Interesting quote from former Attorney General John Ashcroft, during a Tuesday night speech to the Salina Area Chamber of Commerce: “The Patriot Act is a friend of American liberty, not a threat to it.”
Posted by Rhonda Holman
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43 Comments
In what context was the quote made? If the Patriot Act is enforced failrly and it protects the United States of America and helps preserve physical safety, then, yes I would agree that it “a friend.”But if it is used to simply expand the power of governmemt, to arrest and charge all sorts of crimes and even incidents “as terrorism” then it is a threat. But can’t that be said about every law and doesn’t the final say depend on the people who enforce the law. And doesn’t it depend on the people who live under the law too.Good and honest citizens take part in their government; they pay more attention than just on election day.
I like John Ashcroft and will take it in the best light. It would be nice if the EAgle had at least linked his entire speech.
Mr. Macklin-As I am sure you already know, this tripe by Holman wasn’t aboutanything but throwing red meat to the Libs. Their hatred for Bush has blinded them. They won’t see the threats that are out there.You are exactly correct with your assessment. The expansion of goverment for the sake of expansion is a loser. The Patriot Act, properly used, is a winner.
Jose Padilla
HABEUS CORPUSEXTRORDINARY RENDITIONFISALEGAL TORTUREETC, ETC.
SOUND PATRIOTIC?
JM,You are exactly right! My problem with the Patriot Act is that we do not have government leaders who will use it correctly. GW seems to think he is above the law and he does not act in accordance with what he knows, unless he is stupid, deaf, and blind, the country wants. John Ashcroft is just another “christian” who believes God appointed GW. This is the same man who draped all the statues in the govenment buildings because he was bothered by their body parts. How can anyone take anything he says seriously?
Brenda, are you saying that if we had a Dem Prez, the Patriot Act would be OK?
Someone should put a drape over Ashcroft’s head. I think that is a very offensive body part.
Look for the reich-wing to begin a campaign to repeal portions of the (Un)Patriot Act beginning in January 2009 when President Obama takes office.
“Let the eagle soar,Like she’s never soared before.From rocky coast to golden shore,Let the mighty eagle soar.
Soar with healing in her wings,As the land beneath her sings:’Only god, no other kings.’
This country’s far too young to die.We’ve still got a lot of climbing to do,And we can make it if we try.Built by toils and strugglesGod has led us through.”
http://www.cnn.com/video/us/2002/02/25/ashcroft.sings.wbtv.med.html
fleettenema,
You’re a John Bircher for a new generation. People like you are always running scared from something or other. Without fear, who would you be?
“When fascism comes to the United States, it will come wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross.” Upton Sinclair
Yep, we fought the “cold war” for generations only to find out that the old Soviet Union couldn’t fight its way out of a paper bag, (see Chechnya and Afghanistan).
They lost more soldiers in Afghanistan to disease than they lost to the enemy.
But that didn’t stop us from spending enough money over the years to buy EVERYTHING IN THE UNITED STATES (except for the land) to protect ourselves from them.
Now that the “communism bent on world-wide domination” is dead, this godsend comes to the fear-mongers, international terrorism.
Thanks to “international terrorism,” the fear-mongers can finally put some kind of a fig leaf over the obscenity of spending half our tax dollars on the military–on the profanity of spending more on our military than all the countries of the world combined.
A rag-tag band of rag-heads that succeeded beyond their wildest dreams thanks to
Worst. President. Ever.
cf-Please explain this fear angle. I don’t quite get that part. While you’re at it, explain the John Bircher thing. I’m too young to know what he believed.
Pretty ignorant, aren’t you, Enema bag?
That explains your conservative stance.
I almost forgot. CONservatives don’t google. Too much like doing research.
You start doing research, and the next thing you know, you’re believing things based on facts rather than on what Rush and Bush say.
Then you can’t be a CONservative anymore.
Yup, I understand your dilemma.
I’m not the one who brought it up.Fear? Birch?What are you, capn, cf’s butt boy today?
Why be bothered with facts.Use truthiness, and now factiness too.
“What are you, capn, cf’s butt boy today?”
How could one possibly argue with such brilliant analysis?
flleeetttteeeennnneeeemmmmaaaa,
Look it the John Birch society yourself. It’s time you learned how to look stuff up, if not to actually think.
As for the fear angle, your hysterical blubbering about “the threats that are out there” shows you to be incapable of a rational threat assessment. Bedwetters like you need Big Daddy Dry Drunk In Chief to protect you and make it all better.
