By thebeerdoctor, July 17 at 8:07 am

Instead we have “Morning Joe” instructing us that the American people want to know if tears well up in Obama’s eyes, when the U.S. war jets do a fly over, during seventh inning stretch of a baseball game.****

I know this has got to be the most blantant sign of how bad our country has become with ideas and beliefs like this. Because of a bunch of vegged out stupid people have put the emotions as a/the top indicator as the qualities inherent in their idea of a leader we will certainly suffer for this. This could almost mean that ‘well, heck, he don’t cry as war jets fly over, I will vote for mccain.’
I sure looks like the base mass of people in america have been reduced to a quivering puddle of melted fat and dna incapable of any intelligent thought processes.
More kudos for our msm’s pledge to totally stupify the people.

Jackpinesavage on his July 16, 5;08 am post gives the push to the shove, as it were. The facts reveal there is very little thought or analysis being given to anything being said on this campaign. Instead we have “Morning Joe” instructing us that the American people want to know if tears well up in Obama’s eyes, when the U.S. war jets do a fly over, during seventh inning stretch of a baseball game. According to these geniuses Senator Obama just hasn’t “closed the deal”. They say his soul is an unknown. They need to know if he really takes “pride” in America.
On an artistic note, it should be noted that Woody Guthrie wrote This Land Is Your Land as a direct response to Kate Smith’s jingoistic bombast God Bless America.

Ed,

If that’s the best you can do, you just proved my point.  Re-read my original post:

The U.S. has plenty of Middle East specialists in the universities, but they are mostly ignored.  In fact, they are derided.

Instead, we get they views of neo-cons who know nothing about the region and cannot speak the languages.

P.T.:  Another very influential neocon who is fluent in Arabic is Daniel Pipes. If you haven’t heard of him, then you have a very incomplete understanding of who the “prominent neocons” are. It’s not just who has a newspaper column. It’s who has clout in American journalism, academia, law, or government; and Arab-hating, Arabic-speaking neocons like Pipes (and Meyrev Wurmser) have lots of it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Pipes

By P. T., July 15 at 11:27 pm:

Oh. so now you shift the goal posts. Before, it was “name one prominent necocon”, now it has to be a major columnist. Enough. I have proven that there are such neocons and that they are powerful and influential.

Scheuer writes poorly.  Read the article and find it full of innuendoes and falsehoods.  Propaganda of the worst kind.

One of the worst cannards offered up is that the “ Israeli-firsters (whatever that is !), started the Iraq war.”

Now really. I thought it was we here in the United States. Ya’ know. Our government here. Didn’t know that our officials were that susceptible to a lobbyist group.  Like the Irish, or the Polish, or the French lobby. Or the farm lobby.  or the sugar lobby.

Turning the Tables
on the Israel-Firsters
by Michael Scheuer

“Now that the dust has settled in the spat between journalist Joe Klein and the ideologues at Commentary, it is time to regret the ink spilled over the non-issue of “dual loyalties.” The idea that there are U.S. citizens who have equal loyalties to the United States and Israel is passé. American Israel-firsters have long since dropped any pretense of loyalty to the United States and its genuine national interests. They have moved brazenly into the Israel first, last, and always camp. Sen. Joseph Lieberman, Norman Podhoretz, Victor Davis Hanson, the Rev. Franklin Graham, Alan Dershowitz, Rudy Giuliani, Douglas Feith, the Rev. Rod Parsley, Paul Wolfowitz, James Woolsey, Bill Kristol, the Rev. John Hagee, and the thousands of wealthy supporters of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) appear to care about the United States only so far as Washington is willing to provide immense, unending funding and the lives of young U.S. service personnel to protect Israel. These individuals and their all-for-Israel journals – Commentary, National Review, the Weekly Standard, and the Wall Street Journal – amount to nothing less than a fifth column intent on involving 300 million Americans in other peoples’ religious wars, making them pay and bleed to protect a nation in which the United States has no genuine national security interest at stake.

The Israel-firsters’ success is, of course, the stuff of which legends are made. Most recently, for example, we heard President Bush echo Sen. Lieberman’s insane and subversive contention that the United States has a “duty” to ensure the fulfilling of God’s millennia-old promise to Abraham regarding the creation and survival of Israel. Bush told the Knesset all Americans are ready to endlessly bleed and pay to ensure Israel’s security. And where does the president derive authority to make such a commitment in the name of his countrymen? From the Constitution? On the basis of America’s dominant religion? From – heaven forbid – a thoughtful, hardheaded analysis of U.S. interests?

