Giuliani. A real genius that one. Put his anti-terrorism command center in the number one, already been attacked terrorist target in NYC.
How anyone can be dumb enough to think that idiot could do a good job is beyond me.
[quote]JeffR wrote:
lixy wrote:
JeffR wrote:
I’ve predicted that Rudy would have to alter his gun stance. Now, he’s doing it.
You vote for a demagogue without scrupulousness? Nice.
How about somebody who believes in what he stands for, instead of a swingy douche who’ll say anything as long as it gets him votes?
lixy wrote:
JeffR wrote:
I’ve predicted that Rudy would have to alter his gun stance. Now, he’s doing it.
You vote for a demagogue without scrupulousness? Nice.
How about somebody who believes in what he stands for, instead of a swingy douche who’ll say anything as long as it gets him votes?
Looks like it’s me against about seven people (eight if you count lixy).
I guess I still come out ahead ):.
Mike, I appreciate your approach to this issue. You might be surprised if I told you that I can understand your apprehension.
However, I must be in the minority on this board. I view the struggle against against radical Islam as the number one issue facing the U.S. today.
The NUMBER ONE ISSUE. It’s ramifications are dizzying.
Of all the candidates, I trust Rudy to deal effectively with this. That means doing whatever is necessary to make sure that nukes/sarin don’t end up in the hands of lixy’s pals.
I understand that there will be some old dogmas that will be challened.
However, I trust that our checks and balances will allow us to weather this storm.
This is a totally new kind of war. The strategy and the tactics must evolve. Now the enemy attacks whenever he has the weaponry. No warning. Just death and destruction.
I am quite frightened and chagrined when I hear some intelligent people supporting ron paul’s approach to this issue.
WE CANNOT RETREAT INTO FORTRESS AMERICA. It won’t work. They’ll come after us. Worse, they are probably already here.
Now Mike, I’ve written most of this in the past. I’m not going to rehash all of it. However, we have a completely different outlook on this war.
I spend quite a bit of time gameplanning and working to prevent attacks. If you guys knew just how easily some very nasty weapons are acquired and used, I’ll bet you’d be more frightened.
In summary, I don’t agree with everything Rudy says or does. However, I’m 100% behind him in his determination to kill bin laden and others who are our MORTAL ENEMIES.
Of all the candidates, I see him willing to track them all down. Kill all he can. Thwart them before they attack. Go to the American people time and again with updates.
However, I understand that I won’t know everything going on. In fact, in an information war, I don’t think it prudent to tell me everything. I’m going to have to trust in both Rudy and the other members of our Republic to do the right thing.
It’s the only way to win this kind of war.
JeffR
[/quote]
Is Terrorism a Mortal Threat?
by Patrick J. Buchanan
by Patrick J. Buchanan
It may have been politically incorrect to publish the thoughts on the sixth anniversary of 9-11, but what Colin Powell had to say to GQ magazine needs to be heard.
Terrorism, said Powell, is not a mortal threat to America.
“What is the greatest threat facing us now?” Powell asked. “People will say it’s terrorism. But are there any terrorists in the world who can change the American way of life or our political system? No. Can they knock down a building? Yes. Can they kill somebody? Yes. But can they change us? No. Only we can change ourselves. So what is the great threat we are facing?”
History and common sense teach that Powell speaks truth.
Since 9-11, 100,000 Americans have been murdered �?? as many as we lost in Vietnam, Korea and Iraq combined. Yet, not one of these murders was the work of an Islamic terrorist, and all of them, terrible as they are, did not imperil the survival of our republic.
Terrorists can blow up our buildings, assassinate our leaders, and bomb our malls and stadiums. They cannot destroy us. Assume the worst. Terrorists smuggle an atom bomb into New York harbor or into Washington, D.C., and detonate it.
Horrible and horrifying as that would be �?? perhaps 100,000 dead and wounded �?? it would not mean the end of the United States. It would more likely mean the end of Iran, or whatever nation at which the United States chose to direct its rage and retribution.
Consider. Between 1942 and 1945, Germany and Japan, nations not one-tenth the size of the United States, saw their cities firebombed, and their soldiers and civilians slaughtered in the millions. Japan lost an empire. Germany lost a third of its territory. Both were put under military occupation. Yet, 15 years later, Germany and Japan were the second and third most prosperous nations on Earth, the dynamos of their respective continents, Europe and Asia.
