by Anthony Ioven
The end of a year is a reminder that nothing is permanent — not a year, not a life, not an empire. Everything changes. Everything ends.
And so America's dominance as the world power — militarily, economically, culturally — will also end. The cause of our fall might be a devastating war, a relentless onslaught of Katrina-like natural disasters, an unknown and uncontrollable disease. Or possibly we might become so fearful of our enemies, real or imaginary, that we systematically dismantle our free and democratic society, layer by layer, until there is nothing left, because we destroyed it in order to save it.
No one can say how the end of American dominance will come. Only that it is inevitable.
We ought to keep that uncomfortable fact in mind before we act with our usual "me-first" arrogance. The world is fed up with America's assumed moral superiority while we stubbornly refuse to be a good world citizen — We demand special treatment by the International Criminal Court, we ignore the Kyoto protocols, we express our utter contempt for the United Nations by sending John Bolton there as our ambassador. Friendly countries who disagree with us are villainized. The unfortunate citizens of unfriendly countries are subject to punishing sanctions or are bombed back to the stone age.
If we don't have the character to do the right thing for the right reasons, we should at least consider doing it for our usual self-serving reasons. In other words, when we are on our way down, how do we want the up-and-coming nations (China, for example) to treat us?
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!
Or at least, learn.
by Anthony Ioven
The first president of the United States was incapable of telling a lie, or so the story goes, but the current president seems incapable of telling anything but.
So last week, when the president climbed up on his high horse and decried the "shameful act" of leaking his secret NSA spy program to the press, his moral indignation didn't quite ring true, and neither did his defense of spying without a warrant:
We know that a two-minute phone conversation between somebody linked to al Qaeda here and an operative overseas could lead directly to the loss of thousands of lives. To save American lives, we must be able to act fast and to detect these conversations so we can prevent new attacks.
Act fast? Is immediately fast enough? The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which is the law that Bush appears to have violated, allows the government to spy first and ask for a warrant later. It just don't get no faster than that.
What bothers the president is not that he may have broken the law, but that someone dropped a dime on him. The Bush Justice Department has already begun an investigation to find the source of the leak.
But that's putting the cart before the horse. It can't be a crime to expose a criminal act. So before the justice department spends any more time hunting down the person who exposed the NSA's eavesdropping, we need to determine whether the eavesdropping itself was illegal.
And if it is found to be illegal, the whistleblower who exposed the crime should be congratulated, while those who ordered it should be prosecuted, up to and including the president.
by Anthony Ioven
It is no exaggeration to say that America is at a crossroads.
We've been led to this dividing point by President Bush, who ironically used to call himself "a uniter, not a divider" before the falseness of that claim became so glaringly apparent. It was one of the first of many false claims made by this utterly unprincipled president.
No other administration has dared exceed its moral and constitutional authority to the extent that the Bush administration has — not Nixon's during Watergate, and not even Reagan's during Iran/Contra. Nothing in our history even comes close to this:
Bush's abuses of presidential power are the most extensive in American history. He has launched an aggressive war...on false grounds. He has presided over a system of torture and sought to legitimize it by specious definitions of the word. He has asserted a wholesale right to lock up American citizens and others indefinitely without any legal showing or the right to see a lawyer or anyone else. He has kidnapped people in foreign countries and sent them to other countries, where they were tortured. In rationalizing these and other acts, his officials have laid claim to the unlimited, uncheckable and unreviewable powers he has asserted in the wiretapping case. He has tried to drop a thick shroud of secrecy over these and other actions.
There is a name for a system of government that wages aggressive war, deceives its citizens, violates their rights, abuses power and breaks the law, rejects judicial and legislative checks on itself, claims power without limit, tortures prisoners and acts in secret. It is dictatorship.
America under the Bush administration is not a dictatorship. But we are at a crossroads, and one of the roads before us leads straight to that destination. If that is where we do end up, it will not be the actions of the Bush cabal that takes us there. You and I will take us there:
The deeper challenge Bush has thrown down, therefore, is whether the country wants to embrace the new form of government he is creating by executive fiat or to continue with the old constitutional form.