No, Bush’s pledge was based on none of these. Bush’s decision to more deeply involve America in the eternal Arab-Israeli war was based on nothing less than the corruption wrought on the American political system by the Israel-firsters, AIPAC’s enormous treasury, and the lamentable but growing influence of America’s leading evangelical Protestant preachers.

The Israel-firsters started the Iraq war and now have the United States locked into an occupation of that country that may not end in any of our lifetimes. Unless Americans ignore the likes of Hanson, Podhoretz, Lieberman, Woolsey, and Wolfowitz, the cost in blood and treasure will ultimately bankrupt America.

AIPAC is a perfectly legal organization, and the wealth of its members is channeled into reliable campaign contributions for any candidate from either party who will put Israel’s interests above America’s. From McCain to Obama, from Pelosi to Giuliani, from Hillary Clinton to Vice President Cheney, AIPAC pumps money to any and every American politician who is willing to adopt an Israel-first policy.

Leading American Protestant evangelical preachers – men like Hagee, Parsley, and Graham – are the newest and perhaps most anti-American members of this fifth column. They serve two purposes: (1) to reinforce in the minds of their flocks the Bush-Lieberman absurdity that the United States has a “duty” to ensure Israel’s survival; and (2) to use religious rhetoric to steadily convince the Muslim world that U.S. leaders are interested only in taming – and if need be, destroying – Islam.”

Click on URL for the rest of the details:

http://www.antiwar.com/scheuer/?articleid=13139

It took the devastation of WWII for the Germans to face the truth about their polity, and now they are among the most peaceable of peoples.

Now we are plunging into an equal devastation, this time economic, though it was certainly accelerated by the neocon’s Iraq War. I think Americans will wise up fast.

Not to mention the fact that the Second Messiah is already showing his true colors. When Obamamania crashes the survivers will be thoroughly disillusioned with the System.

By P. T., July 15 at 11:27 pm #

Ed,

Name one neo-con who speaks Arabic or Farsi (or even Hebrew) who regularly appears on American television or is a columnist for a major American newspaper.

~~~~~

I can’t think of any. Can anybody else?

~~~~~

ApprxAM, I can’t find your comment that included the mechanics of using a feather to push a square boulder up a greased hill. Where did it go?

I wanna try that.

(Actually, it just occurred to me that I’ve BEEN trying that, every time I respond to a post from an inSAME ideologue on this forum.) Silly me.

Gee, Saggey, what a historian YOU are.  If you buy into that utter false stuff and nonsense and want to revise history, then you are also denying that there was WWII.

Tuf to imagine there are people like that around.

What?!  Educate ourselves about another region of the world...you’ve gotta be kidding.  We’re not even educated about our own history and political machinations.

Yeah, sure, it would be great if we woke up tomorrow and suddenly Americans cared enough to lift the veil of their own ignorance.  But who’s going to educate us?  Our president doesn’t know the difference between Shia and Sunni.  One of our presidential candidates still thinks that Czechoslovakia is a country.  And a frightening percentage of the population couldn’t pass a simple, world geography test.

And there’s the rub.  Our system of self-governance was established with a “well-informed electorate” in mind.  Without it we’re easy prey for television bobbleheads and ideologues like the neo-cons.  Add to that the fact that what little education most of us receive consists of indoctrinating the belief that America is exceptional and the best in every case.  Put it all together, and what can you expect?

Ed,

Name one neo-con who speaks Arabic or Farsi (or even Hebrew) who regularly appears on American television or is a columnist for a major American newspaper.

Okay, it’s always been about education versus ignorance, stupid!

But I do digress by repeating myself!

By P. T., July 15 at 9:41 am:

PT: first of all, you said “the languages of the region”. Hebrew is one of those langauges, and I’m sure you won’t dispute that many neocons know it.

Secondly, regarding other regional languages, there is the example of Meyrev Wurmser, wife of the odious neocon David Wurmser and a prominent neocon in her own right. She is fluent in Arabic and runs MEMRI, a neocon outfit that selectively and slantingly translates Arab news items to “prove” to the Americans that Arabs are evil, by “educating” us as to what “those people” really think. Ms. Wurmser employs a whole army of Arabic-speaking neocon translators working night and day to disinform the American public about Arabs for Israel’s benefit.

