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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Peter Dierks who wrote (693212)	7/21/2005 6:37:45 PM
From: JBTFD	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 769670

"Who says that all posters have skepticism. I have fallen into the trap wanting to believe something badly enough to not check the facts. Everyone has. The nature of SI and other BBs is that people post fast enough that they sometimes let their enthusiasm get ahead of their skepticism." I think talk radio and other really biased sources of information take advantage of this aspect of human nature also. Because the goal is to get people on your side, not give them the whole truth. It is my firm opinion that the actual truth is always complex and never to the soul advantage of one side or the other exclusively. Each side tells the part of the truth that they can spin to their advantage, or they make up just plain old lies to base their position on. I will give one example that will probably make some people angry, but it is a perfect example of what I am talking about. This is the example of the question, "why do the terrorists hate us?" and the completely simplistic answer given by this administration. "They hate our democracy. They hate our freedoms". This answer is at the same time true and not true. It is true that there are some fundamentalist Moslems who feel democracy is not good and who feel our freedoms may lead to degradation spiritually for many people. The part of this that is not true is the idea that this simplistic statement completely covers the entirety of the grievances the Islamic world has against us. First of all it ignores statements made by the leaders of the terrorists who many times delineate some very specific reasons they are willing to die in opposition to our policies. Second of all, it rather naively ignores the possibility that they might have some legitimate grievances against various US policies that relate to their nation states. We have never had an honest discussion in this country about this topic. And we probably never will. Maybe it is because the people in general don't care, or maybe it is because the leaders of this country don't want to take on the difficult task of justifying our foreign policy in public. As long as our foreign policy consists of taking from people who are powerless to protect what they have, there will be some of them who resort to terrorism as a response.