A challenge for all Bush-Haters

[agent compassion]

It's bad enought that you guys pwn me again and again with your anti-Bush wisdom, but then I keep coming back for more. What's wrong with me? I'm such a dumbass. I wish I was a Discordian like you guys.

Good to hear you admit it finally, VoT...

[Cain]

It's the software inside people's heads that wins wars nowadays. You hardware freaks are going to have to face that fact one of these days. And it's this brain-software that we're hopeless at programming. Iraq has proved pretty clearly we don't have a clue how to use the Middle-Eastern brain OS. In fact, we've actually done the impossible: reprogrammed the miserable, cowardly Iraqis into fierce warriors.

Remember Gulf War I? Remember those pitiful fags crawling up to our soldiers to surrender on their hands and knees, sobbing like babies? Two years of occupation by Bush's morons has turned those cowards into fearless kamikazes in Oldsmobiles.

Man, that article was really interesting! Thanks for sharing, Scribe.

Not a problem.  The War Nerd is pretty smart, if somewhat disturbing.

[agent compassion]

The War Nerd is pretty smart, if somewhat disturbing.

Well, war is disturbing...

[Cain]

So you have guns pointed at you when you vote in Illinois?  That's funny because you guys voted for Kerry.  What's that tell you?

Thats someone took my ID and somehow gained for me an American passport, all 4 months ago at least.  And they werent any good, because they should have made more fake IDs to swing the vote properly

[Cain]

It's bad enought that you guys lack creativity in your anti-Bush rhetoric, but then there is shit like this:

"this current american government is settign a very dangerous precedent, which may very well spell the end of american civilization, wether that civilization dies from foriegn invaders or from it's own unwillingness to think critically or beyonf their own personal immidiate wants."

Don't you ever find youself laughing at your own words when you type such loaded bs.  This is the kind of crap that makes people like Rush and Ann Coulter rich talking about how big of idiots some on the left really are.  I'm well aware many of you have legitimate (hate to use that word again so soon) reasons for not liking Bush and this war, but shit like this is just fucking stupid, to be blunt.  If this is really something you truly feel deep down then you need to go have a coke and a smile and shut the fuck up.

My bad, then you'll be supporting an "evil" American corporation, and we wouldn't want to do that.

I see.  So invading foreign countries on the basis of spurious evidence and ignoring the UN whilst doing so (and being a member of the UNPSC) isnt a dangerous precedent.  OK then.  So you wont complain when the nuke comes from NK to end the "fascist police state and bring true Marxist-Leninsit ways" to the US?

[Voice of Truth]

We didn't set the precedent, Scribe (ref England in Ireland, France in the Ivory Coast, or Russia in Chechnya here).  I also was referring to the "end of American civilization" blather.  I'm sorry, you guys can say whatever you want, but sometimes you get so caught up in your OWN rhetoric that you really say some stupid shit.  This was classic in that regard.

[agent compassion]

VOT =

[Cain]

We didn't set the precedent, Scribe (ref England in Ireland, France in the Ivory Coast, or Russia in Chechnya here).  I also was referring to the "end of American civilization" blather.  I'm sorry, you guys can say whatever you want, but sometimes you get so caught up in your OWN rhetoric that you really say some stupid shit.  This was classic in that regard.

But in all of those places there was at least past precedent for control, even if those treaties had been signed at gunpoint.  And there was no UN discussion over them, because they knew they would break it and set a precedent for other third world nations to do the same back, meaning a return to the anarchic international system and therefore ams races, alliances etc the whole lot.  It doesnt look good when the biggest power, who helped found the UN, starts breaking those rules so publicly.

As for "the end of American civilization", well it has to happen one day.  Maybe the day Bush picks a war with a nation that can fight back, maybe 20 years time, maybe 200 years time.  Who knows?  They said Rome was the Eternal City, and while it may still be around, its not exactly the centre of Europe nowadays is it?  And it may not even be so dramatic as an invasion.  What if China etc decide to drop the US debt and a terror attack cuts off Saudi Arabian oil?  Your economy will be fucked and you can expect scenes similar to the last days of Weimar Germany.  And thats just one scernario I can think of.  

