Well, we've only had two little primaries so far. So it's pretty premature to decide which one is going to be the candidate.
But, you know, when you think about it, if you measured everything I've ever said, every vote I've ever taken against the Constitution, you know, I'm a strict constitutionalist.
Are you suggesting the Republicans should write me off because I'm a strict constitutionalist? I'm the most conservative member here. I have voted, you know, against more spending and waste in govern-ment than anybody else.
So you're suggesting that I'm not electable and the Republicans don't want me because I'm a strict fiscal conservative, because I believe in civil liberties? Why should we not be defending civil liberties and why should we not be talking about foreign policy that used to be the part of the Republican Party?
Mr. Republican Robert Taft didn't even want us to be in NATO and you're saying now that we have to continue to borrow money from China to finance this empire that we can't afford?
Let me see if I get this right. We need to borrow $10 billion from China, and then we give it to Musharraf, who is a military dictator, who overthrew an elected government. And then we go to war, we lose all these lives promoting democracy in Iraq. I mean, what's going on here?
And you're saying that this isn't appealing to Republicans? Where did this come about? I think this is the Republican message. I defend the platform. It used to say we'd (inaudible) the Department of Education. It doesn't say that now.
We, as Republicans, went and doubled the size of the Department of Education, so where have we gone? I think we've lost our way. And then the insinuation that I am less Republican because of that?
It's a fairly convincing response. Whether you agree with his policies or not, what is hard to dispute is the fact that he is a conservative of the traditional sense. Small government, free markets, a noninterventionalist stance on global politics. He really is the most "Republican" of them all.
So what does Fox News, self proclaimed champion of the Conservatives of America do? They cut his answer out in the re-brodcast.
WTF?
The truth of the matter is, most Republicans as registered in the official party have no idea what it means to be Republican. People pick their pet ideas, such as ban the gays from getting married, or stop the baby killing, or recycling sucks, or kick the Mexicans out. Few people stop to think about what exactly being "conservative" means. It means more than fighting hippies and homosexuals (on the flip side, not many liberals exactly stop to think about what "liberalism" means. It's more than fighting for vague rights like the woman's right to "choice" or "sticking it to the Man").
If "Democrats" and "Republicans" stopped to really think about what their ideologies really mean, I think they'd be mortified.
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If there's one thing US is doing right it is supporting Musharraf. I am sorry, democracy does not work in unstable regions. It's either military dictatorship or Islamic fundamentalism in Pakistan.
I would have to disagree. It is one thing to try and grow a democracy from the foundation up, like the U.S. is trying to do with Iraq. The thing about democracy is that a good democracy relies on tradition laid down from previous generations of clean elections, plurality of ideas without violence and peacable transition of power. Thus, with a country like Iraq, democracy is hard to produce when there is no precendent of such things.
However, Pakistan, while not perfect, was struggling to establish a democratic tradition. This wasn't a government that needed to be established a democracy from the ground up. It had shaky beginnings, but beginnings nonetheless. To financially support a military dictator who uproots that tradition completely by jailing judges and failing to protect a political rival is hypocritical of what we're doing in Iraq.
And what do we have to show after all that money? Not much. The Taliban still isn't eliminated, and with all the controversy of Musharraf's "transition" to "democracy" and the assassination of Bhutto, some political analysists are saying Pakistan is going through a very real political crisis.
With no help from us, really.
To say that democracy will only result in Islamic fundamentalism in these countries only shortchanges those who are struggling for it. The Middle East and Islamic nations and societies as a whole do not have to be locked into one track. Not every Muslim is a fundamentalist; in fact, only a minority are. It may not be Western style democracy, by any means, but it can be a democracy nonetheless, if we'd just support it. But we're too caught up chasing elusive terrorists abroad to remember what our supposed American principles are. U.S. foreign policy at best is schizophrenic and bipolar and illogical.
Besides, some could argue that our government was hijacked by Christian fundamentalism. We invoke the name of God for justification of our actions just as much as they do with Allah.
Go Libertarians!
