I'm afraid this will actually be the most popular part of his platform. The bigotry and medievalism of the rest of the platform will be ignored by people desperate for more money to make their lives endurable. The present has become so difficult that we will gladly throw our own children off the lifeboat in the future.
This is several steps beyond neoconservatism. You have to look at the history of the ideologies. The neos are secular at the core, but cynically use religion as a front when convenient, especially for mass violence. They believe in an activist government, and are essentially modernist. Most accept the New Deal and World War II as foundations of the modern world. Dick Cheney failed in his first bid at the presidency because he was not anti-abortion enough to qualify with the Christian Right. He may not have been anti-gay enough either.
The creature we are dealing with now can only be understood in the political terms of the 19th century. Both the conflict between the North and South, and the conflict between rural and urban America. If you want to learn more about the extremist movements of the 1970s and '80s that learned various disguises to infiltrate and reconstruct conservatism, look up R. J. Rushdoony, Dominionism, Christian Reconstructionism, and The Turner Diaries.
There is crossover between the two, since the medievalist anti-social justice agenda of the Christians frees up plenty of tax money for the neocons' wars, and both demand vast inequality. I recall a book by high-level neocons Irvin Kristol and Grace Himmelfarb praising Victorian debtors' prisons. They are essentially carpetbaggers who eagerly help the neo-Confederates enslave themselves.
Bingo. You've broken the code. Totalitarian states that rely on muscle instead of brains always need more workers, thus more pregnant women. Stalin used to give medals to women who had many babies, and you recall what happened in Romania.
Question is, does this American movement really want ALL women to have more babies, or only those who will tilt the balance of future voters in their favor?
That is because they all revere a past in which their religions' leaders conquered much of the world by a combination of bloody swords and full wombs.
Every time early Christians differed on important values, the Catholic hierarchy took the side that ensured faster rates of reproduction. Anti-suicide, anti-gay, anti-abortion. They conquered their rivals, then Rome, by numbers. I doubt that the early Moslem leaders were unaware of this.
Protestant evangelicals are johnny-come-latelies to the abortion issue. (Or carpetbaggers, if one wants to get ugly about it.) I've heard Falwell didn't preach his first sermon against abortion until '76.
To me it seems obvious why Southern Baptists, Methodists and Pentecostals horned in on this Catholic issue. In the '60s Southerners got creamed in public opinion by backing Bull Connor vs. Martin Luther King, and the Pentagon vs. the people of Vietnam. They were on the side of the KKK and "baby-killers". They crashed into a new wave of victimization politics.
So they swore to never be out-victimed by the Left again. Embrace the Jews, embrace the embryos, claim reverse discrimination everywhere, claim government oppression everywhere, claim that America is the biggest victim of all.
Ryan is the biggest libertarian hypocrite I have yet heard of, and that's saying something. He's actually a pan-dimensional hypocrite. Pro-war, anti-abortion, pro-bailout, yet worshipped Ayn Rand - until he started sniffing for a spot on the ticket and went all Opus Dei.
Ah, if only Dr. Hunter Thompson were still alive to perform surgery on this... this substance.
Is it a coincidence that we hear such douchebaggery in an era when DNA analysis is proving that more and more of the South's Founding Fathers and other fine gentlemen had impregnated their black slaves? I can already see the defense that will be offered in Christian schools in the future: "It had to be consensual."
If I'm an American, should I believe that I have a greater responsibility to stop the evil of my country, or the evil of its rivals? Because nothing was stopping the Wall Street-neoliberal-Washington Consensus empire and its Shock Doctrine until Bush's stupidity gave other countries a chance to fight back. Many of the leaders of those countries are not paragons of human rights, and some of them deserved to be overthrown. But it's clear that we Americans are too greedy to curb our corporations as they grasp at absolute power and, as we see in the news every day, become absolutely corrupt.
The corporations went through the hassle of turning Mexico into a submissive NAFTA-land, but even an enslaved Mexico can't provide wages as cheap as China, so the sweatshops moved there instead. China is not submissive. It keeps a share of the profits and develops its population, and that makes it a threat to us. Hooray.
Now we've lost Central Asia to the SCO, and Latin America to populism. The BRIC states openly work against Wall Street-mandated intellectual property tyranny. The Arabs refuse to choose between the stereotypical boxes we've set out for them. We've begun the fight for Africa when we've already lost it to the Chinese. And yes, Russian oil & gas have sabotaged Cheney's efforts to peonize Europe via the BTC pipeline.
As for Russia, read Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine" for the story of how America helped Yeltsin destroy democracy and precipitate a mass dieoff of the unproductive. It's amazing the Russians didn't vote in an outright Hitler after what Yeltsin did.
If we lack the courage to topple our own bad guys, then other bad guys have to provide a balance of terror to wear us down before our corporations conquer the world and crush all alternatives or any possibility of change for generations, or even cause its extinction by denying climate change. A competent tyrant is the worst of all, and greed seems to be that tyrant, America's gift to the world.
What can I say? There are evil groups in both blocs, but our media will teach Americans over the next few years to view everyone in the enemy bloc as a new Hitler. It's really more like the cynical alliances that led to World War I, with the czar and two racist colonial empires composing the "liberal" Allies.
Worst of all, no one worked harder than the Bush Administration to convince Arab monarchs that the Iranians were aggressors. Peace between Saudi Arabia and Iran was rumored as possible before that. Now the dynamics of hostile alliances will make it impossible, just as it was made impossible between the Austrians and the Slavic nations in the years before 1914.
If the above income maldistribution chart represents your dream of meritocracy, where is the resulting economic boom to justify the suffering of the rest of us?
They will say that things are different now because the rich can now righteously move their magical productive skills to some other country that will tax them less.
Right now, the only places that would likely qualify are Ireland and Russia. Russia runs on oil and gas money, and Ireland's scheme to attract rich immigrants has collapsed with their real estate bubble.
But beyond that, what happens when rich people and corporations can hold democracies hostage, playing them off against each other by threatening to move to the place with the most Far Right economic policies - and inevitably the most Far Right social and cultural practices to match?
It's been happening for 40 years now, since the Friedmanites got their foothold in Chile. The rape of Latin America has ended because voters of different countries finally saw that they were screwing each other by giving in to the ransom demands of their Wall Street-backed elites. But Europe and America were virgin territories, and their turn came with vastly greater rewards for the rapists.
Where will they go after they've finished with us? Or will they ever finish with us? Once they have reshaped the US and Western Europe into submissive 19th Century societies, with their Cold War militaries still intact, maybe they will pay return visits to old colonial stomping grounds, on the taxpayers' dime?
If we're willing to go this far to destroy Assange, I wonder how much covert money we're now willing to pour into Ecuador's next election to steal it from Morales and get a more cooperative regime in power?
We've cheated in allies' elections. We've overthrown trivial governments on absurd Domino theory arguments. We've also gotten kicked out of so many countries that the ol' covert election-rigging budget is probably begging for reasonable targets. Ecuador is small and poor, and a dollar still goes a long way there.
My God, that libertard being interviewed was a sociopath. Was that real or a hoax? I can't believe, even using a pseudonym, that a libertarian would own up to the return of indentured servitude.
Though I know it would happen if they got rid of "meddlesome government", and then the oppressed servants would start murdering their masters as they did in Virginia in 1676. Then the masters would suddenly ask the meddlesome government to solve the problem by instituting outright slavery.
Several times in the distant past, the Earth was hit with a heating phase intense enough to evaporate methane hydrate deposits in the oceans, which exacerbated the heating until mass extinctions occurred. One of the extinction events that some blame on this process occurred 250 million years ago, as described in Wikipedia:
"Earth's largest extinction killed 57% of all families and 83% of all genera(53% of marine families, 84% of marine genera, about 96% of all marine species and an estimated 70% of land species) including insects. The evidence of plants is less clear, but new taxa became dominant after the extinction. The "Great Dying" had enormous evolutionary significance: on land, it ended the primacy of mammal-like reptiles. The recovery of vertebrates took 30 million years..."
The question then is what got it hot enough for the methane to evaporate. CO2 is certainly capable of warming (see Venus) and varying. I guarantee you, our economy is ridiculously more fragile than the global ecosystem, so the former will break first, but what it leaves behind might take us the rest of the way. Why risk it?
The radical increase of inequality in America in the last 30 years - you're saying that just happened, out of the blue? Not a result of lobbying for policies too complex for most citizens to understand the consequences?
It's obvious that there can never be too much inquality for you. I hope your grandchildren enjoy living like El Salvadorean campesinos.
But by definition the Party that appeals the most to the rich has a advantage, and the more polarized wealth becomes in America, the less that advantage has to do with the actual needs of the citizenry, yes?
Mike certainly is not saying nice things about conservatives.
The issue is that there was a time when the Left was powered by the working class, and it was willing to get bloodied in the streets to put pressure on the 1%. That's what's missing in the age of "lifestyle" liberalism.
In those days, no matter how much pro-capitalist dogma Americans professed to believe, they had to consider their own survival, and they were wage earners or small farmers being squeezed by the inherent biases of the system against them. They had their lives wrecked every decade or so by Wall Street panics (1897, 1907, 1919, 1929) which were inherent in the laissez-faire system. They saw that their wages would not go up as long as they competed against each other in their millions for a few jobs from a few big employers.
Unfortunately these proletarians were not at all liberal on many personal-choice issues. Many immigrated from extremely reactionary cultures with prejudices against everyone and everything. They may have hated each other, but they hated their bosses more, and for sound reasons.
The liberal politics of granting concessions to one's lessers is very different than the radical politics of the have-nots taking action for themselves, and it produces a different range of causes and a very different level of enthusiasm. Little by little, the reversal of the New Deal is bringing back the evils of 19th century capitalism, and either the new proletariat regains its claws or we will sink all the way back to medieval feudalism.
As usual, talk2action's far-right Catholic beat was ahead on this story, covering Ryan's recent Santorumization, necessary to pull a charitable veil over his Randism so he could get on the ticket:
What all of you white liberals pissing on Obama refuse to accept is how far the Right is willing to go. They want Obama's minority base eliminated forever, before it becomes a majority. That is what "the good old days" and "taking our country back" obviously mean: apartheid.
The only chance you have of your pet programs being saved is for whites to lose control of the political system. Voter ID and mass imprisonment of non-whites will be used to decimate the minority vote before that happens. White liberals have run out of ideas and the ability to energize their own young to stop the corporations from doing anything. Either you talk blacks and Latinos into doing it, or no one will do it at all.
Given Romney's willingness to say anything to anybody, it is hard to tell what he will do. However, given that:
a. the public wants someone with a plan, any plan, to get the economy going
b. the GOP allows its officials to support no economic doctrine except classical economics - tax cuts for the rich and wage cuts for the poor
c. We've been trying tax cuts for the rich and wage cuts for the poor since the day Reagan took the oath of office and the only times we've seemed to have any economic growth since then were when we were running crazy public and private debts - but the rich have done incredibly well regardless
Then I conclude that Romney cannot have a new economic policy. It's just doubling down on madness and punishment. The GOP is perfectly happy to see the poor get punished by greater starvation and illness, so why not do it?
Unless....
There is one thing left he could try to create one more fake economic boom, and it is obvious if you consider that every great store of wealth in America has been plundered except for Social Security and our public infrastructure. As a plunderer himself, Romney knows the public doesn't now trust financial markets enough to privatize Social Security.
However, many countries have been tricked into fire sales of their public goods. I'm not talking about having private firms operate public services, a scam that's already getting moldy. I mean, liquidate everything like a junkie looking to pay for one last hit; the National Parks, the National Wildernesses, the highways, the bridges, the prisons, the schools, the universities, the utilities, the dams, the clean water behind the dams.
Everything will seem great at first. Money will pour in to buy everything, and for a while a little of it will be in our pockets. Wall Street will do well enough that people might even forget about the crashes and let Social Security be privatized. The new owners will go through the motions of competing for a while, then consolidate into the usual oligopolies. Then the fees will engulf us and we will be living like the Russians under Yeltsin.
That will be the last pump and dump of America. There won't be any more wealth for the rich to extract, so they will move away, and their branch offices and their low-rent local henchmen will assume control, just like every other 3rd world country.
The Chinese corporations in Africa will simply distribute money directly to individuals, by hiring them in the streets, or giving gold-filled briefcases to them in Nairobi's finest restaurants. Let's see the Pentagon compete with that.
It will probably never occur to anyone that our troops will mostly secure territories for Chinese companies, because they make goods that Africans can actually use, afford, and learn how to make. We don't. I'll bet you hardly a single firm listed on the Dow is doing any useful research on appropriate goods to sell to people earning less than two bucks a day.
