Why Iraq will fail

I don't think that any government that is formed in Iraq will ever resemble a stable representative government for two basic reasons: the attitude of the people in Iraq towards government and the example that the US has provided through our behavior.

A representative government needs leaders that believe in the principles of good government. We had Jefferson, Washington, Adams, Franklin, and many other leaders who, while they were far from perfect and had their own weaknesses, they believed that government was not about getting the votes to do whatever you want to those who lost. It was about debate over political ideology and policy. I have not seen a single leader in Iraq who talks like this. All I see are people wanting to get as much as they can for their religious or ethnic as well as seeking revenge on other groups. In addition, there is no political party that is anything other than a group representing their ethnic/religious group. What would this country have become if we had Baptist, catholic, and Methodist parties or southern, northern, and western parties, or English, German, or Irish parties? It would be a violent mess just as Iraq is. This problem has not been explored in the media at all and is also being ignored by our government.

Our founding fathers did not believe that we should be engaged in a policy of forcing our form of government on others - instead we should be an example to follow. We should inspire not force. When our democracy is having so many problems as we are today we don't set a good example to anyone. We have shown the world that money buys influence and you win by destroying your opponents through personal attacks and dirty tricks. We aren't a good example to anyone.

There is not one positive sign coming out of the country or one positive example coming from ours. This is the biggest foreign policy disaster in my lifetime.

Sned-Rant

Sned-Rant

"We'll succeed unless we quit."

When Bush said this to reporters in Vietnam my jaw would have dropped if an insane statement like this from our dim-witted president wasn't part of a pattern of denial and inability to see the facts.

How can anyone in their right mind say this about Vietnam, much less, Iraq? To me there are two possibilities.

1) Bush is delusional - this is highly possible. When he was in Thailand he was filmed playing a local instrument similar to a xylophone. He looked like he was a kid in a special ed class discovering for the first time that when you hit the key with a mallet it makes a noise.

2) Bush is a liar and knows that Iraq is lost and is trying to bide his time till he leaves office so there is a possibility to blame it on someone else - for "cutting and running." This possibility is more likely. If this is indeed what Bush is doing he should be impeached right now. In the next two years we are likely to have another thousand of our young men and women die. These deaths will be even more needless than the 2,900 that have already been sacrificed for Bush's Folly.

We have not seen this kind of ineptitude in the presidency since James Buchanan (1857-1861) who sat in office and did nothing as the nation moved towards civil war. Kind of a fitting analogy since the current occupant of the oval office is doing nothing to prevent a civil war in Iraq.

George W. Bush has been the worst thing to happen to this country since Richard Nixon and deserves Nixon's fate - to leave office in disgrace. He has disgraced the American people, our image, and our military. The Neo-Con movement needs to go down with this man as well. I didn't think anything could make me wish for a return to Reagan Republicans or better yet Goldwater Republicans.

Jesus H. Tap-Dancing Christ in a Sidecar! Mr. President you are (or have already) ruining my country. Please, for the love of god, leave office and let someone competent take your place.

Iraq is falling apart

I think we have reached a point where no matter what we do in Iraq it is not going to stop them from an all-out civil war. Our troops should be removed immediately - it is not worth it for another American to die for W's horrendous mistake. We are just making things worse and giving the Iraqis someone else to blame for their ethnic hatred other than themselves. One way or another they are going to have to come to grips with their ethnic differences. We are stuck in the middle of their civil and we cannot take sides because none of them offer any solutions. They just want to kill each other and grab power.

There are no leaders in Iraq that are calling for unity or even real democracy. As I have said before, democracy is based on differences in ideology not ethnic/religious differences. All of the elections they have had to this point have been votes stricly along ethnic lines. As soon as we pull out (whenever that may be) they will hold one more election and the group that wins (al Sadr's shei'ites) will take power and end any move towards democracy and beat the Sunnis and Kurds into submission. Dividing the country won't work because there are no hard borders between the three groups.

Learning from history is something the Bushies have refused to do. Not only should they have learned about the impossibility of our country to occupy another from Vietnam but also look at what happened in Yugoslavia after Tito left. A strongman willing to brutalize his people can hold a country like that together not a democracy. It sucks for the people who get on the wrong side of someone like Tito or Saddam but the other option is civil war, ethnic cleansing, and genocide.

