[lit-ideas] Re: Shall Iran blink or shall we?
- From: "John McCreery" <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 27 Apr 2006 16:04:41 +0900
And some presidents, a Harding or Buchanan, for example, were
thoroughly deserving of dispraise. When will you learn that you do
your case no good by cherry-picking evidence? When will you
acknowledge all those idiot/ideologues who told us that Iraq would be
a cakewalk, that our troops would be greeted with showers of rose
petals, and that a budget director who predicted a cost of 200 billion
was way over the top?
You opponents are willing to grant you that many Muslims hate us (more
every day and no wonder given our bull in a China shop, the bomb is OK
for our cronies but not for you, you dirty little raghead approach to
diplomacy).
We also acknowledge that an air campaign could mess up Iran pretty bad.
But you still haven't told us what then? When chances are the Strait
of Hormuz is blocked, oil from the Middle East is choked off, the
number of terrorists multiplies, fissionable materials in the former
USSR remain unsecured, our ports, bridges, chemical and nuclear plants
remain unsecure.....
All you have is the utterly bizarre playground bully idea that you can
secure capitulation from people as nuts as you are by threatening to
kick their ass, and that once we kick some butt, everybodys going to
be too scared to figure out how to hit back. And who are you counting
on when they do? The clowns who mismanaged Katrina sure as hell aren't
ready to cope with anything really dirty going down. Oy, veh.
John
On 4/27/06, Lawrence Helm <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>
>
> As Fukuyama writes on page 188, "An American politician could harbor
> ambitions to be a Caesar or a Napoleon, but the system would allow him or
> her to be no more than a Jimmy Carter or Ronald Reagan – hemmed in by
> powerful institutional constraints and political forces on all sides, and
> forced to realize their ambition by being the people's 'servant' rather than
> their master."
>
>
>
> Presidents, perhaps all of them, have had people rabidly hate them. We look
> back at the evidence of what these presidents did and find they were just
> ordinary presidents doing the best they could. Some of them made mistakes,
> but the allegations of those who hated them, and virtually all of them had
> those who hated them, were largely unjustified. History looks back on many
> of these haters as being unbalanced. . People hated and tried to kill a
> number of our former presidents and we hardly know why. They were unhinged
> by their hatred. We look at the cartoons attacking Monroe, Teddy Roosevelt,
> Harding, FDR, Truman and marvel. Those doing the attacking and hating are
> but footnotes in the history books, testimonies to the difficulties those
> presidents had to overcome in order to perform their duties as servants of
> the American people.
>
>
>
>
> Lawrence
>
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> [mailto:lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Andreas Ramos
> Sent: Wednesday, April 26, 2006 10:08 PM
> To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: Shall Iran blink or shall we?
>
>
>
> From: "Lawrence Helm" <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
>
>
>
>
>
> > On page 193 of The End of History and the Last Man, Fukuyama writes, "We
>
> > value praise or recognition of our worth much more highly if it comes from
>
> > somebody we respect, or whose judgment we trust, and most of all if it is
>
> > freely given rather than coerced. (...) Or, to take a more political
>
> > example, the satisfaction of a Stalin or a Saddam Hussein on hearing the
>
> > adulation of a crowd that has been bused into a stadium and forced to
> cheer
>
> > on pain of death is presumably less than that experienced by a democratic
>
> > leader like a Washington or a Lincoln when accorded genuine respect by a
>
> > free people.
>
>
>
>
>
> When I read that paragraph a few weeks ago, I thought about Bush.
>
>
>
> He was here in Palo Alto a few years ago. He came back last Friday for two
> days.
>
>
>
> " ... when accorded genuine respect by a free people."
>
>
>
> Let's see: it wasn't announced at all that Bush would be here. No mention in
> the papers.
>
> Why? It would give the population enough time to organize demonstrations.
>
>
>
> On Friday afternoon, Bush shows up and is taken to a secret meeting.
>
>
>
> He then went to Stanford. Or, tried to go to Stanford. People in Palo Alto
> blocked the
>
> streets to keep him out. He had to cancel the meeting and was taken to
> another undisclosed
>
> location.
>
>
>
> That is genuine respect, shown by a free people. Bush is a liar and he is
> corrupt. His
>
> administration is in shambles. He can not show his face in public in
> America.
>
>
>
> yrs,
>
> andreas
>
> www.andreas.com
>
--
John McCreery
The Word Works, Ltd.
55-13-202 Miyagaya, Nishi-ku
Yokohama 220-0006, JAPAN
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