Of course any halfway honest terrorist would tell him that they'd prefer that we amend our constitution to take away presidential term limits and then declare George W. Bush leader for life. No other man, with the exception of Dick Cheney, has so played into Al-Qaeda's hands. Given another 4 years they could probably trick Bush into starting a war with Uruguay.

thosethingswesay.blogspot.com

I am humbled, sir.

thosethingswesay.blogspot.com

George Bush takes credit for the fact that we have not had significant terrorism in this country since 9/11. Think about how illogical that is. The terrorists could easily cause havoc in this country, and they could use a hundred different ways, none of which could be stopped. So why don't they? The same reason the North Vietnamese didn't do countless things in
South Vietnam, or the United States, to boost their cause. They did not want the Tiger to unleash its full fury. The North Vietnamese did not want us to invade North Vietnam, or use nuclear weapons or even restart the saturation bombing. They wanted to wear us down so we would leave their part of the world. Same is going on now. The powers to be in the Middle East want us to leave Iraq, so they are not using their tactics here.

Which brings me to my point. We won't see major terrorism in this country before the elections, for one reason: They want the neocons out of power. They want the more pacifist of our politicians to win.

Except, and this is the curve that I personally expect: There are those who want us to stay there. I wonder if they will fake a terrorist attack, a very significant one. Blame it on al Qaeda, or whoever. Then we attack Iran, etc., and Bush probably declares marshal law and claims himself dictator until things settle down. Dictator for life.

ITA

What do Rudy, Hillary, and Bush all have in common? They all supported retreat from Bin Laden to go off on the unrelated, tangential distraction of Iraq. They all supported making Iran more powerful by invading Iraq. And they all suffer the delusion that they are strong on national security.

First of all, this (to my simple taste) is great writing:

like an electric cattle prod plunged into my morning bathwater . . . let's get down to the lick-log . . . Terrorists rule!

As for the final statement, we should go back to The Decider, who declared that:

"Our enemies are quite explicit about their intentions. They want to overthrow moderate governments, and establish safe havens from which to plan and carry out new attacks on our country. By killing and terrorizing Americans, they want to force our country to retreat from the world and abandon the cause of liberty. They would then be free to impose their will and spread their totalitarian ideology. Listen to this warning from the late terrorist Zarqawi: 'We will sacrifice our blood and bodies to put an end to your dreams, and what is coming is even worse.' Osama bin Laden declared: 'Death is better than living on this Earth with the unbelievers among us.' These men are not given to idle words, and they are just one camp in the Islamist radical movement."--Bush, Jan 23, 2007
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/01/20070123-2.html

But wait a minute, perhaps the US has fallen into a trap. Maybe The Decider has lied to us, and the US is actually doing exactly what bin Laden wants it to do.

"All that we have mentioned has made it easy for us to provoke and bait this administration. All that we have to do is to send two mujahidin to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qaida, in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note other than some benefits for their private companies. This is in addition to our having experience in using guerrilla warfare and the war of attrition to fight tyrannical superpowers, as we, alongside the mujahidin, bled Russia for 10 years, until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat. All Praise is due to Allah. So we are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy. Allah willing, and nothing is too great for Allah."--bin Laden, Oct 30, 2004
http://www.worldpress.org/Americas/1964.cfm

"Bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy?" Actually, more. But the blood-money's going to a good cause. VP Cheney has a new $2.9 million home. Bush's ne'er-do-well Uncle Billy is now a Florida millionaire. Oil is nearly $100 a barrel; corporate profits and the stock market are at record highs. So while the country is beyond bankruptcy, the leading lights are doing quite well, thank you. So why not do what bin Laden wants, they say.

"War is a racket . . .the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives."--MajGen Smedley D. Butler, USMC (warisaracket.org)

ecotourism
WeGoEco.com

Deroy Murdock is a faux-conservative who in prevous articles has tried to paint Giuliani as a social conservative (which he isn't) in order to trick the social conservatives into supporting Giuliani's (and Murdock's) socially liberal agenda.

I've said it before and I'll say it again.  The whole Giuliani campaign is based on the slogan "he'll kill the ragheads and that's good enough for me." 

