I am stupefied that no one has picked up on the fact that what is happening in Iraq and the middle east is long planned and the gauntlet will now be carried by others. Bush has ignored all good advice and proceeded with his new order middle east breakdown. He has done his damage. I have said numerous times in the past that bush had nothing to lose Politically so he took the hit for what he has done in the middle east, Now that Republican's are running for reelection he is calling the surge and Iraq a success but it is another Facade. Supposedly the Issue of Iraq has been taken away from Democratic Presidential nominees. Nothing could be further from the truth as once again both party's suffer from tunnel vision and the inability to look at and fathom the big picture. I will explain again!First, those who call themselves experts once again prove they are no longer experts and that they do not have a clue! They stupidly ask Whatever happened to the war? they said that For months, it was all the rage on the campaign trail. Democratic contenders never missed a chance to pound on the Bush administration, rip the Republicans and remind voters over and over how badly things were going in Iraq. Republicans, as often as not, staunchly insisted that distant battles and homeland security went hand-in-hand. Day after day, stop after stop, the war was the focus of all things presidential. Now, the war is little more than a distant echo in most stump speeches. The Democrats are generally saying little more than "We should get out as soon as we can." The Republicans are hardly mentioning it.
Why? Here's their theory: Republicans know that a defining characteristic of the electorate now is widespread distaste for the war that Bush launched and has continued with the help of the Republican Party. They know that voters want out, and so most of the GOP campaigners are like kids who got bad grades in school last week: Although they need to address the issue, for the moment they'd rather not mention it, for fear of further punishment. The biggest exception of course, is Arizona Sen. John McCain. He is still talking about the war extensively and still trying to make the case for a continued U.S. presence in Iraq for years to come. But why aren't the Democrats talking it up so much anymore? Simple: The war is going much, much better than it was a year ago -- even a few months ago. You might even say we are winning. I fully accept that anytime our young people are dying and civilians are being killed in the midst of combat, it is difficult to even talk about winning or losing. But fatalities for troops and civilians alike are way down. Man are they off base with this one
They do not clue that Iraq has served its purpose and others will now pick up the gauntlet but first for us it is now about the economy stupid! But this is no recession we are facing, I will guarantee you that here too Bush will keep the truth hidden as long as he is in office. However if we are lucky enough to be rid of him next year the truth will start coming out. I have talked about this numerous times and it is undeniable to the unbiased thinker. Just read the facts of The Second Great Depression by Mike Whitney
I hope you read that but with that said I refuse to believe that there are still those who do not realize why Bush diverted from the war on terror to get back into the middle east. this was established in 1996 and Bush was just the fool they needed. going after Iran was only one of the original goals. Remember the Perle Wurmser Report from 2003,a Clean Break
Yesterday we discussed how Bush was in Bahrain cheerleading our supposed allies to marshal together and defy Iran who is their main threat. Bush is the big enemy to middle east peace as far as I'm concerned! It is old news now that Bush had pledged $20 Bullion in military aid to Saudi Arabia and other allies and was giving an additional $30 Billion to Israel to offset any threat they may feel. Yesterday he mad a show of making that money available to the Arabs.
Now I have said numerous times that Israel attacking Iran and Bush having to come to Israel's aid will most likely be his excuse to get into Iran. When Bush was caught lying about Iran wanting nuclear weapons Israel said that changes nothing and they are convinced Iran has a program. Today they indicated a willingness to use military force against Iran. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told a powerful parliamentary panel Monday that Israel rejects "no options" to block Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, a meeting participant said. The statement was the Israeli leader's clearest indication yet that he is willing to use military force against Iran.