It does sort of have that stench of 1950s British and French troops setting up friendly armies in the colonies they were having to abandon. Malaya, anyone?
How about the Arizona anti-immigrant activist woman who stormed into the home of a Mexican-American family and killed a little girl several years ago, an event I didn't know about until I clicked the Orcinus link above two days ago. Where was the round-the-clock media hype that should have happened when terrorism involved a hot media issue and a child-killer?
You're being misleading because you know damn well that Wade the Loser's attack will not be depicted as reflecting white people generally or even in significant numbers. Millions of hours of propaganda are being beamed around our country to the effect that Islam is a terrorist religion so as to justify more American mega-death invasions and the transfer of more trillions of tax $ from social programs to the war machine. Fox News is the reality of modern American media.
Were the lynch mobs of the Old South organized, or individual actions?
You damn well know the answer if you've seen the photos of the entire white population of the town attending a lynching like it was a picnic. It was a cultural ritual designed to send a message. Yet it took many years of individual whites and KKK bands attacking black rights during Reconstruction to make that possible, when it seemed impossible in 1865. So how do we know that these new terrorists aren't the beginning of another cycle?
I actually read parts of Breivik's manifesto, and while it was clear that his role for Christianity was to serve as a state church, subservient to his ideological leadership, he absolutely wanted the masses to be kept under the control of traditional European religion. That doesn't mean he was a true believer. The Founding Fathers were so cynical about the subject that they actually discussed how to create a secular state religion to instill civic virtue in the citizenry. But Breivik was much more specific in his deification of Western civilization. Clearly only the very right-wing churches would be allowed to function under his New Order, as in Hitler's Germany.
As the founder of modern conservatism once said,
"Extremism in the name of liberty is no vice."
Once you decode what the white-collars and red-necks mean by "liberty", you know why domestic terrorists are treated differently than the other kind.
And what about abortion clinic bombers? They have been highly successful in making it impossible for doctors to offer abortions in many communities, and they have gotten away with it. A successful far-right terrorist movement, doubtless an inspiration to others.
But that's not how he's depicted in the corporate media, is it? He's depicted as the ultimate madman, one who dared to question Progress, and lived in a cabin with a scary beard. If he'd been a white supremacist, that would have been different because beard, cabin, and hatred of progress would have marked his patriotic nostalgia for what Limbaugh calls "The way things oughtta be." But Kascinsky's intelligence showed him that the problem was not black people, it was all people.
You've just described the process by which a species consisting of hundreds of thousands of seperate tribal communities each with only dozens of members has evolved into a highly regimented population of 7 billion organized into only 200 legal nations, and an ever-declining number of languages and cultures. We have always chosen sides. The great elimination tournament is now down to the semi-finals: whomever wins becomes global hegemon and finishes off the smaller countries with cultural/economic imperialism.
While I think this will prove a spectacularly bad idea, I recognize that I have obtained certain benefits by it.
To refine MK Ultra's point, note that these white far-right terrorists are the white men who think that our government isn't violent and racist enough despite all its carnage. Plenty of "mainstream" supporters of war can live ordinary lives surrounded by entire communities who think just like them. It's not surprising that the ones who wish to go much further are frustrated loners.
I am so glad that you are pointing this double standard out. Another place that seems to have this particular problem is Israel, where the right-wingers were rewarded for assassinating a left-wing prime minister by the voters.
The trick seems to be in our own selfish awareness of the difference in targets between "patriots" and any other kind of violent radical. As long as you look the right way, don't work for the evil pinko government, don't go to the wrong house of worship, and don't protest against capitalism, Tim McVeigh-types are unlikely to intentionally target you... even though you might be an innocent bystander. We take it personally that there are people who target us because our tribal/national/economic bloc is ruining the planet in a hundred different ways. We share with the Nazis a belief that "our kind" should be allowed to dominate the Earth in peace since we're so obviously superior, we differ in the mechanics of how to dominate.
The Vietnamese took far worse damage, again and again, in wars against occupiers from France, the USA and China. You do what you have to do when life becomes intolerable. That is why many sovereign states were founded by revolutionaries; Italy, Ireland, and of course the United States of America.
I have a low opinion of Abdullah because circa 2006, when the Bush gang was screaming at the Arab monarchs about the "Shiite threat", Abdullah was one of the first to drink the Kool-Aid. The ordinary citizens of the Arab states did not drink it; opinion surveys showed they did not want a war with Iran and many admired it for standing up to you-know-who. I think this disconnect helped to create the environment for Arab Spring.
Joe, while I agree that guerrilla strategies are more compex and diverse than just provoking retaliation, I think Mao knew pretty well that Chiang would do awful things while chasing him around China. For instance, an intentional famine that Chiang's troops caused in one region by wrecking irrigation systems that I believe was credited with 30 million deaths - comparable to any of Mao's crimes and fuckups. A book called "Armies in Revolt" described Mao's strategy as exposing the KMT as an army pretending to be a state, with no point to its existence except to chase enemies and no benefits to those civilians under its control.
I would recommend to everyone that they read the Hunger Games trilogy, mainly so they can concentrate on the 3rd book, a brutal depiction of a statewide revolution fought largely in cities. The parallels to the Libyan revolution that occurred soon after its publication are startling. The rebellion is largely about unfair distribution of resources between regions, it involves multiple uprisings which overwhelm the regime's forces and even its airstrikes, and Katniss' attempt to end the stalemated war quickly with a commando strike at the capital runs afoul of a surprise uprising among the capital's supposedly loyal citizens, causing the regime's chaotic disintegration.
In my analysis, the America of these books has a population of only tens of millions, indicating the size of the past apocalypse that eliminated any knowledge of our prior civilization. This also created a low population density, with scattered population centers, that mirrors Libya. If you have a population density like Syria's, the rebels are disadvantaged by lack of mobility, though there are revolutionary doctrines that have overcome this.
Yeah, and you can love Michael Jordan as a media abstraction but still want to deprive the actual blacks in your state of their right to vote because they have a different vision of liberty than you do. What we have gained in theoretically overcoming instant abhorrence of all things non-white, we've lost by becoming vastly more selfish and willing to sacrifice other people for the most trivial gains.
The hypocrisy of exempting NASA from "evil big government" abounds here in Houston. Then there was Sen. Gramm's worship of the Superconducting Supercollider. And looming over it all, Texan militarism.
But it all becomes very simple if you consider Plato's Republic, where a haughty rich boy tells Socrates that justice is "to do good to your friends and harm to your enemies". That was Plato's diagnosis of the madness of tribalism, the honest conservatism of 2400 years ago. In the context of that book, it meant what the proper mission of government is.
The people who profit from the military-industrial complex, which unfortunately is deeply entangled with NASA and high-end college science, are friends of the "tribe". Engineers and scientists help us with weapons to dominate the world. Though them pinko scientists might get kicked out if they keep bad-mouthing fossil fuels. We must also support our boys in uniform on the same principle, no matter how crazy the case might be. We must support our "productive" citizens, meaning if they're white and rich they must make America stronger unless they're George Soros, in which case they're parasites (but we have dropped the prefix "Jew").
But when conservatives talk against the injustice of big government, it is that it helps people who may be citizens but are not really of the "tribe". Not our friends, thus our enemies. I think you can guess who's on this list.
Unfortunately, the Right has had 2400 years to entangle, obfuscate and embellish their once-forthright bigotry into a vast bible of self-serving contradictions. For this reason Nazi murderers like Breivik and Wade The Loser are quite refreshing compared to Christians and capitalists.
Well, all the most productive engineers in this country are foreign students who will eventually go back home, work for crappy salaries and build up their countries while America worships at the dying embers of its fraudulent FIRE sector, like many declining empires before us.
Those engineers can't work for NASA - they're a security risk. The people who aren't a security risk? Half of them believe that the earth is 6000 years old, that capitalism can't possibly destroy the environment, and that Obama is a secret Moslem. Not much to work with here.
Is this what it was like in the later days of Reconstruction, with white supremacists railing against an (actual) occupation by Federal troops, but focusing all substantive action on the killing and exploitation of innocent non-whites to protect the property owners? Little by little, the slanted voting laws, the for-profit false imprisonments, and most importantly the legal gimmicks to take the vote away from more and more blacks? I thought that Jim Crow took the vote away from blacks quickly. It took decades, plenty of time for Americans to see what was happening and put a stop to it. They did not care.
What good does it do to spend generations, as the abolitionists and then the Civil Rights movement did, to get even the possibility of justice, when the public will merely grow resentful of the tiniest sacrifice and the Patriarchs will claw their way back into power? What good is American justice that is taken away as soon as it inconveniences white property owners, again and again?
When will the phrase "three strikes, you're out" finally be applied to America?
I think you're blind to the dangers of the plutocratic, white- and Christian-supremacist society of your nostalgia. Try and bring back the 19th century, old man. Millions of us will experience its inherent evils and will rise to fight it to the death. Better to be dead than be a nigger under the kind of hypocritical, wife-beating, child-molesting, Bible-thumping Patriarchs who ran this country under States' Rights - north and south.
I'd feel statistically safer there than here, Grumpy. However, I stay in America precisely because I want to be here for the civil war between your kind and those you seem to want ethnically cleansed. Guess which side I'm gonna be on?
For better or worse, the assault rifle is becoming the deer-hunting rifle of the 21st century, due to the AK's 7.62 mm cartidge being ballistically similar to the traditional 30-30 Winchester, and due to new AR-15 rounds like the 6.8 SPC, designed by Special Forces personnel to deal with AK-armed opponents more effectively than the 5.56 mm round that the Army has used since 1966.
In fact, more traditional-looking wood semi-auto rifles have been available to hunters for years. But the qualities that make the modern AR and AK useful on the battlefield are also conveniences to hunters: physical toughness, a vast array of modular accessories, the removable box magazine available in all sorts of capacities, and a vast global market for military-surplus ammo.
Of course, deer hunting can feed into certain agendas and alarming cultural subgroups. Rifles are expensive, and thinking that you might "need" to use your sporting gun against a man adds to your willingness to drop $1000 on it. The militaristic glamor of using a combat gun looms large, but it always has, from the Colt 1873 and 1911 to the .30-06 Springfield.
I think the semi-auto is overkill on a deer, but the deer probably think the bolt actions are too. It's hard to construct the argument to hold the line at bolt actions without a painful confrontation over Americans' lurking belief that other Americans are no better than animals who might need to be mass-slaughtered to preserve one's "freedoms".
Belgium WAS part of Nazi Germany during the war. That is the point of conquest. Nazi-occupied countries had their sovereign governments replaced by Wehrmacht rule or by puppet regimes composed of local fascists, whose atrocities later war crime tribunals held Berlin responsible for. If we had recognized those regimes as sovereign, we would have considered them enemy states like Germany's allies Hungary, Romania and Italy, which we bombed.
So to return to my question, is the FATA a sovereign state that is our enemy, or is it a puppet under control of an outside entity that is our enemy?
Our entire problem there was caused by the Pakistani army, which for decades has organized violence from Kashmir to Afghanistan as part of an agenda to rule them through puppets so vicious that Marshal Petain would have winced. Sounds pretty Nazi to me.
This army had direct and indirect US help for much of this effort, based on its bloody anti-leftist credentials. It created the Taliban, then organized militants in the FATA to support it. Its junta starved its public school system to save money for its own priorities, and let in Wahhabi missionaries to create madrassas instead. It spent everything on nuclear weapons and we pretended not to notice.
So the problem with FATA gets bumped up to the next level: is our enemy the Pakistani army, a rogue organization that has behaved much like the Japanese army in the late 1930s, or the fragile civil state that exists at the army's whim?
As for your insinuation that Pakistan's sovereignity can be bypassed because it refuses to control the FATA, you must recall that Bush pressured Musharraf to invade the fiercely-independent (by legal intent!) tribal homelands to prove his new loyalty to us, and the movements (dating back to the days of Reagan's support) that he and his peers had fostered there rightly felt betrayed and fought back hard. So we made things worse, and our bombings began.
So why don't we treat the Pakistani army like the enemy? Because it has nukes and we're scared of it, or charitably, because we know it will overthrow the new democracy and we can't stop it. But our commitment to international law is bullshit if we bomb henchmen under ad hoc legalisms because we're afraid to call out their masters. It's just as much bullshit as our wars on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, leading to the FORESEEABLE deaths of millions, while we played footsie with Moscow and Beijing. Either there is a real Soviet threat, or Pakistani threat, or whatever, and we deal with it by the means of international law up to a declaration of war, or we're just murdering each others' henchmen in a bloody turf game that has nothing to do with our legitimate national survival.
What good is international law, or liberal support for it, if it does not deter that Orwellian nightmare?
