To Supersoulty and John Ford

[NHPolitico]

What makes these things worse is that all my friends and family look to me to reassure them that Bush will win in Nov.  While I constantly have to reassure others, there is never anyone there to reassure me.  All I ever see is Bush bashing.

Did you hear the clip of Bush responding to a question about Indian tribe sovereignty at the UNITY conference of minority journalists? It was a trainwreck. It seriously sounded like he had no idea what the word even meant. It was deeply disturbing.  He kept talking in circles about how sovereignty means you're sovereign and sh!t like that.  They have to do a better job of screening these appearances.

[Q] Good morning. My name is Mark Trahant. I'm the editorial page editor of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and a member of the Native American Journalist Association. (Applause.) Most school kids learn about the government in the context of city, county, state and federal. And, of course, tribal governments are not part of that at all. Mr. President, you've been a governor and a President, so you have a unique experience, looking at it from two directions. What do you think tribal sovereignty means in the 21st century, and how do we resolve conflicts between tribes and the federal and the state governments?

[BUSH]: Tribal sovereignty means that, it's sovereign. You're a -- you've been given sovereignty, and you're viewed as a sovereign entity. And, therefore, the relationship between the federal government and tribes is one between sovereign entities.

[Beefalow and the Consumer]

[BUSH]: Tribal sovereignty means that, it's sovereign. You're a -- you've been given sovereignty, and you're viewed as a sovereign entity. And, therefore, the relationship between the federal government and tribes is one between sovereign entities.

It makes me sad that I have to choose between a man with no brains, and one with no moral backbone.

[David S]

In my estimation America's destruction is more likely to come about as a result of the constantly increasing move toward socialism. It could do for us what it did for the USSR; oppression, death, poverty and destruction!

[Beefalow and the Consumer]

In my estimation America's destruction is more likely to come about as a result of the constantly increasing move toward socialism. It could do for us what it did for the USSR; oppression, death, poverty and destruction!

Americans like freedom too much to ever let it get that bad.  It may lead to crushing taxes and economic inefficiency, but Western Europe's been that way for decades, and they're still surviving.

Of course, thousands of elderly died in the French heatwaves of 2003, thanks to their horrible inefficiency brought about by extreme socialism, so I'm not saying such an America would be all that fantastic, but we're not going to be sending wealthy business executives to the work camps in Alaska, either.

[David S]

In my estimation America's destruction is more likely to come about as a result of the constantly increasing move toward socialism. It could do for us what it did for the USSR; oppression, death, poverty and destruction!

Americans like freedom too much to ever let it get that bad.  It may lead to crushing taxes and economic inefficiency, but Western Europe's been that way for decades, and they're still surviving.

Of course, thousands of elderly died in the French heatwaves of 2003, thanks to their horrible inefficiency brought about by extreme socialism, so I'm not saying such an America would be all that fantastic, but we're not going to be sending wealthy business executives to the work camps in Alaska, either.

I wouldn't be so sure. Let's look at some of the rights we've lost in recent years. Rico acts (Asset forfeiture laws) Allow police to seize property they suspect was obtained through drug trafficing. No trial is necessary and in many cases the victim is not even charged with a crime. Violates the 5th amendments protection of property rights and due process.
Campaign Finance reform act - Prohibits corporations and unions from mentioning a candidate by name within 60 days of an election or 30 days of a primary. Violates 1st amendment's protection of free speech. (Supreme court was asleep at the switch and said its OK)
Patriot act violates 4th amendments protection of privacy by allowing searches with less than probable cause.
At least two American citizens were labeled "Enemy Combatants" by the bush administration and imprisoned without charges and without access to a lawyer. Violates 5th amendment due process, and 6th amendment protection of the right to a speedy trial by an impartial jury. Also Habeaus Corpus.
So where are all the freedom loving Americans voicing their outrage over these violations of the constitution?
They're busy watching The Sopranos, or some other dumba__ TV show. They don't give a damn about the constitution and many would happily sell all their rights in exchange for free Rx drugs or some other unconstitutional government handout program.
Furthermore the socialists are smart enough not to run on a platform of taking our rights and enslaving us. They do things by incrementalism. Taking a little bit here and a little bit there. And they don't call it socialism. They call it progressivism or liberalism.