It's our choice. And in fact, millions of Americans already heartily support this president and his government by executive fiat.
Who says it can't happen here?
by Anthony Ioven
You may have missed this story that the Seattle Post-Intelligencer published on Christmas Eve. It explains the mystery of why the Bush administration sidestepped the FISA court, which virtually never saw a warrant application it didn't like or approve:
Government records show that the administration was encountering unprecedented second-guessing by the secret federal surveillance court when President Bush decided to bypass the panel and order surveillance of U.S.-based terror suspects without the court's approval.
A review of Justice Department reports to Congress shows that the 26-year-old Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court modified more wiretap requests from the Bush administration than from the four previous presidential administrations combined.
When it comes to granting warrants, the FISA court reminds me of what they used to call the most popular girls at school — easy. Since 1978, the court has rejected just five of about 19,000 requests for wiretaps or search warrants. Nevertheless, this administration apparently couldn't have its way with the court as often as it liked, so it simply took matters in its own hands.
by Anthony Ioven
TS Eliot was wrong. December is the cruelest month.
Christmastime is a magical time of light, warmth, hope, love. And of course, music. Some of the most lovely and touching music ever written was inspired by this special time.
Christmastime is like a glass ball you hold in your hand, the kind with a peaceful, idealized snow scene inside. When you shake it, snow falls on the cozy, cheerful houses ablaze with light, Silent Night begins to play, and for just a few moments, you are enchanted.
But it's an illusion. Just like Christmas is an illusion.
In those few moments we spend each year inside that glittering glass ball of Christmas, celebrating that night divine when Christ was born, the joyous music of the Christmas season, singing of peace, love, and redemption,
reminds us how little the real America, Christian America, resembles a true Christian nation. Consider:
A Christian nation does not cut aid to the poor to pay for tax breaks for the wealthy.
A Christian nation would not tolerate a health insurance system that excludes 45 million souls.
A Christian nation does not murder its citizens.
A Christian nation could not possibly punish innocent men, women, and children, for over forty years, because they happen to live in a country whose politics we find unacceptable.
A Christian nation would never contribute to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children in a foreign land, and then excuse it by claiming, "We think the price is worth it."
A Christian nation would not send its good Christian soldiers marching off to war against a country that posed no threat to its safety or welfare.
If this Christian God really does exist, either He is One Supreme Fool, or we are in for one big surprise come judgment day.
by Anthony Ioven
It's not unusual to hear the name Noam Chomsky in the same breath as "extreme left-wing" or "out-of-the-mainstream," but it may surprise you to know that Chomsky himself doesn't agree:
[I]t turns out that, you know, I'm pretty much in the mainstream of public opinion on most issues. I'm not on some, not on gun control or creationism or something like that, but on most crucial issues.
If true, it means that American public opinion is generally much more left-of-center than the so-called left-wing media is willing to admit.
Here are some highlights of a recent interview with Chomsky. See if you agree:
On George Bush and Iraq...
George Bush would be in severe political trouble if there were an opposition political party in the country. Just about every day, they're shooting themselves in the foot. The striking fact about contemporary American politics is that the Democrats are making almost no gain from this...[T]he Democrats are so close in policy to the Republicans that they can't do anything about it. When they try to say something about Iraq, George Bush turns back to them, or Karl Rove turns back to them, and says, "How can you criticize it? You all voted for it." And, yeah, they're basically correct.
On how the Democrats can become more effective...
Democrats read the polls way more than I do...They could take a stand that's supported by public opinion instead of opposed to it. Then they could become an opposition party, and a majority party. But then they're going to have to change their position on just about everything.
On health care...
A large majority of the population is in favor of a national health care system of some kind. And that's been true for a long time. But whenever that comes up — it's occasionally mentioned in the press — it's called "politically impossible," or "lacking political support," which is a way of saying that the insurance industry doesn't want it, the pharmaceutical corporations don't want it, and so on. Okay, so a large majority of the population wants it, but who cares about them?
On the War on Terror...
[T]hat's a way to deal with the War on Terror, namely, increase terror. And the obvious metric, the number of terrorist attacks, yeah, they've succeeded in increasing terror...
