Nice, now please stop SHOUTING! It isn’t nice in polite company.

If you want a third party, or to advance an existing third party (like, say, the Greens), or to mount a primary challenge in 2012, now is the time to start organizing.  Most progs sat on their hands (except for posting rants in blogs) for the last two years and as a result they have no influence and nothing to vote for in the coming election.

PGRP—I myself would rather see a formally correct war crimes trial.  Then the bayonet, perhaps, although the Nazis were disposed of pretty efficiently by hanging.

The trouble is, so many people would have to be tried, and a good many of them almost certainly executed.  (Going by the standards of Nuremberg.)  Well, it would provide a couple of years of reality television, anyway.  Maybe the advertising would pay for it.

As a former combat infantry officer who served a year in South Vietnam, I would dearly love to shove a bayonet up arses of everyone in the lying Bush administration.  These wars, Iraq and Afghanistan, have destroyed America’s credibility and economy.  When will the Obama administration grow a pair and start kicking ass instead of puking and mewling about b.s.?

Citing Anarcissie citing me: [‘I’m not going to argue the rightness or the wrongness of invading Iraq. It’s a done deal. ...’

Not really]

My intent was to say that it is irrevocable. I was pointing to the phoney B.S.

Otherwise, I concur with your post.

The total death toll of Iraqis from 1990-2010 are as follows;

1990-2003:1.525 million Counting sanctions and the destruction by US military of water pumping stations, hospitals, factories, etc. 500,000 of them were under 5 years old. [Madaline Albright was recorded as saying that it was acceptable to her those losses.

2003-2010: Estimated over 1.92 million and counting and should include all deaths attributed to local civil wars started by the occupation and destruction of society.

Grossly under counted, thousands? Not a chance.

The wars are smart for someone. Just not us. Wars of empire not a republic. Which do we want? If the former, do nothing, the latter how do we cut off the money? Cut the money it all ends.

Not just 50,000 troops, also 7,000 guards and over 100,000 corporate troops & their logistical crews there too. Iraq is an occupied country and they got what they wanted out of it. The oil is still under foreign control not local. They have won even if we lose.

Yes SteveE his act is wearing thin but too many are still too desperate for any thing else but a Democrat even if he is a crypto-fascist in disguise. Hope can be used as a weapon against the sincere. A false hope that will never be realized.

Unfortunately our voting system is now set up to only allow the two official parties to have an equal chance to be elected. Corporations can now give unlimited money. (The unions can too but they are few and weak. Can’t begin to match the corporations that have greater GDP’s than half the countries on earth.

The metaphorical “turning the page” can cover a multitude of crimes. Such pragmatism can hide the worst things our gov’t has done in the past and will continue to do into the future if nothing changes.

November 2nd enables and empowers you and I, the citizens of the United States, the ability to get rid of the dumb ass making the decision to carry on their war.

Forget Wolfowitz and Bolton.  Endless war is now the policy of the New Republican Party (aka Democrats) even if they may be outdone by the New Tea Bagger-Repug Fascist Party.  The next election will be another opportunity to pick our poison from the Corporatist Broth that now defines America.

We are not getting out of this mess unless people have the guts and intelligence to yell out lier when Obama waxes on about the “service” to the country by those in the military that are being driven into war crimes by our institutionalized MIC profiteers.

“Our ‘Dumb Wars’ Will Go On”

There’s money in them thar wars.

gerard—‘Bleeds’ is right.

The lie behind the popular “turn the page” idea is that in human behavior—good or bad, right or wrong—there are no pages to turn.  One act feeds or bleeds into the next.  The effects of the past are visible and fade only slowly, if ever.
  Recognition of bad opens the door to good. Change is as possible as stasis, and there is always a choice, and often more than one.  Conscious choice for the better can be made, but first the possibilites have to be recognized—and good results usually have to be worked for. They don’t come without effort.
  Drift most often leads to deterioration or worse. Ditto for ignoring facts.
  The one legitimate purpose of media is to reveal facts, and only secondarily, opinions. Commercial media are in revolt against democracy, along with other big businesses. They do not reveal facts. The only hope left is the internet—plus the common sense of the majority of people.

