Yet one more step taken with great planning and deliberation since 1948 to steal all of Palestine and drive the Palestinians into oblivion. Why on earth would anyone in Washington, in good conscience, want to align themselves with this criminal enterprise? Oh, yes, there is that AIPAC thing. Remember the USS Liberty!
This is a very interesting question one can hope is answered in the near future. Somehow the term, "unwitting," just does not seem to fit Lt. Gen. Flynn.
The 2016 expenditures approached $600 billion, many times that of any other nation and at times variously reported as greater than the combined expenditures of the next 7 nations or 17 to 18 nations combined. Budgets are one thing and expenditures are another. Defense comprised 16% of our 2016 expenditures but 54% of our discretionary expenditures.
Iraq would have a unified national army if the idiots engaged in nation building had not disbanded it after the Gulf War. With Saddam Hussein gone, its Baathist legacy could have evaporated to be replaced with a proud and strong meritocracy.
It is an excellent argument for old fashion conventional war, a thing of the past. With much of the bombing today, we have to wonder how many enemies we have made with each impersonal bomb and for how many decades they will be enemies.
For those of us military/DoD brats who lived in Turkey, experienced their great personal character and warmth, became friends with many, this is just heart breaking.
Labor unions might consider hedging their bets in the future. Why not? A lot of corporations do that. Why choose to put all one's support in one party and eschew having any clout whatsoever in the other? Of course, it would be preferable by far to ban all such contributions.
Have used these maps tracking the theft of Palestinian lands as my FB cover photo for some time. Can't say that it generates much interest let alone outrage, but it reflects a major area of interest and concern to me over the course of 57 years. One day, hopefully in a Clinton administration, in spite of her slavishly prostrating herself before AIPAC this year, we will see some real fairness applied to Israel and Palestine instead of the pathetically impotent condemnation of Zionist settlements on stolen lands that have been the only response of our government in decades. Much of the difficulty the Western world and particularly the United States experiences in the Middle East is traceable to the very real lack of credibility and duplicity in our relationship to the Palestinians. Policies pursued there have not been in our national interest; they have been pursued only for domestic political purposes. Stealing Palestinian homes directly and lands for development has to be a very profitable criminal enterprise, and it has been carried out by the Israeli Defense Forces who's budget is nearly entirely underwritten by the United States. In my view, this support and duplicity has been and remains the seminal most disgusting and ineffectual miscalculation of our governmental policy since the tolerance of Jim Crow laws in the souther states following our Civil War. We have been paying for this miscalculation for decades, in Munich, on the Achille Lauro, highjackings, murders of innocents, 9/11, and right up through multiple incidents of homegrown terrorism in recent months.
We are kidding ourselves and being consummately stupid when we listen to our politicians dismiss terrorist as inherently evil and cast the issue into the mindset of the Crusades. Of course people who go about murdering innocents are inherently evil but it would behoove us to take note and to admit that these terrorist are also horribly angry and have been for generations. The time is long overdue to fracture that paradigm and reset our relationship with Israel and all of the Arab world. We can do that, or we can choose as Israel has, to fight them forever, or at least until nuclear devices will surely and surreptitiously be used to destroy most of Israel. The road to peace comes from absorbing ones enemies not absorbing their ancient lands and sending them into exile.
Trump apologist are trying to spin this as talking about voting 2nd Amendment supports. Two facts are critical: (1) Trump was talking about Clinton appointing SCOTUS judges, therefore he was talking about an elected President Clinton and 2nd Amendment people doing something about that. (2) His next utterance was, critically, "That'll be a terrible DAY." Trump was not talking about prolonged legislative lobbying over days, weeks and months, he was clearly talking about 2nd Amendment supporters doing "something" about HRC and/or her appointments, and doing it in a single, "terrible day." Trump was clearly alluding to assassination of Clinton and possibly her appointments, and he was implying that all 2nd Amendment supporters were potential assassins. Alluding to and therefore suggesting the possibility of assassination, is exactly just how many steps away from calling for assassination? I submit that it is precisely one.
General Michael Hayden, former director of the NSA and of the CIA said if anyone else uttered those words they would be in the, back of a police wagon being questioned by the Secret Service. With Trump, the Secret Service is in the unenviable position of protecting a man they would otherwise at least arrest and question, if not charge. However, the Secret Service is not empowered to chose our presidents and arresting Mr. Trump would unseemingly appear to be doing just that. What a mess and we can lay it all at the feet of Speaker Ryan and his feckless, spineless leadership as well as Reince Priebus and the RNC.
