the president is our enemy

i don't believe in capital punishment, i don't believe in torture. i don't believe in treating other human beings in that way.

i believe the government always goes further, always oversteps its bounds, than we know. given that, want what we know about what the present government has done, i suspect some pretty horrible things have happened in the past five years, things that no american should ever be involved with. things people just should not do.

the problem with all of this, though, is bush's self-justification. he says in times of war the president has special powers to bend the laws in able to successfully prosecute the war. i can't disagree with that. however, that's based on the premise of a war against a defined enemy, i.e. a country, and a certain amount of national, if not global, support for this war. it is based on the idea that the war will conclude at some point, probably not very far in the future.

this 'war on terror', which i'm not sure congress has officially validated, is not this sort of war, as the enemy is amorphous and not at all eager to show itself. we're not fighting another country (though other countries do have involvement in this problem), but instead we're fighting a large and wide-ranging group of people who we can't pin down. this isn't a war, it's a change in lifestyle. it's not something that looks to be temporary, or even avoidable. the liberties bush takes with our rights and protections have no foreseeable end, and that is a problem.

i might be willing to accept limited freedom of movement and speech for a year or two, i might be able to accept questionable wiretaps for a short period of time if a) they were approved legally through fisa, and b) they were related to known national security risks. with the war on terror, b is tough to support. with gwbush, a has been bypassed. this sickens me.

violation of my civil rights, invasion of my privacy, and being told what to think/believe/say appalls me. restrictions on my personal freedoms appall me. i don't like this president, and i hate what he's doing to america.