Gaming Our Way Out of the Bush Years: Fight Al Qaeda, not Iraq
My suggestion for a Democratic slogan: Fight Al Qaeda, not Iraq.
Ok so I'm lazy. I re-read this and decided it still fits. We can look forward to a future apart from Bush, since the bastard will be lucky to get out of office without being impeached, never mind keep his Republican majority. Every dead soldier flown back from Iraq is testament to his mastery of fear, greed, bloodlust, and ignorance as the dominant human traits, and he IS very good at it. To make something happen on this fine Easter you first have to start to "vision" it, the way you're supposed to vision yourself in a job you want, to get your lazy ass up and make it happen. Air America just reported that the fastest growing religion in America is non-religion - the American Atheist Society or some-such (the second-fastest is Islam.) Imagine, the disgusting hypocrisy of the Bush religious base is driving people standing back, on the sidelines, to say, if that's religion, then I'm against all of it. Bush is making the job of honest evangelizers harder. All these people care about is who would Jesus have bombed next. I ain't no philosopher, but there's something wrong with that, man.
RE-POSTED FROM AUGUST 10, 2005
Gaming Our Way Out of the Bush Years
We are now headed down a hole toward a future in which any of us could get SHOT SEVEN TIMES in the head for wearing a warm coat, and have the cops say it was regretful but "necessary." There is no end in sight as long as we grab the war on terror by the wrong end, and believe we can win it militarily. But right-wingnuts make a good point when they say Democrats offer no alternative vision to abolishing civil liberties and staying the course in Iraq. This lets the Karl Roves of the country make speeches claiming Bush wanted to chase the terrorists while liberals wanted to have group therapy with them. It sticks because nothing compelling takes its place.
So how about: start pulling troops from Iraq, redeploy about half of them to Afghanistan to stabilize that country, get serious about hunting down bin Laden in the Afghan-Pakistan border regions (Remember him? He's the guy who attacked us...) and do the 12 Steps to break the oil habit. Of which there isn't much left anyway. When EVEN CHINA is pulling ahead of us on conservation and wind energy, you know it's time to do something.
The crying shame of how Bush handled 9/11 is that we were so unified he could have rammed through legislation to have us off the oil junk in 10 years. We could then renounce the corrupt Saudi dictatorship rather than donate a share of every gallon that goes into your SUV to financing America-hating madrassas. Bush is right: we should spread democracy to combat the ideology of hate. But we should start with our friends Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and the other Gulf monarchies, not Iraq.
Instead of coming up with new and exciting ways to snoop into our business, which won't work anyway, we can listen to CIA Al Qaeda analyst MIKE SHEUER when he suggests most of the terrorism problem disappears the minute there is a fair Israeli-Palestinian settlement. With the PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH now onboard, real safety may be within reach, Post-Bush. The Presbyterians want to pressure Israel to stop building settlements and bulldozing Palestinian homes by calling for divestment in companies like Caterpillar tractor, which provide the hardware.
Another third of the problem disappears when we get the hell out of the Arabian Peninsula where we have no business beyond getting the next oil fix . We are sweating, slobbering addicts who shake when the needle nears empty in our Humvees. This is the disgusting habit for which the victims of 9/11, which I call the Mossadeq Blowback, paid with their lives. (Mohammed Mossadeq, the democratically-elected prime minister of Iran who the CIA overthrew in 1953. Author and New York Times journalist Stevie Kinzer writes that "it is not far-fetched to draw a line from Operation Ajax through the Shah's repressive regime and the Islamic Revolution to the fireballs that engulfed the World Trade Center in New York." It just so happens I wrote an essay on this for my night class; when insomnia really hits HERE IT IS for reading in bed. It is sure to cure insomnia.)
An apology to Iran for our support of the bloody Shah Reza Pahlavi will show the Muslim world that the "good" Americans are in charge again, and even though they want to be nowhere near the Afghan-Paki frontier when we start dropping divisions there to obliterate Al Qaeda, they can trust us to not go into their countries bombing the hell out of everything on the off-chance we might kill a terrorist. An official, high profile apology (Clinton did to Guatemala) will show them we have found the great heart of America again.
After we impeach Bush for harboring traitors and giving aid and comfort to Al Qaeda, because he double-crossed agents who specialized in double-crossing Al Qaeda, we can start winning this war. The key is for a critical mass of intelligent right-wingers to realize we have been following the kind of leader who is confident, harbors no doubts, and is about to get every one of his men killed in an ambush. Every army has them. There are dead men in every war who know who they are. Only an idiot would think a few random bag searches will stop determined and coordinated suiciders. We're headed toward a society divided along ethnic profile lines, something bin Laden would thoroughly approve of.
Right-wing-nuts say this kind of talk is foolishly naive, but where have they gotten us? Terror attacks are on the increase. Al Qaeda has more recruits than it can handle. London shows Jihadists can strike at will in any Western city. Every CIA and military expert with any integrity, like Richard Clarke and Mike Scheuer, says we are following the wrong course. Get out of Iraq, secure Afghanistan, where we have international support for our mission, hunt bin Laden, and spread democracy in the Middle East by pulling the blank checks from Israel and the tyrannical sheikdoms. It's not so hard, guys, we still get to kill people. But the right people.
HERE'S A REPRINT OF A NEW REPUBLIC ARTICLE ON HOW A KERRY ADMINISTRATION WOULD HAVE WON THE WAR ON TERROR, "IDEA MAN" BY SPENCE ACKERMAN.
"Why can't we do something for once that gets these downtrodden countries to like us instead of hating us?" -President Dwight Eisenhower, in disapproval of the plan to overthrow Iranian president Mohammed Mossadeq, which was favored by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles.
