McCain today is competitive. McCain November may be less so. The media is going to do a nmuber on the guy and he is vulnerable. Every journalist on the straightjacket express has his own anecdote of verbal indiscretion that he has been saving up.  It will be drip, drip, drip through ellection day as each reporter claims his moment in the sun by exposing this or that wiseacre remark.

That being said I still welcome a rightist third party run. Better McCain be seen as defeated by the movement than as a fatally flawed candidate. In the months ahead all efforts and enthusiasm should be directed at preserving a healthy Congressional delegation. It will be needed to hold back whoever is in the White House.

McCain has been anointed by everyone but the voters. What happens if this man, deeply distrusted by the party, losos a primary to Huckleberry? It has been a year of longshots. Romney has only suspended his campaign, whatever that means. It may not be over yet. The people may again confound the experts, though I am not running to the two dollar window to get in on it.

A scenario:

Romney runs as a “spoiler”.

Ron Paul: “I said I would never run as a third party, but not as a fourth party”.  Ron Paul runs for president under a non-Libertarian Party, something like “The Patriotic Party”.

Of course Ralph Nader may join in, possibly even Osama or Billary Clinton, whichever of those two that gets shafted at the Democratic Convention.

Question: Who will play the Rutherford B. Hayes of the 21st century?

IT IS MUCH MORE LIKELY MCCAIN WILL CHOOSE SENATOR LIEBERMAN (IND., TEL AVIV) FOR SECRETARY OF STATE.  THEREFORE, MCCAIN CAN ACHIEVE HIS OBJECTIVES OF REMAINING IN IRAQ FOR 100 YEARS AND INVADING IRAN AND SYRIA.

In admonishing “Let’s bring on the crisis of the regime as soon as we can,” by voting for the most disruptive democrat, Paul seems to be advocating an “After Hillary Comes Us” strategy. (For those of you who have read about the German communist party’s overly optimistic view of defeating the Nazis, you’ll recognize the genealogy of my paraphrase.  But I am not literally comparing Clinton to Hitler; it’s just that the slogan has a ring to it.)

While there is merit in this strategy, I am concerned that a Democratic restoration would be brief.  The party faces a terrible dilemma:  if they stay in Iraq, they will divide their party base and the war will become their war (just as Nixon was blamed for the Vietnam War in the Watergate period, even though the war was a creation of the Democrats.)

However, if the Dems withdraw from Iraq, get ready for a neocon-GOP revival.  The Republicans can always blame a weak-kneed liberal (especially a female president) for not having the cajones to fight the forces of evil there.  President Obama could also be attacked for appeasement, based on his monumental lack of experience.

As awful as a McCain candidacy would be, it would forever tar the GOP-neocons with failure, just as Vietnam destroyed the other party of the ruling class.  Give the neocons enough rope to hang themselves!  Perhaps a 3rd party might emerge from the rubble in 4 years.

If CPAC’s embrace of McCain as a Movement Conservative extends to Joe Lieberman as his running mate, why not his running mate’s running mate as well?

Al Gore is by now richer than Romney, and the green fire in his belly is stoked to levels poor Joe can scarcely imagine.

Al besides being a proven vote getter, is respectable as a Lehman Brothers director, has the vice-presidential Experience Thing down cold, and is uniquely positioned to defuse the immigration issue by rebuilding the Information Superhighway athwart the Mexican border.

Yet despite these virtues, he does not have much appeal to the Neocons, and the neocons , who love not McCain control The Base. The solution is simple - make the utterly acceptable Lieberman the lesser half of the CPAC NeoMove ticket :

Gore-Lieberman 2008

If McCain desires to remain in Iraq for another 100 years, his best running mate would be Dick Cheney.

The GOP will get its clock cleaned in November. It won’t happen though because of conservatives refusing to back McCain. The unwinding credit crunch will have the American consumer in a world of hurt by then. The public will react by putting a big government Democrat in the White House.

The economy is not going to help McCain, as the
latest polls show that the American people blame the
poor economy on the war on Iraq - and they have a
point because wars are expensive, and the geniuses in
charge never stopped to think how they were going to
pay for it.

Not only they believed in bloodless victories, but also
on bargain basement victories.

Somehow you need to teach them the following mantras.