The fact of the matter is that there is no War on Terror. It's a minor consideration. So invading Iraq and taking control of the world's energy resources was way more important than the threat of terror...
[W]e are under a rigid doctrine in the West, a religious fanaticism, that says we must believe that the United States would have invaded Iraq even if its main product was lettuce and pickles, and the oil resources of the world were in Central Africa. Anyone who doesn't believe that is condemned as a conspiracy theorist, a Marxist, a madman, or something.
On WMDs in Iraq...
We're told that they didn't find weapons of mass destruction. Well, that's not exactly correct. They did find weapons of mass destruction, namely, the ones that had been sent to Saddam by the United States, Britain, and others through the 1980s. A lot of them were still there. They were under control of U.N. inspectors and were being dismantled.
But many were still there. When the U.S. invaded, the inspectors were kicked out, and Rumsfeld and Cheney didn't tell their troops to guard the sites. So the sites were left unguarded, and they were systematically looted.
On withdrawing from Iraq...
[A]ny discussion of withdrawal from Iraq has to at least enter the real world, meaning, at least consider these issues [such as a loose Middle Eastern Shiite alliance controlling most of the world's oil]. Just take a look at the commentary in the United States, across the spectrum. How much discussion do you see of these issues? Well, you know, approximately zero, which means that the discussion is just on Mars. And there's a reason for it. We're not allowed to concede that our leaders have rational imperial interests. We have to assume that they're good-hearted and bumbling.
On his biggest regret...
I would have done more. Because the problems are so serious and overwhelming that it's disgraceful not to do more about it.
by Anthony Ioven
It's a little like President Nixon's secret bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam War.
The fourteen months of massive bombing was certainly no secret to the Cambodians and the Vietcong on whose heads the bombs were falling. It was an illegal act that was being kept secret from the US Congress and the American people.
And so it is with President Bush's secret wiretapping of US citizens. The president would have you believe the secrecy was necessary to keep suspected terrorists unaware that we were eavesdropping on their chatter. But that's nonsense — surely they know they are targets of all forms of surveillance.
The secret was that the wiretaps were (and still are) being authorized by the president without the required warrant. And that little piece of information was intended to be kept not from the suspects, but from the American people.
But why? If, as the president insists:
It is legal to do so. I swore to uphold the laws. Legal authority is derived from the constitution.
Then why the big secret?
Possibly, it's because someone at the White House remembers that the first impeachment resolution brought against Richard Nixon was not about obstruction of justice or anything to do with Watergate. It was about the secret bombing of Cambodia.
by Richard M. Nixon
You have got to be <expletive deleted> me.
I get shown the White House door just because I may have suggested to the FBI that they stay out of the — you know, the Democratic break-in thing, and why — for my sake? No. Because it would open the whole Bay of Pigs thing up again. I had nothing to do with that hanky panky.
But this guy you've got living in my house today — Jesus, he's done everything but walk off with the White House silverware: torture, kidnapping, tax breaks for the wealthy paid for by spending cuts in programs for the poor. Misleading the nation into war, for God's sakes.
And now we find out he's been secretly authorizing wiretaps on maybe thousands of US citizens, for three years, without a court warrant:
Let's be clear about this: illegal government spying on Americans is a violation of individual liberties, whether conditions are troubled or not. Nobody with a real regard for the rule of law and the Constitution would have difficulty seeing that.
Hell, even I can see that.
So when are the Congressional grim reapers going to descend from Capitol Hill and break the news to this run-amok president that his days are numbered, like Goldwater, Scott, and Rhodes did to me?
But I will say one thing for this arrogant <expletive deleted>, he's pushed me out of contention for the Worst President Ever award.
by Faith Hope
So this morning I'm rushing through Circuit City doing Christmas shopping and while I'm passing the TVs I hear the president of some country somewhere saying how for the last three years he ordered wiretaps of his citizens without court warrants and I'm thinking Jeez I'm sure glad I don't live there but I didn't pay much attention because I still had gifts to buy and who cares anyway as long as no one's wiretapping me, right?