"You say I'm a dreamer.  We're two of a kind.  Looking for some perfect world that we both know that we'll never find." - Thompson Twins, "Hold Me Now"

There only is one real counter and that is to up the rhetorical ante and take every opportunity to say that George W Bush and the republicans have done everything Osama ever wanted, they are the pro terrorist party. They are too stupid the fight the war on terror, like Wiley E Coyote, they fall into the trap every time.

And it can't come from joe blow Americans or 'experts', it has to be out of the mouth of the top Democratic Party leaders, Hillary, Obama, Edwards, Reid, Pelosi, major governors, Congresional comittee heads, etc...

You have to provide a narrative that sticks otherwise the other guys story takes over. If he is honest and tells the truth with all its nuances, well then that's not so bad, but if it is propaganda speach from the far right lizard brain, well then you have a moral obligation to refute it. And this is where the Dem leadership is failing over and over again, verbal leadership, narrative making, the big picture. I am waiting for someone to open up the Democratic Party artillery on these republican clowns but so far it hasn't happned and it's starting to grate on the nerves. Reading Krugman in the NYT is not enough, I want fire supremacy in this fight and that can only come from politicians opening up.

Zionista, you really deserved a "10" for that one, but I could only give you a "5!"

Even if they disagreed, he certainly had the right to say what he (and 70%) of Americans think!

I don't recall Cheney apologizing for saying "Fuck you" to a Senator -- while IN the Senate Offices -- as far as I know, no one even asked him to.

Jan

I was hoping the same thing; also that SOME of his colleagues would stand up for him.  I guess "ElCampo" doesn't agree. 

 Jan

[delete duplicate post]

We have no further need to wory about President Bush declaring himself dictator. He is simply to unpopular right now. Not even the GOP would stand for it.

Guliani is an idiocrat like GWB. The idiots who vote for them want an Idiocracy.

Thanks for your post, Don.  It is clear that BinLadin decides who his enemies are, and it is also very clear that he has no better friends than Bush and Cheney.  They have been willing pawns because both BinLadin and Bush/Cheney are the only winners; everyone else loses.

elcampo -- you are so predictable -->  "1!"  Wow!

Jan

Bluebell:

I guess the obvious response to your post is to say that Democrats shouldn't choose a nominee based on the attitudes of conservatives any more than Americans should choose a president based on the attitudes of the people Klein interviewed. That's kind of the whole point of my post: the enemy of my enemy (even if you believe what Klein's interviewees said) is not always my friend.

But if your "I won't vote for Hillary" promise applies to the general election, I do hope you reconsider if it comes to that, and I speak as one who is completely uncommitted in the nominating contest. It's entirely possible to be pro-Israel without giving a damn about the views of AIPAC, and it's certainly possible--arguably, it's morally necessary--to be "hostile" towards Iran without in any way wanting to wage war against that country. You don't have to deny the deeply reactionary and irresponsible character of the Tehran regime to think it's nuts to go to war with it, barring the remote contingency of an actual threat to the United States.

My own "hostility" to Iran was sealed back in 1984, when its all-male Olympic team refused to walk into the LA Coliseum behind a female volunteer bearing an Iranian flag--because Iranian men don't walk behind women.

Ed Kilgore

Mr Kilgore,
Your article touches upon a peculiar act of submission that is central to the belief that taking a "hard line" is the only way not to appear weak.

The reason given for the belief always boils down to some version of: "Violence is the only thing they understand." The condition this stance submits to is that the "enemy" are the only true measure of the meaning and efficacy of what "we" make and build.

If I build a beautiful house that is soundly made and to my taste in every way and then leave it because my neighbor condemns it as an abomination, then who is weak and who is strong?

We abandon our beautiful house whenever we declare that it is not built strong enough to withstand storms and bad seasons but choose instead to travel far away in an attempt to placate some god who will preserve us from such trials.

The tarring of political opponents as agents of the "enemy" is a rhetorical device that has been employed since the beginning of our Republic. How convincing that condemnation sounds depends on the real and present danger of the threat. In a number of past wars and nearly avoided wars, the very existence of our polity was under contention. Against that background, let us look at what it means to say: "Bring it on!"

Bush said this to a group that was set against the presence of U.S. troops in Iraq.

Imagine the rhetorical power of him saying those same words on September 14, 2001 in New York City.