In summary, things are often more transient then they appear.  And nothing looks good when the worlds most powerful country that purportedly seeks international peace invades without a mandate from an organization it set up.

[agent compassion]

Hey, VoT, chew on this. Maybe you'll learn something....but i doubt it

"Why the Children in Iraq Make No Sound When They Fall
by Bernard Chazelle


No one said that dying had to be dull. "Screaming with fear, paralyzed children at a shelter for the physically disabled and mentally ill in Galle, Sri Lanka, lay helplessly in their beds as seawater surged around them." The CNN report read like the screenplay of a horror film. A crippled girl grows up destitute in a home for the deaf, the blind, the insane, and, for good measure, the disabled elderly (what more could a kid wish for?) At the end of a short life spent wondering why no one ever looked out for her, the child reaches the final punctuation mark of her blessed existence and drowns glued to a wheelchair.

Tragedy should not be too clever. Mourning embraces the solemnity of death but recoils at an overzealous script. When fate appears to cross the thin line between cruelty and sadism, grief turns to anger. We expect the church organist at the funeral mass to interrupt Bach in mid-measure, look up to the sky, and shout "Come on!"

Voltaire had his "come on" moment in the wake of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, suggesting that God's supreme goodness perhaps was not all it was cracked up to be. Religious irreverence is not much in fashion these days. But piety was not always so docile. History has been improbably kind to all sorts of figures who've had cross words with the Almighty. Think of Job, Jonah, Jeremiah, and Jesus on the cross,Äîand that's only for the J's. Once or twice, the dispute even got out of hand: Nietzsche killed God; and Richard Rubenstein saw in Auschwitz confirmation of his death. Admittedly, to reconcile the Holocaust with a just and omnipotent god is an interesting variation on squaring the circle,Äîor, since Mikl??s Laczkovich actually succeeded in doing just that [1], let us say, merely a reminder that gods may die but theological debates just never do.

My own reaction to the CNN report was not nearly as elevated. "Why would God behave like Don Rumsfeld?" I wondered. As the crippled child writhed in agony, I pictured God murmuring "Stuff happens."

Woe unto me. To compare God to Rummy is worse than blasphemous: It's unfair. After all, God did not cow the media into decorating our TV screens with the beatific smiles of preening peacocks reassuring us that smart waves drowned the terrorists, spared the innocent, amused the children, and provided much needed water to drought-prone regions. God gets accused of many things, including being dead, but lying is rarely one of them.

Mendacity, on the other hand, is the reserve currency of this administration. Its marketing hook: "You give us your votes; we give you our lies." From the fictitious Saddam-al Qaeda axis to the rosy updates on the Switzerlandization of Iraq, from the bogus tales of WMD to the assurance that democracy is the future of the region (and always will be, would add the cynics), the giving has been, shall we say, generous.

The taking has been no less effusive. Although the hysterical rantings of prowar voices rarely exceeded, in dignity, the yapping of a chihuahua attacking a meatball, they met only the meekest resistance from an oleaginous mainstream media. The war hawks found powerful enablers in The New York Times, which was more than happy to echo the delusory yarn spun by the White House and pimp for Judith Miller's Best Little Whorehouse in Babylon (where bling bling spells WMD).

Pimping being the fickle business that it is, it won't be long before the In-Bush-We-Trust media gets in touch with its inner peacenik and points an accusing finger at the posse of visionary mediocrities who gave us a nasty case of Iraq syndrome. No doubt some of the neocons will balk at going to their graves with the word "loser" carved on a brass coffin plate; so watch for them to pull a McNamara on us and humbly beg for forgiveness. Being good souls, ie, suckers for smarmy group hugs, naturally we'll oblige.

