Individual Liberty — Individual Responsibility 

I guess some of them do have brains after all, and some don't

I guess even Democratic politicians can demonstrate their intelligence from time to time. The intelligent ones in their number don't want to touch Rep. Kucinich's articles of impeachment against President Bush if they can avoid it. In an Associated Press article headlined "House waves off impeachment measure against Bush", I found this little bit (emphasis added)…

An election looms in which every House seat, a third of those in the Senate and the presidency are up for grabs. House leaders are staunchly against spending the remaining time in the abbreviated legislative schedule on impeachment proceedings.

The House vote sent the impeachment articles to the House Judiciary Committee, chaired by Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., who had once vowed to hold impeachment hearings. He wouldn't immediately comment on the articles' prospects for hearings.

Democratic aides widely suggested those gauging the bill's prospects look to a precedent: the impeachment articles against Vice President Dick Cheney, which were sent to Conyers' committee in November. There's no evidence they will be considered before the Bush administration leaves office in January.

Those were Kucinich's, too. Republicans, seeing a chance to force Democrats into an embarrassing debate, voted to bring up the resolution. Democrats countered by pushing through a motion to scuttle the bill from the floor.

Kucinich's articles also charge Bush with failing to provide troops with vehicle armor, illegally detaining both foreign nationals and Americans, condoning torture, mishandling the government's response to Hurricane Katrina and undermining efforts to address global warning.

The meat of Rep. Kucinich's articles of impeachment against President Bush concerns the allegation that he manufactured a false case for going to war against Iraq. We've been over this so many times it's enough to make one nauseous. If President Bush is guilty of building a false case for the war, then so is the majority of the Democratic party leadership, as well as the previous administration.

Perhaps a brief examination of the other charges is in order?

Who, for example actually failed to provide troops with vehicle armor? What political body is responsible for appropriations to support our nation's military efforts? Wasn't it the Democratic members of the House and Senate that consistently voted against funding the war effort, or that voted to only fund it with unreasonable strings attached?

Pray tell me… when you are faced with people that are actively engaged in hostilities against you, including the use of lethal force, what would you do, particularly if the hostilities occur on the battlefield? Would you… oh, I don't know… would you read them their Miranda rights before accepting their surrender? Since when in all of recorded history has the conduct of a war been carried out as if it were simply the arrest of a burglary suspect on the streets? With what crime do you charge foreign nationals, in a foreign land not subject to the Jurisdiction of American law on the battlefield? Isn't an enemy combatant an enemy combatant, regardless of his citizenship?

Can you honestly tell me for example, that from the point of view of the Union, that Confederate soldiers weren't enemy combatants during the American Civil War? After all, the Union contended that the Confederate States were actually still a part of the United States and that the insurrection was illegal. Should General Grant have arrested them rather than treating them as enemy combatants? Should all Confederate soldiers captured during the war have been brought before civilian courts? Should all Union soldiers captured by the Confederacy been treated that way? As if they were in violation of the law rather than combatants in a war?

Should we have tried to arrest the Germans during World War II rather than treat them as the enemy?

Personally, I find the whole notion of "illegally detaining" someone who is engaged in hostilities against your nation to be ludicrous. Even so, the cases have been wending their way through the courts and finally, the Supreme Court in an astonishingly odd decision has decided that people who have been engaged in hostilities against the United States Military, on the battlefield, in a foreign land ought to be both treated as prisoners of war and accorded the treatment of uniformed soldiers on the battlefield according to the Geneva Conventions and simultaneously granted hearings in civilian courts to determine whether they should be released.

I mean — REALLY! I thought that the whole point of taking prisoners on the battlefield was to remove them from the conflict. I thought that the entire point of detaining them for the duration of hostilities was to prevent them from returning to the battlefield! Apparently I was confused. Either that, or the five more liberal members of the Supreme Court of the United States are. Apparently Justices Anthony Kennedy, John Paul Stevens, Stephen Breyer, David Souter, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg all believe that when you take prisoners on a battlefield during wartime that the whole purpose is to get them before a civilian court.

We've already seen where that leads us, with several of the "former" detainees at Guantanimo having been released and turning up either back on the battlefield, or committing acts of terrorism as suicide bombers shortly after their release. Apparently, Rep. Kucinich, Justice Kennedy, Justice Stevens, Justice Breyer, Justice Souter, and Justice Ginsburg see nothing whatsoever to be wrong with that result. Idiots. Excuse me, flaming idiots.

