Since the attack, I have seen, heard, and read thoughts of such surpassing stupidity that they must be addressed. You've heard them too. Here they are:

1) "We're not good, they're not evil, everything is relative."

Listen carefully: We're good, they're evil, nothing is relative. Say it with me now and free yourselves. You see, folks, saying "We're good" doesn't mean "We're perfect." Okay? The only perfect being is the bearded guy on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. The plain fact is that our country has, with all our mistakes and blunders, always been and always will be, the greatest beacon of freedom, charity, opportunity, and affection in history.

If you need proof, open all the borders on Earth and see what happens. In about half a day, the entire world would be a ghost town, and the United States would look like one giant line to see "The Producers."

2) "Violence only leads to more violence."

This one is so stupid you usually have to be the president of an Ivy League university to say it. Here's the truth, which you know in your heads and hearts already: Ineffective, unfocused violence leads to more violence. Limp, panicky, half-measures lead to more violence.

However, complete, fully-thought-through, professional, well- executed violence never leads to more violence because, you see, afterwards, the other guys are all dead. That's right, dead. Not "on trial," not "reeducated," not "nurtured back into the bosom of love." Dead. D-E-Well, you get the idea.

3) "The CIA and the rest of our intelligence community has failed us."

For 25 years we have chained our spies like dogs to a stake in the ground, and now that the house has been robbed, we yell at them for not protecting us. Starting in the late seventies, under Carter-appointee Stansfield Turner, the giant brains who get these giant ideas decided that the best way to gather international intelligence was to use spy satellites." After all," they reasoned, "you can see a license plate from 200 miles away." This is very helpful if you've been attacked by a license plate.

Unfortunately, we were attacked by humans. Finding humans is not possible with satellites. You have to use other humans. When we bought all our satellites, we fired all our humans, and here's the really stupid part. It takes years, decades to infiltrate new humans into the worst places of the world. You can't just have a guy who looks like Gary Busey in a Spring Break '93 sweatshirt plop himself down in a coffee shop in Kabul and say "Hiya, boys. Gee, I sure would like to meet that bin Laden fella." "Well, you can, but all you'd be doing is giving the bad guys a story they'll be telling for years.
(continued)

(continued)
4) "These people are poor and helpless, and that's why they're angry at us."

Uh-huh, and Jeffrey Dahmer's frozen head collection was just a desperate cry for help. The terrorists and their backers are richer than Elton John and, ironically, a good deal less annoying. The poor helpless people, you see, are the villagers they tortured and murdered to stay in power. Mohamed Atta, one of the evil scumbags who steered those planes into the killing grounds (I'm sorry, one of the "alleged hijackers," according to CNN - they stopped using the word "terrorist," you know), is the son of a Cairo surgeon. But you knew this, too.

In the sixties and seventies, all the pinheads marching against the war were upper-middle-class college kids who grabbed any cause they could think of to get out of their final papers and spend more time drinking. At least, that was my excuse. It's the same today. Take the Anti-Global-Warming (or is it World Trade? Oh, who knows what the hell they want, demonstrators) They all charged their black outfits and plane tickets on dad's credit card before driving to the airport in their SUV's.

5) "Any profiling is racial profiling."

Who's killing us here, the Norwegians? Just days after the attack, the New York Times had an article saying dozens of extended members of the gazillionaire bin Laden family living in America were afraid of reprisals and left in a huff, never to return to studying at Harvard and using too much Drakkar. I'm crushed. I think we're all crushed. Please come back. With a cherry on top? Why don't they just change their names, anyway? It's happened in the past. Think about it. How many Adolfs do you run into these days?

Shortly after that, I remember watching TV with my jaw on the floor as a government official actually said, "That little old grandmother from Sioux City could be carrying something." Okay, how about this: No, she couldn't. It would never be the grandmother from Sioux City. Is it even possible? What are the odds? Winning a hundred Powerball lotteries in a row? A thousand? A million?

