In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

Tag: George W. Bush

Political Crime and Security Culture

The outrageous news from yesterday pushes me to believe that, even as non-violent and non-activist citizens, we need to cultivate a security culture. Though the preliminary reports are likely incomplete, the information provided by the Times and WaPo, expanded upon by Hilzoy, Terrance, and Avedon Carol, is chilling.

More disturbing is that the Times had this story for over a year and, for whatever reason, did not publish the information. Election politics? The Times also did not disclose what circumstances surrounding the story changed, enabling them to publish the story after sitting on it for a year. To our detriment.

Worse, Bush came out today defending his use of this arguably unconstitutional practice citing that the American people want him to do whatever it takes to “protect” us, and assuring us that it had been cleared by the Justice Department. Thankfully many politicians are refusing to toe a party line and defend the president on this business. Arlen Specter, Judiciary Committee Chairman and Pennsylvania Republican, “planned to investigate use of the wiretaps after the New York Times reported on them. Specter, said such a practice would be ‘clearly and categorically wrong.'”

From Forbes:

According to former officials familiar with the policy, Bush signed an executive order in 2002 granting new surveillance powers to the National Security Agency — the branch of the U.S. intelligence services responsible for international eavesdropping, and whose existence was long denied by the government.

“I want to know precisely what they did: how NSA utilized their technical equipment, whose conversations they overheard, how many conversations they overheard, what they did with the material, what purported justification there was … and we will go from there,” Specter said.

I’m donning my tinfoil cap. *cough*

Also read Bush on Wiretapping : I Did It And I’ll Do It Again, and for a more political angle, Bush’s Critics Are Absolutely Right: The President Must Not be Above the Law

Update: Ezra gets at the heart of the matter. via Majikthise

Ugh…

Well this is fantastic.

And thanks, Georgie, for “fighting terrorism.” The war in Iraq has clearly improved things for all of us. I would invite him to accompany me on the very crowded subway to and from school tomorrow. Because the world is a safer place thanks to this war, right?

Posted in War

Lowered Expectations

President Bush needs to raise the bar.

The president’s recent schedule of nonstop disaster-scene photo-ops is reminiscent of the principal of a failing school who believes he’s doing a great job because he makes it a point to drop in on every class play and teacher retirement party. And if there ever was an exhibit of the misguided conviction that for some people very little is good enough, it’s the current administration spin that the proposed Iraqi constitution is fine because the founding fathers didn’t give women equal rights either.

(emphasis mine).

Only a president with no expectation that the federal government should step up after a crisis could have stripped the Federal Emergency Management Agency bare, appointed as its director a political crony who could not even adequately represent the breeders of Arabian horses, and announced that the director was doing a splendid job while bodies floated in the floodwaters.

Ouch.

In Iraq, the elimination of expectations is on display in the disastrous political process. Among other things, the constitution drafted under American supervision does not provide for the rights of women and minorities and enshrines one religion as the fundamental source of law. Administration officials excuse this poor excuse for a constitution by saying it also refers to democratic values. But it makes them secondary to Islamic law and never actually defines them. Our founding fathers had higher expectations: they made the split of church and state fundamental, and spelled out what they meant by democracy and the rule of law.

It’s true that the United States Constitution once allowed slavery, denied women the right to vote and granted property rights only to white men. But it’s offensive for the administration to use that as an excuse for the failings of the Iraqi constitution. The bar on democracy has been raised since 1787. We don’t agree that the 218-year-old standard is good enough for Iraq.

I have nothing else to add; this is spot-on. And yet another reason why I love the New York Times editorial pages.