[Senator Barak] Obama reiterated his call for a "new security" that would involve the doubling of foreign aid. "We have come to view security only in terms of military spending, and military action," he complained. . .Obama provided the example of the Marshall Plan as an instance of foreign aid contributing to our long-term security. There is an obvious problem with that analogy. Before instituting the Marshall Plan, we first had to defeat the Nazis. We didn't attempt to deliver humanitarian assistance to Europe or try to re-educate Germans while Hitler was still in power. The prime breeding grounds for terrorists are in nations ruled by corrupt totalitarian governments hostile to the United States. As long as those governments are still in place, it is unlikely that they will take too kindly to American efforts to feed and re-educate their people.
Monday, August 20, 2007
QOTD
Philip Klein in the August 14, 2007, American Spectator:
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6 comments:
Perhaps he thinks the UN's Oil For Food program should be our model.
This guy would be more amusing if he didn't have a shot at being president. An Obama victory in '08 would wound Democratic credibility for a decade. As the country as a whole might not weather his presidency however, we will have to forgo partisan advantage for the good of the nation.
My response to this email chain letter is at bottom. I think right-wingers who take themselves seriously ought to read it:
----- Original Message -----
From:
To: Undisclosed-Recipient:;
Sent: Monday, August 20, 2007 8:19 PM
Subject: Fw: [Fwd: Who knows he may be right.]
Interesting Reading: It's worth it....
HOW LONG DO WE HAVE
This is the most interesting thing I've read in a long time. The sad thing about it, you can see it coming.
I have always heard about this democracy countdown. It is interesting to see it in print. May God help us, not that we deserve it.
How Long Do We Have? About the time our original thirteen states adopted their new Constitution in 1787, Alexander Tyler, a Scottish history professor at the University of Edinburgh , had this to say about the fall of the Athenian Republic some 2,000 years earlier:
"A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government."
" A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury."
"From that moment on, the majority always vote for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship."
The average age of the world's greatest civilizations from the beginning of history, has been about 200 years." "During those 200 Years, those nations always progressed through the following sequence:
1. from bondage to spiritual faith;
2. from spiritual faith to great courage;
3. from courage to liberty;
4. from liberty to abundance;
5. from abundance to complacency;
6. from complacency to apathy;
7. from apathy to dependence;
8. from dependence back into bondage"
Professor Joseph Olson of Hemline University School of Law, St. Paul, Minnesota, points out some interesting facts concerning the 2000 Presidential election:
Number of States won by: Gore: 19 Bush: 29
Square miles of land won by: Gore: 580,000 Bush: 2,427,000
Population of counties won by: Gore: 127 million Bush: 143 million
Murder rate per 100,000 residents in counties won by: Gore: 13.2 Bush: 2.1
Professor Olson adds: "In aggregate, the map of the territory Bush won was mostly the land owned by the taxpaying citizens of this great Country.
Gore's territory mostly encompassed those citizens living in government-owned tenements and living off various forms of government Welfare..."
Olson believes the United States is now somewhere between the "Complacency and apathy" phase of Professor Tyler's definition of democracy,
with some forty percent of the nation's population already having reached the "governmental dependency" phase.
If Congress grants amnesty and citizenship to twenty million criminal invaders called illegal's and they vote, then we can say good-bye to theUSA as we know it in fewer than five years.
Pass this along to help everyone realize just how much is at stake,
RESPONSE:
Dear John's friends,
How come all these right-wing emails are passed around for years without anyone ever taking even five minutes to check if they're true or not? The answer is that they confirm what people want to hear, regardless of the fact that they're consistently and flagrantly untrue. For example, there is no such school as Hemline University, unless it's a sewing class operating out of Aunt Molly's garage. The actual name is Hamline University, and as this link demonstrates (http://www.snopes.com/politics/quotes/tyler.asp), the information contained therein is wildly inaccurate. I might also point out that the so-called logical deduction from A-to-B in the excerpt below is more like A-to-outer space. One could as easily pick any of millions of other traits, trends or isolated factoids relating to the two areas and juxtapose them at random, which is what the author has done. And incidentally, as the link points out, the author is apparently not Joseph Olson. I would call the guy to double-check, if it was worth my time, but I have a better idea. Why don't Mr. and Mrs. M_____ do it?
Professor Olson adds: "In aggregate, the map of the territory Bush won was mostly the land owned by the taxpaying citizens of this great Country.
Gore's territory mostly encompassed those citizens living in government-owned tenements and living off various forms of government Welfare..."
