In today’s letters, the voices against an imperial Presidency are starting to rise. Remember, I pick these at random. I don’t look for letter with which I agree. When they start to look this one sided, things are starting to improve in the heartland.
P.S. I’m still looking for more front-page writers, so if you’re interested see the bottom of the diary for details.
The Daily Reflector
The outlawing of abortion might now be inevitable. The question then becomes what happens to the “perpetrators,” and when will outrage create a backlash and reversal.
Criminalization of abortion will create a new criminal industry that will have devastating consequences for desperate young women who find themselves pregnant with no where else to turn. … Gullible young women who have criminal abortions in many cases develop horrendous infections and other complications leading to surgery, sterility, and even death. Let us not turn back the clock to the dark ages of criminal abortion. …
DR. WILLIAM MEGGS
Greenville
The Daily Reflector
I’m starting to sound lke a borken record, but is Islamic fundamentalism really the greatest threat we ever faced? Is it more of a threat to our lives and way of life than Naziism, seccession, Soviet Communism, or the coming fight for economic survival with China? I don’t think so. And because I don’t think so, I can’t imagine why we are so willing to surrender everything that makes us American in exchange for “security.”
Citizens should be outraged over spying
It worries me that some of my fellow citizens seem to be having some difficulty understanding the serious threat posed to our basic civil rights by warrantless surveillance/data-mining of private communications, of the kind (illegal/unconstitutional) that King George (the W. stands for “war”) Bush and his men were recently caught doing, and continue to do. The Bushers clearly think they are above the law. …
If the executive branch is allowed to ignore the law in the incidence of terrorism, it won’t be long before any number of criminal (?) activities will be “listen-able” to the delight of over-zealous bureaucrats and political opportunists everywhere. Welcome to 2084. …
True patriots cannot afford to let this bastion of backward thinking go unchallenged.
MITCH BOWEN
Greenville
The Daily Astorian
Is Bush Napolean? Has he turned the Republic into a monarchy destined for war and destruction? I don’t think so, but not for lack of trying, only because there is today no Great Britian to balance us out.
Fear-driven American people accepted the notion that while we were busy building nuclear weapons for ourselves, we were justified evidently in slapping Iraq around, killing thousands of innocent people who lived there, for the purpose, so we were assured, of preventing Iraq from building nuclear weapons. Never should we have allowed our government to sally forth on such premise. …
A thousand years after Caesar disappeared from the scene, King John put his seal on Magna Carta. Since that day there has existed in the western world legal precedent holding no man above the law, be he sheriff, senator, president, or king.
Yet when President George W. Bush signed into law the Defense Appropriations bill containing Senator John McCain’s anti-torture amendment, the President issued a “signing statement” presumably reserving to himself a right to bypass that very law. …
We approach a precipice and the hour is late. Even now the American people may have neither the will nor the means to avert disaster. In a war with Iran we may re-learn hard lessons that the French people learned when they allowed their own Bush, named Napoleon, to invade Russia; a vainglorious move that squandered 400,000 French lives. This time, however, it can be worse because Fourth Generation warfare is conducted not on a foreign battlefield but rather on a local main street. We have heard it said; we may now learn what it means: What goes around comes around.
JACK DENNON
Warrenton
The Spokesman-Review
Read the whole thing. Cutting enough to keep to “fair use” really deprives the letter of the laundry list of crazy that is George W. Bush.
Let’s imagine a candidate for president of the United States with the following psychological tendencies.
He views the world in absolutes and opposites – good or evil, right or wrong, friend or enemy, victory or defeat.
Believing he is always right, he is unmoved by evidence to the contrary. So he won’t compromise, pay attention to critics, or consider changing his mind. …
Wishing to become a great historical figure in world affairs, he longs for an evangelical mission of international deliverance. …
These tendencies are anti-democratic and dysfunctional, so a person who has them ought to be last in line for consideration as president, wouldn’t you think? Or, if such a person already were the president, you would hasten to shorten his tenure, wouldn’t you?
Lee Freese
Pullman
Midland Daily News
Calls for impeachment are starting to resound. But will all be for naught if we fail to take both houses of Congress in ’06. In a way, this is disturbing. I have very little personal doubt that Bush won (to the extent that he “won” by keeping democrats from voting with long lines, inadequate machines, and whatever else) not for love of him, but because people didn’t want to “change horses in midstream” during a war. If the mid-terms become about impeachment, that issue arises again.
It is time for the American people to stop the abuse of power by the executive branch of our government. The actions of these power-hungry individuals is eroding the democracy we believe in. …
The most recent and frightening abuse is the President’s endorsement of wiretapping. He has admitted ordering eavesdropping on American citizens. Mr. Bush justifies this disregard for civil rights and the law as it is written as necessary during the war on terror. When Richard Nixon was questioned about illegal wiretapping he responded that it was not against the law for a president to authorize wiretapping if it was for national security. History proved him wrong. …
I vote to start impeachment proceedings against President Bush. No one in this country, especially not our leader, should consider himself above the law.
Our democracy is being put to the test. We will lose our system of checks and balances if we don’t stand up for law and order for everyone, President Bush included.
Kap Siddall
Midland
El Paso Times
You will need to follow the link to find the list to “think about,” but perhaps you should. Bush has no regard for the Constitution, merely for his own power. As for the “emergency” that makes the extraordinary abuse of power “necessary,” see above, for I think it is a mere fart in the wind, and one most easily dissipated not by violence, but by international cooperation.
Think it’s a good idea to trash the Constitution in exchange for “security?” Think about this: …
The reason for the president’s actions is not to make us safer but to restore the “Imperial Presidency.” Simply “feeling safer” doesn’t actually make you safer.
Barbara Corona
East El Paso
Request for contributors:
I’m ramping The Daily Pulse back up, and viewership has increased significantly. It took 4 months to get the first 3000, and about two weeks for the next thousand. If you’re interested in being a front-page contributor, let me know. Ideally, we’re looking for the following, all to be surveys of different editorial sites like the above:
* Letters to the Editor. I’ve been doing it once a week, but think a daily column gives the best picture of all what people outside the beltway or the political junkie blogs are thinking. Daily is ideal
* Foreign editorials. The best would be to have several different people, each posting once a week. I’d love to have a European Pulse, an Asian Pulse, a Middle Eastern, etc. Now, I try to include one foreign per main entry, but think the blog would be more valuable with a wider voice.
* Alternative editorials. I include GLBT, African American, Jewish, etc., newspapers in my database, from which randomly select editorial pages. But they are such a minority, they rarely pop up. If somebody dedicated themselves to an alternative column, that would be incredibly cool. It could also be broken up- weekly or semi-weekly GLBT, ditto African American, etc.
* Local columnists. Local columnists tend to have their fingers on the pulse of their communities, even better sometimes than the editorials. The editor gets to write whatever s/he wants. Columns sell, and they don’t sell if they’re too far from the community. Daily is best, but a couple of times per week would be cool.
* Other content, esp. local radio and television.
*Whatever else might fit in the format.