“Wars take soldiers. At some point you may have to
start thining of a draft”

“Wars cost money. At some point you’ll need to raise
taxes to pay for them”

If you do not want draft or taxes, do not get into wars.

But if you do, make sure they are absolutely necessary
because you’ll have to supply them with troops and
means, and those can only come from the American people

Anything else is smoke and mirrors

(You know, the debate about taxes reminds me of the
dentist’s drill. I absolutely hated it and thought it
was the worst thing. Until my dentists numbed me with
novocaine to have it done, and I spend the rest of the
afternoon waiting for it to wear out. Since then I have
submitted to non-anesthetized drilling with no complaints
because it is over quickly and I do not spend any time
with a numb mouth afterwards. So it is with taxing. All
the complaints about “tax and spend” Democrats evaporate
when you consider “spend money that isn’t there” Republicans)

Somebody tell which of these “swing states” a Negro Muslim named Osama or a Lesbian White Woman could win:

a)Ohio;
b)Florida;
c)both, or
d)neither

If you chose answer “d”, congratulations, you are a winner!

If you chose “a”, “b”, or “c”, sorry please try again!

The next president of the United States is ... Herbert Hoover.

http://www.reuters.com/article/reutersEdge/idUSN014336782008020

“NEW YORK (Reuters) - Dozens of U.S. banks will fail in the next two years as losses from soured loans mount and regulators crack down on lenders that take too much risk, especially in real estate and construction, an analyst said.

The surge would follow a placid 3-1/2 year period in which just four banks collapsed, all in the last year, RBC Capital Markets analyst Gerard Cassidy said in a Friday interview.

Between 50 and 150 U.S. banks — as many as one in 57 — could fail by early 2010, mostly those with no more than a couple of billion dollars of assets, Cassidy said. That rate of failure would be the highest in at least 15 years, or since the winding down of the savings-and-loan debacle.”

<<The next president of the United States is ... Herbert Hoover.>>

We agree, Prozium (the planets have aligned!)

Only a megalomaniac would want to be president the next four years.

70%+ of the American economy is based on “consumer spending.” The American consumer is now hoarding gift cards to purchase basic necessities at Walmart. China Inc. depends on the American consumer. Should be an interesting four years, no?

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/business/AP-Retail-Sales.html?_r=1&ex=1360126800&en=667a8f3db724d4e6&ei=5089&partner=rssyahoo&emc=rss&oref=slogin

“NEW YORK (AP)—Here’s a sign of how shaky the economy has become: Wal-Mart says its shoppers are redeeming their holiday gift cards for basic items—pasta sauce, diapers, laundry detergent—instead of iPods or DVDs.

Merchants had hoped shoppers armed with gift cards would provide a lift after a dismal holiday shopping season—partly because shoppers tend to spend even more than the value of the card. But that didn’t seem to happen last month, and retailers are feeling the pain.

On Thursday, the nation’s retailers turned in their worst January in almost four decades as high gas and food prices, a slumping housing market, tighter credit and a tougher job market pushed consumers to the edge.”

“The American people, however, want more of the same . . . “ Many people may have come to like the nanny state, but according to all opinion polls some 60-70% of them want US troops out of Iraq either immediately or with a short delay.  You did not discuss the war at all in your calculations, yet, maybe you should give serious thought to the possibility that this public opinion together with McCain’s “Bomb bomb bomb.  Bomb Iran” ditty may make a McCain Liberman ticket a real killer in the ballot box. 

I can already see the ad:  with a video of McCain singing the ditty playing on the background, a text appears on the screen, “Vote for McCain if you want four more years of expanding, disastrously expensive war.” The closing scene will contain references to the coming draft and the tax increases needed to pay for the war.

I’m not so sure that McCain will lose in November (and BTW his running mate will not make a big difference either way). He could certainly beat Hillary. Many Americans who are depressed by Iraq, fall of U.S. dollar, rise of Chine, etc. see McCain as the Alpha Male/Macho Guy, a composite of JFK/Eisenhower/Truman that will return America to its National Greatness from the post-WWII period. He and the Republicans are going to focus on national security, and attack Hillary as a “girlie” and and then there is Barack HUSSEIN Obama. As I suggested earlier, the sturggle against Islamo-Fascism will replace anti-Communism as the glue that hold the Republican Coalition together (note Romney’s remarks at CPAC). Obama, however, has a chance to win against McCain by promiting the generational narrative.

