I hope your vision clears up quickly. I know it never helps to be told to feel or not feel things, however you should not be embarrassed about your vision.
I don’t know if it’s particularly true that knee-jerk liberalism is present in a great proportion of SDMB liberals than knee-jerk conservatism is in SDMB conservatives. There are many more liberals than conservatives here, but there are still some fairly noteworthy irrational, knee-jerk conservatives that post here.
By and large I agree with the idea that most of the liberals here voice irrational thoughts, mostly because I think the vast majority of people, conservative or liberal, aren’t serious enough about politics to have truly informed opinions. It isn’t a personal slam against them, it’s just a reflection of the fact they have other interests. But that doesn’t stop them from having opinions, and often or not the less serious you are about politics the more likely you are to slurp up buzz-words, platitudes, and incredibly one-sided and biased information.
mswas is a pretty good example of what I’m talking about. He/she is a poster who more or less posts nothing but regurgitated platitudes the likes of which you only find coming out of the mouths of biased talk radio types or opinion rags.
A thread on Fredrik Reinfeldt and company wouldn’t go entirely unattended…just sayin’.
Two things - this is a perfectly legitimate reason not to provide a cite. But you should (IMO) have said this, instead of disputing (for one thing) my cite as invalid because it came from the Washington Times just because you couldn’t find a counter-cite. Surely you knew that my cite was not directly lying that Carter started the warrantless wiretap.
Second, my sincere wishes for your speedy and complete recovery.
Regards,
Shodan
I think the disproportion of Left vs. Right almost ensures that there are a larger absolute number of knee-jerk liberals on the SDMB than knee-jerk any-other.
The knee-jerk conservatives get dogpiled into silence a lot more and a lot sooner than the knee-jerk liberals.
Regards,
Shodan
I disagree. I think it is the thoughtful conservatives (and liberals) that go quiet sooner. It is the knee-jerk conservatives (and liberals) that just won’t shut up. shrug YMMV
But as I mentioned, the conservatives of whatever level get dogpiled more and sooner. So the thoughtful conservatives are disproportionately silenced.
If that was a subtle attempt at shaming me into not slapping down the knee-jerkers, it isn’t going to work.
Regards,
Shodan
It wasn’t. It was a simple comment - slap away to your heart’s content. It’s too bad, though, that you don’t have the ability to read a simple comment with filling it full of subtext.
Your posts imply your knee doesn’t jerk just as hard as those liberals you roundly declaim, Shodan. At least they own up to their partisanship.
Bass ackwards. I do not cite this declaration as evidence of anything. The tireless enthusiasm for mendacity. The brazen willingness to interpret the law the same way a balloon-animal guy interprets a balloon. The self-righteous disdain for fact. These are the evidence, evidence that this declaration need not *explicitly *enhance the Presidential power. All it needs do is permit such an interpretation.
What would satisfy, what would render this argument resolved? A trustworthy opinion that the declaration contains sufficient oversight and transparency so that a scoundrel cannot twist it to his own ends.
I don’t say I don’t trust Bush because of this fiendish concoction. I don’t trust Bush, so I am wary of his works, suspicious. Oh, my yes! Now, this may be an entirely innocuous and innocent political action. TG, IANAL, so I don’t have the legal chops for that judgement. I say we have to regard the thing in terms of how it might be misused, as well as its clear intent for use.
And this one, where I tried to show that we couldn’t dismiss this new directive out of hand without knowing what “classified Continuity Annexes” were, and what exactly got thrown out when this new directive completely revoked Directive 67.
Well, the unclassified parts of the directive explicitly state that the directive is to be applied in accordance with the law.
The classified parts could easily be information about where the President and his staff plan to go during an emergency, which is rightfully classified information that we don’t want people outside government to know.
Even if the classified annex said, “The above statements about this directive being applied in accordance with existing laws is void, this directive actually makes George W. Bush, President for Life and Emperor of Mexico.” It still wouldn’t be legally valid GWB doesn’t have the legal authority to make himself dictator, he has the power to issue a directive saying that but no actual power to make it happen.
“Let’s make tapes of all our stupid, profane, bigoted conversations in the Oval Office. Then let’s refuse to turn over the tapes to investigators. Then we’ll turn over some tapes, which will be incriminating plus show obvious signs of tampering. We could have destroyed the tapes on national security grounds, but I’m too stupid to have properly weighed the options.”
Yes, Nixon was a very bright fellow.
I don’t know if the conspiracy nutbags on the Left will turn off enough voters to ensure yet another Republican President. You’d think the GOP has screwed itself so badly that such a result is impossible.
But do we want to take that chance?
Doesn’t it ever get a little breezy up there on that cross?
I note that the thread in question has been locked, although one of the moderators who had been embarassed made sure to get in the last word.
Funny, that.
Regards,
Shodan
It should be noted “Continuity of Operations” plans date back to Eisenhower. At one time, the existence of such a plan was in itself classified information. During the Cold War it was theorized the people would panic if they knew their government was actively planning for post-nuclear holocaust governance. Because of the secrecy surrounding these plans they have always been incredibly ripe grounds for conspiracy theorists–which is why I’m not surprised in the least that this was brought to our attention by BrainGlutton.
In answer to one of his questions, to my knowledge Presidential COOP directives are legally the same as an executive order (every President has used different nomenclature, too–Bush uses National Security Presidential Directive, Clinton used Presidential Decision Directive), meaning they do continue from administration to administration.
Every President since Eisenhower has released their own version of the continuity plan with some modifications every time. All of them have had classified and unclassified segments.
During the Eisenhower and Kennedy admins, the entire documents may have been classified (I’m not entirely sure) and at the very least they were not publicly acknowledged.
If you want to find Clinton’s version of the directive it is titled:
Presidential Decision Directive 67, “Enduring Constitutional Government and Continuity of Government Operations”, October 21, 1998
Link this link explains that while general information about the directive is known, no .pdf has been published. Most likely you can read the directive, but since it is not in .PDF form I imagine you’d have to go to D.C. and visit the LOC to do so.
elucidator, that is all well and good, but perhaps you missed the subject of the origianl thread (and this one, for that matter)? I’m not faulting anyone for suspicion, I’m faulting them for doggedly hanging onto a point that has been shown to be false. That’s all. As far as interpretation is concerned, I don’t see where it leaves open to interpretation that the President may, based on this document, take over all 3 branches of government. I believe it take a rather wild imagination to see any such possible interpretation.
The document that Clinton’s Presidential Decision Directive revised, was the first Bush Administration’s “National Security Directive 69”, that document was classified in its entirety and continues to be so classified. So the simple fact that parts of or the whole of these documents is classified doesn’t actually represent any serious maliciousness. As I pointed out in another thread, the government routinely produces more classified information than it does unclassified information.
Furthermore, plans about how we plan to continue our government following a (presumed) massive nuclear attack from the USSR by their very nature are sensitive and should be classified.
This link has a lot of information on these continuity directives as well as other directives as well. The overwhelming majority of directives from the Clinton and earlier administrations remain classified.
If anything, it’s noteworthy Bush’s directive wasn’t classified in its entirety. From what I understand the Clinton one while possibly not classified, has never been released, and the ones prior to that are explicitly classified or the government has refused to publish them.
I don’t believe so, 65 was a related directive, but 67 was the overarching COOP plan, and the one that Bush’s directive revised.
Thank you for the link, Martin Hyde-I gots some reading to do.