Joe Scarborough: People Who Care About How We Got Into Iraq Are Not “Americans”
Only one of these people is American
Are you in Manhattan, or Georgetown, or on a college campus? Or just care about why we invaded Iraq? You may be surprised to find out that, as Joe Scarborough explained this morning on MSNBC, you’re not an American.
OBAMA: I do know Al Qaeda’s in Iraq, and that’s why we should continue to strike Al Qaeda targets, but I have some news for John McCain. And that is that there was no such thing as Al Qaeda in Iraq before George Bush and John McCain decided to invade Iraq. They took their eye off the people who were responsible for 9/11 — that would Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, which is stronger now than at anytime since 2001. I’ve been paying attention, John McCain.
GEIST: So are you ready for eight months of that argument?
SCARBOROUGH: Well, you know, it is an argument — Mika’s gonna disagree with me on this one — but I would guarantee you, guarantee you, that while a lot of people in Manhattan and Georgetown and on college campuses are worried about what happened in 2002 and the lead up to the war, Americans are concerned about what’s happening now.
It’s amazing how many people there are prancing around who aren’t Americans. For instance, in December, 2005, 56% of Americans un-Americanically believed it was “very important” for Congress to investigate the way we went to war. By June, 2006 (the most recent poll I can find) that number was still steady at 57%.
It’s a lot of fun to imagine what would happen if someone on MSNBC said, “I guarantee you that while a lot of white boys in Alabama and rural Texas are worried about laws banning hand guns, Americans are not.”
If you want to express your opinion to MSNBC, Democrats.com has set up something here.
It’s news to our President that analysts are predicting $4 a gallon gasoline — but he doesn’t know the answer to a question about his Presidential library because he’s been focused on other things, like — wait for it — gasoline prices.
… and let’s not overlook the line about ordinary folks tryin’ to put money on their tables.
Perhaps as you watch Hillary Clinton’s dreams ripped to shreds, you’ve allowed yourself to feel a small measure of human sympathy for her. DO NOT MAKE THIS MISTAKE. She still feels compelled to blatantly lie about everything important, as Robert Naiman explains here.
I have high hopes that an Obama administration would put more effort into its lying, and produce the kind of higher-quality lies that we as Americans deserve.
Apparently the multitudinous military experts who stated with great certainty that Obama’s story from the Austin debate couldn’t possibly be true were, well, blowing smoke out of their asses.
WASHINGTON (CNN) — Army chief of staff Gen. George Casey, testifying on troop strain before the Senate Armed Forces Committee Tuesday, said there is “no reason to doubt” Sen. Barack Obama’s military shortage story during CNN’s debate in Austin, Texas, last week.
Sen. Barack Obama says he knows of a platoon sent to Afghanistan with a shortage of personnel and equipment.
“You know, I’ve heard from an Army captain who was the head of a rifle platoon — supposed to have 39 men in a rifle platoon. Ended up being sent to Afghanistan with 24 because 15 of those soldiers had been sent to Iraq,” Obama told CNN moderator Campbell Brown.
“And as a consequence, they didn’t have enough ammunition, they didn’t have enough Humvees. They were actually capturing Taliban weapons, because it was easier to get Taliban weapons than it was for them to get properly equipped by our current commander in chief,” he added.
War supporters have challenged the story, but Casey said he had “no reason to doubt what it is the captain says.”
The Most Wanted List International Terrorism By Noam Chomsky
On February 13, Imad Moughniyeh, a senior commander of Hizbollah, was assassinated in Damascus. “The world is a better place without this man in it,” State Department spokesperson Sean McCormack said: “one way or the other he was brought to justice.” Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell added that Moughniyeh has been “responsible for more deaths of Americans and Israelis than any other terrorist with the exception of Osama bin Laden.”
Joy was unconstrained in Israel too, as “one of the U.S. and Israel’s most wanted men” was brought to justice, the London Financial Times reported. Under the heading, “A militant wanted the world over,” an accompanying story reported that he was “superseded on the most-wanted list by Osama bin Laden” after 9/11 and so ranked only second among “the most wanted militants in the world.”
