Posted on Thu, 03/20/2008 - 17:24 — by chewy
I guess Obama has lost his momentum, and may lose the primaries. What a shame. That means McCain will probably win in November and we will get 4 more years of George Bush Jr. and Irak will be the news lead until I am an old man. I wanted change, and Obama was the best bet for change on the political horizon. Yes, I probably gave him too much credit for change, because Washington’s dogma is too locked into place. But I was willing to try. You know, 9/11 has so powerfully shaped our view of the world, that we now appear to be a paranoid nation with a itchy trigger finger. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a realist. I think we should have the strongest Coast Guard in the world. I'm a little tired of spending trillions of dollars on defense. Defense against what! Some idiot living in a cave in the middle east? For the trillions of dollars we have spent on defense, I can buy thousands of FBI agents to keep our ports safe. I can buy 10s of thousands of more police to keep our neighborhood streets safe for our children. I can start fixing our roads and bridges, and put people to work. I can buy a ton of education, so we are the smartest country in the world. I might even be able to start fixing global warming with change the left over:) You know, 9/11 should have never happened. Let’s go back to 9/10 when thing were cool. Let’s not be trapped by 9/11 thinking because the our representatives took their eye off the ball. We spent billions on defense and it did not protect the Twin Towers. Not a very good return on your money, huh? I can remember when terrorist were hijacking commercial airliners every other week back in the 1970s. You would think that our government would have learned something about that, and been smart enough to at least lock the door on the pilots cockpit to keep the bad guys out. When was the last time an Israeli airplane was hijacked? It didn’t happen. And using a stupid airplane as a weapon is nothing new, the Japanese kamikaze perfected it over 60 years ago. You would have thought our government would have pick up on that one too. And so now we are stuck with 9/11s aftermath, thousands of precious lives and a trillion dollars. We need a change of direction. The only "good war" was World War II, everything since has been a terrible waste of lives and treasury. You know that the 7th fleet practices war games in case the Chinese go into Taiwan? Taiwan is Chinese territory and the Chinese can figure out their own problems, damn it. If North and South Korea start mixing it up again, are we going to refight the Korean war? We got 50,000 troops there, as a trip wire for war. Are y’all ready to sign up for the cause? We need a change of direction. I guess it's part of our collective personality to just insist on being the world’s policeman. And it cost us DEARLY. If we wanted too, we can be the best professional impartial mediator, the world could ask for. We could make things happen. We are the most powerful nation on earth; with renewed respect and cooperation from the European Union and other stable democracies we can wield more power and influence than any standing army.
|
Joined: Jul 2005
Posts: 730
Report shays
It's going to take a long time (if ever) to restore the cost of George Bush & Co adventures in creating a New American Century. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the resulting quagmire it got caught up in (that we helped fund ... think "Taliban" and "Osama bin Laden") had repercussions from which we might have learned a lesson ... but oh no! Our Chicken-Hawk backseat generals had a strategy in which Iraq, it's people welcoming us with open arms as we dethroned their leader (thanks in large part to assurances from Ahmad Chalabi ... you know, the guy who assumed he would ascend to the throne as our loyal puppet and then be able to loot and rob the country just like we let Saddam Hussein do), would become the centerpiece of our strong and permanent military presence on the border of the Persian Plateau and the Caususes. And, just like the Russians before them, they bit off more than they could chew and the net result will be national bankruptcy. Not an end to the nation, or even to national wealth (quite a few shysters stole an awful lot of the Russian treasury and then fled the country under Boris Yeltzin ... one might even be funding construction of a nuclear bomb to enforce his conservative beliefs, if you believe the blogs and the world of looney conspiracy theorists) ... it's just that you and I will not be control of any of it.
Which is why this election is critical. If McCain wins, we get at least four more years of destructive Republican leadership ... the national debt goes higher, corporations have more unfettered time to consolidate their grip, foreign policy continues in the John Wayne/Ronald Reagan cowboy style. If Hillary wins, we may have a little more sanity in the White House (for example, the spending will be somewhat balanced by an increase in taxes to pay for it ... and the spending will less likely be for the benefit of the wealthy and the corporations, but more as a sop to shut up the unemployed, disabled, and disenfranchised), but the same general slide towards corporatocracy will ensue. Barack has been portrayed as something of a cowboy in regard to foreign affairs ("if Mushariff won't go after al-Qaida, we will"), and there may be some truth in it; but actually what he said was that we have strategic operatives that, given good intel, could surgically pop in and then out of Pakistan with Bin Laden in hand without any (or much) collateral damage ... something the current Administration could also have easily done if hunting down bin-Laden was what it really wanted to accomplish (bin-Laden serves this admins needs much better as a free man than as a captive). He has also been portrayed as "inexperienced" ... which to me is a load of poo and, if it just breaks the good-old boy network in Washington will go a long way toward helping us to reclaim our country from the evil elite that has had its grips on it since at least 1980.