And now a Secret Service guy has been tossed off a plane and we're all supposed to cry about it because he's an Arab? Didn't it have the tiniest bit to do with the fact that he filled out his forms incorrectly ---three times? And then left an Arab history book on his seat as he strolled off the plane? And came back? Armed? Let's please all stop singing "We Are the World" for a minute and think practically. I don't want to be sitting on the floor in the back of a plane four seconds away from hitting Mt. Rushmore and turn, grinning, to the guy next to me to say, "Well, at least we didn't offend them."


SO HERE'S what I resolve for the new year:

Never to forget our murdered brothers and sisters.

Never to let the relativists get away with their immoral thinking.

After all, no matter what your daughter's political science professor says, we didn't start this.

Have you seen that bumper sticker thatsays, "No More Hiroshimas"? I wish I had one that says, "You First. No More Pearl Harbors."

[b]-- Views of Gen. Richard E. Hawley, USAF (Ret.)[/b]

Can I get some Amens out there? This about sums it up, IMO.

Amen, Ooh-rah, Pass the bullets.

Semper Fi

Bulldog OUT

AMEN.TESTIFY

Here at ********, I think we all want equal time and hear the other side of the story.

Published on Sunday, October 14, 2001 in the Los Angeles Times  
[b]No Glory in Unjust War on the Weak[/b]
by Barbara Kingsolver
 
TUCSON -- I cannot find the glory in this day. When I picked up the newspaper and saw "America Strikes Back!" blazed boastfully across it in letters I swear were 10 inches tall--shouldn't they reserve at least one type size for something like, say, nuclear war?--my heart sank. We've answered one terrorist act with another, raining death on the most war-scarred, terrified populace that ever crept to a doorway and looked out. The small plastic boxes of food we also dropped are a travesty. It is reported that these are untouched, of course--Afghanis have spent their lives learning terror of anything hurled at them from the sky.

Meanwhile, the genuine food aid on which so many depended for survival has been halted by the war. We've killed whoever was too poor or crippled to flee, plus four humanitarian aid workers who coordinated the removal of land mines from the beleaguered Afghan soil. That office is now rubble, and so is my heart. I am going to have to keep pleading against this madness. I'll get scolded for it, I know. I've already been called every name in the Rush Limbaugh handbook: traitor, sinner, naive, liberal, peacenik, whiner. I'm told I am dangerous because I might get in the way of this holy project we've undertaken to keep dropping heavy objects from the sky until we've wiped out every last person who could potentially hate us. Some people are praying for my immortal soul, and some have offered to buy me a one-way ticket out of the country, to anywhere. I accept these gifts with a gratitude equal in measure to the spirit of generosity in which they were offered. People threaten vaguely, "She wouldn't feel this way if her child had died in the war!" (I feel this way precisely because I can imagine that horror.) More subtle adversaries simply say I am ridiculous, a dreamer who takes a child's view of the world, imagining it can be made better than it is. The more sophisticated approach, they suggest, is to accept that we are all on a jolly road trip down the maw of catastrophe, so shut up and drive.
I fight that, I fight it as if I'm drowning. [b]When I get to feeling I am an army of one standing out on the plain waving my ridiculous little flag of hope, I call up a friend or two. We remind ourselves in plain English that the last time we got to elect somebody, the majority of us, by a straight popular-vote count, did not ask for the guy who is currently telling us we will win this war and not be "misunderestimated."[/b] We aren't standing apart from the crowd, we are the crowd. There are millions of us, surely, who know how to look life in the eye, however awful things get, and still try to love it back.

It is not naive to propose alternatives to war. We could be the kindest nation on Earth, inside and out. I look at the bigger picture and see that many nations with fewer resources than ours have found solutions to problems that seem to baffle us. I'd like an end to corporate welfare so we could put that money into ending homelessness, as many other nations have done before us. I would like a humane health-care system organized along the lines of Canada's. I'd like the efficient public-transit system of Paris in my city, thank you. I'd like us to consume energy at the modest level that Europeans do, and then go them one better. I'd like a government that subsidizes renewable energy sources instead of forcefully patrolling the globe to protect oil gluttony. Because, make no mistake, oil gluttony is what got us into this holy war, and it's a deep tar pit. I would like us to sign the Kyoto agreement today, and reduce our fossil-fuel emissions with legislation that will ease us into safer, less gluttonous, sensibly reorganized lives. If this were the face we showed the world, and the model we helped bring about elsewhere, I expect we could get along with a military budget the size of Iceland's.

