Maybe more of a vent than debate.. - Page 2 - Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community

dc_dux · 01-11-2007, 09:09 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by dksuddeth

not sure who's trying to fool who, but anyone with a brain should realize that this country is dead.

dk:

You would not be just a nuffin'
Your head all full of stuffin'
Your heart so full of pain.
You would dance and be merry
Life would be a ding-a-derry
If you only had a brain...

...and the vision to support, (in response to MM's quest for solutions from Democrats)....

...A Statement of Principles and a Policy Agenda for the 21st Century from the Democratic Leadership Council - the centrist Democrats.

link

(yeah, yeah, I know its just more socialist/communist american-destroying propaganda to you, DK)

dksuddeth · 01-12-2007, 02:01 AM

It has alot more to do with the whole way the constitution is now 'interpreted', than just the 2nd Amendment, so back off the notion that I'm bitching that I can't have a tank, etc.

In the early 1930's the new deal democrats in congress did more than stretch the limitations of power that the constitution gives them. They convinced the USSC to accept that interstate commerce also includes anything that affects interstate commerce, including intrastate commerce OR any activity that has a 'substantial effect' on interstate commerce. They also imbued themselves with the power of not having to show any cause or correlation that interstate commerce is affected, just make the claim that it is. That is why a once limited federal government is as bloated and cancerous as it is today.....and it's been that way for so long now most people just accept that this is the way that it is.

Look at bill of rights cases in the last 70 years compared to what they were in the 18th and early 19th century cases. The individuals rights are no longer protected, except for freedom of speech. That little puppy gets alot of attention but is catered to because it makes people 'feel' like they have freedom still, but the rest are ALWAYS judged on how much compelling government interest OR how much societal benefit is garnered by infringing on the individual rights. Look at Kelo v. New London....or almost ALL eminent domain cases. Police power is practically unlimited and nearly unaccountable for any infringements of civil rights. The supremacy clause is used dozens of times a year to deny just compensation or redress of grievances to the citizens, who are the ones that the constitution was designed to protect and empower.

No, the socialists and communists have indeed won because nearly all of you resignedly accept that monopolistic practices of a government run amok and are not only unwilling to change it by vote, but do nearly all you can to keep the parasites in power.

As for 'centrists', that just means that they are a whole new group whose sole purpose is to get you to agree that the individuals rights matter less than society as a whole by using 'moderate' as a compromise.

shakran · 01-12-2007, 06:04 AM

dks, to be totally blunt, that's a load of crap. Socialists have lost. Period. Capitalism has won. The corporation is the only thing that matters now. Corporations can get away with just about anything as long as they make money at it. Everyone likes to get down on Enron -their real crime? Not making money. Hiding it is what got them in trouble. Haliburton is so evil as to make Enron look like a fairy tale, but they haven't been stopped or even impeded. Why? Because they make money.

I don't see how you can sit there and say the republicans have done so much better when, since Reagan first got his hand in the country, corporations have been moving more and more toward total domination of society.

Small businesses can't make it because the corporations are too huge. If you want employment and you're not lucky enough to have started a unique business for which there is no competition, you have to work for a corporation where you're expected to give everything you have to the neglect of your personal time, your family, and even your health. Yet that loyalty is not returned - the corporation will cast you adrift in a heartbeat if they think they can be more profitable (even just in the short term) without you.

There are countless stories of executives and middle managers who once had a solidly middle class lifestyle and did their best for their corporate masters - and are now working menial jobs at Home Depot and Walmart just to get by because they were "downsized."

I guarantee you this dks - you can take this to the bank. The current system of capitalism is not sustainable. A revolution is coming - it's just a question of when - and the longer it takes to get here, the worse it's gonna be when it does.

Reagan kicked off the idea that it would be terribly fun to widen the gap between rich and not-rich. Now it's a yawning chasm - that's simply not sustainable. Eventually the poor and middle class will be fed up with watching the country's elite spend more money in a day than they make in a year while they worry about having enough money to buy groceries. Eventually that anger will reach a breaking point. It's happened before (the French revolution comes to mind) and it will happen again, I guarantee it.

dksuddeth · 01-12-2007, 06:23 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by shakran

dks, to be totally blunt, that's a load of crap. Socialists have lost. Period. Capitalism has won. The corporation is the only thing that matters now. Corporations can get away with just about anything as long as they make money at it. Everyone likes to get down on Enron -their real crime? Not making money. Hiding it is what got them in trouble. Haliburton is so evil as to make Enron look like a fairy tale, but they haven't been stopped or even impeded. Why? Because they make money.

I don't see how you can sit there and say the republicans have done so much better when, since Reagan first got his hand in the country, corporations have been moving more and more toward total domination of society.

A couple of things you have wrong here. I have NEVER said that the republicans have done much better than anyone else. They may have done less damage, but only slightly. Also, what we have today is not capitalism, unless you wish to redefine capitalism. If people still wish to deny that what we have is fascism, well they can deny all they want, but thats still what we have. The socialists changed so much of the united states until Reagan that they won. The only thing that the republicans have done is alter the new deal to benefit big business, which still isn't capitalism.

Quote:

Originally Posted by shakran

Small businesses can't make it because the corporations are too huge. If you want employment and you're not lucky enough to have started a unique business for which there is no competition, you have to work for a corporation where you're expected to give everything you have to the neglect of your personal time, your family, and even your health. Yet that loyalty is not returned - the corporation will cast you adrift in a heartbeat if they think they can be more profitable (even just in the short term) without you.

There are countless stories of executives and middle managers who once had a solidly middle class lifestyle and did their best for their corporate masters - and are now working menial jobs at Home Depot and Walmart just to get by because they were "downsized."

Trickle down economics would have been a great economy booster, had it been limited to a very short term...much like the new deal. patents and intellectual property laws were abused to the point of isolating a specific industry to benefit just a few. That is the fault of both parties. Blame the new deal for fostering big business to get people working. Blame this new fascism for putting profit on the stock market and hampering small business.

Quote:

Originally Posted by shakran

I guarantee you this dks - you can take this to the bank. The current system of capitalism is not sustainable. A revolution is coming - it's just a question of when - and the longer it takes to get here, the worse it's gonna be when it does.

Reagan kicked off the idea that it would be terribly fun to widen the gap between rich and not-rich. Now it's a yawning chasm - that's simply not sustainable. Eventually the poor and middle class will be fed up with watching the country's elite spend more money in a day than they make in a year while they worry about having enough money to buy groceries. Eventually that anger will reach a breaking point. It's happened before (the French revolution comes to mind) and it will happen again, I guarantee it.

how will this revolution be attained? sticks and stones? what will happen when your property is taken away to increase a tax base? what will you do when your living area will be searched for anything illegal, at will? No revolution will happen if people do not have the means.

dc_dux · 01-12-2007, 06:26 AM

Quote:

It has alot more to do with the whole way the constitution is now 'interpreted',

dk....the founding fathers knowingingly and wisely drafted a Constitution in very general terms leaving it open to future interpretation to meet changing and evolving nature of the country.

The Supreme Court's power of "judicial review" was confirmed in 1803, when it was invoked by Chief Justice John Marshall in Marbury v. Madison. In this decision, the Chief Justice asserted that the Supreme Court's responsibility to overturn unconstitutional legislation was a necessary consequence of its sworn duty to uphold the Constitution. That oath could not be fulfilled any other way. "It is emphatically the province of the judicial department to say what the law is," he declared.

As Marshall also noted in McCulloch v. Maryland, a constitution that attempted to detail every aspect of its own application "would partake of the prolixity of a legal code, and could scarcely be embraced by the human mind . . . . Its nature, therefore, requires that only its great outlines should be marked, its important objects designated and minor ingredients which compose those objects be deduced from the nature of the objects themselves."

What it comes down to is that the interpretation in 20th and 21st century American may be more expansive than in the 19th century....a natural progression envisioned by the founding fathers.

But decisions that you dont agree with are hardly a communists/socialist plot. While many basic interpretations of Constitutional rights stand the test of time, a 19th century interpretation of a more complex 21st century law or government action, which you seem to suggest is the correct role of the Court, would be as irrelevant and irresponsibile as it is ignorant.

shakran · 01-12-2007, 06:52 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by dksuddeth

I have NEVER said that the republicans have done much better than anyone else. They may have done less damage, but only slightly.

Alright, I'll give you that, my apologies.

Quote:

Also, what we have today is not capitalism, unless you wish to redefine capitalism.

Yes, it is. The almighty dollar is the only thing that matters. That's capitalism in a nutshell.

Quote:

If people still wish to deny that what we have is fascism, well they can deny all they want, but thats still what we have.

Considering you still haven't managed to point us to a definition of fascism that differs enough from it's actual definition to make your point valid, I'm gonna go ahead and call BS on that one.

Quote:

The socialists changed so much of the united states until Reagan that they won. The only thing that the republicans have done is alter the new deal to benefit big business, which still isn't capitalism.

Socialism and big business are not generally used in the same sentence - at least not without a derisive snort.

Quote:

Trickle down economics would have been a great economy booster, had it been limited to a very short term

If trickle down economics would have worked at all (it wouldn't, it's inherently flawed) it would have had to be instituted more than short term, because it would take awhile for that wealth to trickle down to the masses. Of course, the fact that it simply cannot work, at all, ever, makes all of this moot.

Quote:

...much like the new deal. patents and intellectual property laws were abused to the point of isolating a specific industry to benefit just a few. That is the fault of both parties. Blame the new deal for fostering big business to get people working.

The new deal got people jobs. Twisting that idea into allowing corporations to get away with damn near anything was never part of the new deal.

Quote:

Blame this new fascism

It's not fascism. Go get a dictionary.

Quote:

for putting profit on the stock market and hampering small business.

If you think the problem stops at the stock market, you've got another think coming. It's corporate greed, plain and simple. Look, if we're going purely on stock performance, then we don't have to pay the CEO hundreds of millions of dollars - - no, the CEO is screwing over the little guy because it means he gets one more mansion.

Quote:

how will this revolution be attained? sticks and stones?

Pure economics. Used to be laborers were vastly underpaid and overworked. Then they got together and formed unions. That's coming for the white collar workers as well - - it's the only way for them to survive.

Quote:

what will happen when your property is taken away to increase a tax base?

What do you mean WHEN? It's already happening. Eminent domain has turned into "we'll steal your land and give it to the highest bidder."

Quote:

what will you do when your living area will be searched for anything illegal, at will?

That has absolutely nothing to do with the topic at hand.

Quote:

No revolution will happen if people do not have the means.

OK fine, you want people to have guns. Stop bringing EVERY thread around to that, it's old and annoying. I'm not even going to address it here because, again, it has nothing to do with this topic.

I'll tell you how government can stop this mass downsizing trend that's destroying the middle class. Pass a two-fronted legislation requiring unemployment benefits for at least a decade after you downsize someone, and requiring large companies to extend the same benefits to independent contractors as they do to regular employees. Remove the profitability of treating people like chattel, and the corporations will stop doing it. It's a whole lot cheaper to keep that well trained worker on than it is to pay his salary for 10 years AND pay the guy in India who took over his job.

Legislation taxing the holy crap out of imported labor would also help - I'm thinking a variable tax based on the gap between the US worker and his foreign replacement. If your US worker made $20 an hour, and your 3rd world worker makes $1, then the tax is $19 an hour. Remove the profit from the unpalatable activities, and they'll magically stop.

Willravel · 01-12-2007, 09:18 AM

Bottom line, to end this threadjack, the US is not even close to being socialist in any way. Suggesting so shows a massive misunderstanding of both socialism and the world around us. Also, this thread has nothing to do with guns. How would you like it if I brought up the 9/11 conspiracy in every thread?

Chimera · 01-15-2007, 02:55 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by shakran

........

as far as answers, mixedmedia, there are no good answers. This situation is unwinnable. We pull out, we're screwed. We stay there, we're screwed. Fact is, Bush has gotten us into one HELL of a mess, and there is absolutely NO course of action we can take at this point that will be palatable.