The problem is, we simply arrogated unto ourselves the right to bomb any country, at any time, regardless of its form of government. We never specified the difference between Paksistan or, say, France.
The nice thing about Declarations of War, back when we used to use them, was that they were costly in political capital so you can't have a half dozen wars going on at the same time. Is Pakistan our enemy or isn't it? Shouldn't our elected officials be required to make that clear?
Military history said that a war in Libya would be characterized by giant reverses and vast leaps, with so much of the population strung out on one road. Recall Rommel vs Montgomery, which swung back and forth for hundreds of miles until the prolonged siege of Tobruk.
Wars in the densely, deeply populated parts of the Middle East often get ugly. In the big Arab-Israeli wars it went fast in the deserts, and wherever one side had the right combo of superpower-built goodies to attempt an advanced offensive against a poorly prepared or overconfident conventional foe. But the specter that hangs over this struggle is the Lebanese Civil War. Village against village, neighborhood against neighborhood, and each outside power that intervenes to bail out its buddies gets enmeshed and bloodied.
That's the key - this war has more than two sides.
All right, Israel is interested in destabilizing its neighbors until they are under the control of worthless stooges like Mubarak and Prince Playboy of Jordan. If you recall, all of that was in the "Clean Break" paper that the Neocons wrote for the Likud, and it included Iraq on the hit list... then those same Neocons ended up planning the US invasion of Iraq. So Israel is interested in destabilizing its neighbors until forever, because then the Arab citizens try to overthrow these imposed regimes, and then Israel has to destabilize the replacements, etc., etc.
Well then I guess the bastards will pay the tax, which means they won't be so keen to keep inventing bullshit new derivatives. Folks, the problem is the rate of useless speculation. We didn't have these problems under Glass-Steagall regulations, and we had plenty of economic growth in 1933-2000. Since it was repealed, what do we have to show for the insane speculation that was unleashed?
Wherever the transactions flee to, will be the next country to get raped by the transactors. It's called bubble economics. Once every country has been raped, they will all realize they need to stop the insanity, and all pass the tax, thus leaving the pimps with no place to go but the
Fourth World unless they want to pay the tax.
Sanjuro in "Yojimbo": "Now there'll be some peace and quiet in this town!"
Nuclear missile-master Admiral Hiram Rickover in testimony to a Congressional committee: "I do believe that the human race will destroy itself. But new life forms will arise..."
Well, the good news in the entry below is that with most of the US so dry, we had a record low for July tornadoes. But that required a record drought. The last two years we didn't have the drought but we had all the killer tornadoes.
See, it's the ever wilder variations that stress our agriculture and economy. If it were steadily one thing or the other, new crops would replace old ones - at least if you had the resources of a giant agri-conglomerate and could run old farmers off their land and replace them with employee-peons from countries that are already deserts. But how do you choose between tornado years and drought years? Or floods versus Dust Bowls?
I was just reading the first part of the book "Nixon's Piano", about the history of US presidents and racism. This part was about the Founding Fathers, Virginians Washington, Jefferson, Madison and Monroe, each privately admitting that slavery was evil and that it could lead to civil war, but publicly refusing to take any stands that could cost them the votes of their fellow Southerners.
A generation later, because of their silence and hypocrisy, their sons were sunk beyond recall in a cult of slavery, believing it the font of all good and the slightest reform Satanic.
I think this transition has just occurred in American conservatism in the AGW issue. As recently as 2007 you could see conservatives willing to engage on climate change issues. Now it's impossible without facing the teabagger inquisition. Once our other shortcomings finally made us desperate to hold onto every economic advantage, any concession to justice became treason. That is what happened with the slave economy too, desperate to hold back the world and the future, murderously desperate.
Slavery and oil were both in turn means for the "common" working-class white man to live the good life and pretend a special status from God. Not something they could give up lightly.
I believe the basis for concern of runaway heating and mass extinction is based on the existence of methane hydrates. Their dissolution is suspected as being part of the engine of the past mass super-extinction events, meaning 90% of all species. How they counted microorganisms in that, I don't know.
But if it is confirmed that the methane hydrates are evaporating, we're toast. That simple. We won't have time to save bupkis. Every man for himself, knife-fighting on a lifeboat surrounded by sharks.
Which simplifies things greatly. I can just start working on my revenge list.
Given the cruelty and selfishness of "good" Americans, it is useless to use Romney's endless stream of cruel and selfish remarks to get people to vote against him. Besides, they don't give a damn about the outside world.
But what if we got the word out to all our Republican friends that Romney praised Israel's socialized medical system for saving money? Or even pointed out that Israel HAS a socialized medical system?
Let's get this, the least crazy and mean thing the man has said since he's needed to attract Tea Party votes, the public airing it deserves, in time for the GOP convention.
Hillary's "lack of international experience" was codespeak for "we can't trust a woman to slaughter entire nations when useful." Look at how hard Palin and Bachmann work to prove their bloodthirstiness.
What's striking about Romney's behavior is that in his official position on substantive issues, he's maneuvering himself to be only one step to the right of Obama knowing right-wingers have no place else to go. But on SYMBOLIC issues he's very provocative and offensive.
This looks like his NAACP speech; intended to offend non-whites and thus fire up the redneck base who themselves hunger to bully and insult uppity untermenschen. Sorry, I meant take their country back. Except that "country" means "entire world".
Here are some very Bush-sounding comments by Mitt in the Guardian article:
"Romney, who introduced his eldest son, Josh, to the gathering, said he had "read a number of books" on what makes countries successful.
He added: "I am overwhelmingly impressed with the hand of providence, whenever it chooses to apply itself, and also the greatness of the human spirit, and how individuals who reach for greatness and have purpose above themselves are able to build and accomplish things that could only be done by a species created in the image of God.""
For all practical purposes, he's saying white Christians and Jews are richer because their God is the only true God and He makes them smarter and harder-working. In China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, Taiwan and South Korea, I hope people understand that they don't belong in his universe.
As for his book-learnin', too bad he hasn't read Kevin Phillips' "American Theocracy" and "Bad Money", a searing blast on Bush Jr.'s merger of capitalism and theology.
Romney is representative of the capitalist oligarchy of America. He will exploit the Tea Party by promising it that the government will be returned to the 19th century, which means tax cuts for himself. But this simply repeats a process in which reactionary extremists mainstream wave after wave of monstrous ideas via several layers of intermediaries, repeating the memes over and over again, until they end up in the GOP platform. The militia movement of 1996 talked like the Tea Party of 2008 and in turn the GOP leadership of 2012. See this article for how the conspiracy was organized and funded over 40 years:
Given that he's a "close personal friend" of Netanyahu, he would certainly be in a position to know that he's promising to "not turn his back" on a leader for doing something that he really intends to do. It's practically a green light. Israel attacks, Iran retaliates, Romney launches a full-scale US war. What a con.
Joe, if an arms race between Britain and Germany caused the dysfunctional alliances that turned a minor shooting in Bosnia into World War One, then it matters that the USA has a military industrial complex that has defeated democracy, brainwashed the voters, blackmailed the economy, and owns more nukes and receives more revenue than all the other militaries of the world combined. That is more important than Syria. Especially if the rest of the world feels reasonably threatened by our state violence and is willing both to fight back by increased spending versus our dying economy, and by backing regimes we hate, to bleed us with expensive new commitments and aggressions.
This is the classic tale of how empires are brought down by those they bullied, all the way back to the Pelopponesian War. And we've done a lot of bullying. We have to define limits on American power or we will complete the ruin that began with Vietnam.
I think the US did give Assad Senior some goodies in exchange for his joining the first war on Iraq. The question is, were there later deals in exchange for the Syrian secret police torturing Arab militants for us? Mr. McPhee may also be insinuating that the rebels are dependent on the Saudis for weapons, which does tie to the US. However, while the US has fenced ex-Soviet weapons to maintain a cover (like in the Vietnam War), if I were looking for such goods I'd go to a private international arms merchant like the now-jailed Victor Bout, who has doubtless done deals favorable to the US but also deals inimical to its interests.
The problem, Bill, is the larger question of all the weaponry we pimp overseas to favor our armed thugs when there is no longer a Soviet Union to justify it. If our pet thugs have firepower, then their rivals must get some too. Don't forget the Duke Cunningham scandal, where California death merchants got Pentagon contracts due to Rep. Cunningham, and then kicked the money back to his chapter of the GOP. The more weapons floating around the world, the more paranoia favors the imperialist agenda of the GOP, just as the more weapons there are in the US, the more paranoia favors the "good old days" segregation fantasy of the GOP/NRA.
The Olympic winner who said Romney just shouldn't leave the States is Carl Lewis.
Personally, I have a growing anger towards the London Olympics due to the horror stories of people being forced to leave because they wore a t-shirt from an "enemy" non-sponsor corporation, and small businessmen all over London are having to remove the name "Olympic" from their establishments. On top of the military and police state they've created, they impose a corporate dictatorship in the Olympic zone. I hope Britons behold the combination of the two and realize this is what their future looks like under the City of London/Wall Street axis, kick out the Tories and force Labour to live up to its name.
However, this doesn't let Romney off the hook because he'd run the Olympics the same way if he had to deal with a vast, multi-ethnic, politically diverse city like London, instead of SLC. The corporate dictatorship part of it goes without saying with him.
Wait a second. I thought the right wing slam against environmentalists (and feminists and gay-rights activists and peace activists) is that they are too absolutist and too extreme and want to dismantle the American way of life. You're attacking Prof. Cole for being none of those things?
Besides, according to Jevon's Paradox, any energy that individual citizens save as a matter of principle simply leaves more, cheaper fossil fuels for all the pigs to waste. So we either do it collectively, as a society, or we die anyway.
I think if the newest technology were used, the transmission losses would be small compared to the terrible waste of capacity caused by Germany's normal weather versus the Sahara. Furthermore, as a form of 3rd-world outsourcing, you would get lower labor costs for installation and operations - though it is exactly the fact that solar and wind create more labor demand than nonrenewable fuels that might have made Germany so enthusiastic about them.
#7 is the big one. Once the power grid goes across the Mediterranean, you're talking about a lot of time zones, which spreads out demand peaks. Germany would be better off moving all its solar panels to North Africa where they would generate a better return.
But the issue that, as usual, everyone fails to grapple with is the difference between electricity demand and liquid fuel demand. Not only do our cars require the latter, but Americans seem to have zero tolerance for spending extra to get cars that can run on anything other than gasoline.
The cheapness of US natural gas has all the signs of an overproduction bubble; companies will go broke as they try to produce more and more to offset falling revenue. Then production will be shut in and we'll find what the real market price of gas is in the fracking era.
Why do you want so badly for it to remain forever a fantasy instead of doing something to help out those working on a solution? I can tell by the tone of your remarks ("people like you", "just that, dreams") that you feel threatened by even the pursuit of this goal.
Word is, TCH, that Cameron is intentionally sabotaging your National Health service with new privatization mandates, and just by coincidence is getting big money from firms linked to US health service conglomerates.
Be very, very afraid. Or take to the streets and fight.
Yet Obama's grandfather loyally served the British colonial authority in Kenya. Doesn't this count for something with Mitt? And in response to Tehanu, maybe Mitt doesn't think Obama's mom counts as a significant influence because only fathers count.
Answer: not all fascism is white supremacist. While Hitler was Catholic and clearly was influenced by the fascist movement that came to power in Italy before his own ascent, the Catholic brand of fascism, also called falangism, was primarily bigoted against Jews because of their religion, not their "race". Catholicism will accept anyone who submits to it. However, I understand Mussolini's movement was centered in northern Italy and did harbor bigotry towards southern Italians and Sicilians. But that is not the same thing as the reams of Nazi doctrine specifying race as the explanation of all the problems of Germany. Mussolini and Franco were hesitant to follow Hitler's racial laws and deportations; it's rumored that Franco was part-Jewish. Falangism is based more on rigidifying existing class hierarchy and reactionary authorities like the Church.
Then there's Japanese fascism, which turns all this on its head and scapegoats whites. What all fascists have in common is murderous anti-Marxism.
There is a context to this, but I don't know if it applies specifically to the Mormon belief system. There's a nasty Christian fascist rag called "The Philadelphia Trumpet", which promotes Millenialism, hatred of Europe, etc. In the late '90s I encountered a copy that promoted the idea of the US, UK and Israel as the "Nations of Israel".
I recognized immediately that this is an attempt by fundamentalists to write the USA into the Book of Revelation. It is based on the formerly anti-Semitic fantasy that the English are the Lost Tribe of Israel, inverted into a pro-Israel position by removing the part about modern Jews being false descendants of Judea. This Christian Identity dogma is associated with some very bad customers.
