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Ned
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of Aptos, CA
Oct 1999
time: 21:35
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quote:
Originally posted by MichaeltheGreat
WEll, John won't be appointing me to any policy positions until after he's sworn in, so I don't speck for him at this time. 
And it's really not "opinion" unless you want to revise both the concept of "defend" and the location of "America."
Saddam couldn't project a goat turd successfully beyond his own borders, and there's no evidence as of yet that he would have been capable of doing so directly or through future proxies in the near future. Certainly our ability to ramp up and respond to an actual future threat is and at all times was far faster than his ability to develop any such threat.
This had nothing to do with "defending America" it had everything to do with an excuse to go after former perceived American lackey Saddam Hussein for biting the hand that fed him, same way Noriega had to go in the shitter. Bush II had a hardon for Saddam way before he even assumed office, and he stacked his policy deck with Saddam-hawk advisors. |
Saddam was training al-Qaida, built terror training bases inside Iraq, was helping to fund terror against Israel. He had (at least at one time) WMD, the capability to make more, and was working on nukes. So much for your lack of ability to project "turds" concept.
You can only believe that Saddam was no threat to the US and to Israel if you believe in ..... John Kerry. (I was going to say, the "Tooth Fairy," but believing in John Kerry says it all.)
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Ned
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of Aptos, CA
Oct 1999
time: 21:35
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quote:
Originally posted by MichaeltheGreat
The failure was in place since 1954. No RVN government had ever had popular legitimacy, all were corrupt, inept, unable to control their own territory, prevent infiltration, or deal with a peasantry who on average was at least as sympathetic, and in many cases moreso, to the "enemy."
RVN itself was a fictional creation - the French last ditch attempt to retain some influence and prevent total humiliation by partitioning a former colony rather than ceding defeat over the whole of it.
Other than the ARVN Rangers, LDNN, and the ARVN Marines and Airborne forces, which were all highly trained, committed volunteer forces, the main ARVN forces were a sad joke, and riddled with infiltrators (as happened in some cases even with the ARVN Rangers and Marines). In 1972 at Quang Tri, the ARVN was caught with it's pants down despite obvious indicators of NVA units shifting into an offensive posture, and the exemplary leadership of ARVN officers such as Phan Van Dinh and Huang Xuan Lam is still legendary. 
Kerry didn't stab America in the back, the stupid mother****ers who got us into that mess and killed over 60,000 American troops in support of an inept, corrupt, and fraudulent leadership of a half-country are the ones who stabbed America in the back. |
Just a couple of quibbles. The government of Vietnam was not intended to be a regional government. When France ceded the North to Uncle Ho and us merry men, the government of Vietnam only had control over the South.
It is interesting also, is it not, that this government, the government of Vietnam, never signed the Geneva accords and never agreed to any "national elections."
I agree, though, that Diem was a failure because he was more interested in advancing his and his family's interests rather than being popular. This had something to do with his being a dictator.
In retrospect, somebody should have pulled his plug a lot sooner, because it is quiet true that his harsh treatment of the Buddists and other religious groups contributed to rebellions that had nothing to do with communist infiltration, but had everything to do with the formation of the NLF (Viet Cong) in 1961.
I also agree that what Johnson did in getting US ground troops involved in what in many ways was a civil war was ludicrous.
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molly bloom
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Lundenwic
Oct 2001
time: 15:35
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quote:
Originally posted by Ned
Molly, we purchased Florida from Spain, Lousianna from Napoleon (who really didn't own it when he sold it to us), New Mexico and California from Mexico, Oregon from the Brits, Alaska from the Russians, and the Philippines, Guam and Puerto Rico from Spain. Were all these transactions illegitimate in your view simple because the inhabitants (such as the native indians) were not consulted? |
In how many of those places had the local inhabitants fought, or just fought, a war for independence?
And I notice you omit Cuba.
What's the difference between the Philippines and Guam on the one hand, and Cuba?
Couldn't possibly be anything to do with race, or the perception of race, could it?