The most dangerously effective neocons are those who know Arabic. Many Jewish Israelis are fluent in Hebrew, Arabic, and English, have dual US/Israeli citizenship, and are staunch neoconservatives ideologically.

y samosamo, July 15 at 2:33 pm #

By cyrena, July 15 at 12:11 pm #

It probably is because if I called it criminal which it is I would be contradicting other comments I have made in that to be criminal there is a certain amount of intelligence especially if you are to get away with it.

~~~~

Ah Samosamo,
GOT IT!! And, I sure do appreciate your integrity, honesty, and keeping it all sane.

Matter of fact, I especially appreciate the sanity minus the drama. Oh yeah. Consistency means a whole lot to me..especially in this rabbit hole existence ‘they’ have embraced, and are trying to shove on the rest of us.

As for contradicting ourselves from time to time, I think that’s OK, as long as we recognize and acknowledge that it might be exactly that.

Shit happens, and sometimes we DO have to contradict ourselves, or change our minds, or whatever else, to stay in the reality of the moment.

It’s like the bumper sticker says…

“If you haven’t changed your mind lately, how do you know you still have one?”

Thanks for the reply. I do agree with you.

yours truly, (July 15 at 10:41 am)

If your reference to justice for the Palestinians refers to the ‘secret’ Annapolis Middle East Plan, and internet education thereof, i.e.: BBB Annapolis MD _ Middle East

Namely, BRIEFLY titles of document, and BRIEF excerpts follows:

---

COLONEL G.H.W. JESSOP-McNAMARA-BUTLER, USMC
JERICHO G.PEACE.C vs. ‘ARMAGEDDON HOLYWAR GIFT’
KIND-WINNARAINBOW-WOMAN R.S.V.P INVITATIONS &
COMMANDER RAMIUS~ €$£ªΨPILLAR~TYPHOON LOGISTICS

CHEYENNE KING WYOMING LOBSTER SSATIN SUMMIT

. ...

NASRULLAH BBC CLARKE: PALESTINIAN STATEHOOD

BRIEF REASONS FOR JERICHO Green.PEACE.Council

1. HUMAN RESOURCE SCARCITY:
It is hardly necessary for me to raise the issue of history’s oil/black gold and conquest (whether land or ideology, etc.) deification, curse on the Middle East (world). Nor human resource scarcity: geopolitical sincerity, commitment and honourability (political radar Richter scale value?)? Is it remotely possible to envision a stable, reasonably peaceful Middle East (world), in the absence of very frank public political, academic, and corporate conversations (particularly prole education) on among others, but predominantly: consequences of population growth (vis a viz natural resources)?  HomerLea-Orwell would humbly suggest the answer as: ‘MISSION IMPOSSIBLE’. 
2. GEOPOLITICS & NATIONAL INTEREST:
In the (i) face of Peak Oil, (ii) absence of UFO Disclosure revealing the reality of free energy capabilities; there is no future GDP growth. The only future ‘economic growth’ is of the ‘yum, yum’ variety:  depopulation of each country’s population towards a balance with their ecological footprint.
Wars are huge consumers of energy. They are extremely destructive. We will have destroyed nations, cities and infrastructure, and lack the energy to rebuild, no matter how many printing presses there are printing how many billions of whatever bourse currency.
3. OPTIONS:
A.  International acceptance of the Oil Depletion Protocol/Jericho Forgiveness step to Healing Process: (2008) All nations leaders take responsibility for reducing their population ecological footprint as humanely as possible, U.S. withdrawal from Iraq & Afghanistan, release of political prisoners, Palestinian statehood; (2009 à) political will for return to Gold (or similar) standard, ‘Homers negative compound interest protocol’, official UFO Disclosure & international space program..
B.  Religious Wars, i.e. fulfilment of Armageddon (‘end times’) prophecies.
C.  ‘Nationalistic’ Wars, driven by Corporate Predators, predominantly Investment Bankers.
D.  Manmade Depopulation Biological Wars: From AIDS & Ebola, to SARS, cancer, etc. etc. 
My {our} effort herewith is to attempt to encourage (A), and reduce the likelihood, or at the very least the causation and severity of (B), (C) and (D); whereby (A) occurs within a new relating context, focussing repressed energies which plausibly contributed to (B) - (D) towards a new more transparent, intimate, meaningful way of communicating and relating. I can’t guarantee that it will work. We will be a work in progress as we experiment, and all of us will at times stumble, fall, make fools of ourselves, help each other stand up again, and hopefully intentionally help ourselves, while helping each other.
----

I have no problem, further discussing, or exploring the possibility, and implementation thereof, if you are implying that there is SERIOUS, COMMITTED AND HONOURABLE interest therein. 

Previously—and as I see it still, although that can change of course, and if or when it does, fine, but for now it has not yet changed—the problem was, an insistence by various officials to plausible deniability. That, an official at the Iranian Embassy, was willing to admit—once—that I was representing the Pentagon on the issue, seemed irrelevant to officials at the US Embassy, and South African Goverment.

Accordingly I filed the aforementioned suggestion of ‘BBB Annapolis MD’, as:

[STAR] SUBJECT TO ‘JAG’FIGDYE PATRIOT PROTOCOL’S [STAR]

So, let’s see if there is, and if so, if it is serious, committed and honourable. ...

[[PS: I only have ADSL internet contact for a few more days. After that my access to the internet will be sporadic at best.]]

By cyrena, July 15 at 12:11 pm #

It probably is because if I called it criminal which it is I would be contradicting other comments I have made in that to be criminal there is a certain amount of intelligence especially if you are to get away with it. But even so intelligent and smart people do incredibly stupid things from time to time and I think I was just trying say it like that if any of those clowns really stopped to think about it, they would do themselves. Maybe a good example would be w’s wife that ran over and killed a friend, lover, aquaintance but it appears to never have bothered her one jot.

One thing that debilitates U.S. policy is the insistence that issues in the region can be disconnected from each other, and nobody there will notice.  For example, the U.S. maintains that it can, with the right marketing strategy, convince Muslims of its goodwill while simultaneously backing Zionist expansionism.

“To understand the whole unbreakable stance of their supidity, one has to consider why none of them have come to the realization of their incredible harm inflicted in this country and around the world and haven’t put a gun to their head and blown their brains out..”

Samo, I think this isn’t so much stupidity as it is pure evil. The Banality of Evil. They don’t care. Any other person WOULD blow their brains out.

But, think about it. This is really the American mindset of the elite. Remember back when the stock market crashed at the onset of the Great Depression? All of those wealthy or semi-wealthy folks were jumping out of windows and blowing their brains out. NOT because they felt responsible for it, but just because they’d lost what they thought they had.

Now somebody like GW wouldn’t even do it if he lost all of his own trillions, because he IS that stupid, and evil on top of it. But if such a thing happened to many of these neocons, and they lost everything, that would be the time they’d start blowing their brains out.

Not before…

samosamo, it reminds me a revelatory section in a Graham Greene novel, when the narrative reveals that all the high-minded policy stuff is in fact, so much useless junk, and that the real business of the enterprise, carving up the world, can proceed without further pretension.

Why worry about what you don’t already know because you are covered by your own agenda that has been built up since the mid-70s in the neocon think tanks where all sorts of cess is stirred around and pumped out as truth, justice and the american way for the good of the world. Exactly where american’s current governmental supidity overrides the world’s intellect.
To understand the whole unbreakable stance of their supidity, one has to consider why none of them have come to the realization of their incredible harm inflicted in this country and around the world and haven’t put a gun to their head and blown their brains out.
As many people that had to be involved in any of the shady acts of aggression against our own country be it complicity in voting or attacks against our country and other countries and no one has stepped forward to expose any of it leads me to think that a bunch of people have been paid off enough to keep quiet and enjoy their money(lord there has been enough money stolen to believe that) or there are a bunch of people wearing concrete shoes at the bottom of the ocean or there was a lot of practice of extraordinary rendition carried out to ‘hide’ these potential whistle blowers. And the opportunities for that to happen are certainly there.
So, why go back to middle east history 101 and try to understand anything at all?

I would like to know the name of any prominent neocons in the U.S. who are fluent in Arabic or Farsi.  Eliot Abrams?  lol

By P. T., July 15 at 8:22 am #

The U.S. has plenty of Middle East specialists in the universities, but they are mostly ignored.  In fact, they are derided.