How can I take anything but a child's view of a war in which men are acting like children? What they're serving is not justice, it's simply vengeance. Adults bring about justice using the laws of common agreement. Uncivilized criminals are still held accountable through civilized institutions; we abolished stoning long ago. The World Court and the entire Muslim world stand ready to judge Osama bin Laden and his accessories. If we were to put a few billion dollars into food, health care and education instead of bombs, you can bet we'd win over enough friends to find out where he's hiding. And I'd like to point out, since no one else has, the Taliban is an alleged accessory, not the perpetrator--a legal point quickly cast aside in the rush to find a sovereign target to bomb. The word "intelligence" keeps cropping up, but [b]I feel like I'm standing on a playground where the little boys are all screaming at each other, "He started it!" and throwing rocks that keep taking out another eye, another tooth. I keep looking around for somebody's mother to come on the scene saying, "Boys! Boys! Who started it cannot possibly be the issue here. People are getting hurt."[/b]

I am somebody's mother, so I will say that now: The issue is, people are getting hurt. We need to take a moment's time out to review the monstrous waste of an endless cycle of retaliation. The biggest weapons don't win this one, guys. When there are people on Earth willing to give up their lives in hatred and use our own domestic airplanes as bombs, it's clear that we can't out-technologize them. You can't beat cancer by killing every cell in the body--or you could, I guess, but the point would be lost. This is a war of who can hate the most. There is no limit to that escalation. It will only end when we have the guts to say it really doesn't matter who started it, and begin to try and understand, then alter the forces that generate hatred.

We have always been at war, though the citizens of the U.S. were mostly insulated from what that really felt like until Sept. 11. Then, suddenly, we began to say, "The world has changed. This is something new." If there really is something new under the sun in the way of war, some alternative to the way people have always died when heavy objects are dropped on them from above, then please, in the name of heaven, I would like to see it. I would like to see it, now.

Amen, very well stated Jarhead.

Go peddle that weak shit somewhere else, raven. You look those fuckers in the eye and love them while they murder you, your whole family and anyone you care about.

I prefer to kill them before they get a chance this time.

Raven needs a gless belt buckle.  

You didn't like the analogy where she feels the US and the terrorists are like fighting little boys who are going to hurt each other?  

That is some powerful, insightful thinking there.

No, that is exactly the sort of moral relativism that allows groups like al-Qaeda to operate for years with impunity under group-huggers like Bill Clinton.

They blew up our embassies in Africa, and we did nothing.

They blew up the USS Cole in Yemen, and we did nothing.

That lack of strong response only served to encourage them, so they hijacked four planes full of people and fuel and flew three of them into large populated buildings on American soil.

Now we're punishing them with an iron hand, and weak sisters like you and Ms. Kingsolver want to go back to the love-in days? Fuck that. If you want to love a terrorist, go to where they live, because no one here is buying any today, thanks.

Riddle me this Batman: Why did that fourth jet not kill anyone on the ground? Was it because the passengers of flight 93 loved the terrorist blowjobs who had seized control of the cockpit?

woah there a minute hoss...I agree with ya, BUT
Life to me ain't what it seems to you
Let's start on the same page ok----
9-11---twenty something terrorists and support organization----cool kill em all....Don't airdrop supplies to some poor people, don't topple the government of one country, when at least five are involved(toppling governments bad-killinmg everyone and having the government toplle good). Don't decide to get poll numbers by enlisting Tony-boy Blair etc. And don't play this crap of the government knows better than you do what is going on and then turn around as a PR trick and ask the people for ideas.
Still on the same page? to continue
Spies---don't pay bad guys ever. No osama gets money, No PLO gets money, No leader of Israel that used to be a terrorist gets money. NOT one G-damned dime. No building bases in Kandahar for someone else to fight the Russians that we are now trying to root someone out of....
Poor and helpless---decision point here "ya want
to be poor and helpless all your life? or mess with the US and have this be the rest of your life---snap!"
racial profiling---I've got a good one for ya---forget profiling--killl the terrorist, his family, anyone who gave him a dime, and his camel.....I bet you don't have to worry about profiling anymore.

