Letters to the Editor
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@ thelastnamechosen
H/T. May the lares and penates bear witness to your true piety :-)
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Once a hack, always a hack
Joe Klein was a pathetic hack when he wrote Primary Colors and hat hasn't changed since he started his TIME shtick.
I stopped reading the little fruitcake three years ago. He is as useless as The WaPO hack, David Broder.
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Gee, isn't this precious?
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/22/world/middleeast/22fighters.html?ref=world
An induction cell busted on the Syrian border with 5 terabytes of data about "foreign fighters" in Iraq. Seems most are from Saudi Arabia, and most of the financing is from there.
A couple of items easily inferred, but not mentioned:
1) 90% of the suicide bombers in Iraq are foreign fighters.
2) Most of the foreign fighters become suicide bombers.
This makes the dynamic exactly as seen in Afghanistan: only imported zealots do suicide bombings, you can't get someone to blow themselves and their relatives up in a tribal society
3) The elements contributing to the decrease in the effectiveness of al Qaeda in Mesopotamia have not been honestly reported either by the military or the press.
Leaning on Saudi rulers and Saudi Grand Muftis was not what we were told produced the change.
4) The influence of either Syria or Iran on al Qaeda infiltrators appears to have been very small.
Why were they targeted, only because the original PNAC plan called for going against them? And there were 0 Lebanese, what happened to Hezbollah's big reported role?
5) The number of foreign fighters among the insurgents, the number of al Qaeda among the insurgents was smaller by at least a factor of two than that reported.
6) With another 5 terabytes of information on suicide bombers, including detailed interviews and hometown data on each one, a much tighter profile of infiltrating suicidal foreign terrorists should be available. The need for so broad a mandate for surveillance by the NSA, the TSA, and all the other SA's seems to be less, no? We really need to ask, If not, why not?
We should really see some hearings at least into why either of the following was true (excluding the first begets the second):
1)Why was the intelligence on foreign fighters and al Qaeda in Iraq so bad? Isn't this the second time Iraq produced completely off intelligence? -- or --
2)Why have the Bush administration, and their collaborators among the military, been lying to us? And, with all due apologies to how crass it might sound to Clark Hoyt, I do mean Lying - defined as deliberately not telling the truth.
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And while we're at it
Sorry for multiple postings, my Turkey is finally in the oven. Robert Kagan, in today's WaPo, is repeating this canard. It's gotten 50 different repeats from conservative wags since Mush cracked down and Bush failed to live up to his second inaugural.
The Reagan administration, and history, actually repudiated both sides of this doctrine. It turned out that right-wing dictators such as Ferdinand Marcos and the South Korean military junta, as other dictators before them, would only leave power if forced.
Bullfeathers! Reagan cherished every minute of his poolside drinks with Ferdinand Marcos, and had opined on the superiority of the arrangements the Filipino had compared to the American presidency. He backed Marcos with the "some countries need a strong hand" line so long that they were almost over to the palace to start it on fire the last time he backed him. It was the occasion of the now famous line, which was said in exasperation by the then head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Joe Biden, "They must be smoking opium in the White House!"
Just a little history for the Reaganite revisionists and those youngsters that always wondered where that quote came from.
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Ondolette
This old NY Times Magazine article appears to support your point. Yanking a couple of graphs out of the first page:
REAGAN AND THE PHILIPPINES: Setting Marcos Adrift
By STANLEY KARNOW; STANLEY KARNOW'S MOST RECENT BOOK IS ''IN OUR IMAGE: AMERICA'S EMPIRE IN THE PHILIPPINES,'' TO BE PUBLISHED NEXT MONTH BY RANDOM HOUSE, FROM WHICH THIS ARTICLE IS ADAPTED. Published: March 19, 1989
...Marcos constantly - sometimes desperately - sought American approval. And for years, though he abused human rights and, with his wife, Imelda, plundered the country of billions of dollars, the United States coddled him for the sake of its Philippine bases. As Franklin D. Roosevelt had said, justifying his support of Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza, ''He may be an S.O.B., but he's our S.O.B.''
Ronald Reagan, by contrast, genuinely cherished the Marcoses. In 1969, Governor and Mrs. Reagan visited Manila, where Imelda's opulent parties dazzled them. From then on, Reagan, impressed by Marcos's exaggerated stories of his exploits as an anti-Japanese guerrilla, counted him among the world's ''freedom fighters'' in the struggle against Communism. In Reagan's eyes, as one of his aides mused later, Marcos was ''a hero on a bubble-gum card he had collected as a kid.''...
http://tinyurl.com/ywqs86 or, click on my signature
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Two turkeys today - like father, like son
Just a little history for the Reaganite revisionists and those youngsters that always wondered where that quote came from.~ ondelette
And those youngsters shouldn’t forget that Dubya’s daddy on a visit to Manilla in 1981 “gushed effusively” to the dictator Marcos:
"we love your adherence to democratic principles and to the democratic process."
And not to be outdone, Dubya just said that Musharraf “hasn’t crossed the line” and “truly is somebody who believes in democracy.”
As Attaturk so succinctly summed that up...
Shorter Bush:
Arresting your Opponents, including Supreme Court Justices, Suspending the Constitution, and Declaring Marshall Law IS NOT CROSSING THE LINE and are the actions of someone who believes in Democracy.
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So, there you have it on this Turkey day, two quotes, father and son both finding a love of “democracy” among dictators.
Now that isn’t easy, but by Gosh, it can be done – if you just disregard reality, don’t care much about hypocrisy or democracy, and are foolish enough to say any ol’ damn thing that supports your cause of the moment.
http://tinyurl.com/36facn
http://tinyurl.com/2ugt7h