Honestly, I can see your point about wateboarding not being on the same order as some of these other things. And I'll readily admit I don't know a whole lot about the particulars.

I guess what bothers me is that, as a country, we're really suffering from some international image problems that are affecting not just how people see us, but our credibility and our ability to work with other nations.

So, it doesn't strike me as the best time for the administration to get into a semantic debate on this issue.

Well, I'm not sure where that comes from. I can't think of too many countries that don't at the very least have a recent history of throwing criminals out a third story window or "disappearing" people.

What I think hurts our ability to work with other nations is our press merilly exposing every kind of covert operation they get wind of.

Honestly, if you were the head of, say, German Intel, and we wanted your assitance in capturing a high value terror suspect who was holed up in a Hamburg slum, would you want to help us - knowing the very real possibility that a photo of you or Angela Merkel would be splashed across the front page of the N.Y. Times with the banner "German P.M. Colaborates In Kidnapping Plot" above it? Of course not.

Exposing rendition programs, international wire-taps, and money transfer monitoring does nothing but help inform terrorists. It probably makes things like waterboarding all the more necessary.

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The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid? - Psalm 27:1

I'll admit to bias on this one, because I used to be a member of the press (about 5 years ago), but my sense is the press in general has given this administration a LOT of leeway in terms of what they reported/didn't report.

The stories they have reported -- federal wiretapping, extraordinary rendition -- have been things they've believed to be expressly illegal, and thus things the populace had a right to know about.

Believe me, I'm sure there was a lot of hand-wringing and late-night editorial meetings on those decisions. Despite the popular misconception, the press actually "plays ball" with the people in power a whole lot. Too much, actually, for my liking, and that goes for both Republican and Democratic politicians.

Yeah, I mean if they won't tell us who's on The Apprentice: Celebrity Edition, when they knew for a full TWO WEEKS,who knows what else they are withholding...

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"And Lord, I pray that you would guard your own reputation, because they're going to think that their god is bigger than you, if that happens. So I pray that you will step forward and honor your own name with all that happens between now and Election Day."--Rev. Arnold Conrad

This is really dangerous thinking.

Consider the LBJ to Nixon presidencies for a moment. Both men did some very ethically questionable things while in government. We all know what Nixon did.

With LBJ, the New York times got their hands on The Pentagon Papers, a detailed account by Robert MacNamara on the decision making that led up to the Vietnam War.

The biggest juicy bit in the Papers? While LBJ was telling everyone he was going to minimize and scale back the war, he escalated it.

And for Nixon, we only know what Nixon did because two reporters at the Washington Post got wind of the story--and it started because Bob Woodward went to the arraignment hearing for several, I believe it was 5, Watergate burglars.

What was so unusual? Bob Woodward was talking to court-assigned defense lawyers who were called to represent each of the burglars, but then learned that lawyers who work for the Federal government intervened and represented the men, for free, in their behalf. The defense attorneys were never told that they were being replaced, until they were asked to leave when they turned up at court.

For a 3rd rate burglary attempt--it seemed very suspicious.


And that's how Watergate started to unravel.

Over the course of 5 months, Bob Woordward and Carl Bernstein then encountered Don Segretti, a very shady lawyer who admitted of helping run a Dirty Tricks campaign for Nixon.

Don got the FBI to investigate political enemies. He had friends at the IRS to launch audits on challengers. The stuff he admitted to was unbelievable (and yes, some of it is in the movie All The Presidents Men... but the juicier stuff is in the book).

Later on, the Washington Post printed a story that confirmed that there were at least 3 key people who controlled a secret CRP* fund used by the burglars, and two of those people were in the White House itself.


By the time it was discovered that Nixon had taped himself throughout his whole presidency, it was all over.

Nixon summarily destroyed the confidence that we once put in the highest office holder in the land. Sure, there were cynics and pundits back then in 1972. But by 1974, America learned their lesson and stopped putting so much faith and hoist so much idolatry on this office.

What's better? Nixon didn't have to do ANY of this. At his re-election campaign, he won by a landslide.

Little did anybody know, our President was a lying, thieving son of a bitch.






*CRP - Dubbed by Democrats as "creep", was the Committee to Re-elect the President

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WHYY pays their CEO $750,000 a year. So WHYY should I renew my membership? Seems they have no problems finding money and spending it unwisely.


And this is why you should donate to PACCA, not PETA:

In September, PETA made headlines in Vermont and across the nation for asking Ben & Jerry's ice cream to use human breast milk in their ice cream, instead of cow milk

I don't have any problem with either the Pentagon Papers or Watergate and how that was reported.

However, I think a better example would be the breaking of the Japanese Code in WWII or exposing The Venona Papers. Those were ongoing covert intel operations that, fortunately, weren't brought out into public.

I'm trying not to assign the worst motives to my opponents (the press), but I'm not certain they wouldn't "run with it" if it happened today.

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The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid? - Psalm 27:1