Given that, we should leave. Now. We can't do any good there, at least we can save a few soldier's lives.

And, There it is.....dont you just hate it when reality gets Ugly?

desal75 · 01-15-2007, 06:58 AM

I guess a lot depends on what you might consider palatable.

shakran · 01-15-2007, 07:11 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by desal75

I guess a lot depends on what you might consider palatable.

Well, ok, if you consider it palatable to have killed tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis and over 3,000 Americans in pursuit of an illegal war that the president had to lie to get us in to. . . I guess we'll just have to disagree.

If you consider it palatable to now be faced with the reality that absolutely nothing can prevent an Iraqi civil war, and probably nothing can prevent a regional war in the Persian Gulf, we'll have to disagree there as well.

ratbastid · 01-15-2007, 07:19 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by aceventura3

My position won't change. I would say the same about Republicans. Republincan's don't have the same history and level of hypocracy as do Democrats. If this was just a question of debating troop levels, I would join the debate on that subject, but we are still debating being in the war.

I really don't respect Democratic leadership wanting to wait for poll results before laying out a specific alternative to Bush's plan. Given the circumstances why haven't they started their hearings? Is there anything more imortant today, right now?

NOW you're thinking like George!

What you've said here is: My opinion is right, and won't ever change. Others who disagree with me are wrong, and are hypocrites, and probably bad people. And I have no respect for elected representatives who are actually interested in their constituents' views--especially not when 70-odd percent of those constituents disagree with me. Better things keep going the disastrous way they're going (in fact, let's pour some gas on the fire), because I believe in it without any evidence or support or rationale for that belief.

Even Bush admitted errors this week. Can you really be so narrow-minded?

desal75 · 01-15-2007, 07:51 AM

Shakran, if only the world were that black and white.

I deeply wish literally every political decision in this country didn't come down to party lines.

mixedmedia · 01-15-2007, 08:08 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Chimera

And, There it is.....dont you just hate it when reality gets Ugly?

Other than your possibly being right
I'm still uncomfortable when our resignation becomes trite

I'm not at all sure that there is nothing we can do to secure a more functional and secure Iraq.

And quite frankly (I say to no one in particular), us losing military personnel doesn't even enter into the equation of whether we should leave or not. Granted, that is just my opinion, but I find discussions of how many US soldiers we're losing to be distasteful considering what is happening in Iraq now. I think we're all familiar with the casualty numbers. Not to mention that many of the people who would be able to contribute to the maintenance of a functioning, healthy society are either dead or have fled the country with their families. We are responsible for it now. I can't settle for the purely political "republicans did it, it's not our problem now" point of view. I can't wrap my head around that kind of aloofness.

shakran · 01-15-2007, 08:25 AM

I don't have that viewpoint Mixed. I mean, yes, Republicans did it, and they were dumbasses for doing it, but that doesn't mean we can ignore the problem.

However, if we stay the country will degenerate into years of bloody civil war.

If we leave the country will degenerate into years of bloody civil war.

there is NO way to prevent the civil war. None. At all. It's like a tire fire. Once it gets going, you are NOT going to put it out. It will burn until it's out of fuel. You have 2 choices. Send your firefighters in where they might get hurt and inhale toxic fumes, and do absolutely nothing towards getting the fire out, or pull 'em back and just watch it burn. Either way, the result in the tire pile is the same, but the 2nd option at least lets you preserve the life and health of your firefighters.

Iraq is no different. We've sparked the conflagration. It's going to happen. Nothing will stop it. Why not at least pull our guys back so they don't get hurt any more than they already have?

The parallels of this war to Vietnam are becoming more obvious every day. Back then we said "oh we can't pull out, what will they do without us," and it was only when people finally realized that the country was sunk with or without us that we finally pulled out.

The fact is that when we stick our nose in where it doesn't belong, bad things happen - especially if we let incompetent boobs that couldn't even lead a kid to the crapper take charge.

And now not only does Mr. Bush want to stay in Iraq where we will do precisely no good, he wants to move on to Iran as well. This insanity has got to stop some time - it may as well be now.

Oh, and desal75, if you're going to make fun little snips at what those of us in this thread have to say, perhaps you should come out with an opinion of your own. These little quips frankly make you look more like a troll than a debater. If you think I'm seeing the world black and white then please, by all means, educate me. Show me where the grey is.

If you think it all depends on what I call palatable, then give us your definition of palatable and tell us your solution.

Otherwise you're just taking useless pot shots which might work on Fark, but around here, we're not very impressed by it.

dc_dux · 01-15-2007, 09:24 AM

Quote:

The parallels of this war to Vietnam are becoming more obvious every day. .

I think the parallels have become more like Bosnia, but sectarian rather than ethnic. As the violence and ethnic cleansing became unbearable in the fomer Repub of Yugoslavia, all parties, including the US, realized that there was no military solution and only diplomatic and political solutions could bring peace.

And thus, the Datyon accords:

Quote:

On Nov. 21, 1995, after 21 days of intensive negotiations at an anything-but-luxurious American Air Force base in Dayton, Ohio, the three Bosnian leaders initialed a peace agreement and 11 annexes, known as the Dayton accords, to try to bring an end to nearly four years of terror and killing in the former Yugoslavia. About 250,000 people died and another 2.7 million were turned into refugees.

The accords went into effect when the leaders -- Alijia Izetbegovic of Bosnia, Franjo Tudjman of Croatia and Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia -- formally signed the pact in Paris on Dec. 14. NATO troops known as the Implementation Force, or IFOR, took over from United Nations troops in Bosnia on Dec. 20, known as "D-day," starting the clock on a series of deadlines running for a year and bringing some 60,000 NATO troops, nearly 20,000 of them American, to keep the peace in Bosnia.

http://www.nytimes.com/specials/bosn...xt/dayton.html

The Dayton Peace Accords

Twenty-one days of negotiations and they came to a workable solution.

It could work in Iraq, with the only difference being to minimize the US role and face in the process and let Sunnis and Shia, through the Arab League, conduct the negotiations and replace US forces with an Arab Implementatin force.

Its hardly a perfect solution, but IMO, more likely to lead to the cessation of sectarian violence then adding more US troops and maintaing a US occupation.

Before anyone laughs it off, I do recognize that al Queda and other outside terrorists now in Iraq, although small in number, are not open to peace negotations. But they can be marginalized if the US presence is removed and the Iraq people and regional powers (Saudis and Egypt putting political pressure on Iran) demonstrate a commitment to route them out.

The result would be providing for three self-governed regions in Iraq, under a loose central government. The current Iraq was a creation of western geo-political colonialiism. Its time to give it up.

mixedmedia · 01-15-2007, 09:45 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by shakran

I don't have that viewpoint Mixed. I mean, yes, Republicans did it, and they were dumbasses for doing it, but that doesn't mean we can ignore the problem.

Thank you for clarifying your point of view, shakran. I didn't want to point fingers and accuse you of the crime of lassitude.

But that said, I do believe there is a measure of that attitude behind the popular pressure for an immediate withdrawal from Iraq. I've grown quite skeptical of the political imperatives of both parties on this issue. Surprise!

Your tire fire analogy is very compelling. I'm just not sure we are dealing with a conflagration out of control, yet. I'm just not sure.

roachboy · 01-15-2007, 09:51 AM

there might be a way out of the iraq mess via an internationalization of the conflict. the americans would have to recognize that there is no way out FOR THEM because they are and have been from the outset--that is from the invasion--a party within the civil war.

jacques chirac proposed an international congress of some unspecified type that would address these problems last week: i started a thread about it, which went nowhere.
one option would be the un.
another would be something like a congress of vienna, i dont know: but the idea seems far more likely to actually accomplish something positive in iraq than any of the options that are on the table right now--i understand that something like this is an element of biden's plan for iraq as well.

what i see as the primary obstable to this is that from the far right/neocon viewpoint occupied by the bush people, any such internationalization of the conflict would be tantamount to defeat. so the primary obstacle is the hyper-nationalism of the bush administration, the neocon "realism" that remains intact (even after its obvious pulverization by events)---from the start, i have thought that the best document for thinking about the rationale behind the invasion was the project for a new american century website: if you look at it, it is clear that this iraq war is about the first iraq war and the Problem was less saddam hussein than it was the un.

a subtext for the "surge" appears to be saber rattling at iran:

Quote:

Iran target of US Gulf military moves, Gates says

Mark Tran and agencies
Monday January 15, 2007
Guardian Unlimited

Increased US military activity in the Gulf is aimed at Iran's "very negative" behaviour, the Bush administration said today.

The defence secretary, Robert Gates, told reporters that the decision to deploy a Patriot missile battalion and a second aircraft carrier to the Gulf in conjunction with a "surge" of troops in Iraq was designed to show Iran that the US was not "overcommitted" in Iraq.

Speaking in Brussels after meeting Nato officials, Mr Gates said: "We are simply reaffirming that statement of the importance of the Gulf region to the United States and our determination to be an ongoing strong presence in that area for a long time into the future."

Article continues

His remarks followed tough comments on Iran at the weekend from other senior US officials. The vice-president, Dick Cheney, accused Iran of "fishing in troubled waters inside Iraq", while the national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, said the US was "going to need to deal with what Iran is doing inside Iraq".

Such remarks, following the prospect of "hot pursuit" raids into Iran as raised by George Bush in his televised address last week, have fuelled speculation that the US is softening up the American public for possible action against Tehran.

The increasingly confrontational pose struck by the US is a repudiation of one of the key recommendations of the Iraq Study Group, which called for the start of a dialogue with Iran and Syria in an effort to extricate the US from Iraq.

Mr Gates, who as recently as 2004 publicly called for diplomatic engagement with Iran, said the situation was now different. In 2004, Iran was concerned by the presence of US forces on its eastern and western borders, in Iraq and Afghanistan, but its behaviour had changed.

"The Iranians clearly believe that we are tied down in Iraq, that they have the initiative, that they are in position to press us in many ways," he said. "They are doing nothing to be constructive in Iraq at this point."

"And so the Iranians are acting in a very negative way in many respects. My view is that when the Iranians are prepared to play a constructive role in dealing with some of these problems then there might be opportunities for engagement."

Besides concerns about Iran's nuclear programme, the US has accused Tehran of supporting Shia militia and of not doing enough to stop foreign fighters from infiltrating Iraq.

US-led forces in northern Iraq arrested five Iranians last week who the US military says were connected to an Iranian Revolutionary Guard faction that funds and arms insurgents in Iraq - a claim Iran has rejected.

Meanwhile, Iran said it was installing 3,000 centrifuges, effectively confirming that its nuclear programme was running behind schedule as these devices for uranium enrichment were meant to have been in place by the end of last year.

"We are moving toward the production of nuclear fuel, which requires 3,000 centrifuges and more than this figure," the government spokesman Gholamhossein Elham told a news conference. "This programme is being carried out and moving toward completion."

At the weekend, Iran dismissed reports from Europe that its uranium enrichment programme had stalled. Enriched uranium is used as fuel in nuclear reactors and, at a higher degree of enrichment, in atomic bombs.

