"The America of John McCain has no need to be made great again."
--Meghan McCain, today, at her father's funeral
!['It's unbelievable. Americans support this deal by a two-to-one margin, but Republicans in the Senate have chosen to put politics before country.
Read more: http://bit.ly/1KNuxed and http://bit.ly/1wUKaKM
Image by @[346937065399354:274:Occupy Democrats].'](https://fbcdn-sphotos-f-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-xaf1/v/t1.0-9/p480x480/10172768_804863552940034_3047357624392402577_n.jpg?oh=6eebab4e4636f8791c31c6cdd8818dc2&oe=55825414&__gda__=1438557939_dbfae0ccfbb03703c638af2b1b2edf9f)
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Showing posts with label John McCain. Show all posts
Showing posts with label John McCain. Show all posts
Saturday, September 1, 2018
Monday, March 9, 2015
Did You See What Kansas and Missouri Congressional Members Did?
It's a beauty:
Kansas' Senator Pat Roberts and Representative Jerry Moran and Missouri's Senator Roy Blunt all signed this letter.
Bloomberg News reports on an open letter signed by 47 Republicans warning Iran that whatever they negotiate with President Obama can be undone in two years by the next President, who they presume will side with them.
There are a great deal of people on social media just now, suggesting, if not saying that these legislators who have signed the letter have committed treason by way of our own Logan Act, which states:Organized by freshman Senator Tom Cotton and signed by the chamber's entire party leadership as well as potential 2016 presidential contenders Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, the letter is meant not just to discourage the Iranian regime from signing a deal but also to pressure the White House into giving Congress some authority over the process.“It has come to our attention while observing your nuclear negotiations with our government that you may not fully understand our constitutional system … Anything not approved by Congress is a mere executive agreement,” the senators wrote. “The next president could revoke such an executive agreement with the stroke of a pen and future Congresses could modify the terms of the agreement at any time.”
"Any citizen of the United States, wherever he may be, who, without authority of the United States, directly or indirectly commences or carries on any correspondence or intercourse with any foreign government or any officer or agent thereof, with intent to influence the measures or conduct of any foreign government or of any officer or agent thereof, in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.
It's rather difficult to argue with them or with the idea, to me and a lot of us.
Naturally, the usual warmongers like Senators John McCain and Lindsay Graham are in the group but so are possible 2016 presidential candidates like Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and even "Libertarian" Rand Paul. Mr. "I Don't Do War Because I'm a Libertarian" Rand Paul.
I don't know what's worse here--the idiocy or the demagoguery.
Links: Logan Act - Wikipedia
Logan Act legal definition of Logan Act
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
From Slate Magazine, yesterday, on Pres. "McSame" (God forbid)
Slick John McCain and the offshore oil ruse
The safety and economics of offshore drilling are distractions from the much larger challenges that humanity faces: Climate change and peak oil.
By Andrew Leonard
Jun. 25, 2008 | An example of leadership or reckless chutzpah? On Monday, John McCain visited Santa Barbara, the scene of one of the great environmental disasters in American history, and proceeded to downplay the potential consequences of lifting the federal moratorium on new offshore drilling. Modern drilling technology is environmentally safe, he told the audience. According to the Associated Press, McCain "cited the examples of Louisiana and Texas, noting they have allowed drilling and weathered two devastating hurricanes with minimal or no oil spills."
McCain exaggerated. A 2007 report by the U.S. Minerals Management Service unearthed by Outside the Beltway documented the damage caused in the Gulf of Mexico by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita: "124 spills were reported with a total volume of roughly 17,700 barrels of total petroleum products."
Now, 17,700 barrels of oil equals 743,400 gallons. Whether you consider that a lot or a little depends on your perspective. Compared with the 1.5 million barrels pumped out of the Gulf every day, it is a trivial amount. But it's also within shouting distance of the 3 million gallons of oil spilled in the Santa Barbara offshore oil disaster of 1969.
That spill is considered the "environmental shot heard 'round the world." The catastrophe crystallized the environmental movement into a potent political force, resulting in the quick passage of the National Environmental Protection Act later that year, the creation of the EPA in 1970 and, ultimately, the ban on new offshore drilling.
But the safety of offshore drilling is a distraction from what's really at issue in the current tussle over energy policy. An oil spill here or there is irrelevant to the much larger challenges that humanity faces: climate change and peak oil.
The truth is, we can probably make offshore drilling as safe as we reasonably want it to be. Norway, with its environmentally aware citizenry and tight coordination between a watchful government and a state-oil owned company, has been drilling for decades in the North Sea with reasonably good environmental results (notwithstanding the horrific explosion of the Piper Alpha offshore platform in 1988 or the spillage of 24,000 barrels of oil just last December). Then again, for an example of how it can all go terribly wrong, visit Nigeria, where lax environmental controls have resulted in a huge mess in the Niger Delta, and where rebel forces attacked an offshore oil platform just this week.
But drilling practices and technology have improved. With the appropriate government oversight and regulation, it may be possible to drill off the coasts of Florida and California without covering the beaches with sludge and killing thousands of seabirds. Provided we acknowledge, of course, that a few nasty hurricanes in Florida will make at least a little bit of mess, and an earthquake in the wrong spot in California could be a slight problem. And provided we are capable of following the example of Norway, where the government and the people tell the oil company what to do, rather than the example set by the current Bush administration, where the energy industry is in charge of policymaking.
But drilling for more oil in the United States will not lower the price of gas in the short term -- even McCain admitted as much when he said on Monday, "I don't see an immediate relief, [but] the fact that we are exploiting those reserves would have psychological impact that I think is beneficial." Bush's own Department of Energy concluded in 2004 that the long-term impact of lifting the moratorium on offshore drilling on oil prices would be "insignificant." The only way that expanded drilling, offshore and in ANWR, could make a difference at the pump is if global production of oil started significantly outpacing the growth of global demand. Which would probably require that Saudi Arabia crank open the spigot and China, India, and the rest of the world's rapidly emerging economies start to lose their enormous thirst.
In other words, not only is it unlikely, it is completely out of our hands.
For those who accept that burning fossil fuels is contributing to climate change and that there are finite limits to the amount of inexpensive oil that can be pumped out of the earth, a new offshore oil rush is a psychological and practical disaster. It would accelerate climate change and, in the unlikely scenario that new drilling even momentarily slowed down global oil price appreciation, would still postpone that inevitable day of reckoning with the even higher fossil fuel energy prices sure to arrive.
The longer we wait to deal with either problem, the more painful and expensive our options for coping with these challenges will become and the more constrained our maneuvering room will be. The sorry truth is that from the perspective of grappling with climate change, and encouraging investment into alternative energy technologies, expensive gas now is far preferable to even more expensive gas later.
Of course, there are plenty of people, mostly on the right-wing of the political spectrum in the United States, who do not accept that climate change is real or caused by human industrial activity, and who believe there are no real constraints to the global oil supply. They'd prefer to blame environmental activists, present-day descendants of the rabid left-wing commies who exploited the Santa Barbara spill to pursue their anti-business agenda, for today's "high" gas prices.
Such accusations are the stuff of daily grandstanding rhetoric from Congressional Republicans and constitute a major, longstanding front in the culture wars.
There's a large contingent of Americans who do acknowledge that global warming is real and that it would be smart to consume less oil. But the prospect of $5 gasoline tends to reduce their focus from the long term to the here-and-now. The oceans haven't flooded their homes just yet, but their pocketbooks are hurting today.
And there's an election campaign going on.
In Las Vegas on Tuesday, Barack Obama delivered a significant speech on energy issues. He criticized McCain's proposal for new offshore drilling and commented that McCain's reference to "psychological impact" is "Washington-speak for 'It polls well.'" No joke.
In Santa Barbara, McCain attempted to assuage Californian sensitivities by saying that his real position on the moratorium on offshore drilling is that it should fall under the rubric of "state's rights" -- meaning that if Californians want to keep their coastline pristine, they will have the power to do so under a McCain administration. But McCain knows he's not going to win California, so it doesn't matter what he says in Santa Barbara. The offshore oil ploy is a calculated gambit aimed at cashing in on the pain that economically stressed voters in swing states far from the coast (as well as Florida, where environmental sensitivities seem to be on less solid ground than in California) are feeling. In Ohio and Michigan, the ugliness of oil derricks blotting out the sunset isn't a number one problem on anyone's priority list.
McCain's goal is to marry the anti-environmentalist Republican base with the I-like-the-environment-but-am-economically-hurting moderates. Call it the coalition of the unwilling to pay high gas prices.
In his speech, Obama set forth a pretty straightforward platform of vastly increased investment in renewable energy, conservation and efficiency, and proposed to ease the pain of working-class Americans with an economic stimulus plan. One can question how he would end up paying for his proposals or whether he will succeed in steering them through Congress, but one thing that must be conceded is that his approach represents a clear difference from McCain.
Suppose that McCain's strategy works. Suppose voters in enough swing states decide that the pain of high gas prices is so great that they will go with the candidate who is promising them the easy way out -- the gas tax holiday and offshore drilling and a nuclear power plant in every pot. What will that tell us about the American ability to suck it up and face down the challenges of the future?
Easy. It will tell us that we've lost the battle before we've hardly begun to fight. It will tell us that the environment is toast. We will have established that we, the citizens of the richest and most powerful country on the earth, are unwilling to pay the price necessary for embarking on a long-term ecologically sustainable path for existence on the planet. If $4 gasoline is enough incentive to lift the moratorium on offshore drilling, then $10-a-gallon gasoline will inspire even more drastic consequences. We will drill for every drop of oil, we will dig up every ounce of coal, we will sacrifice every environmental regulation, because we just can't take the heat. And then we'll fry.
It will also tell us that the environmental movement that took so much power from the Santa Barbara oil spill of 1969 has failed. That sustainability and conservations were luxuries we decided we could not afford.
(The original link:
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2008/06/25/mccain_offshore_oil/print.html)
The safety and economics of offshore drilling are distractions from the much larger challenges that humanity faces: Climate change and peak oil.
By Andrew Leonard
Jun. 25, 2008 | An example of leadership or reckless chutzpah? On Monday, John McCain visited Santa Barbara, the scene of one of the great environmental disasters in American history, and proceeded to downplay the potential consequences of lifting the federal moratorium on new offshore drilling. Modern drilling technology is environmentally safe, he told the audience. According to the Associated Press, McCain "cited the examples of Louisiana and Texas, noting they have allowed drilling and weathered two devastating hurricanes with minimal or no oil spills."
McCain exaggerated. A 2007 report by the U.S. Minerals Management Service unearthed by Outside the Beltway documented the damage caused in the Gulf of Mexico by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita: "124 spills were reported with a total volume of roughly 17,700 barrels of total petroleum products."
Now, 17,700 barrels of oil equals 743,400 gallons. Whether you consider that a lot or a little depends on your perspective. Compared with the 1.5 million barrels pumped out of the Gulf every day, it is a trivial amount. But it's also within shouting distance of the 3 million gallons of oil spilled in the Santa Barbara offshore oil disaster of 1969.
That spill is considered the "environmental shot heard 'round the world." The catastrophe crystallized the environmental movement into a potent political force, resulting in the quick passage of the National Environmental Protection Act later that year, the creation of the EPA in 1970 and, ultimately, the ban on new offshore drilling.
But the safety of offshore drilling is a distraction from what's really at issue in the current tussle over energy policy. An oil spill here or there is irrelevant to the much larger challenges that humanity faces: climate change and peak oil.
The truth is, we can probably make offshore drilling as safe as we reasonably want it to be. Norway, with its environmentally aware citizenry and tight coordination between a watchful government and a state-oil owned company, has been drilling for decades in the North Sea with reasonably good environmental results (notwithstanding the horrific explosion of the Piper Alpha offshore platform in 1988 or the spillage of 24,000 barrels of oil just last December). Then again, for an example of how it can all go terribly wrong, visit Nigeria, where lax environmental controls have resulted in a huge mess in the Niger Delta, and where rebel forces attacked an offshore oil platform just this week.
But drilling practices and technology have improved. With the appropriate government oversight and regulation, it may be possible to drill off the coasts of Florida and California without covering the beaches with sludge and killing thousands of seabirds. Provided we acknowledge, of course, that a few nasty hurricanes in Florida will make at least a little bit of mess, and an earthquake in the wrong spot in California could be a slight problem. And provided we are capable of following the example of Norway, where the government and the people tell the oil company what to do, rather than the example set by the current Bush administration, where the energy industry is in charge of policymaking.
But drilling for more oil in the United States will not lower the price of gas in the short term -- even McCain admitted as much when he said on Monday, "I don't see an immediate relief, [but] the fact that we are exploiting those reserves would have psychological impact that I think is beneficial." Bush's own Department of Energy concluded in 2004 that the long-term impact of lifting the moratorium on offshore drilling on oil prices would be "insignificant." The only way that expanded drilling, offshore and in ANWR, could make a difference at the pump is if global production of oil started significantly outpacing the growth of global demand. Which would probably require that Saudi Arabia crank open the spigot and China, India, and the rest of the world's rapidly emerging economies start to lose their enormous thirst.
In other words, not only is it unlikely, it is completely out of our hands.
For those who accept that burning fossil fuels is contributing to climate change and that there are finite limits to the amount of inexpensive oil that can be pumped out of the earth, a new offshore oil rush is a psychological and practical disaster. It would accelerate climate change and, in the unlikely scenario that new drilling even momentarily slowed down global oil price appreciation, would still postpone that inevitable day of reckoning with the even higher fossil fuel energy prices sure to arrive.
The longer we wait to deal with either problem, the more painful and expensive our options for coping with these challenges will become and the more constrained our maneuvering room will be. The sorry truth is that from the perspective of grappling with climate change, and encouraging investment into alternative energy technologies, expensive gas now is far preferable to even more expensive gas later.
Of course, there are plenty of people, mostly on the right-wing of the political spectrum in the United States, who do not accept that climate change is real or caused by human industrial activity, and who believe there are no real constraints to the global oil supply. They'd prefer to blame environmental activists, present-day descendants of the rabid left-wing commies who exploited the Santa Barbara spill to pursue their anti-business agenda, for today's "high" gas prices.
Such accusations are the stuff of daily grandstanding rhetoric from Congressional Republicans and constitute a major, longstanding front in the culture wars.
There's a large contingent of Americans who do acknowledge that global warming is real and that it would be smart to consume less oil. But the prospect of $5 gasoline tends to reduce their focus from the long term to the here-and-now. The oceans haven't flooded their homes just yet, but their pocketbooks are hurting today.
And there's an election campaign going on.
In Las Vegas on Tuesday, Barack Obama delivered a significant speech on energy issues. He criticized McCain's proposal for new offshore drilling and commented that McCain's reference to "psychological impact" is "Washington-speak for 'It polls well.'" No joke.
In Santa Barbara, McCain attempted to assuage Californian sensitivities by saying that his real position on the moratorium on offshore drilling is that it should fall under the rubric of "state's rights" -- meaning that if Californians want to keep their coastline pristine, they will have the power to do so under a McCain administration. But McCain knows he's not going to win California, so it doesn't matter what he says in Santa Barbara. The offshore oil ploy is a calculated gambit aimed at cashing in on the pain that economically stressed voters in swing states far from the coast (as well as Florida, where environmental sensitivities seem to be on less solid ground than in California) are feeling. In Ohio and Michigan, the ugliness of oil derricks blotting out the sunset isn't a number one problem on anyone's priority list.
McCain's goal is to marry the anti-environmentalist Republican base with the I-like-the-environment-but-am-economically-hurting moderates. Call it the coalition of the unwilling to pay high gas prices.
In his speech, Obama set forth a pretty straightforward platform of vastly increased investment in renewable energy, conservation and efficiency, and proposed to ease the pain of working-class Americans with an economic stimulus plan. One can question how he would end up paying for his proposals or whether he will succeed in steering them through Congress, but one thing that must be conceded is that his approach represents a clear difference from McCain.
Suppose that McCain's strategy works. Suppose voters in enough swing states decide that the pain of high gas prices is so great that they will go with the candidate who is promising them the easy way out -- the gas tax holiday and offshore drilling and a nuclear power plant in every pot. What will that tell us about the American ability to suck it up and face down the challenges of the future?
Easy. It will tell us that we've lost the battle before we've hardly begun to fight. It will tell us that the environment is toast. We will have established that we, the citizens of the richest and most powerful country on the earth, are unwilling to pay the price necessary for embarking on a long-term ecologically sustainable path for existence on the planet. If $4 gasoline is enough incentive to lift the moratorium on offshore drilling, then $10-a-gallon gasoline will inspire even more drastic consequences. We will drill for every drop of oil, we will dig up every ounce of coal, we will sacrifice every environmental regulation, because we just can't take the heat. And then we'll fry.
It will also tell us that the environmental movement that took so much power from the Santa Barbara oil spill of 1969 has failed. That sustainability and conservations were luxuries we decided we could not afford.
(The original link:
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2008/06/25/mccain_offshore_oil/print.html)
Saturday, April 5, 2008
McCain: sayin' the right thing
Okay, first things first.
Let me make it very clear that I am not a "McCain man". I am absolutely not, in any way for John McCain or for him for the Presidency of the United States in the year 2008. I never voted for him and never will. I did wish it were him instead of the current knucklehead we ended up with, precisely because I didn't think he'd be as bad for us as I thought W would be--and, apparently, I was more than just a little correct in that. I don't think he would have attacked another, foreign sovereign nation, which is so clearly, unalterably against international law. Also, he probably wouldn't have screwed us all up the way this, again, knucklehead has.
All that said, I will say that John McCain said the absolute right thing this week when he said he would not bail out any banks, construction firms or home buyers with government money. He said they made their mistakes and they'd have to live with them.
And you know? He's right.
The banks made lousy--possibly illegal--loans to home buyers and a whole bunch of greedy nincompoops signed off on what were just incredibly stupid home loans because they either believed they could afford them or they were told they could afford them, or both.
We shouldn't now bail them out and we shouldn't have to.
Senator McCain probably only said this to pander to the Conservatives in the party, I'm thinking, and he's only trying to simply prove how Conservative he REALLY is but, hey, he said it and, let me say it again, he was right.
Now, two things have or will have come out of this. First, because everyone's jumping all over him--mostly Democrats--he'll never say it again, which is too bad because--let me repeat--HE WAS RIGHT. Second, the Democrats have jumped all over this saying he's "Mr. Do-nothing" when it comes to the economy, which is nonsense and very close to a lie.
It's wrong and wrong-headed.
Look around. We have a pile of debt as a nation, and it's just getting bigger. Millions, billions and trillions larger. We can't afford to keep bailing out people who do the wrong thing anyway, in business. We just can't. We don't have the money anymore. We don't have that capability. And if we did, we still shouldn't. If your brother always got drunk and blew his paycheck and didn't take care of his family but gambled his money away, instead, would you forever throw money at his problems? No, you wouldn't. And you shouldn't, even if you could and the same applies here.
Now, connected to this bigger picture is the likelihood of a coming recession. Yes, I said the word: recession. (At the beginning of these things--which always come around, folks, I have news for you--people always freak out and only refer to it as "the 'R' word", like a) we've never done this before and b) it's the end of the world.)
I have news for you--we've lived through recessions before and we will again. And again. And again.
And we have to. It's called the business cycle, ladies and gentlemen, and they are a fact of life. They are a fact of the business world. If you don't have busts, you can't have booms. If you get very descriptive of them, you start sounding like Peter Sellers playing Chauncey in the movie "Being There", where you say things about there being a Winter, and then Spring comes along, with new growth.
BUT THAT'S EXACTLY WHAT HAPPENS. And it's what needs to happen.
So when everyone starts talking about pumping money into the economy because, God forbid, we can't have a recession, I want to scream.
Let me say it again: WE NEED RECESSIONS. We need downturns so we clear out the crap. We need downturns so we later have upturns.
And for Hillary and Barack and any politician to say we have to pump money into the economy, I say bunk. More crap. We do not. We decidedly do not.
WE DON'T HAVE THE MONEY. We don't have the funds to keep pumping in. IT ISN'T THERE.
And secondly, WE NEED DOWNTURNS. Throwing money at this recession is a mistake.
I'm not saying "tough" when someone loses their job, no. Actually, what I'm saying is that people inevitably lose their jobs. They'll need to go out with their skills and get a new job, yes, either with what skill set they have or they'll have to get some more training. (News flash: we need LOTS more computer people! And nurses! and teachers! Maybe train there).
So, when I hear politicians pandering that there needs to be more money sent out or given to some group, I just want to say "No! Enough!". And someone needs to. Senator McCain did and he's being vilified for it and it's wrong. He's right.
I hope he has the conservative guts to stick with what he said.
I bet he doesn't.
Let me make it very clear that I am not a "McCain man". I am absolutely not, in any way for John McCain or for him for the Presidency of the United States in the year 2008. I never voted for him and never will. I did wish it were him instead of the current knucklehead we ended up with, precisely because I didn't think he'd be as bad for us as I thought W would be--and, apparently, I was more than just a little correct in that. I don't think he would have attacked another, foreign sovereign nation, which is so clearly, unalterably against international law. Also, he probably wouldn't have screwed us all up the way this, again, knucklehead has.
All that said, I will say that John McCain said the absolute right thing this week when he said he would not bail out any banks, construction firms or home buyers with government money. He said they made their mistakes and they'd have to live with them.
And you know? He's right.
The banks made lousy--possibly illegal--loans to home buyers and a whole bunch of greedy nincompoops signed off on what were just incredibly stupid home loans because they either believed they could afford them or they were told they could afford them, or both.
We shouldn't now bail them out and we shouldn't have to.
Senator McCain probably only said this to pander to the Conservatives in the party, I'm thinking, and he's only trying to simply prove how Conservative he REALLY is but, hey, he said it and, let me say it again, he was right.
Now, two things have or will have come out of this. First, because everyone's jumping all over him--mostly Democrats--he'll never say it again, which is too bad because--let me repeat--HE WAS RIGHT. Second, the Democrats have jumped all over this saying he's "Mr. Do-nothing" when it comes to the economy, which is nonsense and very close to a lie.
It's wrong and wrong-headed.
Look around. We have a pile of debt as a nation, and it's just getting bigger. Millions, billions and trillions larger. We can't afford to keep bailing out people who do the wrong thing anyway, in business. We just can't. We don't have the money anymore. We don't have that capability. And if we did, we still shouldn't. If your brother always got drunk and blew his paycheck and didn't take care of his family but gambled his money away, instead, would you forever throw money at his problems? No, you wouldn't. And you shouldn't, even if you could and the same applies here.
Now, connected to this bigger picture is the likelihood of a coming recession. Yes, I said the word: recession. (At the beginning of these things--which always come around, folks, I have news for you--people always freak out and only refer to it as "the 'R' word", like a) we've never done this before and b) it's the end of the world.)
I have news for you--we've lived through recessions before and we will again. And again. And again.
And we have to. It's called the business cycle, ladies and gentlemen, and they are a fact of life. They are a fact of the business world. If you don't have busts, you can't have booms. If you get very descriptive of them, you start sounding like Peter Sellers playing Chauncey in the movie "Being There", where you say things about there being a Winter, and then Spring comes along, with new growth.
BUT THAT'S EXACTLY WHAT HAPPENS. And it's what needs to happen.
So when everyone starts talking about pumping money into the economy because, God forbid, we can't have a recession, I want to scream.
Let me say it again: WE NEED RECESSIONS. We need downturns so we clear out the crap. We need downturns so we later have upturns.
And for Hillary and Barack and any politician to say we have to pump money into the economy, I say bunk. More crap. We do not. We decidedly do not.
WE DON'T HAVE THE MONEY. We don't have the funds to keep pumping in. IT ISN'T THERE.
And secondly, WE NEED DOWNTURNS. Throwing money at this recession is a mistake.
I'm not saying "tough" when someone loses their job, no. Actually, what I'm saying is that people inevitably lose their jobs. They'll need to go out with their skills and get a new job, yes, either with what skill set they have or they'll have to get some more training. (News flash: we need LOTS more computer people! And nurses! and teachers! Maybe train there).
So, when I hear politicians pandering that there needs to be more money sent out or given to some group, I just want to say "No! Enough!". And someone needs to. Senator McCain did and he's being vilified for it and it's wrong. He's right.
I hope he has the conservative guts to stick with what he said.
I bet he doesn't.
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
Back to more important things
Time magazine has two terrific articles out just now. One is by a soldier in Iraq, about the meaning of 4,000 soldiers dead due to the Iraq war. It's very poignant. You can find it at the following link:
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1725642,00.html
And the other, second article quotes Senator and Presidential Candidate John McCain as saying we need to "collaborate more with allies." You'll find it here:
http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1725541,00.html
I'm more moved by the first, soldier's article, of course, but find this second one fascinating, too, because, if you'll recall, Senator John Kerry was "shot down", forgive the image, 4 years ago when he was running for President for saying just this. "Too wimpy" it was said. Too soft.
How far we've come. Now we think, after all this time and all the soldier's deaths and all the billions of dollars and materiel we've wasted--along with blowing up and destroying a country, only to have to put it back together--when we finally come back around to realizing that maybe talking with our allies was a good idea after all.
And not wimpy.
Watching PBS' "Frontline" series Monday and Tuesday night should have been required for all American citizens this week so we could all know where this Iraq war came from, what it's done and who's been responsible for what, including the lies and misrepresentations.
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1725642,00.html
And the other, second article quotes Senator and Presidential Candidate John McCain as saying we need to "collaborate more with allies." You'll find it here:
http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1725541,00.html
I'm more moved by the first, soldier's article, of course, but find this second one fascinating, too, because, if you'll recall, Senator John Kerry was "shot down", forgive the image, 4 years ago when he was running for President for saying just this. "Too wimpy" it was said. Too soft.
How far we've come. Now we think, after all this time and all the soldier's deaths and all the billions of dollars and materiel we've wasted--along with blowing up and destroying a country, only to have to put it back together--when we finally come back around to realizing that maybe talking with our allies was a good idea after all.
And not wimpy.
Watching PBS' "Frontline" series Monday and Tuesday night should have been required for all American citizens this week so we could all know where this Iraq war came from, what it's done and who's been responsible for what, including the lies and misrepresentations.
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