#2
imploring CENTCOM commanders to dust off and spice up contingency plans for militarily seizing and retaking the Saudi oil fields,
Now there's a good idea that will
never happen with the Texas/Arabia connection,that was forged '"back in the day" and is now so powerful that ,really, no single entity is strong enough to dismantle it... especially now that it has solidified its power so thouroghly into the US political system by controlling its highest levels of Government
Posted by: bk ||
06/18/2006 11:26 Comments ||
Top||
#3
Generations of inbreeding will do that to a country. Any place that thinks of family reunions as a good way to meet future mates has a hell of a lot of problems....
Can one be simultaneously amused and profoundly irritated? One can by watching and reading the British media.
British television and the print press have their knickers in a twist over the triple suicide of terrorist suspects held at the Guantanamo Bay detainment camp in Cuba. Most "reporting" features conclusions and opinion that these men killed themselves out of "desperation" and loss of hope that they would ever get to "tell their stories."
This incident feeds nicely into the British media's line that the United States is evil, President Bush is evil and that the dead terrorist suspects were the moral equivalent of Japanese-Americans interned in the United States during World War II.
Continued on Page 49
Democrats have relentlessly called, or implied their support, for a pullout. But when they get a chance to bring troops home, they don't back up the talk. Perhaps they should sit out the rest of the war in silence.
Democratic senators had their first chance last week to force the administration to surrender, uh, pull the troops from Iraq. The Senate considered a resolution Thursday that would have brought U.S. soldiers home by the end of the year. The debate was described by one reporter as "bitter and sometimes raucous." This might make one think that, in a Senate that is nearly evenly split between the parties, the vote would be close. The result? By a 93-6 margin, the idea was rejected. So much for all the fuss.
The six votes in favor of withdrawal were, of course, cast by Democrats. But a large majority of Senate Democrats 37 of them are forever on the record as voting to keep U.S. troops in Iraq. What happened to all the heated rhetoric about the war being a blunder and the need to retreat from the "quagmire"? Is it confined to those six who supported a pullout: Sens. John Kerry and Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts, Robert Byrd of West Virginia, Barbara Boxer of California, Russ Feingold of Wisconsin and Tom Harkin of Iowa?
Continued on Page 49
Posted by: Fred ||
06/18/2006 00:00 ||
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#2
I just saw Murtha on Meet the Press; for a little while anyway until he repeated his sound bite/talking points for the third time and I couldn't stand it any longer. I call on the people of Pennsylvania to explain WTF they were thinking when they elected this maroon?
By Ralph Peters
International borders are never completely just. But the degree of injustice they inflict upon those whom frontiers force together or separate makes an enormous difference often the difference between freedom and oppression, tolerance and atrocity, the rule of law and terrorism, or even peace and war.
The most arbitrary and distorted borders in the world are in Africa and the Middle East. Drawn by self-interested Europeans (who have had sufficient trouble defining their own frontiers), Africa's borders continue to provoke the deaths of millions of local inhabitants. But the unjust borders in the Middle East to borrow from Churchill generate more trouble than can be consumed locally.
While the Middle East has far more problems than dysfunctional borders alone from cultural stagnation through scandalous inequality to deadly religious extremism the greatest taboo in striving to understand the region's comprehensive failure isn't Islam but the awful-but-sacrosanct international boundaries worshipped by our own diplomats.
Of course, no adjustment of borders, however draconian, could make every minority in the Middle East happy. In some instances, ethnic and religious groups live intermingled and have intermarried. Elsewhere, reunions based on blood or belief might not prove quite as joyous as their current proponents expect. The boundaries projected in the maps accompanying this article redress the wrongs suffered by the most significant "cheated" population groups, such as the Kurds, Baluch and Arab Shia, but still fail to account adequately for Middle Eastern Christians, Bahais, Ismailis, Naqshbandis and many another numerically lesser minorities. And one haunting wrong can never be redressed with a reward of territory: the genocide perpetrated against the Armenians by the dying Ottoman Empire.
