Foot in mouth disease

[Army_of_One]

You quote Keith Olberman....LOL..that's the best you have? That guy is an idiot. Look at his ratings! He's a Bush hating liberal that no one listens to. His audience consists of you Wordy and about 15 other people nationwide.

[wordsmythe]

Ah yes but he does VERY eloquently point out how stupid your boss is and how he's made even more inappropriate jokes about the war he started while our troops are in the harms way he put them in.

[lurker]

Originally Posted by wordsmythe

Ah yes but he does VERY eloquently point out how stupid your boss is and how he's made even more inappropriate jokes about the war he started while our troops are in the harms way he put them in.

Woordley,

Have you ever had a run on with the english Police?

[lurker]

Todays Hutch paper ran this Editorial. You can't see it, but the URL includes the word "distraction" ... ".com/opinion/editorials/stories/distraction110306"

Forget about Kerry; the issue is the war

The big issue less than a week before a dramatic midterm election should not be former presidential wannabe John Kerry, but rather the war in Iraq. But combative American politics have turned a Kerry comment into an overblown distraction.

Earlier this week, Kerry started a controversy when he told some students in California that young people who don't study hard and do their homework likely would "get stuck in Iraq."

The comment was scrutinized and characterized as Kerry saying that soldiers in Iraq essentially are stupid. Read the between the lines, however, and that is not at all what he said.

It was a poor choice of words, to be sure, and we are not sure exactly what he meant. But we highly doubt he meant to denigrate soldiers. That would be politically stupid even if he really believed that.

Another way to interpret the comment, and a more likely explanation of Kerry's point, is this: The country is consumed by the war in Iraq. As a result, our national resources are diverted from other priorities, such as education, to the war. Opportunities for America's youth are limited; sometimes the only opportunity may wind up being the military and serving in the military means going to war.

The distraction in America is the war. It distracts from domestic needs. And, once more, that sad reality is not to be blamed on the soldiers serving in Iraq - who serve with honor and bravery - but rather on the policies and priorities of the Bush administration.

Republicans fearing losing control of Congress jumped all over the Kerry remark. Any comment that hints in the slightest of criticism can be used to question one's patriotism.

Democrats now are distancing themselves from Kerry. They no longer want him on the campaign trail.

Why anyone cares about Kerry is a mystery considering he basically is a has-been on the national scene. His comments deserve no more attention than those of conservative radio personality Rush Limbaugh.

They aren't the story. They shouldn't be the distraction.

The distraction for this country is a fruitless war we unnecessarily started. That should be the focus of the debate, not the personalities on the sidelines.

11/03/2006; 02:36:40 AM

I hopefully want to agree with the writer that kerry is a "has-been" on the national scene and completely and totally disagree that we "unnecessarily started" this war on terrorism.

Anyone who has devoted an hour of research on the Arab/Muslim/Israel history will know that this war has been ongoing since Abraham and has only recently become emboldened with modern technology and a huge infusion of money from the unfortunate coincidence of large oil deposits under their sand.

I remember the 1971 slaughter of 1.2 million muslims when Bangladesh tried to gain independence from Pakistan. Only India's intervention stopped the further slaughter. It was not a war, it was a massacre.

The media doesn't want to remember Iraq's destruction under Saddam Hussein.

Most of the last two decades was the doing of Saddam Hussein. This is another case of a regime that caused the deaths of millions. Nonstop death. One of the highpoints was during the Iran-Iraq war, in the conflict over the Shat El Arab River, the river that is created by the convergence of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers. This was a conflict that led to nothing but large scale destruction and mass killing. Estimates are between 450,000 and 650,000 Iraqis, and between 450,000 and 970,000 Iranians.

In the years 1991 - 1992 there was a Shiite uprising in Iraq. There are contradictory estimates about the number of victims. The numbers vary from 40,000 to 200,000. In addition to the Iraqis that were slaughtered one must add the Kurds. During Saddam Hussein’s reign, between 200,000 to 300,000 of them were killed in a genocide that continued all through the 1980’s and the 1990’s.

Over half a million more Iraqis died from diseases because of the shortage of medicine, which was the result of sanctions imposed after the first Gulf War. Today it is clear that this was a continuation of the genocide perpetrated by Saddam on his own people. He could have purchased medicine, he had enough money to buy food and to build hospitals for all the children of Iraq, but Saddam preferred to build palaces and to distribute franchises to many in the west and in Arab states. This issue is being exposed in the corruption of the UN’s ‘Oil for Food’ project.

The Iraqis continue to suffer. The civil war that is raging there now - even if some would rather not give that name to the mutual massacre of Sunis and Shiites – is costing tens of thousands of lives. It is estimated that about 100,000 people have been killed since the coalition forces took control in Iraq.

Yeah-right buddy. You think "we" started an unnecessary and fruitless war...

Maybe you should be assigned to the HutchNews Classifieds...

Source of quote: A coolaid jar but don't click on it.... much too detailed for the general US public.

Just understand that this war is growing and those tiny hijacked airplanes were simply a face-slap compared to the potential acts of war if we withdraw.

