Morisi was not committed to a democracy. Morisi was committed to a theocracy. That was really the problem and why the transition had no real chance of working. The various factions that put their differences aside when trying to topple Mubarak wanted fundamentally different things. If he was already trying to jail people for criticism of him and charging Coptic Christians with Blasphemy for practicing their faith and he had not even really consolidated power yet, how would the Muslim Brotherhood have behaved when they actually had consolidated power. When they did control the military or had a powerful enough militia to rival it. The art of democracy is tolerance, compromise. If your aim is a theocracy, tolerance and compromise is not going to be on the agenda.
Last time I checked, the US supported a two state solution in the Middle East. So, which 'peace process' is it that we are opposing. The one going on in Syria right now.
There must be a way to challenge the breadth of a subpoena in court. And should not their claims as to fraud, etc., have been addressed in the original lawsuit as part of their defense to that lawsuit. I believe those claims were specifically part of Chevron's defense, so have they not already been adjudicated upon? This looks like a sham lawsuit for sure.
Well, since we are one nation, under Snowden, I guess what he concludes ( He has clearly concluded that it is a sneaky and manipulative government agency that is not subject to sufficient oversight, in part because it misrepresents its actions to the overseers.) should, therefore be definitive. One question, if government spying was so all pervasive how is it that these agencies were not aware, even after they did background checks on him, that Edward Snowden had been in contact with Glen Greenwald, well before being hired by Booz Allen Hamilton.
He seeks asylum in China because he's worried about human rights and transparency and privacy and soon ends up on the propaganda video by North Korea slamming the South for being puppets of America. The Chinese don't really want much to do with him and once they have extracted all they could, show him the door. He's worried about drone strikes but he is hiding out in Russia. The Russia that decimated Grozny and all of Chechyna. The trouble with the left in America, and it is a long standing problem, is that they seem to see themselves as somehow above politics. Everyone is just supposed to recognize their moral superiority and bow down and agree with them. This does not and never had worked in the real world or in real democracies and their results are, how shall we say, mixed. They claim to have ended the war in Vietnam. Here is what they did not do, end the war in Vietnam. What ended the war in Vietnam, as the Pentagon Papers demonstrate, was that no one could find a way to win it. Johnson was at the peace talks in Paris for a reason. He was aware of what was in the Pentagon Papers, certainly, and was therefore trying to achieve a negotiated end to the war. This would have been bad news for Richard Nixon, who was riding discontent over the war right into the Presidency. He and Henry Kissinger, through their emissary Anna Chenault, sent a message to the South Vietnamese that if they walked away from the talks, Nixon would get them a better deal as President. ( See Christopher Hitchens, The Trial of Henry Kissinger.) They did walk away. The left made a hissey fit at the Democratic Convention. The reaction in the country basically made president of the United States the man most responsible for the war not ending in a negotiated settlement as it should have in 1968. Please don't wave your moral rectitude at me. It is disgusting.
What exactly would you want the 'American public' to do about events in Egypt. Not to mention that just recently a reporter in the crowd was stabbed to death while trying to bring America the coverage you seem to think we should be paying more attention to. You act as if American society has somehow regressed to that of the Roman Empire of Caligula. Egypt, quite manifestly is not even up to the Age of the Englightment yet. They are still killing each other over religion.
It is true that Mubarak's greatest failing was in turning democracy into a farce during his time, as most leaders of Muslim countries have done, but is this religious crowd any different. They are like all tyrants in that they have an underlying religious ideology they wish to impose on the country. They will be happy to use the democratic process, defined by them as voting only, to do so, but that is as far as their real commitment to democracy and the rights of citizens that that concept entails, will reach. In short, they view 'democracy' as a mechanism giving them the right, with just enough votes, to impose their religious beliefs on all of the rest of the country, which is not an insubstantial bloc, by use of state coercion. Then, as in Iran, state coercion in elections will be used to ensure that no change in this system can ever again occur. That is not democracy, that is theocracy. Theocracy, by definition, will not allow for the human beings' right to freedom of thought, freedom of speech, or the freedom to worship as you truly believe, rather than as the state tells you to believe. In what moral universe does God want the state to make that decision for you?
The Muslim Brotherhood have broken every promise they made to assure people in Egypt that they would not do exactly what they appear to be trying to do. The court system was just the first step. If they stay in power and consolidate their hold on the government, they will then seek to consolidate their hold on the military. And it is quite evident that, like Assad in Syria, they will have no trouble pulling the trigger on their own people. They have never been about democracy and they will never be about democracy. The Egyptian people were very wrong to trust them.
The Muslim Brotherhood made a lot of pledges and assurances that they would not use the revolution as an opportunity for a power grab. Did they not promise, so to reassure secularist and more liberal elements, that they would not even run a candidate for president and then reneged when they felt they could. I would not trust these people as far as I could spit. Anymore then I would trust any religious party taking over here in America. At some point, they will try to enforce their religion on the whole country. It is what they are about.
