{"id":23,"date":"2008-02-02T04:28:29","date_gmt":"2008-02-01T20:28:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lyspeth.com\/blog\/2008\/02\/02\/evocation-of-a-falling-empire\/"},"modified":"2008-02-02T04:28:29","modified_gmt":"2008-02-01T20:28:29","slug":"evocation-of-a-falling-empire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lyspeth.com\/blog\/2008\/02\/02\/evocation-of-a-falling-empire\/","title":{"rendered":"Evocation of a falling empire"},"content":{"rendered":"

Greenwald writes:<\/a><\/p>\n

That has become Congress’ only role, its only power: to endorse what the President decrees. Like the sad, impotent Roman Senate which existed only to lend its imprimatur to the Emperor’s conduct, the Congress’ only choices are — as it did yesterday — to plead for “re-consideration,” and then, when it’s not forthcoming, either do nothing or endorse the President’s behavior.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Not only a highly evocative description and highly relevant to the latest nonsense on the FISA bill<\/a>, but one of a falling empire — which is what our country is, in case you haven’t noticed lately. It’s extremely depressing, because instead of just stopping the empire-like behavior, we’re doing crazier and crazier things and managing them worse and worse.<\/p>\n

I’m especially discouraged to learn that the other side is smearing the EFF<\/a>, of all things, lumping them in with rich trial lawyers. Because a non-profit law firm protecting people’s rights is oh-so-lucrative…are they crazy? The EFF is a wonderful organization and personally and civically very dear to me. Which reminds me, where is my checkbook? Time to send them some money.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Greenwald writes: That has become Congress’ only role, its only power: to endorse what the President decrees. Like the sad, impotent Roman Senate which existed only to lend its imprimatur to the Emperor’s conduct, the Congress’ only choices are — as it did yesterday — to plead for “re-consideration,” and then, when it’s not forthcoming, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5,18],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lyspeth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lyspeth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lyspeth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lyspeth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lyspeth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lyspeth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lyspeth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lyspeth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lyspeth.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}