Yes, Benito Giuliani’s foreign policy team is very … Halloweenish. In addition to Daniel “Ethinc Cleanser” Pipes, we have one Martin Kramer, as profiled by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:
“‘Academic colleagues, get used to it,’ warned the pro-Israel activist Martin Kramer in March 2004. ‘Yes, you are being watched. Those obscure articles in campus newspapers are now available on the Internet, and they will be harvested. Your syllabi, which you’ve also posted, will be scrutinized. Your Web sites will be visited late at night.”
Kramer’s “Campus Watch” is devoted to harrassing anyone on campus who doesn’t kowtow to The Lobby. How would you like to see him as, say, Secretary of Education?
If Rudy makes it to the White House, and you’re an academic, especially one involved in the realm of Middle Eastern studies, get ready for the knock on the schoolhouse door at night ….
Guiliani’s foreign policy team would be very dangerous to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness for most of us.
The Foreign Policy of DC for Americans has no consequences. It is amusement. For the strange faceless foreigners with unpronouncable names “who don’t value life like we do”- that are on the recieving end of those policies- they mean violence, privation, death, and misery.
And if by some stroke of luck a tiny band of these third world untermensch actually strike back in our “homeland” with “terrorism” why we simply can’t understand why these savages hate us so.
A Ghouliani administration conceivably could be worse than Bush, will Americans fall for this poisonous neocon sock-puppet?
I’ve got two words for Commissar Kramer: “Latvia 1941.”
Another word for you ‘Baltic Sea Lord’: Nuremburg. Here’s another: ‘noose’.
Glad to know that you “hanged” me! Somehow my neck doesn’t feel too stretched. Kramer and his ilk, on the other hand, have far more to fear once they push their “surveillance activities” too far. Just for your information, Tommy, the Letts had plenty of reason to do what they did to the Bolsheviks in 1941. A year of “terrorist surveillance” by Stalin’s goons stacked up tens of thousands of Latvian victims. Since you’re obviously a denier of that Holocaust, it stands to reason that you would side with the Bolsheviks who are entwining their tentacles around American necks.
The first amendment is too narrowly written. As it stands, it is too easy for people like Kramer to take away our EFFECTIVE freedom of speech.
The first amendment specifies only that “Congress shall make no law” abridging the freedom of speech. We need to stipulate, in a new amendment, that no executive order, nor even any action of a private citizen, can be permitted which limits in any way the freedom of speech on public policy matters in the public sphere — especially in academia and the press.
Such an amendment may make for a longer, less elegantly simple wording than the first amendment we already have, but it will better protect our liberties. It’s too bad that this has to be spelled out to protect us from thugs like Kramer.
…coming events cast their shadows beforehand, and these are indeed dark shadows
Dennis prager had a guy on his show the other day who wants to increase our military spending to 4% GDP. later in the week prager was going on about the cost of government and how wasteful it is. I called in and said ” but the other day you had a guy on saying we needed to increase spending drasticly. isn’t the military part of the government? isn’t it just as wasteful. which are you for?” he then explained that supporting 4% was “mature” and that we couldn’t just hire private people to do all that stuff. oblivious to the fact that we don’t need ANYONE to do all that stuff which is why it doesn’t fit in to the conservative ideology. I never understood that part of reagans legacy. I know there was the cold war and everything, but , like lew rockwell says, conservatives are kind of crazy like that. they break all their rules when it comes to war.
at any rate, look for guliani to implement this spartan budget immediately. I can’t see him NOT doing it actually
I wonder if President Abraham Lincoln were alive, how “dangerous” do you think his policies would be? It was Lincoln who suspended the Writ of Habeas Corpus was it not? He did that without even the consent of Congress did he not? But yet you are all so mortified about Bush or Giuliani. Abraham Lincoln knew how to run a war. That is why we will have a Union today.
Uh, isn’t Kramer simply describing what is usually called Internet research? Nothing here smacks of surveillance or intrusion. In fact, it’s what all of us do all the time. Perhaps the overreaction to his words proves his point: academics oppose even the most minimal (and perfectly legitimate) scrutiny.