Iran has condemned as "invalid" and "illegal" a UN security council resolution that imposed sanctions on it last month for its refusal to halt uranium enrichment.

source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/iran/story/0,,1990962,00.html

and this at a point when iran really must be included in a larger dialogue that would enable the americans to make themselves less central to the debacle that they have unleashed (thanks, bushco)....

so with the bush administration still anywhere near power, it seems to me that the americans have no good options. there ARE options, but the ideological worldview of the bush people seem to preclude them. after losing in the polls, the right is now hiding a bit of its ideological underpinnings: they are still as ideologically incoherent as before november, but now prefer to downplay ideology and instead to act as though its alternative universe was a fact of nature, its strategy reasonable and its sense of alternatives legitimate. reality has demonstrated that none of this is true. the people of the us, despite republican gerrymandering efforts, rejected the policies of bushco. the american system of governance is now an ongoing demonstration of the problematic version of democracy we have: bushco is still in power and is still in a position to impose its blinkered, dysfunctional worldview on iraq, on american troops, on their families, on all of us, on the international community--and there appears to be nothing to be done about it.

this does not mean that there are no alternatives: but it does mean that with george w bush in power, these alternatives will not be explored.

meanwhile, again, lots of people will die as the far right cycles through version after version of its idiotic politics based on its idiotic fetishism of the american nation-state as global military hegemon. lots of people die and the bush administration is not, and in all probablility will not be held to account for it. quite the system we have here.

dc_dux · 01-15-2007, 10:11 AM

More on the Biden plan:
http://www.planforiraq.com/

desal75 · 01-15-2007, 10:45 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by shakran

Oh, and desal75, if you're going to make fun little snips at what those of us in this thread have to say, perhaps you should come out with an opinion of your own. These little quips frankly make you look more like a troll than a debater. If you think I'm seeing the world black and white then please, by all means, educate me. Show me where the grey is.

If you think it all depends on what I call palatable, then give us your definition of palatable and tell us your solution.

Otherwise you're just taking useless pot shots which might work on Fark, but around here, we're not very impressed by it.

Maybe I'm just a succinct person Shakran.

And I would think calling another's post useless is more in the vein of being a troll than anything I said. I did not make a personal attack upon you and I'm at a loss to explain why you retaliated the way you did but I guess that is neither here nor there. Its not my job to educate you. Its not the job of this forum to educate you. As far as I know this is a place to express ones political ideas.

Finally, I apoligize for ever giving you the idea that I would post to impress anyone.

Moskie · 01-15-2007, 11:00 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by desal75

As far as I know this is a place to express ones political ideas.

...which you haven't done.

desal75 · 01-15-2007, 11:41 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by desal75

I deeply wish literally every political decision in this country didn't come down to party lines.

It may not be much but I would argue that this qualifies.

Moskie · 01-15-2007, 12:09 PM

At the risk of sounding elitist, I'll reiterate what shakran said: it might qualify on Fark, but we'd prefer a little more "meat" in the expression of your political ideas here.

So, if you please: tell us what you feel is "palatable." Show us the gray area between the black and white you mentioned.

desal75 · 01-15-2007, 01:23 PM

I'm intrigued by the way this thread has become less about politics and more about teaching me how to use this forum. What is Fark anyway?

As for palatable, I wasn't trying to force what I think is or isn't on anyone. I was simply stating that what is needed is different to different people. Some would argue that any loss of life due to war is unnecessary. Others see justifiable reasons for killing and death, no matter on what scale.

The grey area is that in any conflict there is no easy answer. Especially in conflicts like Iraq where the opposition isn't easily distinguished and the goals not easily expressed. Even the notion of winning or losing a conflict such as this is not easily defined. Some would say victory has already been achieved while some would argue that victory can never be attained. The grey is that both arguements have merit.

The_Jazz · 01-15-2007, 02:03 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by desal75

I'm intrigued by the way this thread has become less about politics and more about teaching me how to use this forum. What is Fark anyway?

As for palatable, I wasn't trying to force what I think is or isn't on anyone. I was simply stating that what is needed is different to different people. Some would argue that any loss of life due to war is unnecessary. Others see justifiable reasons for killing and death, no matter on what scale.

The grey area is that in any conflict there is no easy answer. Especially in conflicts like Iraq where the opposition isn't easily distinguished and the goals not easily expressed. Even the notion of winning or losing a conflict such as this is not easily defined. Some would say victory has already been achieved while some would argue that victory can never be attained. The grey is that both arguements have merit.

Thank you for finally expressing an opinion beyond a soundbite/drive-by.

Back on topic, I doubt that I can find anyone stupid enough to try to argue that Iraq isn't SOME form of quagmire at this point, at least based on the information we have now. We're back to figuring out the "least bad" option to extricate ourselves whiles still maintaining some sort of dignity. In the meantime, I just received an email from a client purported to have originated from some Marines in Iraq who, by standing in formation, spelled out something to the effect of "we remember 9/11 and why we are here" despite the fact that the upper echelons of government have admitted that there's no real plausible link between the Saddam regime and the terrorist attacks. I'm starting to come to the conclusion that any sort of pullback without at least the facade of victory would do long-term damage to the national psyche. It may be that that damage is necessary or even welcomed, but I'm not sure of either.

roachboy · 01-15-2007, 02:08 PM

mr. jazz: what exactly is the national psyche?
just wondering.
i really havent any idea.

my husky grows impatient, wanting to go outside and flounce about in the pseudo-snow, so maybe more later.

aceventura3 · 01-15-2007, 02:25 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by The_Jazz

We're back to figuring out the "least bad" option to extricate ourselves whiles still maintaining some sort of dignity.

Some of us, including the Bush administration, still believe we can win, that we can accomplish our original goals.

Quote:

In the meantime, I just received an email from a client purported to have originated from some Marines in Iraq who, by standing in formation, spelled out something to the effect of "we remember 9/11 and why we are here" despite the fact that the upper echelons of government have admitted that there's no real plausible link between the Saddam regime and the terrorist attacks.

Sadaam is dead. Sadaam's regime no longer exists.
The connection with 9/11 is Islamic extremist are at war with us. The war front is currently in Iraq. If we leave Iraq, the war won't end. If Islamic extremist obtain and hold Iraq they will expand their offensive. I don't know what would be next, but you can believe the war will continue.

Quote:

I'm starting to come to the conclusion that any sort of pullback without at least the facade of victory would do long-term damage to the national psyche. It may be that that damage is necessary or even welcomed, but I'm not sure of either.

I think you nailed it. Some think this is some kind of a "feel good war", "a war of choice", " a war of US emperialism", etc, etc. This is a war to defend our freedom and the freedom of billions of people in the world, it is not about "national psyche" but far too many people see it in those terms or in terms of "feelings".

The_Jazz · 01-15-2007, 02:34 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by roachboy

mr. jazz: what exactly is the national psyche?
just wondering.
i really havent any idea.

Exactly? I don't know if I can answer it that way, but I can give you my opinion. In my above post, I meant middle America's pride in the armed forces, their inability to be critical of servicemen and -women and the willingness to enforce patriotism. Basically the vast majority of Americans who see "Born in the USA" as an anthem instead of the protest song that Springsteen meant. Those folks aren't stupid although they allow themselves to be blinded by the glare of the flag sometimes. When Bush declared "victory", that was his target audience. Obviously, they've come to realize that the declaration was something substantially different than the reality of the situation, and without any sort of way to extricate ourselves (which is what John Q. Public now seems to want) with a measure of dignity, I can only see even more voter apathy ahead, which is the worst way to make any changes to the system beyond the calls for violent revolution that go echoing through TFP on a regular basis. As a student of revolutions (1905, 1917-24 in Russia), I'm honestly afraid for me and my family should something like that happen here.

mixedmedia · 01-15-2007, 02:45 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by aceventura3

Sadaam is dead. Sadaam's regime no longer exists.
The connection with 9/11 is Islamic extremist are at war with us. The war front is currently in Iraq. If we leave Iraq, the war won't end. If Islamic extremist obtain and hold Iraq they will expand their offensive. I don't know what would be next, but you can believe the war will continue.

So do you consider Saddam to have been an Islamic extremist?

host · 01-15-2007, 02:46 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by roachboy

mr. jazz: what exactly is the national psyche?
just wondering.
i really havent any idea.

my husky grows impatient, wanting to go outside and flounce about in the pseudo-snow, so maybe more later.

Of course you wouldn't know what it is, roachboy. Reagan and Bush '41 believed it existed, and they successfully manipulated it to lull the sheeple into a state of amnesia induced, national pride and self satisfaction:

Quote:

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articl...g/ai_102119713
Can Vietnam awaken us again? Teaching the literature of the Vietnam War - 1
Radical Teacher, Spring, 2003 by H. Bruce Franklin

<b>....President George Bush the First was remarkably frank about the need to brainwash us.</b> As he explained in his 1989 inaugural address, the problem is that we still retain our memory: "The final lesson of Vietnam is that no great nation can long afford to be sundered by a memory." What Bush meant by "Vietnam" by then was already no longer a country or even a war. Vietnam was something that had happened to us, an event that had divided, wounded, and victimized America. As the grotesque tide of one widely-adopted history textbook puts it: Vietnam: An American Ordeal? (3)

In that 1989 inaugural speech, Bush explicitly blamed "Vietnam" for all the "divisiveness" in America and the lack of trust in our government. Just two years later, gloating over what seemed America's glorious defeat of Iraq, he jubilantly boasted to a nation festooned in jingoist yellow ribbons, "By God, we've kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all!" (4)

The "Vietnam syndrome" had entered America's cultural vocabulary in a 1980 campaign speech by Ronald Reagan, the same speech in which he redefined the Vietnam War as "a noble cause." (5)

By the late 1970s, the Vietnamese were already being transformed into fiendish torturers of heroic American POWs. By the mid 1990s, they were becoming erased from the picture altogether. Want a snapshot of the cultural progression from the late 1970s to the mid 1990s? The Academy Award for Best Picture of 1978 went to The Deer Hunter, which systematically replaced crucial images from the Vietnam War with their precise opposites, meticulously reversing the roles of victims and victimizers. The Academy Award for Best Picture of 1994 went to Forrest Gump, which projects Vietnam as merely an uninhabited jungle that for inscrutable reasons shoots at nice American boys who happen to be passing through. And from then on, one loveable American icon would be Gump, someone incapable of knowing or understanding history.

With the erasure of history came the reign of fantasy: a war fought with one hand behind our back; an invasion of the democratic nation of "South Vietnam" by the communists of "North Vietnam"; betrayal by the liberal media, pinko professors, and Jane Fonda; returning veterans spat upon by hippies; hundreds of POWs forsaken after the war to be tortured for decades; and so on.

Emerging from the quarter century of post-Vietnam War American fantasy are the students sitting in our college classrooms today. That fantasy lives inside their minds, its myths and phony images filtering and obscuring their vision of history, of America's actions in today's world, and even of themselves. This should not be looked upon as merely an impediment to education, or worse still, some infection to be cured with a dose of counter-brainwashing brainwashing.

<b>Why? Because these students are in some senses the world's greatest experts on late 20th-century and early 21st-century American culture.</b> They bring into the classroom invaluable experience and potential expertise on the current cultural role of "Vietnam." For them, the words "Vietnam" and "the Sixties" are powerful, complex, and disquieting signifiers. Precisely because those signifiers have become so falsified, today's students are potentially capable of experiencing something close to what millions of us experienced during the war: a direct confrontation with one's own false consciousness. For many of us, this was the most literally radicalizing experience, because it made us understand the very roots of our own perception of historical and cultural reality. We realized that we had indeed been brainwashed, and we learned who did it and why. We comprehended how 1950s American culture had made the Vietnam War possible. For many of us involved in the genesis of the Radical Caucus, we even began to see how thi s culture had determined how we had been reading and teaching literature, and even which literature we had been choosing to read and teach, and so we began to change our ways...

(1.) Originally presented on December 28, 2002, to the Radical Caucus at the Modern Language Association Convention, this paper will (alas) probably be relevant for quite a while to come.

(2.) For an instructive history, see the Introduction to Louis Kampf and Paul Lauter, eds., The Politics of Literature: Dissenting Essays in the Teaching of English (New York: Random House, 1972).

(3.) This 1990 text written by George Donelson Moss and published by Prentice-Hall, a subsidiary of Viacom, had gone through three editions by 1998. Among the important studies that have explored how the war has been transformed into a trauma inflicted not by America on Vietnam but by Vietnam on America, see Susan Jeffords, The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War (Bloomington, 1989); Fred Turner, Echoes of Combat: The Vietnam War in American Memory (New York, 1996); Keith Beattie, The Scar that Binds: American Culture and the Vietnam War (New York, 1998).

