Letters to the Editor
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TILT!!
Who am I? One who has watched you destroy more threads on UT than Glenn can start.
buckyl
Cause nothing keeps a thread going like accusations of sock-puppetry, which the comment system itself does not permit!
Buckyl, you made a real friend today in me. My opinion of you, your reasoning, and your ability to communicate couldn't be higher. No, I don't think it could be.
Apart from the compliment of thinking I could be LWM, that is!
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@ Jill
-And, I would suggest that his recent slips have caused even the media to question how severely he is out of touch and the potential that they could cover for him for the next four years, were he elected. I would suggest the few mentions, by the media, of his slips might even be trial balloons, because I’m not sure, at this point, they even know what to do.-
On that point, I too see McCain's composure unraveling in the very near future. With the Democratic primaries unresolved he is more or less on vacation at this time compared to what he will be facing in the presidential debates.
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Anomalies
Trying to get Americans to take note of what they are doing to their fellow citizens is well nigh impossible. -- Aycharaych
So, if I may...what immortal hand or eye hath framed thy fearful symmetry? Or mine, or that of any of the other anomalies here present?
Can we replicate the process, or is it just that we're none of us real Americans? Aych, sometimes hyperbole is not your friend. I know you've heard that before, but then turnabout is fair play.
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lwm...bucky...derbig
it lost it's entertainment value around page 30. go to bed. and fuck you lwm (proof that elephants aren't the only one's who don't forget)
cheers
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@sajwan re: Protection Racket
" ... he is the protector of the United States."
---sajwan
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(protector - "a person in charge of the kingdom during the sovereign's minority, incapacity, or absence")
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Well now, just what is John McCain doing as the "presumptive" nominee of the Republican Party for president? Is he talking trash on foreign policy? Is he sending "mixed signals" to our mortal foes, here, there, and everywhere? Is he confused? Addled? Unable to talk intelligently in bytes?
Or is he, in effect, acting as an American "protector," at a time when Bush, the "sovereign," is "incapacitated" - a lame duck?
Mightn't he be appearing before our bleary, war weary eyes, as a sort of Richard III, pretending that a hunger for presidential power is nothing more or less than a hankering for another burger or pork rib? Remember that Shakespeare's Richard, the lord protector for a king who was too young to wield power, killed everyone in his family who stood between him and the throne (including the young king and his brother) And then, the protector became king.
Beyond all this, what is McCain really saying about the Middle East as he fumbles and mumbles about it, with the help of Joe Lieberman and Lindsay Graham, his able courtiers who stood by in a recent trip to help the "protector" clear up a few strands of tangled nuance?
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"The French philosopher Michel Foucault notes that in all societies discourse is controlled - imperceptibly constrained, perhaps, but constrained nonetheless. We are not free to say exactly what we like. The norms set by institutions, convention and our need to keep within the boundaries of accepted behaviour and thought limit what may be touched upon. The Archbishop of Canterbury experienced the backlash from stepping outside these conventions when he spoke about aspects of Islamic law that might be imported into British life.
"Once, a man was held to be mad if he strayed from this discourse - even if his utterings were credited with revealing some hidden truth. Today, he is called 'naive,' or accused of having gone 'native'. Recently, the Royal United Services Unit (RUSI) marshaled former senior military and intelligence experts in order to assert such limits to expression by warning us that 'deference' to multiculturalism was undermining the fight against Islamic 'extremism' and threatening security.
"Former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger, in a recent interview with a German magazine, embellished RUSI's complaints of naivety and 'flabby thinking'. Radical Islam won't stop, he warned, and the 'virus' would only become more virulent if the US were to withdraw from Iraq.
"The charge of naivete is not limited to failing to understand the concealed and duplicitous nature of Hamas and Hezbollah, Iran and Syria; it extends to not grasping the true nature of the wider 'enemy' the West is facing. 'I don't like the term "war on terror" because terror is a method, not a political movement; we are in a war against radical Islam'. says Kissinger. But who or what is radical Islam? It is those who are not 'moderate', he explains. Certainly, a small minority of Muslims believe that only by 'burning the system' can a fresh stab at a just society be made. But Kissinger's definition of 'moderate' Islam sounds no more than a projection of the Christian narrative after Westphalia, by which Christianity became a private matter of conscience, rather than an organizational principle for society.
"Camouflaged behind a language dwelling exclusively on 'their' violence and 'their disdain' for our rationality, these 'realists' propose not a war on terror, nor a war to preserve 'our values' - for we are not about to be culturally overwhelmed. No Islamist seriously expects that a 'defeated' West would hasten to adopt the spirit of the Islamic revolution.
"No, the West's war is a military response to ideas that question Western supremacy and power. The nature of this war on 'extremism' became evident when five former chiefs of defence staff of NATO states gathered at a think tank in Washington earlier this year. Their aim was not to query the realism of the war on ideas, but to empower NATO for an 'uncertain world'.
" 'We cannot survive ... confronted with people who do not share our values, who unfortunately are in the majority in terms of numbers, and who are extremely hungry for success,' Germany's former chief of defence staff warned. Their conclusion was that the security of the West rests on a 'restoration of its certainties', and on a new form of deterrence in which enemies will find there is not, and never will be, a place in which they will feel safe.
"The generals concluded that NATO should adopt an asymmetrical and relentless pursuit of its targets regardless of others 'sovereignty'; to surprise; to seize the initiative; and to use all means, including the nuclear option, against its enemies.
"In Foucault's discourse he identified a further group of rules serving to control language: none may enter into discourse on a specific subject unless he or she is deemed qualified to do so. Those, like the archbishop, who penetrate this forbidden territory - reserved to security expertise - to ask that we see the West for what it has become in the eyes of others, are liable to be labelled as naively weakening 'our certainties' and undermining our national resolve."
[snip]
"If that is the limit to Western thinking, then it is these 'realists', these armchair warrior fighting a delusional war against a majority who 'do not share our values', who are truly naive."
---Alastair Crooke
---former security adviser to the European Union
---The Guardian, 3/24/08
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So is John McCain - the "protector" - laying out, however awkwardly, a new, improved restoration of the West's "certainties" - post-Bush - a "forbidden territory" of foreign policy debate, into which only those with credentialed "security expertise" will be allowed to enter?
Or, maybe he's Gen. Ripper, from "Dr. Strangelove," who went on and on about the threat to our "precious bodily fluids."