There really is a chance for a third party but I don’t know who would lead it.Dr. Paul is almost 73 and has been on the road for a year.He needs a rest with his family. McCain is hated by at least half the party.The democrats will destroy him, especially Obama who has the antiwar issue.He has stolen Ron’s message and says he will have the troops out of Iraq almost immediatly.I think the Republicans will lose at least 100 seats in the house and 15 in the senate.The party seems to be over.

Leon,
You seem to share with Paul an inability to realize that many Americans--quite probably a large majority--think the “National Greatness” conservatives act in ways that destroy America’s national greatness.  In the same vein, the “Alpha Males’” efforts to oppose Islamofascism are strengthening, not weakening it.  (Even Rumsfeld had a short moment of clear thinking, when he wondered aloud “Are we creating more terrorists than destroying?)

Note that there is no disagreement about the goal of America’s greatness.  Opinions differ only on the methods how to achieve that greatness.  McCain is highly vulnerable to the criticism that the warlike policies he advocates have greatly strenthened radical Islam and caused a drastic collapse of US popularity in the world—see the Pew global opinion surveys.  Traditional non-interventionism and turning the other cheeck on occasional attacks, on the other hand, made the US widely admired.

@Kari

Also those efforts to destroy Islamofascism will
come to nothing if you are in the wrong battlefield.

After 9-11 there was a strong rationale for gooing into Afghanistan to
clear out Al Qaeda from its sanctuaries there. Had we concentrated there,
it would have been a sensible decision.

What we did was to take a whole unnecessary detour. In the meantime
Al Qaeda is getting stronger in Afghanistas, and much worse, getting
strong in Pakistan.

Pakistan is a **very*** serious problem because a) it is becoming
politically unstanble and b) has a nuclear program.  Now with enough
instabillity and well-placed sympathizers, it is quite possible that
Al Qaeda will get its hand on nuclear material.

If the government was serious about national security, their first
priotiry would be to keep that from happening. But instead it is
refereering a sectarian war in Iraq, and calling that a priority.

I do hope that either Obama or Hillary makes that point, that we need
to do somethign about Pakistan, to keep Al Qaeda from getting nuclear
weapons, and why the Hell are our troops in Iraq when we need them
clearning up Al Qaeda in its sanctuary? I do not expect McCain to do it,
so it will be up to them…

There is no winning the Iraq war, because when you fight the wrong war,
you lose - no matter how it comes out.

Kari: I don’t think that I have an “inability to realize” the reality out there. And just to make clear: I support Dr. Paul. But I do think that McCain could succeed by exploiting the national security issues. That doesn’t mean that he is right on the issues, but perceptions are sometimes more powerful than facts.

If there is to be a 3rd party, let it be Paul/Buchanan, or better yet, Buchanan/Paul.  With Paul’s precinct captain program, a nation-wide structure is in the making; with Paul’s fund-raising ability, they could mount a first-rate ad campaign in key media markets.  If done properly, this campaign could set the national debate on US Empire, the Fed’s deliberate undermining of the dollar, abortion and other atrocities of the US elite.  Could be a real barn-burner of a campaign.  And of Hillary’s the Dem nominee, Buchanan/Paul would sweep the anti-war vote (the majority.)

Islamofascism??

There is NO SUCH THING!

Of course, i may be misunderstanding some people in that when they refer to it, they may only mean to say that others will use it (islamofascism!) as a trumped up excuse.

Then again, maybe some seemingly intelligent people ARE taken in by the mantra-like repetition of the label of the next bogey man.

bah, humbug!

Dr. Gottfried,

Your essay’s closing sentence reminds me of an argument I used to make to Conservative friends during the Clinton years.  I did not make it on behalf of the Clinton regime, but against its critics’ myopia.

It went something like this: ‘Our nation’s downfall did not begin with the election of Bill Clinton as President. His election was merely a signal that the downfall was already well underway.’

And so it continues unabated…

The significant dynamic in American politics is not “big government”, but Identity Politics. It’s frankly silly to think that the middle class caught between rising costs of housing, health care and college tuition--and their shrinking wages---is going to want more of the same, which is “free market” conservativism.

