So now "interrogations [read torture], renditions, secret prisons, undercover operations targeting Muslims and mosques" are "our defense secrets"? And the truth, however it falls, will "make our enemies more efficient at killing us"? What an incredibly venomous indictment of our country -- in the minds of the posturing "patriots" at the NR, keeping our human rights violations and potential war crimes hidden from view is our only hope for survival? Are we now officially the spiritual descendants of Hitler, Stalin, and Pinochet?

It's clearly still politics above all with them: it's more important to protect Bush/Cheney than to risk letting out some truth about what has been done in our name. These "patriots" paint a picture of America as a place that is not even worth defending. Even Buckley must be spinning in his grave at how poisonous to America his legacy has become.

FDR's response to progressive demands: "I agree. Now go out and make me do it."

Best comedy.  Look at the first comment in this thread.

Ann Althouse is another bedwetter.

NSA warantless electronic surveillance = protecting our freedoms

Health Care Reform = Violation of our Fourth Amendment rights by government making the most extensive power grab in history.*

* From forwarded email I received:

Well, I have done it!  I have read the entire text of proposed House Bill 3200:  The Affordable Health Care Choices Act of 2009.  I studied it with particular emphasis from my area of expertise, constitutional law.  I was frankly concerned that parts of the proposed law that were being discussed might be unconstitutional.  What I found was far worse than what I had heard or expected.

To begin with, much of what has been said about the law and its implications is in fact true, despite what the Democrats and the media are saying.  The law does provide for rationing of health care, particularly where senior citizens and other classes of citizens are involved, free health care for illegal immigrants, free abortion services, and probably forced participation in abortions by members of the medical profession.

The Bill will also eventually force private insurance companies out of business and put everyone into a government run system. All decisions about personal health care will ultimately be made by federal bureaucrats and most of them will not be health care professionals.  Hospital admissions, payments to physicians, and allocations of necessary medical devices will be strictly controlled.

However, as scary as all of that it, it just scratches the surface.  In fact, I have concluded that this legislation really has no intention of providing affordable health care choices.  Instead, it is a convenient cover for the most massive transfer of power to  the Executive Branch of government that has ever occurred, or even been contemplated.  If this law or a similar one is adopted, major portions of the Constitution of the United States will effectively have been destroyed.

The first thing to go will be the masterfully crafted balance of power between the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches of the U.S. Government.  The Congress will be transferring to the Obama Administration authority in a number of different areas over the lives of the American people and the businesses they own. The irony is that the Congress doesn't have any authority to legislate in most of those areas to begin with.  I defy anyone to read the text of the U.S. Constitution and find any authority granted to the members of Congress to regulate health care.

This legislation also provides for access by the appointees of the Obama administration of all of your personal healthcare information, your personal financial information, and the information of your employer, physician, and hospital.  All of this is a direct violation of the specific provisions of the 4th Amendment to the Constitution protecting against unreasonable searches and seizures.  You can also forget about the right to privacy.  That will have been legislated into oblivion regardless of what the 3rd and 4th Amendments may provide.

If you decide not to have healthcare insurance or if you have private insurance that is not deemed "acceptable" to the "Health Choices Administrator" appointed by Obama there will be a tax imposed on you.  It is called a "tax" instead of a fine because of the intent to avoid application of the due process clause of the 5th  Amendment.  However, that doesn't work because since there is nothing in the law that allows you to contest or appeal the imposition of the tax, it is definitely depriving someone of property without the "due process of law.

So, there are three of those pesky amendments that the far left hate so much out the original ten in the Bill of Rights that are effectively nullified by this law.  It doesn't stop there though.  The 9th Amendment that provides: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."  The 10th Amendment states: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it  to the States, are preserved to the States respectively, or to the people."  Under the provisions of this piece of Congressional handiwork neither the people nor the states are going to have any rights or powers at all in many areas that once were theirs to control.

I could write many more pages about this legislation, but I think you get the idea. This is not about health care; it is about seizing power and limiting rights.  Article 6 of the Constitution requires the members of both houses of Congress to "be bound by oath or affirmation" to support the Constitution.  If I was a member of  Congress, I would not be able to vote for this legislation or anything like it without feeling I was violating that sacred oath or affirmation.  If I voted for it anyway, I would hope the American people would hold me accountable.

