Liberals may denounce the “incompetence” of the administration’s catastrophe in Iraq, but they remain incapable of recognizing or identifying the war on Iraq and the current occupation as profoundly immoral.

…

In terms of its original vision, our country has been dying for many decades. But to destroy habeas corpus is to rip the heart out of a body that is still clinging to life. If this legislation remains unaltered, we as a nation are a corpse still capable of automatic, meaningless motion and speech — but the body will collapse soon enough. It is a body deprived of the vitality of life, and there is no longer anything to sustain it. Insofar as the principles that make civilization possible are concerned, we are among the living dead. Now, we all breathe the stench of death itself. The stark, undeniable fact about this latest legislative atrocity is that the Democrats could have stopped it. If they had given a damn, they could have filibustered or stalled it by some other means. Surely all those rules of procedure must be good for something. Unforgivably and damnably, they chose not to.

– Arthur Silber. Emphasis in the original.