I don't suppose these people have ever noticed that the drone strikes are limited to countries such as Pakistan and Yemen. Pakistan, of course, provided Bin Ladin with a safe haven. Yemen is a basket case currently in a state of upheaval and civil war with rather substantial Islamic Jihad sympathies. When the FBI entered the country to investigate the USS Cole bombing, they were met at the airport by a military unit, guns locked and loaded and aimed at them. Their lives were literally in danger during all the time they spent there because the military itself had and has divided loyalties. All countries, even the US, have the right of self defense under international law. These countries take whatever aid they can from the US and in the case of Pakistan that aid is substantial and then support either openly or behind the scenes forces such as Al Qaeda in Yemen and the Haqqani network in Pakistan that attack Americans citizens and American troops. So the US has the a choice. Aggressively pursue these people or withdraw. And keep in mind that the last time the US withdrew those countries were used as bases to train and direct suicide attackers who then attacked New York, London, Madrid, Bali and Mumbai. It would seem to me that this is a covert war that is being carried on by both sides. So, what would you prefer? An open war? I think Obama is pursuing the best option the US has right now in terms of keeping these people from attacking us. Do you suppose if we made a request of Pakistan, under International Law, to hunt for and extradite Osama Bin Ladin to the US for trial for the murder of 3000 Americans, that they would oblige. Oh, wait. We did ask, didn't we?
It is amazing to me that the GOP is all upset over gays getting married and the use of contraception, and yet this looming human crisis does not even seem to register with them as a moral issue. Things that make you go HMMMMM.
I can't help but think that a lot of the money that the US sends to the Pakistani military is being funneled to the Taliban in Afghanistan. The Taliban were, after all, the creation of the Pakistani military and intelligence services and it is not likely they have given up on their desire to see them in power in Afghanistan. They did, after all, harbor Bin Ladin. So this is quite a balancing act the US is trying to pull off there. Trying to create a national entity that can stand up to Pakistan which is right next store and still getting lots of US aid.
I'm sorry, but aren't the Chinese as vulnerable on this point as Assad? Doesn't what they have been doing in Tibet for some time also fall under the definitions you mention?
Morisi was not committed to a democracy. Morisi was committed to a theocracy. That was really the problem and why the transition had no real chance of working. The various factions that put their differences aside when trying to topple Mubarak wanted fundamentally different things. If he was already trying to jail people for criticism of him and charging Coptic Christians with Blasphemy for practicing their faith and he had not even really consolidated power yet, how would the Muslim Brotherhood have behaved when they actually had consolidated power. When they did control the military or had a powerful enough militia to rival it. The art of democracy is tolerance, compromise. If your aim is a theocracy, tolerance and compromise is not going to be on the agenda.
Would that that were us. Us being the United States.
Last time I checked, the US supported a two state solution in the Middle East. So, which 'peace process' is it that we are opposing. The one going on in Syria right now.
There must be a way to challenge the breadth of a subpoena in court. And should not their claims as to fraud, etc., have been addressed in the original lawsuit as part of their defense to that lawsuit. I believe those claims were specifically part of Chevron's defense, so have they not already been adjudicated upon? This looks like a sham lawsuit for sure.
Well, since we are one nation, under Snowden, I guess what he concludes ( He has clearly concluded that it is a sneaky and manipulative government agency that is not subject to sufficient oversight, in part because it misrepresents its actions to the overseers.) should, therefore be definitive. One question, if government spying was so all pervasive how is it that these agencies were not aware, even after they did background checks on him, that Edward Snowden had been in contact with Glen Greenwald, well before being hired by Booz Allen Hamilton.
He seeks asylum in China because he's worried about human rights and transparency and privacy and soon ends up on the propaganda video by North Korea slamming the South for being puppets of America. The Chinese don't really want much to do with him and once they have extracted all they could, show him the door. He's worried about drone strikes but he is hiding out in Russia. The Russia that decimated Grozny and all of Chechyna. The trouble with the left in America, and it is a long standing problem, is that they seem to see themselves as somehow above politics. Everyone is just supposed to recognize their moral superiority and bow down and agree with them. This does not and never had worked in the real world or in real democracies and their results are, how shall we say, mixed. They claim to have ended the war in Vietnam. Here is what they did not do, end the war in Vietnam. What ended the war in Vietnam, as the Pentagon Papers demonstrate, was that no one could find a way to win it. Johnson was at the peace talks in Paris for a reason. He was aware of what was in the Pentagon Papers, certainly, and was therefore trying to achieve a negotiated end to the war. This would have been bad news for Richard Nixon, who was riding discontent over the war right into the Presidency. He and Henry Kissinger, through their emissary Anna Chenault, sent a message to the South Vietnamese that if they walked away from the talks, Nixon would get them a better deal as President. ( See Christopher Hitchens, The Trial of Henry Kissinger.) They did walk away. The left made a hissey fit at the Democratic Convention. The reaction in the country basically made president of the United States the man most responsible for the war not ending in a negotiated settlement as it should have in 1968. Please don't wave your moral rectitude at me. It is disgusting.