When are you going to admit that the “free market” is a fraud. Ronald Reagan didn’t do anything about cutting down the Dept of Eduction, but did a lot to cut down OSHA regulations that gave workers the right to know what dangerous chemicals they had in their workplace. Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts didn’t “grow” the economy, his huge Keynesian deficits did, and he stole from the Social Security trust fund to hide the failing of “supply side” economics, which is really just the conservative version of the free lunch.

And as you rightly point out, he signed the immigration bill which has served to enable the unrestricted immigration that you “paleo-conservatives” complain about.

It’s is not the American people that are too blame, it’s the fraud that you insist on perpetuating that conservativism was something other then giving those that have the most a little more, at the expense of everyone else.

Dr.Gottfried is right McCain Lieberman would sew uo all the Israeli lobby money and a lot of the defense lobby as well,especially against Obama. The Israeli lobby doesn’t trust Obama.They would use our tax dollars, to furthur destroy the republic.Stupid Romney actually had the fortune to run a first class third party campaign.Too bad we don’t have a Perot with a combination of Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul’s beliefs only 10 years younger.John Bolton has just announced his backing of McCain.If McCain wins I guess its of to Canada for my 2 draft age sons.

Not surprisingly, I agree with Leon on this issue. Moreover, since Leon is Ron Paul’s foreign policy adviser, the idea that he’s strayed off the path is plainly absurd.He is correct that McCain will use Islamofascist rhetoric and talk about national security to rally right-of-center voters while at the same time reaching leftward with his image of moderation and openness to porous borders. Mac should be unstoppable, particularly if the superdelegates put Hillary over the top in the Democratic presidential race and the Democrats are forced to run a stale, scowling face as their presidential candidate. Unless there is a serious third party challenge, I doubt that Mac can be beaten. It need hardly be said that I am laying out this scenario without the slightest pleasure

McCain’s fate rests with Democrats more than with conservatives. If Hillbilly grabs the nomination now, by hook or by crook, children and Africans stay home in November. If Obomba gets it, Mexicans take a siesta or move to McCain, which is why Dem elites desperately want Oprah’s manchild to “suspend” his insurgency.

Wake up about Paul. It’s not his message. It’s him. He has no charisma, and he hasn’t “grown” in the campaign. Enough, already. He’d make a nice social studies teacher. Leave it at that.

The “gradual descent into perdition” is inevitable. In fact, it’s about half complete. That’s how we came to be a “consumerist, disintegrating society.” There’ll be no “crisis of regime change.”

To discover that Leon is Ron Paul’s foreign policy adviser was a stunner.  To put it mildly.  If somebody who knows Paul reads this, please tell him to change advisers fast, before he finds himself in the neoconservative war-mongerers camp. 

As to the issues of the debate, Paul, Leon and Adriana all seem to assume that Americans are cheering the Bush administration’s aggressive foreign policies, and that promising to continue those policies will be real vote-getter in the election.  Where do you leave the results in poll after poll that show 60-70% of voters wanting troops out of Iraq either immediately or with a short delay?  To me, this statistic suggests that an offer by Obama to end the war and get the troops home will easily give him the presidency.  We seem to differ quite starkly on what are Americans’ perceptions.

As to how to deal with national security issues, all three of you share the assumption that the most effective way to deal with violence is counterviolence—i.e., beat up the guy who hits you so bad he does not dare to hit again.  There is, however, a diametrically opposed school of thinking, which used to be hugely influential in West, and which saw counterviolence as increasing conflicts, not ending them.  The reasoning was simple:  counterviolence creates hatred and starts a cycle of revenge.  A case study of this phenomenon can be seen in the increasing radicalization of Pakistan that Adriana worries about:  to what extent has this radicalization been caused by American actions in Afghanistan and Iraq?  Furthermore, to what extent will additional American actions just get us deeper into the hole?(Rumsfeld should have continued to pursue his question:  “Are we creating more radicals than we are destroying?")

The Western (at least Anglo-Saxon) tradition called for responding to violence by non-violence— by “turning the other cheeck” and “loving your enemies”.  This seems highly counterintuitive, but it worked.  Interestingly, the emphasis on this approach seems to have been developed by late medieval confessors, who had outstanding opportunities to investigate the depth-psychology of violence and cycles of revenge, since they were right in the middle of the brutal, passionate and irrational society described by Huizinga in his “The Waning of the Middle Ages.”