In any case, I still say it's hilarious to find an American defending this kind of high handed colonialism and imperialism.
Did the United States fight a war with Mexico ?
There really is no point in trotting out all these land acquisitions and pretending or assuming that in every single case there is a valid comparison with the Philippines.
You still can't get around the sticking point that the United States had no more 'right' to be in the Philippines than Great Britain or Siam, and that the only thing that makes it legitimate is might.
Everything else is just eyewash, and justification after the event.
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Ned
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of Aptos, CA
Oct 1999
time: 21:35
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quote:
Originally posted by Spiffor
I would have tried to immediately start negociating the independance, and tried to oversee the political project of an independant Vietnam. I would probably have favored a mixed government, under the symbolic leadership of the royal family, and with input from all factions of the Vietnamese society, including the Communists, and French interests.
I would have tried to keep Vietnam in a kind of French "commonwealth", with favored trading pacts, and military alliance.
And I would have requested money from Paris to build some infrastructure to show our goodwill to the local factions, and to show they had more to win by cooperating with us than by fighting.
Hindsight is always 20/20 however. This a strategy similar to that which we used in Africa in 1960 (save for Algeria). And this part of Africa remained under French influence, and the cold war barely affected it. |
By 1950, France had done all you suggest, and still Ho Chi Mingh fought on to get the French out even when there was a legitimate government of Vietnam.
Also, btw, I have been doing so reading on how France got involved in Indochina. Apparently, the Vietnamese Emperor begin conducting an extermination campaign against the Catholics in Vietnam circa 1836. This continued with the increasing ferocity until France was forced to intervene. No French intervention was ever permanent and the slaughter of Christians would resume. There is a final confrontation between the French and the Chinese, who were the overlords of the empire of Vietnam, in early 1880s. France defeated the Chinese fleet and blockaded Formosa, forcing a Chinese capitulation. As a result, China ceded their protectorship of Vietnam to France. (Cambodia voluntarily sought French protection. Laos switched from Siam to France.)
So looking at this history, it does seem that the French involvement in Indochina was an effort to bring some measure of civility to a region that was quite used to barbarous governments -- primarily to protect Catholics. I find it interesting that I actually had two read up this in order to find the truth. All I ever heard here, and elsewhere before, was that France only wanted to take control of Vietnam the purpose of sucking it dry of its resources.
That is a lie.
Rather, the French are to be applauded for what they did.
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Drake Tungsten
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Knee deep in alien womyn...
Oct 2001
time: 14:35
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Come on, let's get back on-topic! Don't make me report you two to Ming; he's on the lookout for thread-jackers now.
quote:
Kerry on Iraq: Wrong War, Wrong Place, Wrong Time
By Patricia Wilson
CANONSBURG, Pa. (Reuters) - Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry on Monday called the invasion of Iraq "the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time" and said his goal was to withdraw U.S. troops in his first White House term.
Under pressure from some Democrats to change the subject from national security -- regarded by many as President Bush's strongest issue -- Kerry tried to focus exclusively on the economy and other domestic topics at a neighborhood meeting but supporters raised Iraq.
The Massachusetts senator, who has said he would have voted to give Bush the authority to use force if necessary against Iraq even if he had known at the time that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, has struggled to draw clear contrasts with the president.
"I would not have done just one thing differently than the president on Iraq, I would have done everything differently than the president on Iraq," Kerry said.
He denied that he was "Monday morning quarterbacking."
"I said this from the beginning of the debate to the walk up to the war. I said, Mr. President don't rush to war, take the time to build a legitimate coalition and have a plan to win the peace."
Kerry said Bush had failed on all three counts. He called the president's talk about a coalition fighting alongside about 125,000 U.S. troops "the phoniest thing I've ever heard."
"You've about 500 troops here, 500 troops there and it's American troops that are 90 percent of the combat casualties and it's American taxpayers that are paying 90 percent of the cost of the war," he said. "It's the wrong war, in the wrong place at the wrong time."
