Letters to the Editor
Frankly, my dear, ...
Published Letters: 635
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Lapel Pins?
[Read the article: Various items]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]We don't need no steenkin' lapel pins!
Check out Mitch McConnel testifying before congress:
<http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/images/mike-mcconnell-big.jpg>
Do you see any lapel pin? — neither do I.
Who know the DNI was so unpatriotic?
Just as courage is not measured by how loud or how aggressively one talks, patriotism is not measured by lapel pins or armbands or any other manipulation of symbols. Patriotism is measured by one's willingness to defend one's country against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
The Republicans would probably be less chauvinistic if they knew that chauvinism was invented by the French.
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Whoever wins ...
[Read the article: Various items]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]... the coming election will be a historic first
- if Obama, the first African-American president
- if Hillary, the first woman president
- if McCain or Nader, the first person over 70 to be elected and the oldest president at his inauguration (assuming he survives from the election to inauguration)
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L.W.M. said ...
[Read the article: Various items]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]@ William Timberman
I think you may be put off by the frank discussion and terms used by Mr. Bernanke, and a misunderstanding of the term, "hegemony". He's merely stating the foreign policy acumen of Gen. Odom, albeit, less diplomatically.
And I think you must not be reading either what WT or FB wrote. The only place where FB and Odom overlap is that the invasion of Iraq has been an unqualified disaster. Otherwise, FB is simply repeating the Project for the New American Century/British Empire (white man's burden)/Greater East-Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere with different variables.
FB's claim that the ME is important to the US because it has oil and the US needs oil is not echoed by Odom. And the claim that since the US needs oil it has a right to the oil under ME sand and it shouldn't have to pay a high price for it or beg for it is certainly not echoed by Odom.
Indeed, this rationale is, as WT pointed out, the same one used to justify the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor (read <http://www.international.ucla.edu/eas/restricted/geacps.htm>).
FB's premise that the US has a right to the oil in the ME is what has brought us to our present position (that and the PNAC vision of world peace through universal American hegemony through overwhelming military superiority).
Never lose sight of the simple fact that the invasion of Iraq was about oil (so much so that the original designation of the military operation "Operation Iraqi Liberation" had to be changed so that the rubes wouldn't cotton on). The WMD issue was just a pretext, agreed on, as Wolfowitz said, "for bureaucratic reasons" and the "spreading democracy" fable was an afterthought when the WMD disobligingly were not found. The evidence for this is too abundant to need elaboration.
FB and Odom agree that the Iraqi invasion was a complete disaster, but this is where their views diverge. Odom believes that the solution lies in reducing our dependency on oil and that "spreading democracy" (white man's burden) is not a viable strategy. FB, on the other hand, still believes that the US has a right to the Middle East's oil and that it shouldn't have to genuflect to the Sheiks and Sultans of the region to get it or to pay an excessive price for it.
Curiously, at the time of the invasion of Iraq the price of oil was around $30 a barrel. No less a luminary than Rupert Murdoch predicted that the invasion of Iraq would result in $20 a barrel oil. Instead the invasion has resulted in $100 a barrel oil. Presumably more invasions, say of Iran or Saudi Arabia, would reduce the price further. Clearly, the price of oil is not a factor in Middle Eastern policy or else the people who run this country (Dick Cheney and his Energy Task Force) would have stopped the war long ago. Higher oil prices mean increased profits because profits are figured as a percentage of costs. The losers are the American tax payers because the federal gasoline tax is a flat tax per gallon and is not based on the price of a gallon of gasoline. No matter how high the price of oil goes, federal tax revenue on its sale remains the same. The difference goes to the oil companies.
FB's call for more regime change in the Middle East in order to benefit US interests (read oil) is simply an extension of the invasion of Iraq by other means. One of the (PNAC's) stated reasons for the invasion of Iraq was that it would make the other regimes in the area more amenable to US policy goals (lest they receive the same treatment). This is precisely the definition of state terrorism.
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I like Duncan's response
[Read the article: Obama shows that dismissing slimy right-wing attacks is not difficult]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The tactic to use? The accuser becomes the accused.
<http://atrios.blogspot.com/2008_02_24_archive.html#4631351186724822521>