Turns out the Trumpet is continually harping on this Nations of Israel meme, as part of the longstanding Christian Zionist movement. By writing the USA into a near-term Battle of Armageddon... well, that speaks for itself.
A minority of whites voted for Obama. Millions of the remaining whites freaked out when they realized that there were enough non-white voters to defeat them. The rise of the Tea Party and "voter fraud" laws are about preventing that from ever happening again, a la 1876 and South Africa 1948. It is going to get harder and harder for whites in the future to avoid choosing a side, meaning both sides might get larger, but the movement to "purify" America is more united, confident, and aggressive.
Which is why Reagan never would have said the crap that Romney and his people are saying.
America's immigrant populations are no more fractured now than 100 years ago. Back then, cities had major newspapers in Yiddish or any number of other languages, and theater as well. What is striking to me in Houston is that young people of every ethnicity have assimilated into a stew comprising both corporate materialism and the culture that arose from hip-hop. The differences between young blacks and Mexican-Americans are hard to discern besides the latter being fluently bilingual. A lot of the Asian kids seem to be orbiting that from a greater distance.
But out in the exurbs, you have an alien landscape of Christian fundamentalist indoctrination, with their own TV, radio, books, schools, and versions of every form of history and even science. I don't think even the antebellum North and South were this disunited over what constitutes fact.
That's the fracturing. And it's not new. 100 years ago WASP rural America was in a war against the evil immigrant cities. Prohibition and women's suffrage, ironically, were linked movements attempting to punish immigrants and their behavior. The immigrants were the engine of the new popular culture of the 20th century: mass-market newspapers, nickelodeons, and jazz music. Eventually, they led the victory of progressive politics.
Difference is, America was on the way up then, and the cities had the upper hand. Now America is descending into senile nostalgia, and old white people are aggregating to offset their dwindling numbers to carry out some great blow against democracy. The robber barons never had it this easy.
I recall a theory that people belonging to faith-based groups are especially attentive to their comrades mouthing the same mindless slogans because whatever their personal agendas are, the group cannot win without unity. In other words, dogma and slogans are the members' way of continually proving to each other their commitment. No one wants to find when the going gets tough he's been left the lone sucker.
So "believing" may be a sophisticated form of voluntary self-brainwashing. At some level, no, I don't believe, but I still want to win and obtain benefits thereby. At any point, it's easier to mouth the lies than face defeat by my enemies.
I agree, JT. Libertarians who have any kind of historical context are whores for the age of robber barons, satanic mills and Herbert Spenser.
Meaning, they want a power vacuum to be filled by the business class, so they combine Jefferson's limited agrarian government with an out-of-control industrial capitalist oligarchy that Jefferson himself opposed. To do this, they lie about the existence of power as being inherent in complex social arrangements and diverse/immigrant populations (required by capitalism). They pretend that governments create power, so that if we cripple the government, power will magically go away instead of reverting to the rich, who will switch their payroll from lobbyists to El Salvadorian-style death squads.
I think "Does Not Sell", Jon and Simon are getting close to the heart of the matter of the militia ideology. Though the modern Tea Partiers are canny enough to deny it, they are mainstreaming the radical militia agenda of the '90s. The role of the gun in that ideology is exactly that of the gun in the Southern traditional ideology.
That ideology is based on a capitalist perversion of the Old Testament Patriarchy, in which the male head of household (owner of land/property/capital) has absolute power over his family and slaves, and thus by forming a "republic" with his fellow patriarchs, rules all the non-citizens with an iron hand. Thus, the executive government only serves them by organizing their private firepower to destroy all opposition at home and abroad.
Certainly they thought that their cultural indoctrination makes their weapons more effective than their enemies, so after 1865 they would tolerate blacks having small arms, but not the organization to attain a balance of terror against their own militia.
The Southern ideology also leaned on feudalist fantasies, in which knights owned farms but were obligated to provide military service (plus their personal weapons and horses) to their lords. That meant that every militia member was a kind of knight (Invisible Knights, anyone?) and their strongest regiments were bankrolled by wealthy men, who received the title "Colonel" just as European lords got military titles like "Baron" and "Duke".
Meaning: they don't care if you own a pistol as long as they have machine guns and group training in how to use them to exterminate you when the time comes. The government is an obstacle, but it relies heavily on their caste as a source of soldiers, cops and prison guards. So they have no problem with spending all your tax $ on making the military strong; they already have a 5th column inside it in the tradition of Franco and Pinochet.
But then why aren't things like this in Europe? Breivik was simply a political terrorist, unprecedented in Norweigan history and possibly inspired via the Internet by American extremists. Are you saying that Europeans are inherently more moral and sane than Americans? I'd like to have a national discussion about that.
Or they could be a stepping stone to a murder rate as low as Canada's. Do you want a serious debate about that or are you going to claim that all the rest of the 1st World countries are Communist?
Actually, I recall Finland's murder rate is high for Western Europe but of course low compared to America. Questions:
Rifles or pistols?
Truly private or militia-issued?
These are important considerations. Canada has plenty of rifles, and Switzerland has plenty of militia-issued assault rifles, but both are based on cultural factors that indoctrinate the citizens to not go around blasting people they don't like in their communities.
Americans are truly in a state of low-intensity war against each other, with some embracing it and others in denial.
Better being an Arab world completely controlled by Israel and Saudi Arabia via their corrupt, murderous, oligarchic puppets? You must have voted for Bush.
Passive resistance assumes that your enemy needs to leave you alive to obtain his goals. What happens if, say, a Martin Luther King succeeds, and the resulting society for one reason or another is unbearable to the bigots who backed down the last time? Or what if every ethnicity in a country like Syria has historical reason to believe that at least one of the others will wipe it out rather than deal with the hassle of merely oppressing it? Or what if the main source of a country's wealth is not any of its people, but the oil under their feet?
Genocide actually has worked an awful lot, so much that we don't know how many societies, ethnicities, and sects have been exterminated. We've trapped in a giant elimination tournament, that now has the globe down to only a few big players. Those players tried to put a halt to it when they formed the UN, but America has more people in it that reject the UN than any of those other countries. Apparently, they really like their odds in the tournament.
If the faction in the population that fetishizes guns as the foundation of their right to a monopoly on power as "real" Americans knows that the other faction believes that privatized lethal force is an insane basis for a human society, then I'm not surprised that the former disproportionately signs up for jobs as cops, prison guards and soldiers, yet simultaneously tries to dismantle the government that creates a legal basis for the right of people to live as equal citizens without becoming Conan the Barbarian.
In other words, your preferred model looks like the Old South, where guns were legal only because whites knew they had blacks, Jews, labor organizers and intellectuals vastly outgunned, and had organized permanent terrorist groups plus ad hoc armed mobs to destroy any threat to that formula, hand-in-hand with a government limited to protecting property rights. It was a bully society, like the one the Rhodesian and South African settlers tried to build and the Israelis are trying to build.
If you genuinely will respect the right of the poor and the anti-capitalist to equal firepower, fine with me, but all your compatriots know that would be a formula for revolution and will always find ways to rig the laws and their enforcement in their favor. All those "free" societies I just mentioned ended up with their own versions of concentration camps and torture (i.e., throwing innocent blacks into prisons for profit).
You do too have nuts in Canada. They're just not empowered nuts. America is dominated by a movement whose godfather said that "Extremism in the name of liberty is no vice."
The Russians will do anything to hold onto that naval base. And they should. Regaining that base on the Mediterranean was Putin's way of saying his regime had regained superpower status, or at least a status greater than any of the other Great Powers beneath the US hegemony. The Brits struggled for centuries to keep the Russians out of the Mediterranean, and dumped that burden onto our eager hands. Bush pissed it away without a thought in his head. I want that Russian base there if for no other purpose to stand as a monument (visible from white-folks country, unlike Iraq) of how moronic the Neocons were and why they should never be let back in the White House again.
I guess the conspiracy guys will now regale us with web links proving that a Predator drone has the capability to plant bombs inside a flowerpot and a box of chocolates.
Because I believe that any alternative to Hezbollah will be what we've already seen in Lebanon, meaning worse for the poor. The Hariris created a Potemkin economy run by Saudi lords and Thatcherite dogmas.
Because a census would favor the poor, it won't happen. It's always been hinted that it would lead to a new civil war. Hezbollah's cleverness was to give up the census in exchange for an ad hoc power-sharing bargain, which it's good at.
And to put it bluntly, because the things I've seen over the course of my life convince me that non-militarized uprisings by the poor probably won't succeed enough to stop the truly monstrous crimes that the global corporate oligarchy is cooking up this very minute. Citizens United, global warming denial, massive thefts of clean water, the imposition of privatized prison slavery and the still-growing gap between rich and poor will eventually take the West to serfdom and selective extinction. All we will have left is the right to revolution, just like in the 1890s, and it will take all the organizational lessons of past revolutionaries like Hezbollah and the Vietminh to even begin to force the bad guys to concede power.
I am terribly ignorant about Syria. It appears to me that the only possibility for negotiated peace is for every ethnic group to be guaranteed that it won't be exterminated by the others. This is the kind of problem that plagued the Balkans, and the attempted solutions were terrible. Finally it ended with UN occupiers completing Yugoslavia's partition. How else can these grou7ps be prevented from future reprisals?
You seem to be assuming that Hezbollah's rise to power had nothing to do with the abuses against Lebanon's soon-to-be-majority Shia population by the corrupt oligarchic Saudi-backed Sunnis and the formerly-fascist Christians and the endless procession of foreign occupiers.
If you really believe in democracy, then you should be calling for Lebanon to finally do a new census that would reveal the size of the Shia population, and call for one-man one-vote. Then the Shia wouldn't need Hezbollah's protection, as every single ethnic/religious group in Lebanon/Syria (itself an artificial division) seems to require.
We've helped everyone against everyone at one time or another. We've helped the Baath against Communists. We helped Ho Chi Minh against the Japanese. We helped train Cambodian insurgents in the '60s to use against North Vietnam even though those insurgents' agenda was to retake Khmer land then part of South Vietnam. We took sides in Africa where everyone claimed to be a Marxist at some point. And of course, we overlooked Chiang Kai-Shek's past of getting both Soviet and German aid.
It's hard for me to tell where the line is between our cynicism and our ignorance.
All she and her supporters give a damn about is making America stronger by making the rest of the world a ruin. Any Moslem who will support that goal, including Saudi Arabia, which is her ally on most of the points you mention, is good no matter how much blood is on his hands. If there's no greater enemy of America around for us to use Sunni fundamentalist proxies as cannon fodder against (USSR, Iran), suddenly things are completely the opposite (Egypt, Libya).
It's more complicated than that, Joe. Read the history of the Vietnamese war against the French. Premature attempts at conventional warfare against France's technological army dealt severe setbacks to the Vietminh. Mao argued that revolution had to go through stages, and that you can't rush into the final stage of attacking the regime in the big cities.
However, the Vietnamese found that you can't always tell if your actions are premature; sometimes you have to move to the next phase, find out you're not ready, take your licks and revert to what was working before. This should be true of other armed revolutionary forces, but few had the cohesion and recruiting ability of Ho Chi Minh's. Getting slaughtered in Damascus could set the rebels back years. Then again, the Libyan rebels surprised everyone after a long stalemate by moving forces via the mountains into Tripoli, finding it practically unguarded, and coordinating with a popular uprising. You can't be 100% sure which of these outcomes will occur no matter how good your intelligence is.
There's a scene in Oliver Stone's movie "Nixon" that haunts me. Nixon goes to the Lincoln Monument to confront antiwar demonstrators (true incident) and tries to spout politician gibberish to explain why he's kept the war going all this time. A girl confronts him with a look of horror, and says, "You really can't stop it, can you? You're not really the one in charge."
Looking at what Carter was able to accomplish in and out of office, and the mugging of every president who's even briefly tried to blow against the wind of plutocracy and empire, we have to wonder, can the office of the presidency really do any good any more?
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I'm afraid this will actually be the most popular part of his platform. The bigotry and medievalism of the rest of the platform will be ignored by people desperate for more money to make their lives endurable. The present has become so difficult that we will gladly throw our own children off the lifeboat in the future.
This is several steps beyond neoconservatism. You have to look at the history of the ideologies. The neos are secular at the core, but cynically use religion as a front when convenient, especially for mass violence. They believe in an activist government, and are essentially modernist. Most accept the New Deal and World War II as foundations of the modern world. Dick Cheney failed in his first bid at the presidency because he was not anti-abortion enough to qualify with the Christian Right. He may not have been anti-gay enough either.
The creature we are dealing with now can only be understood in the political terms of the 19th century. Both the conflict between the North and South, and the conflict between rural and urban America. If you want to learn more about the extremist movements of the 1970s and '80s that learned various disguises to infiltrate and reconstruct conservatism, look up R. J. Rushdoony, Dominionism, Christian Reconstructionism, and The Turner Diaries.
