Originally Posted by acroy
sorry for the mispelled - i get fat fast fats all tangled, partly due to my Biblical "seek and you shall find" typing methodology.
to your post;
as long as we're quoting stuff let's get the quotes right, according to the Wiki-world it's
"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety"
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin
I sure don't agree with the corollary staement you make; i think logically the corollary would read "they who do not give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety do deserve both liberty and safety".
but this is semantics. SOunds like you agree with the statement except when you don't want to agree, cause then the ends justify the means? i.e. let's wiretap (invade everyone's privacy) to catch a few bad guys. why not implant a gps chip & transmitter in everyone so Big Bro can track & hear everone all the time, and catch all the bad guys every time. the principle is the same, only the scale of implementation changes.
the above is an extreme example but I do consider it a very dangerous slope to slide on. this is the government we're talking about , it needs (in my opinion) to be kept on a very short leash by it's subjects.
back to the topic, are there any other car free conservative/Repiblicans out there? for the record i'm a car-lite socially conservative Liberatarian.
ride home & beer time
There are numerous variations of the Franklin quote, but the key word is the word
essential. Not all liberty is essential, and those who will not give up non-essential liberty in time of crisis, may end up losing
all liberty. The worst catastrophe that can befall a nation is to lose a war. If you doubt that, ask a German or Japanese who remembers WWII.
I'm not advocating the curtailment of essential liberty. I am saying that non-essential liberties, the things that are nice to have in tranquil times, but make a society too vulnerable in wartime, can and should be curtailed. It's nice to be able to call anyone, anywhere, anytime, without worrying about government surveillance, but should we extend that right to Osama Bin Laden?
It would be nice to be able to show up at an airport, and just walk on to my plane, but in this day and time, I'm not sure I'd want to get on an airliner if the passengers weren't searched. The notion of extending habeas corpus to POWs is a liberty that no one practices, so why should we start doing it? One of America's greatest problems is that it has too many lawyers and too little real work for them.
A government has the moral right and the responsibility to protect it's citizens' rights, including the right not to be attacked by foreigners. The first duty of government is to protect its citizens from foreign invasion, because if it can't protect against that, it can't protect anything.
The wiretapping program that has so many peoples' knickers in a knot was not directed at random citizens. It was directed at calls from suspected terrorist operatives to their associates in the US. I hope to God
somebody on our side is listening to them, warrants be damned. We're not talking about criminal investigations here, we're talking about military intelligence. That is a military function, properly under the authority of the commander-in-chief. It's none of the courts' (or Congress') business.