But then I was like, wait — I know that voice. I stopped and looked at the wall of TVs and sure enough President Bush was on every one of them.
The president of the United States can't order wiretaps without a court order, can he? I wondered as I rushed off to pick up an iPod and some Game Boys and then I realized — Well, I guess he can, sure. He's not going to do anything illegal. I mean, hello, he's not stupid, right?
But then I'm driving home and listening to the radio and now I'm not so sure. Russ Feingold said that Bush's remarks were breathtaking in how extreme they were. Then he said:
"He's trying to claim somehow that the authorization for the Afghanistan attack after 9/11 permitted this, and that's just absurd. There's not a single senator or member of Congress who thought we were authorizing wiretaps...If he needs a wiretap, the authority is already there — the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act."
Well whatever I just don't know and in any case if he did bend the rules a little he only did it for our own good and like I said before, no one's wiretapping me, right?
And besides if it was something really bad, the media would let us know.
Oh well gotta run.
by Anthony Ioven
Just when it seems John Kerry has finally found the wherewithal to say something and then actually stand by it, he goes into his Emily Litella impersonation — Never mind.
Speaking to about 100 former Kerry campaign workers yesterday, Kerry said:
If we take back the House [in 2006], there a solid case to bring articles of impeachment against this president.
But after Republicans and even a few timid Democrats (a redundancy, I know) claimed to be offended by Kerry's remarks, a Kerry aide did the flip-flopping for him — apparently, Kerry was only joking:
Impeachment jokes in Washington are as old as Don Rumsfeld and as funny as Dick Cheney is gruff.
I'm surprised the Republicans' funnybone wasn't tickled by Kerry's remarks. Possibly all the Republican scandals and all the horror stories about torture and rendition over the last year have dampened their sense of humor. Why, just last year, the Republicans giggled like schoolgirls over the president's tasteless skit at the Radio and Television Correspondents annual dinner. You remember — that's when the eternal fratboy showed slides of himself in the Oval Office looking under desks and behind curtains for the missing WMDs, after it had become painfully clear that WMDs were not going to be found in Iraq.
It was a more obscene act than Bill Clinton ever committed in the Oval Office, but the good Christian soldiers of the Republican party and their media shills thought it just delightful.
Manipulating intelligence about WMDs to justify an unprovoked invasion of Iraq, resulting in thousands of American and Iraqi casualties, and then callously joking about the deception — don't these offenses rise to the same level of "high crimes and misdemeanors" that Bill Clinton reached when parsing the word "is" before a grand jury?
Of course they do, and then some. But don't expect John Kerry to say so, at least not with a straight face.
by Anthony Ioven
Fifty years ago, the president of General Motors boasted, What's good for the country is good for General Motors, and vice versa.
Unfortunately for Americans, that country today is India:
 General Motors Corp. said Tuesday it plans to nearly triple the number of cars it produces in India to meet growing demand in the South Asian country.
The announcement came just weeks after the company said it would slash 30,000 jobs and scale back production in the United States.
During the cold war, Americans were obsessed with the idea that communists were out to destroy us. But today, it's looking more and more as though capitalism will be our undoing.
by Anthony Ioven
President Bush's insistence that he doesn't live in a bubble would be a lot more convincing if he didn't also say this on the same day:
And knowing what I know today, I'd make the decision [to invade Iraq] again. Removing Saddam Hussein makes this world a better place and America a safer country.
Unless the president is, in fact, living in a bubble, and the bubble happens to be on some distant planet, he certainly must know that Saddam Hussein had exactly zero WMDs, had no connection to al Qaeda, and had nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11.
And it's hard to argue that America is safer today when we're generating terrorists in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East faster than we're recruiting fresh US troops.
A statement like that could coax Ted Koppel out of retirement, just so he could burst Bush's bubble like he pierced Mike Dukakis' heart in 1988, with this polite pin-prick: "With all due respect, let me suggest to you, I still don't think you get it."
Pop. SSSSSSSSsssssssssssss.........
by Anthony Ioven
Another gem from President Bush's surprise Q&A today:
The long run in this war is going to require a change of governments in parts of the world.