GETTING OUT OF IRAQ
Kerry, like Bush, promised that the United States would stay the course in Iraq until the country is secure, saying: "We have to do what we need to do to get out and do it right."
He pledged to internationalize the forces in Iraq and do a better job of fighting "a more effective, smarter" war on terror that he said would actually make Americans safer.
Although he declined to set a precise timetable for pulling out U.S. troops, Kerry said it would be possible if certain conditions were met, such as bringing allies to the table to help with security and reconstruction.
He also said Washington should make it clear to the world that the United States had no "long-term designs to maintain bases and troops in Iraq.
"We want those troops home and my goal would be to try to get them home in my first term and I believe that can be done," he said.
If Kerry were to beat Bush in the Nov. 2 presidential election, his first four-year term would end in January 2009.
Kicking off a Labor Day offensive in three crucial battleground states -- Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Ohio -- Kerry focused on pocketbook issues as he tried to reinvigorate his campaign after new polls showed him trailing Bush by double digits.
On the front porch of Dale and Jody Rhome's house in Canonsburg, he assailed the president's economic policies and said if Americans wanted four more years of losing jobs and health care "then you ought to go vote for George Bush" |
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tm...mpaign_kerry_dc
Yet another sign that Kerry is considering a cut-and-run in Iraq. Why anyone trusts this vacillating douchebag to be our Commander in Chief during a time of war is beyond me...
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MichaeltheGreat
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Apolyton Grand Executioner
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mooning the house that Ruth built.
Oct 1999
time: 21:35
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quote:
Originally posted by Ned
Molly, we purchased Florida from Spain, Lousianna from Napoleon (who really didn't own it when he sold it to us), New Mexico and California from Mexico, Oregon from the Brits, Alaska from the Russians, and the Philippines, Guam and Puerto Rico from Spain. Were all these transactions illegitimate in your view simple because the inhabitants (such as the native indians) were not consulted? |
Hmmm, lessee - we purchased Florida and the Louisianna purchase from European enemies of Great Britain, with the not too thinly veiled implication that they'd be better off selling what they really had no means to keep if push came to shove.
The only purchase made from Mexico was the Gadsden purchase of the southernmost portions of Arizona and New Mexico territory, the one part of northern Mexico we didn't steal in 1848. We made that purchase when we figured that mineral wealth > pain in the ass from Mescalero + Chiricuhua + Bedonkohe Apache.
We took the former Spanish possession by force, then decided that the little brown people therein weren't competent to have any voice in running things, so Congress passed a number of acts, subsequently endorsed by SCOTUS, to make sure that the Constitution didn't apply to the little brown people.
The question of "legitimacy" is just an exercise in pseudointellectual masturbation. The imperial powers (including the US) who engage in this sort of wholesale conquest and acquistion of other lands and other peoples also happen to make up for themselves their own criteria of "legitimacy."
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MichaeltheGreat
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Apolyton Grand Executioner
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mooning the house that Ruth built.
Oct 1999
time: 21:35
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quote:
[SIZE=1] Originally posted by Drake Tungsten
Yet another sign that Kerry is considering a cut-and-run in Iraq. Why anyone trusts this vacillating douchebag to be our Commander in Chief during a time of war is beyond me... |
If we can't consider being out of that ****ing shithole by January 2009, then we're in serious trouble.
At the present post-"mission accomplished" rate of casualties and expenditures, we'll be over 2,500 KIA, 20,000 WIA (about line combat strength of two full divisions), and in excess of a half trillion in direct expenditures, not counting Halliburton's pork bailouts and giveaways to the Iraqis. If we haven't got a viable chance to be over and done with the mess before that point, then Bush, Cheney et al have royally ass****ed us all, and there's going to be a perpetual global shortage of Preparation H.
But of course, that will be someone else bleeding and dying, so the "We're gung ho cuz we'll never have to go" crowd can still cheerlead and go "rah rah rah." 