1. Don't topple the government of one country when at least five were involved.

Maybe we're just getting warmed up. Can you provide a more complete list?

2. Don't decide to get poll numbers by enlisting Tony-boy Blair etc.

Is Tony Blair that popular in this country that he had a positive effect on anyone's poll numbers?

3. And don't play this crap of the government knows better than you do what is going on and then turn around as a PR trick and ask the people for ideas.

They asked hollywood guys for ideas too. I don't see how the government not sharing intel and sources with the public has any impact on that.

4. Spies---don't pay bad guys ever.

That is exactly what caused the HUMINT vacuum that we have suffered through for the last twenty years. Choir boys don't know anything helpful. I'm not saying we should fund any foreign terrorist groups, but we have to get someone there on our payroll so we get the good (lifesaving) gouge.

5. racial profiling---I've got a good one for ya---forget profiling--killl the terrorist, his family, anyone who gave him a dime, and his camel.

Then we're always on the back foot whenever something happens, forced always to react instead of act. Check the statistics on who is the threat, then keep an eye on those who match that description. Don't just "round up the usual suspects," but don't wait for someone to kick in a cockpit door to say, "that dude [b]did[/b] kind of look suspicious," either.

I'm with Jarhead 100%


I wish we had more of you in this country.

[img]shtf.net/fisrt1.jpg[/img]

Thanks Raven... Now I know how Liberals feel about it.

And I could give less of a shit.  It's so stupid as to give me a headache, trying to find the logic in this womans statement.[>:/]

All I can see that she's a poor bleeding heart who believes that Osama and his band of merry men would stop their crusade if only we'd turn the other cheek and send our sympathy and love to them. Hippie bitch.[pissed]

Oh come on!  Not everyone in the US is "good".  We have 2 million people in prison.  We have the most evil government agencies in the world--ATF, IRS, DEA, to name but three.  Simple good vs. evil arguments are for poorly educated cannon fodder people that get sent out to die in hopeless battles.  Read some books about WWI already!




Let's do just that, it's a great idea.  As soon as the all those pitiful regimes flounder and collapse, the world's population can begin to rebuild and maybe do something right again.  No wars would even be necessary.



Operation Anaconda meets your defintion of "unfocused and inneffective" then because the outcome is that more US troops will get killed.  I need only look to Israel to see how the cycle of violence perpetuates itself.



This sounds a lot like Hitler's "final solution."  Is this what you want, Jarhead?  Another holocuast?



It has failed us because even with the huge budgets they have and all the resources they are given, they failed to see what was coming.  Why is that?  How much more money should we spend on defense?  It was a bureaucratic failure that no amount of money will ever fix.  The time has come for a federal government downsizing and the realization that America is not the moral center of the universe.

Damn!  You type more than I do!



Too simplistic an argument--sounds like a shibboleth to me, so I agree with you on this one Jarhead. I think there is more going on than meets the eye and it all points back to Saudi Arabia and oil.



Some may have use the antiwar effort as a dodge, but I feel that many made an honest stand against the war.  I would have stood with them--Vietnam was a complete boondoggle, and so was Korea before that.  




This is bs, yes.  I'm sick of seeing old people shaken down at airports. But the problem is this:  We have a federal government that has embraced fascism.  Stop the federal monster and you stop the abuses.




Rhetoric.  They are not my actual brothers and sisters.  I look out for my own.  Jumping into other peoples' moralistic quagmires is not a good idea.



They're entitled to their opinions, as are you.  Otherwise you're a fascist, too.



That's debatable.  You think this all began on 9/11?  Come on!  

Still advocating and encouraging terrorist attacks against America, trickshot?

trickshot, I hear ya.

I love my country, but I'm not happy with how it got like it is these days. The people that profess a BLIND LOVE for the actions of the government are no better than the mindless Nazi soldiers of the Third Reich. US citizenship calls us to objectively double-check the government of our country and keep it under-control. This gung-ho attitude is just as bad as apathy in my book.

