Fight you ninny! Have at you!

I'm just trying to locate your goat, and then get your goat.

I am very hawkish though and see nothing wrong with attacking and threatening countries willy-nilly, to the extent that it is reasonable given their offense. And I don't think attacking or deposing these regimes will necessarily make more terrorists in the long run compared to NOT reconstructing the states (regardless of an attack. I would say that many states in the Middle East need 'reconstruction' right now that we haven't even blown up)

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Vote Jeb Bush 2008

Right, sorry. "Fights Go Here." Of course...

Uhm.... I don't think we should go to e-voting until they can include a paper-trail in the process, fart-nose.

Hmmm... lacking. How's this? How can you justify troglodyte behavior in a world where compassion and cooperation are bound to work better than tried and failed policies of brute force?

Maybe you should pick on someone that likes to fight. If it helps, I'll continue annoying you with bits of news I scrape up. That should at least make you mad.

8-)

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"Jelly-belly gigglin, dancin and a-wigglin, honey that's the way I am!" Janice the Muppet

IT MAKESS MEWE SO MAD II HATE YTOU SO MUCH!!!

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Vote Jeb Bush 2008

Administration Faces Subpoenas From 9/11 Panel

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Think classy, you'll be classy.

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I am very hawkish though and see nothing wrong with attacking and threatening countries willy-nilly, to the extent that it is reasonable given their offense.

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Yeah we dole out so much international aid and military police forces every year, we are such monsters.

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Vote Jeb Bush 2008

I assume you meant the royal "We."

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"Jelly-belly gigglin, dancin and a-wigglin, honey that's the way I am!" Janice the Muppet

*tweak*

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"Jelly-belly gigglin, dancin and a-wigglin, honey that's the way I am!" Janice the Muppet

I asked a simple question: Does the word "countries" include the US? Why won't you answer it?

But to take your sarcastic remark as a point of departure, how much "international aid" does Washington "dole out" every year? How does it compare to other G-8 countries? Any idea whatsoever what this princely sum is, which is so magnificent that it justifies "attacking and threatening countries willy-nilly?"

And we "dole out" military force? Really? If, say, China deployed forces in this hemisphere, would you regard that as an act of generosity?

And how much of Washington's "international aid" takes the form of military and economic assistance to dictatorships?

Anyway, the more basic question is, does your logic regarding hawkishness apply equally to ourselves? If not, it's just an appeal to force, and none of this talk about "reasonable given their offense" is applicable.

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What others say about boorite!

My hawkish nature applies to other countries because someone has already taken it upon us already! If someone burned down your garage and vowed to burn down your house next, I guess you'd just figure you have it coming, and wait to die?

Economic aid can take many forms other than just lump sums of cash.

Probably no, you know, since China is a dictatorship with no freedom of religion, marginal freedoms of speech and a terrible human rights situation.

Does this mean you know the answer, or are just parroting an often lobbed, but never backed up argument against America's global presence?

And are you saying that dictatorships are terrible things? Well then, let's go in there and overthrow them..

Oh wait we just DID that and you're BITCHING about it.

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Vote Jeb Bush 2008

Rummy shaking hands with Saddam. At what point are we supposed to hate these guys instead of sell them weapons? When mommy tells us to?

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"Jelly-belly gigglin, dancin and a-wigglin, honey that's the way I am!" Janice the Muppet

Challenge Bush - Become a federal target

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"Jelly-belly gigglin, dancin and a-wigglin, honey that's the way I am!" Janice the Muppet

After the Soviet Union collapses and it will no longer upset a precarious global balance of power to overthrow them. That's when.

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Vote Jeb Bush 2008

So if a country does it to the US it's OK to do it to that country. I don't think anyone here is Amish and is arguing against the right of self-defense. What I am asking is: Was it the case that Iraq and Afghanistan attacked the US, such that invason was necessary; and more generally, and more directed toward your remarks, if the US "takes it upon" some other country, then is it OK to "attack and threaten [the US] willy-nilly?" I'm asking a very simple question: Does your moral calculus apply to your own conduct, and that of your country?

Economic aid can take many forms other than just lump sums of cash.

Obviously. So what marvelous forms does US magnaminity take, and how much does it cost us? Any idea?

Probably no, you know, since China is a dictatorship with no freedom of religion, marginal freedoms of speech and a terrible human rights situation.

