I don’t buy it. Lets review the chronology:

August 1992 – shoot-out at Ruby Ridge.

January 1993 – Clinton sworn into office.

February-April 1993 – Standoff at compound in Waco, Texas.

The Ruby Ridge incident occurred before Clinton took office, which hasn’t prevented Republicans from blaming Clinton for it. Waco occurred because an inexperienced administration basicly allowed career officials to do what they wanted. It appears that Clinton then fixed the problem, because we haven’t seen incidents like Ruby Ridge or Waco since then.

“It is not a party thing, it is a power thing”

If that’s the case, then why didn’t abuses like Ruby Ridge and Waco continue to occur while Clinton was in office?

White Agent: Thanks for proving my point for me.

Austin Roth: Strawmen? You’re kidding, aren’t you.

Now I’ll be the first to admit that the religious and political beliefs of Weaver family and the Branch Davidian sect are too far out on the fringe for my tastes. But here’s the thing – these folks were right wing folks on the fringe, people who were preceived as dangerous religious right wing loonies by the mainstream left in the Clinton administration. Armed confrontations developed – complete with shoot outs and dead women and kids in both cases. And how many women and kids have the feds shot during the Bush administration? Calling George Bush a “Nazi” by implication as Wolf does is really well beyond the realm of reasoned discourse for most people away from the Kos Kids.

A conservative can easily go down Wolf’s list and provide examples of how the Democratic presidents have behaved badly; the problem is, it is not a party thing, it is a power thing, as Nic shows. Lord Acton was correct: “Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

In effect, rather than write a long dissertation on sloganeering, I chose the shorter approach of accenting the highlights by using an example. To understand, you have to be able to jump from the abstract position, to an acual one, when it’s used in debate to score a political point.

I’m not sure what I find most appalling, the sheer ignorance of history, or the deeply held desire to demonize anyone who disagrees with your political ideology.

Ah! the joys of leftism in America.

Second, I’m not interested in a “what’s wrong with Christians” discussion for probably the same reason you find such a discussion problematic:
1) I was raised Christian
2) Christians have done many wonderful and horrible things, but those things may be better assigned to humans in general rather than Christians in particular.

IMO, the “It’s not fascism when…” poster uses the word Christians where it might better make its point with the word “we”. Of course, I don’t know for certain what the poster’s creator (artist) means, but the point I’d like that person to be making is that we, too, however much a light on a hill we suppose ourselves to be, may fall into the snares of authoritarian militarism.

I realize I’m not really debating here, just clarifying an imaginary point I’m attributing to a piece of political propaganda. On the other hand, I’m pretty sure Naomi Wolf didn’t blame Christians for anything in particular, so when you say,
>Now if those politicians happened to be Christians does that mean all of >Christianity is EVIL
>I say no. This article quite clearly is saying yes.
I’m not sure which article you’re talking about.

On to “the war”…
(Third)
1) You won’t catch me saying that the US Government is currently Fascist, although I do see various steps toward Fascism (and not just recently — Nic Rivera posted a good review of US history above, and as you point out, various presidents from Washington to Lincoln to Bush have pushed the boundaries of executive power in what they called “war”).
2) Congress gave Bush permission to use force, and he invaded Afghanistan and Iraq. That looks like war to me. I can’t say it’s not war, and I wouldn’t want to try. On the other hand, the “war on terror”? Let’s use a separate heading…
3) IMO, declaring war on abstract concepts is one of the great public policy debacles of the 20th Century, updated by the current administration to become one of the great debacles of the 21st (though it is still a young century). The War on Poverty and the War on Drugs both failed to eliminate their opponents. In fact, some would argue that, like Prohibition, the War on Drugs just made things worse! Of course, this is the sort of argument that a loony free market advocate like me might typically point out, so you may wish to close your ears. The War on Terror has so far increased Fear (a synonym of Terror, or a close ally, depending on whether you believe abstract concepts like these are allied to other abstract concepts). But let’s drop the abstract concepts and get back to the actual violence…
4) September 11, 2001 was a terrible tragedy, and the people who committed this vast crime were mass murderers. Their greatest hope (and the hope of all those who wish to wage “holy” war) was that the families and countrymen of their victims would treat their attack, not as a reprehensible crime, but as an act of war. Civilian casualties, collateral damage, are dignified, permitted, by war. The rhetoric of jihadists who fantasize about a global caliphate claims that the murder of innocents is wrong, but that if innocents die as a side effect of attacking the soldiers, infrastructure, and symbols of the enemy, this is permissible. I believe this rhetoric is incorrect, and that it masks or excuses the purely criminal activities of terrorism, but we should keep in mind that we use similar words to excuse our use of explosives in the context of urban warfare, as do all industrial powers. For this reason alone, we should stay far away from calling mass murder of civilians an act of war. To call it war aids the moral cover-ups of terrorists.
5) Terrorism is the tribal violence of the 20th and 21st centuries — brutal, illegal and ethnic, attempting to gain political goals by intimidating voters and politicians. As many of our politicians have said (hey, politicians I agree with!) the terrorists hope to destroy our way of life. Although I don’t think that’s the only goal, or even a universal goal, of terrorist jihadists, I do think that we lose something vital for every civil liberty we give up. Instead of thinking of this situation as a brief war that might be resolved in five years, I believe we must consider it to be a lasting situation. The ways we respond to terrorism will shape how a whole generation grows up, what our entire nation considers normal or permissible. For this reason, we must live during this time as we believe best for all times.