We are not the beacon of morality on earth, but many people here and elsewhere in this country think like that and make no secret of it to everyone they know. There is a difference between patriotism and being a bigot pain in the ass. I think it is a lot of people not liking the US elsewhere has to do with this. I'm not saying we should start to "be nice" to everyone, bullshit. I believe that firstly we should develop our own energy independence and retract our influence from all over the world a good amount, and enhance the ability of the citizen to protect his country (allow modern military firearms, etc). This widespread interventionalism will be our downfall, and I question the validity of some of our "interests", such as our safari's in places like Columbia. I know that if I had a pie and someone else was sticking his dick in it and giving me orders, I'd be pissed, even if I was getting aid money from him.

I believe that there exists no better good a citizen of this great country can do than be a pain in the ass for the government that violates the Constitution. I love my country, yet she starts to look more and more like the Roman Empire in decline day by day. If you see everything in black and white -- good and evil -- your solutions and alligence will be that simple as well.

Robby

Sounds almost like a direct quote from the book I'm currently reading: [url=https://www.amazon.com/dp/0609609874?tag=arfcom00-20]Robert Baer's [u]See No Evil[/u][/url].

It is an excellent view at what happened to the CIA and how the DC boys were ninnified over the last couple decades into PC, pencil-pushing bureaucrats.

Hey jarhead...maybe we ain't on the same page..
1. don't topple governments period--kill people.
Saudi, germany, palestine, pakistan, iraq
2. Tony blair etc...why ask anyone's permission?
3. Not exactly sure what you are getting at...but why should the people footing the  bill be the only ignorant people in the circle?
4. I stick with the don't pay bad guys---kill them--soon no bad guys
5.Big disagreement---starting with the Cuban missile crisis...if we had poked everybody who treatened us with a sharp stick, by now we wouldn't have so many people willing to try.
Temujin is still alegend for killing everything
So is Vlad the Impaler.....no more Mr. Nice Guy

Okay [b]dicksnot[/b], put your money where your shit-filled mouth is.

Sudanese Slave trade, Rwandan machette massacres, Haitian Death Squads, Mexican prisons, Zimbabwe's white's land confiscation programs, Gassing of Iraqi Kurds, Tiananmen Square, Taliban, Uganda, Cuba, Phillipines, South Africa, Columbia, Russia...

WE are the most evil in the world?!? WTF?? Do you have ANY fucking idea what you're talking about?


Ya' know, I've used up enough napalm on [b]dicksnot[/b] in previous threads to bring a tear to the eye of Col. Kilgore. No sense wasting any more on the same old asinine barf he's retching again this time. Y'ain't worth it.

Wipe the diarrhea from your chin and crawl back into that rotting, putrifying stack of cow shit  that you call home.

Truly this is a coming sign of the End Times.  Jarhead_22 and I agree on something.  At least trickshot and I are still at odds, so I don't feel too bad.

God Bless Texas

hello Mac....not in total disagreement with you...but let me take a swing at your list...
Sudanese Slave trade,-----IRS
Rwandan machette massacres---Waco
Haitian Death Squads---Ruby Ridge
Mexican prisons----nope can't imagine anything worse
Zimbabwe's white's land confiscation programs--
eminent domain,
Gassing of Iraqi Kurds---negro prison health treatment in the 40's and 50's
Tiananmen Square----Ohio State
Taliban--------the president of your choice
Uganda----American Indians
and I will skip to
Russia...the evil empire that we shipped food to for the last fifty years

shades of grey man

Moral equivalence = lack of cognition.

I REALLY hope you were being facetious [b]hound[/b].  

There can't be TWO anencephalic people on the same forum - both you and [b]dicksnot[/b]. What are the odds of that?

Not even close.  The IRS are bad, but nowhere near the realm of evil that is involved in the slave trade.  To make that claim is amusing, but ludicrous.



More like unchecked agression of militarized Federal Law Enforcement that gets glossed over when the truth is known.  But hey, they were just a bunch of religious nuts following a child molester and a racist, right? [:rolleyes:]



There isn't.  Attempt a bribe immediately before you get in the system.  Otherwise, you're screwed.



