bleeding heart

I assume you meant that as the Honorific...not as the bigoted slur.

dp

They boarded the boat because of Holocaust denial???

Ah, an allusion to Layton's illness, which killed him. Stay classy, bro.'

These aren't your words, directly preceding the rest?: ? Excellent. I look forward to your thoughts on the matter.

i agree completely. And yet: the UNIONS!

Yeah...but you also said, in essence: "Reagan.,..is that all ya got?" Which--as you knew at the time--was not the case. If your subsequent remark cancels out the first (patently false) one...then why include it? I anticipated just this response. Not because of my powers of prediction, but because of the predictability of those frightened to discuss serious western crimes...of the type that match some of our worst enemies. That's no fun, is it? Best to ignore history, ignore your county's responsbility for mass murder. A sigh of relief...and then you can on to denouncing the terrorism of others...a much more relaxing (if morally vacuous) enterprise. You have been offered an extremely solid argument for the outright terrorist collusion of Western states...with the United States clearly leading the way. This quite authoritatively refutes your silly notion that the Western democracies don't "intentionally" kill innocent civilians, or resort to terrorism. And you are completely unable to offer a reasoned rebuttal to any of it. American Woman...stymied and at a loss for words! We don't see that every day.

Which would then be offered as proof of how rotten today's youth are.......

Yeah....that, or sad neurosis.

I like the move, whatever intentions might undergird it. I think that's part of the point of democratic politics: we demand certain behaviour from the government...but we can't demand intentions. Incidentally, I enjoy the OP here: the Left-obssessives are getting more and more fun to watch, quite dramatic at times. (Kraychik remains the Queen of this phenomenon, however.)

Don't confuse the poor guy.

Good point. I adored the way my children were polite and civil and generous-hearted. (They atill are, but now they're adults.) At any rate, since we all have to go on are personal impressions....our house was Teen Central during the early 2000's, lots of coming and going and the damn kids eating all my snacks....but these were really nice kids. So I'm just not seeing it.

Graham's partisan politics trumps Graham's religious convictions. Too sweet.

They're not dumb at all. But it's questionable whether the smarter ones will be voting for an effete aristocrat wearing magic underwear.

That's your answer to his use of proxy terror groups in Latin America? It was by far the lesser of the two situations I summoned (both right off the top of my head); and the second one is a 25 year situaitoon, bipartisan, and involving several Western nations. Maybe read before you respond in such a way. At any rate, if you're genuinely interested in the Indonesia/East Timor situation, here are some links, from both during and after the brutality: http://www.gwu.edu/~...BB174/index.htm http://etan.org/timor/BkgMnu.htm http://etan.org/timor/uspolicy.htm http://etan.org/et20...y/1-6/1oped.htm http://www.etan.org/news/2006/cavr.htm

I assumed it meant "drunk." (Which reminds me, got some oatmeal stout to drink.....)..

I'll drink to that.

Do you have a link for this? I'm not disputing it; I believe it shows that I was mistaken. I'm just interested. OK, but the "hands tied behind our backs" bit is absurd. The amount of bombs dropped, alone, was staggering. The number of people who were killed was immense. "Their principled grounds"? As opposed to...whose, exactly? Hopefully I won't have add extra qualifiers to every word I use, just to point out what is alrady obvious.

If that's the case, why wouldn't the greater concentration of private power leasd inevitbalt to more ocrruption. As you imply, knowingly or not, the problem is not "government"...it's Power itself. This is one of the great weaknesses of the libertarian Right...while cogently explaining (well...arguably) how smaller government would benefit society, they tend to forget that concentrations of private power will tend to rise and fill the vaccuum. Unelected, unrepresentative, unaccountable concentrations of private power. that's not preferable to governent; it is de facto government. Sans democratic principles.