There is crossover between the two, since the medievalist anti-social justice agenda of the Christians frees up plenty of tax money for the neocons' wars, and both demand vast inequality. I recall a book by high-level neocons Irvin Kristol and Grace Himmelfarb praising Victorian debtors' prisons. They are essentially carpetbaggers who eagerly help the neo-Confederates enslave themselves.
Bingo. You've broken the code. Totalitarian states that rely on muscle instead of brains always need more workers, thus more pregnant women. Stalin used to give medals to women who had many babies, and you recall what happened in Romania.
Question is, does this American movement really want ALL women to have more babies, or only those who will tilt the balance of future voters in their favor?
That is because they all revere a past in which their religions' leaders conquered much of the world by a combination of bloody swords and full wombs.
Every time early Christians differed on important values, the Catholic hierarchy took the side that ensured faster rates of reproduction. Anti-suicide, anti-gay, anti-abortion. They conquered their rivals, then Rome, by numbers. I doubt that the early Moslem leaders were unaware of this.
Protestant evangelicals are johnny-come-latelies to the abortion issue. (Or carpetbaggers, if one wants to get ugly about it.) I've heard Falwell didn't preach his first sermon against abortion until '76.
To me it seems obvious why Southern Baptists, Methodists and Pentecostals horned in on this Catholic issue. In the '60s Southerners got creamed in public opinion by backing Bull Connor vs. Martin Luther King, and the Pentagon vs. the people of Vietnam. They were on the side of the KKK and "baby-killers". They crashed into a new wave of victimization politics.
So they swore to never be out-victimed by the Left again. Embrace the Jews, embrace the embryos, claim reverse discrimination everywhere, claim government oppression everywhere, claim that America is the biggest victim of all.
Ryan is the biggest libertarian hypocrite I have yet heard of, and that's saying something. He's actually a pan-dimensional hypocrite. Pro-war, anti-abortion, pro-bailout, yet worshipped Ayn Rand - until he started sniffing for a spot on the ticket and went all Opus Dei.
Ah, if only Dr. Hunter Thompson were still alive to perform surgery on this... this substance.
Is it a coincidence that we hear such douchebaggery in an era when DNA analysis is proving that more and more of the South's Founding Fathers and other fine gentlemen had impregnated their black slaves? I can already see the defense that will be offered in Christian schools in the future: "It had to be consensual."
If I'm an American, should I believe that I have a greater responsibility to stop the evil of my country, or the evil of its rivals? Because nothing was stopping the Wall Street-neoliberal-Washington Consensus empire and its Shock Doctrine until Bush's stupidity gave other countries a chance to fight back. Many of the leaders of those countries are not paragons of human rights, and some of them deserved to be overthrown. But it's clear that we Americans are too greedy to curb our corporations as they grasp at absolute power and, as we see in the news every day, become absolutely corrupt.
The corporations went through the hassle of turning Mexico into a submissive NAFTA-land, but even an enslaved Mexico can't provide wages as cheap as China, so the sweatshops moved there instead. China is not submissive. It keeps a share of the profits and develops its population, and that makes it a threat to us. Hooray.
Now we've lost Central Asia to the SCO, and Latin America to populism. The BRIC states openly work against Wall Street-mandated intellectual property tyranny. The Arabs refuse to choose between the stereotypical boxes we've set out for them. We've begun the fight for Africa when we've already lost it to the Chinese. And yes, Russian oil & gas have sabotaged Cheney's efforts to peonize Europe via the BTC pipeline.
As for Russia, read Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine" for the story of how America helped Yeltsin destroy democracy and precipitate a mass dieoff of the unproductive. It's amazing the Russians didn't vote in an outright Hitler after what Yeltsin did.
If we lack the courage to topple our own bad guys, then other bad guys have to provide a balance of terror to wear us down before our corporations conquer the world and crush all alternatives or any possibility of change for generations, or even cause its extinction by denying climate change. A competent tyrant is the worst of all, and greed seems to be that tyrant, America's gift to the world.
What can I say? There are evil groups in both blocs, but our media will teach Americans over the next few years to view everyone in the enemy bloc as a new Hitler. It's really more like the cynical alliances that led to World War I, with the czar and two racist colonial empires composing the "liberal" Allies.
Worst of all, no one worked harder than the Bush Administration to convince Arab monarchs that the Iranians were aggressors. Peace between Saudi Arabia and Iran was rumored as possible before that. Now the dynamics of hostile alliances will make it impossible, just as it was made impossible between the Austrians and the Slavic nations in the years before 1914.
Addendum to the libertarian trolls:
If the above income maldistribution chart represents your dream of meritocracy, where is the resulting economic boom to justify the suffering of the rest of us?
Let me be here to greet the trolls.
They will say that things are different now because the rich can now righteously move their magical productive skills to some other country that will tax them less.
Right now, the only places that would likely qualify are Ireland and Russia. Russia runs on oil and gas money, and Ireland's scheme to attract rich immigrants has collapsed with their real estate bubble.
But beyond that, what happens when rich people and corporations can hold democracies hostage, playing them off against each other by threatening to move to the place with the most Far Right economic policies - and inevitably the most Far Right social and cultural practices to match?
It's been happening for 40 years now, since the Friedmanites got their foothold in Chile. The rape of Latin America has ended because voters of different countries finally saw that they were screwing each other by giving in to the ransom demands of their Wall Street-backed elites. But Europe and America were virgin territories, and their turn came with vastly greater rewards for the rapists.
Where will they go after they've finished with us? Or will they ever finish with us? Once they have reshaped the US and Western Europe into submissive 19th Century societies, with their Cold War militaries still intact, maybe they will pay return visits to old colonial stomping grounds, on the taxpayers' dime?
If we're willing to go this far to destroy Assange, I wonder how much covert money we're now willing to pour into Ecuador's next election to steal it from Morales and get a more cooperative regime in power?
We've cheated in allies' elections. We've overthrown trivial governments on absurd Domino theory arguments. We've also gotten kicked out of so many countries that the ol' covert election-rigging budget is probably begging for reasonable targets. Ecuador is small and poor, and a dollar still goes a long way there.
My God, that libertard being interviewed was a sociopath. Was that real or a hoax? I can't believe, even using a pseudonym, that a libertarian would own up to the return of indentured servitude.
Though I know it would happen if they got rid of "meddlesome government", and then the oppressed servants would start murdering their masters as they did in Virginia in 1676. Then the masters would suddenly ask the meddlesome government to solve the problem by instituting outright slavery.
Several times in the distant past, the Earth was hit with a heating phase intense enough to evaporate methane hydrate deposits in the oceans, which exacerbated the heating until mass extinctions occurred. One of the extinction events that some blame on this process occurred 250 million years ago, as described in Wikipedia:
"Earth's largest extinction killed 57% of all families and 83% of all genera(53% of marine families, 84% of marine genera, about 96% of all marine species and an estimated 70% of land species) including insects. The evidence of plants is less clear, but new taxa became dominant after the extinction. The "Great Dying" had enormous evolutionary significance: on land, it ended the primacy of mammal-like reptiles. The recovery of vertebrates took 30 million years..."
The question then is what got it hot enough for the methane to evaporate. CO2 is certainly capable of warming (see Venus) and varying. I guarantee you, our economy is ridiculously more fragile than the global ecosystem, so the former will break first, but what it leaves behind might take us the rest of the way. Why risk it?
The radical increase of inequality in America in the last 30 years - you're saying that just happened, out of the blue? Not a result of lobbying for policies too complex for most citizens to understand the consequences?
It's obvious that there can never be too much inquality for you. I hope your grandchildren enjoy living like El Salvadorean campesinos.
But by definition the Party that appeals the most to the rich has a advantage, and the more polarized wealth becomes in America, the less that advantage has to do with the actual needs of the citizenry, yes?
Well, we don't have to estimate how big our deficits were before Ronald Reagan rewrote American ideology to champion short-term greed over all.
It's simple. We used to have a top tax rate of 91% on the rich, and balanced budgets, and a GOP that supported this arrangement.
Mike certainly is not saying nice things about conservatives.
The issue is that there was a time when the Left was powered by the working class, and it was willing to get bloodied in the streets to put pressure on the 1%. That's what's missing in the age of "lifestyle" liberalism.
In those days, no matter how much pro-capitalist dogma Americans professed to believe, they had to consider their own survival, and they were wage earners or small farmers being squeezed by the inherent biases of the system against them. They had their lives wrecked every decade or so by Wall Street panics (1897, 1907, 1919, 1929) which were inherent in the laissez-faire system. They saw that their wages would not go up as long as they competed against each other in their millions for a few jobs from a few big employers.
Unfortunately these proletarians were not at all liberal on many personal-choice issues. Many immigrated from extremely reactionary cultures with prejudices against everyone and everything. They may have hated each other, but they hated their bosses more, and for sound reasons.
The liberal politics of granting concessions to one's lessers is very different than the radical politics of the have-nots taking action for themselves, and it produces a different range of causes and a very different level of enthusiasm. Little by little, the reversal of the New Deal is bringing back the evils of 19th century capitalism, and either the new proletariat regains its claws or we will sink all the way back to medieval feudalism.
As usual, talk2action's far-right Catholic beat was ahead on this story, covering Ryan's recent Santorumization, necessary to pull a charitable veil over his Randism so he could get on the ticket:
http://www.talk2action.org/story/2012/8/12/145544/628/Front_Page/Paul_Ryan_s_Aquinian_Epiphany
What all of you white liberals pissing on Obama refuse to accept is how far the Right is willing to go. They want Obama's minority base eliminated forever, before it becomes a majority. That is what "the good old days" and "taking our country back" obviously mean: apartheid.
The only chance you have of your pet programs being saved is for whites to lose control of the political system. Voter ID and mass imprisonment of non-whites will be used to decimate the minority vote before that happens. White liberals have run out of ideas and the ability to energize their own young to stop the corporations from doing anything. Either you talk blacks and Latinos into doing it, or no one will do it at all.
Given Romney's willingness to say anything to anybody, it is hard to tell what he will do. However, given that:
a. the public wants someone with a plan, any plan, to get the economy going
b. the GOP allows its officials to support no economic doctrine except classical economics - tax cuts for the rich and wage cuts for the poor
c. We've been trying tax cuts for the rich and wage cuts for the poor since the day Reagan took the oath of office and the only times we've seemed to have any economic growth since then were when we were running crazy public and private debts - but the rich have done incredibly well regardless
Then I conclude that Romney cannot have a new economic policy. It's just doubling down on madness and punishment. The GOP is perfectly happy to see the poor get punished by greater starvation and illness, so why not do it?
Unless....
There is one thing left he could try to create one more fake economic boom, and it is obvious if you consider that every great store of wealth in America has been plundered except for Social Security and our public infrastructure. As a plunderer himself, Romney knows the public doesn't now trust financial markets enough to privatize Social Security.
However, many countries have been tricked into fire sales of their public goods. I'm not talking about having private firms operate public services, a scam that's already getting moldy. I mean, liquidate everything like a junkie looking to pay for one last hit; the National Parks, the National Wildernesses, the highways, the bridges, the prisons, the schools, the universities, the utilities, the dams, the clean water behind the dams.
Everything will seem great at first. Money will pour in to buy everything, and for a while a little of it will be in our pockets. Wall Street will do well enough that people might even forget about the crashes and let Social Security be privatized. The new owners will go through the motions of competing for a while, then consolidate into the usual oligopolies. Then the fees will engulf us and we will be living like the Russians under Yeltsin.
That will be the last pump and dump of America. There won't be any more wealth for the rich to extract, so they will move away, and their branch offices and their low-rent local henchmen will assume control, just like every other 3rd world country.
The Chinese corporations in Africa will simply distribute money directly to individuals, by hiring them in the streets, or giving gold-filled briefcases to them in Nairobi's finest restaurants. Let's see the Pentagon compete with that.
It will probably never occur to anyone that our troops will mostly secure territories for Chinese companies, because they make goods that Africans can actually use, afford, and learn how to make. We don't. I'll bet you hardly a single firm listed on the Dow is doing any useful research on appropriate goods to sell to people earning less than two bucks a day.
It does sort of have that stench of 1950s British and French troops setting up friendly armies in the colonies they were having to abandon. Malaya, anyone?
How about someone's relative lack of a civil war now?
How about the Arizona anti-immigrant activist woman who stormed into the home of a Mexican-American family and killed a little girl several years ago, an event I didn't know about until I clicked the Orcinus link above two days ago. Where was the round-the-clock media hype that should have happened when terrorism involved a hot media issue and a child-killer?
