Good point ITN.
The anti-Americanism zietgeist is strong and vibrant.
It's a worry.
I don't think I want nukes dropped on anyone but America is becoming harder and harder to like. In my younger years I read G.I. Joe comics and learned that all Japanese(Gooks)were bandy-legged little guys with thick glasses. I couldn't understand why the Americans weren't in the war against Hitler when Canadians had been at war for several years. Our side won that war with big help from a late America.
Later wars were more complicated. Korea was a police action that has never seemed to be fully over.
VietNam was a long running, ugly, nightmare for the VieNamese and a horror show for young Americans drafted and transported into that tiny country to fight a war that only the politicians knew the reason for , and a war that sixty odd thousand Americans never came home from.
Iraq was a war that G.W. Bush wanted but who knows why? Oil?
Jimmoyer
What passes for "fact" in Amercan's thinking today Jim? Is it the "fact" that Iraq wasn't involved in Al Qeada and didn't have enormous stockpiles of WMDS...or is it the "fact" that Americans (and anyone) who refutes those facts and argues for considered balanced foreign policy is a traitor and a terrorist?
Is it the "fact" that America was and has been complicit in creating situations like Saddam Hussein's genocide on his people...while supporting Iraq's war against Iran...or is it the "fact" that America has an incapacity to see beyond the outrage of an Iranian kidnapping...and has now reserved this behaviour as its own...(Guantanamo)? Is it the "fact" that your government has suspended the freedom of its people and authorized wire-taps without any greater justification than..."We think there's something going on..." Is it the "fact" that the government of the United States has withdrawn from the greater "forest" of international committment to the Geneva Accords and is re-writing the books on habeus corpus...?
How long and under what circumstances would you have the world support a government that has demonstrated its preparedness to bankrupt its people on the basis of lies and corruption?
Give us the facts Jim!
Gore Vidal speaks to Afshin Rattansi about another of President Bush's attorney-generals facing a subpoena, the White House becoming Persepolis and military action against Iran.
Afshin Rattansi: We hear that Michael Mukasey is going to become the latest of the President's Attorney-Generals to be subpoenaed, this time over his conversations with Bush and Cheney -- does this show that Congress is serious about calling the executive to account?
Gore Vidal: No, Congress has never been more cowardly, nor more corrupt. All Bush has do is to make sure certain amounts of money go in the direction of certain important congressmen and that's end of any serious investigation. After all, one of the bravest members of Congress is Denis Kucinich who brought the article of impeachment in to the well of the House of Representatives. The House of Representatives must then try the president, and then after that it goes to the Senate for judgment. However, none of these things will happen because there's nobody there except for Mr. Kucinich who has the courage to take on a sitting president who is kind of a Mafioso.
Afshin Rattansi: How can it just be one person among so many hundreds of Congressmen who wants the impeachment of George W. Bush in these circumstances?
Gore Vidal: Well it's because we no longer have a country. We don't have a republic any more. During the last 7 or 8 years of the Bush regime, they've got rid of the Bill of Rights, they've got rid of habeas corpus. They have got rid of one of the nicest gifts that England ever left us when they went away and we ceased to be colonies -- the Magna Carta -- from the 12th century. All of our law and due process of law is based on that. And the Bush people got rid of it. The president and little Mr. Gonzales who for a few minutes was his Attorney General. They managed to get rid of all of the constitutional links that made us literally a republic.
Afshin Rattansi: You have often written about the United States' superpower status in terms of the history of previous superpowers. Do you think we're witnessing the end of U.S. power as some suggest. Will the White House be seen like Persepolis?
But I liked it, Praxi! Please, put it back!:smile:I was thinking of changing it soon......
Hi, Mikey et al;.... It's not enough apparently that thousands of young men and women died in Iraq...for the lies of the U.S. government.... etc
....the list goes on and on and where are Americans?
Munching Big Macs and watching American idol....
They need something to get them motivated...and maybe a nuke would do that!
it is now forbidden to photograph returning coffins of fallen soldiers.[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]As of Sunday, April 25, a total of 718 American sons and daughters have come home from Iraq in flag-draped coffins, 117 in April alone. While President George W. Bush does not seem to be concerned about this -- he hasn't attended a single military funeral since launching the war -- he does seem to be concerned about the American people seeing images of the carnage his disastrous policies have wrought.
....
[/FONT][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]The images, however, capture the tragic reality of war and that's why George W. Bush doesn't want you to see any more of them. The truth is the president's torturer, and any image that challenges his arrogant fantasies must be stopped.[/FONT]
Unbelievable!! How disgusting!! [FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif][FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]As Gulf War I began, Bush the Elder feared a repeat of the Vietnam-era images of an unrelenting stream of coffins returning home. Forget a free society and a Constitution that protects expression, these are forbidden images, unfit for the eyes of the American people. [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Barbara Bush, wife and mother of the presidents, already stated her aversion to such unpleasant images, and perhaps she's making the call here. [/FONT]
[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]In March of last year, as the invasion of Iraq began, Mrs. Bush told Diane Sawyer of ABC News that she wouldn't watch any television reports about her boy's war because, she said, "Why should we hear about body bags and death and how many? ... Oh, I mean, it's not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?" [/FONT]
[/FONT]He (Bush) has succeeded in creating a false image of himself, and he has been widely successful in selling the phony reasons for war and images he's fabricated to the American people. Grim, vivid reality cannot be tolerated.
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0427-12.htm[FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]Jane Bright of West Hills, Calif., disagrees. Her 24-year-old son Evan Ashcraft was killed in combat in Iraq last July. She told CBS, "We need to stop hiding the deaths of our young. We need to be open about their deaths."
[/FONT] [FONT=Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]President Bush fears openness about anything, especially Iraq. He and his handlers want to control every image and the reality of war -- death, suffering and destruction -- must be suppressed.[/FONT]