THe GOP is in headlong collapse but in this crisis lies an opportunity. Now is the time for Hillary Clinton to embrace a coalition government centrist government, one giving nod to some major conservative concerns as well as progressive concerns. It is possible, it is done everyday in government's elsewhere in lieu of inspired gridlock. How? HRC needs to approach the GOP with an invitation to join her Cabinet. Most appealing would be the positions of Defense, State and Commerce. These positions have often been held by Republicans without any undue impact on domestic policies more relevant to progressives.
A coalition government would do the most to restore face amongst the GOP, give them skin in the game, end the obstructionism of the radical right, and most importantly give the GOP a chance to rebuild right of center, the political party we need from them to effectively govern.
A President Clinton could, if she wants, do much to heal the GOP, end the constant squabbling over issues that we should no longer be arguing about, and do much to heal the nation by restoring faith in our basic two party system.
Pressure needs to be kept up on HRC. We can no longer afford to engage in the duplicity of impotently condemning the theft of Palestinian homes, lands and orchards, euphemistically call settlement policy, and the complete funding of the IDF, often the vanguard in this criminal enterprise. US policy must become even handed. Perhaps there is hope. While her husband was President and HRC was touring in the Middle East, she raised the subject of a two-state solution, the first person to do so associated with high office. It was not long after that WJC echoed those sentiments. But then, we can hope that her servile and obscene performance before AIPAC earlier this year was just a calculated political move.
Americans largely conflate religious conservatism with political conservatism to their everlasting detriment. While our Founders were certainly considered to be radicals by King George, for their countrymen, by 1788, they were the very foundation of our fledging democratic republic. If we measure from the brief time span between the Declaration of Independence, the writing and adoption of the Constitution and the subsequent adoption of the proposed Articles which became the first ten amendments know as the Bill of Rights, we establish an all important reference point. I submit, that, without judgement or preconception, nothing could, by definition be more politically conservative than adherence to the explicit views and political will of our Founders. Proposing that as the definition of a political conservative, as a starting point, then we are prepared to discuss what is so glibly talked about and attributed to conservatives in today's world.
Mike Pence and others of his ilk bill themselves as conservatives but are in fact religious and social conservatives with nothing in common with our Founders. Pence and his kind seek to use the power of government to informed their particular religious beliefs on the rest of us. Nothing was more antithetical to the Founders wisdom than the imposition of a state religion. Religious freedom and the utter separation of church and state was a fervently held belief amongst our Founders and a principle reason why the came to these shores and why they fought in Our Revolution.
Pence and his kind in imposing their religious views, in opposing the rights of women, opposing the concept of one man - one vote with their gerrymandering and support for corporate money in politics are, by comparison to our Founder's, the foremost liberals in this country. Liberals are not people that advocate human rights. That is what our Founders did. Liberals are those that take great liberties with your rights and mine, most especially by seeking to diminish them, in the voting booth, in public speech and even in our bedrooms.
That, is precisely why the Founders fretted over whether to even list our rights and then, true to form, compromised on a workable solution, what was the language of the 2nd proposed article and became the 9th Amendment: "The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." The 9th Amendment is the Rosetta Stone of the Constitution, there because the Founders had great fear that people would come along calling for an expansion of government authority, most especially over our private and religious lives by trivializing their most salient and completely agreed upon point of view, namely that they were explicit and exact in describing the limited powers of government.
Given that, should one read the SCOTUS decisions in Griswold v Connecticut and Roe v Wade, and most especially Justice Goldberg's concurring opinion in Roe, one would realize that these are more than reproductive rights cases, they are human rights cases of the greatest significance precisely because they evoke our Founder's view over what constitutes the proper relationship between free people and a government of explicitly stated and limited powers.
Today, and in recent years, the true conservatives on the Supreme Court have been the advocates of human rights, not the advocates of expanded corporate rights, voter suppression, unlimited money to buy politicians or the picking of a president. Those justices, mistakenly called conservatives when nothing more or less than social and religious conservatives are the true liberals on the court, the very justices taking liberties with your rights and mine.
Is interesting that the likely sole exception to this point of view comes from the so called social or religious conservative' support for the 2nd Amendment, so much so that as with the NRA, one would think that was the only amendment. It is not, but the 2nd Amendment is the only one with millions of dollars in NRA pipeline there to corrupt a political process, represent not sportsmen and sportswoman, but the firearms industry and to preclude a healthy and needed discussion of what can be done to uphold the 2nd Amendment and end the senseless slaughter of innocents.