Rhetoric is important. Khrushchev said "We will bury you." We need not be so ambitious. Let us say: "We will get over you."

Watch where the money goes. Understand the war.

My father gave me his biography to read when I was a boy. He was one amazing Marine.

The only thing that appeals to me about a Clinton presidency is the sheer joy I will take in doing everything I can from 2009 onward to to help take down the Clinton machine, undermine its foreign and domestic policies, attack its leading lights and expose and harass its corrupt neo-imperial alliance of unaccountable private and corporate wealth, vested interests, elite charlatans, beltway courtiers and peddled influence. What this country needs is a Vast Left Wing Conspiracy, and the Clintons will make a fine first target.

It's time to dismantle this rotten empire, and the perverse and wildly undemocratic national security state built up over the past 60 years. We need a movement for constitutional reform to cut the presidency down to size and build a truly democratic and republican form of government; we need to persuade Americans how poisonous militarism is to democracy, and how much we can do if we tear down our oppressive and wasteful global garrisons; we need to build international solidarity to achieve social justice, combat global problems, defeat militarism, and struggle against the pretensions of hegemonic nation-states.

I know people who think like me are still a minority in this country. But I also believe that millions of Americans know at heart that something is really wrong with the way we live now, and with the hollowness of our acquisitive and exploitation-driven consumer society in whose opressive rackets they are all implicated. They know something is really wrong with the way this country and its government conduct their business. It's a matter of putting names on vague feelings, learning how to communicate better, and ultimately over many years convincing about 70% of the country that they don't have to live the way the other 30% want them to live.

Americans have been intellectually subordinated by decades of social and economic orthodoxy promulgated by the minority that benefits most from that orthodoxy, and by their bought intellectual courtiers. They have been cowed and intimidated for years by people like J. Edgar Hoover, Joe McCarthy and now Bush and Cheney, so that they barely even allow themselves to think about systemic change. We can convince them that there is more to chose from out there than Reaganism, neoliberalism, Clintonism, DLC-ism and all of the other scams that serve wealth and power and dress them up like real social progress.

The biggest waste in contemporary political life is the energy that is dissipated in futile debates and wrangling over elections and the thin gruel of mainstream policy options. Instead of building a social movement that electoral politics will eventually have to answer to, the left is constantly enticed into thinking that they can fulfill their dreams through politics as usual. But there are way too many gatekeepers. Change is not going to happen unless we figure out how to rouse the populace, disabuse them of their illusions, and get them on our side.

Back in the day, I used to be such a nice, centrist Democratic boy. But the events of the past several years have stripped away all of my old illusions, exposed the total rottenness of the imperial system we live under, and radicalized me.

I didn't take it as a scold, Zionista. The extreme futility of trying to change the minds of dittoheads is a good point. We'd be wasting our time if we tried to do that. But their "memes" do have influence over casual voters, so getting effective alternative ideas in currency is important. The conservatives are, if nothing else, highly skilled at making simplistic statements that sound like irrefutable common sense. The other night while driving home I was flipping through AM radio (always interesting) and heard some dittohead saying something like: "If a terrorist knew about a plot to blow up a city and kill a million people, how could you not torture him to get the information and save all those lives?" You've heard the same thing, of course, many times over. This is extremely effective because it appeals to various emotions (fear, the desire to save lives, heroism) and because it is so simple and seemingly clear that anything must be done to save all those lives. It's far more difficult to talk about the less immediate(but in some ways far more pernicious and corrosive) dangers of allowing torture and interrogation in the absence of any due process. I'm not sure I know how to counter these kinds of arguments. But finding similarly simplistic opposing statements would be a necessary step. It's just not easy because fear is such a strong motivater.

They know something is really wrong with the way this country and its government conduct their business. It's a matter of putting names on vague feelings, learning how to communicate better, and ultimately over many years convincing about 70% of the country that they don't have to live the way the other 30% want them to live.

So true and just as true among many Republicans.   Clintonism is part of the problem not the solution.   The reason it bothers me so much is that as long as you have an opposition party, you've got a chance to fight and win another day, but what do you do when both parties are so totally bought by the same interests and both are out to con you, trick you and bamboozle you away from the truth and the public interest?