After he's out of office you find out he isn't mentally all there?

Have you listened to the moron?!?!? He's been this way for a long time.....

Cheers,

Karen,

Not your fault. I've never really understood why the war started, not really, not in a way that you feel is true. So as I began thinking about your comment, and could see a mental image of how each person, each policy wonk, each journalist, each government advisor, was hanging with cool, at a conference here, a cocktail party there, a meeting..., a signing ceremony,..., it juxtaposed with mental images of soldiers in 110&degree; heat, refugee lines, dead people, and it was like, Oh, no! If only this guy hadn't wanted this little thing and that guy hadn't wanted that little thing, then this article wouldn't have been written, that policy statement wouldn't have been published, this decision wouldn't have been made -- all these people wouldn't have died, got maimed, marched across the desert into homelessness... I suddenly started feeling sick. I guess I was thinking that it was probably true.

I know, I know. But I meant finding out he has an organic brain deficit, not the terminal laziness syndrome.

I’m in strong agreement with Greenwald’s recent columns and the need to reality check “conventional wisdom” and pundits. MSM does not do this, the reverse in fact.

That said (and my comment was aimed at the Powers memo and Greenwald’s recommendation of it), I think the recent dust-ups between Clinton and Obama have more to do with politics and electioneering and little with substance, more with differentiating themselves from each other.

They also have to be seen within the context, which is Bush, his Iraq war, his refusal to talk one on one with North Korea and other “axis of evil” countries, the lack of control over departments, the stupid, pointless rhetoric (“old Europe-“ what purpose did that serve?) that maybe reflected the unseen, wars waged by Cheney and Rumsfeld on Powell and Rice, the incompetence and lack of accountability, etc., etc.

I think any of the Democratic candidates would engage with other countries if that offers a way to influence them. None will use nuclear weapons against a terrorist camp, and all will run a tighter ship than Bush, reducing the unnecessary belligerence and arrogance and mis-statements.

My comment was specifically on the Samantha Powers memo; apart from one swipe at Clinton, suggesting her as a person who “supported” the war, I saw the rest of her points as simply differentiating Obama from Bush’s policies of invading Iraq, disengaging instead of negotiating, careful and controlled official speech by all, and other governmental competencies we Americans have taken for granted up until Bush. I don’t know why Greenwald wrote it was “one of the best and potentially most important political documents I have read in some time.” It seemed to me just a spin for Obama, mild soft soap compared to the lies put out by rightwing and neocon think tank propagandists. I guess the idea is that Clinton portrays Obama as inexperienced and he portrays her as conventional old school. Who wins more votes based on the emotional content? No policy here.

My comments apply just to her memo, as I have not read anything else by her.

“Radically new perspectives” to me would be broad policy objectives like reallocating military spending to upgrading domestic infrastructure, reducing our military presence overseas, a goal of reversing the job flow away from service to production, which is killing this country on many levels, public works programs, a single payer Medicare or VA style universal health care system, massive aid to alternative energy efforts, a specific program for disenfranchising and shipping all lobbyists, public relations spoke persons, spin doctors, and advertising executives to reeducation camps, the usual pipedreams we see so often on these pages. I realize its hard for a politician to say they will set goals like this because it opens too much room for attack, and pundits will ask “what’s your plan to get there,” but I'd like to hear them put out for discussion, and I’m not nearly as impressed by the signifiers being put by Clinton and Obama and their camps.

What's really odd is that I sometimes check out the slide shows in Yahoo, and awhile back I thought I noticed that GWB was looking especially clumsy, even for him. Photos often had an arm or a leg askew, or he was at a funny angle, and I wondered if there was some possible physical/mental reason.

Guess I should have checked those photos more carefully and commented on it...

It requires a lot of work to compartmentalize just enough to be able to function in daily life, but not so much as to become an unfeeling automaton. And every so often it all coalesces, and you can't keep it all separated anymore.

Even well before the war, I kept having these little negative epiphanies, like the one when I realized while reading Krugman, that they really were succeeding in the way they wanted with the economy. (They being Bush & cronies.)

That might be when I seriously felt for the first time that we were really doomed.

The kids and soldiers doing the grunt work in Iraq? Probably a lot of them never really wanted or expected to be hanging out with the cool kidz, except maybe for some athletes.

I must admit some bias here, that I didn't think to mention before... I hated junior high, even more than high school. It was awful.

Yet this President Bush is not a good scapegoat. Rather than betraying the right, he has given it virtually everything it craved, from humongous tax cuts to conservative judges. Many of the worst errors were championed by conservative constituencies. Some of the arrogance in foreign policy stems from the armchair warriors of neoconservatism; the ill-fated attempt to “save” the life of the brain-dead Terri Schiavo was driven by the Christian right. Even Mr Bush's apparently oxymoronic trust in “big-government conservatism” is shared in practice by most Republicans in Congress. -- Is America turning left? (08/09/07)

The Economist doesn't much care for anything except money, so GWB never bothered them, but at least they're under no illusion about what he is. I'm also still giggling about this, said of Hillary Clinton: She also mentions God more often than the average European bishop.

I'm a subscriber, so the little flags that tell you whether or not the article is a free one don't show for me, but for those who want to have a bash, here's the URL:

http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9621579