A
truly great exchange happened on the floor of the senate today:
Sen. John Cornyn: "None of your civil liberties matter much after you're dead."
Sen. Russ Feingold: "Give me liberty or give me death."
(The part that makes this worth a diary (I hope) comes after the fold)
If you think about it, its really quite amazing that we're sitting here in 2005, STILL debating whether the ideas that our country was founded on more than 200 years ago are good or not. Our Founding Fathers were willing to risk everything, including their very lives, for vague, non-tangible ideals such as freedom, liberty and justice.
200 years. You'd hope that the human race would have made some progress during that much time. Yet here we are today, with a Senator willing to stand before Congress and say that he believes freedom should be thrown away if there's even a glimmer of a promise of safety to be gained from doing so.
Its worth mentioning here Cornyn's reply: "Talk is cheap." It certainly is. WOULD Feingold be willing to give everything, including his life, for freedom, or is it just political maneuvering? I have no idea. One thing that can be said, though, is that Feingold is at least willing to pay lip-service to the beliefs of our Founding Fathers. Cornyn can't even do that much. He went on the floor of the Senate today and publicly spit on the ideals that our country was built on.
I'm struck by how ironic it is, that the Republican party, the conservative party, has so thoroughly rejected what our Founding Fathers gave us, all while pretending to speak for them. Liberals are supposed to be attracted to new ideas, yet here we are today arguing for what our forefathers argued and fought for 200 years ago. History has come full circle.
That's a different discussion, though. What I'm struck by now is a simple question: IS freedom worth dying for? If someone, right now, stuck a gun in your face and offered you the choice between a relatively pleasant life without freedom or death, how would you choose?
I mean this as a serious question. If we cannoy honestly say that we would be willing to die for our liberty, then is there anything more to the criticism of Bush's actions beyond partisian politics?