By way of disclosure, I used to vote primarily for Republicans and now primarily for independents and Democrats. I am also a Patron Life Member of the NRA who rather than just complain, actually votes for new leadership every chance I get.
Day after day, more and more, the deeds and unaccountability of the Israeli government leave us stunned and near speechless. We wonder how those that suffered so horribly in WWII could give birth to a nation that emulates all but the absolute worse behaviors they themselves so completely experienced. Critics, even the most hopeful, falling silent, give what the Israeli government hopes to acquire, not acquiescence, but the next best thing, that silence. Are we but months now from the time when the maps, 1946 to present, no longer show any trace of Palestinian lands? Just how will that be rationalized? Will it be said that at least, gas and ovens were not use?
Hogwash. If there is any one event that has brought about ISIL, it is the Bush/Cheney decision to engage in regime change and "nation building" (hubristic farce) by invading Iraq, throwing Saddam Hussein out of power and disbanding the Iraqi army.
Many of us are convinced that Erdogan is pushing for more than an autocratic presidential "system;" he is pushing for an autocracy. Unfortunately, being thus focused so entirely on his aggrandizement of power, serious problems on Turkey's borders, in want of creative solutions and a leader of vision go unabated. My sense of this is that the opportunity is there for Turkey to become a major constructive and modulating force in the Middle East, so desperately in need of one and Erdogan, like Nero, fiddles.
Excellent and timely article. Sent it on to my pastor. Am really surprised at Wheaton. Evidently, you can get suspended for quoting an authority over there? Really? Isn't that usually thought to be a scholarly pursuit, part and parcel of the research based productivity most tenured professors and those seeking tenure, are expected to do?
What an astute observation, GOP candidates and party leaders often see themselves as victims or the public as victims, duped by the cataclysmic evil forces out there and in need of their "strong" often ignorant and always condescending leadership. Haven't quite thought of it that way. Contrast that with the voices of Democrat leaders that so often are simply telling us we can do better: Franklin Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt, John Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden just to name a few.
Yet one more step taken with great planning and deliberation since 1948 to steal all of Palestine and drive the Palestinians into oblivion. Why on earth would anyone in Washington, in good conscience, want to align themselves with this criminal enterprise? Oh, yes, there is that AIPAC thing. Remember the USS Liberty!
This is a very interesting question one can hope is answered in the near future. Somehow the term, "unwitting," just does not seem to fit Lt. Gen. Flynn.
The 2016 expenditures approached $600 billion, many times that of any other nation and at times variously reported as greater than the combined expenditures of the next 7 nations or 17 to 18 nations combined. Budgets are one thing and expenditures are another. Defense comprised 16% of our 2016 expenditures but 54% of our discretionary expenditures.
Iraq would have a unified national army if the idiots engaged in nation building had not disbanded it after the Gulf War. With Saddam Hussein gone, its Baathist legacy could have evaporated to be replaced with a proud and strong meritocracy.
It is an excellent argument for old fashion conventional war, a thing of the past. With much of the bombing today, we have to wonder how many enemies we have made with each impersonal bomb and for how many decades they will be enemies.
For those of us military/DoD brats who lived in Turkey, experienced their great personal character and warmth, became friends with many, this is just heart breaking.
Labor unions might consider hedging their bets in the future. Why not? A lot of corporations do that. Why choose to put all one's support in one party and eschew having any clout whatsoever in the other? Of course, it would be preferable by far to ban all such contributions.
Have used these maps tracking the theft of Palestinian lands as my FB cover photo for some time. Can't say that it generates much interest let alone outrage, but it reflects a major area of interest and concern to me over the course of 57 years. One day, hopefully in a Clinton administration, in spite of her slavishly prostrating herself before AIPAC this year, we will see some real fairness applied to Israel and Palestine instead of the pathetically impotent condemnation of Zionist settlements on stolen lands that have been the only response of our government in decades. Much of the difficulty the Western world and particularly the United States experiences in the Middle East is traceable to the very real lack of credibility and duplicity in our relationship to the Palestinians. Policies pursued there have not been in our national interest; they have been pursued only for domestic political purposes. Stealing Palestinian homes directly and lands for development has to be a very profitable criminal enterprise, and it has been carried out by the Israeli Defense Forces who's budget is nearly entirely underwritten by the United States. In my view, this support and duplicity has been and remains the seminal most disgusting and ineffectual miscalculation of our governmental policy since the tolerance of Jim Crow laws in the souther states following our Civil War. We have been paying for this miscalculation for decades, in Munich, on the Achille Lauro, highjackings, murders of innocents, 9/11, and right up through multiple incidents of homegrown terrorism in recent months.