Continued on Page 49
#4
I could heartily support a rump Saudi Homelands Independent Territory around Riyadh, as suggested by the author, especially since they have been such loyal allies over the years.
Reviewing Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy by Noam Chomsky
By Peter Beaumont
Sunday Observer I will admit one thing from the start. When I read Noam Chomsky, the voice I hear is that of Chloe, the terrier-like computer geek in 24. This is not without reason. I met Chomsky once at a New Statesman lunch and that nagging, bullying, wheedling voice has stuck with me since. It is a voice that brooks no dissent from his dissident view. 'You'll know ... ' was his opening line on being introduced to two of us who covered the war in Kosovo, before launching into one of his favourite rants - that it really wasn't the poor Serbs what done it, but nasty Nato.
What is most troubling about all this is that there is much that Chomsky and I should agree on. Like him, I was opposed to what I believed was an illegal war in Iraq. In my travels in that country, I, too, have been troubled by the consequences of occupation. Where I differ from him, however, is that I reject Chomsky's view that American misdeeds are printed through history like the lettering in a stick of rock. Instead, the conclusions I have drawn from more than a decade of reporting wars on the ground is that motivations are complex, messy and contradictory, that the best intentions can spawn the worst outcomes and, occasionally, vice versa.
But you've got to admire him for the verbal speed with which he comes out from his corner, if not for his grasp on reality. He hits you with five facts before you have had time to digest the first. Chomsky is an intellectual bruiser. Bang, bang, bang, he goes, and all that is left for slower-witted mortals is to hang on, 'rope-a-dope', like Muhammad Ali and try to survive until the round is over. Except it doesn't work quite so well in his written prose.
Continued on Page 49
#1
Chomsky is moonbatted enough for two.
The author, however uses an interesting turn of phrase:
illegal war in Iraq.
Often I hear this non-sequiter.
What is a legal war ? How many wars , importanat to the history of the world have been "legal" in whatever way they suppose this to mean ?
Firstly there was NO peace with Iraq. There was a war against Iraq to stop their blatant territorail aggression.
This war ended not with a treaty but a cease fire .
Furthere the "soveriegn" nation of Iraq was not, in that two thirds of their airspace was denied to them as "no-fly" zones and they were compelled by the UN ( leagalizer of warfare ?) to do all their busness through the UN.
Not a soveriegn nation at peace at all.
So how can it be illegal to finally finish a war that simmers for twelve years ?
Posted by: J. D. Lux ||
06/18/2006 11:17 Comments ||
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#2
Thus on page 129, comparing a somewhat belated US conversion to the case for democracy in Iraq after the failure to find WMD,
The loon may see through the greater loon, but remains a loon. There was no "conversion" to a case for democract in Iraq; it was there from the fricking start. Hell, Clinton talked about it while signing the Iraqi Liberation Act in 1998.
God, I hate the leftists.
Posted by: Robert Crawford ||
06/18/2006 12:00 Comments ||
Top||
#3
Thus on page 129, comparing a somewhat belated US conversion to the case for democracy in Iraq after the failure to find WMD,
Whereas the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 (Public Law 105-338) expressed the sense of Congress that it should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove from power the current Iraqi regime and promote the emergence of a democratic government to replace that regime;
You know that Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 passed during your man Clinton's tenure. Gee, how did you miss it? Belated? It was in integral part of the justificiation to use force. But then again, them's facts. You don't want to disturb yourself with facts. It's all about how you feel.
#5
The loon may see through the greater loon, but remains a loon.
Pretty much.
I could find no mention of the Marshall Plan...
That's because the Marshall Plan was not a humanitarian effort, but a way to boost European economies so that US manufacturers would have markets for their goods. Everyone knows that!
...but nothing about the genuine fear of the Soviet Union, one of the most brutally efficient human-rights-abusing states in history.
