Let's talk about replacing GWBush in 2004.

Bush has got some tap-dancers on his team. Consider Powell's performance before the UN.

i really hate to say this but Powell has extremely disappointed me.

Me too dyslexia, he is coming around again - he is the best thing in the Bush regime but he sold out Iraq -

I don't like (trust) Powell.

As in, who will he sell out next?

exactly

Once you lose your integrity, the rest is a piece of cake" - JR Ewing

And Powell was the only integrity Bush had. The only way Powell can get his back is by resigning with a carefully worded going out speech <sigh>

If Powell steps down from that group, bye-bye all those nice, remunerative consultancies and corporate board positions and a very cushy old age.

If you're suggesting that his resignation would affect his earning power, I'd rethink that. He could live off the residuals from one "tell-all" book (regardless of its veracity), to say nothing of the obscene speaking fees he could get.

Well, that's true. But there's nothing like knowing when to sell your Halliburton shares and generally trade your way through life on insider info.

I still believe Powell has a good heart. I have to, my inner self says there has got to be something good and just with this government!

Well, Powell looks like a nice guy, but a look at his recent career (and the mere fact that he joined that administration is enough) tells me he's a possibly pleasant, probably maddening, jerk.

I think he went into it with hopes that maybe he could make some kind of difference. Instead, he got sucked into the madness. How, why, who knows?

I agree with eoe. He seems to have the kind of commitment that would prevent him from resigning, plus I think he continues to believe that he can provide a small spark of sanity to this administration.
Now, of course, he is being shoved into a corner by the Pentagon.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


'Blame America'
fever infects left





At the 1984 Republican National Convention, Jeane Kirkpatrick, then the Reagan administration's UN delegate, gave a speech that has stuck with me. She blasted the Democratic Party's approach to foreign affairs, repeating the phrase "the blame-America-first crowd." I hated the speech at the time but have recently reread it. It has aged better than I have.
Kirkpatrick's mantra mostly applied to the Cold War. But it could just as aptly be applied to some of those - note the modifier "some" - who opposed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and almost everything else the U.S. does.

A case in point is a recent article in The Nation, a liberal magazine, by Wayne Smith, who was chief of the U.S. Interests Section in Cuba from 1979 to 1982. It begins by characterizing Cuba's swift execution of a trio of ferry hijackers and the jailing of scores of dissident journalists and writers as "deplorable." I would have used a stronger word, but okay.

The article goes on to blame this judicial murder and unconscionable jailing of human rights activists on the U.S. "Why the crackdown?" Smith writes. "In part, it was in reaction to growing provocations on the part of the Bush administration." What provocations? Foremost among them were the activities of the chief U.S. diplomat in Cuba, James Cason, who opened his home to meetings with the dissidents.

That same tendency to blame America for the shortcomings of others unfortunately permeates the left and the Democratic Party. I got the first whiff of it after 9/11, when some people reacted to the terrorist attacks by blaming American policy - in the Mideast specifically, but around the world in general.

Had we not supported Israel, had we not backed the corrupt Saudi monarchy, had we not been buddies with Egypt, had we not been somehow complicit in Third World poverty, had we not developed blue jeans and T-shirts and rock music and premarital sex, the World Trade Center might still be standing and the Pentagon untouched.

But this was the mass murder of innocents. The attacks were not in self-defense or even in revenge for something America had done, but a fanatical, insane and futile blow directed at modernity.

The same sort of reasoning surfaced before and during the war with Iraq. Although I supported the war, I could understand some of the arguments against it. But I could not understand those who said the war was about oil or empire or reconstruction contracts and who seemed to think that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was the lesser of two evils - the U.S. being the greater, of course.

Beneath this reasoning seethes a perplexing animosity toward the U.S. - not the people, but the government and the economic system. Possibly, it has its roots in the Great Depression, when capitalism seemed kaput and socialism so promising and the government an adjunct of monied interests. And, of course, governments on all levels were unabashedly racist.

Almost none of that still applies - although money still talks. Yet the impulse to blame America first lingers, an atavistic reflex that jerks the knees of too many on the left and has cost the Democratic Party plenty over the years.

Kirkpatrick, a former Democrat, put her finger on it 19 years ago. It's about time the Democrats listened to what she had to say.

au

You seem to be on a little right wing kick this morning. Second thread visited with a quotation from unnamed writer and publication, both doing the 'rah rah for the great red, white and blue!' thing.

Well, aside from the little rock/sex rhetorical irrelevancy, that's almost certainly true, of course. But it's not a matter of blame the victim - it's a matter of that entity which has so often victimized others engaging in some humble reflections on how it isn't perfect and what it is doing wrong (morally and strategically) in the world. This tendency within the US to not be responsible for its failings and imperfections and past actions is not just unwise, it's repugnant.

Of course, there is that little iraqi kid without any arms who might say the same.

This is the old straw man argument brought out again. You really ought to get clear on how logically fallacious this is, au, and not trouble us again with it.

"Perplexing" is the key word...this writer, whomever it is, will die in seething perplexity because he/she cannot, simply cannot, do the look-in-the-mirror thing.

And THAT is what is interesting. Why cannot this writer, or you, or so many other Americans make that leap into national self-reflection?

blatham


Same paper an editorial written by Richard Cohen. I guess if it does not agree with you or the left it is not a valid viewpoint. When did you become an a2k censor?

Hardly censorious to ask for sources, to criticize, to point to editorial slant, or even to poke fun at bad arguments, au.

ps...if you aren't clear on exactly how that one argument I labelled as a 'straw man' is correctly labelled as such, let me know and I'll carefully take you through it (though this evening, not right now). I am not meaning to be rude here, by the way. But this is a very common logical error, and this particular version of it keeps coming up to no one's advantage. It just muddies peoples' thinking.