We are kidding ourselves and being consummately stupid when we listen to our politicians dismiss terrorist as inherently evil and cast the issue into the mindset of the Crusades. Of course people who go about murdering innocents are inherently evil but it would behoove us to take note and to admit that these terrorist are also horribly angry and have been for generations. The time is long overdue to fracture that paradigm and reset our relationship with Israel and all of the Arab world. We can do that, or we can choose as Israel has, to fight them forever, or at least until nuclear devices will surely and surreptitiously be used to destroy most of Israel. The road to peace comes from absorbing ones enemies not absorbing their ancient lands and sending them into exile.
Trump apologist are trying to spin this as talking about voting 2nd Amendment supports. Two facts are critical: (1) Trump was talking about Clinton appointing SCOTUS judges, therefore he was talking about an elected President Clinton and 2nd Amendment people doing something about that. (2) His next utterance was, critically, "That'll be a terrible DAY." Trump was not talking about prolonged legislative lobbying over days, weeks and months, he was clearly talking about 2nd Amendment supporters doing "something" about HRC and/or her appointments, and doing it in a single, "terrible day." Trump was clearly alluding to assassination of Clinton and possibly her appointments, and he was implying that all 2nd Amendment supporters were potential assassins. Alluding to and therefore suggesting the possibility of assassination, is exactly just how many steps away from calling for assassination? I submit that it is precisely one.
General Michael Hayden, former director of the NSA and of the CIA said if anyone else uttered those words they would be in the, back of a police wagon being questioned by the Secret Service. With Trump, the Secret Service is in the unenviable position of protecting a man they would otherwise at least arrest and question, if not charge. However, the Secret Service is not empowered to chose our presidents and arresting Mr. Trump would unseemingly appear to be doing just that. What a mess and we can lay it all at the feet of Speaker Ryan and his feckless, spineless leadership as well as Reince Priebus and the RNC.
THe GOP is in headlong collapse but in this crisis lies an opportunity. Now is the time for Hillary Clinton to embrace a coalition government centrist government, one giving nod to some major conservative concerns as well as progressive concerns. It is possible, it is done everyday in government's elsewhere in lieu of inspired gridlock. How? HRC needs to approach the GOP with an invitation to join her Cabinet. Most appealing would be the positions of Defense, State and Commerce. These positions have often been held by Republicans without any undue impact on domestic policies more relevant to progressives.
A coalition government would do the most to restore face amongst the GOP, give them skin in the game, end the obstructionism of the radical right, and most importantly give the GOP a chance to rebuild right of center, the political party we need from them to effectively govern.
A President Clinton could, if she wants, do much to heal the GOP, end the constant squabbling over issues that we should no longer be arguing about, and do much to heal the nation by restoring faith in our basic two party system.
Pressure needs to be kept up on HRC. We can no longer afford to engage in the duplicity of impotently condemning the theft of Palestinian homes, lands and orchards, euphemistically call settlement policy, and the complete funding of the IDF, often the vanguard in this criminal enterprise. US policy must become even handed. Perhaps there is hope. While her husband was President and HRC was touring in the Middle East, she raised the subject of a two-state solution, the first person to do so associated with high office. It was not long after that WJC echoed those sentiments. But then, we can hope that her servile and obscene performance before AIPAC earlier this year was just a calculated political move.
Americans largely conflate religious conservatism with political conservatism to their everlasting detriment. While our Founders were certainly considered to be radicals by King George, for their countrymen, by 1788, they were the very foundation of our fledging democratic republic. If we measure from the brief time span between the Declaration of Independence, the writing and adoption of the Constitution and the subsequent adoption of the proposed Articles which became the first ten amendments know as the Bill of Rights, we establish an all important reference point. I submit, that, without judgement or preconception, nothing could, by definition be more politically conservative than adherence to the explicit views and political will of our Founders. Proposing that as the definition of a political conservative, as a starting point, then we are prepared to discuss what is so glibly talked about and attributed to conservatives in today's world.
Mike Pence and others of his ilk bill themselves as conservatives but are in fact religious and social conservatives with nothing in common with our Founders. Pence and his kind seek to use the power of government to informed their particular religious beliefs on the rest of us. Nothing was more antithetical to the Founders wisdom than the imposition of a state religion. Religious freedom and the utter separation of church and state was a fervently held belief amongst our Founders and a principle reason why the came to these shores and why they fought in Our Revolution.
