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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Alighieri who wrote (174412)	8/24/2003 2:21:45 AM
From: tejek	Respond to of 1576165

Yes. If they had to have their own military industrial complex, if they had to develop their own drugs and medical technologies, if they had to have the infrastructure to support a large population, etc., these nations would fall appart at the seams. And if the United States didn't have all these things, they most certainly would have to (IF they were to maintain their standards of living). You have twisted the topic in which the initial assertion was that liberals are parasitic. His comments are a joke. The guy probably hasn't been to NYC let alone Sweden or Denmark. And apparently, he doesn't know their history. Like most neocons and other lower forms of life, he believes only in his pumped up version of Americana. I loved to put him in the same room with a bunch of Swedes.......they'd have a field day! <g> ted

To: Alighieri who wrote (174412)	8/24/2003 2:25:43 AM
From: tejek	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1576165

<font color=purple> A good article!<font color=black> ted **************************************************** richardreeves.com August 20, 2003 Iraq: A Bait and Switch Con Job BY RICHARD REEVES \| Universal Press Syndicate CHAPEL HILL, N.C. -- We were in North Carolina last Tuesday, delivering the last of our children to college. I left my wife at a Borders bookstore along the way to meet a friend for tea, then headed for Durham. I turned on the radio and heard that the United Nations had been bombed and Sergio Vieira de Mello was dead along with at least a dozen more UN employees. My wife’s colleagues and friends. She works for the United Nations, is director of one of their principal offices. I turned around, went back to the bookstore and told her what had happened. "The UN will stay in Iraq," she said. "So will we," I thought, meaning the Americans. "We," Americans, are victims of one of the great bait-and-switch con jobs in recent history--taken into harm’s way by history--ignorant ideologues. We were told we were in imminent danger, that a truly evil regime in Baghdad had the means and will to do us immediate and mortal harm, that the fools in "Old Europe" and the rest of the world were just cowards when they disagreed with us or tried to warn us it would not be that simple. Vice President Richard Cheney and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, leaders of the zealots, told us how easy it would be, particularly after the initial fighting ended. War on the cheap (they refused to talk about costs) and then Iraqis would greet us with flowers. "Many other countries will want to be with us when that evil regime is removed from power," Wolfowitz said last October. "Some who now criticize us will want to be part of that very positive opportunity to build a more peaceful and just and representative nation in this critically important Arab and Muslim country...Unlike the Balkans, Iraq’s recent history is not one of bloody ethnic conflict but rather one of bloody repression by the regime of all ethnic groups." On the day after the UN bombing, The Financial Times quoted Wolfowitz saying it was a mistake for Defense Department to assume Iraqi troops and police would be in place to maintain law and order as crowds cheered American leaders. The paper introduced his quote by saying, "Wolfowitz, in an unusual moment of candour..." The zealots seemed capable of saying anything to bait us into war -- and they have prevailed. Their dream is of an essentially a unilateralist, single superpower dream was of a Middle East controlled by the United States, with the rest of the world, led by the United Nations, cleaning up the mess and the details. Americans, deceived and conned, have woken up to find their magnificently trained, equipped and motivated young soldiers pinned down in a hostile environment, stalked by mujihadeen from other Islamic countries sneaking into the chaos of Iraq. It was not bad enough that terrorists were able to find ways to get into the United States and harm us greatly, we have now set ourselves up on their territory -- as targets. So what? The odds are that President Bush and his men will tough this out, at least politically. The irony of the moment is that the worse they do the better off they are. On a strategic level, they will argue that any withdrawal now will only embolden terrorists and governments that secretly support them. That is almost certainly true, as argued in an editorial in Newsday, the Long Island newspaper, on Thursday: "In the past, Washington has set bad examples of its fortitude by pulling out from Beirut after the bombing of the Marine barracks and from Somalia after the Special Forces casualties in Mogadishu. The world must know this won’t happen in Iraq, whatever it takes." Bush can get away with this because -- like his coalition junior partner Tony Blair in England -- his opposition is too intimidated by patriotism to argue with him. Most of the Democrats chasing the chance to run against him next year are now criticizing the war, mildly to be sure, but they voted for it when they had a chance to slow him down and ask what exactly he had in mind. They know, as the president knows, that now that our troops are in harm’s way, most politicians must "support" them, whatever that means. That’s the switch. RICHARD REEVES is the author of 12 books, including President Nixon: Alone in the White House. He has written for the New York Times, the New Yorker, Esquire and dozens of other publications. E-mail him at rr@richardreeves.com.