~~~~

Yep P.T...they ARE indeed ignored and derided. Sometimes we’re even attacked viciously and hatefully by those who would prefer to make sure that nobody knows even a morsel of the truth.

How else could one justify the atrocities of the past several years if they had even a clue to the truth, rather than the bullshit propaganda that the thugs have been so determined to put out there?

beerdoc.

I’ve said the same thing about Scott Ritters article as well. That Obama should read it. It wouldn’t make an iota’s worth of difference with McCain.

re: By P. T., July 15 at 12:22 pm:

Actually, P.T., many of the neocons and their Israeli counterparts do know plenty about the region and do speak one or more of the regional languages (Hebrew, for starters; and Israelis often speak Arabic as well) - but they are Jewish American or Israeli Zionist fanatics, and they’re the only “experts” Americans are allowed to hear from on TV. Benjamin Netanyahu, for example, is not ignorant of the region. He’s just an ethnic nationalist bigot. He’s very happy to “explain” the Arabs to us and our Congress — and he gets lots of opportunities to do so.

The U.S. has plenty of Middle East specialists in the universities, but they are mostly ignored.  In fact, they are derided.

Instead, we get they views of neo-cons who know nothing about the region and cannot speak the languages.

This particular Robert Fisk article is a prime example of how much the United States does not know about that area of the world. Senator McCain should read this. Senator Obama should read this. It is too bad that so much diplomacy in the United States, is left to political cronies.