We need a UNITED States but the media can't seem to grasp it.

[wordsmythe]

That was a tad run on wasn't it?

It was early.

[lurker]

Originally Posted by wordsmythe

That was a tad run on wasn't it?

It was early.

Kerry plays the Manchurian Candidate
Gerard Baker
04nov06

IN John Frankenheimer's electrifying 1962 thriller The Manchurian Candidate, an American soldier is captured by communists during the Korean War, brainwashed and programmed to return to the US and, years later, to assassinate a presidential candidate.

There is compelling evidence now that John Kerry is a kind of Manchurian Candidate of Democratic politics.

It seems entirely possible that at some point in his career he was seized by a youthful Karl Rove, brainwashed and programmed to kill off, at crucial moments in American history, the Democratic Party's political prospects.

The clues were there all along, if we'd only looked closely enough. His curious combination of self-satisfied superiority and baffled indecisiveness was obviously too contradictory a mental characteristic to be natural. His ponderous oratorical style and studied condescension suggested something artificial had interfered with the firing of the synapses.

But the plot worked brilliantly. In 2004, as the party's presidential candidate, Kerry threw away a golden opportunity for a Democratic victory against an increasingly unpopular incumbent fighting an increasingly unpopular war.

Startlingly, this week, with the Democrats on the brink of their first clear victory in congressional elections for 14 years, the Manchurian Candidate seized a second chance to assassinate his party.

Speaking to a crowd of students in California, Kerry mused on the importance of education: "If you make the most of it, if you study hard and you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don't, you get stuck in Iraq."

Now it is entirely plausible that Kerry did not mean to insult the intelligence and diligence of all who serve in the US military, and that he was merely bungling a rather predictable joke about President George W.Bush's supposed intellectual shortcomings.

But the ambiguity of the remark, coupled with the Massachusetts senator having a bit of form when it comes to making demeaning remarks about US soldiers, was unfortunate, to say the least.

Whatever Americans think of the war in Iraq, they harbour a deep respect for their men and women in uniform. The clumsy gaffe clearly required an urgent clarification and an apology. But the Republicans' most effective secret weapon since Michael Dukakis put on an ill-fitting helmet in a TV advertisement and lost an 18-point lead in the 1988 presidential election was not about to let the Democrats off the hook that lightly.

He initially wheedled, refusing to apologise, and rounded instead on his critics. In the process he managed to drag out a no-win story for the Democrats for an improbable two days of news cycles until he was eventually forced to issue a proper retraction.

It's still not clear how effective the latest Kerry intervention will be. The senator himself is not running for office in Tuesday's elections and so, this time, Democrats felt free to walk quickly away from the wreckage of their former leader's self-destruction.

But the incident has shone a rare spotlight, in this critical mid-term election campaign, on the Democratic Party. The reason it received so much attention, and so alarmed Democrats, is that it threatened to undermine the party's entire strategy for taking control of Congress.

Since the election battle was joined months ago, the Democratic approach has been to keep the attention on the Republican Party. As long as the election is about the unpopular Bush and his fellow Republicans in Congress, voters are inevitably much more likely to vote against them.

When a party has dominated, as the Republicans have done for the past six years, the debate focuses on their shortcomings, which are not in short supply.

But elections also require voters to choose between alternatives, and Democrats have been extremely anxious not to talk about what they will do if they win on Tuesday. Other than a few old commitments to raising the minimum wage and re-examining tax cuts, there is no 2006 Democratic equivalent of the "Contract with America" that Republicans brought to Washington when they won control of Congress in 1994.

This is partly because the notoriously fractious Democrats can't really agree on much. On Iraq, the issue most likely to persuade voters to choose them, Democrat policies cover the entire spectrum of possible choices.

Some want US troops out immediately. Others back Bush's "stay the course" approach. Some of the party's foreign policy leaders back a plan to partition Iraq into three states. Others have described the idea as suicidal.

More generally, on national security the party is split deeply. On the one hand a growing and vociferous band of radical progressives wants to reconnect with their inner peaceniks from the 1960s and join hands with European lefties in calling for an end to the abuses of American power. On the other, hawks such as Hillary Clinton have criticised Bush at times for being too soft on Iran and "contracting out" US diplomacy to Europe.

Democrats are also unwilling to show their hand because it may scare the voters. They have moved sharply to the Left since Bill Clinton's new Democrats won in the 1990s. Anger and resentment at Bush's brand of conservatism have curdled inside their party to a point where many of its activists no longer care about reaching the middle ground.

The party's leaders, such as Nancy Pelosi, who will become Speaker of the house, is among the most left-wing of house Democrats. On economics, the party has abandoned Clintonian pragmatism for naked populism.

The glimpse of Democratic leadership afforded by Kerry's intervention probably came too late to deprive the party of a majority in at least one and possibly both houses of Congress next week. But as Democrats prepare the celebrations, most know their problems are just beginning.

The Times

The final two paragraphs surely were written before Pelosi (and those who want to be our Leaders) went underground. Rumor has it that they are peasant hunting....

An Amber Alert has been issued for Nancy.... But we'll see if she's found before Tuesday.