OK, let's say Germany deployed a force to invade, say, Panama or Colombia, amidst much PR about liberation from the clutches of tyranny. Would you say, oh my, what an act of generosity? No, you would probably see it as a self-interested power move. So how come your skepticism fails you when it comes to Washington?

(A German invasion of any country in this hemisphere is an utterly fantastic scenario, of course. Washington wouldn't tolerate it, reserving to itself the right to commit violence in other people's backyards. So you'll have to exercise the old Imagination here.)

Does this mean you know the answer, or are just parroting an often lobbed, but never backed up argument against America's global presence?

Never backed up? Have you been living in a cave? I mean, literally? The record is so abundant on this score that providing specific examples is kind of misleading, like saying, here is an example of a beach with sand on it. But let's start with the leading human rights violator (and by no coincidence, the leading aid recipient) in this hemisphere, Colombia. Now how about our pals in the East: Turkey, Indonesia, and Egypt, perennial leading recipients of US military aid.

And we don't have space here to go into every Pinochet, Duvalier, Marcos, Suharto, Shah, Noriega, and Somoza in the US's closet. Suffice to say that Saddam was one of those until he slipped his leash.

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And are you saying that dictatorships are terrible things? Well then, let's go in there and overthrow them..

Oh wait we just DID that and you're BITCHING about it.

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And to answer your question: Yes, dictatorships are terrible things, and while it would be nice to overthrow them all, we could start with the much simpler measure of not supplying them with weapons and money.

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What others say about boorite!

I'm sorry if believing that some people can be in the right and some people can be in the wrong equates to confusing "moral calculus" for you. If you don't know what's right and wrong then I can understand how this could be confusing for you.

We pretty much pull the economic gravy train around the earth, boorite. And yes, we make money too. How terrible.

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OK, let's say Germany deployed a force to invade, say, Panama or Colombia, amidst much PR about liberation from the clutches of tyranny. Would you say, oh my, what an act of generosity? No, you would probably see it as a self-interested power move. So how come your skepticism fails you when it comes to Washington?

(A German invasion of any country in this hemisphere is an utterly fantastic scenario, of course. Washington wouldn't tolerate it, reserving to itself the right to commit violence in other people's backyards. So you'll have to exercise the old Imagination here.)

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I'm sorry if believing that some people can be in the right and some people can be in the wrong equates to confusing "moral calculus" for you. If you don't know what's right and wrong then I can understand how this could be confusing for you.

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I said theocracies and dictatorships. His was a dictatorship.

If you don't know how America economically enriches the world I guess I can believe that. Our presence is so prevailent it would be hard to imagine the world economy without it.

And yes I'd support action against Saudi Arabia, but I'd hope things would change enough given our presence that we didn't need to take action. It is in this respect I call Iraq an important foothold.

I think I made my point about everything else I'm sorry my point of view still isn't clear. Also I could "use my imagination" about a lot of things but it doesn't change the reality of the situation. You could make a lot of arguments based on imaginary scenarios.

Use you imagination boorite! What if Saddam had dropped an atomic bomb on us! Then we'd be right! And thus your points of view are wrong because of this.

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Vote Jeb Bush 2008

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Use you imagination boorite! What if Saddam had dropped an atomic bomb on us! Then we'd be right!

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If you can't understand right from wrong then of I guess I should not be surprised when you cannot determine joke from serious remark.

Ok, if Germany got permission from the UN on humanitarian grounds to clean house in Colombia, then yes I would support that. But that wouldn't happen because we are on the ground already in Colombia. And even if we weren't the Colombian cartel would probably be able to clean Germany's occupational clock. And then of course the United States would have some response to a European powering moving into its backyard and making it look bad.

That's the problem with a hypothetical like that, there are too many factors. Part of the reason we could assemble permission to go into Iraq is that no one felt very safe with the government that was in place there given its history. We could have just as much cause to go into Iran, but they haven't invaded any of their neighbors lately, and so the world is more complicit with their continuation of government versus the amount of turmoil it would cause to overthrow them. A coalition could have easily combined against the United States to defend Iraq if they thought we were so wrong...but mysteriously they didn't, they just moaned about it on the UN floor. Not even other states in the area stood behind Iraq. How very odd.

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Vote Jeb Bush 2008

The US could have easily crushed any military opposition the world could have mounted against an Iraq invasion.