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Berzerker
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topeka, kansas,USA
May 1999
time: 23:35
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quote:
Molly, we purchased Florida from Spain, Lousianna from Napoleon (who really didn't own it when he sold it to us), New Mexico and California from Mexico, Oregon from the Brits, Alaska from the Russians, and the Philippines, Guam and Puerto Rico from Spain. Were all these transactions illegitimate in your view simple because the inhabitants (such as the native indians) were not consulted? |
Of course, why do you even need to ask?
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Drake Tungsten
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Knee deep in alien womyn...
Oct 2001
time: 14:35
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quote:
JOHN KERRY said yesterday that Iraq was "the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time." Translation: We would be better off if Saddam Hussein were still in power.
Not an unheard of point of view. Indeed, as President Bush pointed out today, it was Howard Dean's position during the primary season. On December 15, 2003, in a speech at the Pacific Council on International Policy in Los Angeles, Dean said that "the capture of Saddam Hussein has not made America safer." Dean also said, "The difficulties and tragedies we have faced in Iraq show the administration launched the war in the wrong way, at the wrong time, with inadequate planning, insufficient help, and at the extraordinary cost, so far, of $166 billion."
But who challenged Dean immediately? John Kerry. On December 16, at Drake University in Iowa, Kerry asserted that "those who doubted whether Iraq or the world would be better off without Saddam Hussein, and those who believe today that we are not safer with his capture, don't have the judgment to be president or the credibility to be elected president."
Kerry was right then. |
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Conte...04/587jxocg.asp
Now even Kerry himself is saying that he is unfit for command...
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Drake Tungsten
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Knee deep in alien womyn...
Oct 2001
time: 14:35
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Another choice Kerry quote...
quote:
"Everybody told me, 'God, if you're coming to Canonsburg, you've got to find time to go to Toy's, and he'll take care of you,'" Mr. Kerry said, dropping the name of a restaurant his motorcade had passed on the way in. "I understand it's my kind of place, because you don't have to - you know, when they give you the menu, I'm always struggling: Ah, what do you want?
"He just gives you what he's got, right?" Mr. Kerry added, continuing steadily off a gangplank of his own making: "And you don't have to worry, it's whatever he's cooked up that day. And I think that's the way it ought to work, for confused people like me who can't make up our minds." |
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/06/p...ner=rssuserland
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Ogie Oglethorpe
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Marietta, GA
Dec 1999
time: 05:35
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More Dem defections:
Orson Scott Card - The Mormon Vote
quote:
World Watch
First appeared in print in The Rhinoceros Times, Greensboro, NC
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By Orson Scott Card August 29, 2004
Election Guidebook, Kerry's Conscience, and Doomsayers II
Hugh Hewitt has a nationally syndicated radio show that I've never heard. He's an unabashed Republican partisan, and he's written a book called If It's Not Close, They Can't Cheat: Crushing the Democrats in Every Election and Why Your Life Depends On It.
Hewitt doesn't hate Democrats. He just hates it when Democrats are in office. At least now.
As he points out: During the doldrums of the 90s, after the Soviet Union fell and before anybody believed that Islamist terrorists really meant it, we could afford to have an empty presidency like the Clinton years and muddle through with nothing more than embarrassment and annoyance.
But in 2000, though we didn't realize it, we were in a nontrivial election. It mattered who was at the helm in 2001, and it matters all the more in 2004, 2006, and 2008.
Hewitt believes that not only must we have George W. Bush in the presidency for the next four years, but the Democratic Party seems poised to go on, for the foreseeable future, choosing presidential candidates who would be disastrous to our defense against people who want our civilization in ashes and us dead.
He also does a thorough job of pointing out that the Democratic Party has a proud tradition of rather openly stealing elections, like the 1960 election (which Nixon, like a mensch, refused to contest even though it was glaringly obvious that Illinois and Texas probably really voted Republican if you counted only existing, living, eligible voters once each) and the attempt in Florida in 2000 and the attempt in California's recall election last year.
Hence the title of his book.
Those who think that what we need right now is a president who takes war to our enemies instead of letting them bring it to us can't afford to sit back and let others do the voting. Cheating only works when the vote is close, and when you know the other side cheats, you have to make sure the margin of victory is too wide to be overcome that way.
