Every well informed foreign policy expert, including Senator Obama, is in agreement. The largest, and most dangerous, nation to pose a threat to world peace is Pakistan. And, the lid has just come off.
Possessing nuclear weapons, involved in a decades long simmering war with India, barely controlling vicious religious violence, and with a lengthy history of bad political leadership, Pakistan is now in the hands of two political factions that will barely acknowledge each others existence.
The departure of Pervez Musharraf has left Pakistan adrift, and giddy with its newly found freedoms. Freedoms that may pose a danger to the entire world if solutions to the looming economic and political crisis can not be found.
I didn't want to write about this, because thinking about it makes me angry and depressed at the same time. Our functioning Democracy has been made increasingly dysfunctional by the Bush Administration. Police have been granted far broader powers to spy on American citizens, according to a new Washington Post article. Spencer S. Hsu and Carrie Johnsondescribe the expansion of police powers at the 18,000 local branches of law enforcement in the United States.
It must be my latent masochistic tendencies which lead me to scan the PUMA sites, but I keep hoping against hope that I will find a ray of light in the dark minds of the Obama haters. Like an addict eyeing a crack pipe sitting on the table across the room, trying not pounce on it; each day I think "today I will not look at them and it will ok... really I’m fine ... I can handle this. Well ... maybe just a peek. Today could be different!" Then I look and realize I should have known better...
You have not yet announced your selection of VP running mate. Before you make your announcement, please meditate on the following two words which have prevented Democrats from breaking 50% in the past 9 out of 10 presidential elections:
The height of editorial irresponsibility. This article is an atrocity and deserves no place in our national discussion, not to mention a place in the New York Times. Would the NYTimes ever publish an op-ed by an Iranian calling for a preemptive, possibly nuclear strike versus Israel? No way.
I thought it might be illuminating to share my political journey; Hillary and I are almost the same age. My first specific political memory centered around the duck-and-cover, hide-under-our-desks, exercises that were a regular feature of my early school life from age 5 on. I knew enough about nuclear war to be terrified. We lived one mile away from an air force base, and I used to go out to the backyard, look up at the planes, and try to determine if they were American or Russian. What I thought I could do about it, I don't remember. I even checked a book out of the library on aircraft identification. When I heard Joseph Stalin died when I was 7, I remember asking if that meant no one would drop atom bombs on us
In 1954, when I was 9, I had a severe case of the measles and my Grandma Nolan came to help nurse me. My eyes hurt so much I had to stay in a darkened room and couldn't read. Grandma was listening to the Joseph McCarthy army hearings. Hatred of McCarthy's voice might have shaped my entire political development.
I have got a very deep dark guttural feeling that sometime in the next couple of months or so, your country will be in the midst of ANOTHER illegal attack on a sovereign nation. This time, perhaps, armed with nuclear weapons. Regardless, it will bring on a world wide retaliation that will make 911 look like childs-play.
As the primary is all but decided, and Democrats are largely focused on defeating McCain at the polls this fall, it's worth remembering that the current administration is not yet out of office, and still primarily composed of radicals, criminals, torturers, liars, thieves, and basic tormentors of the other 99% of humanity.
On May 8th, Jes Richardson, Leslie Angeline and Medea Benjamin of CodePink crashed a Hillary fundraiser and managed to unfurl a banner protesting her remarks about "obliterating" Iran. Clinton's dismissive reaction as Jes was led from the room was to hope that "he didn't step on any of the cookies or the cakes."
Well Hillary and supporters, I am sorry to have to go to this extreme, but here it is...
Warning: graphic picture of some cookies and cakes that got stepped on below the fold...
This then is the present situation. How do we perceive the problem of peace now? - Albert Schweitzer, 1952
I left a comment in Troutfishing's diary, quoting Omar Bradley and suggesting that Sens. McCain and Clinton also read Albert Schweitzer's 1952 Nobel Prize lecture, "The Problem of Peace". I think it's important and relevant enough to stand as a diary, as well.
I hear Hillary speak of destroying Iran and I am taken aback. How can any responsible person running for the highest office in our land speak so casually about such an event? Can she simply not know?