"Israel clearly will not reconcile itself to a nuclear Iran," the meeting participant quoted Olmert as telling the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. "All options that prevent Iran from gaining nuclear capabilities are legitimate within the context of how to grapple with this matter." The meeting participant spoke on condition of anonymity because the session was closed. Olmert addressed the panel days after discussing Iran's nuclear ambitions in talks with President Bush in Jerusalem. During that visit, Israeli officials disputed the recently released conclusions of a U.S. National Intelligence Estimate that concluded Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003. please read the entire story
** Anyway you look at it Bush will have his excuse to attack Iran and get his created middle east breakdown in full swing using Israel and so called middle east allies to do it while he uses another Facade and makes believe he is a peace maker. Iraq is not a dead issue it will no more be at peace than the rest of the middle east thanks to Bush. This is still just taking shape and I wish those so called experts would realize Iraq is not a dead issue. Democracy will not work there but Iraq has served its purpose. Bush got back into the middle east and he has managed to stay the course until an excuse can be found to get into Iran. Then this will really get started! Bush has set the stage for our future regardless of who is elected if we even have elections. This is still just taking shape and Bush will pay others to do their share of ensuring many wars to come in the near future while the chief idiot tries to secure his legacy as the fiscally responsible Peace President. What a bad joke and a Farce!
9 comments:
Try this Jim:
ON FREEDOM
ByGaither Stewart
“In truth that which you call freedom is the strongest of those chains, though its links glitter in the sun and dazzle your eyes.” [The Prophet, Gibran Kahlil Gibran]
My Italian Rizzoli-Larousse Encyclopedia dedicates seven long, tight columns to libertá. Italian, French, Spanish, and other languages are limited to the one Latin root, libertas, while English is blessed with both liberty and freedom, the latter from the Anglo-Saxon freodom and Middle English fredom. To my ear, freedom rings stronger, harsher and more deeply rooted than the romantic and heroic “liberty,” probably because of the historic echo of liberté, egalité, fraternité. Rizzoli defines liberty—therefore also freedom—in many diverse connotations and usages, from constitutional freedoms to freedom of speech and religion, and freedom from want and fear.
Here my intention is not to speak such political or social freedoms. I have in mind interior freedom: the latent personal freedom, inside each individual that can exist under the harshest of dictatorships, and metaphysical freedom, an innate independence that exists even in situations of physical dependence.
In the sixth column under libertá, my encyclopedia has a sub-entry, “freedom of choice,” which points to the freedom I have in mind: “Freedom itself implies a conscious choice.” That is, the interior freedom that makes me only me and not someone else.
Thus choice is the first great act of freedom. Choice is human prerogative. Choices are landmarks in all our lives—the choice of a profession, a religion, an ideology, or another person. I think that ultimately we all come to know, if only subconsciously, that it is the concept of choice that grants us freedom.
Americans profess admiration for the rugged individualist who abandons the security of the mainstream and goes alone out into the world to seek his true self. We love the words “only the brave.” We scorn conformism. Yet the reality of our lives is different. Autonomy might be a live goal but few attain it. Personality is its own end but society still overpowers its individual elements with auras of false consciousness.
You can ascertain that many people around you apparently refuse to choose. I say apparently because I have realized that I can experience only my own freedom. Since this is a metaphysical matter I can only have risky opinions about another’s freedom … or lack of it. It is impossible to determine metaphysical freedom in another. Nonetheless the brutal reality is that most people do not seem to know they are prisoners. They have no chance of being free unless they become aware of the possibility of choice and then choose. The freedom of choice is the most wonderful capacity of human beings.
I cannot remember the precise moment I made my choice of freedom but I do remember when I came to know I was a prisoner of collective habits, customs, traditions, prejudices, career, fashions. Since then I have come to understand that my interior freedom is embedded in choice, and thus in myself.
Kierkegaard believed that the first basic choice that conditions all others is the choice of being oneself, and not someone else. The expression “to choose oneself” belongs to the founder of Existentialism. The expression is the Kierkegaardian-Existentialist version of Socrates’ motto of “know thyself.”
Kierkegaard writes that “One [that terrible anonymous little pronoun, “one”, Kierkegaard noted] can make other choices, the choice to live only in the present, externally, following blindly each new fad, forever living in imitation of others. One can be talented, gifted, intelligent, and beat his breast in self-satisfaction, and still be a slave of fashion. That is what the Arab writer, Gibran Kahlil, meant by his words to the people of Orphalese [New York], “you shall be free indeed when your days are not without a care nor your nights without a want and a grief, but rather when these things girdle your life and yet you rise above them naked and unbound.”
There is a world of difference between “being free” and “acting or feeling free.” It is the difference between being and seeming. The free person finds pathetic the figure of the apish wannabe artist, dressed like an artist, speaking like an artist, standing in a crowded gallery for the vernissage of his paintings—of nothing. Imitators surround the imitator; the imitators praise the non-art and imitate the non-artist.