[12th Doctor]

What makes these things worse is that all my friends and family look to me to reassure them that Bush will win in Nov.  While I constantly have to reassure others, there is never anyone there to reassure me.  All I ever see is Bush bashing.

Did you hear the clip of Bush responding to a question about Indian tribe sovereignty at the UNITY conference of minority journalists? It was a trainwreck. It seriously sounded like he had no idea what the word even meant. It was deeply disturbing.  He kept talking in circles about how sovereignty means you're sovereign and sh!t like that.  They have to do a better job of screening these appearances.

[Q] Good morning. My name is Mark Trahant. I'm the editorial page editor of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and a member of the Native American Journalist Association. (Applause.) Most school kids learn about the government in the context of city, county, state and federal. And, of course, tribal governments are not part of that at all. Mr. President, you've been a governor and a President, so you have a unique experience, looking at it from two directions. What do you think tribal sovereignty means in the 21st century, and how do we resolve conflicts between tribes and the federal and the state governments?

[BUSH]: Tribal sovereignty means that, it's sovereign. You're a -- you've been given sovereignty, and you're viewed as a sovereign entity. And, therefore, the relationship between the federal government and tribes is one between sovereign entities.

I know this is a minority conference, but what the Hell kind of question is that?  I'm sure that Tribal Sovereignty is a huge issue to .01% of the population, but it isn't big on most Americans' radars and I don't hink most people, including Bush and Kerry, have given it much thought anythime it the past... I don't know... life time.

[NHPolitico]

MarkDel, things aren't as bleak as that. Take some happy pills or something. We live in a corporatist nation. They won't allow the left to totally destroy the country because it hurts the bottom line.  I know how losing can get to you-- I'm a freakin' Red Sox fan!  This is all a game. Winners and losers. The stakes aren't as high as you think.  We aren't fully in control of the plane. We can't crash it into the ground.

Cheer up, and come back to the forum!!!  

[M]

Soulty- ah yes, what Churchill used to call his "black dog" moods. I get those too. They make it seem like life is hardly worth living. But then there are the other times when the world seems incredibly beautiful and nothing that is bad really matters, and those can make the whole deal worth it.

I'm worried about Bush too, I'll admit it. I think that, following our victory in the Cold War, we have returned to a sort of national isolationism. September 11th reversed this for a while, but we've crawled back in. So the bad news is we cannot secure world democracy on our own. The good news is that our example is automatic, and eventually people will demand it. The ugly news, though, is that in the short term, direct threats to our country and our allies from the Iranian and North Korean nuclear programs and from various terrorist groups, absolutely must be stopped or millions of innocent people are going to die. And I think Kerry will play the Chamberlain/Carter game and wait until our demise is the next thing to unavoidable.

I'll tell you what I read recently that was depressing. Brandeis' orientation program assigned all incoming freshmen to read Tracy Kidder's "Mountains Beyond Mountains", ostensibly about health care in the third world and especially Haiti, following around a man name Dr. Paul Farmer. However, it becomes clearer and clearer throughout the book that we have here a latter day Das Kapital. Aristide and Castro secure lavish praise repeatedly; at one point Farmer says criticism of Cuba makes his "blood boil". Farmer says that the Marxist worldview surely cannot be denied, as there is obviously a social war in which the rich of all nations attempt to opress the downtrodden masses for their own ends. His list of villains includes Woodrow Wilson, FDR, Frederick Douglas ("who served as ambassador to, and effectively enforced the Monroe Doctrine in Haiti"), and Mother Teresa (who was once in a photograph with Baby Doc Duvalier). Farmer's motto is from a Cuban politica poster, "patria es humanidad"- the only true nation is humanity. And at one point when a post-communist Russian colonl asks him is America is a democracy, he says anyone who is rich claims to be a democracy; "Americans are lazy democrats"; and surely anyone who is poor or sick is not a member of a democracy.

Clearly this book illustrates that Stalinism is alive and well in very high places in this country. The ideology responsible for more deaths than National Socialism still dominates the universities and popular cultures of the free-est nation on Earth. What really scares me is that this is what I, and all other incoming Brandeis freshmen, were supposed to read over the summer for our new student forum. What in the name of G-d does that tell me!?!