The contrary approaches to violence may reflect a deeper religious/ cultural difference.  This possibility stems from the question:  are humility, meekness, not revenging wrongs, turning the other cheeck and loving your enemies part of the Jewish tradition at all?  My knowledge of Judaism is very limited, so I wonder if somebody who knows Judaism could provide details on this point. 

Humility is clearly implied in the Torah, because pride is the sin of the devil and very harshly condemned.  This logically makes humility the highest virtue.  However, is this is implication worked out somewhere, or was Christ with his emphatic teaching of humility and meekness the first to make this natural extension to the moral teaching of the Torah?

With due respect to Kari, what I find in his comments is the foreign policy position heard among my leftwing Anabaptist colleagues. I can’t think of any phrase in the Old or New Testament that obliges a believer to let enemies occupy one’s country and threaten one’s family without offering resistance. Jesus does not urge anything as weird as this position. He teaches the individual how to be saintly and how to prepare for the Kingdom of Heaven. He is not constructing a foreign policy for the Jews, Greeks, or anyone else. Unlike Jesus, however, the Old Testament never teaches the Jews to love their enemies. Although Jesus’s precept may be commendable, it is not a Jewish one, anymore than it is an attempt to reconfigure American foreign policy. Speaking for myself,although I doubt that Leon would dissent, it is quite possible to justify force as a defensive weapon if one’s country is really being threatened,while opposing the Jacobin or Trotskyist imperialism preached by the neocons. The two are not the same. For while I despise ideological warmongers as a public nuisance, I would not disapprove of the Poles for failing to welcome the armies of Hitler or Stalin into their country. Their resistance deserves our praise and should not be vewed as as a dereliction of their religious duties.

Kari, I think you are confusing Leon’s prediction with what he wants to have happen.

McCain a) definately could win and c) conservative whining against McCain could him in the end.

I think Ohio or Florida could go for Hillary, but it is hard to see how Obama takes the brass ring in the end.  He might win California with 90%, but he probably still loses Ohio 51 to 49.

Maybe this year will be different though.  Maybe Ohio has had enough “free market” for a while, and enough men lost to Iraq.

I have to say I am not sure who I will support although I currently have promised myself I will not vote for McCain.

For the sake of the VP question, I’ll offer I think if McCain goes Lieberman, Jim Webb would make an interesting choice for Hillary and almost insure her election and the drubbing of McCain.

Obama I think is a Wesley “Waco” Clark guy...maybe Bob Kerrey.

“Let’s bring on the crisis of the regime as soon as we can!” Hear, hear! Attrition policies will get us nowhere as our demographic base is diluted and diminished on a daily basis. While the country might still have a vestige of moral and patriotic capital left, lets “immanentise the eschaton.”

@Paul, I concur with you in your response to
Kari. Thre is a difference between aggresion and
legitimate defense, and no amount of Christian
virtue will obviate the need for the police.

After 9-11 we were justified in going after the
perpetrators, who happened to be holed up in
Afghanistan, with the connivance of the government
there.

We would have been justified in pursuing them into
Pakistan, since that’s where they were escaping - this
with the assistance of Pakistan’s government.

We were not justified, not morally and not strategically,
to go on a wild goose chase into Iraq and engage in nation
building, something that conservatives decried when Clinton
did it in Kosovo (with the difference that Kosovo is a lot
more peaceful than Irak is these days - either Clinton was
a lucky bastard, or he knew what targets to pick and which
ones to leave alone).

I wish that people could tell the difference.

“[...] I would prefer having the most disruptive Democrat win in November to the prospect of a McCain victory”
Grant Havers has done a good job of arguing against this.  I add what seems obvious.  The folks at Waco were killed because they were Christians.  A vote for Hilary is spit on their graves and a vote for more Wacos.