Were it so simple.

The abject surrender of the media fed a slew of illusions to the public, none more craven than the belief that he whom we kill must be killed. Yeah, yeah, we occasionally obliterate the wrong house and incinerate its occupants, but that's just "friendly fire." (A lovely phrase if there's one: Let's hear the surgeon who amputates the wrong leg inform his patient of his "friendly amputation.") Minus the friendliness, however, our whiz-bang weapon wizardry never fails to separate the wheat from the chaff, the nursing mother from the crazed beheader. So goes the creed, anyway.

The Lancet,Äîthat well-known freedom hating rag,Äîbegs to differ. It estimates that our high-IQ, mensa-schmensa bombs have killed 100,000 civilians [2]. Iraq Body Count, which plays the lowballing game by shunning projections, reports the deaths of 600 non-combatants during our latest goodwill tour of Fallujah (by now primed to be renamed Grozny on the Euphrates) [3].

And then there is the Iraqi girl, hands soaked in her dead father's blood, whose little brother does not yet understand that his childhood has just come to an end. Fearing for their lives, US soldiers killed the parents in the front seat of the family car. Demons will likely haunt their nights. Stuff happens. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, bless their souls, will sleep well tonight.

Wars never fail to produce their share of pithy lines. Tommy Franks made sure this one would be no exception. "We don't do body counts," crowed the general, who really meant to say that he does not do "dark-skinned body counts" (he counts the others just fine). Lucky for us that he doesn't run a Swedish newspaper, or it would have splashed the headline: "Tsunami kills 2,000 Swedes,Äîand a few locals." To be fair, Franks remembered the last time he did body counts, Vietnam, and how well that ended. But today's tactical thinking packs a wallop of self-righteous denial. We don't tally the children we kill for the same reason monsters don't buy mirrors: That's how they go through life thinking they're angels.

We've snuffed out innocent lives in numbers that insurgents and terrorists could only dream of. But we avert our eyes. We bury our heads in the sand and turn a blind eye to our moral cowardice, thus pulling off the amazing feat of being ostriches and chickens all at once. We owe this marvel of ornithology to the inexorable fragility of human illusions. To quote James Carroll, "we avert our eyes because the war is a moral abyss. If we dare to look, as Nietzsche said, the abyss stares back." George Bush, the philosopher, has updated Berkeley's riddle: Do Iraqi children scream when the bombs fall if there is no one in the White House to hear them?

The celebrity of the month, the tsunami victim, has hogged newspaper headlines nationwide with stomach-churning photo spreads of wailing mothers and floating cadavers. Like his unsung Iraqi brethren, the victim has reminded us that calamity always strikes the poor, the sick, and the helpless first. It's invariably those with the least to lose who lose the most. At the great banquet of cataclysms, rich Westerners get served last. Bush would have us believe that we've suffered so much from terrorism the world owes us undying compassion. In truth, our induction into the Misery Hall of Fame is still a long way off. With our sustained assistance, however (coddling Saddam while he was gassing Iranians, slapping sanctions that killed half a million children, and fighting two wars in twelve years), Iraq made it on the first ballot. Who ever said that we didn't have a big heart?

Not Condoleezza Rice: "I do agree that the tsunami was a wonderful opportunity to show not just the US government, but the heart of the American people, and I think it has paid great dividends for us" [4]. And I just can't wait for the next one, our top diplomat might have added.

While watching Colin Powell, pocket calculator in hand, add up the geopolitical benefits of our generosity and tell us how shocked, shocked he was by the tsunami's devastation, I could almost hear the Beatitudes from The Gospel According to Dubya: "Blessed are the children whom the sea swallows, for they shall tug at our heartstrings. / Cursed are the children whom our bombs blow up, for they shall roam the dark alleys of our indifference." We've been Iraq's tsunami. But expect no charity drive, no minute of silence, no flag at half-staff: nothing that would allow shame to rear its ugly face.

