My two sons or the mass grave?

Discussion in 'Politics' started by TM_Direct, Jul 22, 2003.

  1. We agree about one thing: Arguing with someone like yourself is a complete waste of time.
     
    #31     Jul 23, 2003


  2. That's pretty hilarious: You offer a blanket characterization of the Republican Party - and then you complain about blanket characterizations of the Left.

    As usual, you show little understanding of the topics - such as the provenance of the UN or the nature of international law - about which you offer your other assertions, and you still have never explained, and I doubt ever will explain, how your supposed disgust with Saddam is more than a self-satisfying fantasy that obscures your lack of any morally, strategically, or intellectually credible policy alternatives.

    What a bunch of huffing and puffing over nothing - a mixture of trivia and the usual empty, self-serving assertions.

    Oh yeah - and which UN resolution was it that the US defied?

    I don't know you except on the basis of your posts. I'd almost be willing to say that the prospect of your eternal disappointment pleases me - but I think it's more likely that someday your perspective will mature.
     
    #32     Jul 23, 2003
  3. Lies-

    1."Defying UN resolutions in order to punish somebody who defied UN resolutions"
    What UN resolution did the US defy?

    The rest is only opinion and conjecture that can't be proved either way. Heap big smoke but no fire.
     
    #33     Jul 23, 2003
  4. A perfect statement of the Liberal's view of the First Amendment: Anyone who doesn't agree with me shut the F*ck up. Since the end of the Clinton administration it is only enforced on university campuses. But in light of the current Supreme Court's demonstrated ability to recast liberal social ideas as "Constitutional law", who knows?
     
    #34     Jul 23, 2003
  5. Excerpt from his column:

    Welcome to the Big Darkness
    By Hunter S. Thompson



    Hi, folks, my name is still Thompson, and I still drink gin with ER Nurses at night -- but in one particular way, I am a New Man, a different man, a more dangerous man than I was the last time we talked. And that was a few weeks ago, eh?...........

    ............But I have just returned from an extremely intense few weeks at the world-renowned Steadman Hawkins Clinic in Vail, Colo. (yes, the same city where Kobe Bryant ...), where I had radical surgery to repair what was beginning to give me some pain. Great pain on some days, and I finally decided to get rid of it.....

    ...Kobe cheating on his wife? Rape allegations? It's only just begun, America.
    When I went into the clinic last April 30, George Bush was about 50 points ahead of his closest Democratic opponent in next year's Presidential Election. When I finally escaped from the horrible place, less than three weeks late, Bush's job-approval ratings had been cut in half -- and even down into single digits, in some states -- and the Republican Party was panicked and on the run. It was a staggering reversal in a very short time, even shorter than it took for his equally crooked father to drop from 93 percent approval, down to as low as 43 percent and even 41 percent in the last doomed days of the first doomed Bush Administration. After that, he was Bill Clinton's punching bag.

    Richard Nixon could tell us a lot about peaking too early. He was a master of it, because it beat him every time. He never learned and neither did Bush the Elder.

    But wow! This goofy child president we have on our hands now. He is demonstrably a fool and a failure, and this is only the summer of '03. By the summer of 2004, he might not even be living in the White House. Gone, gone, like the snows of yesteryear.

    The Rumsfield-Cheney axis has self-destructed right in front of our eyes, along with the once-proud Perle-Wolfowitz bund that is turning to wax. They somehow managed to blow it all, like a gang of kids on a looting spree, between January and July, or even less. It is genuinely incredible. The U.S. Treasury is empty, we are losing that stupid, fraudulent chickencrap War in Iraq, and every country in the world except a handful of Corrupt Brits despises us. We are losers, and that is the one unforgivable sin in America.

    Beyond that, we have lost the respect of the world and lost two disastrous wars in three years. Afghanistan is lost, Iraq is a permanent war Zone, our national Economy is crashing all around us, the Pentagon's "war strategy" has failed miserably, nobody has any money to spend, and our once-mighty U.S. America is paralyzed by Mutinies in Iraq and even Fort Bragg.

    The American nation is in the worst condition I can remember in my lifetime, and our prospects for the immediate future are even worse. I am surprised and embarrassed to be a part of the first American generation to leave the country in far worse shape than it was when we first came into it. Our highway system is crumbling, our police are dishonest, our children are poor, our vaunted Social Security, once the envy of the world, has been looted and neglected and destroyed by the same gang of ignorant greed-crazed bastards who brought us Vietnam, Afghanistan, the disastrous Gaza Strip and ignominious defeat all over the world.

    The Stock Market will never come back, our Armies will never again be No. 1, and our children will drink filthy water for the rest of our lives.

    The Bush family must be very proud of themselves today, but I am not. Big Darkness, soon come. Take my word for it.


    To be continued very soon.

    Published in full:

    http://espn.go.com/page2/s/thompson/030722.html
     
    #35     Jul 23, 2003
  6. END OF A DYNASTY

    By RALPH PETERS
    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

    July 23, 2003 -- THE deaths of Saddam's sons is a more important step in the liberation of Iraq than the fall of Baghdad. Their deaths destroyed the dynasty at the heart of Saddam's dreams and Iraqi fears.

    For the long-suffering people of Iraq, the deaths of Uday and Qusay matter more, on a practical level, than even Saddam's confirmed death one day will. With his sons alive, Saddam remained a threat to the future. With both of them dead - as well as his eldest grandson, perhaps - he's only a broken tyrant on the run.

    Saddam remains a symbol, but a hollow one. His power to make himself feared required sons to extend his reign. And the symbolism of American soldiers scoring the kill makes it unmistakably clear who holds the upper hand and how little Saddam's campaign of assassinating our troops achieved.

    He killed America's sons. And we killed his.

    In the Middle East, family trumps all other worldly connections and obligations. And sons are the most important part of an Arab family. Saddam's visions of himself as a successor to the great rulers of the golden age of the Arabs are void without sons to carry on the line. He hoped to create a hereditary throne. Now the would-be caliph sits amid empty chairs.

    Saddam cherished his sons so blindly that he tolerated their monstrous excesses. Uday was wildly vicious, Qusay coldly murderous. Together, they seemed to guarantee the enduring power of the House of Hussein - perhaps even beyond the American occupation.

    Now the chain is broken.

    Saddam feels, at last, the pain he inflicted upon countless Iraqi families. He murdered their sons or threw their lives away in wars of aggression. Now he knows the shock of a father's loss. Saddam has been called "inhuman" with good reason. Now he feels as human as any man.

    Nothing could hurt him more than the loss of his sons. Not the loss of Iraq. Not even his own death. For all those who longed for revenge upon Saddam, this is it. If he is still alive, the deaths of Uday and Qusay are the greatest torment that could be visited upon him.

    His fall, his suffering - his punishment - are almost Biblical in their resonance. Pharaoh has lost his first-born and more. The prodigal sons will not return in this telling. He who sowed the wind has reaped the whirlwind.

    The winds of change will blow more strongly now. In the short term, we may see a burst of violence directed against our troops as Pharaoh Saddam, in his rage, attempts to avenge the loss of his savage offspring. But desperate moves reveal vulnerabilities. The deaths of Uday and Qusay mark the unraveling of the regime's last hopes.

    Saddam, too, will be taken or killed eventually. He may remain as a murderous spirit haunting Iraq for months. But that is the extent of his dominion - a bloody usurper put down, not a once-and-future king.

    It's significant, too, that his sons were hiding in Mosul, a traditional Kurdish city stolen by Saddam's favored Sunni Arabs. While the attacks on our troops occurred to the south in the Sunni Arab heartland, Uday and Qusay thought they might hide securely in the quieter north.

    They found there was no safety for their kind. The expedient loyalties collapsed, the courtiers fled. The tip that led to the violent end of Saddam's sons came from a citizen of Iraq, not from a satellite.

    The tide of peace has turned as decisively as the tide of battle did some months ago. Saddam knows that his cause is hopeless now. Any further cruelties he perpetrates will be acts of revenge, not hope.

    Other tyrannical dynasties, in the Middle East and beyond, should draw a lesson. The age of tyrants is waning. Behind all the self-important claims in the media or Congress that our occupation of Iraq is in danger of failing, there is one fierce, bright, irresistable truth: Iraq is not the end. It's a beginning.

    Two murderers are dead. Justice was done.

    http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/1283.htm
     
    #36     Jul 23, 2003