DOJ refused to release their names, or, indeed, any information about them. See Center for National Security Studies, et al. v. U.S. Department of Justice- the DOJ has yet to comply with the request to release the detainees’ information, although most of them have been deported or charged now.
Well, everyone knows how evil the Ministry of Irrigation was.
Was that the “shock,” or the “awe?”
I only read the original source for his cite, but it said that the complaints numbered over a thousand. The figure of 34 was a subset of those have been investigated so far.
They also mentioned over 500 problematic cases involving immigration status found by the inspector general. It isn’t entirely clear from the article, but I presume those are separate from the 1000 cited.
As long as we’re singing-----, how about:
compared to the days of the buffalo and the cowboys, we’ve already lost a lot of our freedom . Back then the “good ol’ days”, a man could buy a gun and wear it on his belt, hitch up a horse and drive his wagon wherever he wanted. Nowadays, you have to ask the government’s permission to buy a guy, you have to take lessons and ask the government to give you a test to drive your wagon, which has to be licensed and inspected by the government.
.
Would the sheriff in Dodge City have thought his job was to arrest somebody for “DWI”–driving a wagon while intoxicated? Or stop a cowboy and ask to see his insurance papers?
Times change, and our sense of freedom changes, too. Today we happily tolerate intrusions into our privacy that were unthinkable years ago.
But for me–its ducksters post above that makes it acceptable:
We have a free press, and the abuses that occur are eventually rectified. Police powers can be abused( Rodney King.)So can the Patriot Act. But we have a free press and a whole lot of lawyers to keep things within reasonable limits.
(And ,hey, I like this idea of starting posts in GD with songs! 
Since when does 3,000 equal “a few”? I’d hate to burst your bubble here, but if either of the WTC attacks caused immediate structural failure (as they both could have) we would be talking about 10,000 or 15,000.
Yes, the government inflicts lesser pain on all of us, that’s what they do. Rather than let criminals run wild, we all are under a certain level of scrutiny. We all wait longer at the airport, we all get our bags checked at big public events, etc. That’s the price you have to pay for security.
There hasn’t been a terrorist attack on our soil since 9/11. If it takes heightened security and a few hundred to a thousand people getting crap from some agents to accomplish this, then that’s what it takes. I’m not seeing the original fears of widespread abuses coming true, I’m seeing normal day-to-day problems with the enforcement of laws, any laws.
Well, if you take Plan B’s methodology and consider that there are 293 million citizens in the US, 3000 is a very small amount. However terrible those deaths are, it is only .00001% of the population of this country.
See the thing is that no matter how many freedoms we give up, we will never be perfectly safe from another such incident. Perhaps we can ensure that hi-jacked airliners won’t be crashing into the Sears Tower, but terroristic attacks and the resulting deaths will eventually revisit our homeland. I certainly wish it weren’t true, but they will. So what we’ve done with the Patriot Act is to give up some of our freedom for a false sense of security. Are we safer as a result? “Maybe” is the best answer we can come up with.
Now if were to give up freedoms to prevent death to American citizens, wouldn’t it make much more sense to focus on the more than 40,000 deaths that occur on our streets each year? Giving up the freedom to drive in a manner that tends to cause accidents, or the freedom to drive a vehicle that is itself an accident waiting to happen, is a trade off in which America would arguably come out ahead. We might even get the added benefit of MORE freedoms from such a tradeoff, such as freedom from plaintiff’s attorneys and freedom from outrageous insurance rates.
The thing is, if you are convinced that we must give up freedoms to make ourselves safer, why don’t you start with some freedoms that don’t relate to unreasonable searches, siezures, and arrests and then only give them up for reasons that make sense? Quit giving my freedoms away for little or nothing.
CJ
Highly partisan and essensially irrelevant 9/11 commission testifiershold up Patriot act as important to preventing terrorist attacks.
The Patriot Act was passed in the Senate by a vote of 98-1 and a House vote of 357-66.
The Patriot act is hardly the first law to give the law enforecement agencies the power to look at records…
That poll shows exactly why we have a Bill of Rights summarizing rights that cannot be infringed. example: The 1st Amendment gives individuals the freedom to practice their religion. If 90% of this country is Christian, then it’s not the Christians who need the Freedom of Religion denoted in the Bill of Rights. It’s the 10% of people who practice other religions or no religion who it protects. In a country in which lawmakers are elected by majority vote, it’s the minorities that need protection. So showing that 69% of the public believes that the Patriot Act is just right or doesn’t go far enough merely tells us why Congress would vote 98-1 and 357-66. But the point is that even if the votes were unanimous, the gov’t STILL shouldn’t able to take away such rights. So if and when the Patriot Act is brought to the Courts, it should be deemed “Unconstitutional”.
In Nazi Germany, the people voted Hitler into office. Sure, the majority of the people had their vote. But if Germany had had a Bill of Rights, there would be no way that the Jews would’ve had their freedoms taken away. The Patriot Act clearly undermines the inalienable rights that the founding fathers sought to give us. And when people flippantly compare this administration to the Nazis, I don’t think that they realize how correct they are.
Can’t really get enough Nazi Germany comparisons in this debate. Because we all know that wiretaps and interrogations are pretty much the same thing as concentration camps and gas chambers.
CJ, it may be your opinion that the Patriot Act doesn’t protect us, but there haven’t been any further attacks on our soil. There have been plenty of attacks elsewhere, and WE are really the primary target, so I think the government is doing something right. I’m not going to argue that the Patriot Act provides the best use of our resources, or that things can’t be improved upon. We can always do things better, but that doesn’t mean that the Patriot Act is trampling on our civil rights.
[QUOTE=BrainGlutton]
[QUOTE=rjung]
If they did, how would we know?
Why prosecute?
The goal of a D.A. or someone like that is to get the longest sentence possible. What’s longer than “indefinite”?
-Joe
That’s brilliant. They started with gas chambers and concentration camps? Feel free to find a cite, or recant.
No, they started by removing their rights. Sound familiar?
By your logic, WW2 ended with the atom bomb. Makes me wonder why they didn’t use it sooner…
-Joe, hates the PA, but doesn’t think we’ll go Fascist overnight
This would make a good sig line - may I use a modified version of this on another board?
I’ve always found myself somewhat conflicted about the PATRIOT Act. I believe that legislation that is rushed inherently cannot be good. However, the act contains bits of legislation that I agree with and would have supported even prior to 9/11, such as the “roving wiretap” idea where the warrant for a wiretap is issued on a person, not on a single phone, though if the EFF is right then I agree that the law is overbroad. Generally, I agree with the EFF’s analysis.
However, I haven’t seen any news of a big abuse either. And it could still sunset at the end of next year. A question I have is, does it take both the Congress and the President to renew it, or just Congress?