This kind of junk thinking, science, politics is why tens of millions of Americans voted for a guy whose only experience prior to entering politics was losing others peoples' money. Every business he was ever involved in lost major money. And what do you know, he's done it again, but this time it's our money and it's not millions of dollars, it's trillions! And the war in Iraq which he just had to get into -- despite the fact that he went AWOL when it came time for him to serve -- is the most disgusting debacle in American history. We have literally destroyed Iraq, which, prior to our invasion, was an island of rationality and modernity in a sea of Islamic fascism that sounds a whole lot like the kind of claptrap many Americans are spouting these days. That doesn't defend Saddam, but it does say that there was a democratic, anti-Saddam movement in place there that we should have encouraged, rather than rushing in like Custer, blowing the place to bits and destabilizing the entire region for years to come. If anyone thinks that George Bush and Dick Cheney have any hope of "winning" in Iraq, they have their heads in the sand...or somewhere equally dark.
Instead of continuing to find lame excuses for George Bush as he destroys America as we knew it, people ought to read the news critically for once and stop relying on internet conspiracy blogs. The right wing -- and especially the religious right -- is responsible for the election of this lame brain. If you had any interest in continuing the American experiment as laid out in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, you would call your Congress members immediately and demand that they impeach Bush and Cheney for war crimes (ordering torture and rescinding habeas corpus), fraud against Congress and the American people, and criminal malfeasance related to the dismantling of our government departments and the looting of our Treasury.
All rational responses welcome.
Bud Hazelkorn
Berkeley, California
District 9 Impeachment Coalition
d9ic@earthlink.net
PS: The following transcript regarding the situation in Iraq and the Middle East, from yesterday's Democracy Now, should be required reading for all Americans. Check it out:
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/21/1349252#transcript
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Bud, you got off to a great start - the letter you responded to does have major weaknesses and inaccuracies.
Then you go leaping off the other side of the boat with weak and inaccurate arguments of your own. When you want to go through those items point by point (from rational pre-2003 Iraq to AWOL to destabilizing), rather than just seeing how many times you can defecate in two minutes, you will find people willing to discuss them. When the student is ready, the teacher arrives.
Where do you get the idea that because some right-wingers send around mild foolishness that all, or even some solid percentage, of other right-wingers support it? You have created a right-wing that bears little relation to reality to oppose yourself to. That may be comforting, but it does not move us forward.
Count me with AVI. Pick apart error or overstatement here, fine, but I'm not responding to a straw man of a straw man.
> despite the fact that he went AWOL when it came time for him to serve
This comment alone says that the respondent has no more respect for the truth than those he rails against... and which he doesn't take the time to disprove, he just throws names at it... The only thing he does is correct hemline for hamline.
> prior to our invasion, was an island of rationality and modernity
Yasss, in the "Pol Pot" and "Auschwitz" sense of "rationality and modernity". How many bodies have we found in mass graves? 300,000? Or is it more now? How many Kurds were gassed by Saddam's "rational and modern" government? And, of course, while it is unlikely anyone will ever know the figures, how many fathers and mothers and children "rationally" watched their family members raped, or fed into industrial meat-grinders WHILE ALIVE, thanks to Saddam's "modern" sons, Uday and Osay?
Sorry, while certainly Iraq is suffering now, the difference is, THEY HAVE A FUTURE which may NOT involve suffering and deprivation.
In other words, they now have a reason to HOPE.
And THAT beats the crap out of a "rational and modern HELL" in which they don't.
Q. E. D.
.
> > despite the fact that he went AWOL when it came time for him to serve
> This comment alone says that the respondent has no more respect for the truth than those he rails against...
Ah, sorry, meant to actually take the time to justify that statement, just to show what a crock it is. This has been done ad nauseum, but not recently, so I thought I'd sum up the main point:
1) This whole thing is based on a hoary claim that ended the career of Dan Rather.
2) The fact of the matter is that GW's TANG (Texas Air National Guard) service was based on a concept of "number of days of service" -- that is, he put in a certain amount of time each year which was to total a certain amount over a time period (IIRC, five years).
3) At the time "debated" his total time "paid into" the system was WELL in advance of that required at that point -- i.e., he was required to spend "x" number of days total over the five years period, and, despite being well below the amount typically allotted for the *year* in question, he was at or near the total required number of days for the service requirement to be fulfilled.
4) He applied for, and received, release from whatever (if any) commitment remained in order to go off and do public service (although I ack it was political service) for the remainder of the year.
BTW, anyone who hasn't really thought about it, Bill Whittle, over at Eject!Eject!Eject! has done a remarkably cogent job in his essay "Seeing the Unseen, Pt1", of debunking the notion that GW's TANG service was "less dangerous" than Vietnam. First off, he flew fighter jets. Whittle points out that the requirements for doing that more than amply show GW to be far from the moron the Left likes to paint him as (read it). Second off, the jet he flew was one dangerous piece of equipment, with a huge percentage of them crashing on takeoff due to some weaknesses in the design (again, read it). The whole article (long!) is well worth the read, but, if you just want to skip to the GW part, it's the first part after the heading "War of the Bumper Stickers".
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