George Galloway blasts the Senate

... I'm thinking OJ Simpson, Michael Jackson,

the "third strike" system, leading to horrendously long prison sentences for relatively minor offences,

the attempts to withdraw the teaching of evolution in schools,

the worrying amount of power that religeon has in the USA,

the biased News and Media programmes,

the lack of open, unscripted debate between your politicians on live TV..............

Maybe I should reconsider?.......NOPE, I still think that you deserve at least fifth place.

ME:-
"making accusations against the character of a democratically elected British Member of Parliament, in the most scathing of language. The accusor then has to sit there on live worldwide TV, as that maligned (to date there is STILL no evidence) person thoroughly humiliates him (and the USA in the process) by ripping him apart."


Whooda replied:-
"I can positively hear Union Jacks snapping in the breeze here, Lord E.
See JTT's comments RE Oklahoma twisters ..."

So, Whooda.....please be good enough to tell me what was factually innacurate about my statement, and how you consider it as "spin"?

Or is it ACTUALLY the case that people are presumed guilty in the USA, without hard evidence, and the accused then has to prove his/ her innocence?

Maybe I should revise my ranking for the USA after all, eh?

Disclaimer:

This is a picture from Portsmouth, England, where they're celebrating the 200th anniversary of the battle of Trafalgar and it has no connection to Galloway or any other posts on this thread; I just love ships!

... Yes, Whooda, it WAS my perception, also (IMO) that of about 95% of the UK population who were given their proper freedom of speech and "open" TV privileges, to be able to watch the Galloway "interview", in its entirety, on national TV.
How many national, mainstream channels screened the entire, uncut interview in the USA, I wonder?
Whoever watched the whole thing, wherever they were in the world, would have had to have been a thoroughly brainwashed Bushite, not to have recognized that Galloway came out the clear winner.

......and I dont even like the guy, but I feel that nobody should be allowed to get away with such slandering, and act with such comfortable arrogance, as that Senator did in that report. If he had evidence, he would have presented it by now. Surely it doesnt take the mighty workings of the FBI and CIA THIS long to manufacture something.

That Senator is dead in the water.

The Chamberlain of Augustus the Strong recorded in his private journal that the King (Augustus was the elected King of Poland) once asked him how many bastards were receiving a pension from him. The minister replied that he believed the figure was 355. Sometimes a gentleman's indiscretions reach proportions such that he could not make the tally independently even if he lacked the necessary discretion . . .

Disclaimer:

This is a picture from Portsmouth, England, where they're celebrating the 200th anniversary of the battle of Trafalgar and it has no connection to Galloway or any other posts on this thread; I just love ships!

"...we all have to recognize?-no matter how great our strength?-that we must deny ourselves the license to do always as we please".
(Harry Truman)
Great powers, of course, are not philanthropists. The US never ceased to pursue the national interest as successive administrations understood it. But for ten years following the end of the cold war the US and the "international community" appeared, however fortuitously, to share a common set of interests and objectives; indeed, American military preponderance fueled all manner of liberal dreams for global improvement. Hence the enthusiasms and hopes of the Nineties?-and hence, too, the angry disillusion today. For the US of President George W. Bush most decidedly does not share the interests and objectives of the international community. Many in that community would say that this is because the United States itself has changed in unprecedented and quite frightening ways. Andrew Bacevich would agree with them.

Bacevich is a graduate of West Point, a Vietnam veteran, and a conservative Catholic who now directs the study of international relations at Boston University. He has thus earned the right to a hearing even in circles typically immune to criticism. What he writes should give them pause. His argument is complex, resting on a close account of changes in the US military since Vietnam, on the militarization of strategic political thinking, and on the role of the military in American culture. But his conclusion is clear. The United States, he writes, is becoming not just a militarized state but a military society: a country where armed power is the measure of national greatness, and war, or planning for war, is the exemplary (and only) common project.