You're being misleading because you know damn well that Wade the Loser's attack will not be depicted as reflecting white people generally or even in significant numbers. Millions of hours of propaganda are being beamed around our country to the effect that Islam is a terrorist religion so as to justify more American mega-death invasions and the transfer of more trillions of tax $ from social programs to the war machine. Fox News is the reality of modern American media.
Were the lynch mobs of the Old South organized, or individual actions?
You damn well know the answer if you've seen the photos of the entire white population of the town attending a lynching like it was a picnic. It was a cultural ritual designed to send a message. Yet it took many years of individual whites and KKK bands attacking black rights during Reconstruction to make that possible, when it seemed impossible in 1865. So how do we know that these new terrorists aren't the beginning of another cycle?
I actually read parts of Breivik's manifesto, and while it was clear that his role for Christianity was to serve as a state church, subservient to his ideological leadership, he absolutely wanted the masses to be kept under the control of traditional European religion. That doesn't mean he was a true believer. The Founding Fathers were so cynical about the subject that they actually discussed how to create a secular state religion to instill civic virtue in the citizenry. But Breivik was much more specific in his deification of Western civilization. Clearly only the very right-wing churches would be allowed to function under his New Order, as in Hitler's Germany.
As the founder of modern conservatism once said,
"Extremism in the name of liberty is no vice."
Once you decode what the white-collars and red-necks mean by "liberty", you know why domestic terrorists are treated differently than the other kind.
And what about abortion clinic bombers? They have been highly successful in making it impossible for doctors to offer abortions in many communities, and they have gotten away with it. A successful far-right terrorist movement, doubtless an inspiration to others.
But that's not how he's depicted in the corporate media, is it? He's depicted as the ultimate madman, one who dared to question Progress, and lived in a cabin with a scary beard. If he'd been a white supremacist, that would have been different because beard, cabin, and hatred of progress would have marked his patriotic nostalgia for what Limbaugh calls "The way things oughtta be." But Kascinsky's intelligence showed him that the problem was not black people, it was all people.
You've just described the process by which a species consisting of hundreds of thousands of seperate tribal communities each with only dozens of members has evolved into a highly regimented population of 7 billion organized into only 200 legal nations, and an ever-declining number of languages and cultures. We have always chosen sides. The great elimination tournament is now down to the semi-finals: whomever wins becomes global hegemon and finishes off the smaller countries with cultural/economic imperialism.
While I think this will prove a spectacularly bad idea, I recognize that I have obtained certain benefits by it.
To refine MK Ultra's point, note that these white far-right terrorists are the white men who think that our government isn't violent and racist enough despite all its carnage. Plenty of "mainstream" supporters of war can live ordinary lives surrounded by entire communities who think just like them. It's not surprising that the ones who wish to go much further are frustrated loners.
I am so glad that you are pointing this double standard out. Another place that seems to have this particular problem is Israel, where the right-wingers were rewarded for assassinating a left-wing prime minister by the voters.
The trick seems to be in our own selfish awareness of the difference in targets between "patriots" and any other kind of violent radical. As long as you look the right way, don't work for the evil pinko government, don't go to the wrong house of worship, and don't protest against capitalism, Tim McVeigh-types are unlikely to intentionally target you... even though you might be an innocent bystander. We take it personally that there are people who target us because our tribal/national/economic bloc is ruining the planet in a hundred different ways. We share with the Nazis a belief that "our kind" should be allowed to dominate the Earth in peace since we're so obviously superior, we differ in the mechanics of how to dominate.
Joke:
"So I hear there's now one gun for every one and a half Americans...
What's 'half an American'?
That's the one without the gun!"
Har, har, har.
The Vietnamese took far worse damage, again and again, in wars against occupiers from France, the USA and China. You do what you have to do when life becomes intolerable. That is why many sovereign states were founded by revolutionaries; Italy, Ireland, and of course the United States of America.
I have a low opinion of Abdullah because circa 2006, when the Bush gang was screaming at the Arab monarchs about the "Shiite threat", Abdullah was one of the first to drink the Kool-Aid. The ordinary citizens of the Arab states did not drink it; opinion surveys showed they did not want a war with Iran and many admired it for standing up to you-know-who. I think this disconnect helped to create the environment for Arab Spring.
Joe, while I agree that guerrilla strategies are more compex and diverse than just provoking retaliation, I think Mao knew pretty well that Chiang would do awful things while chasing him around China. For instance, an intentional famine that Chiang's troops caused in one region by wrecking irrigation systems that I believe was credited with 30 million deaths - comparable to any of Mao's crimes and fuckups. A book called "Armies in Revolt" described Mao's strategy as exposing the KMT as an army pretending to be a state, with no point to its existence except to chase enemies and no benefits to those civilians under its control.
I would recommend to everyone that they read the Hunger Games trilogy, mainly so they can concentrate on the 3rd book, a brutal depiction of a statewide revolution fought largely in cities. The parallels to the Libyan revolution that occurred soon after its publication are startling. The rebellion is largely about unfair distribution of resources between regions, it involves multiple uprisings which overwhelm the regime's forces and even its airstrikes, and Katniss' attempt to end the stalemated war quickly with a commando strike at the capital runs afoul of a surprise uprising among the capital's supposedly loyal citizens, causing the regime's chaotic disintegration.
In my analysis, the America of these books has a population of only tens of millions, indicating the size of the past apocalypse that eliminated any knowledge of our prior civilization. This also created a low population density, with scattered population centers, that mirrors Libya. If you have a population density like Syria's, the rebels are disadvantaged by lack of mobility, though there are revolutionary doctrines that have overcome this.
Yeah, and you can love Michael Jordan as a media abstraction but still want to deprive the actual blacks in your state of their right to vote because they have a different vision of liberty than you do. What we have gained in theoretically overcoming instant abhorrence of all things non-white, we've lost by becoming vastly more selfish and willing to sacrifice other people for the most trivial gains.
The hypocrisy of exempting NASA from "evil big government" abounds here in Houston. Then there was Sen. Gramm's worship of the Superconducting Supercollider. And looming over it all, Texan militarism.
But it all becomes very simple if you consider Plato's Republic, where a haughty rich boy tells Socrates that justice is "to do good to your friends and harm to your enemies". That was Plato's diagnosis of the madness of tribalism, the honest conservatism of 2400 years ago. In the context of that book, it meant what the proper mission of government is.
The people who profit from the military-industrial complex, which unfortunately is deeply entangled with NASA and high-end college science, are friends of the "tribe". Engineers and scientists help us with weapons to dominate the world. Though them pinko scientists might get kicked out if they keep bad-mouthing fossil fuels. We must also support our boys in uniform on the same principle, no matter how crazy the case might be. We must support our "productive" citizens, meaning if they're white and rich they must make America stronger unless they're George Soros, in which case they're parasites (but we have dropped the prefix "Jew").
But when conservatives talk against the injustice of big government, it is that it helps people who may be citizens but are not really of the "tribe". Not our friends, thus our enemies. I think you can guess who's on this list.
Unfortunately, the Right has had 2400 years to entangle, obfuscate and embellish their once-forthright bigotry into a vast bible of self-serving contradictions. For this reason Nazi murderers like Breivik and Wade The Loser are quite refreshing compared to Christians and capitalists.
Well, all the most productive engineers in this country are foreign students who will eventually go back home, work for crappy salaries and build up their countries while America worships at the dying embers of its fraudulent FIRE sector, like many declining empires before us.
Those engineers can't work for NASA - they're a security risk. The people who aren't a security risk? Half of them believe that the earth is 6000 years old, that capitalism can't possibly destroy the environment, and that Obama is a secret Moslem. Not much to work with here.
Is this what it was like in the later days of Reconstruction, with white supremacists railing against an (actual) occupation by Federal troops, but focusing all substantive action on the killing and exploitation of innocent non-whites to protect the property owners? Little by little, the slanted voting laws, the for-profit false imprisonments, and most importantly the legal gimmicks to take the vote away from more and more blacks? I thought that Jim Crow took the vote away from blacks quickly. It took decades, plenty of time for Americans to see what was happening and put a stop to it. They did not care.
What good does it do to spend generations, as the abolitionists and then the Civil Rights movement did, to get even the possibility of justice, when the public will merely grow resentful of the tiniest sacrifice and the Patriarchs will claw their way back into power? What good is American justice that is taken away as soon as it inconveniences white property owners, again and again?
When will the phrase "three strikes, you're out" finally be applied to America?
I think you're blind to the dangers of the plutocratic, white- and Christian-supremacist society of your nostalgia. Try and bring back the 19th century, old man. Millions of us will experience its inherent evils and will rise to fight it to the death. Better to be dead than be a nigger under the kind of hypocritical, wife-beating, child-molesting, Bible-thumping Patriarchs who ran this country under States' Rights - north and south.
"This is your rifle, this is your gun.
One is for fighting, one is for fun."
Do the DIs still teach that one?
I'd feel statistically safer there than here, Grumpy. However, I stay in America precisely because I want to be here for the civil war between your kind and those you seem to want ethnically cleansed. Guess which side I'm gonna be on?
For better or worse, the assault rifle is becoming the deer-hunting rifle of the 21st century, due to the AK's 7.62 mm cartidge being ballistically similar to the traditional 30-30 Winchester, and due to new AR-15 rounds like the 6.8 SPC, designed by Special Forces personnel to deal with AK-armed opponents more effectively than the 5.56 mm round that the Army has used since 1966.
In fact, more traditional-looking wood semi-auto rifles have been available to hunters for years. But the qualities that make the modern AR and AK useful on the battlefield are also conveniences to hunters: physical toughness, a vast array of modular accessories, the removable box magazine available in all sorts of capacities, and a vast global market for military-surplus ammo.
Of course, deer hunting can feed into certain agendas and alarming cultural subgroups. Rifles are expensive, and thinking that you might "need" to use your sporting gun against a man adds to your willingness to drop $1000 on it. The militaristic glamor of using a combat gun looms large, but it always has, from the Colt 1873 and 1911 to the .30-06 Springfield.
I think the semi-auto is overkill on a deer, but the deer probably think the bolt actions are too. It's hard to construct the argument to hold the line at bolt actions without a painful confrontation over Americans' lurking belief that other Americans are no better than animals who might need to be mass-slaughtered to preserve one's "freedoms".
Belgium WAS part of Nazi Germany during the war. That is the point of conquest. Nazi-occupied countries had their sovereign governments replaced by Wehrmacht rule or by puppet regimes composed of local fascists, whose atrocities later war crime tribunals held Berlin responsible for. If we had recognized those regimes as sovereign, we would have considered them enemy states like Germany's allies Hungary, Romania and Italy, which we bombed.
So to return to my question, is the FATA a sovereign state that is our enemy, or is it a puppet under control of an outside entity that is our enemy?
Our entire problem there was caused by the Pakistani army, which for decades has organized violence from Kashmir to Afghanistan as part of an agenda to rule them through puppets so vicious that Marshal Petain would have winced. Sounds pretty Nazi to me.
This army had direct and indirect US help for much of this effort, based on its bloody anti-leftist credentials. It created the Taliban, then organized militants in the FATA to support it. Its junta starved its public school system to save money for its own priorities, and let in Wahhabi missionaries to create madrassas instead. It spent everything on nuclear weapons and we pretended not to notice.
So the problem with FATA gets bumped up to the next level: is our enemy the Pakistani army, a rogue organization that has behaved much like the Japanese army in the late 1930s, or the fragile civil state that exists at the army's whim?
As for your insinuation that Pakistan's sovereignity can be bypassed because it refuses to control the FATA, you must recall that Bush pressured Musharraf to invade the fiercely-independent (by legal intent!) tribal homelands to prove his new loyalty to us, and the movements (dating back to the days of Reagan's support) that he and his peers had fostered there rightly felt betrayed and fought back hard. So we made things worse, and our bombings began.
So why don't we treat the Pakistani army like the enemy? Because it has nukes and we're scared of it, or charitably, because we know it will overthrow the new democracy and we can't stop it. But our commitment to international law is bullshit if we bomb henchmen under ad hoc legalisms because we're afraid to call out their masters. It's just as much bullshit as our wars on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, leading to the FORESEEABLE deaths of millions, while we played footsie with Moscow and Beijing. Either there is a real Soviet threat, or Pakistani threat, or whatever, and we deal with it by the means of international law up to a declaration of war, or we're just murdering each others' henchmen in a bloody turf game that has nothing to do with our legitimate national survival.
What good is international law, or liberal support for it, if it does not deter that Orwellian nightmare?
The problem is, we simply arrogated unto ourselves the right to bomb any country, at any time, regardless of its form of government. We never specified the difference between Paksistan or, say, France.