Question #1: regarding your last comment, provide evidence that the United States invokes the name of God as much as 'they' do. Not just isolated incidents either. If your claim is true, for every suicide bomber crying ‘God is great!’ before he detonates himself, you should find a US soldier saying something similar before opening fire on unarmed women. For every terrorist training camp in operation, you must find one in the West the bases its motivation on Christianity. Good luck.
Question #2: concerning Afghanistan and Iraq. What would you suggest doing other than complain? How can you be sure your ideas will be any better than the current course we are taking now?
Ugh, this is a blog entry of its own. I apologize for its length.
Re: #1 - The beauty of America is the fact that somehow, against all odds, we have a bunch of random people jostled together in a country and we make it work. Such a thing is rarely repeated thoughout the world.
What concerns me is the idea from the evangelical Christian (and probably Christian in general) voting bloc of "taking back our country and returning it to Christian roots."
We are certainly not at the same level of fanaticism as Islamic terrorists, and for this, I do apologize for insinuating that fact. However, I won't apologize for the fact that to the rest of the world, we certainly do seem like a fundamentalist Christian group from time to time.
Take a look at the Republican party front-runners. Almost all of them constantly invoke God in their debates, their commercials and ads, their speeches, and so forth. While I think the phrase "in God we trust" is innocuous and harmless in our pledge of alligence, the fact that the proposal to remove it provokes such hostility from a vast majority of the people is surprising for a country that prides itself on the idea of religious freedom. We may not pull out our AK-47s and shoot people up because we're mad; we just speed dial our lawyers. Religion is huge! People freak out when Romney (which most of the world doesn't consider Christian) mentions religion once but give people like Huckabee a free pass. The fact that people like Huckabee can win Iowa simply on the platform of Christianity is ridiculous in a country where we espouse such traditions as religious freedom and seperation of church and state.
We are not in danger of having state sponsored Christian camps or anything like that any time soon. But we are dangerously close to being absolutely hypocritical to those who see us from the outside in. We go about, trying to promote democracy, yet get angry or upset when they inject religion in their politics. Perhaps we should take a good look at ourselves, the example to the world, and discover why they might do it and get angry when we tell them not to.
Whenever people talk about Iraqis, terrorists, insurgent troops and so forth, it often devolves into an "us" versus "them." While not specifically racist, there are unintentional racist terms. The idea that Middle Eastern countries can't govern themselves properly without devolving into fundamentalist regimes or outside help from more "enlightened" states, the concept that the terrorists from third world countries hate us so much that they would come in waves and droves to the U.S. and somehow invade our lands and bring the war to us and yet, we, of course, being the "good guys" would never do that to them, and so on. Nobody takes the time to understand why they might be so bloody hostile. If China came in and started forcibly trying to sell us their way of life, and build bases in our land "for our security," even if their intentions were good, we'd pull out our guns and start shooting the crap out of things too!
I'm not condoning what the terrorists have done, but in order to defeat an enemy, you need to know them. And terrorists don't blow themselves up because they are innately evil or because they hate the Great Evil Empire because it's a past-time of theirs. There is something that drives people to do atrocious acts, and even if it's us being misaligned by fringe groups, we should still understand why and minimize the cause for them to try and blow us up.
While we may not, numerically, tit for tat, match up verbally with "the terrorists" or whoever we're supposed to be fighting in terms of invoking religion in our actions, many of our political leaders are certainly in the same mindset as some of the leaders in the Middle East - that America is a Christian nation and should stay that way. And this idea is not an isolated incident but is actually becoming somewhat of a "party policy."
Re: #2 - This is a complex subject, so I will attempt to answer it without being verbose.
To successfully win these wars, we will have to go all the way back to 2001. September 11 has just occurred. A terrible tragedy garners the support of the international community for us and wakes our country up to the fact that despite the end of the Cold War, the world is a very dangerous place. We declare war on the Taliban controlled Afghanistan, we go in, we tear out the terrorists from the heart of the government, and we congratulate ourselves.
