Perhaps, Diamond, but if the warmongers have their way, they’re going to drag all of us into Perdition with them.

some of the Evangelicals will vote for him. a
relatively small slice will reject him on religious
grounds and more of them will scorn Romney as a wild-
eyed pinko, but not all of those crazy bastards are
entirely bat-shit crazy.

“I don’t think Dr. Paul means to pull the rug out from under anybody but the merchants of death, the neocons, and the big generals and admirals; I’m willing to vote for him, and wait and see.”

Well, you’re wrong. He does. And you would regret voting for him - a lot. But that’s all academic: Ron Paul is simply too much of a flake to be a credible candidate and they will just have to go with Mitt Romney, unless Sarah Palin staggers back on stage. That will be good, of course because it will seal the Republicans’ fate. The evangelicals won’t vote for Mitt because he’s a Mormon, moderates of any stripe won’t vote for him once they realize he wants to make Guantanamo twice as big and the progressive/anti-war voters won’t vote for him because he’s itching to attack Iran. Obama will eat him alive in the debate. All round the Republicans are exactly where they deserve to be - in hell.

jeandavid~~~~~~“The Libya operation [provides] a model for low-cost, no-
consequence interventions … [promoting] U.S. values at minimal cost to U.S.
interests. “

It is disgusting and revolting that these moral cripples can speak like this. Low
cost? Trillions of dollars wasted is low cost? Killing a million and a half Iraqis is low
cost?

———

you seem to be confusing Libya with Iraq…. not a good thing to do.

If you want to know how valuable your vote is, and how
it could really change things, just look at the number
of people trying to convince you that its worthless and
that you shouldn’t bother.  A lot of people seem to
want to put a lot of effort into convincing you that
your vote is worthless.  You should ask yourself, why?

Its 2012, which means its an election year.  Which
means the American people can change this if they
want to change it.  On the Republican ballot, there
is a major candidate running near the top of the
field that would not start a war with Iran, and who
would end our other wars and bring the troops home. 
That is of course Ron Paul. 

Thus, the American people have the option right now,
today, of supporting a candidate who has a real
chance of winning and who would end these wars.  In
states with ‘open’ primaries, anyone can vote in the
Republican race and chose the anti-war option. In
other states, anyone can still help join Paul
campaign by volunteering to work, call voters etc.

And, in the fall, there will certainly be at least
one if not (unfortunately) several anti-war
candidates on the ballot.  It may of course be Mr.
Paul if he does win the Republican nomination. But
even if he doesn’t there will likely be at least
three anti-war choices on the ballot.  Support and
vote for those choices if you don’t want more war.

At least this year, there’s no fake candidate
running.  In 2008, Obama was the fake anti-war
candidate.  Strangely supported by the anti-war
professionals even though he was calling Afghanistan
‘the right war’ and was promising an ever increasing
‘defense’ budget.  But, that bit of fakery can’t
occur this time with Obama now clearly in the pro-war
camp as supporting, or even enlarging, Dubya’s
foreign policy of never ending wars and ever growing
defense budgets.

Some 60% to 70% of voters tell pollsters they oppose
the wars.  In 2008, about 3% of the voters voted for
an anti-war candidate.  If Americans really want the
wars to end, they have to stop doing that.  The war
party(s) will spin every lie they can to keep you
from doing that.  The current favorite is that the
left can’t dare to support the ‘dangerous’ Mr. Paul. 
Don’t get fooled again.  Vote anti-war every chance
you get.

Thank you, Working Man; interesting read.

The Ron Paul people, and really not just them but anybody who supports third party candidates or thinks the current two parties are really just one party, might be interested in the Two Round System of voting.

link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-round_system

Liberal intervention and liberal delusion?—how does it differ from the neocon
brand of intervention and delusion? With the exception of Ron Paul, the crazy republicans who are running for the White House are primed for war with Iran, if elected; but Pfaff misses the opportunity to observe the breathtaking irony that Obama, the democrat, has us balanced on the point of war with Iran right now.

It hasn’t been that long
since Obama colluded in a foreign sponsored coup against Libya, a real enough
war that involved a lawless end run around congressional authority.

“If Obama is re-elected president, will he replace old wars with new? ” Yes, and
the sun rises in the East.

France, Britain, and Italy, are also in on this US policy which amounts to
provocation and acts of war against Iran. The most ridiculous thing Pfaff writes
is this:

“Now the good guys are on our side again: springtime Arabs, rebels against
dictators, generals and brutal policemen, wired-in new-style protestors. We
helped them in Libya (or, actually France, Britain, Qatar and a few others helped
them, and we went along for the ride). We felt really good about this. The
political “realism” of the past, support for “regional despots” and for the hard-
eyed CIA types who manipulated them, are all out of fashion.”

No, the good guys are not on our side. Not in Bahrain, or Saudi Arabia, or
Eygpt, either. It is still despotic royalty and military juntas that US policy favors. The junta still refuses to budge in Egypt; and the protesters don’t trust Obama or US policy to be in their corner.