Still, if that were all this book was about, I wouldn't waste time on it in this column.
However, Hewitt offers something much more important. This book, despite its being partisan and disparaging of Democrats, is absolutely accurate about the way American politics function, and what individual voters can and must do to help influence the outcome.
Even if you're a Democrat so loyal that you think Al Franken is sane enough to operate heavy machinery and John Kerry knows how to make facial expressions but merely chooses not to, this book nails exactly what the strengths and weaknesses of both major parties are in coming years; why third-party votes are wasted and harmful; how Democrats have finally succeeded in rigging election funding to benefit them and hurt Republicans, and how Republicans can counter it.
Here's the key point he makes, however -- the point his subtitle is all about.
It's not enough, he says, to reelect President Bush if you don't vote for Republicans in every national race -- Senate and House of Representatives.
His warning is especially to conservative purists who would like to throw out proven vote-getters like Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania because he's "too liberal."
Hewitt's point is this: When the Senate organizes itself at the beginning of each session, there's a head count. People line up as Republicans or Democrats. Whoever has the most, gets to appoint the chairpeople of all the committees, and gets to have a majority on all the committees, and gets to set the calendar and decide which bills make it to the floor.
When that count is taken, Arlen Specter is a Republican. You may not like how he votes on abortion or what-all, but when the key decision about legislative power is made, he's one vote on the side of the aisle that can organize a Senate that will advance President Bush's agenda, instead of one that will obstruct him at every turn.
The time for idealogical purity, in other words, says Hewitt, is not during election season.
The Democrats know this; the Republicans keep forgetting.
Thus Hewitt calls for Americans -- not just Republicans, but all Americans who recognize that only the Republican Party shows the will or the wit to combat our terrorist enemies abroad -- to vote for Republicans all the way up and down the ballot.
Now, as a Democrat, what can I say to that except that, because my party has been taken over by an astonishingly self-destructive bunch of lunatics who are so dazzled by Hollywood that they think their ideas make sense, I have to agree that right now, any President but Bush and any Congress but a Republican-dominated one would be disastrous.
As a Democrat, I would hope that a solid trouncing of our fanatic-ruled party at the polls this November would serve as a wakeup call and remind Democrats that they only get to do the things that the Democrat Party exists to do if they get enough votes to control the White House and Congress. Which requires that you have serious candidates and embrace serious issues that most Americans, not just tiny pressure groups, care about.
And on that day, Democratic moderates can take the party back. And yes, Democratic moderates actually exist. They're all voting for Bush this year, but they'd rather have had a Democratic candidate to vote for.
Here's where I think Hewitt is dead wrong. Voting a straight ticket below the national level makes no sense at all.
For instance, here in Guilford County, I'm casting my vote for any candidate who is running against Sheriff Barnes and any of the Republican cabal that he supported in the Primary elections.
Why? Because Barnes went after and defeated one of the best people in local government, Mary Rakestraw, and the reason he did it was because she refused to go along with his plan for extra-legally increasing the budget of the sheriff's department.
It's not just that he's a sore loser. It's that he has figured out a way to create machine politics in Guilford County.
Not party politics: Machine politics, where you do what the boss says, or you lose your office, even if you're in his party. No room for anyone else to have a conscience. No room for anyone else to respect the law more than they respect the boss's authority.
And the only way to get rid of a tinhorn dictator like that is to vote against him and everybody he nominates, until the regular, honest party takes back control of their candidate-selection process.
B.J. Barnes is the most dangerous man in Guilford County, because he thinks he's above the law, and he thinks that all Republicans need to obey him, and the Republican Party should be working as hard as they can to get rid of this man and restore democracy within the Guilford County Republican Party.
But since they won't, it's up to Democrats like me, and independents who care about things like freedom and conscience, to show him that he can't carry a general election using the same tactics that won the primaries for him and his minions.