Why does the US Department of Defense currently maintain 725 official US military bases outside the country and 969 at home (not to mention numerous secret bases)? Why does the US spend more on "defense" than all the rest of the world put together? After all, it has no present or likely enemies of the kind who could be intimidated or defeated by "star wars" missile defense or bunker-busting "nukes." And yet this country is obsessed with war: rumors of war, images of war, "preemptive" war, "preventive" war, "surgical" war, "prophylactic" war, "permanent" war. As President Bush explained at a news conference on April 13, 2004, "This country must go on the offense and stay on the offense."

Among democracies, only in America do soldiers and other uniformed servicemen figure ubiquitously in political photo ops and popular movies. Only in America do civilians eagerly buy expensive military service vehicles for suburban shopping runs. In a country no longer supreme in most other fields of human endeavor, war and warriors have become the last, enduring symbols of American dominance and the American way of life. "In war, it seemed," writes Bacevich, "lay America's true comparative advantage."

Bacevich is good on the intellectual roots of the cult of therapeutic aggression?-citing among others the inimitable Norman Podhoretz (America has an international mission and must never "come home"). He also summarizes the realist case for war?-rooted in what will become the country's increasingly desperate struggle to control the fuel supply. The United States consumes 25 percent of all the oil produced in the world every year but has proven reserves of its own amounting to less than 2 percent of the global total. This struggle Bacevich calls World War IV: the contest for supremacy in strategic, energy-rich regions like the Middle East and Central Asia.[10] It began at the end of the Seventies, long before the formal conclusion of "World War III" (i.e., the cold war).

In this setting today's "Global War on Terror" is one battle, perhaps just a sideshow, among the potentially limitless number of battles that the US will be called upon (or will call upon itself) to fight. These battles will all be won because the US has a monopoly of the most advanced weaponry?-and they may be acceptable to the American people because, in Bacevich's view, that same weaponry, air power especially, has given war "aesthetic respectability" once again. But the war itself has no foreseeable end.

As a former soldier, Bacevich is much troubled by the consequent militarization of American foreign relations, and by the debauching of his country's traditional martial values in wars of conquest and occupation. And it is clear that he has little tolerance for Washington's ideologically driven overseas adventures: the uncertain benefits for the foreign recipients are far outweighed by the moral costs to the US itself.[11] For Bacevich's deepest concern lies closer to home. In a militarized society the range of acceptable opinion inevitably shrinks. Opposition to the "commander in chief" is swiftly characterized as lèse-majesté; criticism becomes betrayal. No nation, as Madison wrote in 1795 and Bacevich recalls approvingly, can "preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare."[12] "Full-spectrum dominance" begins as a Pentagon cliché and ends as an executive project.

Disclaimer:

This is a picture from Portsmouth, England, where they're celebrating the 200th anniversary of the battle of Trafalgar and it has no connection to Galloway or any other posts on this thread; I just love ships!

In a country no longer supreme in most other fields of human endeavor, war and warriors have become the last, enduring symbols of American dominance and the American way of life. "In war, it seemed," writes Bacevich, "lay America's true comparative advantage."

"Bacevich is a graduate of West Point, a Vietnam veteran, and a conservative Catholic who now directs the study of international relations at Boston University."

At the outer edges of the US imperium, in Bratislava or Tiflis, the dream of republican America still lives on, like the fading light from a distant, dying star. But even there the shadows of doubt are growing. Amnesty International cites several cases of detainees who "just could not believe Americans could act this way." Those are exactly the words said to me by an Albanian friend in Macedonia?- and Macedonian Albanians have good reason to count themselves among this country's best friends and unconditional admirers. In Madrid a very senior and rather conservative Spanish diplomat recently put it thus:

We grew up under Franco with a dream of America. That dream encouraged us to imagine and later to build a different, better Spain. All dreams must fade?-but not all dreams must become nightmares. We Spanish know a little about political nightmares. What is happening to America? How do you explain Guantánamo?[16]