(4.) "Kicking the Vietnam Syndrome,"' Washington Post, March 4, 1991.

(5.) Turner, Echoes of Combat, 63; Arnold R. Isaacs, Vietnam Shadows: The War, Its Ghost, and Its Legacy (Baltimore, 1997), 49.

Quote:

http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~hbf/london.html
“‘Vietnam’ in the New American Century”

by H. Bruce Franklin

.....For years, the American people refused to support hostilities against Vietnam.Indeed, the fall of 1945 was the beginning of the American movement against the Vietnam War.When those U.S. troopships arrived in Saigon, they were greeted and saluted on the docks by Japanese soldiers, uniformed and rearmed by British troops under the command of General Douglas Gracey.The enlisted men on the crews of these troopships then all drew up and signed letters and petitions to Congress and the President denouncing these "imperialist policies" and the use of American ships "to subjugate the native population" of Vietnam.

The American movement against the war, initiated by these hundreds of sailors, kept growing in the nine years leading to French defeat in 1954.In April of that year, on the eve of the French surrender, Vice President Richard Nixon declared that the United States may "have to send troops there" because "the Vietnamese lack the ability to conduct a war or govern themselves."[5]This trial balloon launched by the White House sparked a firestorm of protest against what some called the "Nixon War."[6]

Thousands of letters and telegrams opposing U.S. intervention deluged the White House.An American Legion division with 78,000 members demanded that "the United States should refrain from dispatching any of its Armed Forces to participate as combatants in the fighting in Indochina."[7]There were public outcries against "colonialism" and "imperialism."Senators from both parties rose to denounce any contemplation of sending U.S. soldiers to Indochina.For example, Senator Ed Johnson of Colorado declared on the Senate floor:"I am against sending American GI's into the mud and muck of Indochina on a blood-letting spree to perpetuate colonialism and white man's exploitation in Asia."[8]By mid-May, a Gallup poll revealed that 68% of those surveyed were against sending U.S. troops to Indochina.[9]So the Eisenhower Administration was forced into fighting a war hidden from the American people, a covert war.The first stage was creating in June the puppet regime of Ngo Dinh Diem, creating a new proxy army, and launching terrorist and other secret operations orchestrated by Edward Lansdale.All this began before the Geneva Conference concluded, with its recognition that Vietnam was a single, independent nation and an agreement that French and DRV military forces would regroup on either side of the 17th parallel, a "military demarcation line" that "should not in any way be interpreted as constituting a political or territorial boundary."[10]It would take Vietnam 19 years to force Washington to accept these agreements.

Nine years after Geneva, the Kennedy Administration felt itself forced into another conspiracy, this one to remove Diem and replace him with generals on the Pentagon's payroll.As U.S. Ambassador to Saigon Henry Cabot Lodge wrote in a top-secret cable in August 1963: "We are embarked on a course from which there is no respectable turning back: the overthrow of the Diem government. . . . there is no turning back because there is no possibility, in my view, that the war can be won under a Diem administration, still less that any member of the family can govern the country in a way to gain the support of the only people who count, i.e., the educated class in and out of government service--not to mention the American people."[11]

The coup, including the assassination of Diem, took place in the first week of November.Three weeks later, President Kennedy was assassinated.Within 72 hours, newly installed President Lyndon Baines Johnson signed off on NSAM 273, the top-secret plan for a full-scale U.S. war in Vietnam.A key section of NSAM 273, entitled "Plausibility of Denial," essentially asked for an assessment of whether the American people would be stupid or gullible enough to believe the government's lies when it denied the covert air, sea, and land attacks on northern Vietnam that would lead up to the open dispatch of combat forces.Meanwhile, President Johnson's main foreign-policy campaign gambit in 1964, repeated over and over again, was his promise that "I shall never send American boys to Asia to do the job that Asian boys should do."As soon as he was inaugurated as an elected president, after burying openly hawkish Barry Goldwater in a record landslide, Johnson sent in the Marines and began overt non-stop bombing of the north.

In that great 1974 documentary Hearts and Minds, Daniel Ellsberg outlines how "the American people" were "lied to month-by-month" about Vietnam by Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, and says "It's a tribute to the American public that their leaders perceived they had to be lied to." But then he pauses and adds, "It's no tribute to us that it was so easy."

The lies did not stop when military combat ended in 1975, partly because they were necessary to legitimize that remorseless economic and political war Washington waged against Vietnam for the ensuing quarter of a century.Indeed, by 1978 a cultural juggernaut designed to reimage the war was beginning to overwhelm and replace everything we had remembered with its opposite.

The key cultural text here is The Deer Hunter.This lavishly-financed celluloid fantasy was sanctified by four Academy Awards, capped by Best Picture--an award presented appropriately enough by John Wayne, that World War II draft dodger who received a Congressional Gold Medal for being a make-believe warrior hero.With wicked virtuosity, The Deer Hunter transformed the most powerful and influential images of the war, images deeply embedded in American culture, into their precise opposites.The first scene in Vietnam shows North Vietnamese helicopters napalming a South Vietnamese village, where the surviving women and children are then slaughtered by North Vietnamese Communists.This My Lai style massacre is halted by the first American to appear in this fantasy of Vietnam, Robert De Niro as a lone heroic guerilla.The tiger cages in which we tortured and crippled thousands of Vietnamese become tiger cages in which they try to cripple us.The bodies of Vietnamese prisoners being hurled from helicopters by American interrogators became American prisoners falling from helicopters.One of the most potent images of the real war was the photograph of Saigon secret-police chief General Loan killing an unarmed "Viet Cong suspect," his arms bound behind his back, with a revolver held to his right temple.The Deer Hunter artfully reverses this image, with American prisoners forced by sadistic Communist officers to play Russian roulette with a revolver held to their right temple below a portrait of Ho Chi Minh.The American POWs in The Deer Hunter are all working-class GIs, unlike the reality in which all but a handful of the POWs were flight officers.(And most of the enlisted POWs were in the Peace Committee, allied with their Vietnamese captors.)[12]

The Deer Hunter succeeded not only in reversing key images of the war but in helping to transform U.S. prisoners of war into the most potent symbols of American manhood. It was the trailblazer for the POW/MIA cult movies, beginning with Uncommon Valor starring Gene Hackman (1983), the first of Chuck Norris's Missing in Action films (1984), and of course Sylvester Stallone's Rambo (1985).Wounded, tortured, imprisoned, victimized by bureaucracy and a feminized culture, American manhood now fought back as super-muscled heroes.By 1988, three years after he singlehandedly won the last phase of the Vietnam War by freeing the POWs, Rambo was blasting the Russian hordes on another battlefield: Afghanistan.

The year after the Motion Picture Academy canonized The Deer Hunter, another Hollywood product--Ronald Reagan--brilliantly reimaged the Vietnam War as part of his campaign to capture the White House.During the 1980 election campaign, Reagan coined the "Vietnam syndrome" metaphor and, in the same speech to a Veterans of Foreign Wars conference, redefined the war as a "noble cause."[13]By 1982, then President Reagan was articulating a version of the history of the Vietnam War, every sentence of which was demonstrably false.[14]<h3>By the end of the 1980s, the matrix of illusions necessary for endless imperial warfare was in place and functioning with potency.The two great myths--the spat-upon veteran and postwar POWs--were deeply embedded in the national psyche.What was needed next was erasure of memory of the reality.</h3>

The cultural march from demonization of the Vietnamese in the late 1970s to eradication in the 1990s was vividly projected by Hollywood.Whereas the Academy Award for the Best Picture of 1978 went to The Deer Hunterwith its meticulously reversed images of victims and victimizers, the winner of the Academy Award for the Best Picture of 1994 was Forrest Gump, which projects Vietnam as merely an uninhabited jungle that for inscrutable reasons shoots at nice American boys who happen to be marching through.And our iconic hero is now a man constitutionally incapable of understanding history.

How did we get to Gumpify "Vietnam"?

Throughout the decades that the United States was waging war in Vietnam, no incoming president uttered the word "Vietnam" in his inaugural address.[15]Ronald Reagan, in his 1981 inaugural speech, did include "a place called Vietnam" in his list of battlefields where Americans had fought in the twentieth century.But it was not until 1989 that a newly-elected president actually said anything about the Vietnam War.What he said was: forget it.

It was George Bush the First who broke the silence with these words explicitly calling for erasure:"The final lesson of Vietnam is that no great nation can long afford to be sundered by a memory."Note that by now "Vietnam" was no longer a country or even "a place called Vietnam," as his predecessor had put it. It had become a war, an American war.Or not even a war. It was an American tragedy, an event that had divided and wounded America. Bush's speech went on to blame "Vietnam" for the "divisiveness," the "hard looks" in Congress, the challenging of "each other's motives," and the fact that "our great parties have too often been far apart and untrusting of each other." "It has been this way since Vietnam," he lamented.[16]

Two years later, Bush began the war against Iraq with the promise that “this will not be another Vietnam.”[17]Inextricably intertwined with "Vietnam," "Iraq" has also become a construct of simulations, an illusionary reality continually being spun.If the Vietnam War is the longest U.S. foreign war, the Iraq war is the second longest.After all, by now it has already been going on for fourteen years, through three American administrations.

Before U.S. and allied ground troops withdrew in 1991 from the parts of Iraq they had invaded, the United States, with assistance from Britain and France, began to set up a form of aerial occupation and control, the so-called no-fly zones.This was an application of a strategy for imperial rule from the air developed by Britain back in the 1920s, then named "Control without Occupation."Britain tried this out first in 1922.Where?In Iraq.The first RAF report gleefully described the panic the air raids evoked among the "natives" of Baghdad, especially the terrified women and children: "Many of them jumped into a lake, making a good target for the machine guns."[18]The no-fly zones in continual operation between the 1991 and 2003 invasions had two interrelated purposes, both preconditions for eventual full occupation and control

1) detaching the oil-rich regions of the north and south from central control, thus destroying the economic and political coherence of the nation; and (2) providing pretexts for ongoing aerial bombing campaigns designed to degrade and ultimately neutralize Iraq's military defense system.

The fantasy “Vietnam” has proved crucial to launching and maintaining the war against Iraq.In 1991, the myth of the spat-upon Vietnam veteran was invoked to discredit the burgeoning antiwar movement and to create the emotional support necessary to start the war.How this was done is explored brilliantly in the 1998 book The Spitting Image, the landmark study of the spat-upon veteran myth by sociologist Jerry Lembcke, himself a Vietnam veteran.

The Bush Administration had offered many different reasons for going to war: "liberating" Kuwait; defending Saudi Arabia; freeing all those foreign hostages Iraq was holding (I bet you forgot that one); Saddam as Hitler; the threat to America's oil supplies; the 312 Kuwaiti babies dumped out of incubators by Iraqi soldiers (a fiction concocted by leading PR firm Hill and Knowlton); and so on.But the only one that succeeded in generating the required passion was "Support our troops!Don't treat them like the spat-upon Vietnam vets!"From this flowed the ocean of yellow ribbons on cars and trucks and homes that deluged the American landscape.The yellow ribbon campaign, with its mantra of “Support Our Troops,”"dovetailed neatly," as Lembcke wrote, with that other Vietnam issue "about which the American people felt great emotion: the prisoner of war/missing in action (POW/MIA) issue."[19]So finally the war was not about political issues but about people.Which people?Again in Lembcke’s words, "Not Kuwaitis.Not Saudis. . . .The war was about the American soldiers who had been sent to fight it."(20)

In March 1991, gloating over what seemed America's glorious defeat of Iraq, President Bush jubilantly proclaimed to a nation festooned in its jingoist yellow ribbons, "By God, we've kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all!"[20]Kicked?Syndrome?Had Vietnam become America's addiction?Its pathology?

The President's diagnosis proved more accurate than his prognosis.Sixteen months after claiming to have cured us of our Vietnam disease, George Bush was on national TV shouting "Shut up and sit down!" at MIA family members heckling him at the July 1992 annual convention of the National League of Families.