The argument that the concept of freedom can be reduced to awareness of the potential choices and a conscious selection of the most appropriate one in one’s life seems weak in the face of the interior freedom we are speaking of and man’s relationship with the universal. Well, no, we do not stand face to face with infinity each day. But what is such a weak mundane choice of “the most appropriate” for the kind of man Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov speaks of: “kto ya, chelovek ili tvar drozhashchaya?” What am I, a man or a trembling creature? I see such a dialectic as a justification of unfreedom: you accept the Orphalese ease [appropriateness] of slavery and label it freedom.
Dostoevsky in The Grand Inquisitor illustrated how easy, comfortable and secure it is not to choose oneself and to remain unfree. To be possessed by extraneous things and the temptress security. There is no getting around it, unless I choose myself I am destined to copy the world.
But what is the self that I must choose? What is the self? we ask again and again. What is it that makes me, me? It is an amazing sensation to know that the same self remains with me all my life. My self as a child is the same as my self today. I stop and think back and though it is vague and blurry I can again project myself into that childhood self. I remember that it existed. Memory is self. It is remembering that I am I. Not someone else. Vaguely, I can feel things I felt then. I feel the expression on my face today is the same as when I was a boy. Though it is like my shadow, we—my former self and my self today—are the same. Yes, but what is it, one still wonders? The self most of us easily forget? For me this self is the metaphysical freedom I spoke of: my freedom as an individual in search of the universal. Otherwise I am just clay. If I do not choose to be “I”, I am unfree.
Just now I stopped and tried to concentrate on my individuality. I broke into a sweat. The veins in my head pounded over the abstractedness of the concept of my own self. It is like trying to comprehend eternity. The relationship between my particular self and the universal is no less complex. We remain close to each other, the universal and I, like my self and I are close for a lifetime. I believe that is what the mystery of my individual life is. My self makes me different from everyone else.
There is no question about it. One needs guts to choose freedom—the freedom that leads to oneself. Only the brave can live out there alone, independent of the net of conventions around us. It is precarious and lonesome out on the end of the thin limb of freedom. There is too much solitude out there. Your head spins. You feel giddy. You suffer. You feel like a failure. Unloved. Absurd. The eternal outsider. It takes courage to live like a hermit—again, a metaphysical hermit—for you know that the hermit is easily transformed into a heretic. Or a fanatic. You are surrounded by ghosts. The creator, the free man, walks in solitude along the rim of an abyss. Freedom, emerging also from the creator’s imagination, is not only a spark; it can be a raging fire, and a scream in the dark. To be genuinely yourself, genuinely inwardly different, is a dangerous path, for though it leads to happiness it can also become an obsession.
Yet, contradictorily, the courageous choice is contagious. The free person arouses envy and jealousy … but also fear and hate. Unfree imitators tease him and treat him as a child … but they imitate him. The choice of self not only disturbs and even hurts others. It is also painful and frightening to the free person as well. At the moment of choosing yourself and freedom, you feel despair and bewilderment. You know you stand to lose the abundance of life. You are afraid of the solitude of the empty spaces.
But in the long run the reward arrives: the free man is not dependent. Fulfillment is inherent in him. Uneasiness is inherent to the fashionable world of unfree imitators. The free man can somehow get by, as do people who choose freedom even in social unfreedom.
Existentialist writer Alberto Moravia claimed that despair-desperation is the natural condition of man. For after you choose yourself, you at first fear the solitude. Then gradually you come to realize that the self is not as abstract as you thought. The instinct of freedom brought you here. Your instinct was to flee. To flee from society’s rosy promises of a radiant future. You instead chose to flee back to silence. Back to the silence of freedom. To reticence and abstention. One has said that man by nature is a poet. Gradually the poet in you becomes conscious of your freedom. You do not boast but it is a wonderful sensation to realize that you are you and no one else, that you speak only as you, and that you are independent—perhaps still a bit desperate—and free.
Your newly discovered self is protective and also jealous. It knows that power is not freedom. No more than evil is freedom. It knows that despite appearances freedom cannot exist in the tangled web of mundane obsessions and oppressions. Even though it often has to compromise, it tolerates a minimum of encroachments or limitations.
