quote:

Originally posted by Groundhog Boy I know Q, it's real hard when the subject of dissent is blowjobs, you know, the topic Clinton couldn't claim executive privilege on. When it's actually some area that people care about, like leaking classified info, it's of no consequence and should be kept from the rest of the world, particularly the segment funding it.

i don't care about blowjobs you moron, i care about context. something this thread grossly lacks and something you people consistantly fail to grasp when it comes to breaking the law when it doesn't fit your particular political mold. thats exactly what Clinton did, he broke the law and used Executive privilege to conceal it. Nixon did the same.

it cant really be described better than this:

Of course, the concept of hypocrisy is inherently asymmetrical, the phoneme hypo- being the Greek prefix for “beneath.” A hypocrite is one who has acted beneath the level of judgment we would ordinarily expect of him.

There is no such thing as hypocrisy when one is a pragmatist, or nihilist, a post-modernist, or a Democrat. When you profess no absolute, enduring principles, it’s simply impossible to fall short of them.

That’s why the left harps on republican “hypocrisy.” They themselves are immune to the charge, and hence it’s a rhetorical advantage to them.

Nevertheless, the asymmetry of the weapon has the compensating benefit that every time it is hurled at republicans it is, or should be, a reminder that, unlike leftists, we still admit there are transcendent principles worth striving for.

Bush couldn't have broken any laws because Bush can fire prosecutors for refusing to wear funny hats to work if he chose to.

Bush has every right to take the challenge to court and thats what he's going to do.

quote:

I really have no clue how in years of seeing your views on here, you have never dissented from what Bush has said once. I know you have served in the military, but that shouldn't have turned you into a conscript that was forced to accept every comment until your death.

i can smell a Donkey party political shakedown from a mile away. they're dogs that will say and do anything to regain their power and tear down the Executive for their own partisaned gains. thats what this fight is about. thats what most of these fights are about.

i

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My father, a 3 tour Vietnam vet, prays for guys like you and he's far from a religious man. I still vividly remember the day when I was at home going through my job search and Colin Powell spoke to the UN. My dad came home from work during the speech to the UN and both of us got to call "bullshit" on how we sold this war. He watched us lie our way through Vietnam and this was par for the course. By the way, what ever happened to those mobile chemical weapons labs? Did they fail to exist, just like everything else we spoke against?

touching. did your father vote for Clinton or Gore?

quote:

Nixon was a saint compared to these assholes. At least he was responsible enough to accept his losses and mistakes. It's too bad that we don't live closer to the Bushido code..

Nixon broke the law

Last edited by Q5echo on Jul-14-2007 at 20:58

quote:

Originally posted by Q5echo i don't care about blowjobs you moron, i care about context. something this thread grossly lacks and something you people consistantly fail to grasp when it comes to breaking the law when it doesn't fit your particular political mold. thats exactly what Clinton did, he broke the law and used Executive privilege to conceal it. Nixon did the same.

Nixon and Clinton merely got caught. If this president truly has not broken the law, then surely in all instances such as turning over RNC emails, allowing Miers and Taylor to directly testify in this particular instance, it begs the question as to the rationale of his actions and what exactly he is withholding from Congressional inquiry in the same manner as why Nixon and Clinton both claimed Executive Privilege and refused to allow their senior officials to testify.

quote:

it cant really be described better than this: Of course, the concept of hypocrisy is inherently asymmetrical, the phoneme hypo- being the Greek prefix for “beneath.” A hypocrite is one who has acted beneath the level of judgment we would ordinarily expect of him. There is no such thing as hypocrisy when one is a pragmatist, or nihilist, a post-modernist, or a Democrat. When you profess no absolute, enduring principles, it’s simply impossible to fall short of them. That’s why the left harps on republican “hypocrisy.” They themselves are immune to the charge, and hence it’s a rhetorical advantage to them.

Assrocket? Malkin? Who said this tripe? How come you never quote your sources anymore?

quote:

Nevertheless, the asymmetry of the weapon has the compensating benefit that every time it is hurled at republicans it is, or should be, a reminder that, unlike leftists, we still admit there are transcendent principles worth striving for. Bush couldn't have broken any laws because Bush can fire prosecutors for refusing to wear funny hats to work if he chose to. Bush has every right to take the challenge to court and thats what he's going to do.

No one argues or denies that. Do you have a good quote about obfuscation and straw men arguments? You really need one inserted here, because you are continually creating them.