Read Hewitt's book ... learn the civics lessons he teaches ... and then make sure you're well-enough informed to make smart decisions in every contest you vote in.
*
Kerry feels fine about accepting money and sharing a podium with Hollywood fanatics who hurl vile and baseless charges against the President, but when the Swift Boat Veterans lay far more serious -- and far more substantiated -- charges against him, then like a crybaby he says, "No fair!"
The fact is, Kerry tries to have it both ways on everything. Slanderers on his side have nothing to do with him; but if supporters of President Bush make accusations against Kerry, then that's dirty politics and President Bush must be behind it.
The "Bush campaign and its allies have turned to the tactics of fear and smear," said Kerry at the Cooper Union school in New York. Isn't that hilarious, coming from a man who embraces the support of slanderers like Michael Moore and Al Franken?
But this is nothing new. Remember how the "vast right-wing conspiracy" played out for the Clintons. Remember how the would-be election thieves in the Democratic Party were able to charge the Republicans with having stolen the election.
Accuse your accusers of your own bad acts, that's the method -- but will it work again? Are the American people that slow at learning when they're being scammed?
Maybe when it comes to the war in Vietnam, Kerry cannot have it all. Maybe he -- and the American people -- are beginning to realize it.
"John Kerry reporting for duty," he said at the Democratic convention, insisting that America view him as a heroic soldier ready to lead us through our war on terrorists.
But when we find out that one of the Purple Hearts he used to get out of the war early may well have been an accidentally self-inflicted wound, it's harder to understand how his conscience allowed him to use those "wounds" to get out of Vietnam early, when other men stayed to do their duty.
So Kerry has flipped to the other side of the coin. It's not his war record he wants to be judged on now, it's his anti-war record.
The Swift Boat Veterans' second ad points out that his false charges that American soldiers regularly committed atrocities gave the North Vietnamese exactly what they were torturing American POWs to try to them to say.
At a fund-raiser in Philadelphia, Kerry defended those false statements by saying they were "an act of conscience" and adding "You can judge my character, incidentally, by that."
Well, Mr. Kerry, we will.
You did some brave things in Vietnam. But afterward, you said terrible things about your fellow soldiers -- things that clearly were not true, and that you either knew were not true when you said them, or at least knew you had no evidence for.
Let's see ... you'll make false accusations against American soldiers for your own political advantage. And we should vote for you as our commander-in-chief, to decide when American soldiers should lay their lives on the line.
Speaking as an embarrassed and fed-up Democrat, I have to say to the national leaders of my own party: What were you thinking when you nominated this man!
Is there really no one better than this that the Democratic Party can offer to the American people to lead us in time of war?
Well, yes, there is. The Democratic Party could have nominated Joe Lieberman. The Democratic Party could have chosen a candidate who would help unite the country in the prosecution of a war forced on us by cruel and ambitious enemies -- and then put forward the Democratic program for keeping America a decent place for people who haven't got great stock options.
Instead, the Democratic Party has nominated a man who has spent his whole career attacking Americans who actually fight for their country, provoking divisiveness during wartime for his own political gain, and voting with absolute consistency to strip America of the means of defending ourselves against our enemies.
What were the Democratic Party leaders thinking?
Not of America's good, that's for sure.
As it seems right now, the Democratic Party has apparently nominated three habitual, self-serving liars in a row. The guy who has his own definition of "is," the guy who invented the Internet, and now the guy who spent Christmas in Cambodia.
Why hasn't Michael Moore made a movie about that? If, as Linda Ronstadt says, Moore's a great American who exposes liars and hypocrites, then surely we should be seeing the documentary Christmas in Cambodia in all the theaters.
But of course we never will. Because members of the Liars Club never rat each other out. There is, apparently, honor among mudslingers.
*
I've heard from some readers of last week's column the response that "Not everybody who cries doom is right." Well, that's certainly true. Remember the eschatalogical warnings we had about the Y2K calamities that were sure to befall us? What nobody took into account was the fact that those very warnings caused people to make the necessary changes so that Y2K passed with scarcely a hitch.