And they went from being a food exporter to relying on food imports to feed themselves.  This is what happens when affirmitive action becomes victimization with little thought to the consequences of not knowing the ins and outs of growing crops.

Still, at least when the screw you out of your land or valuables with eminent domain, they are supposed to at least pay you fair market value.  Evil, I agree, and even more so with the spin that was put on it in the name of the "War on Drugs."



Ohio State?  Don't you mean Kent State?  And I find it funny you can compare events from America's history ranging from 30-60 years ago with recent world history events in this one.  

No one has ever said America was perfect, and no one has ever said we were never wrong, but there's a reason people come here looking for the American Dream.  How many other places in the world offer the kinds of opportunity?  You don't hear of the Chinese Dream, or the Iraqi Dream, do you?  Why?  Because for all it's faults America is the best place in the world to live.  It isn't perfect, but there is nowhere else in this world that I'd rather live.

As an American Indian who could live on the reservation if I so chose to, I can tell you that the "white man," for everything he did to us in the past, has also given us great opportunities we might not have experienced under the French or the Spanish, had they taken over these lands.  You won't find me crying over what happened to my people.  We were outgunned and we lost.  At least we don't send people to blow themselves up because we believe in some sort of "occupation" of our land.



Oh please.  How many US Presidents have tried to enfore a hardline radical fundamentalist religious agenda?  Modern republics like ours are based on Roman law, not theistic law.  Then again, I think the 10 Commandments are a good way to live one's life.  Hell, even the pillars of Islam aren't that bad, really.  You just have to watch out for the nutjobs telling those who can't read how they should think.  Kind of reminiscent of the Catholic Church during the Dark Ages.



Shade of grey my ass...  Historical relativism.

I can live with that.


If we are attacked by terrorists who are sponsored by governments, those governments reap the same steel whirlwind as the terrorists. This discourages others who see the results.


It's a coalition kind of world these days, isn't it? I don't agree with it either. England wasn't attacked, we were. F 'em if they don't like it.


Are you or aren't you suggesting that the government shouldn't protect intelligence and intelligence sources?


Sure, I'd stay away from international scumbags, but we need to have intelligence sources on the inside unless we're willing to unleash the dogs like the Jordanians did to Abu Nidal. Newsflash: most people aren't willing. Folks like trickshot would be pissing themselves purple if we started TCB.


I'm definitely in for killing all the bad guys. Unfortunately, they don't wear tee shirts with [b]"Bad Guy"[/b] on the front and back, or black hats to assist in identification. We have to take some steps to guard against the incognito bad guys in our midst, not just wait until they start killing people, then react.

I hear him too...it's like that annoying little whine when there's a misquito just outside your tent flap.

If you REALLY think that any of the agencies in the US are more evil or abusive than ANY OTHERS in the world, you're either lying or you're simply a fool.  I know which one my money is on.

Attempting to debate the dishonest, terrorism advocating trickshot is like trying to teach a pig to dance:

You get dirty and the pig is the only one who enjoys it.

What? You never learned the joys of pig-wrestling? [;)]

Well, there was that one girl in 29 Palms, but...

No, no pig wrestling here! [:D]

Just for the record,  that article was written by Larry Miller, a comedian.  Totally serious, I'm sure, well *almost* totally...


[url]http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/000/762dbnlm.asp[/url]


Not that it really matters, and I agree 100% with what he said.

Jarhead for President!!! We cannot afford to give these vermin the upper hand like we have in the past. They are bred into hatred and violence and cannot be reasoned with. They do not want peace, they thrive on strife and violence. They need to be dealt with accordingly.

I'll be damned, DScott. I cut and pasted it verbatim from AssaultWeb, including the attribution to the retired Air Force General. Live and learn to check your sources, I guess. [:I]

[img]http://www.seeleyswanpathfinder.com/pfnews/nov98/boot2.jpg[/img]

While we here tend to give more power and credibility to (ahem!) military sources, I think the statements are even more powerful in that they came from a "regular guy"... and an actor/comedian at that!

There's hope for this country yet, when regular people see what's wrong and stand up to it.

I guess "rule 7" only applies to some people...