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KevinTheOmnivore KevinTheOmnivore is offline
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Old Dec 30th, 2005, 02:48 PM       
i'd like to take a tangent away from what we were discussing. I have a new question, and it may tie in to what you just said about American apathy.

Do you think Americans could today be lulled into a dictatorship, or a weird sort of "empire"?

The example i cite is this NSA stuff. Now we already have threads for that, so i don't want this to become a debate over that. However, I am of the opinion that the president may have very well violated the law here. There's legal experts, FISA court judges, as well as conservative intellectuals who can back me up on that. At the very least, let's just say he "took liberties" with the law.

A recent poll conducted shows that over 60% of Americans, 51% of Democrats, are okay with the spying.....! This is where i become curious. Even if this violated the Constitution, it would seem Americans are more than willing to hand over liberty for the sake of security. Maybe more than ever.

So i guess my question is two-fold:

A. If the tactics the president uses are necessary, welcome, and effective, then can a republican, free market nation even call itself such if it's willing to bend the laws when they become inconvenient?

B. If it means bending and perhaps even violating the Constitution, does that mean democracy and capitalism can't beat islamic fundamentalism, much like the President would claim?
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