No nation is above criticism at any time but its a matter of scale isn't it. The US seems to have ignored problems at home and these external conflicts the US chooses to engage in seem more frequent and worse. There was Vietnam, Panama, gulf war one to name a few, countless problems from administrations including Nixon and Reagan which further jeopardizes faith in the government. There is waste at home and atrocities abroad. It was after WW2 that there seems to be this dramatic shift towards imperialism.
I didn't realise he had openly come out in support of third party interrogations, I just knew that substituting the CIA with the FBI was window dressing. I'm psychic.Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
Yes, in some cases. The Australian guy is under some kind of agreement with serious penalties, IIRC. And the Brits, along with some others, who have attempted "legal redress" have run into very serious impediments - they cannot subpoena evidence, compel testimony, establish standing even, that kind of thing.
Yes. That`s the day the music died. Perhaps its just: "Trying to address the anti Islam damage and disinformation done by Bush & Co." :m:
The one that caused every person of Arab appearance to be obsessively scrutinized and searched at US airports.
Are most terrorists threatening the United States nuns from Ireland? Ghanians? Inuit? Was the damage done by Bush, or by the Arab attackers of the WTC buildings?
I'll put it this way................ "YES WE CAN" reversed sounds like THANK YOU SATAN thank our mason goverment not obama the puppet???
I think the damage was done by 60 years of US intervention in the Middle East, or perhaps the world. And they are still continuing that failed policy. Unless the US economy breaks its back over Afghanistan [the graveyard of empires indeed], they will probably continue this same policy over and over until every single hapless society has been destroyed. We're all just...collateral damages.
kindly substantiate that or get banned for violating the good faith clause and stop ignoring the mods
"We don't do body counts" And in keeping with Obama's new change ie all bluster and no actual change in policy, we have his new policy on I-P http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1110507.html What is America but a beacon of hope for those who want to trample on the rights of others?
It is, in that it was a rhetorical one. I agree that in capitalism all people are collateral to some extent - although the same could easily be made of every political system to some degree - and its true that the US - among other powers not wholly Western - has been meddling. But all nations and all empires meddle, and the US condition has been to some extent determined by their history of the first half of the 20th century. This hasn't prevented national myopia, of course.
Nations are very new, so the meddling game is very colonial, not really national, although one could argue that the colonial states were the first nation states. Perhaps its the borders that are the problem. Maybe we need to do away with borders and revert to local self government
Modnote: I'm consolidating some criticism and irony toward President Obama here. Pardonnez-Vous mon dust.
Criticism and America No, but the Cold War brought a growing Straussian myth, a sociopolitical mix of Machiavelli and Mani. In terms of Hype's assertion, that we don't know where we're going at the moment, we're just now focusing on a new opposite according to the Straussian myth. Terrorism is the new foe, and we're still fine-tuning the outlook. It's new; it's going to take a while to accustom ourselves to the perspective. In ten years, it will feel much more natural. In the former period, when Communism was the foe, the liberal objection was marginalized as Communist, and the conservative objection marginalized itself. The Reagan era marked a split in the Republican Party (e.g., conservative movement) when the religious conservative movement was invited to the table in order to advance an essentially neoconservative foreign policy. It is evident in the curious mix of Christianity and capitalism about the GOP that would even confound Weber. That makes an interesting backdrop to the state of the party today, but that's a separate issue altogether. The religious conservatives often chose non-participation in a governmental establishment they considered corrupt. Whatever criticisms they offered fell on deaf ears. The left, of course, was easily denounced as Communist. The sensible thing to do, then, was follow the yellow brick road. And you'll find this is still true in many contemporary American recollections of the Cold War. There is this presumption that we were nearly infallible. It's not that we weren't above criticism during those periods. It's just that it wasn't, according to domestic conventional wisdom, sensible to care. Consider the beginning of the War on Terror. It was the same thing all over again. If you objected you were anti-American, or a terrorist sympathizer. I actually started to miss being called a commie. And I'm furious that I'm now blue on the map. At any rate, some Republicans are doing a sound check on the idea of saying we should get out of Afghanistan. They're going to catch hell for all that "cut-and-run" disdain sewn through the Bush years, but that doesn't mean the question isn't valid. We need to get the fuck out of there. Somehow. Sure, it's been almost sixty years since people were arrested, deported, and even hauled before Congress for being too liberal, but we hear in the early War on Terror the echoes of McCarthy, and therein an example of why the United States was "above criticism". It wasn't. But it just wasn't proper to criticize. Really. You're supposed to be thankful to God that you get to live in the greatest country in the world. Honestly. I'm not kidding. A lot of my generation were raised on that sort of stuff.
Tiassa: "A lot of my generation were raised on that sort of stuff." I was (thankful to God). It's still like hitting the human lottery just to be born in the USA (or other more open society of which there are few).