"Condoning torture"? Since when? By whose definition? I've seen news reporters voluntarily undergo some of the "torture" practices. That hardly compares to the practices of the enemy. I'm not going to delve too deeply into this particular issue though. Administration officials have denied condoning torture, and some have admitted that it has occurred. Whether this can be directly laid at President Bush's feet remains to be seen.

Mishandling the government's response to Hurricane Katrina? Haven't we already seen that the real problems in Louisiana were the fault of the Mayor of New Orleans and the Governor of the state, failing to ask for federal aid until it was nearly too late? If we're going to seriously talk about mishandling things in Louisiana, then can someone explain to me why it is that the Friends of New Orleans, a charity formed to aid the victims of Hurricane Katrina is spending it's money to host a party for the Democratic Party's convention in Denver?

The party for the 6,000 delegates and their guests on Aug. 24 will honor Friends of New Orleans, a charity formed to help that city recover from the devastation of Hurricane Katrina.The host committee will pay for the party, but is saving money by consolidating the 24 separate parties into one.

After the party, Friends of New Orleans is planning a gathering of its own at Fillmore Auditorium...

That seems to me to be a mishandling of those funds, unless the problems in New Orleans have been fixed? Is Rep. Kucinich going to protest that too? Somehow I don't think so, but maybe he'll find time to protest the party being held by the Friends of New Orleans taking place in Minnesota a month or so later.

I had a hard time even finding that story in the media, even though I knew it was out there. It certainly didn't seem to get national attention.

Finally, since when is it either a high crime of a misdemeanor for the President of the United States to "undermine efforts to address Global Warming"? Especially when the science isn't truly settled and there is wide dissent among scientist as to whether it's even really a problem? Hmph! Even Congress can't seem to decide whether it's really necessary to address the "problem", since they've completely dropped their latest "cap and tax" program to exploit the media hype combat climate change.

Yes indeed. It seems that some of the House Democrats have brains in their heads after all. Perhaps that's why they voted to shove these thirty five little embarrassments off to committee where they'll probably never see the light of day again. Now if only the liberal five on the supreme bench could blow the dust off of theirs and put them back in their skulls.

… Nah. That'd be too much to wish for.

Here at last

Some time back I wrote about my efforts to re-write my computer simulation without any dependencies on the Microsoft .NET framework. Those efforts were pretty much successful, although I left them unfinished. I still haven't re-written the help file. I still haven't connected the help file to the application, and I still haven't implemented the slider that adjusts the "clock speed" of the machine. Nevertheless, I did package it up. You can download the zip file containing the installer and run it on your machine if you get into that sort of thing.

My inspiration for writing that application came several years ago when I read Charles Petzold's wonderful book Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software. Now, his new book is out, and my pre-ordered copy has finally arrived! His new book is titled The Annotated Turing: A Guided Tour through Alan Turing's Historic Paper on Computability and the Turing Machine. As soon as I realized it was here, I ripped open the box and started reading it. This book is going to be a bit of a tougher read than the other one, but it looks promising already.

Alan Turing provides an opportunity for an important lesson about things that are seemingly unrelated to computers and mathematics. First and foremost, he was a man, a member of that species of imperfect beings crafted in God's image. He gave the world two great gifts with the Turing Machine (without which, you wouldn't be reading this) and the Turing Test (a way to determine if a machine could possibly be intelligent). He was also hounded by the world and died a very tragic death after only 41 years on this Earth.

The lesson we are given the opportunity to learn from Alan Turing's life is about tolerance and acceptance. Alan Turing was a victim of homophobia and as a result committed suicide at the age of 41. I'm not an advocate of homosexuality, far from it. Nevertheless, I know that I am an imperfect man myself, and I believe that we all must be tolerant of the choices and lifestyles of others. It's not necessary to agree with or even to accept someone's chosen lifestyle to be tolerant of them and to accept them as a human being. And we MUST be tolerant of one another and accept each other as human beings, or we are less than human ourselves.

Alan Turing was a brilliant man, and without him the information age would probably not have turned out as it has. Imagine the gifts he could have given to the world had he lived in a more tolerant time.