The nice thing about Declarations of War, back when we used to use them, was that they were costly in political capital so you can't have a half dozen wars going on at the same time. Is Pakistan our enemy or isn't it? Shouldn't our elected officials be required to make that clear?
Military history said that a war in Libya would be characterized by giant reverses and vast leaps, with so much of the population strung out on one road. Recall Rommel vs Montgomery, which swung back and forth for hundreds of miles until the prolonged siege of Tobruk.
Wars in the densely, deeply populated parts of the Middle East often get ugly. In the big Arab-Israeli wars it went fast in the deserts, and wherever one side had the right combo of superpower-built goodies to attempt an advanced offensive against a poorly prepared or overconfident conventional foe. But the specter that hangs over this struggle is the Lebanese Civil War. Village against village, neighborhood against neighborhood, and each outside power that intervenes to bail out its buddies gets enmeshed and bloodied.
That's the key - this war has more than two sides.
All right, Israel is interested in destabilizing its neighbors until they are under the control of worthless stooges like Mubarak and Prince Playboy of Jordan. If you recall, all of that was in the "Clean Break" paper that the Neocons wrote for the Likud, and it included Iraq on the hit list... then those same Neocons ended up planning the US invasion of Iraq. So Israel is interested in destabilizing its neighbors until forever, because then the Arab citizens try to overthrow these imposed regimes, and then Israel has to destabilize the replacements, etc., etc.
Well then I guess the bastards will pay the tax, which means they won't be so keen to keep inventing bullshit new derivatives. Folks, the problem is the rate of useless speculation. We didn't have these problems under Glass-Steagall regulations, and we had plenty of economic growth in 1933-2000. Since it was repealed, what do we have to show for the insane speculation that was unleashed?
Good.
Wherever the transactions flee to, will be the next country to get raped by the transactors. It's called bubble economics. Once every country has been raped, they will all realize they need to stop the insanity, and all pass the tax, thus leaving the pimps with no place to go but the
Fourth World unless they want to pay the tax.
My favorite two epitaths for the human race:
Sanjuro in "Yojimbo": "Now there'll be some peace and quiet in this town!"
Nuclear missile-master Admiral Hiram Rickover in testimony to a Congressional committee: "I do believe that the human race will destroy itself. But new life forms will arise..."
Well, the good news in the entry below is that with most of the US so dry, we had a record low for July tornadoes. But that required a record drought. The last two years we didn't have the drought but we had all the killer tornadoes.
See, it's the ever wilder variations that stress our agriculture and economy. If it were steadily one thing or the other, new crops would replace old ones - at least if you had the resources of a giant agri-conglomerate and could run old farmers off their land and replace them with employee-peons from countries that are already deserts. But how do you choose between tornado years and drought years? Or floods versus Dust Bowls?
I was just reading the first part of the book "Nixon's Piano", about the history of US presidents and racism. This part was about the Founding Fathers, Virginians Washington, Jefferson, Madison and Monroe, each privately admitting that slavery was evil and that it could lead to civil war, but publicly refusing to take any stands that could cost them the votes of their fellow Southerners.
A generation later, because of their silence and hypocrisy, their sons were sunk beyond recall in a cult of slavery, believing it the font of all good and the slightest reform Satanic.
I think this transition has just occurred in American conservatism in the AGW issue. As recently as 2007 you could see conservatives willing to engage on climate change issues. Now it's impossible without facing the teabagger inquisition. Once our other shortcomings finally made us desperate to hold onto every economic advantage, any concession to justice became treason. That is what happened with the slave economy too, desperate to hold back the world and the future, murderously desperate.
Slavery and oil were both in turn means for the "common" working-class white man to live the good life and pretend a special status from God. Not something they could give up lightly.
I believe the basis for concern of runaway heating and mass extinction is based on the existence of methane hydrates. Their dissolution is suspected as being part of the engine of the past mass super-extinction events, meaning 90% of all species. How they counted microorganisms in that, I don't know.
But if it is confirmed that the methane hydrates are evaporating, we're toast. That simple. We won't have time to save bupkis. Every man for himself, knife-fighting on a lifeboat surrounded by sharks.
Which simplifies things greatly. I can just start working on my revenge list.
Don't forget the City of Domes. Your palm is glowing red.
Amazing that Romney doesn't know this when so many of the Arab-Americans you mention are in his own original home state of Michigan.
Guess he didn't get out of the limo much growing up.
Given the cruelty and selfishness of "good" Americans, it is useless to use Romney's endless stream of cruel and selfish remarks to get people to vote against him. Besides, they don't give a damn about the outside world.
But what if we got the word out to all our Republican friends that Romney praised Israel's socialized medical system for saving money? Or even pointed out that Israel HAS a socialized medical system?
http://www.salon.com/2012/07/30/romneys_israel_healthcare_stunner/
Let's get this, the least crazy and mean thing the man has said since he's needed to attract Tea Party votes, the public airing it deserves, in time for the GOP convention.
Hillary's "lack of international experience" was codespeak for "we can't trust a woman to slaughter entire nations when useful." Look at how hard Palin and Bachmann work to prove their bloodthirstiness.
What's striking about Romney's behavior is that in his official position on substantive issues, he's maneuvering himself to be only one step to the right of Obama knowing right-wingers have no place else to go. But on SYMBOLIC issues he's very provocative and offensive.
This looks like his NAACP speech; intended to offend non-whites and thus fire up the redneck base who themselves hunger to bully and insult uppity untermenschen. Sorry, I meant take their country back. Except that "country" means "entire world".
Here are some very Bush-sounding comments by Mitt in the Guardian article:
"Romney, who introduced his eldest son, Josh, to the gathering, said he had "read a number of books" on what makes countries successful.
He added: "I am overwhelmingly impressed with the hand of providence, whenever it chooses to apply itself, and also the greatness of the human spirit, and how individuals who reach for greatness and have purpose above themselves are able to build and accomplish things that could only be done by a species created in the image of God.""
For all practical purposes, he's saying white Christians and Jews are richer because their God is the only true God and He makes them smarter and harder-working. In China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, Taiwan and South Korea, I hope people understand that they don't belong in his universe.
As for his book-learnin', too bad he hasn't read Kevin Phillips' "American Theocracy" and "Bad Money", a searing blast on Bush Jr.'s merger of capitalism and theology.
Romney is representative of the capitalist oligarchy of America. He will exploit the Tea Party by promising it that the government will be returned to the 19th century, which means tax cuts for himself. But this simply repeats a process in which reactionary extremists mainstream wave after wave of monstrous ideas via several layers of intermediaries, repeating the memes over and over again, until they end up in the GOP platform. The militia movement of 1996 talked like the Tea Party of 2008 and in turn the GOP leadership of 2012. See this article for how the conspiracy was organized and funded over 40 years:
http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2004/Republican-Propaganda1sep04.htm
There are too many people who fail to see that the GOP is moving to the far right even faster than the Democrats are moving to the center.
Given that he's a "close personal friend" of Netanyahu, he would certainly be in a position to know that he's promising to "not turn his back" on a leader for doing something that he really intends to do. It's practically a green light. Israel attacks, Iran retaliates, Romney launches a full-scale US war. What a con.
There's plenty of Christians in the US who will vote for Israeli wars of conquest.
Joe, if an arms race between Britain and Germany caused the dysfunctional alliances that turned a minor shooting in Bosnia into World War One, then it matters that the USA has a military industrial complex that has defeated democracy, brainwashed the voters, blackmailed the economy, and owns more nukes and receives more revenue than all the other militaries of the world combined. That is more important than Syria. Especially if the rest of the world feels reasonably threatened by our state violence and is willing both to fight back by increased spending versus our dying economy, and by backing regimes we hate, to bleed us with expensive new commitments and aggressions.
This is the classic tale of how empires are brought down by those they bullied, all the way back to the Pelopponesian War. And we've done a lot of bullying. We have to define limits on American power or we will complete the ruin that began with Vietnam.
I think the US did give Assad Senior some goodies in exchange for his joining the first war on Iraq. The question is, were there later deals in exchange for the Syrian secret police torturing Arab militants for us? Mr. McPhee may also be insinuating that the rebels are dependent on the Saudis for weapons, which does tie to the US. However, while the US has fenced ex-Soviet weapons to maintain a cover (like in the Vietnam War), if I were looking for such goods I'd go to a private international arms merchant like the now-jailed Victor Bout, who has doubtless done deals favorable to the US but also deals inimical to its interests.
The problem, Bill, is the larger question of all the weaponry we pimp overseas to favor our armed thugs when there is no longer a Soviet Union to justify it. If our pet thugs have firepower, then their rivals must get some too. Don't forget the Duke Cunningham scandal, where California death merchants got Pentagon contracts due to Rep. Cunningham, and then kicked the money back to his chapter of the GOP. The more weapons floating around the world, the more paranoia favors the imperialist agenda of the GOP, just as the more weapons there are in the US, the more paranoia favors the "good old days" segregation fantasy of the GOP/NRA.
This story just keeps rolling on - in British, but not American media.
http://www.politicususa.com/romneyshambles-olympic-winner-americans-shouldnt-leave-country.html
The Olympic winner who said Romney just shouldn't leave the States is Carl Lewis.
Personally, I have a growing anger towards the London Olympics due to the horror stories of people being forced to leave because they wore a t-shirt from an "enemy" non-sponsor corporation, and small businessmen all over London are having to remove the name "Olympic" from their establishments. On top of the military and police state they've created, they impose a corporate dictatorship in the Olympic zone. I hope Britons behold the combination of the two and realize this is what their future looks like under the City of London/Wall Street axis, kick out the Tories and force Labour to live up to its name.
However, this doesn't let Romney off the hook because he'd run the Olympics the same way if he had to deal with a vast, multi-ethnic, politically diverse city like London, instead of SLC. The corporate dictatorship part of it goes without saying with him.
Wait a second. I thought the right wing slam against environmentalists (and feminists and gay-rights activists and peace activists) is that they are too absolutist and too extreme and want to dismantle the American way of life. You're attacking Prof. Cole for being none of those things?
Besides, according to Jevon's Paradox, any energy that individual citizens save as a matter of principle simply leaves more, cheaper fossil fuels for all the pigs to waste. So we either do it collectively, as a society, or we die anyway.
Feckless egomaniac? You mean Mitt Romney?
I think if the newest technology were used, the transmission losses would be small compared to the terrible waste of capacity caused by Germany's normal weather versus the Sahara. Furthermore, as a form of 3rd-world outsourcing, you would get lower labor costs for installation and operations - though it is exactly the fact that solar and wind create more labor demand than nonrenewable fuels that might have made Germany so enthusiastic about them.
#7 is the big one. Once the power grid goes across the Mediterranean, you're talking about a lot of time zones, which spreads out demand peaks. Germany would be better off moving all its solar panels to North Africa where they would generate a better return.
But the issue that, as usual, everyone fails to grapple with is the difference between electricity demand and liquid fuel demand. Not only do our cars require the latter, but Americans seem to have zero tolerance for spending extra to get cars that can run on anything other than gasoline.
The cheapness of US natural gas has all the signs of an overproduction bubble; companies will go broke as they try to produce more and more to offset falling revenue. Then production will be shut in and we'll find what the real market price of gas is in the fracking era.
Why do you want so badly for it to remain forever a fantasy instead of doing something to help out those working on a solution? I can tell by the tone of your remarks ("people like you", "just that, dreams") that you feel threatened by even the pursuit of this goal.
Word is, TCH, that Cameron is intentionally sabotaging your National Health service with new privatization mandates, and just by coincidence is getting big money from firms linked to US health service conglomerates.
Be very, very afraid. Or take to the streets and fight.
Yet Obama's grandfather loyally served the British colonial authority in Kenya. Doesn't this count for something with Mitt? And in response to Tehanu, maybe Mitt doesn't think Obama's mom counts as a significant influence because only fathers count.
Answer: not all fascism is white supremacist. While Hitler was Catholic and clearly was influenced by the fascist movement that came to power in Italy before his own ascent, the Catholic brand of fascism, also called falangism, was primarily bigoted against Jews because of their religion, not their "race". Catholicism will accept anyone who submits to it. However, I understand Mussolini's movement was centered in northern Italy and did harbor bigotry towards southern Italians and Sicilians. But that is not the same thing as the reams of Nazi doctrine specifying race as the explanation of all the problems of Germany. Mussolini and Franco were hesitant to follow Hitler's racial laws and deportations; it's rumored that Franco was part-Jewish. Falangism is based more on rigidifying existing class hierarchy and reactionary authorities like the Church.
Then there's Japanese fascism, which turns all this on its head and scapegoats whites. What all fascists have in common is murderous anti-Marxism.
