Wednesday, July 02, 2008

WSOGMM

This is the whole sort of general mish mash, politics style. Lots of shit going down, and some of its silly and minor, other stuff is pretty profound. So lets dive in.

This should be important, like really important, John Yoo the assistant to the Attorney General and adviser to the President by extension, educated at Harvard and Yale cannot answer wither or not there is any limit on what the President can have done to a terror suspect. This is the United States of America if someone asks if the president can bury a man alive because he may or may not have committed a crime, the answer SHOULD be real fucking obvious, no, hell no, what the fuck? What kind of country do you think this is, obviously there are laws to prevent anything even vaguely of that nature. At least that would have been the answer during the last century. Today thats a tricky question, do we need to limit the king, er presidents power? Can't we just assume that our glorious dictator will only torture for good?

So what else is going on? Wes Clark said that being shot down in an airplane doesn't qualify you to be the President. Duh. Although that does lead us into an interesting question of what does qualify a person to be president? Yeah I could get into a rant about how stupid it is that the press is making a big deal, or any deal out of this, how it's just retarded because the man with the "offensive" words is a freaking General, does that mean he's better qualified than McCain? But thats would be just as pointless as the debate in the media. No instead I want to focus for a sec on what exactly does qualify someone to be President? Be an American and by 35, thats about all the Constitution has to say about it. Beyond that its actually a lot harder to say than it sounds, no one has really come up with a definitive set of traits or background that make a good President.

Obama said that he wants to expand the faith based crap. I like the fact that he wants to be strict about what the money can and can be used for but the simpler solution to me is stop giving money to faith based organizations. I don't like this move at all but hey the guy can't agree with me on every subject, if he did he'd never get elected. I'm annoyed but hey this is minor breach of the constitution compared to what we've grown used to.

I ran out of time.
thats probably obvious

Thank you to Douglas Adams for the title.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I just took my teacher course on teaching AP US Government and Politics. It seems the Cheney Administration has put presidential scholars on their ears with a completely unprecedented view of political power. It's too long to get into this early in the morning, but I'll post something on it... hopefully this week if I find my notes.

I think McCain has the potential to abuse power as much as Cheney.

I don't think the faith based initiative is a bad idea, but I understand why you wouldn't like. The government is broke, and will be completely busted under the Obama administration regardless of what he does. People are going to need to turn somewhere for help, and they won't get it from the government, and won't get it right away from their fellow Americans who've been taught that sharing is akin to communism, or is it Islam now? The Koran talks about sharing ya know.

Kilgore Trout said...

The irony is going to be if Obama decides to force through drastic social initiatives while calling them part of the war on terror. The military build the Interstate system because infrastructure is critical to national defense, the nazi's never would have been able to fight the US, the UK, and Russia at once if not for the autobahn and we knew it. Now we are fighting against terrorism, or social unrest. Therefore if he felt like it he could argue that anything which promotes social well-being is critical to the war on terror and then he can pretty much do anything he wants, a la bush. Suddenly the repubs will be questioning if they should have allowed such a concentration of power. Yeah it'll still be unconstitutional but a few fuck yous before we fix the laws might be kinda fun. If you don't support the president and his call for universal health care then you support the terrorists! Eh, probably wouldn't work. Americans can connect bombs to killing bad guys, even if they don't but connecting health care would required like a 20 second attention span. It'll never work.

I'm feeling rather cynical the last few days, like more than usual.

As for the faith based. I'll write up a better reason why I'm against it.