MarkDel, I hope you do return once you get a chance to cool off. Also, ould you please send me yur e-mail so I can contact you? You can reach me at superamerican@hotmail.com or unilateralist@hotmail.com .

[12th Doctor]

Soulty- ah yes, what Churchill used to call his "black dog" moods. I get those too. They make it seem like life is hardly worth living. But then there are the other times when the world seems incredibly beautiful and nothing that is bad really matters, and those can make the whole deal worth it.

Yes.

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Not so much "isolationism", I think, so much as it is this "me first" attitude.  People only seem to care about what feels good to them now.  After 9/11, it felt good to get back at those terrorists bastards.  Afterwords, though, people fell away from commitment to a long term strategy to fight terror when they discovered that it would take more than a few months and probably many lives.

All of a sudden, what Bush says doesn't "feel good" anymore because no one wants to have to deal with commitment.  What Kerry says apparently "feels good" to a lot of people, because it lacks commitment to any priciples or the will to hunker down for the long term and deal with the causes of our problems.

[angus]

Soulty- ah yes, what Churchill used to call his "black dog" moods. I get those too. They make it seem like life is hardly worth living. But then there are the other times when the world seems incredibly beautiful and nothing that is bad really matters, and those can make the whole deal worth it.

I'm worried about Bush too, I'll admit it. I think that, following our victory in the Cold War, we have returned to a sort of national isolationism. September 11th reversed this for a while, but we've crawled back in. So the bad news is we cannot secure world democracy on our own. The good news is that our example is automatic, and eventually people will demand it. The ugly news, though, is that in the short term, direct threats to our country and our allies from the Iranian and North Korean nuclear programs and from various terrorist groups, absolutely must be stopped or millions of innocent people are going to die. And I think Kerry will play the Chamberlain/Carter game and wait until our demise is the next thing to unavoidable.

I'll tell you what I read recently that was depressing. Brandeis' orientation program assigned all incoming freshmen to read Tracy Kidder's "Mountains Beyond Mountains", ostensibly about health care in the third world and especially Haiti, following around a man name Dr. Paul Farmer. However, it becomes clearer and clearer throughout the book that we have here a latter day Das Kapital. Aristide and Castro secure lavish praise repeatedly; at one point Farmer says criticism of Cuba makes his "blood boil". Farmer says that the Marxist worldview surely cannot be denied, as there is obviously a social war in which the rich of all nations attempt to opress the downtrodden masses for their own ends. His list of villains includes Woodrow Wilson, FDR, Frederick Douglas ("who served as ambassador to, and effectively enforced the Monroe Doctrine in Haiti"), and Mother Teresa (who was once in a photograph with Baby Doc Duvalier). Farmer's motto is from a Cuban politica poster, "patria es humanidad"- the only true nation is humanity. And at one point when a post-communist Russian colonl asks him is America is a democracy, he says anyone who is rich claims to be a democracy; "Americans are lazy democrats"; and surely anyone who is poor or sick is not a member of a democracy.

Clearly this book illustrates that Stalinism is alive and well in very high places in this country. The ideology responsible for more deaths than National Socialism still dominates the universities and popular cultures of the free-est nation on Earth. What really scares me is that this is what I, and all other incoming Brandeis freshmen, were supposed to read over the summer for our new student forum. What in the name of G-d does that tell me!?!

MarkDel, I hope you do return once you get a chance to cool off. Also, ould you please send me yur e-mail so I can contact you? You can reach me at superamerican@hotmail.com or unilateralist@hotmail.com .

I can assure you mark is sane and healthy, just busy.  I will send you Mark's email address privately.  I'm sure he wouldn't mind, as you and he are pretty old-fashioned moderate republicans with quite a bit in common.  I suspect that we won't be hearing from you quite as much after classes begin.  Good luck, and get off the computer and out into the beautiful New England countryside once in a while.  

[M]

Soulty, you may be right. I'm starting to worry that the Aquinians may have a point, and that the whol natural cycle of civilizations is kicking in, with the power in decay and barbarians at the fronteir.