To: Alighieri who wrote (174412)	8/24/2003 2:37:58 AM
From: tejek	Respond to of 1576165

<font color=orange>I am sickened and outraged. The money pit and death trap will just get bigger and bigger. Some heads need to roll starting with rummy Rummie and wolfish Wolfie and mystic Cheney.<font color=black> ****************************************************** washingtonpost.com McCain: More Troops for Iraq By Mike Allen Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, August 24, 2003; Page A17 Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said after visiting Baghdad last week that President Bush needs to level with the public about the need for more U.S. troops as well as dramatically more spending to make postwar Iraq peaceful enough for democracy to unfold. McCain said that, when he returns from the Middle East, he plans to mount a heavy campaign on the issue in meetings with national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and other White House officials and during hearings of the Senate Armed Services Committee. "We need to tell the American people directly, and I think they'll support it," McCain said from Islamabad, Pakistan. "We must win this conflict. We need a lot more military, and I'm convinced we need to spend a lot more money." When Bush returns next weekend after a month at his ranch in Texas, one of the first political firestorms he will confront is a broad effort by Democrats on Capitol Hill and on the presidential campaign trail to convince the public that the administration's plans for postwar Iraq need rapid revision. Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), ranking minority member on the Foreign Relations Committee, said last week that the administration had "vastly underestimated" the policing and the work on Iraq's infrastructure that would be needed. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said commanders have assured him that the level of U.S. troops in Iraq is adequate. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell asked the United Nations to encourage members to send more troops to Iraq as part of a U.S.-led coalition, and Bush said he expects more foreign troops to arrive in Iraq. Aides said Bush plans to ask for more funds for Iraq in a supplemental budget request later this year. He has refused to give any range for how much might be needed. Joshua B. Bolten, director of the Office of Management and Budget, said Friday during a visit to The Washington Post that the amount will depend on the flow of oil, the security situation and the level of international contributions. "I think the president will be comfortable coming forward with his proposal when he feels confident enough in the numbers that we feel we can give it a good justification," Bolten said. "We thought the only responsible thing to do was wait until we had a clearer picture of what the answers to those questions would be." The skeptics' case has been bolstered by the continuing casualties among U.S. troops and by the administration's admission -- after the bombing Tuesday of U.N. headquarters in Baghdad -- that foreign-fed terrorism has become a grave threat in Iraq. McCain, who is leading a bipartisan House and Senate delegation throughout the Middle East, said Friday that he estimates the United States needs to add $13 billion to $15 billion for reconstruction alone, "as quick as we can spend it." He said the failure to restore basic services more widely could lead to more violence. "When it's 125 degrees and people don't have electricity and water, they get very unhappy," he said. "Time is not on our side." A Newsweek poll released yesterday found that 60 percent of respondents thought the United States was spending too much in Iraq and should scale back, and that 69 percent were concerned the United States would be bogged down for many years in Iraq without making much progress. The telephone poll of 1,011 adults was conducted Thursday and Friday, after Tuesday's bombing of the U.N. offices, and had a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points. © 2003 The Washington Post Company

To: Alighieri who wrote (174412)	8/24/2003 9:32:35 AM
From: i-node	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1576165

You have twisted the topic in which the initial assertion was that liberals are parasitic. No, I think I made the point clearly. It isn't just the military industrial complex these countries are missing. We develop important new drugs then sell them to these other countries for less money than we sell them to ourselves. I'm not saying we shouldn't (in fact, I'm one of those who opposes the attempts to limit such sales). But realistically, these countries have their standards of living ONLY because we, the citizens of the United States, aid in their support -- in more ways than one. As to whether or not they WANT our support, well, probably nobody does until they need it. Last, I would be remiss if I did not comment on a remarkable piece of nonsense you posted earlier about how your liberal customers come to you looking for tax evasion, while your conservative clients are more than happy to pay their taxes in silence. It is not nonsense, it is an observed fact over 17 years of tax practice. Hell, I was in practice with an extremist liberal partner. It was a chronic problem to keep him from accomodating these people. Why is this? Was my partner a bad person? Of course not. But he had a very difficult time visualizing the line between right and wrong. Do I blame the clients? No, because they hire a CPA and rely on his judgment as to where the lines are. At any rate, these are facts, you weren't there, and you thus have no basis for challenging what I've said.