Mike789, September 7 at 8:33 am:

‘I’m not going to argue the rightness or the wrongness of invading Iraq. It’s a done deal. ...’

Not really.  There are a lot of inconvenient facts hanging around that won’t go away, such as the 50,000 US troops still in the country, and the enormous expense of the war, financial and spiritual, most of it still to be paid.  By the standards of the Nuremberg Trials, Bush, Cheney, Powell, Rice, Rumsfeld and so forth are all war criminals of the sort who were condemned to death and hanged at Nuremberg.  They won’t be tried in a court of law but they will be tried in history, along with the fact that their supposed competitors, the Democrats, enabled their activities and later refused to prosecute or even investigate them.  Non of that is going to go away either.

In any case, the kind of people who started the war are not ‘rejects from the past’.  It’s obvious they’re still in power.

Perhaps willful ignorance is a prerequisite for columnists.  The fact is that this Administration is as pro-war as any Republican, and there is no difference between the two when it comes to war-mongering and subsidizing the wealthy.  Sure, one party talks a better populist game at times, but the real “dumb” are those who believe the differences are more than that. Obama signaled what he was well before he was appointed by the corporate class that installed him, and he has yet to let them down.

Petraeus is asking for more troops for Afghanistan.
“Well, a funny thing happened roughly halfway between the announcement of the escalation and the now thoroughly irrelevant “drawdown” date. Gen. David Petraeus, the new commander in Afghanistan, is now asking for more troops.”
http://news.antiwar.com/2010/09/06/petraeus-seeks-more-troops-for-afghanistan/
It seems rather hypocritical to talk about the warmongering Chickenhawk Republicans when Obama’s hand-picked Annointed One is wanting another troop escalation.

I’m not going to argue the rightness or the wrongness of invading Iraq. It’s a done deal. The fact that literally decades of military experience was ignored is bad enouth, but what pisses me off more than anything is the continued subterfuge the Bush bunch think they have to employ in order to sell the war. As a military retiree, though not a “my country right or wrong” robot, (I can make an informed decision), I do prefer the facts up front. So although, I can acknowledge the underlying reason of a military presence in the Mid-East, I disdain the deceit. Just tell me it’s a logical chess move, with it’s concomittant “risk/reward” consequences, good and bad, and get on with it. This war was concocted by chicken hawks and that imprint will not ever wash.

Sending soldiers into a war theatre on shallow, trumped up assertions eventually diluted the “raison etre” of the whole shebang and will add confusion to its historic significance.

It is not insignificant for the soldier and he should know the naked truth. And the truth is we are a nation that has a deep-seated proclivity to project power. We are a violent race. Don’t believe it? Just wait until climate change tips the scales.

Acknowledging one’s inherent violent nature is the first step in controlling that nature. To candy-coat the selling of this war to the American public reveals s contempt for that public by its leaders.

I can’t get over the fine tuning Obama has performed on The Constitution while in
power. When the Repugs get back in and they will, watch out. They are going to
love their new toys. No wonder Dawn Johnsen was left hanging in the wind waiting
for her appointment to be confirmed. Most Americans don’t realize how badly
their Dept. of Justice is thrashed. We can blame a lot on the MSM.

There is very little worse than lying about your own self created lies.

No one’s “act” has worn out so quickly and so completely as Barack Obama’s.  This man, totally, thoroughly devoid of any leadership ability, still doesn’t realize that he is merely another well paid worker on the assembly line of American national disaster. He will sleepwalk his way to political oblivion still believing that a hundred years from now there will be statues of him in every town square in the United States. This man, this human blank slate, every bit the failure George W. Bush was and still is, is the current lying face of America’s heedless and half-assed march into irreversible mediocrity.