Matthews spills the beans: the media wants this to go until the eleventh hour of the convention. He chuckles heartily about it with McAuliffe.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/194907.php

Unaccountable. The media class have no sense of shame or responsibilty about their serious task to educate the public.

Why does our foreign policy...

...read like a comic book?

Green Lantern ("more will power"), Superman ("the American way"), Batman ("bring it on"), etc.

I've covered this. They are spoofing a spoof (click my sig for the fun stuff; click link through to my original post on this too). It's meta-satire. Only for highbrows, you know, like the intellectual luminaries that make up the Beltway crowd, like Kristol and Freidman....

Cheers,

P.S.: Getting serious for a second, I think that the "comic book" approach within the maladministration and its sycophants actually accurately reflects the mental/emotional age of these people....

Iran executed about 300,000 people ex judicio in 1979.

Yeah. That was just the ranks of the SAVAK and their brown-shirt contingent (see link). They were pervasive (even sent minders [one-in-one, I think] to keep an eye on the Iranian students at MIT when I was there in the 70s....) The world's smallest record player is playing "My heart bleeds for them".....

Cheers,

[some eedjit]: Predestination?

It may be said with rough accuracy that there are three stages in the life of a strong people. First, it is a small power, and fights small powers. Then it is a great power, and fights great powers. Then it is a great power, and fights small powers, but pretends that they are great powers, in order to rekindle the ashes of its ancient emotion and vanity. After that, the next step is to become a small power itself. -- Chesterton

[Glenn]: It's hard to imagine a more concise and accurate explanation for what motivates the Tom Friedmans of the world and what that mentality is doing to the United States.

[some eedjit]: Excuse me, motivation? do you mean that Friedman is trying to make the US a small power? Or that Friedman's theory of confrontation will lead to being a small power? Or that by virtue of Chesterton's prognostication, our becoming a small power is ineveitable, Freidman is just the facilitator?

I ask, because I had presumed the US being a small power, is what the Salonistas desire. No?

Try reading for comprehension. Big but important words highlighted for the hard-of-thinking. It's not that hard ... for most competent eighth-graders.

Thanks in advance.

Cheers,

Until we realize how intimately tied into our economy is the State of Constant War, it will persist. There was an article on Truthout recently describing a new book about this issue (The Complex, Nick Turse). It is amazing how dependent we are on War and War Preparations, and the whole economy of war. This is the reason war has become stitched into the hem of the once republican garment of the now oligarchical State.

I realize that I'm goofing, and it has Nothing to do with the price of a beano-pill. If I was a vigilante with beano beans to shoot @ 242.... yikes. I still dream my bandolier is empty.

odd? All day a red and black bird, a cardinal, keeps chirping outside my window. I love red and black cardinals. Serious.

Oh~I ran out of ammo....

I'll go deliver quail eggs.

The Cambodians do pickle.

We go half/half. No count!

Yummy. Pickle quail eggs.

'um make Pho & egg roles.

Speaking seriously of a “Cold War” against Iran only resonates with the ancient Persia link, even though this makes no sense in a region where there is often little continuity from one government to the next, much less any kind of equivalence between regimes separated by centuries. Tehran under the Shah wasn’t Tehran under Mossadegh wasn’t Tehran under the Ottomans. “Iran” is not “Persia”, any more than the current government of Egypt is a direct descendant of the Pharaohs of the Old Kingdom. Just because Xerxes invaded Greece doesn’t mean Ahmadinejad has designs on southern Europe. Khaddafi wasn’t the second coming of Hannibal.

True, Saddam did his best to identify with the Ancient Babylonians, but I don’t see the powers-that-be in Iran going that route, even if some of them dream of the return of the Caliphate. (I doubt Saddam’s example was an encouraging one.) It does make sense they would want to try to dampen possible chaos in their neighborhood. Recognizing that doesn’t make you Mr. Rogers.

Instead of overblown phrases like “Cold War”, we might consider referring to our conflict with Iran more realistically as “our dispute with that regional power we strengthened by mistake”, or “our argument with the country whose legitimately elected government we overthrew to get the British cheap oil”.

Of course, maybe people like Friedman have a problem understanding countries like Iran because of the unique nature of our own. We have had the same constitutional government (more of less) for over two hundred years. So in trying to define what the United States is – how it acts, what it stands for, what it may do or become – we are within our rights to include references to its actions in the past.

At the same time, because of the uncomfortable range and diversity of that history, we are constantly struggling between selective memory and cognitive dissonance.

If only there were more of this mental Cold War going on in Friedman’s head.

A grassroots group No War On Iran that formed over some beers, brought together an impressive group of military and Middle East experts to testify to the Chicago Human Relations Committee so that today, the City Council would vote on a resolution (http://www.nowaroniran-chicago.org/resolution.htm) against any attack on Iran by either our government or Israel. Those testifying were: Scott Ritter, chief weapons inspector for the United Nations Special Commission in Iraq; John Mearsheimer, co-author of the book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy and Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science and Co-Director of the Program on International Security Policy at the University of Chicago; Stephen Kinzer, teaches international affairs and journalism at Northwestern University and was a foreign correspondent for the New York Times for over 20 years; Douglass Cassel, director of the Center for Civil and Human Rights at the University of Notre Dame Law School; Norma Claire Moruzzi, Associate Professor of Political Science and Gender and Women’s Studies and Director of the International Studies Program at the University of Illinois at Chicago; and Farrah Hassen, a Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C. and is a member of the team which produced the recent primer Iran in the Crosshairs: How to Prevent Washington’s Next War.

This distinguished group was unanimous in their belief that the Bush Administration wanted to attack Iran before a decision was made to invade Iraq and is hell bent on attacking Iran before they are all mercifully out of office. The Busheviks couldn’t build a sufficient case for Iran, so they invaded Iraq as a second choice.

The media in Chicago chose to ignore their case and sent no one to cover their press conference except for public radio that put out a brief, meaningless short news item today. Robert Naiman did cover the event and his post is on Huffington Post, see sig.

At the press conference, Ritter said this:

To those who are concerned about the threat to Israel: I am a friend of Israel. I worked in Israel, trying to protect Israel against the threat of missiles raining down on Israeli cities. And that's one of the reasons I'm here, to turn the US away from a policy that will guarantee that missiles rain down on Israeli cities.

I'm concerned that people say that they know things that they don't know. We know that Iran has an enrichment program. The question is how should we should deal with that. Should we launch a pre-emptive strike, pushing them into a corner, making it more likely that they will pursue a nuclear weapon more vigorously in the future. Or shall we pursue real diplomacy.

When we're talking about whether Iran is a threat to the United States that would justify a US military attack, we're not talking about the relationship of Iran to Hezbollah in Lebanon. That is not a threat to the United States. The question is what the evidence is that Iran is a threat to the United States.

Our role in a democracy is not to take the statements of our government or any government at face value. Our role is to challenge.

The ramifications for not stopping the Busheviks are extremely serious and yet the Serious experts and lapdog M$M are once again ignoring a presidential decision that could outrank his other long list of incredibly stupid decisions.

I ask all commenters to take on the challenge of doing all they can to prevent another disaster that could put us on the brink of never being able to reverse the consequences.