BlkbrryTheGreat wrote:You don't seem to understand. If Bush ever shows/says explicitly, in public, that hes as bad as a third world dictator, by lets say gathering up his enemies and boiling and eating them on the White House lawn, he'll be in so control that there will be no way of unseating him short of a revolution/civil war. Maybe not even then, not even Hitler came out and explicitly said that he was gathering up the "untermench" and gassing them.
There was
plenty of evidence that Hitler was a tyrant in the making long, long before people started getting rounded up and sent to the camps. The street thug tactics of the Nazi party in general and the SA in particular, Hitler's own stated aims in
Mein Kampf, the anti-semitism enshrined into law, and many, many other things besides. These warnings were ignored by the German people because of factors like the crushing depression of Weimar Germany, the perceived humiliation of WWI, and other factors. But the warnings were there, and if you think there is anything close to this ominous about the Bush administration you're paranoid.
BlkbrryTheGreat wrote:What I'm basically saying is that if a President is violating the rights of Individuals and "poo-pawing" the constitution we should unseat him right away (via impeachment), and not say "well gee he isn't macheting people yet, so lets wait and see how it turns out."
He hasn't yet done anything that really rates impeachment. He may have infringed on the constitution to a degree, but no more so than a number of other presidents have done going right back to the earliest days of the republic. We didn't impeach Adams, Jackson, Polk, Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Truman, LBJ or Reagan, and they all did things as out of bounds as anything Bush has done so far. And we are not quite a police state yet.
BlkbrryTheGreat wrote:Tyranny isn't a matter of numbers, if your the President and you arrest an American citizen, without charching them and you then furhter deny them their basic rights, then your a tyrant.
I disagree. While it is true that there is no clearly defined number we can point to and say that if you fall on this side of it you are a tyrant and on that side of it not quite, I absolutely disagree with slapping the label "tyrant" on someone just because he promulgates a particular law that exceeds previous judicial boundaries in specific cases. Such a situtation certainly bears close scrutiny, and if repeated attempt to "push the envelope" take place, then we may have to take steps to reign him in before this is allowed to get out of hand.
But tyrant is simply
not an appropriate label to use at this point. Some words are reserved for big, important concepts. When you casually apply those words to lesser things then you cheapen those words and lessen their impact. When you go around calling someone a tyrant because of a few isolated infractions that appear rather small in the grand scheme of things, then you find, when a
real tyrant comes along, you no longer have a meaningful word to express the enormity of his crimes and malefactions.