The world always has its irrational cranks, crying doom based on arbitrary turns of the calendar, confluences of planets, or sightings of Elvis's image on rusting refrigerator doors. I am firmly of the opinion that such doomsayers can be safely ignored; and if they do turn out to be right, it would prove the universe to be so irrational that I'm probably better off dead anyway.
The point of my column is that when someone who is very, very bright, like Jane Jacobs or Winston Churchill, gives warning of grave dangers and backs up the warning with serious references to current trends and analogous events in history, then only a fool dismisses their warnings out of hand.
There are disasters that certainly will happen.
For instance, Balboa Island just off the coast of Newport Beach in southern California is going to be the site of thousands of tragic, needless deaths, when the inevitable earthquake causes the inevitable tsunami that sweeps across the densely populated island with little warning and long before even a tiny percentage of the inhabitants can escape across the single narrow bridge to the mainland. This is obvious, unavoidable, and those who choose to live there are merely betting that they'll be away on that day -- or are announcing their preferred method of death.
On a grander scale, it is absolutely certain that sometime in the future, Earth will be struck by a meteor large enough to cause widespread devastation, climate change, and vast losses of life. The trouble is, we don't know when it will happen. It's hard to work up much of a budget urgency about something that might not happen for three hundred thousand years.
Yet as the movie Deep Impact and its trashy cousin, Armageddon, anticipated, when such a meteor is spotted out in space (if it is spotted; horrible devastation could be caused by a meteor too small to see until it was virtually upon us), we will wish we had prudently invested in spacecraft and other devices that could be employed to turn such a meteor out of its course (we don't care if it passes us by and lands on Venus).
A President who seriously campaigned on a promise to spend billions to stop meteors from wiping out life on Earth would be, quite properly I think, regarded as being somewhat out of the intellectual mainstream. (Sort of like Howard Dean or Al Gore would be, if America's intellectual mainstream were actually moored somewhere near reality.)
Yet it should be done, don't you think? Because it could also happen next year, and wouldn't we all feel stupid if we had had the technology but not the will to build such a meteor-collision-avoidance system when we had the chance?
Still, anyone who says that he knows when the meteor is coming -- well, give him a buck and move on down the sidewalk. (Unless there is scientific evidence, like proof of a past, periodic meteor shower that has caused devastation on a regular basis in past epochs.)
And then we have the problem of doomsayers who were right, but not right enough. For instance, we found plenty of evidence of Saddam's ongoing will to create weapons of mass destruction, but no workable nukes, and somehow that seems to be the only evidence that would satisfy the smug critics who mock President Bush for not knowing what no one knew.
Already people are gearing up to oppose President Bush if he decides to take action against North Korean or Iranian nuclear programs; but those very people would be the first to charge him with every vile crime imaginable if an Iranian or North Korean nuke blew up a city somewhere. Especially here.
Then Bush would be cursed for being short-sighted and weak-willed. Maureen Dowd would explain why Bush actually meant for the nuke to explode, and Michael Moore would show footage of Bush eating a really thick sandwich when he should have been blowing up Iran's nuclear weapon assembly plant.
The fact is, we've already traveled far down some terrible roads that, if followed to their end, will put period to our civilization. But good, smart people can still disagree about the degree of danger or the preferred solution. Good, smart people can be wrong, and they're still good, and still smart -- just human.
But people who were warned and answered the warning, not with serious evidence and reasoning, but with dismissive name-calling -- like that which Churchill faced for so long -- they are fully to blame for their own fate. For they answered reason with scorn, facts with name-calling. Which makes them truly, deeply, stupid.
Please, let us not be governed by those people.
Oh, wait. Both teams in our electoral system are absolutely packed with people who are "wise" about the warnings they believe in, but stupid and scornful about the warnings that don't come from their own team.
Does that mean we're doomed?
Just remember that old saying: "God protects fools, drunks, and the United States."
Let's hope it keeps on being just true enough to get us by.
Copyright © 2004 by Orson Scott Card.
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06-09-2004 09:51
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