This sounds like empty rhetoric, but actually you're right. In '08, the Obama campain won a major marketing award..for their Presidential campaign. That sort of sums it up. And before any erswhile Republicans (or Canadan Republican wannabees) pipe up in agreement, let's not pretend this is a Democrat thing specifically: the McCain/Palin campaign actually cribbed a bit from Obama's: their whole "maverick/outsiders/change Washington" bit, while old and well-used, wasn't so far off from Obama's "Hope and Change" emptiness.

No, I don't understand. It sounds counterintuitive. I am more than willing to pay attention if you could expand on this.

Me too. I think it's awesome. .

And so it's accurate...except the civilian deaths part? And this response doesn't surprise me. But I'm not sure you're seeing things clearly. That's because, I think, you're looking at things far too simplistically. I suspect plenty of people hate the Taliban and the NATO coalition, both at once. Not neccessarily an irrational stance. It's not in doubt; it's not even a controversial assertion. The better question is whether or not there's a direct causal link; that we don't know. Please. Reagan arming, training, and funding the terrorist Contras isn't even a secret...and only the most hardcore idiots still support that monstrous idea. That's terrorism by any definition. But a much bigger, more horrible example is the material aid for Indonesia's State terror against East Timor; terror that couldn't have continued without decisive Western support (both in arms and in diplomatic wrangling). At least a sixth of the population was murdered...perhaps almost as much as a third, much of it by enforced starvation, the rest through mass slaughters. Rape was a common war practice, as we've seen elsewhere. So was torture. East Timor did nothing to us...and in fact, did nothing to Indonesia. This was the nexus of Imperial and Cold War military politics at its ugliest. Ford and Kissinger explicitly gave Suharto the go-ahead, as we know now from declassified records...suggesting only that he keep it quiet till the President was back in the US, so that Ford could avoid the domestic embarassment of having green-lighted an illegal invasion and the subsequent murders...which a few countries, including yours and mine, all supported, ensuring diplomatically that the events continued, and supplying the arms necessary to kill all those pesky human beings. The US, Canada, UK, Australia, and Japan knew exactly what was being done with our generous help...and so we kept helping with it. Paul Wolfowitz, as diplomat, was a major booster of General Suharto, right through the worst excesses. Before that, US ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then Ambassador to the UN, was charged with making sure the UN remained powerless to stop Indonesia's attempted genocide...as Moynihan pointed out in his memoirs. In Canada, as in the US (and probably in the other colluders with state terror) there was a little debate noise made, in our respective political Houses, but nothing much. And so it continued. If it weren't for some leftist activists, some Catholic activists (working outside permission from the Church, I believe, but am not certain) and of course the courageous East Timorese people themselves...well, probably most of them would have been murdered, E. Timor would be an Indonesian Province or territory, and no one would be the wiser. As it stands, most people don't know, although the information is easily available. Heck, you didn't even know that your own coutnry was an intentional, intrinsic part of one of the worst acts of State terror in the postwar era. ??? Of course it's not automatically bad just because we are doing it. Things are bad, good, a combination, or neutral by virtue of themselves, not by virtue of the agents involved. Of course we agree that far. That's the question, the best question, and the one that seems to always have us all vexed.

I'll give you 1967 Desert Storm was sold to the public precisely on the grounds that they weren't going whole hog, because they didn't want a high casualty rate. It's the exact opposite of your thesis. And by the way, the more hawkish voices were making precisely the same complaint about "softness" that you are making now, which adds a rather interesting layer to your example, here. Hiroshima and Nagasaki is not a stellar example, either...as your own qualifier, "perhaps," exposes immediately. So you've named one conflict (at best!) out of....how many, do you think?

No, from '65 till '67, opposition was low. People qwere more servile, more obediently willing to stare with dewy eyes at noblwe eladers bombing inferior foreigners. (some people remain this way; the technical term for them is "sycophants." ) In '67 opposition started to pick up, with the real firestorm occuring in '68. Yes, by some; others opposed it wholesale, on principled grounds.