Any dissent in the Former Workers' Paradise was largely due to paid American agents. The Soviets were justified in putting down what amounted to a foreign invasion! [I thank Lynne Stewart for pointing this out.]
The US had nothing to fear from the Soviet Union. The USSR's military build-up was triggered by Carter's provocative rhetoric. Any bluster coming from the Soviet side was mistranslated and besides was meant for domestic consumption anyway.
#6
Any dissent in the Former Workers' Paradise was largely due to paid American agents. The Soviets were justified in putting down what amounted to a foreign invasion!
I wonder how the average Pole, Hungarian, and Czech feels about that one.
#7
The worst monsters - Hitler, Stalin, Japanese fascists, Suharto, Saddam Hussein and many others - have produced moving flights of rhetoric about their nobility of purpose.'
I notice that NC fails to include his old mate Pol Pot in his list of monsters...
#8
I do find it amusing that liberals have become so unpopular that they are willing to give their yoda Chomsky the boot. He's doing too good of a job highlighting their message and it is embarrassing them. They want to go back to the days when they could pretend they were enlightened by talking nonsense and insisting the rest of us were just too dense to understand how it all made sense.
#9
Spase Thetle7047, he still hasn't apologized for supporting the bastard in the first place. He's not about to admit that a supergenius like him could possibly be wrong.
A hurricane of fraud? FEMA did mismanage Katrina relief, but it's wrong to blame victims for spending irresponsibly. Move over, reckless consumers. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has outdone your irresponsible spending by racking up a debit card bill so outrageous it could have been created using Mad Libs. Sex-change operations, vacations to the Dominican Republic and wild nights at strip clubs were all bought on the government's dime by both con artists and legitimate victims of Hurricane Katrina. But try to keep that knee from jerking although FEMA's oversight was lacking, wasted money is an inevitable byproduct of providing rapid emergency assistance.
The tawdry expenses are listed in a report released Wednesday by the Government Accountability Office. Though the headline makers were select items purchased with debit cards that FEMA gave out immediately after Katrina struck, the centerpiece of the survey was an estimate that about 16% of the agency's more than $6 billion in overall hurricane relief payments were improper and potentially fraudulent. And that figure is probably on the low side because it only accounts for certain categories of fraud, such as misrepresentation of identity and duplicate payments.
Continued on Page 49
Posted by: Frank G ||
06/18/2006 13:46 Comments ||
Top||
#4
Next time, we need to assign each victim a minder who will determine if expenditures are in accordance with published guidelines for that particular disaster.
#6
Sex-change operations, vacations to the Dominican Republic and wild nights at strip clubs were all bought on the government's dime by both con artists
For a moment there, I thought they were talking about Capital Hill!!!
We've reached an odd place in Western history when a case has to be made for fatherhood, but here we are.
I'm a shameless "Daddy's girl" even though I'm well past the age of a "girl" and "Daddy" is 10 years in the grave. I'm even past grieving at this point and struggle sometimes to bring his face into focus.
What I have no trouble recalling is the power of his influence in my life and the utter impossibility of imagining a childhood without him. It's not that he was perfect - who is? - but he was mine. And because my mother died young, he was mostly mine for much of my childhood.
This particular happenstance is probably what led me to become a champion of fathers. If my father had died young instead of my mother, maybe I'd be a champion of motherhood, but I doubt it for this simple reason: Motherhood doesn't need a champion.
The sanctity of motherhood is intact and manifest, as irrefutable as the umbilical bond between mother and child. Fatherhood is something less certain. Until the advent of DNA to prove paternity, fatherhood was a bond of faith founded in trust.
She says, "The baby's yours."
He says, "I will be his father."
Unlike women, who know with inescapable certainty that they are the parent of their own child, men have had to place their faith in the integrity of their sexual partner. Thus, fatherhood was a voluntary commitment, a quintessential offering of self-sacrifice and surrender to mother and child.
