( – promoted by buhdydharma )
Chief Justice Roberts cracks wise:
“Congress and the executive (branch) are uniquely positioned to make principled distinctions …”
Bwaa haa ha! Principled distinctions? As in “universally applicable discriminations?” As in “Iraq = Al Qaeda?” As in “Whoops, we killed a million people and shattered the cradle of civilization?” As in “torturing innocent humans to secure false confessions to justify brazenly fallacious war-mongering = self-defense?” As in “lobbing Hellfires from predator drones to kill women and children = winning hearts and minds?” As in “extrajudicial assassination by fiat = due process?”
Okay, let’s let him finish:
“Congress and the executive (branch) are uniquely positioned to make principled distinctions between activities that will further terrorist conduct and undermine United States foreign policy, and those that will not,” Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. wrote for the majority. “A foreign terrorist organization introduced to the structures of the international legal system might use the information to threaten, manipulate and disrupt. This possibility is real, not remote.”
OMG! Don’t let terrorists near the law! They might use it! “To threaten, manipulate, and disrupt [U.S. foreign policy]” You see, U.S. foreign policy is, by definition, above the law. And the legal use of the law by terrorists threatens the orderly use of the legal, universally principled, discriminative distinctions of law U.S. foreign policy.
The law is what we say it is, because we determine who can use it. And even if you are not a terrorist, even if you are exercising your constitutional rights to free speech and association, we plan to intimidate you with lengthy prison sentences for exercising those rights. Wow! Talk about principled distinctions!
The vote was 6-3, Stevens concurring. So, I guess Elena Kagan will, in fact, be the perfect replacement for Stevens, because 9/11 changed everything.
If I were president, I’d declare the Supreme Court a terrorist organization for providing legal assistance to U.S. war crimes.
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declare the Supreme Court a terrorist organization for providing legal assistance to U.S. war crimes, he’d have to make a principled decision to have the previous president shackled to the wall in the old jail in the basement of the principled capitol and tried for war crimes while post presidentially impeached in case it ever crosses his mind to run for public office again while in prison for the war crimes.
And then of course there would be the whole principled question of being an unprincipled accessory after the fact to those war crimes to consider. My gawd, he might have to have the white house terrorist organization preemptively invaded and himself arrested and shackled to the wall to effect a principled regime change.
This could be serious.
…. regarding those that His Majesty and the Lords at State hath once decreed as,
it is illegal for some Ahmeruckans to support them, if they attempt to renounce violence and take up peaceful ways of resolving disputes.
Because only the Mighty Alliance of Catholic, LDS & Calvinist Doctrinaire federal DOD contractors can really fight them terrorists. With the help of Wall Street investors.
The rest of us are just spectators and teh worker bees.
There is no salvation. There is only faith. Remember, we have to have confidence in the economy. Or something like that.
remains firmly in charge, words mean precisely what she means them to mean.
There’s a wonderful essay by the Polish scholar-activist Adam Michnik written in the late 70s on the emptying of the political language of the Soviet sphere of any substantive meaning. (Unfortunately hours of searching for it suggest it simply is not online.) This serves as a great mechanism for neutralizing any political resistance to a totalitarian system, if the language even those who oppose use seems hollow and fails to resonate with the oppressed. Michnik goes so far to suggest that there cannot be an effectively functioning totalitarian system that does not empty its rhetoric of meaning, because that is the one sure way to make meaningful debate not only illegal, but impossible.
But, beyond prosecution I fear.