The free person is not ashamed to be considered naïve, odd, a flower child. He is not afraid of ridicule. Even to yourself you might seem to be still the same person you were before your choice, but you are not. Freedom has changed you. And the consequences can be both terrible and wonderful. You do not need to dress outlandishly or become a Buddhist to seem different. You do not have to live a bohemian life or disobey social rules. Without imitating, you are different from everyone else in the universe; yet you know you are striving toward the universal: the more universal-human you become, the more you are extraordinary and free. Not only do you know the difference between right and wrong; awareness of reality never escapes you again. The flag of freedom is planted in your self. Your interior freedom will now grow.
Kierkegaard warned that you will be surprised when others feel deceived that you have turned out to be “good.” Everybody expected “more” of you. The good man, the free man, is underestimated; he is strange, enigmatic, and perhaps idiotic. He creates embarrassment and unease but also envy.
The free man is different. He does not know bigotry or piousness. In his apparent simplicity, he holds close to his knowledge that he is nearer and nearer to the universal.
One rebuts that it is possible to choose oneself for purely selfish reasons, like to emerge in a career. That is true. But choosing oneself is not falling in love with oneself. Moreover, freedom is development. You have to realize freedom again and again.
Though I cannot remember the exact moment I chose freedom, I can remember when I was not free. That view of my personal history is not in my CV. Each of us has his own interior history. Our interior life has many turns. You feel you are diverse persons throughout your life. You seem to live several lives in one lifetime but at the core you are always the same you.
I believe that our interior history is the divine in us. The choice of freedom then gives continuity to our personal history. The process is one of revelation of and reconciliation with your self.
But what a task we take on when we opt for freedom. We have to learn that abundance counts for little. Other things count more: for example, one problem of freedom is the responsibility. The moment I choose myself and freedom, I assume the responsibility for myself. It is enough to look around and find that many people reject the responsibility of freedom.
Alluringly, a rejection of responsibility is of course a kind of freedom, too. And a great consolation. The collective of abundance offers a false, glossy freedom. It is the great temptation. The collective prefers two things: social abundance and non-responsibility.
However, the desire for abundance and security also complicates one’s life. For in everyday life the unfree man can never acquire enough to satisfy him. His despair is mortal. He is perhaps happy, but a slave. The free man instead has his liberated self to fall back on.
Once I chose freedom I came to realize that the universal lies deep inside my individuality, like quiet subterranean water. The striving toward the core, toward the universal, it seems, is the basic concern of human beings once they have chosen freedom.
It is an interesting experience to look into yourself and ask as candidly as possible if you are free. In this territory you are working without a net. You can compare yourself to others. When you become aware of life’s many prisons and begin to wonder about others, you find it is possible to recognize the unfree. But because man by nature is an actor, it is probably impossible to identify the free man. In his role the actor is fleeting.
Ephemeral. The actor also becomes his roles and carries them over into his everyday life. He wears many different masks. Freedom can be a deceptive mask.
I felt and still feel guilt for choosing freedom. Guilty for the pain it costs others. Guilty for my egoism. The result is solitude and melancholy and the guilt for my reckless choice that triggered the sense of responsibility for my self and my freedom. The situation is grim. There I am basking in freedom, smiling and laughing at the world around me, while those I love do not yet realize there is a possible choice. I want to explain. But how? And why guilt? For what? Because I am a human being? Because I chose freedom? I should feel innocent. Nonetheless it is impossible to be completely sad—the joy of freedom is too great. I realize that my self is the absolute, its own end.
For Albert Camus, God is the fundamental problem of freedom. Also Dostoevsky wrote of his novel, The Brothers Karamazov, that the chief question in his book was the existence of God. Both writers accept that “metaphysical” freedom presupposes the existence of God. Yet, for both a limited God. Camus writes in The Myth of Sisyphus, “either we are not free and God is all-powerful and responsible for evil, or we are free and responsible but God is not all-powerful.” Dostoevsky wrote in his Diary of a Writer that God is necessary and must exist but that he knows he does not exist. That is our absurd human state.
The point is that we can understand things only in our limited human terms. Everything else is speculation, myth, superstition, or hope. Too bad! For our freedom makes us want what we cannot have. Yet we cannot exist freely without the search. I reject the road of those who believe the only acceptable human path is to surrender freedom, the freedom of choice, and have faith.