Ok so I'm lazy. I re-read this and decided it still fits. We can look forward to a future apart from Bush, since the bastard will be lucky to get out of office without being impeached, never mind keep his Republican majority. Every dead soldier flown back from Iraq is testament to his mastery of fear, greed, bloodlust, and ignorance as the dominant human traits, and he IS very good at it. To make something happen on this fine Easter you first have to start to "vision" it, the way you're supposed to vision yourself in a job you want, to get your lazy ass up and make it happen. Air America just reported that the fastest growing religion in America is non-religion - the American Atheist Society or some-such (the second-fastest is Islam.) Imagine, the disgusting hypocrisy of the Bush religious base is driving people standing back, on the sidelines, to say, if that's religion, then I'm against all of it. Bush is making the job of honest evangelizers harder. All these people care about is who would Jesus have bombed next. I ain't no philosopher, but there's something wrong with that, man.
RE-POSTED FROM AUGUST 10, 2005
Gaming Our Way Out of the Bush Years
We are now headed down a hole toward a future in which any of us could get SHOT SEVEN TIMES in the head for wearing a warm coat, and have the cops say it was regretful but "necessary." There is no end in sight as long as we grab the war on terror by the wrong end, and believe we can win it militarily. But right-wingnuts make a good point when they say Democrats offer no alternative vision to abolishing civil liberties and staying the course in Iraq. This lets the Karl Roves of the country make speeches claiming Bush wanted to chase the terrorists while liberals wanted to have group therapy with them. It sticks because nothing compelling takes its place.
So how about: start pulling troops from Iraq, redeploy about half of them to Afghanistan to stabilize that country, get serious about hunting down bin Laden in the Afghan-Pakistan border regions (Remember him? He's the guy who attacked us...) and do the 12 Steps to break the oil habit. Of which there isn't much left anyway. When EVEN CHINA is pulling ahead of us on conservation and wind energy, you know it's time to do something.
The crying shame of how Bush handled 9/11 is that we were so unified he could have rammed through legislation to have us off the oil junk in 10 years. We could then renounce the corrupt Saudi dictatorship rather than donate a share of every gallon that goes into your SUV to financing America-hating madrassas. Bush is right: we should spread democracy to combat the ideology of hate. But we should start with our friends Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and the other Gulf monarchies, not Iraq.
Instead of coming up with new and exciting ways to snoop into our business, which won't work anyway, we can listen to CIA Al Qaeda analyst MIKE SHEUER when he suggests most of the terrorism problem disappears the minute there is a fair Israeli-Palestinian settlement. With the PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH now onboard, real safety may be within reach, Post-Bush. The Presbyterians want to pressure Israel to stop building settlements and bulldozing Palestinian homes by calling for divestment in companies like Caterpillar tractor, which provide the hardware.
Another third of the problem disappears when we get the hell out of the Arabian Peninsula where we have no business beyond getting the next oil fix . We are sweating, slobbering addicts who shake when the needle nears empty in our Humvees. This is the disgusting habit for which the victims of 9/11, which I call the Mossadeq Blowback, paid with their lives. (Mohammed Mossadeq, the democratically-elected prime minister of Iran who the CIA overthrew in 1953. Author and New York Times journalist Stevie Kinzer writes that "it is not far-fetched to draw a line from Operation Ajax through the Shah's repressive regime and the Islamic Revolution to the fireballs that engulfed the World Trade Center in New York." It just so happens I wrote an essay on this for my night class; when insomnia really hits HERE IT IS for reading in bed. It is sure to cure insomnia.)
An apology to Iran for our support of the bloody Shah Reza Pahlavi will show the Muslim world that the "good" Americans are in charge again, and even though they want to be nowhere near the Afghan-Paki frontier when we start dropping divisions there to obliterate Al Qaeda, they can trust us to not go into their countries bombing the hell out of everything on the off-chance we might kill a terrorist. An official, high profile apology (Clinton did to Guatemala) will show them we have found the great heart of America again.
After we impeach Bush for harboring traitors and giving aid and comfort to Al Qaeda, because he double-crossed agents who specialized in double-crossing Al Qaeda, we can start winning this war. The key is for a critical mass of intelligent right-wingers to realize we have been following the kind of leader who is confident, harbors no doubts, and is about to get every one of his men killed in an ambush. Every army has them. There are dead men in every war who know who they are. Only an idiot would think a few random bag searches will stop determined and coordinated suiciders. We're headed toward a society divided along ethnic profile lines, something bin Laden would thoroughly approve of.
Right-wing-nuts say this kind of talk is foolishly naive, but where have they gotten us? Terror attacks are on the increase. Al Qaeda has more recruits than it can handle. London shows Jihadists can strike at will in any Western city. Every CIA and military expert with any integrity, like Richard Clarke and Mike Scheuer, says we are following the wrong course. Get out of Iraq, secure Afghanistan, where we have international support for our mission, hunt bin Laden, and spread democracy in the Middle East by pulling the blank checks from Israel and the tyrannical sheikdoms. It's not so hard, guys, we still get to kill people. But the right people.
HERE'S A REPRINT OF A NEW REPUBLIC ARTICLE ON HOW A KERRY ADMINISTRATION WOULD HAVE WON THE WAR ON TERROR, "IDEA MAN" BY SPENCE ACKERMAN.
"Why can't we do something for once that gets these downtrodden countries to like us instead of hating us?" -President Dwight Eisenhower, in disapproval of the plan to overthrow Iranian president Mohammed Mossadeq, which was favored by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles.
posted by Jobs for Afghans at 8:41 PM