What is at the heart of this investigation is NOT whether Bush has the right to fire his attorneys at the blow of his fucking coke-littered nostrils, nor is what Bush or Gonzales has said publicly which albeit is flat-out bullshit is not on oath. What IS at the heart of this investigation, however, is conflicting testimony by Bush's AG and the AG's officials that needs further clarification from documents and testimony being withheld. Furthermore, the offshoot of this investigation also requires further documentation from the RNC email server as to whether or not Rove and others violated the Hatch Act or Presidential Records Act by governmental source email accounts to conduct political activities.

That is the heart of this investigation.

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i can smell a Donkey party political shakedown from a mile away.

Wipe your neocon Bush-apologist ass for once and stop blaming everyone else of the stench.

quote:

they're dogs that will say and do anything to regain their power and tear down the Executive for their own partisaned gains.

The oversight really doesn't sit too well for you Republicans, does it? I'm sure sorry all this darn investigative stuff seems to make you all a bit uneasy, but considering you boys did jack shit of it over the past 6 years, it takes time to start cleaning up the fucking mess you created.

Unfortunately, the cleanup will last long after your leader whom you never question will be long gone.

quote:

thats what this fight is about. thats what most of these fights are about.

Hmmm, if you say so, champ.

quote:

Nixon broke the law

Nixon got caught.

___________________
Whence September dusk grows crisper still,
with leaves all crimson conquered,
I yearn to shout,
and dance about,
and stick pickles in my honker...

quote:

Originally posted by Q5echo Bush has every right to take the challenge to court and thats what he's going to do.

It's too bad that there won't be anything done until after he's out of office. To be honest, I'm all for them pressing this as far as they can, except that Bush stacked the court in his favor with Roberts and Alito (as shown by all of the recent decisions). So by the time that it gets to them and a Democrat is in office, they'll shoot it down to avoid precedent.

If you really think that what this administration is doing isn't illegal, I'll expect you to be awfully silent on here between 2009 and 2012 if a Democrat uses the power in even 1/2 as much force as this administration does.

This country needs strict constructionist judges, which is exactly who wasn't appointed, in order to stop the tyranny that is being spread through our country. I don't really give a shit which party is in power, as long as they don't have the power that Bush and Cheney thinks that a president should have.

BTW, Cheney, had no problem with Nixon, even though you deemed him a criminal.

quote:

Mr. Cheney’s Minority Report By SEAN WILENTZ Published: July 9, 2007 Princeton, N.J. Anthony Russo TWENTY years ago this week, Lt. Col. Oliver North testified for six days before a special joint House and Senate investigating committee. Permitted by the Democratic majority to appear in his bemedaled Marine uniform, and disastrously granted immunity, Colonel North freely admitted that he had shredded documents, lied to Congress and falsified official records. Colonel North justified these crimes as necessary to protect two of the Reagan administration’s covert policies: defying a Congressional ban on aiding the anti-Sandinista contra insurgents in Nicaragua; and selling arms to Iran — officially classified as a terrorist state — in order to free American hostages in the Middle East. Mixing bathos with belligerence, Colonel North played the incorruptible action hero facing down Washington politicians and lawyers. He also suggested that, under the Constitution, the president and not Congress held ultimate authority to direct foreign policy. Most of the Congressional committee members, Republicans and Democrats alike, expressed shock at Colonel North’s testimony. And despite the surge in Colonel North’s personal popularity, he failed to sway other Americans on the underlying issues. Clear majorities in opinion polls said that Colonel North had gone too far in his covert operations, especially in helping the contras. Roughly half of those polled believed that he had acted as if he was above the law. Sixty percent said that Congress was more trustworthy than the Reagan White House on foreign relations. And Mr. North was eventually convicted of three federal felonies — receiving an illegal payment, obstruction of a Congressional inquiry and destroying official documents, although an appellate court held that his testimony delivered under Congressional immunity may have affected jurors and reversed one conviction. (Prosecutors gave up on the other two.) But there were dissenters. A number of House Republicans on the committee cheered Colonel North on. One who led the way was Dick Cheney of Wyoming, who praised Colonel North as “the most effective and impressive witness certainly this committee has heard.” Mr. Cheney the congressman believed that Congress had usurped executive prerogatives. He saw the Iran-contra investigation not as an effort to get to the bottom of possible abuses of power but as a power play by Congressional Democrats to seize duties and responsibilities that constitutionally belonged to the president. At the conclusion of the hearings, a dissenting minority report codified these views. The report’s chief author was a former resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, Michael J. Malbin, who was chosen by Mr. Cheney as a member of the committee’s minority staff. Another member of the minority’s legal staff, David S. Addington, is now the vice president’s chief of staff. The minority report stressed the charge that the inquiry was a sham, calling the majority report’s allegations of serious White House abuses of power “hysterical.” The minority admitted that mistakes were made in the Iran-contra affair but laid the blame for them chiefly on a Congress that failed to give consistent aid to the Nicaraguan contras and then overstepped its bounds by trying to restrain the White House. The Reagan administration, according to the report, had erred by failing to offer a stronger, principled defense of what Mr. Cheney and others considered its full constitutional powers. Not only did the report defend lawbreaking by White House officials; it condemned Congress for having passed the laws in the first place. The report made a point of invoking the framers. It cited snippets from the Federalist Papers — like Alexander Hamilton’s remarks endorsing “energy in the executive” — in order to argue that the president’s long-acknowledged prerogatives had only recently been usurped by a reckless Democratic Congress. Above all, the report made the case for presidential primacy over foreign relations. It cited as precedent the Supreme Court’s 1936 ruling in United States v. Curtiss-Wright Export Corporation, which referred to the “exclusive power of the president as the sole organ of the federal government in the field of international relations.” History, the report claimed, “leaves little, if any doubt that the president was expected to have the primary role of conducting the foreign policy of the United States.” It went on: “Congressional actions to limit the president in this area therefore should be reviewed with a considerable degree of skepticism. If they interfere with the core presidential foreign policy functions, they should be struck down.” These conclusions went beyond what had long been considered the outermost limits of presidential power — and they put a special twist on history. Hamilton certainly desired a strong executive, but warned that it would be “utterly unsafe and improper” to give a president complete control over foreign policy. The Curtiss-Wright decision actually concerned a presidential claim of constitutional power to act in the absence of an act passed by Congress, not in violation of such an act. One of the foremost constitutional scholars of the 20th century, Edward S. Corwin, stated in 1957 that the Constitution was “an invitation to struggle for the privilege of directing American foreign policy,” and that in many cases “the lion’s share” of that privilege belonged to the president. But Corwin finally insisted that “the power to determine the substantive content of American foreign policy is a divided power.” The Iran-contra joint committee majority in 1987, including some Senate Republican members, charged that the minority report, with tortuous illogic, reduced Congress’s foreign policy role to nearly nothing. Senator Warren Rudman, a New Hampshire Republican and vice chairman of the Senate side of the investigating committee, paraphrased Adlai Stevenson and quipped that the minority report had separated the wheat from the chaff and left in the chaff. His comments did not lead Mr. Cheney to alter course, as Mr. Cheney’s actions as vice president demonstrate. Asked by a reporter in 2005 to explain his expansive views about presidential power, Mr. Cheney replied, “If you want reference to an obscure text, go look at the minority views that were filed with the Iran-contra committee.” “Nobody has ever read them,” he said, but they “are very good in laying out a robust view of the president’s prerogatives with respect to the conduct of especially foreign policy and national security matters.” In truth, as Mr. Cheney has also remarked, the struggle for him began much earlier, during the Nixon administration. A business partner says that Mr. Cheney told him that Watergate was merely “a political ploy by the president’s enemies.” For Mr. Cheney, the scandal was not Richard Nixon’s design for an imperial presidency but the Democrats’ drive for an imperial Congress. Still, Mr. Cheney’s quest to accumulate unaccountable executive power — a quest that has received much attention of late — took a major turn 20 years ago. And part of Iran-contra’s legacy has now become a legacy of the Bush-Cheney administration. Sean Wilentz, a professor of history at Princeton, is the author of a forthcoming book on the Reagan administration and its legacy. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/09/o.../09wilentz.html

Oh, yeah, and my father sure as hell didn't vote for this corrupt administration, either time.

___________________
"Go back to bed america your government is in control
Here's American Gladiators, here is 56 channels of it,
Watch these picturary retards bang their fuckin' skulls together and congratulate you on living in the land of freedom,
Here you go America you are free to do as we tell you
We want your soul
Your cash, your house, your phone, your cash, your house, your life" -Adam Freeland - We Want Your Soul

Last edited by Groundhog Boy on Jul-14-2007 at 23:19

quote:

Originally posted by Groundhog Boy If you really think that what this administration is doing isn't illegal, I'll expect you to be awfully silent on here between 2009 and 2012 if a Democrat uses the power in even 1/2 as much force as this administration does.

That's not how fundamentalism works.