I personally believe dKos is one of the most important communities on earth, indeed, dKos may be as responsible as any other community for saving this planet from the neofascist cabal so eloquently expressed by the current administration.
So feel free to troll rate this diary, but whining about the recent OBL tape is wrong. Kiss my ass wrong.
Go to the Aljazeera site and read the excerpts of bin Laden's "speech."
Yes, they are only excerpts, so they only reveal part of the substance (and leave the reader to determine whether, and which, is "truth").
With the exception of the boast of 9/11, little bin Laden said, in those excerpts, is different from what I believe in my heart or from what most (IMO) dKos participants believe in their hearts.
As OBL (maybe?) said, they didn't attack Sweden. They didn't attack "freedom." They attacked the most visible symbol of the culture they presume is attacking them, and I can't define "them" except in general terms (Arabs? Muslims? Palestinians? Brown skinned people who live wherever there is oil? (Sorry, "Floridians" comes also to mind of late)).
I know for sure who they attacked.
Here's something else OBL (may have) said:
Despite entering the fourth year after Sept. 11, Bush is still deceiving you and hiding the truth from you and therefore the reasons are still there to repeat what happened.
Duh...I know that's true, and anyone with even half a brain knows that's true, the only variable is whether we can prevent a "repeat." And while Dept. of Homeland Security people have time to make a toy store owner in Oregon get rid of her faux Rubic's Cubes, almost nine out of ten shipping containers that come into the Port of Miami aren't inspected (to quote JK at 11 am Friday morning at Expo Centre in Orlando, Fla., and he was strong).
Here's something else OBL (maybe?) said to describe the moral basis for his actions:
In those difficult moments [when he decided to attack us] many emotions came over me which are hard to describe, but which produced an overwhelming feeling to reject injustice and a strong determination to punish the unjust.
That's the biggest single reason why John Kerry will be our next president: to reject injustice. We won't punish the unjust, we don't do that in America anymore. but we'll stop them, hopefully, for a generation or two. That's the least we owe our children.
OBL chides America when he says how easy it was:
We had no difficulty in dealing with Bush and his administration because they resemble the regimes in our countries, half of which are ruled by the military and the other half by the sons of kings ... They have a lot of pride, arrogance, greed and thievery.
That's probably the second biggest reason John Kerry will be our next president, and try to imagine any but the most melt-brained idiot who doesn't also know that, party preference be damned.
9/11 likely would never have occurred if we, the USA, did what we tell our children we do when they're in sixth grade history class.
If we worked to empower freedom and equality around the globe, instead of American commercial hegemony, then the myth we all want to believe - that people everywhere love us and want to emulate us - would ring true.
It doesn't, anywhere, except maybe in marbled board rooms in Riyadh and Frankfurt and Miami.
The values that drove the framers of the U.S. Constitution, and the organizers and fighters of the American Revolution, and most of us out campaigning now, aren't American values. They are human values.
They have been best expressed here in America, until 2000, that is, and they are now best expressed in this dKos community, which reflects of course a larger, rising tide of American sentiment approaching Tsunami intensity.
B/C and their fascist neocon cabal may have successfully and even permanently established "reality" for Fox News drones, but altogether they number about one-ninth the crowd of folks who paid $8 to see Fahrenheit 911.
They haven't established reality for me, or anyone else I know. As much as I am ashamed to say it, excerpts from the bin Laden tape speak more truth than our own specially selected president.
The fact is, we fingered bin Laden as the perpetrator of 9/11 back on 9/12. Now, three years later, that perpetrator is on worldwide TV, and as much as we pooh-pooh the impact of that video or discredit his words, the words he happens to be saying are true. And we aren't the only people wwho know that, the whole world is watching.
OBL seems healthy and alert. And 1,100+ of our American men and women lay dead in their graves, our national wealth squandered, our grandchildren indebted and the coffers of Halliburton and other corporate Satans too numerous to mention way fatter.
Don't try to parse that last sentence. Instead, go look at what's happened to Halliburton stock over the past three years.
Nothing I can think of can more clearly illustrates the powerful point JK has been driving home for three months now: Bush has failed us, Bush has betrayed us, Bush has sold our children into slavery to pay off his debt to the war munitioners.
This dKos community is way bigger and better than the hand-wringers. Our security is in our hands. My hand has already voted. And for the next three days my ass will be out on the street convincing anyone I can to do the same. The answer is clear to me.
I hope it is for everyone else here as well.
And when it's over, I'm going to do everything I can to help John Kerry reshape the American project in a way that is just and equitable. America should be a microcosm of the world. Every ethnic taste and color is represented in our culture, and that makes our culture the best there ever was or will be.
As the song goes, we can bomb the world to pieces, but we can't bomb it into peace.