From this point, what we should have done was focused a lot of money, manpower and support into establishing order in Afghanistan. Maybe not a democracy right away - democratic traditions must be desired and fought for, not forced upon. But we would establish order, build up their economy, build schools and educate the people, rebuild their infrastructure such as roads and bridges, rail-lines, power plants, etc. It would take several years, of course, to see this happen. Meanwhile, you'd take very careful care of their borders to make sure terrorists don't seep in. With prosperity and a rising middle class comes the desire to control the future and with education comes the knowledge that they can control political affairs competently.
We fill the vacuum immediately with more necessary commodities - food, shelter, security, water, electricity, then connection to the world through an infrastructure. We institute a Marshall Plan that would start in Afghanistan and possibly spread through the Middle East. Then, when needs are met, we can start on the more lofty, abstract goals of self rule, elections, representatives, peaceful transitions of power, plurality of ideas and so forth.
What we ended up doing was forgetting about Afghanistan and focusing our attention elsewhere within months, a big mistake. With remaining 3rd world conditions and the political vacuum being filled with warlords and druglords, we are now almost back to square one in that country.
Where does Iraq come into the picture? It doesn't - for now. Why, for the love of all that is good and holy, are we in there? I hear many answers - 9/11 (erroneous at best, downright idiotic at worst), "yellowcake," WMDs, violation of human rights, they will come bring the war to us despite the fact that they're a 3rd world country and we decimated their military despite giving them home advtange in two weeks. Now it's things like, establish democracy, get the job done, because if we did leave, the region would be destabilized and collapse into chaos. The latter reasons are more sound, but only because of our mistakes in the beginning. We rarely now contemplate on what got us there in the first place. We lost sight of our original goal because we didn't really have one. And if it was because of Saddam or WMDs or 9/11, if this is really the case, why are we not invading Iran? Pakistan is a military dictatorship and we support them. The majority of hijackers were from Saudi Arabia. So what do we do? We give them dangerous and advanced military weapons and tools for cheap prices and then beg for their oil. What about Rawanda? What happened there? Or Darfur? Those were massive human rights violations and few people even blinked an eye.
The truth is, we should never have rushed in there. We couldn't possibly rebuild two nations filled with hostile people at the same time effectively. We should have focused on Afghanistan, then we should have garnered the interational community's support in fighting elsewhere for the nebulous ideal we call Democracy.
What happened to Bush's 2000 platform of no nation building? I dunno. I guess he forgot.
If we didn't invade Iraq right away, we could have built Afghanistan up to a U.S. ally. It would have immense implications. Afghanistan is vitally positioned geographically in that area, and had we successfully established a democracy there within the space of five to ten years - maybe even fifteen to twenty years, helped it grow in its economy and join the global community not as a pariah or a mistake or a lost cause but as another nation that can compete in a globalized economy successfully, and continued to support it, who knows? It certainly could have had a ripple effect through the region there. Other nations, when seeing the effect the U.S. has in raising living standards, bringing in income, helping to establish a developed base of technology in infrastructure, reducing poverty and building a stable, educated, healthy and happy middle class, would be more open to the U.S. in helping them out economically and financially. The people would demand it. They would want what Afghanistan could have had. Instead, we have two messes on or hands (though, thankfully, Afghanistan is not as bad as Iraq, though it certainly could be a lot better!). Iraq is finally somewhat under some semblance of control and it gladdens my heart that we may successfully pass off much of the responsibilities now to the Iraqis - not because I want our troops out of there specifically, but because maybe we can turn this around and still make it a success story - but our decision to invade without any further intelligence or post-battle plan more detailed than "shock and awe" had disasterous results. We could have handled both situations better. It's been almost seven years now since 9/11. In seven years, Afghanistan could have been a lot further along than it is now. Kids would be graduating from schools and colleges, international businesses would have established a foothold in connecting that country to the global economy. Jobs would be available, and with economic prosperity would lead to democracy. Instead, because we tried to grab too much at once, we have little to show for it after seven long years.
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