"I often wonder if I'd be here in an armchair typing away on an Internet discussion forum, making a very comfortable living as an engineer, having gone to an Ivy League university, and even being born here in America, had America been too "isolationist" to defend South Korea."
Very probably not. So?
Not my problem. No insult intended, but people have been killing other people since the dawn of time, from neolithic tribesmen to Alexander to Genghis Kahn to Adolf Hitler to Mao to Shrubya.
To tell Americans living in Kansas and California, and even in Portland, that they must travel 8000 miles away and die in some trenches so that a government in the south can be protected from a government in the north is a repudiation of _everything_ the United States Constitution was established for.
Think about it. Deeply.
Read the Constitution. Read the Federalist Papers. Read the other Founding documents. Nowhere is it said that free men in America will be sent to fight in foreign wars, no matter how noble the cause, no matter how many "entangling alliances" have been established.
BTW, think deeply about our "alliances" with so many other countries. When have they ever come to _our_ defense? I mean when we were attacked, not when they they were on the same side as us in some foreign war. Why have alliances with foreign countries when all the fighting is "one way," with the U.S. entering World War I (certainly not _our_ war...99% of the people cannot give a coherent explanation of what World War I was even about), entering World War II (90% of the American people give the wrong answer here, too), entering the Korean War (a civil war between two factions), Vietnam, the Gulf War(s), and the Yugoslav war (where the balkanization was repeated again, and where even the immediate neighbors were uninterested in intervening).
Again, there is nothing in the United States Constitution, nothing in the Bill of Rights, saying that free men would be used as cannon fodder in foreign wars where the U.S. was not attacked.
We should withdraw from all treaties and leave Germany to defend itself, leave South Korea to boycott their McDonald's and spit on Americans and ultimately be overrun by DPRK troops who will rape their wives and children (I, for one, will laugh uproariously at seeing these silly Koreans slaughtered as they wave their "No War" signs while Americans are defending them).
This is all why I am so happy to see the clusterfsck unfolding in Iraq. The U.N. is shown to be inept and the American people will not support it (I hope Ted Turner has enough billiions left to keep them afloat), NATO is in disarray, and the body bags coming back from Iraq will burn off this mood of adventurism for decades to come.
My main concern is that if the war goes badly (and I mean in terms of budget and lives lost, not whether Saddam is pushed out or killed), the Demoncrats will win the next election just as Clinton won over Bush Sr. in 1992. And they will raise taxes enormously, to soak the rich and reward their welfare mothers and other "people of color" base. Which means the people of whiteness, like me, will be fscked again.
This country needs to have its hard drive reformatted.
"No need to mention the ingrates in Seoul who think Bush is "more evil" than Kim Jong Il. I hear the United States also has its fair share of Blame-America-First fanatics. (I can't drive through downtown Portland without running into a bunch of them.) All of them are practicing the very freedoms that American troops died to protect."
No Americans have died to protect freedoms for a very long time. The deaths of American cannon fodder in the last N wars have been to prop up one dictator over another, to protect oil wells (sounds conspiratorial, but it's true, witness our involvement with Kuwait and Iraq but not Rwanda and Burundi), and to project American "values."
The 55,000 dead in Vietnam did not "die to protect our values."
And in the past couple of years, more constitutional rights have been undermined (PATRIOT, Homeland Security, gutting of the First, Second, Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments, for starters) than have been "protected" in the past century.
IMO, all of those in leadership positions in recent government should be tried and executed.
--Tim May |