There is a context to this, but I don't know if it applies specifically to the Mormon belief system. There's a nasty Christian fascist rag called "The Philadelphia Trumpet", which promotes Millenialism, hatred of Europe, etc. In the late '90s I encountered a copy that promoted the idea of the US, UK and Israel as the "Nations of Israel".
I recognized immediately that this is an attempt by fundamentalists to write the USA into the Book of Revelation. It is based on the formerly anti-Semitic fantasy that the English are the Lost Tribe of Israel, inverted into a pro-Israel position by removing the part about modern Jews being false descendants of Judea. This Christian Identity dogma is associated with some very bad customers.
Turns out the Trumpet is continually harping on this Nations of Israel meme, as part of the longstanding Christian Zionist movement. By writing the USA into a near-term Battle of Armageddon... well, that speaks for itself.
A minority of whites voted for Obama. Millions of the remaining whites freaked out when they realized that there were enough non-white voters to defeat them. The rise of the Tea Party and "voter fraud" laws are about preventing that from ever happening again, a la 1876 and South Africa 1948. It is going to get harder and harder for whites in the future to avoid choosing a side, meaning both sides might get larger, but the movement to "purify" America is more united, confident, and aggressive.
Which is why Reagan never would have said the crap that Romney and his people are saying.
Well, something had to replace white supremacy to keep working-class whites from turning on their bosses.
America's immigrant populations are no more fractured now than 100 years ago. Back then, cities had major newspapers in Yiddish or any number of other languages, and theater as well. What is striking to me in Houston is that young people of every ethnicity have assimilated into a stew comprising both corporate materialism and the culture that arose from hip-hop. The differences between young blacks and Mexican-Americans are hard to discern besides the latter being fluently bilingual. A lot of the Asian kids seem to be orbiting that from a greater distance.
But out in the exurbs, you have an alien landscape of Christian fundamentalist indoctrination, with their own TV, radio, books, schools, and versions of every form of history and even science. I don't think even the antebellum North and South were this disunited over what constitutes fact.
That's the fracturing. And it's not new. 100 years ago WASP rural America was in a war against the evil immigrant cities. Prohibition and women's suffrage, ironically, were linked movements attempting to punish immigrants and their behavior. The immigrants were the engine of the new popular culture of the 20th century: mass-market newspapers, nickelodeons, and jazz music. Eventually, they led the victory of progressive politics.
Difference is, America was on the way up then, and the cities had the upper hand. Now America is descending into senile nostalgia, and old white people are aggregating to offset their dwindling numbers to carry out some great blow against democracy. The robber barons never had it this easy.
I recall a theory that people belonging to faith-based groups are especially attentive to their comrades mouthing the same mindless slogans because whatever their personal agendas are, the group cannot win without unity. In other words, dogma and slogans are the members' way of continually proving to each other their commitment. No one wants to find when the going gets tough he's been left the lone sucker.
So "believing" may be a sophisticated form of voluntary self-brainwashing. At some level, no, I don't believe, but I still want to win and obtain benefits thereby. At any point, it's easier to mouth the lies than face defeat by my enemies.
She's going to be Romney's Sistah Souljah? Appropriate, somehow.
I agree, JT. Libertarians who have any kind of historical context are whores for the age of robber barons, satanic mills and Herbert Spenser.
Meaning, they want a power vacuum to be filled by the business class, so they combine Jefferson's limited agrarian government with an out-of-control industrial capitalist oligarchy that Jefferson himself opposed. To do this, they lie about the existence of power as being inherent in complex social arrangements and diverse/immigrant populations (required by capitalism). They pretend that governments create power, so that if we cripple the government, power will magically go away instead of reverting to the rich, who will switch their payroll from lobbyists to El Salvadorian-style death squads.
Which is really all feudalism and militias were.
I think "Does Not Sell", Jon and Simon are getting close to the heart of the matter of the militia ideology. Though the modern Tea Partiers are canny enough to deny it, they are mainstreaming the radical militia agenda of the '90s. The role of the gun in that ideology is exactly that of the gun in the Southern traditional ideology.
That ideology is based on a capitalist perversion of the Old Testament Patriarchy, in which the male head of household (owner of land/property/capital) has absolute power over his family and slaves, and thus by forming a "republic" with his fellow patriarchs, rules all the non-citizens with an iron hand. Thus, the executive government only serves them by organizing their private firepower to destroy all opposition at home and abroad.
Certainly they thought that their cultural indoctrination makes their weapons more effective than their enemies, so after 1865 they would tolerate blacks having small arms, but not the organization to attain a balance of terror against their own militia.
The Southern ideology also leaned on feudalist fantasies, in which knights owned farms but were obligated to provide military service (plus their personal weapons and horses) to their lords. That meant that every militia member was a kind of knight (Invisible Knights, anyone?) and their strongest regiments were bankrolled by wealthy men, who received the title "Colonel" just as European lords got military titles like "Baron" and "Duke".
Meaning: they don't care if you own a pistol as long as they have machine guns and group training in how to use them to exterminate you when the time comes. The government is an obstacle, but it relies heavily on their caste as a source of soldiers, cops and prison guards. So they have no problem with spending all your tax $ on making the military strong; they already have a 5th column inside it in the tradition of Franco and Pinochet.
But then why aren't things like this in Europe? Breivik was simply a political terrorist, unprecedented in Norweigan history and possibly inspired via the Internet by American extremists. Are you saying that Europeans are inherently more moral and sane than Americans? I'd like to have a national discussion about that.
Or they could be a stepping stone to a murder rate as low as Canada's. Do you want a serious debate about that or are you going to claim that all the rest of the 1st World countries are Communist?
Actually, I recall Finland's murder rate is high for Western Europe but of course low compared to America. Questions:
Rifles or pistols?
Truly private or militia-issued?
These are important considerations. Canada has plenty of rifles, and Switzerland has plenty of militia-issued assault rifles, but both are based on cultural factors that indoctrinate the citizens to not go around blasting people they don't like in their communities.
Americans are truly in a state of low-intensity war against each other, with some embracing it and others in denial.
Better being an Arab world completely controlled by Israel and Saudi Arabia via their corrupt, murderous, oligarchic puppets? You must have voted for Bush.
Passive resistance assumes that your enemy needs to leave you alive to obtain his goals. What happens if, say, a Martin Luther King succeeds, and the resulting society for one reason or another is unbearable to the bigots who backed down the last time? Or what if every ethnicity in a country like Syria has historical reason to believe that at least one of the others will wipe it out rather than deal with the hassle of merely oppressing it? Or what if the main source of a country's wealth is not any of its people, but the oil under their feet?
Genocide actually has worked an awful lot, so much that we don't know how many societies, ethnicities, and sects have been exterminated. We've trapped in a giant elimination tournament, that now has the globe down to only a few big players. Those players tried to put a halt to it when they formed the UN, but America has more people in it that reject the UN than any of those other countries. Apparently, they really like their odds in the tournament.
If the faction in the population that fetishizes guns as the foundation of their right to a monopoly on power as "real" Americans knows that the other faction believes that privatized lethal force is an insane basis for a human society, then I'm not surprised that the former disproportionately signs up for jobs as cops, prison guards and soldiers, yet simultaneously tries to dismantle the government that creates a legal basis for the right of people to live as equal citizens without becoming Conan the Barbarian.
In other words, your preferred model looks like the Old South, where guns were legal only because whites knew they had blacks, Jews, labor organizers and intellectuals vastly outgunned, and had organized permanent terrorist groups plus ad hoc armed mobs to destroy any threat to that formula, hand-in-hand with a government limited to protecting property rights. It was a bully society, like the one the Rhodesian and South African settlers tried to build and the Israelis are trying to build.
If you genuinely will respect the right of the poor and the anti-capitalist to equal firepower, fine with me, but all your compatriots know that would be a formula for revolution and will always find ways to rig the laws and their enforcement in their favor. All those "free" societies I just mentioned ended up with their own versions of concentration camps and torture (i.e., throwing innocent blacks into prisons for profit).
You do too have nuts in Canada. They're just not empowered nuts. America is dominated by a movement whose godfather said that "Extremism in the name of liberty is no vice."
The Russians will do anything to hold onto that naval base. And they should. Regaining that base on the Mediterranean was Putin's way of saying his regime had regained superpower status, or at least a status greater than any of the other Great Powers beneath the US hegemony. The Brits struggled for centuries to keep the Russians out of the Mediterranean, and dumped that burden onto our eager hands. Bush pissed it away without a thought in his head. I want that Russian base there if for no other purpose to stand as a monument (visible from white-folks country, unlike Iraq) of how moronic the Neocons were and why they should never be let back in the White House again.
I guess the conspiracy guys will now regale us with web links proving that a Predator drone has the capability to plant bombs inside a flowerpot and a box of chocolates.
Because I believe that any alternative to Hezbollah will be what we've already seen in Lebanon, meaning worse for the poor. The Hariris created a Potemkin economy run by Saudi lords and Thatcherite dogmas.
Because a census would favor the poor, it won't happen. It's always been hinted that it would lead to a new civil war. Hezbollah's cleverness was to give up the census in exchange for an ad hoc power-sharing bargain, which it's good at.
And to put it bluntly, because the things I've seen over the course of my life convince me that non-militarized uprisings by the poor probably won't succeed enough to stop the truly monstrous crimes that the global corporate oligarchy is cooking up this very minute. Citizens United, global warming denial, massive thefts of clean water, the imposition of privatized prison slavery and the still-growing gap between rich and poor will eventually take the West to serfdom and selective extinction. All we will have left is the right to revolution, just like in the 1890s, and it will take all the organizational lessons of past revolutionaries like Hezbollah and the Vietminh to even begin to force the bad guys to concede power.
I am terribly ignorant about Syria. It appears to me that the only possibility for negotiated peace is for every ethnic group to be guaranteed that it won't be exterminated by the others. This is the kind of problem that plagued the Balkans, and the attempted solutions were terrible. Finally it ended with UN occupiers completing Yugoslavia's partition. How else can these grou7ps be prevented from future reprisals?
You seem to be assuming that Hezbollah's rise to power had nothing to do with the abuses against Lebanon's soon-to-be-majority Shia population by the corrupt oligarchic Saudi-backed Sunnis and the formerly-fascist Christians and the endless procession of foreign occupiers.
If you really believe in democracy, then you should be calling for Lebanon to finally do a new census that would reveal the size of the Shia population, and call for one-man one-vote. Then the Shia wouldn't need Hezbollah's protection, as every single ethnic/religious group in Lebanon/Syria (itself an artificial division) seems to require.
We've helped everyone against everyone at one time or another. We've helped the Baath against Communists. We helped Ho Chi Minh against the Japanese. We helped train Cambodian insurgents in the '60s to use against North Vietnam even though those insurgents' agenda was to retake Khmer land then part of South Vietnam. We took sides in Africa where everyone claimed to be a Marxist at some point. And of course, we overlooked Chiang Kai-Shek's past of getting both Soviet and German aid.
It's hard for me to tell where the line is between our cynicism and our ignorance.
All she and her supporters give a damn about is making America stronger by making the rest of the world a ruin. Any Moslem who will support that goal, including Saudi Arabia, which is her ally on most of the points you mention, is good no matter how much blood is on his hands. If there's no greater enemy of America around for us to use Sunni fundamentalist proxies as cannon fodder against (USSR, Iran), suddenly things are completely the opposite (Egypt, Libya).
It's more complicated than that, Joe. Read the history of the Vietnamese war against the French. Premature attempts at conventional warfare against France's technological army dealt severe setbacks to the Vietminh. Mao argued that revolution had to go through stages, and that you can't rush into the final stage of attacking the regime in the big cities.
However, the Vietnamese found that you can't always tell if your actions are premature; sometimes you have to move to the next phase, find out you're not ready, take your licks and revert to what was working before. This should be true of other armed revolutionary forces, but few had the cohesion and recruiting ability of Ho Chi Minh's. Getting slaughtered in Damascus could set the rebels back years. Then again, the Libyan rebels surprised everyone after a long stalemate by moving forces via the mountains into Tripoli, finding it practically unguarded, and coordinating with a popular uprising. You can't be 100% sure which of these outcomes will occur no matter how good your intelligence is.
There's a scene in Oliver Stone's movie "Nixon" that haunts me. Nixon goes to the Lincoln Monument to confront antiwar demonstrators (true incident) and tries to spout politician gibberish to explain why he's kept the war going all this time. A girl confronts him with a look of horror, and says, "You really can't stop it, can you? You're not really the one in charge."
Looking at what Carter was able to accomplish in and out of office, and the mugging of every president who's even briefly tried to blow against the wind of plutocracy and empire, we have to wonder, can the office of the presidency really do any good any more?