| TheRealMafoo said: I see, Funny that the entire time you have argued against what the Bush administration did, it was what we were doing to people, not that we didn't have a law in place to do it. Now that your guy is in office, if we pass laws to treat people the exact same way we have been treating them for the last 6+ years, you're OK with it. So in your eyes, raping women is bad, but if a law passed that said it was legal to rape women, then it's OK? (yea, it's an extreme to prove a point, I know you would not be ok with it) |
I thought the way Bush did it was too broad and wouldn't have been able to fly even if he had gone to Congress and the courts. Obama is reserving this for the 10-15% of detainees where this is truly a problem, not 100% of them like Bush did until the Supreme Court ruled on the issue and the Bush Administration had to let a lot of people go.
Extreme times sometimes call for extreme measures, but if you are going to use extreme measures, there is an appropriate way to do so. Congress is directly accountable to the voters every two years. If they approve something, the voters can express their disaproval pretty quickly. And anything that goes through Congress typically becomes public records. Every law passed by Congress is public domain. The executive branch, on the other hand, has broad latitude to hide things. Fortunately Obama is trying to narrow the scope of "executive privilege" to just hide things, though at the moment his legal people kind of have to make do with the legal memos they have on hand.
And having the courts oversee the process is huge. Its like letting a kid run wild in the house over the weekend and he throws a party and trashes the place versus hiring a babysitter. It makes a big damn difference.
Going to Congress means that the public knows what is going on and how exactly it is supposed to work. Getting the courts involved prevents abuse of what is a power that should only be used in the most extreme circumstances.
I don't necessarily approve of everything Obama is doing in this department, but at least he is doing it the right way. That does matter as it does have consequences. And frankly its just more honest.
We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers…Also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of beer, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls. The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. –Raoul Duke
It is hard to shed anything but crocodile tears over White House speechwriter Patrick Buchanan's tragic analysis of the Nixon debacle. "It's like Sisyphus," he said. "We rolled the rock all the way up the mountain...and it rolled right back down on us...." Neither Sisyphus nor the commander of the Light Brigade nor Pat Buchanan had the time or any real inclination to question what they were doing...a martyr, to the bitter end, to a "flawed" cause and a narrow, atavistic concept of conservative politics that has done more damage to itself and the country in less than six years than its liberal enemies could have done in two or three decades. -Hunter S. Thompson
