Letters to the Editor
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Stop Wasting Time With Bush-Compliant Democrats
After 37 years of faithfully voting for candidates from the Democratic Party and helping to elect a Democratic Congress that was going to bring the Bush criminal enterprise to a grinding halt, I've found that they are spineless shills for the neocon war machine, excepting perhaps Henry Waxman, John Conyers, Dennis Kucinich, and the 13 other Democrats who signed on a co-sponsors for Kucinich's resolution to impeach Dick Cheney.
I'll be donating to Cindy Sheehan's campaign to unseat arch-betrayer Nancy Pelosi.
I'm now a registered Republican who enthusiastically supports Ron Paul's candidacy. His record is unsullied by compromise with neocons; his opposition to warrantless wiretapping and the Iraq invasion and occupation has been principled and consistent.
If you want your country to be taking the fast-track to becoming a corporate-controlled totalitarian police state, vote for any of the "front runner" Democrats or Republicans, it probably doesn't make a dime's worth of difference which.
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Gee! You sound like George Bush.
Why not just call them "evildoers". One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter.
Denning... They live in caves for good reasons
No. They are not smart in any way. Even though I know what you mean, I disagree with you, first, because of the undue credit it gives the terrorists, and second for how it makes their us feel and act.
Terrorists are base, murderous criminals and nothing else.
They are also too lazy to do the thinking and the hard work to find their way out of a predicament. Just violence. On philosophical groundss, I refuse to accept anyone whose solution to a problem is violence as smart.
Including the revolutionaries who founded this country?
I didn't use any term besides "they". That would be anyone using suicide terrorism as a tactic in any struggle, and more specifically, proponents of radical Islam willing to use it against targets of the United States, here and abroad.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dying_to_Win:_The_Strategic_Logic_of_Suicide_Terrorism
Ch. 10: The Demographic Profile of Suicide Terrorists
“In general, suicide attackers are rarely socially isolated, clinically insane, or economically destitute individuals, but are most often educated, socially integrated, and highly capable people who could be expected to have a good future” (200). Pape discusses problems of data-gathering (201-02). He establishes 462 individuals in his “universe” of suicide terrorists available for analytical purposes (203). Hezbollah suicide bombers in the period 1982-1986 were 71% Communist/Socialist, 21% Islamist, 8% Christian (204-07). In general, suicide terrorists are in their early 20s (207-08). Females are fewer in Islamist groups: “Islamist fundamentalism may actually reduce the number of suicide terrorists by discouraging certain categories of individuals” (208-09). Female suicide terrorists tend to be older than male (209-10). There is no documented mental illness in any case of suicide terrorism, though there are 16 cases of personal trauma (e.g. the loss of a loved one) (210-11). Arab suicide terrorists are in general better educated than average and are from the working or middle classes (211-16). “[T]hey resemble the kind of politically conscious individuals who might join a grassroots movement more than they do wayward adolescents or religious fanatics” (216).
Denning... Second, thinking that we're dealing with a smart enemy is what makes us act out of character. WE wouldn't be having this discussion about spying on each other, or torture, etc. if we had been confident that terrorists were no REAL threat to us. As it is becoming more and more evident to some of us, the real existential threat doesn't come from two-bit murderers on the outside. It could more easily come from our own fears inside.
-- Denning
No REAL threat to us?
I think you mean that the chances of dying in a terrorist attack here are very low. That's certainly not the same as "No REAL threat. Running red lights late at night when there is little likelihood of cross traffic hitting you is "no real threat," until that one time.
And then the neocons were conned by Chalabi, working for the Iranians, into taking Saddam out for them. That was pretty damn smart, if you ask me. So instead of staying to finish the job in Afghanistan, in one fell swoop, people who think like you and underestimate these backwards and unsophisticated barbarians took the bait OBL offered and transformed al-Qaeda from what it was, a bunch of homeless guests of the Taliban to what it is today, a world-wide movement.
From where I sit it's al-Qaeda 1. U.S. 0
Iran 1. U.S. 0.
And Saddam is dead. Maybe you sound more like a Roman.
They got nineteen airline tickets, took some classes, and bought box-cutters.
The 9/11 attack was many things: insane, horrifying, savage, daring. It was not sophisticated.
-- lupercus
It took a fair amount of sophistication, and some luck, to pull it off without being detected and as successfully as they did. You make it sound simpler than it was, yet simple changes in our practices, reinforced cockpit doors like El Al has had for some time, for instance, could have prevented it. But our airline companies are cheap bastards. That's asymmetrical warfare for you. They got a helluva bang for their buck. If you can come up with a cheap and simple method to defeat a costly and "sophisticated" multi-million dollar weapons platform, like an Abrams tank at half a billion plus a pop, you have achieved some kind of "sophistication," or at least defeated the other side's sophistication. We could bring down a building with a cruise missle, again, half a billion plus a pop. I wouldn't take any enemy for granted they way some of you seem to. That's one of the other stupid things about the fearmongering and crying wolf for political reasons. Some days there are wolves.
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Spineless Democrats
I once floated a proposal that we send a corps of chiropractors to Washington to help the Democrats find their spines. No one responded.
I think I would also like to go to a slaughterhouse and collect male gonads to send them, too, since they seem to be deficient when it comes to their own.
I swear, if I were an editorial cartoonist I would draw Bush as a lame duck being held up by a pair of crutches, one named "Pelosi" and the other named "Reid." I guess the casts on his feet would be named "Hoyer" and the other "Emmanuel."