His selfish interest, of course, was tied to his wish to propagate and protect his own bloodline. Even so, sticking around requires a leap of faith that borders on the mystical.
It's really rather sweet when you think about it - man surrendering his less laudable nature, tamping down his more natural inclination to play Johnny Appleseed in order to mow grass on weekends and patch skinned knees for the added privilege of working hard for little credit.
Fathers, in a word, are awesome.
Things have shifted a bit in recent years, you may have noticed, and "awesome" isn't a word you hear much in describing men, unless you've got some little moon-faced twit gaping at a guy's pecs or the angle of his jeans. More often they're deadbeats, losers, rapists, murderers and abusers. Oh, and idiots. Name a TV dad who can tie his shoes without assistance from his far-smarter wife or kid.
Fathers aren't only morons, they're expendable.
Today's women - armed with degrees and checkbooks, not to mention easy access to sperm banks - enjoy the social freedom to have children with or without dear ol' dad counting contractions and are increasingly opting out of the paperwork. Gone is any shame associated with having children out of wedlock.
For a visual aid, picture Angelina Jolie - goddess/mother toting her collection of global offspring with unwed Brad-Dad in tow, shuffling along like a bashful Sherpa. You get the feeling he's a bit player in the larger narrative, a cameo father with a little "f." How long before mother becomes bored with the father she thus far hasn't bothered to marry?
Obviously, celebrities occupy a demographic all their own, and celebs of Jolie-Pitt status dwell in a niche apart. Who else gets to shut down a country while they give birth? But the broader celebration of these faux-unions and love-babies creates a new storyline that trickles down to the street and gets re-enacted by the un-celebs and lesser actors among us.
Advice to Jolie wannabes: If you're going to have babies outside of marriage, it's best to have a few millions stashed in el banco. Barring that, it's best to have a father who cares that his offspring are more than the result of a random sprint around the fallopian track.
To say that children want, need and deserve to have a father seems as unnecessary as insisting that they want, need and deserve oxygen. How did we arrive at not knowing this?
That some marriages aren't good enough to preserve is understood and regrettable. But why we would willingly fashion a society in which men are denigrated and fathers minimized like some useless icon is a mystery that escapes me.
The even greater mystery is that men continue to sign up for the job, to sublimate themselves to the higher charge of being a father even in the face of a culture that belittles them. That's what fathers do, of course: take the grief and keep on keeping on.
Which is why we love them.
Thank you Rantburg dads and keep up the good work!
Am off to celebrate the day that honors my old hero, my dad (been gone almost 14 years, but still miss him a lot), and my new one (the Tsar....sure, our kid's not here officially yet, but will be later this year, and the Tsar's been wonderful as can be ever since he found out he's going to be a papa).
And thanks to all the Rantburg daddies out there! Hope you have a good one!!
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
Democrats have relentlessly called, or implied their support, for a pullout. But when they get a chance to bring troops home, they don't back up the talk. Perhaps they should sit out the rest of the war in silence.
I will admit one thing from the start. When I read Noam Chomsky, the voice I hear is that of Chloe, the terrier-like computer geek in 24. This is not without reason. I met Chomsky once at a New Statesman lunch and that nagging, bullying, wheedling voice has stuck with me since. It is a voice that brooks no dissent from his dissident view. 'You'll know ... ' was his opening line on being introduced to two of us who covered the war in Kosovo, before launching into one of his favourite rants - that it really wasn't the poor Serbs what done it, but nasty Nato.
Move over, reckless consumers. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has outdone your irresponsible spending by racking up a debit card bill so outrageous it could have been created using Mad Libs. Sex-change operations, vacations to the Dominican Republic and wild nights at strip clubs were all bought on the government's dime by both con artists and legitimate victims of Hurricane Katrina. But try to keep that knee from jerking although FEMA's oversight was lacking, wasted money is an inevitable byproduct of providing rapid emergency assistance.