I would rather accept a risk of injury in a terrorist attack for myself and my loved ones than give up the liberties on which our country was founded. It is true that Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, and some would say he trampled on states’ rights as well. His presidency — and his life — passed quickly, though, together with the war he fought. The United States is still healing from that conflict, but we came out of the war while he still lived. Habeas corpus was restored. If our Congress and our President had recently defined a particular enemy that we could beat in a particular time, the war would be over before protests against loss of civil liberties could really get going! In the current situation, however, we have a “Long War”, a war of Orwellian proportions. People have been fighting tribal conflicts for as long as we’ve had tribes. Unless we develop a global government with which all people are relatively happy, there will still be murderers who hope to achieve political goals by killing civilians in spectacular ways. Since we’re not about to get such a global government (and I’m not saying we should have one), we ought to do what we can to fight such violent crime within the bounds of the Constitution and our nation’s laws.

Okay, I’m done.

Sincerely,
NT White

Every argument that he does not agree with is a strawman. 1 trillion and 1 times.

C Stanley,
Be honest with us. The understood definition of moral relativism for conservatives includes a clause that it only applies to liberals.

Uh, no. But I guess if you define it in a silly way and then turn around and apply your silly definition of it to a conservative argument, then object when we say that the argument was not an example of moral relativism except in the sense of your mistaken understanding of what the term means, well, then yeah, I guess we do exempt our own arguments from that.

And Doma, I wasn’t talking about you using an example of that for illustrative purposes, I was talking about this:

Those from the Right criticize the Left for Moral Relativism, when one idea is put into a broad context of ethical considerations. Evil is evil, good is good, and no blurring of absolutes is allowed.

Then they use histoical comparisons to point out how a current phenomenon RELATES to others in the past. Today’s evil is not really as bad as yestersay’s evil, it turns out.

What I’m trying to say is that your statement “evil is evil, good is good” is a mistaken understanding of the concept of moral relativism. What you are saying there is that EVERYTHING has to be black and white and you are advancing the argument that this is how many conservatives see the world. But really the concept of moral relativism (and our disdain for that) is that we don’t accept that there are NO black and white issues, that everything has to be put on equal moral footing even if clearly one thing is more morally correct than the other.

So no, you were not just mentioning how these things sometimes get bandied about and distort the conversation, you were doing some of the bandying yourself (probably not purposely, but that is why I tried to clarify what conservatives actually mean when we complain about moral relativism, which is not what you explained it to be.)

Chuck prez issued a rebuttal and then another demanding a response from me. I replied.

We are debating (quite poorly I might add) Its not Fascism if Christians do it. A blanket statement that goes to the heart of the lefts attack on Bush using every means at their disposal.

However if you want to address each item above then you too are barking up the wrong tree because they are not even associated with Christians. They are associated with our government. Christians did not do any of those things. Politicians did. Now if those politicians happened to be Christians does that mean all of Christianity is EVIL

I say no. This article quite clearly is saying yes.

To debate the merits of points 1 thru 10 requires one premise that both sides must agree to and I do not believe you and I could even agree on the framework for the debate.

The USA is at WAR. Yes or No. You would most likely say no and therefore you would be correct in asserting that items 1 thru 10 above are being abused. However if we are in a war, then presidents from George Washington thru George Bush have done the above to protect the citizens of this country and we did not slip into fascism.