Inaugurated with a promise that he would heal America's Vietnam wounds, Bush tried to win reelection by reopening them, turning Bill Clinton’s anti-Vietnam-War activities and draft avoidance into a central campaign issue.But meanwhile Ross Perot, the original fabricator of the POW/MIA issue back in 1969, now launched his own campaign as the wartime champion of the POWs and a Rambo-like hero who would rescue not only the dozens allegedly still alive in Indochina but also the nation itself.Perot masterfully played his role of the lone outsider from Texas ready to ride into Washington to save us from its sleazy bureaucrats and politicians who had betrayed the POWs and the American people.

Unlike the Republican and Democratic candidates, Perot had no national party apparatus.What he used as a remarkably effective substitute was a ready-made national infrastructure, a network of activists motivated by near religious fervor and coordinated by grassroots organizations: the POW/MIA movement.A master of symbolism, Perot chose ex-POW James Stockdale as his running mate and ex-POW Orson Swindle as his campaign manager.A POW/MIA organization illegally turned the Vietnam Veterans Memorial into a perpetual campaign prop for Perot.[21]At his rallies, Perot sat with former POWs and family members on a stage bedecked with POW flags.POW activists and their organizations led the petition campaigns that got Perot on the ballot in every state.[22]Without the Perot candidacy, Bush would undoubtedly have beaten Bill Clinton in a one-on-one race.In the televised debates, when Bush attempted to focus on Clinton’s draft records, Perot argued that the Bush Administration had given Saddam Hussein permission to “take the northern part of Kuwait.”[23]Perot’s 20 million votes, drawn mainly from Republican voters, amounted to almost four times Clinton’s margin of victory over Bush, who got almost ten million fewer votes than he had received four years earlier.If Perot was responsible for Bush's defeat, then clearly the POW/MIA issue was central to the election's outcome, for without it Perot would surely not have been a national political figure much less a presidential candidate.In fact he would not have even made his first billion dollars, which came from contracts awarded by the Nixon Administration for selling the POW/MIA issue to the American people.

But the first President Bush was right about one thing.The invasion of Iraq accelerated the continuing militarization of American culture, thus allowing us to “kick” the"Vietnam syndrome."At the end of combat in Vietnam in 1975, a Harris poll indicated that a mere 20% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 trusted the leaders of the military.In December 2002, as the second Bush Administration was ramping up for a renewed invasion of Iraq, a Harris poll indicated that this number had more than tripled to 64%.[24]

What Lembcke wrote in 1998 about events that occurred in 1991 seems even more relevant today, when the ostensible reasons for the 2003 invasion of Iraq have all been discredited.Iraq of course had no arsenal of chemical or bacteriological, much less nuclear, weapons that was threatening the United States or anybody else, and this arsenal, we now know, was an Administration concoction based on cherry-picked and flagrantly bogus intelligence.Amnesiac America recognized no similarity to the bogus intelligence used to substantiate the White Paper of 1965, which provided the justification for overt U.S. war in Vietnam.[25]Iraq of course had nothing to do with 9/11, but the war has been a bonanza for jihadists.Now we are supposed to believe that the war was designed to liberate the people of Iraq and bring them democracy.Well, maybe it was necessary to destroy the country in order to save it.But none of these rationalizations of the war today generate any pro-war fervor.No, those who fervently support the war today do so because they “Support Our Troops,” rather than betraying them while they are fighting or spitting on them and calling them baby-killers when they come home.

In 2005, the yellow-ribbon tsunami of 1991 has swept over America once again, helped by a cute technological gimmick.Now, instead of those perishable actual yellow ribbons that festooned American homes and cars as a buildup to Operation Desert Storm in 1991, we have magnetic yellow ribbons, emblazoned with the slogan “Support Our Troops,” attached to millions of American cars and SUVs and vans and trucks, sometimes riding happily above the old-fashioned black-and-white POW/MIA bumper stickers.

And by 2004, “Vietnam,” that construct of illusions, myths, fantasies, and lies that had replaced the realities of the Vietnam War, had become a defining test of character to determine who was fit to lead America during another construct of illusions and lies, the so-called “War on Terror.”In this psychocultural hall of mirrors, George Bush, who had used family connections to avoid serving in Vietnam or even fulfilling his minimal National Guard obligations, appeared as a towering figure of bravery and determination, while John Kerry, who had received three purple hearts for combat wounds and five medals, including the Silver Star, for bravery and heroism, was imaged as a cowardly wimp if not downright traitor who, along with Jane Fonda, had gotten Americans to spit on our troops and call them baby killers.

The onslaught against Kerry was led by John O’Neill, who had been recruited by Richard Nixon’s dirty tricksters back in 1971 to discredit the combat veterans then leading the antiwar movement.The Nixon White House had been rattled by the Winter Soldier Investigation held by Vietnam Veterans Against the War, during which more than a hundred combat veterans testified about atrocities and war crimes they had witnessed or actually participated in; some showed pictures reminiscent of recent photos from Abu Ghraib, such as an interrogator yanking on a cord tied to the testicles of a Vietnamese prisoner.In April, Washington was besieged by antiwar demonstrators, eventually numbering half a million and led by thousands of Vietnam War veterans.The veterans’ six-day demonstration climaxed when almost a thousand threw their medals over a hastily erected fence around the Capitol building and when their spokesman, Navy Lieutenant John Kerry, testified for two hours in nationally televised hearings of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.Kerry included in his lengthy opening statement a brief summary of the veterans’ testimony at the Winter Soldier Investigation.[26]More than three decades later, those few words about the conduct of the war would be used as an explosive charge hurled with deadly effect at the Kerry campaign, thus demonstrating how thoroughly the realities of the Vietnam War have been replaced by jingoist fantasy.Never mind that the Kerry’s 1971 testimony, like that of the Winter Soldier Investigation, was contemporaneous with the trial of Lt. Calley for the slaughter, rape, and sodomy in My Lai in 1968.Never mind that in April 2004, the Toledo Blade newspaper received a Pulitzer Prize for a series about systematic atrocities carried out by an elite U.S. Army unit, as part of U.S. policy, in the same province as My Lai in 1967. Never mind that back in 1967, months before My Lai, Jonathan Schell had exposed the genocide in this same province.Never mind that every one of Kerry’s words about U.S. atrocities and war crimes has been proved, over and over again, to be true.No, by 2004 the hideous record of U.S. atrocities in Vietnam had been erased, and Kerry’s 1971 testimony could be portrayed as a libelous if not downright treasonous attack on America and its soldiers.

Looking backward from 2005, the efforts of the Nixon gang to neutralize Kerry seem crude and primitive.“We found a vet named John O’Neill and formed a group called Vietnam Veterans for a Just Peace,” Nixon Special Counsel Charles Colson boasted.“We had O’Neill meet the President, and we did everything we could to boost his group.”[27]The White House engineered letters to newspapers demanding that they “expose” Kerry as a “fraud,” and Colson arranged an Op Ed denouncing Kerry that was syndicated in 150 newspapers, with copies then mailed to “all veterans organizations and military groups in plain envelopes with no cover letter.”[28]

Thirty-three years later, and months before Kerry became the Democratic candidate in July 2004, O’Neill, with massive financial support from Bush backers and unlimited media connections, launched the assault, 21st-century PR style.An April interview on CNN and a May 4 Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal headlined “Unfit To Serve” set the stage for Unfit For Command, the book O’Neill co-authored with right-wing fanatic Jerome Corsi, and the made-for-TV film, “Stolen Honor: Wounds that Never Heal,” both blaming Kerry for prolonging the war and causing the torture of American POWs.O’Neill and his Swift Boats organization got incessant media exposure on radio, TV, newspapers, magazines, and the internet, including a free non-stop book-promotion blitz that turned Unfit For Command into the nation’s top nonfiction bestseller for weeks during the crucial final months of the presidential race.Leading the circus was Rupert Murdoch’s Fox network.Show after show on Fox featured voices such as former Contragate conspirator and now Fox News Channel host Oliver North, who claimed that the atrocities cited by Kerry in 1971 simply “did not happen,” former Republican Speaker of the House and now regular Fox contributor Newt Gingrich, who invented a tale of secret 1970 meetings in Paris between Kerry and “Communist leaders of a country that were [sic] killing young Americans while John Kerry is sitting in Paris talking to them,” and right-wing Washington Postcommentator and regular Fox contributor Charles Krauthammer, who claimed that Kerry “betrayed” his “comrades” by “telling the world that these soldiers left behind were committing atrocities, as Kerry has said on a daily basis.”[29]Over and over again, the wounded and decorated warrior was explicitly branded a “traitor” responsible not only for the torture of POWs and the betrayal of his fellow soldiers, but even for the eventual defeat of the United States by the Communists.

The main piece of evidence for all this was a picture of John Kerry in the War Remnants Museum of Ho Chi Minh City, a picture that John O’Neill and his cohort claimed to have discovered.Unfit To Command opens with a sensationalized account of this discovery by a touring Vietnam veteran:

He realized that he had seen this face before—for the first time more than thirty years ago.It was John Kerry.The Vietnamese photo of a 1993 meeting of Kerry and Vietnamese leaders, including the General Secretary of the Vietnamese Communist Party Do Muoi, was to honor John Kerry’s “heroic” contributions to the North Vietnamese victory.[30]

Unfit For Commanddevotes an entire chapter to this incriminating photograph, which is actually a picture of Kerry’s reception in Vietnam as head of a congressional delegation seeking information about unaccounted-for American servicemen.

Kerry and his campaign have been criticized for not responding more aggressively to these scurrilous attacks.Some have argued that he should have reaffirmed the validity of his 1971 view of the war and his later efforts to resolve postwar issues and bring about normal relations with Vietnam.In fact, as co-chair of the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs during its 17 months of investigations in 1991 and 1992, Kerry had played a major role in the gradual beginnings of trade relations during the first Bush and Clinton Administrations and the eventual establishment of diplomatic relations in 1995.

Yet Kerry and his campaign dared not take this tack.Was this a mistake?To do so would have required confronting head-on the fantasy “Vietnam.”Two-thirds of the American people still believe that Vietnam secretly held many U.S. POWs after the war and therefore they are either still there or they were executed.The myth that Vietnam veterans were routinely spat upon and called baby killers is almost universal.The irrationality on this issue is suggested by the accusation, made by a former San Diego mayor acting as guest host on the enormously popular Rush Limbaugh radio show that John Kerry “was the one who coined the phrase ‘baby killers,’” “the phrase returning veterans from Vietnam had to hear . . . when they were spit upon in airports.”[31]

John Kerry was indeed a prominent activist against the Vietnam War, which explains some of the hatred and loathing evoked by his candidacy.But the fact that a prominent activist against the Vietnam War came very close to being elected President of the United States in 2004 suggests that the war in America over the Vietnam War has another side and has not yet been decided.

Although the fantasy “Vietnam” is dominant in 21st-century American culture and politics, the antiwar movement that arose from the realities of the war still exerts a profound and powerful counterforce.Demonstrations against the Iraq war have rivaled in size those against the Vietnam War, and the anti-imperial consciousness that emerged a little over three decades ago has deepened and gained a wider constituency among the American people.Because the actual history of the Vietnam War has not yet been entirely expunged, it still threatens to obliterate the fantasy of Vietnam so essential to the Project for the New American Century.

[5]Reprinted in Vietnam and America: A Documented History, Revised and Enlarged Second Edition, ed. Marvin Gettleman, Jane Franklin, Marilyn Young, and H. Bruce Franklin (New York: Grove Press, 1995), 52.

[6]Senator Ernest Gruening and Herbert Wilton Beaser, Vietnam Folly(Washington, DC: National Press, 1968), pp. 100-105.

[7]Gruening and Beaser, p. 105.

[8]Gillen, 379-383, 402.As Gillen notes, some sources incorrectly attribute this speech to Lyndon Johnson.

