MJ

While I would agree with what you say in the above post, I cannot help but feel that you are buying into the Democratic notion that all Republicans are Neocons.

Yesterday you quite deliberately accused John McCain of chosing "evil" over "good" when it comes to his decision-making process. I'm assuming that such rhetoric is a play on the absurd grandiose vocabulary that President Bush has employed for the last 8 years.

With that being said, the Obama camp has gone out of its way to portray Senator McCain as a comfortable bedfellow with the current president despite the fact that the Iraq War is virtually the only thing the two have agreed on in principle. The attempt at painting all Republicans as Neocons is clever (and probably the most logical strategy for the Dems), but I wonder if it's purely a political strategy or if Democrats actually believe it to be true?

oops, apologies for the duplicate post. The server said my original submission was unsuccessful...guess not.

McSame and Bush are Republicans/liars. That being the fact, they have everything in common: Neanderthal Conartists.

Great editorial by Cohen...thanks for the link MJ.

On 9/11/01 criminals perpetrated a terrorist attack on the US. Over 2,000 Americans lost their lives in the attack including many brave police officers and firefighters who gave their own lives trying to save others. What were we told to do in the wake of 9/11/01? Instructed by El Presidente to go shopping.

Cohen's editorial makes some good points about how our government country has conducted its, and our, business (in fact in a side bar I saw a link to an article about widespread corruption in an agency within the Dept. of Interior that was responsible for managing oil and gas leases...it really supported Cohen's point of what has happened since 9/11). Tax breaks for large corporations, loosening of regulation which has allowed for windfall profits to be made by the same corporations, billions of dollars going to politically connected companies to wage a war in a country that had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks. A war which has resulted in more deaths of US citizens than occurred because of the 9/11 attacks. And how did the Bush administration view 9/11? No national sacrifices were asked for, no pulling together as a country, only cynically using the 9/11 attack as a weapon to bludgeon the adminstration's political opponents. And in doind so Bush has desecrated the the memories of the lives lost 7 years ago today.

I will always remember where I was when that attack occurred and I will never forget the innocent lives lost. Some of us want to make sure it never happens again and others continue to try to use the cowardly attack in an attempt to keep themselves in power to further their partisan political agendas of greed, corruption and war. As stunningly tragic as our loss as a nation was on 9/11/01 what has transpired under the stewardship of George Bush is incomprehensible as more American lives are lost and America's treasure is squandered. And Bush, his party, and their heir apparent sets his sights on Iran...the next tragedy waiting to happen.

Cohen's op-ed was a very good, albeit sobering, read and framing it in biblical terms was very appropriate because what our country has lost since is bordering on biblical in its proportions.

I was in Naples when the planes hit. I toured Pompeii (couldn't get home, after all) while the ash fell on Manhattan. I stayed with family friends of my father's, from WWII, in Paris while we waited for the flight ban to be lifted, and attended bi-lingual services at Notre Dame for all the losses and the stranded travelers in paris, while the Mayor went on the radio hourly asking for citizens to call in to volunteer to take in the travelers that had overwhelmed Paris's hotels.
I came home to zombie-followers of Bush, liberal friends all, who had seen 8(?) days of uncommercial, unplotted TV news, of the attack played ad infinitum and the speeches of Junior and Rudy run on perpetual TV loops.
I saw the true reaction of the world, in Italy, France and England, among locals and immigrants like our taxi driver in Paris, a Muslim who refused to let us pay for our fare.'We're all Americans now.' The old crone from Greece, traveling to her borther's funeral, who patted my hand during the minute of silence while we were in the air from Rome to Paris, 'So sad. So sad.'
My experience of Sept. 11th separates me from my fellows in America, and every 9-11 I want to talk about it.
But the thing that I remember most is the monument the Parisians have put up, on the far corner of the gardens of Les Invalides, to the victims of the series of bombings in Paris in the mid-90's, bombing most of us never heard about.
It is a fountain, of a stylized, single person in a long coat, standing on a small rise. The person' backbone is absolutely straight, a rectangluar bar than cannot be bent. The person holds something in the crook of its left arm. And that something explains the rise the statue stands on. Because that something is the person's head, eye-to-eye with the observer, open and unflinching. While the water of the fountain flows slowly out of the severed neck of the person, killed in a terrorist attack, and flows down the coat, the person continues to stand, unbowed, open-eyed, undaunted.

I needed that monument that day, to remind me that people before us have known how to survive, how to continue, how to deal.

And I recall it as a symbol of all the people I met in those two weeks when I couldn't return home, to counter the hatred my government later ginned up against all those people for not doing what our president wanted in Iraq. It reminds me of the opportunity America and the rest of the world lost by having the government we had that day.

And until I die, I will never forget that, and I doubt I will ever forgive those bureaucrats, Republicans all, for throwing that opportunity away.

What's this "Ass bear honey" he speaketh of? Sounds kinky. Or is that just a Biblical term for gold-plated bullshit?

Gettysburg -- even were it true that "...Iraq War is virtually the only thing the two [McCain and Bush] have agreed on in principle" that fact alone -- hundreds of thousands of Iraq dead and maimed, nearly twice as many American war dead than from the twin tower attack, nearly four times as many American soldiers maimed than from the 9/11 attack, the premptive decimation of a country that had no weapons nor threat to the US, the survival of Al Queda and Bim Laden, the loss of American prestige, these are enough to damn McCaim. However, McCain has also bent his morals on torture to fit Bush, abamadoned his fiscal conservativism to obey Bush, voted with Bush 90% of the time, and even celebrated his birthday by eating a big ol' gooey cake with Bush while New Orleans was consigned to toxic flood and snakes. Anyone of these abject failures in judgement should consign this fraud to the trash heap of shame, but all together they damn McCain as an utter fraud.