I am staring at a photograph of corpses.
As far as the eye can see, stretched out like some vast human landfill, they lie in heaps, twisted, distorted, flung into grotesque parodies of the people who, not long before, they were. The photo is not close up; we see none of the disgusting wounds or the infiltrating maggots (if indeed any insects have survived the carnage). What we see is a field of clearly charred and mangled bodies, lying in a smoky haze, while behind them, in a distance, stunned survivors stare at the wreckage of their city.
This was Hiroshima. This is one of ten photographs just released and featured in the The Robert L. Capp collection at the Hoover Institution Archives. The release that accompanies these photos, as well as a link to the photo I discuss above, may be found below the fold. But please note: the photo is indeed graphic.
While Americans dither around trying to elect a new President to replace the World’s Dumbest, Most Dangerous Leader, the answer to their country’s dire political mess lives to the south, in Venezuela!
Yes, folks, Hugo, the darling of the South Americas, is the answer that America is looking for. He will clean up their entrenched political corruption and wealth-based elitism in double-quick time.
To be fair, he won’t be able to be a full-time Commander in Chief because he has his own country to run and his own people to look after.
Today's Boston Globe has another editorial, entitled Hillary Strangelove, that points out how truly stupid and foolhardy Hillary Clinton's recently articulated commitment to "Bomb Bomb Bomb Bomb Iran" is, labeling the policy a "foolish and dangerous threat [that] was muted in domestic media coverage".
I was in grade school in Miami forty five years ago during the Cuban Missile Crisis. I remember vividly the "Atom Bomb Drills" in which the bell rang three times, air raid sirens went off, the teacher pulled the blinds and we got under our desks with our hands over our eyes and our heads between our legs so we wouldn’t be blinded by the flash. Blindness was the big fear that was impressed upon us by our teachers and our parents. We were scared but we were reassured that if we did these things, we would be Okay. I remember also that there were more and more absences from our classroom as students were taken out of school by their parents to prepare to flee for Jacksonville. My family stayed because my Dad said, "No damn commie is going to make me leave my home!" They had special prayer services at church. People stocked up on milk and toilet paper.
"I want the Iranians to know that if I'm the president, we will attack Iran," Clinton said. "In the next 10 years, during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them."
Somewhere Joe Lieberman is weeping tears of joy. John McCain, after being wakened from his nap, and told about Hillary's interview, resumes his fitful sleep humming a Beach Boy's tune, "Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb-bomb Iran...".
Just finished watching Clinton's 15 minutes on Countdown. Olbermann was respectful, and asked her questions that provided rope. It was the question about the security umbrella that gave me shivers. Under no uncertain terms, she has thrown down the gauntlet of nuclear war. That is one of those no-going-back moments. America should believe in the safety of Israel, but to threaten nuclear war against a nation that will attack Israel not through its professional army, but through state-sponsored terrorist activities is frightening. I'm no absolute pacifist. I believe in the use of force when it is necessary, such as the decision to go into Afghanistan following 9/11. But as Shakespeare once wrote, this way lies madness.
Humans have been around in their current form for let’s say 10,000 years. During that time, history reveals a continuum of strife, the rise and fall of many empires, the shrinking of the world, massive episodes of genocide, plagues, famines, wars, slavery, etc.
The major change in the last hundred years, sadly, is not in man’s nature but in the weapons of war. Thanks to man’s technological intelligence, there have been incredible changes. We’ve moved from the bi-plane to supersonic jets and from firing pistols at other pilots in open cockpits to using atomic bombs on civilians and developing intercontinental missiles that can virtually knock the eye lash off a fly thousands of miles away!
Looking at our current troubled world there are several scenarios that are fraught with the real danger. Iraq and Afghanistan bubble away and Iran hovers in the bomb-sights of some (Admiral Fallon's resignation is worrying). Pakistan is in political turmoil while South America is in the process of ridding itself of American influence. America seems intent on further expanding its hegemony and is setting up missile bases all over the world while China and Russia are busily expanding their spheres of influence and their military.