[9]Gillen, 402.

[10]"Final Declaration of the Geneva Conference," July 21, 1954.InVietnam and America, 75.

[11]Cablegram from Ambassador Lodge to Secretary of State Rusk, August 29, 1963, reprinted in Vietnam and America, 227.

[12]A revealing inside account can be found in James A. Daly, Black Prisoner of War: A Conscientious Objector’s Vietnam Memoir (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2000).

[13]Turner, Echoes of Combat, 63; Arnold R. Isaacs, Vietnam Shadows: The War, Its Ghost, and Its Legacy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 49.

[14]Vietnam and America, xv.

[15]Christian G. Appy, Working-Class War: American Combat Soldiers and Vietnam(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 9.

[16]George Bush, “Inaugural Address, January 20, 1989,” Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: George Bush, 1989 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1990), Book 1: 3.

[17]George Bush, “Address to the Nation Announcing Allied Military Action in the Persian Gulf, January 16, 1991,” Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: George Bush, 1991 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1992), I: 44

[18]Sven Lindqvist, A History of Bombing (New York: New Press, 2001), 43.C. G. Grey, Bombers (London: Faber & Faber, 1941), 71. See my discussion in War Stars, 88-89.

[19]Lembcke, 20.

[20]"Kicking the `Vietnam Syndrome,'" Washington Post, March 4, 1991.

[21]"Veterans Raise Perot Banner," New York Daily News, June 11, 1992.

[22]David Jackson, "MIAs' Kin Want Perot as President," Dallas Morning News, May 19, 1992; interview with David Jackson, May 18, 1992; telephone interview with John LeBoutillier, June 12, 1992; "It's Businessman Perot and Not War Hero Bush Who Attracts a Following Among U.S. Veterans," Wall Street Journal, July 2, 1992.

[23]The Third 1992 Presidential Debate, October 19, 1992, http://www.pbs.org/newshour/debating...tiny/92debates.

[24]"Trust in the Military Heightens Among Baby Boomers' Children," The New York Times, May 27, 2003.

[25]U.S. Department of State, Aggression from the North: The Record of North Vietnam’s Campaign to Conquer South Vietnam, Publication 7839, Far Eastern Series 130 (Washington, DC, 1965) in Vietnam and America, ed. Marvin E. Gettleman, Jane Franklin, Marilyn B. Young, and H. Bruce Franklin (New York, Grove Press, 1995).

[26]For the complete text of Kerry’s statement, see Vietnam and America, 456-62.

[27]“The Lies of John O’Neill,” Media Matters for America ( http://mediamatters.org/items/printable/200408250002 .

[28]Tom Wells, The War Within: America’s Battle Over Vietnam (New York: Henry Holt, 1994), 490.

[29]Media Matters for America, http://mediamatters.org/items/printable/ 200408260004, 200409020010, 200409010004.

[30]John E. O’Neill and Jerome Corsi, Unfit for Command (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2004), 7.

[31]Roger Hedgecock, the former San Diego mayor, was acting as substitute host for Limbaugh when he made this claim on August 25, 2004.His claim that Kerry coined this term in his 1971 Senate testimony is demonstrably false as well as a bit illogical, since most Vietnam veterans returned prior to 1971.Media Matters for America, http://mediamatters.org/items/printable/200408270003 .

The_Jazz · 01-15-2007, 02:51 PM

Ace, I understand where you're coming from, but I just can't buy into most of your response.

Quote:

Originally Posted by aceventura3

Some of us, including the Bush administration, still believe we can win, that we can accomplish our original goals.

So the WMD are going to magically appear someday? Even if I temporarily conceed that they did exist and were spirited away to Syria, they're never going to materialize. That was the majority of the arguement for our invasion in the first place. Our goals then shifted to making Iraq "safe for democracy", etc. but I don't see how anyone can consider us closer to those goals now.

Quote:

Originally Posted by aceventura3

Sadaam is dead. Sadaam's regime no longer exists.
The connection with 9/11 is Islamic extremist are at war with us. The war front is currently in Iraq. If we leave Iraq, the war won't end. If Islamic extremist obtain and hold Iraq they will expand their offensive. I don't know what would be next, but you can believe the war will continue.

I don't think that I was clear enough with my description of the email, but there was a definite tone linking Iraq to Al Qaida. However, I think that what I highlighted in your statement is the gist of my arguement - the war won't end. I think it's important to note that the war won't end if we stay either. The big problem is that there's no real way to quantify sucess in this conflict. The only positives are lack of negatives. Given that there are lots of negatives, it appears (whether it's true or not) that we're losing.

Quote:

Originally Posted by aceventura3

I think you nailed it. Some think this is some kind of a "feel good war", "a war of choice", " a war of US emperialism", etc, etc. This is a war to defend our freedom and the freedom of billions of people in the world, it is not about "national psyche" but far too many people see it in those terms or in terms of "feelings".

I can't accept this statement in any fashion. If this were a war about defending our freedoms, we would have done better to focus on real threats to our freedom, such as the Chinese who seized an American military plane operating in internation airspace months before the Iraq war. Or we could have faced off against the North Koreans who I think I can easily catagorize as the loudest saber rattler in the world. If it were about getting the terrorists, why didn't we go after the head of the snake in the Saudi and Egyptian citizens that finance Al Qaida et al? Make no bones about it, the Bush administration chose to prosecute this war in the face of diplomacy. We chose the time and place for it and followed through on our threats.

host · 01-15-2007, 03:07 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by aceventura3

Some of us, including the Bush administration, still believe we can win, that we can accomplish our original goals.

Sadaam is dead. Sadaam's regime no longer exists.
The connection with 9/11 is Islamic extremist are at war with us. The war front is currently in Iraq. If we leave Iraq, the war won't end. If Islamic extremist obtain and hold Iraq they will expand their offensive. I don't know what would be next, but you can believe the war will continue.

I think you nailed it. Some think this is some kind of a "feel good war", "a war of choice", " a war of US emperialism", etc, etc. This is a war to defend our freedom and the freedom of billions of people in the world, it is not about "national psyche" but far too many people see it in those terms or in terms of "feelings".

ace....$400 billion spent, 3000 plus US soldiers dead and 10,000 plus more permanently removed from the fighting force and as "fit and functioning" members of US society.

Hundreds of billions more spent on an intelligence apparatus and a department of fatherland security that has it's head up it's ass....

In Negroponte's first annual Threat Assessment testimony, he mentioned only the farce of a criminal investigation in Lodi, CA to describe the grave threat we face in America from "Islamic Fascist Butcher Killers", ace.....
http://www.senate.gov/~armed_service...2002-28-06.pdf

Quote:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontl...mywithin/view/
.....However, a deeper look at the evidence creates uncertainty about what kind of threat actually did exist in Lodi and provides a case study of America's response to the threat of domestic terrorism. In "The Enemy Within," FRONTLINE and New York Times reporter Lowell Bergman examines the Lodi case and interviews FBI and Homeland Security officials to assess U.S. anti-terror efforts

The Lodi investigation drew the attention of senior U.S. officials. <b>"A network of Islamic extremists in Lodi," Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte told Congress in February 2006, "maintained connections with Pakistani militant groups, recruited U.S. citizens, … [and] allegedly raised funds for international jihadist groups."...</b>

Quote:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontl...ws/wedick.html
James Wedick was a FBI street agent and supervisor for 35 years. Before retiring in April 2004, he was in charge of a number of high-profile criminal investigations into public corruption. Soon after Umer and Hamid Hayat were arrested in the Lodi, California terror case, Wedick was sought out by Umer Hayat's defense attorney to review the government's evidence. At the trial, Wedick wasn't allowed to testify about the FBI's videotaped interrogation of the Hayats and their confessions, nor about the quality of the overall investigation; the judge ruled the value of Wedick's testimony was "outweighed by its potential for confusing the jury." In this interview, Wedick discusses the weaknesses in the government's case, the problems in how it was handled and his concern about the FBI's new paradigm favoring disruption and prevention over prosecution. This is an edited transcript of an interview conducted June 30, 2006.:

....from a sympathetic corner, ace:

Quote:

http://article.nationalreview.com/?q...ZmOWUzMGNmZGY=

.....David Schenker
This was a great week for Syria. First, Hezbollah moved one step closer to toppling the democratically elected Lebanese government. Then, Damascus’s leading nemesis, U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, submitted his resignation to President Bush. Still basking in the warm afterglow of Bolton’s departure, on Wednesday Syria seemingly hit the trifecta when the Iraq Study Group Report advocated U.S. diplomatic reengagement with Damascus.

The Assad regime, the ISG tells us, has “indicated that they want a dialogue” with the US. And so even though the report says the insurgency is indigenous in nature — <b>that the estimated 1,300 foreign fighters in Iraq play only a “supporting role” in the violence</b> — the ISG nevertheless recommends engaging Syria as a critical component of our diplomatic offensive on Iraq. ......

...I'll continue to post here, tirelessly, until we reach a point where you are too embarassed, ace, to post such nonsense as a belief that the US expenditure has been "worth it". There was no foreign terrorist threat in Iraq before the US invaded, ace. Powell's presentation to the UN in Feb. ,2003, was bullshit. It was never verified that Zarqawi "sought medical treatment" with the approval of Saddam's government, or that a "poison camp" in Kermal or Kermil, or Khurmal, existed in any area of Iraq that was under the control of Saddam's regime, but there is much evidence that a camp of that name with "terrorists" loyal to Zarqawi, existed in the area under control by the Kurds, and accessible to the Americans.

We were told, after 9/11, that there were "thousands" of "terrorist sleeper cells" in the US, ace, can you point to one that was "busted up", by the US government?

Chimera · 01-15-2007, 03:11 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by aceventura3

Some of us, including the Bush administration, still believe we can win, that we can accomplish our original goals.

This would entail finding and destroying stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, which was the original goal I believe. We would also need to liberate the Iraqi people, as this became the goal shortly after the first one was discarded. Unfortunately, neither of these seem likely in the near future, if only because the first one does not exist, and the second requires ending a civil war.

Sadaam is dead. Sadaam's regime no longer exists.
The connection with 9/11 is Islamic extremist are at war with us. The war front is currently in Iraq. If we leave Iraq, the war won't end. If Islamic extremist obtain and hold Iraq they will expand their offensive. I don't know what would be next, but you can believe the war will continue.

Yes it will, But WE chose this war, and in my opinion mistakenly chose Iraq as the battlefield, rather than Afghanistan. Imagine what we would have accomplished if the Afghan Government had half the resources we have poured into Iraq. Likely there would now be a relatively stable, and growing democracy in the middle east, with a very strong U.S. military presence backing the westernized Afghanistan.
Do you think others.....might be envious of such a place, and perhaps hope for a similar change? Maybe say....The Kurds?

I think you nailed it. Some think this is some kind of a "feel good war", "a war of choice", " a war of US emperialism", etc, etc. This is a war to defend our freedom and the freedom of billions of people in the world, it is not about "national psyche" but far too many people see it in those terms or in terms of "feelings".

In my experience very few people opposed to this war base the leaning on these "Feelings" alone...but indeed this is a war of choice. We Invaded a nation based on poor intellegence, and cannot seem to protect the very people we supposedly Liberated. There was no "Iraqi Attack" which we reacted to, and in fact they were less guilty than many of our close allies. Likely we wont know for a decade at best, why we actually invaded Iraq, as the administration has consistantly blocked access to the Data needed to get the truth.....But it is clear to me, the reasons are not the ones we have been given.

Willravel · 01-15-2007, 03:17 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by host

We were told, after 9/11, that there were "thousands" of "terrorist sleeper cells" in the US, ace, can you point to one that was "busted up", by the US government?

There were all those cells that Jack Bauer went after....but that's it.