What the hell does that mean? Iraq and Afghanistan aren't enough?
After interrupting himself with a rambling digression that ranged from Elvis to his father's fighting the Japanese to 'go-bys' — whatever they are — he continues his thought:
So the fundamental question is, do we have the confidence and universal values to help change a troubled part of the world. If you're a supporter of Israel, I would strongly urge you to help other countries become democracies. Israel's long-term survival depends upon the spread of democracy in the Middle East...I believe democracy — the desire to be free is universal. That's what I believe. And if you believe that, then you've got to act on it. That doesn't mean militarily. But that means using the influence of the United States to work with others to help — to help freedom spread.
Funny, but I don't find "That doesn't mean militarily" in the least bit reassuring, coming from the "bring 'em on" president.
When does the bloodshed end?
by Deep Post
I have it on good authority that the following is a verbatim transcript of a conversation that took place between President Bush and the Official White House Nanny in the Oval Office this week:
Nanny: Georgie, Laura told me I should talk to you right away. What's wrong?
POTUS: Nothin's wrong. I decided to declare war on the UN, that's all. But she thinks it's stupid. What — I'm gonna listen to some pot-pusher now? Heh... Don't tell 'er I said that.
Nanny: Georgie, you can't declare war on the UN.
POTUS: Hey, I'm the damn president. See that Presidential Seal on my rug? I can declare war on anyone I want. How's this for a war slogan — You're either with us or you're with the peaceniks.
Nanny: But Georgie, the UN is not even a country. How can you attack something that isn't even there?
POTUS: Terrorism's not a country either. But we've been at war with terrorism for years. Saved my presidency, too. I'm the goddamn War President. Love the way that sounds. Get me Rummy on the phone.
Nanny: Wait — Georgie, tell me what this is about. Why do you want to do this?
POTUS: Because I'm sick of that holier-than-thou Kofi Annan. Hear what he said about us the other day?
Let us be clear: torture can never be an instrument to fight terror, for torture is an instrument of terror.
POTUS: He's calling us terrorists. We're not the terrorists. We're America, for God's sakes. How can we be the terrorists? Gonna kick his ass for saying that. Maybe I'll waterboard the bastard.
Nanny: Georgie, I'm afraid I have to put my foot down on this one. You can't do this.
POTUS: 'Course I can. And I'm gonna start by bombing the damn UN building. Don't tell that tightass Blair, though.
Nanny: You'll do no such thing, Georgie. There are innocent people in that building.
POTUS: Your point being . . .
Nanny: That is my point, Georgie. You may not declare war on the UN and you most certainly may not bomb the UN building. Do you understand me?
POTUS: Ok. Fine. But I'm at least gonna whack that Annan. Get me Tony Soprano on the phone.
Nanny: Georgie, Tony Soprano is just . . . well, all right, you win. But don't do anything until you hear from him, all right?
POTUS: Thanks Nanny. We'll pop him right behind the Bada Bing. Need a night out, anyway. But don't tell Laura . . .
by Anthony Ioven
1968 Presidential Upstart McCarthy Dies, proclaims the headline of the AP story in the Guardian, Yahoo, and no doubt other news outlets.
But trivializing Eugene McCarthy as an "upstart" is an injustice.
In the tumultuous year of 1968, Eugene McCarthy, a Democratic Senator running for president, won 42% of the vote in the New Hampshire presidential primary against the sitting president of his own party, Lyndon Johnson.
In 1968, McCarthy electrified the nation as an anti-war candidate — the first presidential candidate in either of the two major parties to take that bold stand.
Four days after McCarthy's surprisingly strong showing in New Hampshire, another anti-war Democrat, Robert Kennedy, declared his candidacy for president.
Two weeks after that, President Johnson stunned the nation when, in a televised address, he announced that he would not run for re-election, using the now-famous words, "Accordingly, I shall not seek, and I will not accept the nomination of my party, for another term as your president."
Eugene McCarthy legitimized the anti-war movement. He accelerated the opposition to the war in Vietnam into what became massive resistance, which would have ended the war years sooner were it not for the stubbornness of the Nixon administration, which succeeded Johnson's, and the arrogance of the American people, who refused to believe America could lose a war to the Vietnamese, who were seen as our military and cultural inferiors.
