Now…I was never a fan of Pat but I have to say this man speaks the righteous truth…
Your opinions.
Is he wrong?
Of course he isn’t. We need to get the United States back on the course we were on for 200+ years. Before Bushco usurped power and veered us off course.
Will Pat’s thoughts do any damage to Bush’s reelection hopes?
Well, I generally think Pat Buchanan is a fascist loon, but I think he has the right idea for an exit strategy. Get elections held, then get the fuck out of there. Sorry, George. I’m gonna vote for you this November, but you screwed the pooch on this one (and with Ashcroft, but that’s another rant entirely!)
Now wait just a minute. Before Buchanan went into la-la land by thinking he could get elected on the Facist ticket, he used to do commentary on John MacLaughlin. From time to time he made perfectly valid points; he was half-way decent at assessing relative political positions, for example.
Even a stopped clock is right twice a day. And I hardly think Reeder’s saying that Buchanan’s not wrong here amounts to heaping praise on him.
I don’t know if you noticed it though, but ol’ Pat isn’t a member in good standing of the conservative movement these days. He has a checkmark on his report card saying he doesn’t work and play well with others.
He tends to hand out with some other misfits in the A/V room and take potshots at the class president. Nobody much pays attention to him, though.
Those A/V types tend to be the ones with both brains and technical skills, while the class presidents so often seem to go on to be slimy used-car salesmen, or even slimier politicians.
QtM, MD and high school misfit, thank you very much, Mister Moto
Sorry if I offended with a stretched analogy, QtM.
My point about Buchanan is true, though. If the criticism were coming from the folks over at National Review, it would be more worrying.
And just as I don’t get to decide what “real” liberals are, Reeder doesn’t get to decide what a “real” conservative is. Political labels in America usually are self-applied.
Right, but for the wrong reasons. This could never happen not because of the scandals in Iraq, but because the age of Imperialism is long dead and gone. The international community is established, and nations can no longer be dealt with in Imperial manners. Nations are contained and restrained by international law, and those that don’t comply get weakened. The age when a superpower could say or do anything and back it with their might and industry is past, and we have to come to the table with “lesser” nations as equals. They may dream of an American age, but if that happens, it will be via society and culture spreading through mass media, not government and military. Put in lay terms, Nike has more influence internationally than the Feds do.
The government can not control the press, can not contain information, can not influence behavior. The military can not enforce dictums or dictate policy. The people of the world know too much too quickly, and they won’t put up with this kind of shit. We can win battles and topple governments constantly, but we will still lose the war, because we are fighting on terms centuries old.
Even the age of Nationalism is over. It ended with Vietnam, and its death knell was that of the Berlin Wall.
The current government does not understand all of this. They view their position of power as one of domination, when all it truly does is unite people against it. The more it tries, the faster it loses.
You can not win. The tighter you close your fist, the more systems will slip through your fingers.
Andrew Sullivan discusses the issue and some of it’s implications.
"The one anti-war argument that, in retrospect, I did not take seriously enough was a simple one. It was that this war was noble and defensible but that this administration was simply too incompetent and arrogant to carry it out effectively.
To have humiliated the United States by presenting false and misleading intelligence and then to have allowed something like Abu Ghraib to happen - after a year of other, compounded errors - is unforgivable."
Even the age of Nationalism is over. It ended with Vietnam, and its death knell was that of the Berlin Wall.
[QUOTE]
I don’t understand this statement. The Vietmnam war was the successful struggle for Vietnamise self determination in the face of outside ideological opperession, while the fall of the Berlin wall was the beginning of the reunification of the German People, 1870 and Bismark all over again. If anything, they mark the re-emergence of nationalism,
Sadly, I disagree with you. All of these things can and have happened for at least short periods. The government controls the press by not allowing access. That happens at Dover Airforce Base. It happens in Iraq. It happens when they do not release all photos of abuse to the press. These are just corrent examples.
During my lifetime I have watched the news and seen members of our armed services storm onto a university campus in Ohio and kill four students. Some where just on their way to class.
I have seen the armed tanks go down the main streets of Nashville.
Things can change so quickly.
Just last night on Bill Moyers, a woman discussed the potential for rising nationalism in this country because of the blending of religion with patriotism in the extreme.