Many American Democrats are now saying, after a decade of bloodshed, that
the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were probably a mistake, and, yes the
American destruction of Southeast Asia was wrong, but the Civil War - that was
a grand crusade, a holy cause, the successful outcome of which should cause
American breasts to swell with pride. Never mind that the black man in America
is in prison in vast numbers and out of work; white yankees provided him with
a great victory. The point is not that these wars, these crusades for freedom in
Iraq and Afghanistan are a mistake, not really the necessary moral ventures that
they were cracked up to be; the point it that the United States and her little
European camp followers have no right to pass judgment on others and to again
and again invade and dominate other lands that are none of their business. This
is colonialism, pure and simple. The Civil War set the precedent for all of these
other ventures and it laid out the logical arguments, and until the self-
righteous liberals stop paying constant lip service to all this long-outdated
Napoleonic freedom rhetoric and the moral necessity of the Civil War, they will
continue to support those who devise lucrative war plans. With their help the
US will keep on raping poor countries, destroying their sustainable cultures,
and it will continue to free people around the world from all of the cultural and
religious discipline that sustains them.

Gulam:

Well put. Can you imagine the gall of Peetawonkus- excusing the US government for invading a country to tell it how to run its own affairs? Shocking. Just because they had slavery (read- oppression of women, genocide on a massive scale, religious intolerance, etc in today’s dispensation) is NO excuse to invade. It’s none of our business. We should not have been such hegemonic imperialistic bullies back in 1860. Lincoln was a precursor of Hitler I say! No, worse! George Bush! No, Cheney!!! Sorry, the Tourettes is kicking in.

I am not at all claiming the moral high ground for the South. Slavery was very
wrong, but sending in hundreds of thousands of soldiers into someone else’s
states on the assumption that the USA is a moral exemplar was an even greater
wrong than the whole of slavery, because it taught Americans that they can get
rich, invade others and take their property, rape their women and destroy their
culture and still be morally OK. It set a pattern that has been followed again and
again from Sante Fe, to Manila, to Saigon, Baghdad, and Kabul.

Gulam
You must be posting from that alternate universe, the fictional one where the poor slave owners are oppressed by ideas of freedom? The one where the Germans are the good guys in WWII? Oh, wait. That is the South. As Faulkner said, leaching its poison into the rest of the country.

I like the alternate universe where Lincoln survived and had the slave owners of the South hung for treason, instead of the blanket pardon they got.

Regarding the congressperson’s shooting,I think we
can all agree that Rupert Murdoch, Roger Ailes, Glenn
Beck, Bill O’Reilly, Mitch McConnell, John Boehner,
Eric Cantor, Peter King, Larry Summers, Tim Geithner,
perhaps even Obama,  Wall Street and other
conservatives are doing the “Happy Dance Circle Jerk”
over this, eh?
When the Barlow strikers threatened the plutocrat, he
had them shot.  Homestead, Haymarket….  The rich know
how to get it done, and the rest of us grab our
ankles.

And the south should have been allowed to secede. 
Why murder 600,000 to keep a bunch of redneck jerks
in the Union?  Slavery would have been gone soon,
anyway.

How do we protect ourselves from the enemy within? that is the real terrorism - expensive stupid wars notwithstanding.

“with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to
finish the work we are in”

The work that they were in was a long, brutal war involving hundreds of
thousands of deaths which Mr. Lincoln chose to pursue. As long as you keep
glorifying the invasion, rape, and domination of the South by the self-
appointed armies of God from the North, then do not wonder when Americans
keep playing that same highly profitable game over and over and over. The
same Napoleonic ego trip, the same Enlightenment freedom jargon is buffed
into shape and wheeled out again for use every decade or two, and Union
armies go off once more to tramp out the vintage, which is blood. Every few
years America is off again using liberation as a stalking horse for pillage and
domination. At the present time Americans claim to be liberating Afghan
women and bringing democracy to Iraq.

This kind of liberal worship of Lincoln is even more at the heart of American
aggression than the right wing nuts and the generals. The South provides more
than its share of ignorant young people for today’s American armies, but it is
the soul killers at Harvard, Yale, and Columbia who provide the expertise,
financial connections, and the intellectual justification for mass murder. It is
indeed sad when Southerners get into waving the Confederate flag about, but
we still see massive monuments and statues to the fools who died in the War of
Yankee Aggression on nearly every New England town green. If you did not
react negatively to the use of LIncoln’s purple prose in this article then you are
part of the reason we just destroyed Iraq and are still leading the gang rape of
Afghanistan.

Sad indeed. A fringe Tea Party fruitloop I’m afraid. Another spoiled slacker with too much time on his hands. And, Ortiz, the answer is, too many more.

Another sad day of senseless violence.

How horrific. I hope ms. Giffords recovers fully.

Jared Loughner has been arrested in connection with the shooting.
He seems to be a loner with disjointed and paradoxical thoughts. For instance, he
lists both the Communist Manifesto and Mein Kampf as favorite books.

This is his Youtube profile:

http://www.youtube.com/user/Classitup10

How many more Loughners are there in the US?