W - dumb, dumb dumb!

Why this talk about a strong economy is a lie

The GOP keeps touting the record Dow Jones as proof that the economy is strong. I would disagree with this assessment - in fact, it is a sign that the worst thing that could happen to our economy, the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer, is well underway. The stock market is in record territory because corporations are shipping formerly high-paying manufacturing jobs out of the country to countries that allow them to exploit their poor.

American workers' wages have decreased steadily since the age of Reagan and the policies of the Bush Administration are accelerating this trend. International or American corporations go into developing countries and take advantage of lax or corrupt governments to exploit poor people. They convince them or force them off of their land and into their factories and they become defacto forced labor fueling the US consumer market. Sure we get cheap Nikes and clothing but we are trading our middle class and our homeland security in the process. I don't think that it is worth it. Our shrinking middle class no longer has union manufacturing jobs to look forward to and can be expected to pay an increasing share for health care (if they have any to begin with).

The corporations use lame arguments that they are helping to industrialize the world thus expanding markets and improving the poor countries they are exploiting for personal gain. This is also supposed to help us here at home by increasing trade abroad. It is not working nor will it ever work. One of the things that made the US manufacturing base expand was our consumer culture. While arguments can be made about whether or not our consumer culture was a good thing, its growth has built the middle class of this country because they could afford to buy the things they are producing. This is not the case in the developing world - how can a worker making $2 a day ever afford a $100 pair of Nikes much less an automobile? The answer is the cannot nor and will not ever to be participants in a consumer culture in their own countries. In addition to the exploitation of the poor workers, the corporations take all the capital out of the country where it is needed to build infrastructure and safety nets for people that desperately need it. Thus, no real development takes place and US workers suffer because only if international wages improve will wages in the US improve.

Homeland security is another component of this issue. We no longer have steel industry, we no longer have a clothing industry, and we are losing our agriculture industry due to foreign competition. It is painfully obvious how our lack of energy independence has hurt our national security. Bush ran commercials about how drug use supports terrorists but this pales in comparison to how filling up your Hummer twice a week supports terrorists. The right whines about the border with Mexico and illegal immigration but insists on their companies in Mexico paying wages that do not allow those people to support their families. It is a no-brainer for a Mexican worker faced with a choice of working in an unsafe factory in Matamoros for $5 a day or to cross the border and make more than that in a single hour picking fruit in California. While this inequity exists no amount of fencing will ever secure this border. Vicente Fox has been using our country as a safety valve for social unrest in his own country and Bush allows it because his supporters profit from it. Establishing and enforcing an international minimum wage and forcing countries that do business in developing countries to help with infrastructure even if the corrupt governments don't require it.

A thriving middle class in developing countries will greatly increase our security and the security of the world at large. People who are able to feed and educate their families are very unlikely to be susceptible to the sway of radical Islam. If workers in Mexico can earn enough to feed their families in their own country, they will not cross the border to work here illegally.

Changing the way multinational corporations do business will hurt their bottom line. It may mean that they fail. They do not deserve to get rich at the expense of our national security or our middle class. If we truly want to make the world safer and push back terrorism around the world multinational corporations must be the sacrificial lamb.

John McCain - Base Licker

John McCain is selling out any support he might have had to gain the support of the radical right for the nomination for 2008. He has recently embraced Jerry Fallwell, the guys who spearheaded the racist push-poll in South Carolina in 2000, caved into the Whitehouse on the torture bill, and has blindly supported the Bush administration's failed war policy. I used to respect this "independent" Republican but there doesn't seem to be much left of the man made famous for his "Straight Talk." I thought he had learned from his moral lapse in the Keating 5 scandal and had acted as one of the few Repubs that didn't engage in shameless "base licking." He seems to feel that in order to get the 2008 nomination that he has to pander to the worst elements of the GOP. He is going to have hard time moving back towards the middle after all the things he has said - he has certainly lost my respect. I wish I had more hands so I could give him 4 thumbs down!

Rove gets his comeuppance - finally

Karl "Wormtongue" Rove has, up until Tuesday, thought himself a super-genius but it looks like his slash-and-burn style has finally run its course. The resounding defeat of the GOP on tuesday has ended his career, I hope. It looks like his lap-dog Ken Mehlman is toast and their incessant oversimplfication and misreperesentation of the issues will be no more. The thing that worries me most is that Bill Clinton seems to have a strange admiration of this guy and might start employing his tactics in 2008.

