Letters to the Editor
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WHEN THE NEW TERROR LEGISLATION IS PUT INTO PLAY
American will have been set back 700 years to the time BEFORE the Magna Carta and the basic human right of Habeus Corpus.
All in a span of six short years, and I call the Dumocrats criminally negligent about defending America from this terror coming from Washington.
I do not know who is worse, Bin Laden, Bush or the Dumocrat Party. but I do know Bin Laden has no power other than the occasional well timed missile or bomb, Bush has the power to implode the USA at will, and the Dumocrats are the ONLY opposition this country knows (thanks to the two parties diligent efforts to deprive others from starting EFFECTIVE third parties).
Maybe the Dumcrats ARE the most evil, since they and only they can challenge this nonsense effectively.
America is plunging the world into the NEW DARK AGES. Thanks to Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum and their allegiance to the international bankers over the needs of Americans.
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Idiocy
When will american journalists, and plain americans, learn that it is impossible to wage war on an emotion, i.e. terror?
Are you really so stupid that you fall for the shrub's propaganda tricks?
And by the way: one cannot fight terrorism by military means.
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Well, At Least You Got One Sentence Right . . . .
"By any conventional political measure, breaking with the toughness paradigm and launching a direct attack on Bush's 'war on terror' could be seen as rash to the point of insanity."
Makes for a nice rant, but it would certainly take Mark Foley and the National Intelligence Estimate off the front page. One lesson from history that Mr. Kamiya needs to learn is that people who would rather be right than be President always get their wish -- just ask President Goldwater or President McGovern. This "holier than thou" type of ideological purity, worn on the sleve, is a sure route to electoral disaster. Nothing more, nothing less.
While the thoughts about effectively combatting terrorism are largely correct, effective outreach 1) is meaingless without a resolution of the Israli/Palestinian problem, and 2) will still have to be accompanied by a fair bit of jingoist rhetoric here at home. People want to fight back. And frankly, some bit of fighting back is necessary. And if we have to add a bit of extra rhetorical gloss on to get elected, I'm all for it.
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Great article
This is about the best article on the WoT that I've read in years. Its been clear to me for some time that to some degree, Al Qaeda got lucky with the 9/11 attacks: people didn't fight back on the hijacked flights because no one on them expected the crashes at the end. We know exactly when that changed, and that, too, was on 9/11, during the rebellion on flight 93.
There are other "surprise" attacks that terrorists could mount that would be world changing, but they probably all require getting access to significant amounts of nuclear materials. (I have yet to be convinced that terrorists have the capabilities to generate bioweapons that can affect large numbers of people). A reasonable approach would then be to ensure that tight international monitoring of *all* fissionable material in the world is occuring, with the alternative being a complete economic boycott and possible military action against the offenders. The goal would be sufficiently careful auditing of both military and civilian nuclear plants that terrorists would be unable to steal useful amounts of these materials.
Beyond that, we clearly should try to supplant the Saudis in funding schools for poor Islamic students in Pakistan and elsewhere: these are just jihaddist training schools. Of course, having the Federal government funding schools in Pakistan would lead to unpleasant questions about why we don't provide funding for schools in *America*, which the Republicans would have trouble answering :-) But these are pretty clearly not huge money sinks.
Most fundamentally, we need to acknowledge that democracy almost always *follows* the creation of a signficant middle class, and can't be imposed at gun point. Look at South Korea, the Philipines, and India, all of whom had significant middle classes before democracy took hold. We have counterexamples, the best known of which is post-war Germany, but Germany, and Japan, were really special cases: completely destroyed in war, and occupied by, at least in Germany, immense numbers of troops. And Germany *had* been a democracy during the Weimar years.
The United States can't lead the world in promoting democracy, in any manner, until it gets its house back in order. In recent days, Congress has voted to give the President the right to unilaterally label anyone, citizen or not, an unlawful enemy combatant, strip them of all legal rights, and toss them into jail and torture them forever. All this was done without a strong argument from the Democrats, much less a filibuster.
The path out of this mess is clear, as the author of this article points out. We just need the balls to stand up for it.
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Great article
The Democrats are running scared from Bush, because they know that in the red states any nonsense that Bush comes out with has purchase, traction, and they can't be bothered to to do the hard work, to take risks, take a leadership and educational role and challenge the incompetent (but highly belligerent) and dangerous fools in the current and quite possibly worst ever US administration.
The Democrats just want to win again and get their noses into the trough of the amazing never ending corporate gravy train that is American politics.
The line "how will this play back home" is so telling, as it implies that your political representatives, have no generative power to speak of something they truly believe, namely, that the law is just plain bad, and if you don't agree with me "I will explain why"
When you have such a widespread and near-complete death of articulate speech and coherent argument (dumbing down) the race to the bottom to align oneself with existing ignorance and prejudice among key sections of the electorate is really a grievous-wound-to-the-body-politic just waiting to happen.
And to think that all this has been predicated on Bush's stunning reversal to 9/11 which could have been, "it happened on my watch, I will pay dearly for this" to - rather incredibly - "I am your greatest protector".
Now we find out from Woodward's 'State of Denial' that Tenet and Cofe warned Rice in no uncertain terms that a major attack was imminent, she, of course has no recollection of these dire and specific warnings. There must be some law of physics that says that when so many lies accumulate in the spaces that crowd out any possibility of truth a complete and spontaneous 'bonfire of the underwears' will surely and spontaneously errupt amongst the holders of office in this administration. Then, denial will become impossible.