Tyranny

Yup, there it is. Bush is the tyrant King, and congress wants to enable him.

Let’s hope the Supreme Court has the good sense to save us from us tyranny.

Unclaimed Territory – by Glenn Greenwald

There really is no other way to put it. Issues of torture to the side (a grotesque qualification, I know), we are legalizing tyranny in the United States. Period. Primary responsibility for this fact lies with the authoritarian Bush administration and its sickeningly submissive loyalists in Congress. That is true enough. But there is no point in trying to obscure that fact that it’s happening with the cowardly collusion of the Senate Democratic leadership, which quite likely could have stopped this travesty via filibuster if it chose to (it certainly could have tried).

And this point is important too. People aren’t even UPSET by this blatant display of tyranny!

There is a profound and fundamental difference between an Executive engaging in shadowy acts of lawlessness and abuses of power on the one hand, and, on the other, having the American people, through their Congress, endorse, embrace and legalize that behavior out in the open, with barely a peep of real protest. Our laws reflect our values and beliefs. And our laws are about to explicitly codify one of the most dangerous and defining powers of tyranny — one of the very powers this country was founded in order to prevent.

“This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears he is a protector.” — Plato

“Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.” — C.S. Lewis

“The liberties of our country, the freedoms of our civil Constitution are worth defending at all hazards; it is our duty to defend them against all attacks. We have received them as a fair inheritance from our worthy ancestors. They purchased them for us with toil and danger and expense of treasure and blood. It will bring a mark of everlasting infamy on the present generation – enlightened as it is – if we should suffer them to be wrested from us by violence without a struggle, or to be cheated out of them by the artifices of designing men.” — -Samuel Adams

“Tyrants have always some slight shade of virtue; they support the laws before destroying them” — Voltaire

“If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy” — James Madison

“The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home.” — James Madison

“The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants, and it provides the further advantage of giving the servants of tyranny a good conscience” — Albert Camus

“There is no crueler tyranny than that which is perpetuated under the shield of law and in the name of justice.” — Charles de Montesquieu

“A great wave of oppressive tyranny isn’t going to strike, but rather a slow seepage of oppressive laws and regulations from within will sink the American dream of liberty” — George Baumler

“The offspring of riches: Pride, vanity, ostentation, arrogance, tyranny”
— Mark Twain (does this sum up Dubya or what?)

“There are historic situations in which refusal to defend the inheritance of a civilization, however imperfect, against tyranny and aggression may result in consequences even worse than war” — Reinhold Niebuhr

“Necessity, the tyrant’s plea” — John Milton

“Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.” — Thomas Jefferson.