But then in June, 1968, Kennedy was assassinated. McCarthy was marginalized by the media. Hubert Humphrey, who was Johnson's Vice President, won the Democratic nomination but lost the election to Nixon. The war dragged on for years.
In 1968, the media dismissed McCarthy as a one-issue candidate. But that is also an injustice. In fact, a McCarthy presidency may have profoundly changed the course of world events, and not just in Vietnam:
After the 11 September 2001 attacks on the United States, [McCarthy] said the US was partly to blame for ignoring the plight of Palestinians.
"You let a thing like that fester for 45 years, you have to expect something like this to happen... No one at the White House has shown any concern for the Palestinians."
Once again, the marginalized Senator McCarthy exposed one of the great injustices of the 20th century. Only this one is still being felt, and will continue to be so well into the new century.
by Anthony Ioven
Forget Iraq.
Never mind the abuse of prisoners, the outright torture, the Orwellian "extraordinary rendition."
Put aside our sabotage of the Kyoto agreements and the International Criminal Court, not to mention the dirty bomb we planted in the United Nations in the form of John Bolton. Who cares if we have pissed away the moral authority, admiration, and respect we've built up over decades within the world community.
Ignore the corruption, the vindictiveness against those who refuse to support the administration's lies, the shameless manipulation of the press both here and in Iraq.
If all of this had never happened, this morally bankrupt administration and its wing of far-right supporters would still have egregiously violated the public trust over one issue and one issue alone — taxes:
[The House of Representatives] cut $50 billion last month from programs serving low-income Americans. This week they passed the final part of what amounts to $95 billion in tax cuts. It represents a height of taking from the poor to give to the rich. Out went billions for student loans, Medicaid, and food stamps. In came billions for stock dividends and capital gains.
Democratic Representative John Lewis of Georgia called this subsidizing of the wealthy by the poor "unmoral, uncaring and without compassion." I call it a criminal abuse of authority.
Still, I don't blame these self-serving right-wingers for acting like — well, self-serving right-wingers. They are what they are.
I blame you.
I blame the 60 million Americans who voted for this administration and its band of brothels. For a second term.
And I blame the tens of millions more who never bothered to vote at all.
This great country has been hijacked, while those who could have prevented it sat on their hands.
by Anthony Ioven
Every Christmas season you hear the same resentful laments over someone wishing a stranger Happy Holidays, or calling a Christmas tree a "holiday tree," or over a Christmas card that doesn't contain the word "Christmas."
Bah, humbug.
Is this really what should be occupying Christians' thoughts during this enchanting season of peace on earth, good will towards all?
Rather than fretting over putting Christ back in Christmas, given the state of the world and of our own country, maybe it's time to put Christ back in Christianity.
by Anthony Ioven
Victory is Sweet!
Special Interests Getting The Boot.
Voters take back elections.
From the breathless headlines, you would have thought that Americans finally made the sweeping reforms to our electoral system we so desperately need, like abolishing the electoral college, completely revamping the presidential primary system, and, if we were really serious about preserving our democracy, outlawing the corrosive influences of paid lobbyists and political contributions from sources other than private individuals.
But the victory being hyped is a much more modest one — the passage of a campaign finance reform bill in Connecticut.
And a minor reform bill at that.
The bill provides public funding to qualifying candidates in statewide campaigns who refuse private contributions. This is certainly an improvement over the practice of fat-cat contributions that currently corrupts the democratic process in Connecticut and most other states. But the bill is not without its problems.
First, it's optional. So if you are running for governor of Connecticut and you choose to use public funds, you can qualify for a $3 million grant. But if your opponent is Michael Bloomberg, who crosses state lines into Connecticut with a carpetbag stuffed with his personal fortune of $5 billion, and he chooses not to use public funds, guess who wins? (Hint: he just spent $77 million to purchase another term as mayor of New York.)
