Many citizens are breathing a sense of relief today. When we saw the Obama Administration bomb the capital of a sovereign nation and openly support rebel forces in the field, many jumped to conclusions and asked how Obama could start a war without congressional approval under Article I. White House Spokesman Jay Carney has finally set the record straight. This may look like war but it is really “a time-limited, scope-limited military action.”
What idiots the Framers were not to see the difference. They drafted Article I, Section 8, Clause 11 without expressly distinguishing time-limited, scope-limited military actions in bombing other nations. Instead, when Pierce Butler of South Carolina argued that the president could commit the United States to war, people like Elbridge Gerry responded that he “never expected to hear in a republic a motion to empower the Executive alone to declare war.” Others like George Mason also expressed total opposition to such a notion. It turns out that a president only has to call a war “a time-limited, scope-limited military action” and can bomb capitals and spend hundreds of millions of dollars to support one side in a civil war.
This could have not just constitutional but artistic implications. Consider the lyrics to the The Temptations song, War: “War“a time-limited, scope-limited military action” , what is it good for?”
Of course, someone may want to inform those people being bombed that this should not be taken as an act of war . . . more like a violent gesture of peace.
Jonathan Turley
Tootie sez: He wants America destroyed. He hates her.
**************************************
And you know this how? What exactly has the President done to convince you that he hates America and wants it destroyed?
On the other hand, we cold make a valid case in that direction for Grover Norquist, ‘Box Turtle’ McConnell, Boehner (R) Orange, and Frank Luntz. I have become convinced that Frank Luntz does not believe in anything. He is anybody’s dog that will hunt with him, and the Republicans pay well. I don’t think the Koch, Walton and Bush crime families want to destroy America, they just want to own it in the fashion of a medieval feudal fiefdom.
He is demonic and depraved. Only an imbecile or evil doer would vote for him again. He wants America destroyed. He hates her.
Not the Temptations though
“WASHINGTON (AP) — The United States welcomed a partial handover for the Libyan air campaign to NATO on Thursday, but the allies apparently balked at assuming full control and the U.S. military was left in charge of the brunt of combat.”
Combat? Why that sounds, oh, I don’t know, distinctly war-like.
Read the rest here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/24/nato-command-no-fly-libya-us-combat_n_840408.html
Did it all start with the lend / lease?
AY,
I think you are ight about the underlying reason for the Libya action. Oil.
@Blouise -> ‘spook’ speak
This is kinda like crap. Hey for all who care…Haliburton and Exxon are contracted to drill 1,500 new wells in Iraq…..I wonder whats in store for Libya….
What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?
~ Mahatma Gandhi
is that what the japanese were doing on dec. 7 1941. “a time-limited, scope-limited military action.”
just to help their hawaiian friends.
bombing another country is an act of war.
period
BIL,
Oooo … good one …
The president hiding behind the Secretary of State to explain what we’re doing in Libya?
Obama is turning out to be more than two faced; he’s a weasel as well.
Heard this on the radio whilst running errands and it made me think of you, Barry.
It sounds like the so-called “police action” phraseology from Korea and Vietnam. If some people are dying and we are shooting at them, it is a war.
Gyges,
As I said … CIA speak. There’s a whole department within the CIA dedicated to “politically acceptable verbiage”. I believe they call themselves “the hallmark group”.
While I usually try and avoid long blocks of quoted text, this seems an appropriate excerpt from Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language:”
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called PACIFICATION. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called TRANSFER OF POPULATION or RECTIFICATION OF FRONTIERS. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called ELIMINATION OF UNRELIABLE ELEMENTS. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, “I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so.” Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:
While freely conceding that the Soviet régime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.
The inflated style is itself a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns, as it were instinctively, to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as “keeping out of politics.” All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find–this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify–that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years as a result of dictatorship.
CIA speak
It’s not a timeline, it’s a time horizon.
It’s not war, it’s a time-limited, scope-limited military action.
Same old shit, different day.
It’s not Important…
Thanks!!
That’s a load off of my mind…