The terminology is accurate enough, according to the rules of Anglo-American discourse, which defines “the world” as the political class in Washington and London…
In the present case, if “the world” were extended to the world, we might find some other candidates for the honor of most hated arch-criminal. It is instructive to ask why this might be true.
Obama will move us to One World Government in the blink of an eye, and environmentalists are Nazis.
Glenn Beck also spends a lot of time mocking people who — in his phrasing — say “help me, government, help me, I’m scared!” — (i.e., people who believe that government programs to help the needy are actually a good thing.)
That’s when he’s not saying, in all seriousness, “Please build a fence along the Mexican border, government, I’m scared!”
HARTFORD, Conn. –U.S. Sen. Barack Obama rallied Connecticut Democrats at their annual dinner Thursday night, throwing his support behind mentor and Senate colleague Joe Lieberman.
Obama, an Illinois Democrat who is considered a rising star in the party, was the keynote speaker at the annual Jefferson Jackson Bailey Dinner.
Lieberman, Connecticut’s junior senator, is under fire from some liberal Democrats for his support of the Iraq War. He was key in booking Obama, who routinely receives more than 200 speaking invitations each week.
Some at Thursday’s dinner said that while they were pleased with Lieberman’s success in bringing Obama to Connecticut, they still consider Lieberman uncomfortably tolerant of the Bush administration.
Obama wasted little time getting to that point, calling it the “elephant in the room” but praising Lieberman’s intellect, character and qualifications.
“The fact of the matter is, I know some in the party have differences with Joe. I’m going to go ahead and say it,” Obama told the 1,700-plus party members who gathered in a ballroom at the Connecticut Convention Center for the $175-per-head fundraiser.
“I am absolutely certain Connecticut is going to have the good sense to send Joe Lieberman back to the U.S. Senate so he can continue to serve on our behalf,” he said.
Bill Clinton also came to Connecticut and campaigned for Joe, though if I recall correctly, Hillary was carefully neutral. And once Ned Lamont won the Democratic primary, both Hillary and Obama threw their support behind him.
Still: two years ago, Changey McHopealot’s first impulse was to endorse Joe Lieberman.
This is from James Loewen’s book Lies My Teacher Told Me, a survey of what the most widely-used high school textbooks on American history leave out. It was published in 1995:
The sole piece of criminal government activity that most textbooks treat is the series of related scandals called Watergate…In telling of Watergate, textbooks blame Richard Nixon, as they should. But they go no deeper. Faced with this undeniable instance of government wrongdoing, they manage to retain their uniformly rosy view of the government. In the representative words of The United States—A History of the Republic, “Although the Watergate crisis was a shock to the nation, it demonstrated the strength of the federal system of checks and balances. Congress and the Supreme Court had successfully check the power of the President when he appeared to be abusing that power.”
As Richard Rubenstein pointed out, “the problem will not go away with the departure of Richard Nixon,” because it is structural, stemming from the vastly increased powers of the federal executive bureaucracy. Indeed, in some ways the Iran-Contra scandal of the Reagan-Bush administration, a web of secret legal and illegal acts involving the president, vice-president, cabinet members, special operatives such as Oliver North, and government officials in Israel, Iran, Brunei and elsewhere, shows an executive branch more out of control than Nixon’s. Textbooks’ failure to put Watergate into this perspective is part of their authors’ apparent program to whitewash the federal government so that schoolchildren will respect it. Since the structural problem in the government has not gone away, it is likely that students will again, in their adult lives, face an out-of-control federal executive pursuing criminal foreign and domestic policies. To the extent that their understanding of the government comes from their American history courses, students will be shocked by these events and unprepared to think about them.
Who does Usama bin Laden want to be the next president? More people think the terrorist leader wants Obama to win (30 percent) than think he wants Clinton (22 percent) or McCain (10 percent). Another 18 percent says it doesn’t matter to bin Laden and 20 percent are unsure.