What exactly would you want the 'American public' to do about events in Egypt. Not to mention that just recently a reporter in the crowd was stabbed to death while trying to bring America the coverage you seem to think we should be paying more attention to. You act as if American society has somehow regressed to that of the Roman Empire of Caligula. Egypt, quite manifestly is not even up to the Age of the Englightment yet. They are still killing each other over religion.
What a surprise. A member of the Muslim Brotherhood behaved like a member of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Hasn't that train of 'foreign involvement in local wars' already left the station? Russia, Iran, the Gulf States, factions in Lebanon.
It is true that Mubarak's greatest failing was in turning democracy into a farce during his time, as most leaders of Muslim countries have done, but is this religious crowd any different. They are like all tyrants in that they have an underlying religious ideology they wish to impose on the country. They will be happy to use the democratic process, defined by them as voting only, to do so, but that is as far as their real commitment to democracy and the rights of citizens that that concept entails, will reach. In short, they view 'democracy' as a mechanism giving them the right, with just enough votes, to impose their religious beliefs on all of the rest of the country, which is not an insubstantial bloc, by use of state coercion. Then, as in Iran, state coercion in elections will be used to ensure that no change in this system can ever again occur. That is not democracy, that is theocracy. Theocracy, by definition, will not allow for the human beings' right to freedom of thought, freedom of speech, or the freedom to worship as you truly believe, rather than as the state tells you to believe. In what moral universe does God want the state to make that decision for you?
The Muslim Brotherhood have broken every promise they made to assure people in Egypt that they would not do exactly what they appear to be trying to do. The court system was just the first step. If they stay in power and consolidate their hold on the government, they will then seek to consolidate their hold on the military. And it is quite evident that, like Assad in Syria, they will have no trouble pulling the trigger on their own people. They have never been about democracy and they will never be about democracy. The Egyptian people were very wrong to trust them.
The Muslim Brotherhood made a lot of pledges and assurances that they would not use the revolution as an opportunity for a power grab. Did they not promise, so to reassure secularist and more liberal elements, that they would not even run a candidate for president and then reneged when they felt they could. I would not trust these people as far as I could spit. Anymore then I would trust any religious party taking over here in America. At some point, they will try to enforce their religion on the whole country. It is what they are about.
I don't suppose these people have ever noticed that the drone strikes are limited to countries such as Pakistan and Yemen. Pakistan, of course, provided Bin Ladin with a safe haven. Yemen is a basket case currently in a state of upheaval and civil war with rather substantial Islamic Jihad sympathies. When the FBI entered the country to investigate the USS Cole bombing, they were met at the airport by a military unit, guns locked and loaded and aimed at them. Their lives were literally in danger during all the time they spent there because the military itself had and has divided loyalties. All countries, even the US, have the right of self defense under international law. These countries take whatever aid they can from the US and in the case of Pakistan that aid is substantial and then support either openly or behind the scenes forces such as Al Qaeda in Yemen and the Haqqani network in Pakistan that attack Americans citizens and American troops. So the US has the a choice. Aggressively pursue these people or withdraw. And keep in mind that the last time the US withdrew those countries were used as bases to train and direct suicide attackers who then attacked New York, London, Madrid, Bali and Mumbai. It would seem to me that this is a covert war that is being carried on by both sides. So, what would you prefer? An open war? I think Obama is pursuing the best option the US has right now in terms of keeping these people from attacking us. Do you suppose if we made a request of Pakistan, under International Law, to hunt for and extradite Osama Bin Ladin to the US for trial for the murder of 3000 Americans, that they would oblige. Oh, wait. We did ask, didn't we?
It is amazing to me that the GOP is all upset over gays getting married and the use of contraception, and yet this looming human crisis does not even seem to register with them as a moral issue. Things that make you go HMMMMM.
I can't help but think that a lot of the money that the US sends to the Pakistani military is being funneled to the Taliban in Afghanistan. The Taliban were, after all, the creation of the Pakistani military and intelligence services and it is not likely they have given up on their desire to see them in power in Afghanistan. They did, after all, harbor Bin Ladin. So this is quite a balancing act the US is trying to pull off there. Trying to create a national entity that can stand up to Pakistan which is right next store and still getting lots of US aid.
I'm sorry, but aren't the Chinese as vulnerable on this point as Assad? Doesn't what they have been doing in Tibet for some time also fall under the definitions you mention?