Hooray for Rand Paul

By -
Here.

Soon a certain friend of ours will doubtlessly argue that it is humanitarian for the government to use drones to kill Americans as they drive home from work or play softball, and so Paul should just stop being a pest.

UPDATE: He beat me to it.

If Obama begins arresting people for criticizing these policies, I'm quite sure Kuehn will tell us he can "read the constitution for himself" and that it certainly doesn't prevent a president from shutting up nuisances.

Comments

  1. Anonymous8:47 PM

    "argue that it is humanitarian for the government to use drones to kill Americans as they drive home from work or play softball"

    That's got nothing to do with any reasonable interpretation of Eric Holder's letter. Which contemplates using military force on US soil in the case of a catastrophic attack.

    Rand Paul is grandstanding and talking out his ass about shredding the constitution and 'being bombed in his bed'. I haven't seen such a bogus moral-preening event for years, I'm sure.

    People have tried to say that Holder's invocation of Pearl Harbor and 9/11 was somehow out of line. But It's not a hypothetical; The Air Force was ordered to shoot down flight 93 (chock full of innocent civilians!) before it crashed. To my knowledge, there hasn't been an objection on constitutional or legal grounds, and I can't see what one would be.

    Maybe I'm butting into your dispute with Kuehn, which I haven't paid much attention to, but I don't see where you're coming from on this.

    But I'm really disappointed that you linked to Breitbart on this. It's 2012, Gene, no Breitbart 'exclusive' should be taken as fact. These are men who deliberately lie and mendaciously omit context in order to smear people.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. gcallah3:16 PM

      On Holder's letter: "Any thinking person can see that Holder's letter is non-responsive, evasive, and deliberately manipulative in its sly reassurances..."

      Argosy, sorry, you've written yourself out of the "thinking person" category.

      Delete
  2. gcallah9:00 PM

    "That's got nothing to do with any reasonable interpretation of Eric Holder's letter."

    Did I mention Holder's letter? I did not. But if Obama supported this, Kuehn would defend it.

    "Rand Paul is grandstanding and talking out his ass about shredding the constitution and 'being bombed in his bed'. I haven't seen such a bogus moral-preening event for years, I'm sure."

    I haven't gotten such an asinine comment in years. No, wait, that would be months. Or weeks. But it is still pretty asinine.

    "But I'm really disappointed that you linked to Breitbart on this."

    So, are you saying that Anders DOESN'T support Paul on this? because if he does, then what does it matter whose story reporting this I link to?

    argosy, I'm really disappointed you made this comment.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Unknown6:13 AM

    Gene

    You really need to have someone read the Constitution to you, at least once.

    If you did read the Constitution you would quickly see that there are no Constitutional limits on the power of the President to suppress insurrections and repel invasions, a point made emphatically by the power of the President to pardon.

    But, this is not about such at all. Rand Paul and his fellow travelers wanted to show exactly how shallow they are, how shallow you are, at which they were successful. Durbin ran Paul off the floor at the end of night with one sentence, merely asking what if Ben Laden had been a citizen?

    What is most unfortunate about the entire episode is that in just a few hours whatever we have attempted to accomplish in the last 10 years has been badly hurt.

    Equally unfortunate is that the posturing of Rand and his fellow travelers makes it highly unlikely that we will have the kinds of discussions that should be taking place about our Drone war overseas. The policy is a lawnmower policy. Whether we can have any other policy is highly debatable and it is likely that in the coming years we are going to have to mow taller thicker grass ever more often.

    In sum, all Paul has done is make a bad situation worse, but since it was wholly about him, that's what we should expect

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. gcallah11:45 AM

      Alexander, you are hilarious! You come to my blog and make a snotty little comment about how I need someone to "read me" the constitution, and yet... YOU DON'T EVEN KNOW WHICH BRANCH OF GOVERNMENT IS ASSIGNED THE JOB OF DEALING WITH INVASIONS AND INSURRECTIONS!

      And that's just leaving aside the fact that the US is not being invaded, nor is there any insurrection going on.

      "whatever we have attempted to accomplish in the last 10 years has been badly hurt."

      You mean crush the civil liberties of Americans while killing thousands of innocent people abroad? ooh, I'm so sorry that project isn't going as you hoped.

      Bye Alexander.

      Delete
  4. Renato C. Drumond12:27 PM

    This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
Read more