MARTIN DYCKMAN
TALLAHASSEE - A thousand dead in Iraq. For what? History's highest budget deficit. For what? George W. Bush has been so reckless with America's lives, wealth and reputation and so stupendously incompetent and untrustworthy overall as to defy belief that anyone but Halliburton and the House of Saud would want him to be elected.
What about Ariel Sharon and Wolfowitz?
And yet, if the polls are accurate, Bush is leading. Dismal as that news may be, what's more to be feared is the reason. Though they see through him in nearly every other respect, many people are convinced of his leadership, his courage, his sense of resolve.
| Yeah. That's what I like about him, too... |
| Not me, man. I just like the way he pisses off the French. |
This triumph for the art of propaganda - all we really know about his courage, after all, is how little of it he displayed during Vietnam - signifies mortal danger for American democracy.
| Oh, I don't agree. By the way, Martin Dyckman, how much courage did you display during Vietnam? |
| That was different, of course. |
The "man on horseback" mentality, the belief that a leader's strength is more important than where it leads them, defines a population that is vulnerable to dictatorship.
We 'merican people are sooo stoopid. We always look for the horse guys to lead us. After all, look at FDR.
| Mr. Dyckman appears to be complaining because Bush is showing resolution and determination, that having determined a path that he thinks is correct he's sticking to it. It just isn't done in Mr. Dyckman's circles, y'know... |
This is not to call Bush a dictator or suggest that he wants to be one.
| No, no, certainly not! You wouldn't call him a dictator, you'd just imply it. Nice shiv, by the way. |
But let no one believe that it couldn't happen here, as has happened so often elsewhere. It has happened here, and by the design of better statesmen than Bush.
| The fact that it could happen here doesn't mean that it is happening here. There's a difference to be found between the possible and the actual. |
| And it won't happen here today because we have about a hundred million Americans who own about two hundred million guns. |
John Adams, an original American patriot, signed the Alien and Sedition Acts that put people in prison for what they said or wrote.
| Seems to me the Alien and Sedition Acts were repealed. Nor did they turn the nation into a dictatorship. |
Abraham Lincoln, one of our three greatest presidents, suspended the writ of habeas corpus.
| As a temporary measure when the nation was in a state of emergency. There was that matter of half the country being in rebellion against the Union, y'see... |
Woodrow Wilson, a scholar by profession, jailed and deported people for opposing a war that, nearly a century later, still raises the question of what American interests compelled our participation.
| If the question is finally settled, will that mean the deportations and juggings can stand? And, of course, the dictatorial Wilson administration did lead to the excesses of the 1920s, Prohibition, the Hall-Mills Murder Case, the novels of Thorn Smith, and Sacco and Vanzetti. I guess that means we should think twice before declaring war on Kaiser Bill again, even should a Lusitania or two go down and no matter how many telegrams Zimmerman sends... |
Franklin D. Roosevelt put 110,000 men, women and children in concentration camps because of their race.
| That, and the fact that there were active spy rings and such in the country. And I believe that among the numbers interned there were also a bunch of Germans and Italians... |
America's first though fourth Dictators. Right there on the List of Dictators with Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin.
| So now we know that Dyckman wouldn't have fought the Civil War, WWI and WWII. |
In each instance, danger was the pretext for suspending democracy and decency.
Pretext=War?
| Any thought that the "pretexts" may have represented valid concerns, Mr. Dyckman? Any thought at all, for that matter? |
Dictatorship has struck even in the absence of danger. Right here, in Florida.
| Yes, Yes! We all remember when the Black Shirts rose up in Tampa and... ummm... Oh. Sorry. That didn't happen. What're you talking about, Mr. Dyckman? |
| But he did raise Florida right on cue ... |
In December 2000, the Florida House of Representatives, in broad daylight, voted 79 to 41 to steal the 2000 presidential election by formally appointing the Republican slate of electors regardless of what a recount might show. Though presumptively legal under the Constitution, that was a dictatorial act in light of the modern expectation that the people, not the politicians, elect the president.