What a classic “conservative” viewpoint: fllllleeeetttteeeennneeemmmaa learns nothing and forgets nothing.
Fleetfuck doesn’t use facts or logic in his posts – he just tosses around the same old lame insults and talking points from Rush.
Like the rest of the reich-wing, he never adds anything to the thread except mindless, repetitive nonsense.
Blah, blah, blah – you support terrorists – you hate America – libs this – libs that – baby killers – cowards – yada, yada.
That pretty much sums the posts for today from the right.
No, Enema, I’m YOUR butt boy.
Every time I see your dumb butt hanging out, I give it a good, swift kick.
I’m Punch and you’re Judy, bitch.
(You’ll probably have to look that up too, I s’pose.)
Capn: “rag-tag rag-heads”? HA!
Good thing you’re a liberal with a pure heart and good intentions. Otherwise, that would be racist.
I’m equal opportunity in my insults . . .
I think that fear of the threats that are out there is a good thing. Whistling past the graveyard is a bad thing.Coddling terrorists is a bad things. Taking the fight to them is a good thing.Being a cut and run defeatist, bad. Wanting America to win, good.
I was always taught that the reason people use coarse and vulgar language is because their verbal skills are not very well developed and by using gutter language they only have to remember five or ten words to express themselves. Of course those of us who have a bigger vocabulary are able to make our points and point out the inaccuracies of the left. This makes them so mad that they forget even those words and are reduced to using only 2 or 3.
I once was a liberal in the sixties and then I grew up.
ksgrm,
Don’t condescend. More to the point, I’ve seen nothing you’ve written that merited any sort of response. Your posts are typically impressionistic and poorly argued, and your attempts at ‘debunking’ superficial and ideological.
Whenever “CONservatives” resort to the old potty mouth attack against liberals, it’s indicative of how little substance they have on their side.
Interestingly, the older CF gets, the more radical he becomes. Winston Churchill in reverse.
Well at least CF I got you to argue a point without retorting to gutter language to put someone down. Show me the logic in your debate and I will refute it. Just calling CONservative names doesn’t advance any logic.
There never is any logic in your debate points, Germ. Most of the time you have your facts so twisted as to be completely backwards. I have yet to see anything that you have posted that made any sense.
Are you married to Fleetwood?
And just for the record – I grew up in Detroit where even the nuns will tell you to go fuck yourself if you cross them.
Imagine the laws as your worst enemy is the one who gets to enforce them. That is how you know if a law is good or not.
I do not trust with all that this administration has done, that their patriot act is any sort of positive friend to me.
No way, no how.
I guess that is why you left Detroit and came to a state with a better class of nun.
So, pmom, I’ll ask you the same question that Wendy would not.If we had a Dem Prez, would the Patriot Act be OK?
Pmom I have never advocated that the Patriot act is a good thing. I feel that our intelligence agencies need the freedom to gather data from suspects that have displayed suspect behavior. If in doing this they find my family will all be at Aunt Sue’s for Christmas – so be it. I would like to see government become the agency it was intended to be when our forefathers drafted the constitution. Career politicians were not in their thinking. The framers were usually farmers who took a couple of months after the crops were in to go to Washington to do the nations business. Then they went back home and tended their farms, raised their children, helped the widows and pitched in to make their communities safe and prosperous. I didn’t attach any bogus websites, or quote any suspect columnists but I did learn this in Government 101. We need less government not more.
A Nun that swears probably shouldn’t be a nun or at least confined to duties that wouldn’t involve the public.
I don’t know what Catholics call the defrocking of a nun, but I’m sure if the Priest in charge of the local Diocese heard of such a verbage by a nun on a regular basis, she would be de-frocked?
Or at least out of Public interaction as I mentioned before.
“We need less gov’t not more.”
Yes and no.
We need less gov’t in our bedrooms and more in our boardrooms.
We need less gov’t trying to fix the catastrophe of Iraq and more trying to fix the catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina.
We need less gov’t help for the rich and more for the middle class.
We need less gov’t trying to “reform” (destroy) social security, and more gov’t reform of our voting security.
In other words, we need BETTER government–sometimes that means less and sometimes that means more government.
JM–
Grow up.
Thank you.
The Management
ksgrm,
So, let me get this straight: you advocate an increased intelligence apparatus as consistent with government becoming ‘the agency it was intended to be when our forefathers drafted the Constitution,’ but you then say that ‘career politicians were not in their thinking.’