Now, after writing this, I wonder about the situation of interior freedom today. Perhaps because in its popular sense the words freedom and liberty have been used so long in the name of slavery and injustice, the true meaning eludes us. As far as the metaphysical freedom discussed here is concerned, I also wonder if I am genuinely free as I boasted.
Perhaps it is true that we choose only partly; sometimes circumstances choose for us; sometimes fate chooses for us. The doubt lingers: perhaps choice is just chance at work in our lives. I have to wonder.
Yes, perhaps it is true that also fate-inspired choices choose for us. It often seems that way—if you are too weak-hearted to make the choice yourself. Sometimes chance is a beautiful woman, sometimes she is a monster.
As Dostoevsky wrote, “Existence is illusory and it is eternal.”
Can't argue with this Jim:
Toward Militarism, War, Empire, Caskets, and Bankruptcy
By Jacob G. Hornberger
14/01/08 "fff" -- -- When U.S. intelligence agencies recently surprised the nation with their National Intelligence Estimate announcement that Iran had ceased its nuclear-weapons program several years ago, many people, including ardent supporters of the president, felt that the announcement put to rest any chance of a war against Iran.
Not so fast! After all, did the disintegration of the WMD rationale for invading Iraq dissuade the interventionists from continuing their invasion of Iraq and occupying the country and continuing to kill Iraqis for several years after that?
The incident in the Gulf of Tonkin — excuse me, Gulf of Hormuz — this past week confirms how easy it is for an American ruler to send the entire nation into war, especially given that he is now permitted to ignore the constitutional provision requiring a congressional declaration of war. If the captains of those U.S. battleships and destroyers had blown those Iranian speedboats out of the water, one can already hear Bush and Cheney proclaiming, “We’ve been attacked! We’ve been attacked! The Department of Defense is responding by defending our nation from this attack by bombing Iran. Support the troops. God bless America!”
Question: If China, Iran, and Venezuela sent a fleet of warships into the Gulf of Mexico for joint war games, how would U.S. officials respond? Wouldn’t they go ape?
Question: What’s the point of sending a fleet of battleships and destroyers into the Middle East if it’s not to poke hornets’ nests? Surely, U.S. officials aren’t claiming the Muslims are getting ready to board millions of troops onto tens of thousands of Muslim naval vessels in preparation for an imminent invasion of the United States.
Of course, in the old days, when the president was expected to comply with the Constitution, the president would have to go to Congress, which would decide whether such an incident warranted going to war against a nation. Today, the Decider decides whether to declare war, no matter what the Constitution says. Poking hornets’ nests can play an important role in that process.
Amidst all the political fanfare about “change,” if anyone was hoping for a change away from the machismo, militarism, and empire that has held our nation in its grip, last night’s Republican presidential debate confirmed that change isn’t going to come from that direction (Ron Paul excepted, of course).
What was fascinating was watching how conflicted these people are within their own minds. They first point out that yes, America is faced with economic problems. They then point out that it’s all because Washington, D.C., is “broken” and that each of them is the man who can finally fix the nation’s capital. They then say that the U.S. should continue expanding its overseas empire, especially in the Middle East. Of course, no department or agency of the federal government should be abolished.
It’s all just a mishmash of thinking that boils down to this: “Give the power of the welfare-warfare state to me. Put your faith in me.”
They just don’t get it — or maybe they do. The problem is not that Washington, D.C., is broken. It’s that their beloved welfare-warfare philosophy is broken and bankrupt in every sense of the term — morally, financially, and economically. The dollar, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, education, Iraq, immigration, trade, foreign policy, housing, drug war — all broken and bankrupt. After decades of welfare-warfare failure and catastrophe, the chickens are finally coming home to roost.
And all these people can do is summon the ghost of Ronald Reagan and call for “tax cuts,” no matter how much the Federal Reserve must continue to debase the dollar to finance the ever-increasing debt to pay the ever-increasing expenses of this federal monstrosity.
One of the weirdest parts of the debate came when they were praising Ronald Reagan’s “defense” buildup, which, they said, brought down the Soviet Union. Yeah, never mind that it was out-of-control government spending that brought down the Soviet Union. That just can’t happen to the U.S. Empire. After all, we’ll just continue borrowing the money from the Chinese communists!