Pence and his kind in imposing their religious views, in opposing the rights of women, opposing the concept of one man - one vote with their gerrymandering and support for corporate money in politics are, by comparison to our Founder's, the foremost liberals in this country. Liberals are not people that advocate human rights. That is what our Founders did. Liberals are those that take great liberties with your rights and mine, most especially by seeking to diminish them, in the voting booth, in public speech and even in our bedrooms.
That, is precisely why the Founders fretted over whether to even list our rights and then, true to form, compromised on a workable solution, what was the language of the 2nd proposed article and became the 9th Amendment: "The enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." The 9th Amendment is the Rosetta Stone of the Constitution, there because the Founders had great fear that people would come along calling for an expansion of government authority, most especially over our private and religious lives by trivializing their most salient and completely agreed upon point of view, namely that they were explicit and exact in describing the limited powers of government.
Given that, should one read the SCOTUS decisions in Griswold v Connecticut and Roe v Wade, and most especially Justice Goldberg's concurring opinion in Roe, one would realize that these are more than reproductive rights cases, they are human rights cases of the greatest significance precisely because they evoke our Founder's view over what constitutes the proper relationship between free people and a government of explicitly stated and limited powers.
Today, and in recent years, the true conservatives on the Supreme Court have been the advocates of human rights, not the advocates of expanded corporate rights, voter suppression, unlimited money to buy politicians or the picking of a president. Those justices, mistakenly called conservatives when nothing more or less than social and religious conservatives are the true liberals on the court, the very justices taking liberties with your rights and mine.
Is interesting that the likely sole exception to this point of view comes from the so called social or religious conservative' support for the 2nd Amendment, so much so that as with the NRA, one would think that was the only amendment. It is not, but the 2nd Amendment is the only one with millions of dollars in NRA pipeline there to corrupt a political process, represent not sportsmen and sportswoman, but the firearms industry and to preclude a healthy and needed discussion of what can be done to uphold the 2nd Amendment and end the senseless slaughter of innocents.
By way of disclosure, I used to vote primarily for Republicans and now primarily for independents and Democrats. I am also a Patron Life Member of the NRA who rather than just complain, actually votes for new leadership every chance I get.
The hole Israel digs for itself deepens. It must be very warm down there. Can there be much further to go?
A must read, just ordered.
Day after day, more and more, the deeds and unaccountability of the Israeli government leave us stunned and near speechless. We wonder how those that suffered so horribly in WWII could give birth to a nation that emulates all but the absolute worse behaviors they themselves so completely experienced. Critics, even the most hopeful, falling silent, give what the Israeli government hopes to acquire, not acquiescence, but the next best thing, that silence. Are we but months now from the time when the maps, 1946 to present, no longer show any trace of Palestinian lands? Just how will that be rationalized? Will it be said that at least, gas and ovens were not use?
Hogwash. If there is any one event that has brought about ISIL, it is the Bush/Cheney decision to engage in regime change and "nation building" (hubristic farce) by invading Iraq, throwing Saddam Hussein out of power and disbanding the Iraqi army.
Very interesting.
Many of us are convinced that Erdogan is pushing for more than an autocratic presidential "system;" he is pushing for an autocracy. Unfortunately, being thus focused so entirely on his aggrandizement of power, serious problems on Turkey's borders, in want of creative solutions and a leader of vision go unabated. My sense of this is that the opportunity is there for Turkey to become a major constructive and modulating force in the Middle East, so desperately in need of one and Erdogan, like Nero, fiddles.
Really, Israel frets? Maybe they should stop working so hard at pissing all their neighbor's off.
Ted Cruz is the most highly educated idiot I have ever encountered.
Excellent and timely article. Sent it on to my pastor. Am really surprised at Wheaton. Evidently, you can get suspended for quoting an authority over there? Really? Isn't that usually thought to be a scholarly pursuit, part and parcel of the research based productivity most tenured professors and those seeking tenure, are expected to do?
What an astute observation, GOP candidates and party leaders often see themselves as victims or the public as victims, duped by the cataclysmic evil forces out there and in need of their "strong" often ignorant and always condescending leadership. Haven't quite thought of it that way. Contrast that with the voices of Democrat leaders that so often are simply telling us we can do better: Franklin Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt, John Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden just to name a few.