A lot of people have onest trouble differentiating between the fantasy spun by the media and reality. In reality, there is no evidence to suggest that there are terrorist cells in the US. There is no evidence that Saddam was a threat to the US. There is no evidence that the war in Iraq has decreased terrorism, in fact there is staggaring evidence that shows it has INCREASED terrorism substantially. There is no evidence that the US has done anything but hurt Afghanistan, and now warlord are making millions of dollars on drugs that could easily fund 'terrorism'. There is no evidence that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction following the destruction of most if not all his weapons in the early 90s. There was no link between 9/11 and Iraq whatsoever. There is, however, evidence that the US does not have the funding or manpower to 'win' against the 'terrorists' (they are not actually terrorists, but rebels) in Iraq.

aceventura3 · 01-15-2007, 03:34 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by mixedmedia

So do you consider Saddam to have been an Islamic extremist?

No.

We took out Sadaam because he was a threat. He used weapons of mass destruction and would develop and use them in the future if he remained in power. He was in violation of, I don't know how many, UN resolutions, he used his military to attack us in the no fly zone. He sponsored terrorists to the tune of $25k. We should have taken him out in the first Gulf War.

mixedmedia · 01-15-2007, 03:34 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Chimera

*snip*.....But it is clear to me, the reasons are not the ones we have been given.

Absolutely. But getting Bush loyalists to admit that we were lied to...even while espousing their own various ad hoc reasons for us going to war...is like pulling teeth. I'm not sure why it's so difficult to admit when faced with the obvious.

roachboy · 01-15-2007, 03:37 PM

i was thinking about this while i ws being dragged around outside on the far end of a huskyleash: the "national psyche" as a construct, the ideal-typical recipient for conservative ideological memes, and so the subject-position built into those memes, taken in sequence: the optimized receiver post, the presumed addressee of these messages. when you read them, or receive them (these memes) you can allow yourself to be enframed by them, so they appear to speak to and for you. since this positioning is never without accompanying claims, this act of being-enframed (interpellation in althusserspeak) is never neutral: so you position yourself as you allow yourself to be positioned, and you position yourself via assent as an element within this "national psyche".....and because the whole of conservative ideology is predicated on the notion of the nation, and within that on the notion of a "national will" it follows that to position yourself as an element within the "national psyche" is to position yourself on conservative ideological grounds.

conservatives like to imagine this national will/national psyche as being identical with themselves, politically speaking, and by extension as being "unified" it would follow that the "national pysche" or will has to be referenced in the singular, as if by dissenting you fall outside of it, fall outside of the "nation" as conservative like to think of it.

seems a pretty effective way of getting folk to police what they think, doesnt it? and to experience it, all you need to do is buy the underlying mythology enough that conservative ideological propositions--which effectively tell you how to react as they tell you about the world as that ideology allow it to be understood--seem to make sense to you intuitively.

if that happens, then dissent in any meaningful sense of the term threatens to push you off the edge of the earth. and all that is Out There is chaos.
so it is no wonder that you worry about that, mr jazz: if you find these types of sentences to be compelling, and you read them as they "should" be read, you react as you are instructed to without that requiring much of any effort beyond the normal assimilation of infotainment in written form.

its all about this goofball noun "nation" and what it entails.
and in the hands of the right, that noun is about the least democratic possible. because its inclusive effects are all about exclusion. what you see in it depends on where you find yourself falling in relation to the propositions that use it.

i dont find anything commonsensical about that word. i dont find it to be anything other than an ideological function.
when i read books of american history written by americans, i find the same tic everywhere: the american mind, the american people, the american nation: all are first person plural names that get to run around and do things: it (the noun) assesses, reacts, does stuff, goes to a bar, has a few beverages, stumbles home, like the good mr. zappa talked about back in the day.
it is all about a strange, and very particular fantasy of unity where none necessarily exists.
i have never understood why americanists indulge this particular mythology, but they do, and all the bloody time.
i guess the word "nation" appeals at some level, so the host of analytic problems that should be raised about it arent raised.
and so all these first person plural standins for nation get to do stuff.
very strange.
anyway, without the notion of nation, conservative ideology has no signifieds. it already has no referent, but in that it is not different from anything else.

the material host posted above gets to the same point, i think, in a kind of historically oriented fashion.

i wonder if this qualifies as a rant.
huh.

mixedmedia · 01-15-2007, 03:38 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by aceventura3

No.

We took out Sadaam because he was a threat. He used weapons of mass destruction and would develop and use them in the future if he remained in power. He was in violation of, I don't know how many, UN resolutions, he used his military to attack us in the no fly zone. He sponsored terrorists to the tune of $25k. We should have taken him out in the first Gulf War.

So he was not an Islamic extremist, yet it was fitting to wage an all-out war against Iraq in the fight against Islamic extremism? Why does this make sense to you?

aceventura3 · 01-15-2007, 03:50 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by The_Jazz

So the WMD are going to magically appear someday?

No

Quote:

Even if I temporarily conceed that they did exist and were spirited away to Syria, they're never going to materialize. That was the majority of the arguement for our invasion in the first place.

Other reasons were given as well.

Quote:

Our goals then shifted to making Iraq "safe for democracy", etc. but I don't see how anyone can consider us closer to those goals now.

In war, conditions change. We are in war with an enemy that adapts to changing conditions they develop plans and strategies just as we do. We have unrealistic expectaions involving wars today.

Quote:

I don't think that I was clear enough with my description of the email, but there was a definite tone linking Iraq to Al Qaida.

The Germans had nothing to do with Peril Harbor. We declared war on Germany and Japan. The two were linked. Sadaam and Al Qaida had a common enemy, it was us.

Quote:

However, I think that what I highlighted in your statement is the gist of my arguement - the war won't end.

it will end when we win.

Quote:

I think it's important to note that the war won't end if we stay either.

We will have a military presence in the Middle East for decades into the future. Regardless of which party has control of the White House.

Quote:

The big problem is that there's no real way to quantify sucess in this conflict.

No civilian casualties due to terrorists attacks in our borders.

Quote:

The only positives are lack of negatives. Given that there are lots of negatives, it appears (whether it's true or not) that we're losing.

Not in my view. My biggest concern is that we don't have the will to finish the job and we will leave it for future generations to fight.

Quote:

I can't accept this statement in any fashion. If this were a war about defending our freedoms, we would have done better to focus on real threats to our freedom, such as the Chinese who seized an American military plane operating in internation airspace months before the Iraq war. Or we could have faced off against the North Koreans who I think I can easily catagorize as the loudest saber rattler in the world. If it were about getting the terrorists, why didn't we go after the head of the snake in the Saudi and Egyptian citizens that finance Al Qaida et al? Make no bones about it, the Bush administration chose to prosecute this war in the face of diplomacy. We chose the time and place for it and followed through on our threats.

If you disagree on strategy that is one thing, but I am not sure you agree with the threat to our freedom. If that is true why are you concerned about North Korea, etc, etc.

Quote:

Originally Posted by mixedmedia

So he was not an Islamic extremist, yet it was fitting to wage an all-out war against Iraq in the fight against Islamic extremism? Why does this make sense to you?

I understand the confusion but the two are seperate issues. If 9/11 never happened and there were no Islamic extremist wanting to kill us, Sadaam would have still been a problem. At some point there would have been a confrontation. I am relived it happened when he was in a weakened state with no weapons of mass destruction or chemical weapons, aren't you? Don't you agree, that Sadaam was a problem, that he wanted to re-build his military, that he wanted to control the Middle East and cause great harm to the US?

Quote:

Originally Posted by mixedmedia

Absolutely. But getting Bush loyalists to admit that we were lied to...even while espousing their own various ad hoc reasons for us going to war...is like pulling teeth. I'm not sure why it's so difficult to admit when faced with the obvious.

O.k. you were lied to. Bush tried to sugar coat the fact that we wanted to use Iraq as the global front in the war on terror. Removing Sadaam was a secondary benefit. But, wait - he actually said that, he just did not put enough emphsis on it, so you are still right you were lied to.

Also, he lied because he left some with the impression the threat was more imminent than it actually was. I think we are splitting hairs. I think it all depends on how you define imminent, as Bill would say.

Willravel · 01-15-2007, 04:08 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by aceventura3

Other reasons were given as well.

Two were given: WMDs and a link to al Qaeda. Not only have those proven to be faulty, but it is clear now that evidence that went against those two ascertions was ignored by the administration.

Quote:

Originally Posted by aceventura3

In war, conditions change. We are in war with an enemy that adapts to changing conditions they develop plans and strategies just as we do. We have unrealistic expectaions involving wars today.

Conditions change, but Saddam didn't go back in time and destroy his weapons or disable his links with the al Qaeda terrorist organization. Those simply were false ascertions made by our gallary of ignorance better known as the Buhs administration.

Quote:

Originally Posted by aceventura3

The Germans had nothing to do with Peril Harbor. We declared war on Germany and Japan. The two were linked. Sadaam and Al Qaida had a common enemy, it was us.

Germany attacked our allies and was a clear and immediate threat to us. The same cannot be said of Iraq.

Quote:

Originally Posted by aceventura3

it will end when we win.

This is exactly the point. If we can't win, this will never end.

Quote:

Originally Posted by aceventura3

No civilian casualties due to terrorists attacks in our borders.

Which is like saying that we are winning the war against the martians becuase they havn't attacked. We were never in any danger.

Quote:

Originally Posted by aceventura3

If you disagree on strategy that is one thing, but I am not sure you agree with the threat to our freedom. If that is true why are you concerned about North Korea, etc, etc.

Odd language. They aren't a threat to our safety, they are a threat to our "freedom"? Are they carving up the BOR? Are they getting wire taps without warrents? Are they suspending Habius Corupus?

"Terrorists" are not a threat to our freedom. They *might* be a threat to our safety becuase they have been galvanized together becuase the US attacked Iraq without provocation, but they are certinally not a threat to our freedom.

Quote:

Originally Posted by aceventura3

I understand the confusion but the two are seperate issues. If 9/11 never happened and there were no Islamic extremist wanting to kill us, Sadaam would have still been a problem. At some point there would have been a confrontation. I am relived it happened when he was in a weakened state with no weapons of mass destruction or chemical weapons, aren't you? Don't you agree, that Sadaam was a problem, that he wanted to re-build his military, that he wanted to control the Middle East and cause great harm to the US?

Saddam wasn't a problem, though, and that's clear as crystal now. He had no links to any terrorist organization, and he had no real weapons. As was made clear by the Shock and Awe massacre, we would wipe the floor with him and get almost no collateral damage in he process. Saddam was losing control of his country, he was starting to go broke, he had lost most of his allies, and revolution was on the horizon. Saddam wanted to rebuild his military, but he didn't have the means.

Saddam was no threat to us. He was even losing his power in his own country.

aceventura3 · 01-15-2007, 04:25 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by willravel

Two were given: WMDs and a link to al Qaeda. Not only have those proven to be faulty, but it is clear now that evidence that went against those two ascertions was ignored by the administration.

Primary reason was our global war on terror.

Quote:

Conditions change, but Saddam didn't go back in time and destroy his weapons or disable his links with the al Qaeda terrorist organization. Those simply were false ascertions made by our gallary of ignorance better known as the Buhs administration.

We were wrong about weapons of mass destruction. Isn't that a good thing? Al Qaeda was not directly linked to Sadaam, Bush has said that many, many times.

Quote:

Germany attacked our allies and was a clear and immediate threat to us. The same cannot be said of Iraq.

We acted sooner in the war on terror than we did in WWII. Isn't that a good thing? If we had a re-do on WWII I know I would have acted sooner, not later.

Quote:

This is exactly the point. If we can't win, this will never end.

As long as others want to steal the lives and freedoms of others, the fight will continue, don't you agree at least in theory?

Quote:

Which is like saying that we are winning the war against the martians becuase they havn't attacked. We were never in any danger.

This is real, not fantasy.

Quote:

Odd language. They aren't a threat to our safety, they are a threat to our "freedom"? Are they carving up the BOR? Are they getting wire taps without warrents? Are they suspending Habius Corupus?

