I know that omooex and I can only sling mud at each other but you seem to be missing an important point. We don't really care about democracy, it is just a word Americans use because it reminds us how awesome we are while sounding sophisticated and peaceful at the same time, helping us perceive ourselves as the tip top leaders of the "civilization" ladder.

We can say we support, promote, and love all the Democracy stuff, and we can call it whatever we'd like, but the Empire just wants someone who will cooperate and play ball. That's all it wants. Friends that will play ball, you never can have too many friends. It doesn't matter if our friends are Dictators or Kings of not, and hell if we luck out and one of our friends actually is a democracy then we'll go ahead and exploit that perception for our own benefit, e.g. Israel, and ignore it when it doesn't benefit us, e.g. Egypt and SA.

Just take Iran in 1953 as an example. They had a democracy complete with a democratically elected leader, but it wasn't our Democracy, he wasn't our man, we suspected he was Moscow's man and even though he may play ball, you never know and can't be too sure, he might not follow the rules we dictate or something crazy. So we overthrew the Democratically elected Iranian Government and installed the Shah. Who played ball.

I read his posts about Peace Laureate Obama and about halfway through I'm thinking "What is going on? Where is the meat? Has Mr. Greenwald put on water skis? Is he jumping the shark? Say it isn't so, I'd better finish reading."

Then I finish reading and say to myself, "Oh I get it now, Mr. Greenwald is trying to balance his criticism with that whole fairness thing."

He never did this for Mr. Bush iirc, but he would have had Mr. Bush actually done something worthy of Greenwaldian Praise or any praise for that matter.

We wouldn't want them identifying US soldiers...

I wonder why the Republicans don't wax nostalgic about those days ...

Because those days are over and they are never coming back. It wouldn't be nice of the Republicans to try and get people's "hopes" up with false pretenses.

Let them identify targets and set strategy.

Yeah, right. We wouldn't them identifying us soldiers and setting strategies to deal with them.

Oh wait, the people in Afghanistan already do that but we label them the Taliban instead of labeling them as Freedom Fighters.

The difference an agenda makes.

We didn't try to "fix their country for them"---we BROKE their country for them. Twice, maybe 3 times now, plus the Soviet invasion.

So what? That is what the military does, it breaks shit. If we were into fixing things we wouldn't have an army full of tools for killing, we'd have ondelette's army of calculus professors and mechanics.

We don't fix things, we break them. It's our specialty. We are going to spend over half a trillion this year breaking things. That's what we do, that's what great American minds study on behalf of their Government.

(1) War

(2) Negligence

And repeat.

Let's not do it again.

Why not? It's what we spend more money than any other country on the planet doing. It's what our interventionist policies are geared towards. It's what Obama voters voted for in a cunning political gambit. Intervention is the American way, for now.

Hopefully it never becomes the Chinese way or any other country's way. We have such a positive perception of our do-gooding it wouldn't be very nice of the Chinese to spoil that by trying to co-opt our empire shtick.

Nobody is forcing you to read the letters and articles on Salon and nobody is forcing you to cry about them.

Graham emphasized his conservative bona fides — particularly his record of opposing abortion rights and support of gun rights — but said GOP needs to build a broader coalition. Otherwise, he warned, those trying to purify the party will turn Congress over "to the most liberal people in the world because somebody disagrees with you."

You see, purity spoils the party! Be it Mr. Ruinwald's purity or Dr. Paul's purity, purity is a spoiler. A ruiner, just like Mr. Greenwald. In fact, replace the word Liberal with the word Conservative and you have half many of the letters written in response to Mr. Greenwald's criticism of Peaceful Nobel Peace Laureate Barack Obama.

Graham is also a very clever politician. He knows that placating the peasants with domestic issues will distract from his love of foreigner killing. Notice how he builds his "conservative bona fides" preaching about abortion and gun rights and not his love of foreigner killing. All he has to do to change his "conservative bona fides" to "liberal bona fides", switch stances on those two issues, and he'd become the Liberal Interventionist Blueprint. The Perfect Progressive.