Presumptively legal because it is SPELLED OUT in the document? That each State's House is responsible for selecting electors? And yet the Barking Moonbats aren't aware of how our Constitution works?
| "Presumtively legal" is the very same thing as "legal," Mr. Dyckhead, even if it means things didn't go your way... |
| 'course, Marty would rather whinge than do something like, you know, proposing to amend the Constitution or something. |
Florida rewarded the perpetrators by sending Tom Feeney to Congress and re-electing nearly everyone who followed his orders. If that disgraceful vote ever became even an issue in any of their campaigns, I am unaware of it.
So when the Florida House performed their constitutionally mandated vote to secure a "safe harbor" for the voters of Florida, that is disgraceful? What IS disgraceful is what you write, Sir. Have you no decency?
| Wonder why his pals the Dems didn't raise the issue, other than it was a dead-bang loser. |
The Senate
(which Senate? Oh, the FLORIDA SENATE)
did not follow suit
(Of course under that Constitution thingie, only the HOUSE is relevant)
on, but only because of President John McKay's shrewd strategy of waiting to see what the Supreme Court would do. Nonetheless, a precedent was set for use in the next state where one party controls both houses and opportunity knocks.
The number of houses is irrelevant. It is the HOUSE that is relevant.
Meanwhile, it is becoming clear that the great falsehoods of this administration were not limited to the phantom weapons of mass destruction, the fanciful link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida, and (most recently) the phony Medicare drug benefit cost figures that were deliberately fed to the Congress.
Phantom, fanciful and phony, eh?
| He's not talking about the chem weapons found, or about Zarqawi. I don't know anything about Medicare drug benefits, but he's probably not talking about those, either. He's talking about... ummm... something else. |
To that list must be added the deception that the Republicans wanted Howard Dean for their opponent. The Washington punditry corps regurgitated that as fact and helped give the Republicans exactly what they did want: a senator (actually, two senators) on the opposition ticket.
Those nafarious Pubs can do ANYTHING, I tell ya. The Dhimmis, of course, have no responsibility in their own party as it is apparently run by the Pubs.
| I had no idea Karl Rove was that good. |
It didn't matter who. Sitting members of Congress are sitting ducks because they come with the fresh baggage of complicated voting records that are easy to misconstrue and misrepresent.
Yeah, facts can be so pesky when your a Democrat.
| Wonder what it says about the voters of the party who selected two sitting ducks as their standard-bearers? |
The Homeland Security Act, for example, contained a poison pill for Democrats: Its labor-bashing component set up Max Cleland, a triple amputee Vietnam War hero, to be smeared as unpatriotic. If there is such a place as hell, surely it awaits the liars who did that.
If the Dims took a poison pill on that act, if was a suicide. And, Cleland wasn't questioned on his patriotism, but on his placing pleasing Unions over National Security. It wasn't over the ad. No less an authority than Zell Miller, who has known both men for more than 30 years explained Cleland lost because he was voting with the liberals, not Georgians, he said to Russert and Brokaw during the DNC.
In the entire history of the United States, there have been only four presidents who went straight from the Congress to the White House. The last of them - and the only Democrat - was John F. Kennedy, 44 years ago.
Real JFK was a Democrat, but, didn't he do things like massive tax cuts and talk about America's obligations to the whole world? Sumthin' 'bout "Bear any burden".
| That, and the family bought all the votes in West Virginia. And those of all the dead people in Chicago. And he still didn't manage to get more of the popular vote than Nixon... |
Former members of Congress have fared much better, but in recent years only by way of the vice presidency. The Democrats should have learned by now. Of the six Democratic presidents directly elected since the Civil War, all but one (JFK) were governors: Grover Cleveland, Wilson, Roosevelt, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. (Michael Dukakis would have won too had he managed to show anger, or any other passion, at appropriate moments.) Truman and Lyndon Johnson would not have made the White House but for the vice presidency.
Dukakis only lost because he wasn't a barking moonbat, eh? Yeah, that would have helped.
| Help me out, Martin, what's your complaint again? |
Governors, or former governors, have played well for the GOP too: e.g., Ronald Reagan, George Bush. A governor's record is rarely as complex as that of a member of Congress, and the job title itself conveys a sense of competence and authority.
Complexity=Nuanced
Even if, as we see now, the competence is only an illusion.
| Wow! Wotta piece! I can't believe somebody actually printed this! This is a classic cry from the heart of somebody who's not getting his own way. Poor, poor Mr. Dyckman. |
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