The bill also "set[s] the bar higher for third-party candidates" to take on Democrats and Republicans, according to Lowell Weicker. Weicker, still formidable after all these years, is promising to mount a legal challenge once the bill is signed into law.
But the real problem with the bill is that it doesn't go far enough. You can't have effective campaign reform without curbing spending as well as financing.
An election should be about communicating and debating ideas, not raising and spending money. Not only is the focus on money corrupting, it shifts focus away from the issues.
With a system like ours, no one should be surprised we end up with the likes of Tom DeLay and Randy Cunningham in Washington. And these two may prove to be just the tip of the iceberg, if lobbyist Jack Abramoff decides to cut a deal for himself.
So before we dislocate our shoulders slapping ourselves on the back for the great victory over the special interests in Connecticut, let's keep in mind one simple fact — there can be no real change in this country without real election reform.
by Faith Hope
So I just finished dropping off the kids at school and I'm heading for work when I hear on the news that Condoleezza Rice is going to tell those holier-than-thou Europeans to back off with all their whining about us flying a few suspected terrorists to other countries where they are supposedly mistreated, poor babies — right, like their own history is so pure, hello. Good for you, Condi.
You know what — I don't know if we're torturing those nutjobs or not and I don't care if we are because if they're terrorists they deserve it and worse for what they did on 9/11.
Condi knows what we're up against in this War on Terror and she's not afraid to say so:
[S]he made the point that aggressive work to counter potential terrorists can be uncomfortable for democracies.
"The captured terrorists of the 21st century do not fit easily into traditional systems of criminal or military justice," she said. "We need to adapt."
And I think we're adapting just fine thank you.
But the part I don't get is if we're not sending these terrorists beyond the reach of US law so they can be tortured, like Condi insists, then why are we flying them all over kingdom come? I mean we're not flying them halfway around the world just for the hell of it are we? How would that be considered so "aggressive" that it makes democracies "uncomfortable"?
Who knows — maybe all these guys are such pathetic little cowards that they're terrified of flying. And on top of that if we make them eat some indigestible in-flight dinners and force them to watch some old Ronald Reagan movies they'll be ready to admit to anything by the time they land.
Oh well gotta run . . .
by Anthony Ioven
Always one to believe that the chalice is half full rather than half empty, WorldNetDaily is accentuating the positive in the number of deaths of coalition forces in Iraq.
In 2004, 905 coalition troops, "chiefly Americans and Brits," lost their lives in Iraq. You nattering nabobs of negativism out there will no doubt fret that that's a tragically high number of unnecessary deaths.
Not so, says WorldNetDaily, not when you compare it to the 2,394 people murdered in California in that same year. The WorldNetDaily Exclusive, headlined "California homicides dwarf Iraq deaths," leads with a statistical trump card:
Recently released crime statistics show the homicide rate in California is 265 percent higher than the death rate suffered by U.S. and British military personnel in Iraq.
There are 265 percent fewer deaths of coalition soldiers in Iraq than homicides in sunny, civilized California? There you are — the war in Iraq's not going so badly after all.
But let's take a "chalice is half empty" approach instead, and say that 905 deaths is still 905 deaths too many. And of course, 2,394 deaths is far too many. So why not take all the coalition forces out of Iraq, where they will no longer die, and put them in California, where they can reduce the horrific number of homicides?
Ok, so I'm being facetious (at least about the second part). But that's not nearly as great a sin as WorldNetDaily's using two sets of completely unrelated statistics in an attempt to minimize the significance of the deaths of thousands of young men and women in an unjust war.
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UpdateAmerica.com
604.UpdateAmerica.com
December's Posts
The Bells of a New Year
The Wrong Investigation
Which Way?
'Back to the Bad Old Days'
Merry Christmas
Joy to the World
'The US Ought to be an Organizer's Paradise'
A Dark and Dangerous Secret
Heckuva Job, Georgie
What Are We Supposed to Think?
The Joke's On You
We Will Bury You
Bubble Boy
'Democracies Yield the Peace'
Godfather, I Need a Favor
Eugene McCarthy
Hijacked
Put Christ Back in Christmas
A Baby Step Forward
Fear of Flying
Good News from Iraq
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