Letters to the Editor
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More Authoritarian B.S. From nabalzbbfr
nabalzbbfr:
There is a cancer growing in the Middle East and threatening to metastasize worldwide. President Bush courageously decided to address this problem head on instead of patching it over with band aids like previous administrations.
Ah yes! The courageous codpiece to the rescue!
The fearless authoritarian leader can do no wrong. He takes up Hurculean tasks that other (girly) men have shrunk from in shame, and sets right the order of the world!
Meanwhile, in the real world, Bush is feeding the cancer, having totally ignored the most pressing problems we faced in the Middle East, in order to create a whole bunch of new ones.
Here's what his former Mideast envoy, General Anthony Zinni said back in August, 2002, regarding the notion of invading Iraq:
You need to weigh this: what are your priorities in the region? That's the first issue in my mind.
The Middle East peace process, in my mind, has to be a higher priority. Winning the war on terrorism has to be a higher priority. More directly, the situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Central Asia need to be resolved, making sure Al Qaeda can't rise again from the ashes that are destroyed. Taliban cannot come back. That the warlords can't regain power over Kabul and Karzai, and destroy everything that has happened so far.
Our relationships in the region are in major disrepair, not to the point where we can't fix them, but we need to quit making enemies we don't need to make enemies out of. And we need to fix those relationships. There's a deep chasm growing between that part of the world and our part of the world. And it's strange, about a month after 9/11, they were sympathetic and compassionate toward us. How did it happen over the last year? And we need to look at that -- that is a higher priority.
The country that started this, Iran, is about to turn around, 180 degrees. We ought to be focused on that. The father of extremism, the home of the ayatollah -- the young people are ready to throw out the mullahs and turn around, become a secular society and throw off these ideas of extremism. That is more important and critical. They're the ones that funded Hezbollah and other terrorist organizations. That ought to be a focus. And I can give you many, many more before you get down to Saddam and Iraq.
Woops!
Source:
http://www.npr.org/programs/morning/zinni.html
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Hang on a Sec...Let Me Get this out of the Salon Archive
...sorry had to post this to get to my other letters:
My next post was a reaction to the article on Fox that was featured the other day...it has some relavance here...read my next post...ed
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Mein Herz Brennt
The following was a response to how Faux news enshrines the "pathology" of the left in order to gets it audience to accept the unthinkable. One can substitute "Fox news" with Neoconservatives....
...is a propaganda tactic that showcases the malformed, mad or sickly, which are presented as the norm of a societal subset.
Thus when the far-left jumps at the chance to speak thier mind--the ringmasters can say "...witness the deformity, the sickness of these people. How can we let this monstrosity to go unpunished..."
During the rise of the Nazi party this was done by parading around people with physical, mental and other deformities.
It was done regardless of the subjects religious affiliation--Jewish or not. This in turn inured the German populace to the murder, and torture of 6 million human souls.
It reinforces the natural fear of "..the other...".
The Serbs did it to the Croats...
The Hutus did it to the Tutsis...
The Conservatives are doing it to the liberals...
And THAT my good friends is what this is all about...
My heart burns...
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Glenn/El Cid
Glenn, I've reread your post - you are right; I was wrong, having read it incorrectly.
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czapniks:
I've reread your post - you are right; I was wrong, having read it incorrectly.
Thanks - really appreciate it - we all misread things sometimes.
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27 people is mass destruction?
Anyone remember when 12 or so Rawandans (?) with machetes killed over a thousand people?
I can kill more than 27 people with a pair of butterfly knives. Next they'll be claiming that handguns, knives, IEDs and conventional bombs are all WMDs. Rather than admit they were wrong, they just keep lowering the bar until anything that can kill you is a WMD, including a matchbook.
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shooter, what in hell are you mainlining now...or is it a slow weekend?
shooter wrote, more or less:
"unless you have something better to offer, authoritarianism is the only game in town."
First, where's your objective evidence for a sick, twisted apologia like that? Did you just pull that one out of your backside? Sounds like it.
Second, I commend to you this bit of wisdom, if you have the wit to understand it:
First They Came for the Jews
First they came for the Jews
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the Communists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for me
and there was no one left
to speak out for me.
Pastor Martin Niemöller
*********
and who are the "they" exactly? The authoritarians. When they come for you, by-and-by, if things work out as you seem to wish, you might give a thought to Niemoller's observation..
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some facts
Margalis: no, it wasn't only 12 Rwandans with machetes. You're off by several orders of magnitude.
Unless that was your point.
Paul Rosenberg (and Glenn):
It is important to note that people like nabalzbbfr usually speak only in metaphors. "There's a cancer growing in the mideast!" "If Vietnam falls, the rest of Southeast Asia will fall like dominos!" This reliance on metaphorical speaking is a sign that the person in question doesn't really know a lot of facts, and needs to resort to fantastical explanations for their thinking. The truth is that the threats exist more in the minds of the person in question than in reality.
For the past fifty years, most of American foreign policy has been driven by overhyped paranoia. During the Cold War, there was at least some reason to respect the strike capacity of the purported enemy, even if his motivations were utterly overstated and fantastical. But as more and more information comes out about the Cold War, it becomes increasingly clear that the Soviet threat was vastly overstated by intelligence analysts.
As for the threat in the "War on Terror", it is important to note that the people who back this war cannot even make clear what set of people the US is at war with. This kind of thinking is virtually unprecedented in history - that a nation so powerful should see its foreign policy drown so hopelessly in the clutches of propaganda. Is the US at war with Sunni Jihadists, Sunni secularists, or Shia jihadists? The 9/11 terrorists were in the first group, Saddam Hussein in the second, and the Shia backed by Iran are in the third. As far as we know, there has been no alliance between any two of these three groups.
And yet the Bush administration is happy to play a shell game with all three possible targets to make sure there is always a "bad guy" for the ignoramuses like nabalzbbfr to get hysterical about.
We really need to get these people away from the levers of power as quickly as possible.