For too long, Rove has paid off journalists to write bogus stories so that the GOP can use them as proof that their policies are right; he has leaked classified information to discredit W's critics; he has used racism as a political weapon against members of his own party, and tried to portray political opponents as un-American or weak or worse.

Rove belongs on the trash pile of history along with the rest of the neo-cons, preemptive warfare, and the 43rd President of the United States.

Iraq Study Group/New Defense Chief

It looks like the shrub needs his daddy to bail him out again. James A. Baker is supposed to be making suggestions to W about what to do about the mess in Iraq. I also see that he got Robert Gates, his dad's old CIA chief to try to fix the problems caused by outgoing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

The problem with Iraq is that no matter what we do or how competent the people W hires, Iraq is lost. The civil war is only going to get worse and there is not going to be a democracy no matter what we do. When the Iraqi people went to the polls and voted strictly along religious/ethnic lines it was the last nail in the coffin. They chose to persecute each other and squabble over the oil riches rather than working together. In a true representative democracy, factions are created along political ideology not religious affiliation or ethnic identity. This idea has been lost on the GOP, a party that has been hijacked by the religious right becoming a party that Barry Goldwater would not recognize. Their view of government is overly simplistic as is their black-and-white view of every issue.

What to do about Iraq? I don't think partitioning the country will work since the central region is so mixed. A unity government among people who want to kill each other won't work either. Letting the civil war play itself out is another poor alternated - it would leave hundreds of thousands of people dead and destabilize the rest of the Middle East. It seems like all we can do is hope and pray that the Iraqi leaders come to their senses and decide that working together is better than dying together - though I doubt that this is possible at this point.

I hate to say that Iraq was better off with Saddam in power but it looks so. We would not have 2,900 American dead and several hundred thousand Iraqi dead and we could have focused more on Afghanistan but we let that slip too. I hope things begin to turn around soon but I doubt it. If anything is to be learned from this tragedy it is that preemptive wars are a very bad idea and that the US should not try to export democracy at the barrel of a gun.

VA Marriage Amendment

Virginia Marriage Amendment

It is a sad day in Virginia.

The biggest disappointment in this election was the small-minded ballot initiative to prevent gay marriage. It is really a shame that a constitution carries nonsense like this - constitutions should specify rights that we have not limit rights we don't have. It's a very bad idea whether or not you approve of gay marriage. I never understood why people get so enraged about gay marriage - unless you own an insurance business and don't want to cover a bunch of new people. I have long suspected that the insurance industry was behind a lot of this since they would take a big hit having to insure folks as well as having to pay death benefits to same-sex
couples.

Virginians, If you don't like gay marriage, don't marry a gay person. It really is that simple.

There is not a single marriage other than mine in this whole country that I personally care about or has any affect on mine. Not that I wish other marriages ill and I hope everyone is happy with their choice of a partner - it's just not my business nor is it anyone else's business.

I have always understood that marriage laws were about property rights and the division of property upon the dissolution of marriage. There is no slippery slope to polygamy since marriage is essentially a 50-50 business contract between 2 people - you cannot engage in this kind of partnership with more than one person. Nor, as Rick Santorum, claimed that it would lead to bestiality since the last time I checked, a dog cannot enter into a legal contract, nor can a child.

There is no law or code or anything telling people that when they get married they have to have children or even love each other. Therefore, all of the arguments that say that marriage is for raising children do not hold water. So it is ok for a gold-digging woman or man to get married only to leach off another human being even if you despise the person you decide to marry. We let Britney Spears wield the institution of marriage like a 3-year old with a squirt gun but a same sex couple that has been loyal to each other for 20 years cannot. It isn't fair and isn't right. If your church doesn't want to perform same sex marriages that is church business - the state's business should not discriminate against any group for the sole reason that they belong to a certain group. When I got married this summer I don't remember seeing anything saying that I was doing so I could have children or any other reason other than my wife and I decided it was the right thing to do.

57% of Virginians did a huge disservice to my state and were dead wrong – very disappointing. The Virginia constitution is a venerable document and should not have been stained with this amendment.