Well, ksgrm, neither were intelligence professionals. But you say we need them, even while also asserting that ‘we need less government, not more.’
These statements are not necessarily irreconcilable. But the argumentation needed to square them is entirely absent, much less the documentation that would be required to legitimate your claims about what the Founding Fathers did or did not intend.
I fall back on my earlier assessment. When you write something that merits a response, you may perhaps expect one from me. But, to mix a metaphor, the warmed-over ideological stew / word salad you’re serving up makes no substantive claims, nor gets as far as constructing an argument that can be debated.
Capn if we have government in our boardrooms wouldn’t that make us a fascist nation where the government runs the company and then takes the profits in the shape of taxes. This has never enriched a country. Look at Cuba as a perfect example. Don’t we need government to stand back and let the owners of the business run their businesses and decide how to invest their own profits and not try to tax them so high that no money is reinvested and jobs are lost as equipment is unable to keep up with the newest technology.
If government would keep their hands out of that famous “lock box” that holds SS money, it would not be in the shape it is in today. Al Gore seems to be the only one who knew where that box was kept.
Both parties have and are continuing to make very poor choices about spending our money. That is what we should be upset about not the social issues that take up so much of the time and space on these blogs.
My weekend is calling.
One last post. CF I don’t have the time to go back and educate you on something you should have learned in gradeschool, high school or any institure of higher learning. I audit classes ocassionally and this was covered in a Government 101 class just recently. Sorry for the lack of opportunity for you to be educated in the same way.
ksgrm,
Cuba is a communist nation. It is not fascist. Communism is the opposite of fascism.
Don’t presume to condescend to me, ksgrm. You don’t know what you don’t know.
Government 101, indeed.
The problem with the Patriot Act is that now when people hear that term, they immediately think about the little old grandmothers that have been practically strip searched at the airport to go visit her grandchildren.
If the Patriot Act was passed in order to catch terrorists, then go for it. But I feel it has been used too many times in such a senseless way.
Also, this Patriot Act was touted to catch terrorists but yet at the same time Bush and his buddies advocated handing our security of our ports to a company based in Saudi Arabia. Now that was a pretty stupid idea.
Again, it is the perception of the Patriot Act that maybe the problem – not the Patriot Act itself. If applied correctly and democractically, I would have no problem with it but I do not trust George W. Bush to not overstep his boundandries – and I’m willing to bet there are more people like me than not.
fleet – I am not really sure why you were referring to me on this post, as I have not posted ANYTHING on here regarding this matter… So I am a bit confused. perhaps if you could clarify your statement to Pmom for me, I would be happy to answer your question…. because in it’s current context, it doesn’t make much sense to me…
Brenda,”My problem with the Patriot Act is that we do not have government leaders who will use it correctly.”That’s the problem with any law, it’s why we have a constitution. It’s up to our lawmakers to write our laws in ways that can’t be misused! However our current administration uses or misuses that law, it’s way too vague and broad. How do you suppose the next administration will interpret it, or the administration after that?The Patriot Act is anything but patriotic; it is a loaded gun aimed at the soul of America. Whose finger may end up on the trigger?
Brenda,”My problem with the Patriot Act is that we do not have government leaders who will use it correctly.”That’s the problem with any law, it’s why we have a constitution. It’s up to our lawmakers to write our laws in ways that can’t be misused! However our current administration uses or misuses that law, it’s way too vague and broad. How do you suppose the next administration will interpret it, or the administration after that?The Patriot Act is anything but patriotic; it is a loaded gun aimed at the soul of America. Whose finger may end up on the trigger?
“if we have government in our boardrooms wouldn’t that make us a fascist nation where the government runs the company and then takes the profits in the shape of taxes”
Uh, no, Gram.
What I meant by that is, say a member of the board of directors gets a tip that the quarterly earnings are way under projections before anyone else gets that information. So he sells 800,000 dollars worth of stock and makes a tidy profit while all us other shlubs just take a bath because we don’t know what’s coming.
That’s what George W. did when he was on the board of Harkin Energy.
It’s illegal, but when your dad is the President of the United States, the Justice Dept. seems to have “other priorities” than investigating white collar crime of close family members if you know what I mean.
Meanwhile, every lurid detail of Clinton’s two or three blowjobs were spread from coast-to-coast 24-7.
That’s what I meant by out of our bedrooms and into our boardrooms.
Wow, how did I miss this thread?
Oh well. I devoted many hours to fighting this crap. Too busy these days (try not to grin too big, CF!).
You’re doin’ fine folks!