One amusing moment in the debate was when Paul pointed out (I’m paraphrasing): “Let me see if I understand this correctly. You people want to go out and borrow millions of dollars from the Chinese communists in order to give the money to the unelected dictator of Pakistan while you’re continuing to kill people in Iraq for the sake of democracy.”
What was amazing was that you could tell from the faces of the other candidates that they didn’t see anything odd about any of that.
If America continues to move in the same direction of militarism, interventionism, war, and welfarism and if all this pushes our nation into a perfect storm of financial, monetary, and economic crises, combined with lots of caskets containing the remains of U.S. soldiers as well as victims of terrorist blowback, Americans will be left with a sad lament: “If only we had listened to the libertarians rather than the welfare-warfare statists who took us down this road.”
Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation.
While Shrub is waving a Saudi scimitar and flinging $30B of precision munitions at his daddy's oil buddies to get them to menace Iran, it now emerges that the threatening audio (and the separately filmed speedboats in the Shat al Arab/Persian Gulf/Homuz Straits) was glued together from war games and a ham radio nutter. It now makes the Tonkin/Sidra provocations seem well fabricated by comparison.
Roll on November.
Larry
this is very good and right on. All of it but htis: Here my intention is not to speak such political or social freedoms. I have in mind interior freedom: the latent personal freedom, inside each individual that can exist under the harshest of dictatorships, and metaphysical freedom, an innate independence that exists even in situations of physical dependence.
This is why I try to tell people all the time to be happy, do what you can but don't let what is going on today affect you. you just worry about yourself. You are your own best friend or your own worst enemy. I see he was saying when he made the decision to be happy.
I never made the decision. I was born this way. But that is right on. You cannot let anything on the outside affect your inner person. That is you and nothing or no one should be able to affect that. Thanks again Larry, you're a wealth of knowledge!
Larry
Again as we have discussed numerous times, this guy is right on and as I have been saying for years now, Bush's original goal for attacking Iraq was to go after Iran and he will not stop. As you know, he is running out of time and this will all blow soon.
We are in the perfect storm. Bush and his handlers have fabricated it and it will not be prevented in furthering. ???
amphibious
You know Bush is instigating Iran to war. He is doing what he did to Iraq. He will keep changing his excuses until he finds one people will fall for.
He was caught instigating and lying again but he will not be detered and the war will happen then it will really spread from there.
Bush is in the gulf with 3 carrier battle groups to fight Iran and Pakistan along with all comers from there. That way he will not have to enlarge our military too much as is going on right now.
This idiot reads like a book. I just wish would see it, listen, and get the truth heard where it can make a difference.
Freedom is both a mental and a physical condition and orientation. To define it in an absolute term just limits its own meaning. It all seems to get contradictory if you allow logic to loop around it. As in, "we are free to conform."
Let me just say this absolute characteristic about freedom: You know what is is when you lose it.
And, of course, "proles and animals are free."
It is a healthy mental exercise for us to ponder freedom.
Ah, the libertarian paradox.
And how does libertarianism stop the unregulated growth of military industrial complex? How will all that economic and military power be controlled? Can libertarianism do anything but nurture unchecked corporatism?
At least the social safety nets of medicare, medicaid, and social security can be supported without bankrupting the nation. Along with raising the wage cap for those poor souls making over 90 grand a year, merely rolling the taxes back on the top 10% to Reagan era levels will take care of all of it.
But, I guess it all comes down to those who's "values" have nothing to do with most of us.
Dave
You are entirely right and whatever these idiots do to us and our America I for one will never stop fighting but will always be happy and free.
Take care and stay in touch. I was running out this morning and wanted to post something quick. It was about taxes and very thought provoking. Did you see it? I hope to put something together today but I am pretty busy for a while.
Now Bush is saying he will stop troop withdrawal, and wants to sign a(international) contract to keep our troops in Iraq for another 10-20 years. Thats binding, and we won't be able to do anything about it.
Then again, I think if anyone still thinks that Bush had any intentions of helping Iraq get on its feet, and then we'd scram is probably in need of medication. Or a crack to the head to straighten them out.
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