Anyway, my question about Germany invading Colombia was, would you believe the humanitarian rhetoric emanating from Bonn and Berlin? I mean, do you really think states send their armies halfway around the world out of the generosity of their hearts? I don't think so, which is why I found the phrase "dole out" to be very odd with respect to military force.

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What others say about boorite!

It is irksome and somewhat ironically amusing that the most salient trait of all right-wing Americans is the nod and the wink, when it comes to domestic economic policies and our foreign policy in general.

"Well, heh, yeah I guess them Godless foreigners DID get the shitty end of the stick, *nudge* *wink* but... hey! This is America and we have to look out for ourselves! Think of what it will mean to American business to get our hands on that country's oil/strategic locale/resources, etc...."

*wink**wink*

What it will mean is that the rich will get richer, because that is the great fallacy of America:

"If you play along and keep your mouth shut while we send people in olive drab combat uniforms and people in neckties to grab whatever we can get our hands on, from whatever place we have decided we should get it, under whatever pretext we can drum up.... you might get some of the loot."

"Play along.... Don't rock the boat! You'll get yours, you good American, you!"

And how.

How we manage to keep overlooking the fact that the whole of corporate America does nothing whatsoever with what they can get their hands on, other than stick it in their own pockets, is astounding. They drop the interest rate once in a while when car sales aren't moving fast enough to clear out inventory before the new ones arrive in the showrooms, and job out anything that can be done by a machine - or a person in Calcutta for 2.50 a day - as fast as they can. Aside from that, they just keep sucking up the gravy and installing front men to wave from platforms and smile every four years.

We keep sitting there like the good child. Like the believer at Christmas, letting our abusive and power drunk daddy play upon our nascant greed. It's like an episode of Married With Children, for crying out loud.

There is no payoff.

There is no Christmas stocking with your name on it for playing along, turning away and keeping your mouth shut.

It's a sucker's game. Wall to wall. And they need suckers here in order to play the sucker's game they run on the poor bastards everywhere else.

If you think for two seconds that, should America's poor rise up and start pushing on the gates of corporate and political America's party center, that the people who endlessly perpetrate this deadly industry -in the name of liberation, freedom and protection- would hesitate to flatten those poor, fed-up bastards like so much foreign real-estate before them, you are fucking deluded.

War isn't an unfortunate circumstance. War is a very profitable business. It's an industry. It's probably the last product we actually manufacture here instead of in Guadalajara.

So Right Wing America® can shut up and eat their fast food lunch and poo poo those "silly, commie, weeping sister naysayers" until their gums bleed. I don't care. But I tell you what.... Their slice of the robber's pie has already been eaten. Theirs, yours... Yes, your fucking slice, Virginia. They are waiting for a come up in exchange for being a good, I.E: quiet, American that aint gonna come. The rah rah Republican poor are just another bunch of mooks to keep placated, as far as the war machine is concerned. Being on the side that's making the most scoreboard, (simply due to them being the biggest, fattest kid on the block) by the accident of birth does not make you rich or guided by God's will. Sounds a lot like the poor, deluded cowards who slammed jets into the World Trade Centre for "Allah", to me. Nor does being on the side of the winning team keep you safe. (See: Jets slamming into the World Trade Centre.)

I have no qualms with blowing somebody who attacks us willy nilly - to coin a phrase- to smithereens.

Now...

Who was it, exactly, that attacked American soil with Boeing 757's on that September day?

Yeah.. We still don't seem to know. Aint that funny? With the preponderance of the wealth, intelligence and might upon the world's stage at our disposal, we can't seem to find out who actully started the ball rolling on 9/11. Was it Osama Bin Forgotten? It sure as hell wasn't Iraq. But, hey... that's ok.. *nudge* *wink*

All the sudden, the game of Risk becomes more than a parlour game for the power elite when something bad happens to us. Because we all know that nothing bad should happen to us because everything we do is to make the world better for everybody everywhere.

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I wanted my half in the middle and I wound up on the edge.

Most of 'em were Saudis.

So we invaded... Iraq! Hurrah!

Also seemed like a good time to get rid of the fundamentalists we installed in Afghanistan some time back.

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What others say about boorite!

*nudge* wink*

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I wanted my half in the middle and I wound up on the edge.

Maybe, maybe not. But we might not have gone in if we were facing a military conflict with friendly nations.

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Anyway, my question about Germany invading Colombia was, would you believe the humanitarian rhetoric emanating from Bonn and Berlin? I mean, do you really think states send their armies halfway around the world out of the generosity of their hearts?

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