heartland - beltway - heartland - beltway.

I know I can never keep them straight......

Digby says it a lot. You point it out a lot. But it bears repeating often. The reason the Republicans get away with portraying the Dems as weak against the nation's enemies is because they manage to make them look weak against the Republicans. How can you expect anyone to stand up to Osama Bin Laden if they can't stand up to Karl Rove.

Yes, it involves misdirection and takes advantage of the confusion on the part of the electorate but it still works every time.

The link below includes this sentence:

I fully expect to see David Ignatius, Anne-Marie Slaughter, David Broder, and others up in arms about this affront to bipartisan cooperation and common decency in the days ahead.

http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2007/08/no-deal.html

This of course simply identifies the surrender-enablers who dominate the media and help define "conventional wisdom". Did I mention Joe Klein?

with responsibility for all escalations in killing.

Responsibility comes from action. If you shoot someone, your responsible for their death. If you bomb a country, killing their soldiers, capturing and executing their leader, then you are responsible for the death of the soldiers and the death of their leader. You are also responsible for the resulting chaos. If you cease killing people and go back to where you live, you do not suddenly become MORE responsible for the chaos that you leave behind.

To suggest otherwise is to be a reprehensible liar of the first order. People who kill are responsible for death. People who don't kill are not. What could be simpler?

There's a rather important difference between new Orleans and Iraq. New Orleans is within the borders of the United States of America. As such it's easier to assign responsibility for its protection to the US government. Iraq is a sovereign nation that has been invaded and occupied by a foreign power. That foreign power is currently occupying the country against the will of most of its inhabitants.

There is no moral basis with which to continue justifying the occupation other than the one that states that anything the US does is automatically good. There used to be a basis for that claim, but it has all but disappeared within my own reasonably short lifetime.

It isn't rocket science but it does require the removal of one's partisan/nationalistic blinders. That's why the rest of the world is looking on at us in horror.

Today the Army released a statement asserting that Scott Thomas Beauchamp is a liar but offering no evidence other than their assurance to back the claim. Watch who picks this up and runs with it. The noise machine still lives and breathes. Read it and weep.

http://news.google.com/nwshp?tab=wn&ncl=1119076215&hl=en&topic=n

In case anyone doubted that our MSM is literally in bed with the Army.

While the Pakistan controversy might be generating more press, I'm personally more chilled by the suggestion that there's something naive about ruling out nuclear weapon use in-theater. Apparently conventional wisdom suggests that we can't control the world unless we're willing threaten to incinerate sizable chunks of it.

People who think about such things, allowing themselves the degree of detachment necessary to contemplate massive destruction without thinking of the human consequences have no business telling anyone that they're naive. They are evil.

Our entire defense structure has been built up to enrich manufacturers while the resources required to actually deal with the world have been shortchanged at every opportunity. The result is there for all the world to see.

Or do they feel people in the US are too scared to think about the world without blinders on?

It depends on which blinders you're talking about. The American people definitely have blinders on when it comes to evil acts committed in their name.

The whole Beauchamp episode (like the Dixie Chicks one before it) reveals that people will expend huge amounts of energy to dissipate the discomfort that comes from the knowlege that the business of soldiers is killing and that killing is an inherently evil act. I won't suggest that killing can't be justified but I will note that in all cases it NEEDS to be justified.

The moral dissonance this creates is very discomforting and when brought to the fore in needs to be SHOUTED DOWN!

Or do they feel people in the US are too scared to think about the world without blinders on?

It depends on which blinders you're talking about. The American people definitely have a s set of blinders on when it comes to evil acts committed in their name. As the Beauchamp affair demonstrates (and the Dixie Chicks affair before), there is a lot of discomfort associated with the fact that the business of soldiers is killing and that killing is an inherently evil act. While I won't suggest that killing is never justified, I will point out that in all cases it NEEDS to be justified. This creates a dissonance in the minds of many people.

And whenever someone says or writes or says something whice brings this dissonance to the fore, it needs to be SHOUTED down.

but most of us aren't so deaf that we have to have the same ten words repeated at us 7 or 8 times per thousand.

We're having a serious policy debate about whether it's a good idea to use a nuke to take out 100 guys in a cave!!!

Tell me again how attentive we've all been to important questions? And how reasonable "conventional wisdom" is. And just WHO we should be listening to?