With Bush's reelection, America now has the president it deserves. And should you find that Lady Liberty, all dolled up with the latest in fashion from Abu Ghraib and Guant?°namo, looks a bit like a used up hooker, you won't need to ask who hired her pimp: We did.

The liberation of Iraq began with smart flying bombs crashing over Baghdad. We should have known better. Liberations that start with a reenactment of 9/11 rarely end well.

[1] Laczkovich, M. Equidecomposability and discrepancy; a solution of Tarski's circle-squaring problem, J. Reine Angew. Math. 404 (1990), 77-117.

[2] 100,000 Civilian Deaths Estimated in Iraq, by Rob Stein, Washington Post, October 29, 2004. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7967-2004Oct28.html

[3] Iraq Body Count Falluja Archive, www.iraqbodycount.org, 2004. http://www.iraqbodycount.net/resources/falluja/

[4] Dr. Rice's senate confirmation hearing, Agence France Presse, Tuesday, January 18, 2005. http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0118-08.htm

Bernard Chazelle is a professor of computer science and Princeton University Fellow, American Academy Arts & Sciences, European Academy of Sciences.

© 2005 Bernard Chazelle"
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0128-24.htm

[Bob the Mediocre]

Your economy will be fucked and you can expect scenes similar to the last days of Weimar Germany.  And thats just one scernario I can think of.

Damn that's scary. I could see someone much worse than Bush grabbing power then.

VoT, I doubt anyone here is seriously saying they'd be glad to see America fall. I just see it as historically inevitable, and think Bush is helping speed it up. Now let's get back to the flaming.

[agent compassion]

Yeah...um...has anyone seen my vast empire?

No?

Anybody?

Shit.

VoT, empires fall, they always do, and that's why it's upsetting to see G-Dub acting like an emperor; where is it written that America can't be successful without trying to over the world? What is so wrong with just being America and playing nice? I happen to like this country quite a bit and would hate to see it crap the bed after just a couple of centuries....but I'm not the President....

[Scytano]

Boy, this thread is a train wreck.

I really cannot understand those who don't think this election was a colossal success for both the Iraqi people and the Bush administration, without whom this vote would have never taken place (or at least it probably wouldn't have happened for a very long time). This vote showed the Iraqi people that THEY could take things into their own hands. They got up and braved geting shot and blown up, so they could vote. Those they voted for will then write the country's constitution, and democracy will hopefully follow.

I don't think even the hardcore PNAC folks could say that this war has gone smoothly or that it's a complete success... there's been too many missteps and problems for that to be true. Equally though, I think many people are underestimating how important it is to have a functioning Democracy in this part of the world, sitting right between Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia. This is huge, if it works, and all indications are that this bloodied and beaten country is still on its feet and fighting for its future as a free state. That is a wonderful thing.

[Guido Finucci]

Equally though, I think many people are underestimating how important it is to have a functioning Democracy in this part of the world, sitting right between Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia.

Important for who, exactly? The Iraqis don't need to have a functioning democracy between Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia -- they've lived without one for a long time now. I doubt the Iranians, Syrians or Saudis feel a need for one either.

Important for the Americans perhaps?

[Scytano]

Equally though, I think many people are underestimating how important it is to have a functioning Democracy in this part of the world, sitting right between Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia.

Important for who, exactly? The Iraqis don't need to have a functioning democracy between Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia -- they've lived without one for a long time now. I doubt the Iranians, Syrians or Saudis feel a need for one either.

Important for the Americans perhaps?

I think Democracy, and it's immediate family, is the only form of legitimate government in the world today. Sure, it's important for the US too.

[Guido Finucci]

I think Democracy, and it's immediate family, is the only form of legitimate government in the world today. Sure, it's important for the US too.

Two questions before I launch into another screaming rant that no-one wants to read:
a) What do you mean by, "Democracy, and it's immediate family"?
b) What make a form of government, any form of government, "legitimate"?