Powell’s point is not that terrorism is not a threat. It is that the terror threat must be seen in perspective, that we ought not frighten ourselves to death with our own propaganda, that we cannot allow fear of terror to monopolize our every waking hour or cause us to give up our freedom.
For all the blather of a restored caliphate, the “Islamofascists,” as the neocons call them, cannot create or run a modern state, or pose a mortal threat to America. The GNP of the entire Arab world is not equal to Spain’s. Oil aside, its exports are equal to Finland’s.
Afghanistan and Sudan, under Islamist regimes, were basket cases. Despite the comparisons with Nazi Germany, Iran is unable to build modern fighters or warships and has an economy one-twentieth that of the United States, at best. While we lack the troops to invade Iran, three times the size of Iraq, the U.S. Air Force and Navy could, in weeks, smash Iran’s capacity to make war, blockade it and reduce its population to destitution. Should Iran develop a nuclear weapon and use it on us or on Israel, it would invite annihilation.
As a threat, Iran is not remotely in the same league with the Soviet Union of Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev, or Mao’s China, or Nazi Germany, or Imperial Japan, or even Mussolini’s Italy.
And why would Tehran, which has not launched a war since the revolution in 1979, start a war with an America with 10,000 nuclear weapons? If the Iranians are so suicidal, why have they not committed suicide in 30 years by attacking us or Israel?
What makes war with Iran folly is that an all-out war could lead to a break-up of that country, with Persians, Azeris, Kurds, Arabs and Baluchis going their separate ways, creating fertile enclaves for al-Qaida recruitment and training.
Yet, while talking common sense, Gen. Powell himself reverted to cliché. “America could not survive without immigration.”
But this is nonsense. From 1789 to 1845, we had almost no immigration, before the Irish came. Did we not survive? From 1925 to 1965, we had almost no immigration. Yet, we conquered the Great Depression, won World World II, became the greatest power on earth and ended those four decades with an Era of Good Feeling under Ike and JFK unlike any we had known before.
Was the America of the 1940s and 1950s in which Colin Powell grew up in danger of not surviving for lack of immigration?
In our time, Pakistan, Ethiopia and Czechoslovakia have split apart. The Soviet Union and Yugoslavia have broken up into two dozen nations. Terrorism had nothing to do with it. Tribalism had everything to do with it.
Race, ethnicity and religion are the fault lines along which nations like Iraq are coming apart. If America ends, it will not be the work of an Osama bin Laden. As Abraham Lincoln said, it will be by our own hand, it will be by suicide.
September 22, 2007
[quote]Mick28 wrote:
If you think that there would be ZERO terrorism if we hadn’t been as aggressive, you should think again. [/quote]
Wouldn’t be ZERO, that much is a given. Groups around the world have always used terrorist tactics and will, no matter what.
Yes, you are killing some terrorists. But, for every one you eliminate you end up killing a few innocents. And that’s the unacceptable part. With every woman killed by an American in Iraq (US soldier or mercenary), you increase the chances of her kids seeking revenge the only way they can: By blowing up random Americans. Even the CIA acknowledges that the current “strategy” creates more trouble than it fixes.
Realize that the threat we are facing today from Ben Laden and his ilk, has nothing to do with the Nazis. The Germans had a country behind them, with its industry, infrastructure, people, etc. Al-Qaeda is a stealthy entity with no centralization. You cannot defeat it militarily. In fact, it feeds on violence to broaden its base.
Your die-hard partisanship blur your judgment - and it shows.
Excellent post,Orion.I find the use of fear politics to be reprehensible,in any country,at any time.
But why would we expect any better of politicians,despicable beings that they are?
[quote]GreenMountains wrote:
Giuliani. A real genius that one. Put his anti-terrorism command center in the number one, already been attacked terrorist target in NYC.
How anyone can be dumb enough to think that idiot could do a good job is beyond me.[/quote]
To paraphrase the guy that plays the jewish detective on Law and Order : SVU - He was seen walking around the city on 9/11 because he had no fucking office, he had nowhere to fucking go.
[quote]Mick28 wrote:
Why the fuck do you have to run off into left field?
[/quote]
How is that left field? Where do you think Rudy’s war on terror is going to take this place?
[quote]Mick28 wrote:
Innocents? Are you kidding?
