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Quote:

Ventilating Those Hyperventilating about an IRAN BOMB

Paul Kerr at Total WonKerr has an interesting piece up about Iran's nuclear intentions.

I think he's on target and have long felt that what Iran wants less than a nuclear weapons program is a nuclear weapons "option."

I think Iran wants to be Japan -- in the sense that like Japan, the Iranian leadership wants a full fuel cycle nuclear energy program that can serve as a base for but which is a step short of nuclear weapons development.

A lot of folks blur the issue of a "nuclear weapons option" and "nuclear weapons in hand." And I think these distinctions do matter.

-- Steve Clemons

End quote

Funny if Obama needs to be ventilated :)

need to use great caution with many of our neighbors in the world, in particular the Islamic nations, if they are to provide safety for our country and Western culture.

Tommy's post should have read "blah, blah, blah, blah, . . . the Arabs are such scary barbarians and Western culture is so powerful and superior that we must necessarily wet ourselves in fear at the mere thought of existing in a world with very scary and wily barbarians."

The only two nations on the planet who have definitively shown that they can't be trusted are America and Israel. I sure haven't noticed Iran "preemptively" invading another sovereign nation in, like, well, centuries. Gunboat diplomacy American style. Isn't America super stupendous and wonderful with all its smily faced freedom, liberty, rule of law mythology trumpeted endlessly right up until the time they start raining bombs on some hapless nation that has the temerity to not immediately prostrate itself in homage to our stupifying greatness.

Now try to do the same thing, but substitute "Islam" with "Judaism."

Gosh, you don't suppose, that just as it is with Islam, facts might be preferable? I'm sort of thinking that you don't know what they are.

Why does Wallaby and Neo-Con and the others scare you so much?

Why respond to them with the very thing they ardently desire, classic anti-semetic stereo-types, the very presence of which Zionists use to invalidate any fact-based arguments?

Why give them all that power? Do you work for them? It almost seems like it!

I'd wager we're pretty close to agreement except for this - you're willing to make certain "accommodations" in the case of KSM et al because they're really bad guys? C'mon. You're a smart guy and you see where that leads.

We had a system in place, that, while flawed, worked pretty well most of the time. The Bushies, w/ malice aforethought, threw that system out the window. How can you come up w/ a solution the adheres to the Rule of Law? Follow the Laws as they exist! Jeezuz, man. There are Absolute prohibitions against Torture for a reason. If we've got nothing on KSM that isn't tainted, then so be it. He walks. Thank the Bushies.

LL Exhibit 3 (and counting):

God. To think that Obama can make Bush look good!

You ever hear the expression "jumping the shark" Well, GG and his coterie have just done it.

bamage said:

We had a system in place, that, while flawed, worked pretty well most of the time. The Bushies, w/ malice aforethought, threw that system out the window.

Derbig, in relation to your Wallaby response several pages back, that's almost certainly the latest incarnation of "Electro". It doesn't take long to spot his latest handle if you read more than GG's letters section. He does drive-bys on all of them, and the fist (or style, what have you) is fairly unmistakable. "Zyklon-B" is/was also almost certainly him.

I let my subscription lapse and I have no intention of renewing it until Salon does something more about policing or providing more tools for the letters sections so that they don't become playgrounds for the mentally ill, like that guy. GG is about the only one who takes it seriously, and it's appreciated.

I'd like to see all this parsing and guessing and speculating stop for a while - at least till the man's actually inaugurated and can actually DO something. This is the typical lefty reaction to good news. Hey, we won the election! We have the white house and both houses of congress! Oh my gosh, if Obama doesn't say and do EVERY SINGLE THING I think he should, we're doomed!

Give it a rest - you too, Greenwald. How helpful can it actually be for a new president to have as much criticism lobbed at him from his own party as from the opposition? As usual, all the republicans have to do is sit back and watch the left tear itself apart, then they will take over again.

I'm watching Democracy Now!'s Davis-Gordon debate. Davis labels Gaza "civilian territory" in blaming Hamas for siting its rocket launchers among civilians. He narrowly defines "terrorism" to mean only intentional targeting and killing of civilians.

AMY GOODMAN: We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Lanny Davis, you’re in full support of the Israeli invasion. Tell us why.

LANNY DAVIS: The right of self-defense. When terrorism kills innocent civilians intentionally, there isn’t a civilized nation in the world that wouldn’t attack back to try to prevent that terrorism. I use “terrorism” with a very specifically defined expression. When a party shoots to kill innocent civilians intentionally for a political purpose, including one’s own citizens to be exposed to death for political purposes, that’s terrorism. So I support the right of self-defense against terrorism, as any country would if this were happening, I believe. And the United States certainly would. If Rochester were being exposed to mortars and rockets from Montreal, I believe that the United States would not sit idly by and allow the Canadians to do that. So I think the first and most foremost right is the right of self-defense against terrorism, which is intentional killing of civilians. http://www.democracynow.org/2009/1/12/fmr_clinton_special_counsel_lanny_davis

But glaringly absent is any reference to history beyond the last Hamas rocket. He completely ignores the violence of Israel's 42-year old occupation of Gaza and it's subsequent conversion into an open-air prison, as Gordon goes on to remind him.

And yet, in response, Davis again fails to acknowledge the violence of over forty years of brutal occupation.

Is there any "civilian" territory in Gaza? As the occupying power, how can Israel claim the land it refuses to allow sui generis sovereignty actually is "civilian?"

Davis speaks of the spoken objective of Hamas: the destruction of its tormentor of the last 6 decades; but what is the unspoken objective of Israel in the occupied territories, if not genocide?

Davis makes the same type of false comparison other propagandists have made: if Montreal were firing rockets on Rochester, the US would surely respond. But Montreal, as anyone not blinded by the myth of American and Israeli Exceptionalism aka white male supremacy can see, is not Gaza: the US has not occupied and converted Montreal into an open-air prison, in defiance of laws it helped put in place; etc.

This is what myth-jacking looks like in real-time. Listen to what isn't being said, listen to the Word behind words, and you'll hear it loud and clear.