Angus, thanks. I probably will become less prolific once classes start, but I hope I'll be able to stick around at least till November, and I have to say this forum has become a very big deal to me and I really like a lot of the people here, and there are a few I feel are friends or the next thing to it, especially Soulty and Gus. Maybe I'll get to see beautiful New England girls along with the countryside, too. Well, I will surely see them, but I'm hoping to actually see them.

I was just in Borders, and I went to my second favorite section, political science and current events. (Surpassed by Sci-fi/Fantasy, where I went first). Just standing there and looking at the books, I felt overwhelmed and depressed. Yes, even in Houston, only two authors get an entire row- Noam Chomsky and Ralph Nader. Most of the junk there was cheap junk, with titles like The Bush Dyslexicon, Bushwacked, The Lies of George Bush, Dynasty, The Why I Hate Bush Reader,. But some of the work there obviously was Stalinist, I say this at the risk of sounding like Joe McCarthy, Johnny Iselin, and Ann Coulter but consider the following:

The New Rulers of the World, by an Australian named Pilger. It dwells at length on how Suharto was a Western creation (um- the Non-Aligned Movement?); propagates the anti-semitic lies of a "Jenin Massacre" during operation Defensive Shield, and claims the Israelis attacked not because of the Netanya Passover suicide bombing which wiped out 27 people, but because Arafat and Hamas were on the verge of ending the intifada and Sharon and Mofaz wanted it to continue; and concludeswith a tragic eulogy on the First Australians, an example of Imperialism unchecked, what Bush and Blair stand for today.

There were only a handful of conservative leaning volumes, vastly overshadowed by Cruel and Unusual and Hetsgaard's In the Shadow of the Eagle (or something similar), but I selected a couple, nearly depleting the store's entire colection. These were Bill Bennett's Why We Fight,and a volume called The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the 21st Century, by one Thomas P. M. Barnett, which laid out a much more believable view of the coming decades and looked absolutely fascinating.

Anyway, all this nastiness sure has gotten to Bush. You can see it in his face. He looks tired, and he looks sad, and he looks beaten. I sure am gonna miss him. I really do love that guy.

[The Duke]

M and Soulty,

The American people aren't losing heart because what Bush says is hard to hear.  They're losing heart because we aren't making progress for the lives we're losing.  They know something's wrong but can't pinpoint it.  Kerry also says he thinks something is wrong, and people want to believe that he knows what the problem is and can fix it.  They're wrong of course, but its Bush's responsibility to get that hangdog look off his face and get the job done.

Classic "Charismatic Leadership" model.  Bush's popularity is based on success of his military policies.  Victory on the field equals victory in elections.

[M]

In Vietnam, we were able to almost completely annihilate the Viet Kong. The problem, and the reason we had no chance of winning, was that we ended up fighting NVPA dressed as Viet Kong and funded and equipped by the USSR and the PRC, and we weren't allowed to take Hanoi for various reasons. Michael Ledeen suggests that Iranian Revolutionary Guards, Hezbollah terrorists, ane members of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's al-Qaeda linked group are puring in from Iran and Syria, which fund, equip, and provide a safe haven for them. In other words, to really win we have to invade Iran, something Ledeen strongly supports.

I must say that  I am much more worried about the dangers of invading Iran. I do think it is oreferable to them getting nukes and so may became necessary, but I sure hope to avois it and think it would be extremely difficult. (An Osirak stle strike I think is a very good idea. MOABs can hit there underground junk, and the Israelis know exactly where it is from Ofek-5 satellite photos. But the price could be very high- Shehab-3 and 4 missiles, some packed with nerve gas, raining down on Israel; the Arrow-2 is th best thing of its kind, but it was built for Scuds, which travel at half the speed.)

Anyway, in the near term we are not going to capture Teheran any more than we were oing to take Peking in 1964. So the war just might be unwinnable. Here is why I have hope. Our process of Iraqization has been much bigger, better, and sooner than Vietnamization ever wad. If in a year's time we have good Iraqis fighting bad invaders, mostly Iranians and Lebanese, I think that god new Iraq has a chance. Even most Shi'ite Iraqis retain the national hatred for the "subhuman" Persians.

So see? I'm heartening already. The forces of right and reason still have a very good fighting chance, thanks to the courageous work of President Bush. Health care, though, that I am really worried about.