How many “innocents” do you think we killed when we dropped the bomb on Hiroshima?[/quote]
WTF? What have Iraqis done to you? Did they attack your country?
Are their kids’ lives any less worthy than yours?
“Why of course the people don’t want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship… Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.” – Hermann Goering
What’s citizenship gotta do with anything? Are you under the impression that the 9/11 crew was from Iraq?
Look around. Many - if not most - of your compatriots realize that the Iraq war is criminal.
Boo-hoo.
I lost a cousin in a terrorist attack in Algeria. I was meters away from a detonation that killed dozens on the 16th May 2003.
What have you been through?
[quote]lixy wrote:
I lost a cousin in a terrorist attack in Algeria. I was meters away from a detonation that killed dozens on the 16th May 2003.
What have you been through?[/quote]
Do you believe the people who killed your cousin in Algeria or the ones who killed dozens on May 16th, 2003 deserve to die?
Or do you think that the US caused your cousin’s death and almost your own in the other explosion?
Comparing religious extremism to Nazism is a poor comparison. You clearly don’t understand terrorism, like most republicans. None of your statements in that diatribe even make any sense. Perhaps you should leave the thinking to the big boys.
[quote]Gkhan wrote:
Do you believe the people who killed your cousin in Algeria or the ones who killed dozens on May 16th, 2003 deserve to die? [/quote]
They must to be hunted down. In the case of Algeria, they were probably set loose after the “national reconciliation”. In Morocco, they got shot after an expeditive lawsuit.
One thing is certain; The solution isn’t military.
[quote]Mick28 wrote:
Fitnessdiva wrote:
Comparing religious extremism to Nazism is a poor comparison.
The comparison was of foes, not of beliefs systems. No two enemies of the USA have ever been exactly the same. But my comparison is quite valid when it comes to your inane comment: “We’re just creating more terrorists”. Honestly that is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard out of the left. You should get better talking points.
As I stated, every enemy grows in numbers until they are cut down…by total defeat.
[/quote]
You still don’t understand that the differences between the two makes the comparison totally invalid. No matter how many names you call me, what I said is still completely true. Your resort to name calling proves you don’t understand any of it, or you understand and know I’m right.
[quote]Fitnessdiva wrote:
Comparing religious extremism to Nazism is a poor comparison. You clearly don’t understand terrorism, like most republicans. None of your statements in that diatribe even make any sense. Perhaps you should leave the thinking to the big boys.[/quote]
You are bitter, bitter, bitter.
Every time I see your name as the “latest poster,” I know that I’m going to be in for a single acerbic paragraph calling someone an idiot for disagreeing with you.
Ever hear of catching flies with honey?
[quote]Mick28 wrote:
lixy wrote:
…
Are their kids’ lives any less worthy than yours?
Yes.
Now get the fuck off this thread and go tend to your sheep.
[/quote]
This has got to be one of the stupidest comments ever. Anyone that does not put his kids lives above others is a liar or a lunatic.
[quote]nephorm wrote:
Fitnessdiva wrote:
Comparing religious extremism to Nazism is a poor comparison. You clearly don’t understand terrorism, like most republicans. None of your statements in that diatribe even make any sense. Perhaps you should leave the thinking to the big boys.
You are bitter, bitter, bitter.
Every time I see your name as the “latest poster,” I know that I’m going to be in for a single acerbic paragraph calling someone an idiot for disagreeing with you.
Ever hear of catching flies with honey?[/quote]
If you could point to any post where I’ve called someone a name, I’d appreciate it if you would being that you are going to say that I do. on the otherhand I’ve been called quite a few names for going against neoconservative thinking that quite a few members have on this board. That being said, I will stand up for myself.
[quote]Fitnessdiva wrote:
Fitnessdiva wrote:
Comparing religious extremism to Nazism is a poor comparison. You clearly don’t understand terrorism, like most republicans. None of your statements in that diatribe even make any sense. Perhaps you should leave the thinking to the big boys.
[/quote]
You are right. I should have used the verb “imply” instead of “call.”
[quote]
If you could point to any post where I’ve called someone a name, I’d appreciate it if you would being that you are going to say that I do. on the otherhand I’ve been called quite a few names for going against neoconservative thinking that quite a few members have on this board. That being said, I will stand up for myself.[/quote]
Remember the old folk-wisdom: two wrongs don’t make a right!