They want us dead. They want our allies wiped off of the map. They want you to be Muslim and live by their rules or die. I don't understand your point.

Quote:

"Terrorists" are not a threat to our freedom. They *might* be a threat to our safety becuase they have been galvanized together becuase the US attacked Iraq without provocation, but they are certinally not a threat to our freedom.

Perhaps some kind hearted person can go and interview them and findout what they want? I think that person would be murdered.

Quote:

Saddam wasn't a problem, though, and that's clear as crystal now. He had no links to any terrorist organization, and he had no real weapons. As was made clear by the Shock and Awe massacre, we would wipe the floor with him and get almost no collateral damage in he process. Saddam was losing control of his country, he was starting to go broke, he had lost most of his allies, and revolution was on the horizon. Saddam wanted to rebuild his military, but he didn't have the means.

Saddam was no threat to us. He was even losing his power in his own country.

Why did Sadaam invade Kuwait? Why do you think he would not want to do it again? Why did Sadaam send missles into Isreal? Why don't you think he would want to again? Why did Sadaam declare war on Iran? Why do you think he would not do it again? Why did Sadaam kill thousands of his own people? Why do you think he wouldn't do it again? Why did Sadaam burn oil fields? Etc, etc, etc, etc, etc.

01-12-2007, 02:01 AM	#42 (permalink)
dksuddeth Junkie Location: bedford, tx	It has alot more to do with the whole way the constitution is now 'interpreted', than just the 2nd Amendment, so back off the notion that I'm bitching that I can't have a tank, etc. In the early 1930's the new deal democrats in congress did more than stretch the limitations of power that the constitution gives them. They convinced the USSC to accept that interstate commerce also includes anything that affects interstate commerce, including intrastate commerce OR any activity that has a 'substantial effect' on interstate commerce. They also imbued themselves with the power of not having to show any cause or correlation that interstate commerce is affected, just make the claim that it is. That is why a once limited federal government is as bloated and cancerous as it is today.....and it's been that way for so long now most people just accept that this is the way that it is. Look at bill of rights cases in the last 70 years compared to what they were in the 18th and early 19th century cases. The individuals rights are no longer protected, except for freedom of speech. That little puppy gets alot of attention but is catered to because it makes people 'feel' like they have freedom still, but the rest are ALWAYS judged on how much compelling government interest OR how much societal benefit is garnered by infringing on the individual rights. Look at Kelo v. New London....or almost ALL eminent domain cases. Police power is practically unlimited and nearly unaccountable for any infringements of civil rights. The supremacy clause is used dozens of times a year to deny just compensation or redress of grievances to the citizens, who are the ones that the constitution was designed to protect and empower. No, the socialists and communists have indeed won because nearly all of you resignedly accept that monopolistic practices of a government run amok and are not only unwilling to change it by vote, but do nearly all you can to keep the parasites in power. As for 'centrists', that just means that they are a whole new group whose sole purpose is to get you to agree that the individuals rights matter less than society as a whole by using 'moderate' as a compromise. __________________ "no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything. You cannot conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him."

01-15-2007, 06:58 AM	#49 (permalink)
desal75 Psycho Location: Western New York	I guess a lot depends on what you might consider palatable. __________________ The Man in Black fled across the desert and the Gunslinger followed.

01-15-2007, 07:51 AM	#52 (permalink)
desal75 Psycho Location: Western New York	Shakran, if only the world were that black and white. I deeply wish literally every political decision in this country didn't come down to party lines. __________________ The Man in Black fled across the desert and the Gunslinger followed. Last edited by desal75; 01-15-2007 at 08:17 AM..

01-15-2007, 08:25 AM	#54 (permalink)
shakran Tone.	I don't have that viewpoint Mixed. I mean, yes, Republicans did it, and they were dumbasses for doing it, but that doesn't mean we can ignore the problem. However, if we stay the country will degenerate into years of bloody civil war. If we leave the country will degenerate into years of bloody civil war. there is NO way to prevent the civil war. None. At all. It's like a tire fire. Once it gets going, you are NOT going to put it out. It will burn until it's out of fuel. You have 2 choices. Send your firefighters in where they might get hurt and inhale toxic fumes, and do absolutely nothing towards getting the fire out, or pull 'em back and just watch it burn. Either way, the result in the tire pile is the same, but the 2nd option at least lets you preserve the life and health of your firefighters. Iraq is no different. We've sparked the conflagration. It's going to happen. Nothing will stop it. Why not at least pull our guys back so they don't get hurt any more than they already have? The parallels of this war to Vietnam are becoming more obvious every day. Back then we said "oh we can't pull out, what will they do without us," and it was only when people finally realized that the country was sunk with or without us that we finally pulled out. The fact is that when we stick our nose in where it doesn't belong, bad things happen - especially if we let incompetent boobs that couldn't even lead a kid to the crapper take charge. And now not only does Mr. Bush want to stay in Iraq where we will do precisely no good, he wants to move on to Iran as well. This insanity has got to stop some time - it may as well be now. Oh, and desal75, if you're going to make fun little snips at what those of us in this thread have to say, perhaps you should come out with an opinion of your own. These little quips frankly make you look more like a troll than a debater. If you think I'm seeing the world black and white then please, by all means, educate me. Show me where the grey is. If you think it all depends on what I call palatable, then give us your definition of palatable and tell us your solution. Otherwise you're just taking useless pot shots which might work on Fark, but around here, we're not very impressed by it. Last edited by shakran; 01-15-2007 at 08:28 AM..

01-15-2007, 10:11 AM	#58 (permalink)
dc_dux Location: Washington DC	More on the Biden plan: http://www.planforiraq.com/ __________________ "The perfect is the enemy of the good." ~ Voltaire

01-12-2007, 06:04 AM	#43 (permalink)
shakran Tone.	dks, to be totally blunt, that's a load of crap. Socialists have lost. Period. Capitalism has won. The corporation is the only thing that matters now. Corporations can get away with just about anything as long as they make money at it. Everyone likes to get down on Enron -their real crime? Not making money. Hiding it is what got them in trouble. Haliburton is so evil as to make Enron look like a fairy tale, but they haven't been stopped or even impeded. Why? Because they make money. I don't see how you can sit there and say the republicans have done so much better when, since Reagan first got his hand in the country, corporations have been moving more and more toward total domination of society. Small businesses can't make it because the corporations are too huge. If you want employment and you're not lucky enough to have started a unique business for which there is no competition, you have to work for a corporation where you're expected to give everything you have to the neglect of your personal time, your family, and even your health. Yet that loyalty is not returned - the corporation will cast you adrift in a heartbeat if they think they can be more profitable (even just in the short term) without you. There are countless stories of executives and middle managers who once had a solidly middle class lifestyle and did their best for their corporate masters - and are now working menial jobs at Home Depot and Walmart just to get by because they were "downsized." I guarantee you this dks - you can take this to the bank. The current system of capitalism is not sustainable. A revolution is coming - it's just a question of when - and the longer it takes to get here, the worse it's gonna be when it does. Reagan kicked off the idea that it would be terribly fun to widen the gap between rich and not-rich. Now it's a yawning chasm - that's simply not sustainable. Eventually the poor and middle class will be fed up with watching the country's elite spend more money in a day than they make in a year while they worry about having enough money to buy groceries. Eventually that anger will reach a breaking point. It's happened before (the French revolution comes to mind) and it will happen again, I guarantee it.

01-12-2007, 09:18 AM	#47 (permalink)
Willravel ... a sort of licensed troubleshooter.	Bottom line, to end this threadjack, the US is not even close to being socialist in any way. Suggesting so shows a massive misunderstanding of both socialism and the world around us. Also, this thread has nothing to do with guns. How would you like it if I brought up the 9/11 conspiracy in every thread?

01-15-2007, 12:09 PM	#62 (permalink)
Moskie Pure Chewing Satisfaction Location: can i use bbcode [i]here[/i]?	At the risk of sounding elitist, I'll reiterate what shakran said: it might qualify on Fark, but we'd prefer a little more "meat" in the expression of your political ideas here. So, if you please: tell us what you feel is "palatable." Show us the gray area between the black and white you mentioned. __________________ Greetings and salutations. Last edited by Moskie; 01-15-2007 at 12:11 PM..

01-15-2007, 01:23 PM	#63 (permalink)
desal75 Psycho Location: Western New York	I'm intrigued by the way this thread has become less about politics and more about teaching me how to use this forum. What is Fark anyway? As for palatable, I wasn't trying to force what I think is or isn't on anyone. I was simply stating that what is needed is different to different people. Some would argue that any loss of life due to war is unnecessary. Others see justifiable reasons for killing and death, no matter on what scale. The grey area is that in any conflict there is no easy answer. Especially in conflicts like Iraq where the opposition isn't easily distinguished and the goals not easily expressed. Even the notion of winning or losing a conflict such as this is not easily defined. Some would say victory has already been achieved while some would argue that victory can never be attained. The grey is that both arguements have merit. __________________ The Man in Black fled across the desert and the Gunslinger followed.

01-15-2007, 02:08 PM	#65 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	mr. jazz: what exactly is the national psyche? just wondering. i really havent any idea. my husky grows impatient, wanting to go outside and flounce about in the pseudo-snow, so maybe more later. __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite

01-15-2007, 03:37 PM	#76 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	i was thinking about this while i ws being dragged around outside on the far end of a huskyleash: the "national psyche" as a construct, the ideal-typical recipient for conservative ideological memes, and so the subject-position built into those memes, taken in sequence: the optimized receiver post, the presumed addressee of these messages. when you read them, or receive them (these memes) you can allow yourself to be enframed by them, so they appear to speak to and for you. since this positioning is never without accompanying claims, this act of being-enframed (interpellation in althusserspeak) is never neutral: so you position yourself as you allow yourself to be positioned, and you position yourself via assent as an element within this "national psyche".....and because the whole of conservative ideology is predicated on the notion of the nation, and within that on the notion of a "national will" it follows that to position yourself as an element within the "national psyche" is to position yourself on conservative ideological grounds. conservatives like to imagine this national will/national psyche as being identical with themselves, politically speaking, and by extension as being "unified" it would follow that the "national pysche" or will has to be referenced in the singular, as if by dissenting you fall outside of it, fall outside of the "nation" as conservative like to think of it. seems a pretty effective way of getting folk to police what they think, doesnt it? and to experience it, all you need to do is buy the underlying mythology enough that conservative ideological propositions--which effectively tell you how to react as they tell you about the world as that ideology allow it to be understood--seem to make sense to you intuitively. if that happens, then dissent in any meaningful sense of the term threatens to push you off the edge of the earth. and all that is Out There is chaos. so it is no wonder that you worry about that, mr jazz: if you find these types of sentences to be compelling, and you read them as they "should" be read, you react as you are instructed to without that requiring much of any effort beyond the normal assimilation of infotainment in written form. its all about this goofball noun "nation" and what it entails. and in the hands of the right, that noun is about the least democratic possible. because its inclusive effects are all about exclusion. what you see in it depends on where you find yourself falling in relation to the propositions that use it. i dont find anything commonsensical about that word. i dont find it to be anything other than an ideological function. when i read books of american history written by americans, i find the same tic everywhere: the american mind, the american people, the american nation: all are first person plural names that get to run around and do things: it (the noun) assesses, reacts, does stuff, goes to a bar, has a few beverages, stumbles home, like the good mr. zappa talked about back in the day. it is all about a strange, and very particular fantasy of unity where none necessarily exists. i have never understood why americanists indulge this particular mythology, but they do, and all the bloody time. i guess the word "nation" appeals at some level, so the host of analytic problems that should be raised about it arent raised. and so all these first person plural standins for nation get to do stuff. very strange. anyway, without the notion of nation, conservative ideology has no signifieds. it already has no referent, but in that it is not different from anything else. the material host posted above gets to the same point, i think, in a kind of historically oriented fashion. i wonder if this qualifies as a rant. huh. __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite