Monday, January 29, 2007

"Not every adversary is an apocalyptic threat"

I've been saying this for a while now but David A. Bell in an op-ed at the LAT puts it more eloquently. We've allowed this White House to throw the entire country into a state of panic over terrorism that is hugely overblown relative to the actual danger terrorists present to "our freedoms." There are simply not enough terrorists in the entire world, even if they could put aside their own sectarian differences and all band together, to invade our country and take over our government.

The Bush administration and their hand wringing wrongwingnuts would have you believe these vile evil-doers are massing on every border and hatching plots in every mosque to take us over and force our women into burquas and compel us to pray to Mecca six times a day. If it was just a random guy on a street corner plying this fantasy, he'd been in Bellevue by now under psychiatric care for paranoia.

Yes, the terrorists hate us. But they don't stand a prayer of "winning." Hell they're barely even in the game. They're mostly just sitting on the bench watching our troops do the work of fostering turmoil for them. Our troops have killed at a minimum, if you take the lowest estimates, over 100,000 people. How many has bin Laden taken credit for lately?

Hell, bin Laden has a lower disapproval rate than Bush since our president declared his war on terror. More people die in car accidents than from terrorism every single day. We should think about that before we willing cede any more of our freedoms to a unitary executive in order to "protect" ourselves from phantom threats.
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7 Comments:

Blogger Kathy said...

The David Bell's of the world tried to say the same thing in the buildup to the Iraq war and they were shot down by hysterical right-wingers.

I wish we could sue those who supported this war for financial damages. Some of the money could go to the families of soldiers who lost their lives, some to the soldiers left physically or mentally disabled, and the rest could go toward paying down the deficit created in part by this war.

5:31:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

we are going to look back on these years like "holy CRAP" we are on the cups of massive world wars every minute. the president is not steering the ship. he can't do a single thing right. It's really an amazing period in history. I can't wait till it'
s over.

C SPAN was running old state of the unions a while back. clintons from like 1997 or something. it was insane. we had NO problems. People looked relaxed.

8:21:00 PM  
Blogger Libby Spencer said...

I wish we could indict the people who got into this occupation for war crimes myself but it would be nice if those who so blithely support other people dying had to pay for the damages.

Lester, I'm already looking on this and saying holy crap. How did we get in this mess?

11:20:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

what's sad is that kids today think this is how things are. When I was growing up there was none of this. 1980-2000, basically we went to the olympics every 4 years and won like 300 medals and waited for the next one. the Space Shuttle explosion was the most profound disaster of that whole era. now there's perpetual disaster

1:24:00 PM  
Blogger Libby Spencer said...

These are indeed troubled times Lester. Since Bush has been in office in the entire world is in turmoil.

3:31:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I see disaster when i look at him. it's in his eyes. he's oblivious

5:54:00 PM  
Blogger Libby Spencer said...

I see it in his eyes too Lester, but I not so sure he's oblivious, more like imperious to me.

6:14:00 PM  

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