The US president is committed to aggression against Iran, and to a policy fetish
that blindly supports warlike, paranoid Israel.  Romney and Obama might as
well be blood brothers, where the subject of war is concerned.

Diamond, if we don’t put a non-warmonger in the White House, imperial overstretch due to the idiotic wars will destroy this country’s prosperity, and then where will the welfare state be? I don’t think Dr. Paul means to pull the rug out from under anybody but the merchants of death, the neocons, and the big generals and admirals; I’m willing to vote for him, and wait and see. The wars must END, friend. It’s that simple. National ruin awaits us all if they don’t.

“vote for Ron Paul in the primaries. Knock
that goofball Romney out of there.”

They’re both goofballs: Ron Paul is a goofball on the economy and social policy and Mitt Romney is a goofball on just about everything. If he genuinely believes the story that is the basis of Mormonism he’s just not very bright. People attack Obama for not closing Guantanamo Bay but the people who really stopped it being closed are in the Congress. The last thing they want is for those people who they cannot put on trial in a normal court, because all they have is tortured evidence, to be moving around freely talking to lawyers and the media. What many people don’t realize is that Mitt Romney wants to make Guantanamo Bay twice as big (to hold all the ‘terrorists’ he intends to hunt down). In his second term Obama will do a lot of things he couldn’t do in his first term (because he would have risked not being re-elected) and that’s why Michelle Bachmann constantly bleated that she would make sure he was ‘a one term president’. Ron Paul can’t be trusted on the economy and social policy and Romney can’t be trusted, end of story. It defies logic to believe that a Libertarian like Ron Paul is somehow different to all the other free market, economic rationalist Libertarians who dominate the Republican Party. He would continue the rush to economic ruin that has been the pattern since Reagan and even more ghost towns would dot the American landscape while the end product of his social policies would be more and more homeless people and shantytowns like the ones in the third world.

“The Libya operation [provides] a model for low-cost, no-consequence interventions … [promoting] U.S. values at minimal cost to U.S. interests. “

It is disgusting and revolting that these moral cripples can speak like this. Low cost? Trillions of dollars wasted is low cost? Killing a million and a half Iraqis is low cost? It this country’s conscience had not totally collapsed, people like this would be ashamed to appear in public or to make statements like this. But they have no shame; they are a disgusting reminder of how low the human race has fallen. “How does it become a man to behave toward this American government to-day? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it.” Henry David Thoreau

alas, most americans believe there was or is now an america. in fact, there were
always at least 10 species of americans and 30 or 40 or 100 ethnoses in america—
and thus americas—and with descending econo-military-politico-educational
powers from the top one to the bottom one.
the wasp was dominant one for 4 C years and now has to share the glory,
american dream, god bless america [anglo-saxons, scots], we are a nation of laws,
etc., with ashkenazim; some people of the latter ethnos [or, rather, a multi-
ethnicity] being better banksters than the dumb [in use of money; id est, only]
anglosaxons.
===
and hedges/et al are on their way to mars by suing the leading anglos and
ashkenazim for the breech of THEIR CONSTITUTION, THEIR DREAMS, ADDICTION
TO POWERS.

“It’s just a handful of people that run everything, and that’s provable….I have this feeling that whoever’s elected president…no matter what promises you make on the campaign trail – blah, blah, blah – when you win, you go into this smoky room with the twelve industrialist, capitalist scumfucks that got you in there, and this little screen comes down… and it’s a shot of the Kennedy assassination from an angle you’ve never seen before, which looks suspiciously off the grassy knoll…. And then the screen comes up, the lights come on, and they say to the new president, ‘Any questions?’

‘Just what my agenda is.’”

- Bill Hicks

http://michaelfury.wordpress.com/2008/10/09/the-protection-racket/

A Bird in the Hand is spot-on!

i say that usa might bomb iran but would not wage an open war against it for decades.
and it is doubtful that usa could use iraq to once again attack iran as it did in late 70s.
but usa [or the ‘elite’] needs now more than ever rumors of war and wars. and it’ll pick
easier victims than iran. rising cost of oil arising out of hormuz closure would constitute
one cause for usa not attacking iran.
there is a next. we can expect that.
for one thing, both the warfare [includes cia terror] and the army is by now totally
privatized.
that makes warring much easier. but let’s go back to who’s next? i expect it’ll be syria, cuba,
vietnam, [in change of mind] libya, korea, lebanon, sudan.

but pfaff, as always before, omits to dwell on why usa wages wars. without knowing the
WHY [the causative factors for all wars and not just that by usa] americans are deprived of
knowledge that one must have before one can prevent wars or stop them once under way.
one can ‘know’ all about wars and all the reasons for wars and yet KNOW NOTHING unless
one knows why wars are waged.

@louiss123

I agree.  And while my choice for POTUS is R.
Anderson, and would cast my worthless vote there if I
were voting my conscience, I know the right-wing
faction of the Corporate Party called the Democrats
will never allow him anywhere near the final ballot,
just as the extreme right-wing faction of the
Corporate Party called the Republicans will do
everything they can to keep Paul off their ticket. 
Given that reality, an overwhelming vote for Paul in
the Primaries might be our last, best hope for the
restoration of Constitutional government and the Rule
of Law, and undoing the damage of the Bush-Obama
regime.