For those who might doubt the nature of this threat I suggest they consult the source. Here is a link to the Constitution:
http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/constitution_transcript.html<http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/constitution_transcript..html>

And another to the Bill of Rights: http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/bill_of_rights_transcript.html

There you can see exactly what we are about to have taken from us.

This is what they believe.  Bush and his theory of a Unitary Executive Branch is fine and dandy when a Republican is President.  But "poof" it vanished the minute a Democrat took office, so that even legislation properly passed by Congress and signed into law is a massive power grab of unlimited and frightening scope.  These same people no doubt take the money from Social Security and the health care coverage provided by Medicare without blinking an eye.

A conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned how to walk forward. Franklin D. Roosevelt

I love this assumption:

USS Cole, 9/11 plotter to be tried in New York. So the anti-war left finally gets the Bush-Cheney trial is has so desperately wanted, Judge Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, A.Q., presiding.

It would be easy to get depressed about the prospect of unlawful combatants, war criminals, being afforded all the rights and privileges of American citizens in a civilian court. But apparently we'll have to get past that. Might as well sit back and enjoy the show ... the Greatest Show on Earth!

They automatically assume that the real revelations of crimes will be those committed by Bush and Cheney.  I admit that that would be a nice side benefit, but it won't happen.

For the history-impaired:

KSM tried to plead guilty in a tribunal last December and somehow as the last act in the Bush administration's excremental handling of this whole issue, they declined to accept the guilty pleas. I think the biggest failure of W's two terms is the lack of convictions for the jihadis at Gitmo. If they had manned up and rammed some form of tribunals through they would have set a legal precedent, or simply affirmed the one that LBJ set by convicting and then killing the German saboteurs in WWII. Once this was done it would have been much more difficult for the left to put up the kind of legal fracas we are about to experience.

I've got a bit of advice for these folks: Put the TV on the floor and the channel on Fox. Gather up all your guns that Obama plans to take away and crawl under your bed with them in your arms while sucking on a tea bag and playing with yourself thinking that Sarah Palin was actually winking at YOU.

Why are the tea baggers et al so afraid of the Bill of Rights? Could it be that they secretly hanker for a dictator to solve all their problems and relieve them of the necessity for some good, hard thinking.  Time for them to grow up and start acting as responsible citizens.

  Take the sucker out of your mouths, folks, the wadding out of your ears and the blind folds off of your eyes.  The world, really, isn't all that bad.  Really.

Be bold, for boldness conquers everything.

The Right is afraid that that wussy law enforcement might turn out to not be so wussy after all.

And that history's judgment of the Bush-Cheney folly might come sooner instead of later.

There is the possibility that some of the defendants might plead guilty in exchange for life imprisonment.

Now if troops are out of Iraq and Afghanistan before the trials are concluded, the "during a time of war" crap might not stand up anyway.

A $1 trillion foolish mistake laid at their doorstep: that is what they are afraid of.

50 states, 210 media market, 435 Congressional Districts, 3080 counties, 192,480 precincts

In the play "A Man for All Seasons" the question of the law was discussed, and it has guided me often when I think the law unjust, and when I have wanted to tear it to pieces.

The following is an excerpt of a dialogue among Thomas More, his daughter and her suitor, William Roper, in Robert Bolt's two-act play
.
More     There is no law against that.
Roper    There is! God's law!
More     Then God can arrest him.
Roper    Sophistication upon sophistication.
More     No, sheer simplicity.  The law, Roper, the law.  I know what's legal not what's right.  And I'll stick to what's legal.
Roper    Then you set man's law above God's!
More     No, far below;  but let me draw your attention to a fact - I'm not God.  The currents and eddies of right and wrong, which you find such plain sailing, I can't navigate.  I'm no
voyager.  But in the thickets of the law, oh, there I'm a forrester.  I doubt if there's a man
alive who could follow me there, thank God....
Alice     While you talk, he's gone!
More     And go he should, if he was the Devil himself, until he broke the law!
Roper    So now you'd give the Devil benefit of law!
More     Yes.  What would you do?  Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
Roper    I'd cut down every law in England to do that!
More     Oh?  And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you - where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat?  This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast - man's laws, not God's - and if you cut them down - and you're just the man to do it - d'you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes,  I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake.

These people want to roll back the Enlightenment. I curse and damn them for it.

So now there is no need for any of that democratic stuff like right to trial etc. Ignoring that brings us down to their level and as we have seen for years that only wrecks our international standing.