...and here is where all truthdig members have a one in a life time choice. Change
their voter registration to republican, and vote for Ron Paul in the primaries. Knock
that goofball Romney out of there. Then lets see how an Obama/Raul Pres. debate
would go. You may not like his social or abortion policies but he could not change
those with a stroke of a pen anyway. What he could do is immedietly bring the
troops home and change foreign policy.
Are there invisible hands pulling strings behind the scenes? Sure, why wouldn’t
there be? Paul might have an ace up his sleeve in that regard.
No whining, take action, be positive.

“I actually wonder whether any politician, including the president, has any say at all in going to war.”

Of course they don’t. Kennedy told someone after the Bay of Pigs disaster that he was going to ‘tear the CIA into a million bits and scatter it to the winds’. He took all covert ops out of their hands and gave them to the Chiefs of Staff and he fired Dulles. He was also going to get out of Vietnam and he had started to thaw out the ice that ran the Cold War. Remember what happened to him? Clinton refused to ‘follow orders’ when the neo cons told him that America had to invade Iraq with or without UN sanction. Remember what happened to him? Then they stole the 2000 election via their friends in the Supreme Court and the rest is grubby, venal history.

Pfaff is exactly right about this global Empire which hides behind the facade of America engaging in massive wars regardless of which faux-Emperor/president is allowed to take center stage in this ‘show’ election.

Obama is not being ‘lured into war’ by Mittens.

Both these shills of the global corporate/financial/militarist (and media) Empire that has ‘captured’ and now fully “Occupies” our former country, by hiding behind the facade of that Empire’s modernized TWO-Party ‘Vichy’ sham of faux-democratic and totally illegitimate government—- just as surely as the Nazi Empire tried to hide behind its crude, first-generation, and merely single-party ‘Vichy’ regime facade in ‘captured’ and ‘occupied’ France c. 1940-44—- are merely auditioning for the roll of faux-Emperor/president, and both of these whores of Empire will carry the exact same pro-war, pro-tyranny, pro-looting, and pro-Empire policies forward, with the only difference being their relative skills at deceiving citizens/voters into passively acceding to the Empire’s will.

If a business-like no-nonsense approach is of more value to the underlying Empire, then Romney will be made into the faux-Emperor/president.

But if the more emotive, “we’re in this together” empathetic lip-biting act is judged more beneficial to the Empire, then Obama will be retained as the faux-Emperor/president.

Only an alternative third-party overtly anti-war, anti-looting, anti-tyranny, and publicly anti-EMPIRE candidate could change the arc of Empire by one bit.

The principled anti-war, anti-looting, anti-tyranny, and anti-Empire libertarian right has the guts to forward such a serious candidate (Ron Paul)—- who will mount a third party run beyond the phony Republican dog and pony show.

Hopefully, the principled anti-war, anti-looting, anti-tyranny, and anti-Empire social/economic democracy left will also forward a serious candidate to challenge Obama in the phony Democrat dog and pony show—- who will then mount a third party run, perhaps even in concert with the libertarian “Against Empire”.

Best luck and love to the “Occupy Empire” educational movement.

Liberty, democracy, justice, and equality
Over
Violent/Vichy
Empire,

Alan MacDonald
Sanford, Maine

I actually wonder whether any politician, including the president, has any say at all in going to war. Those in charge of the country are the corporate elites, and money can be made out of wars with no need for change, retooling or rethinking.  Corporations like to make money—and with the least possible amount of change, retooling or rethinking.  They can also buy elections. Ergo ...

Pfaff’s article is full of typical delusions.

“If Romney succeeds, and does what all the Republican candidates (Paul excluded) have promised—strike Iran, or sustain Israel in attacking that country—the United States would begin 2013 in or at the edge of a new Middle Eastern war, estranged from the European democracies, as well as from much of the non-Western world.”

France and the UK are being just as threatening towards Iran as the US, Sarkozy and Cameron are both itching for another conflict, especially since their own domestic situations are becoming quite unstable economically. As for the rest of the Europe, Greece and Italy are no longer democracies.

“Now the good guys are on our side again: springtime Arabs, rebels against dictators, generals and brutal policemen, wired-in new-style protestors. We helped them in Libya (or, actually France, Britain, Qatar and a few others helped them, and we went along for the ride). We felt really good about this. The political “realism” of the past, support for “regional despots” and for the hard-eyed CIA types who manipulated them, are all out of fashion.”

Really? Tell that to the people of Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the UAE and every other despot the Obama White House continues to support despite their brutal crackdowns against protesters. Didn’t Obama just welcome the king of Jordan this week? Whatever Pfaff is smoking it isn’t bringing clarity to his Obama-worshipping skull.

Everyone is mentioned except those who actually select
the next CEO of the lawless, war-for-profit USA, Inc.:

The corporate owners and international bankers.

If voting could change anything, it would be illegal.

That’s real easy to answer:

Ron Paul= No War

Obomber or Mittens= Endless Wars

Choose carefully..