“Let’s bring on the crisis of the regime as soon as we can!”
A lot of folks in the League of the South say this.  Maybe they’re right.  For my money, the “crisis of the regime” is worth having ONLY if we know what’s waiting in the wings.  The “crisis of the regime” in England 1641, Russia 1917, Italy 1922, and Germany 1933, and in France 1789, 1792, 1794, 1799, 1814, 1815, 1830, 1848, 1870, 1940 didn’t turn out quite so quite rosy.  True, France 1958 did have a good result; yet a proven National Savior and the transmigrated soul of Joan of Arc isn’t running for the US presidency this year.
“Old Testament never teaches the Jews to love their enemies..”
A common misunderstanding and UTTERLY wrong.  For proof of the exact opposite, try Job 31: 29-30. The entire passage – chapters 29-31 and esp. Chap 31 – can be called the ethical ideal of the OT—if not the whole Bible.  (Verses 31:38-40 are probably a copyist’s error, and may belong between verses 28 and 29.) IHS was preaching Judaism with his Summary of the Torah.  The lie that “the NT is the book of love and the OT is the book of wrath” is antisemitic/Judeophobic drivel to anyone whose bothered to read the Bible.  Want love?  Try Hosea.  Want wrath?  Try the sevenfold WOES of Matthew 23:13-36 (to wish “woe” upon someone is to wish harm). Try Luke: 6:24-26 (read in context of vv20-26: after the Beatitudes come the “Curse-itudes”. Or Luke 10:13-15.  And no one can accuse St. Luke of being a Judaizer!

Paul,
You might want to give a careful reading to the Sermon on the Mount.  The instructions there are quite emphatic, and they deal with all violence toward oneself.  At least as far as I can see, there is no exception for violence coming indirectly via an attack to one’s country—indeed, I wonder what Christ would have said about nationalism?

Christ thus does teach things that at first sight appear very counterintuitive and non-logical indeed.  The instructions of the Sermon on the Mount begin to seem more reasonable when you take them with late medieval cofession manuals’ discussion of the sin of hatred.  Those discussions go in great detail on the psychology of cycles of revenge, and how meeting violence with violence simply continues the cycle and reinforces it.  (I could write a piece on this material, but Spencer is not interested in the interaction between religious morality and politics.)

Hitler can be seen as a result of people failing to follow the “forgive wrongs” and “love your enemies” rule.  Keep in mind how (I’ writing from memory, so the name may be wrong) Keynes in the peace negotiations after WW I demanded magnaminity, and how he left in the middle of the negotiations saying that the terms imposed on Germany make a new war inevitable.  Keynes was right:  the revenge indeed did strengthen the cycle of violence.  Note in particular the contrast between WW I and Napoleonic wars:  Napoleon was not hung, there were no war crimes trials, no reparations, all was forgiven in a surprisingly short time, and the result was a century of lack of large-scale wars between Europe’s major powers—unless you count the Wars of German Unification.

As to the question on whether Christ’s teaching should be applied to foreign policy, and, if so, what effect will humility, meekness, forgiving wrongs and loving your enemies have on a country, the moral rules I am describing come from the most popular manuals of 17h-century England.  The timing is significant, because 17th-century Englishmen created one of the most successful states known to history, the British Empire.  The correlation is very probably not just a coincidence, since Englishmen knew remarkably well what they were doing:  the “Oak in a Flowerpot” view of the Empire was based on the idea that the Britons were far too few to rule by force.  They had to make themselves liked, and in that effort humility was a remarkably effective tool—a fact of which 17th-century Englishmen were very, very well aware.

Paul, Sid, and Kari are raising all the great questions about the meaning of Christian love.  I would only add that “neighbor” and “enemy” can be so often blurred, as the entire Bible teaches.  Thus one must love both by attempting to understand that they are often the same.  Without using the term “love,” Ron Paul was trying to teach this message during the GOP debates by contending that we must at least read and grasp what radical Moslems are writing about US policy (which to them supports occupation, not democracy).  Paul was advocating empathy, not sympathy.  They’re very different!

Sadly, Huckleberry and Rudy denounced Paul as an appeaser; a great insight into a truly moral foreign policy was lost!

@Adriana,

you wrote ....

“After 9-11 we were justified in going after the perpetrators, who happened to be holed up in Afghanistan, with the connivance of the government there.”

Weren’t “the perpetrators” supposedly all killed in the airplanes that struck the towers and the PentaGRAM?  Weren’t they, for the most part, from Saudi Arabia?

The way i remember it, the U.S. made a series of demands of Afghanistan, one of which was that they immediately hand over Osama.  The Afghanis, apparently and NOT unreasonably, replied that the americans should show them what they had against Osama.

Soon thereafter the bombing commenced.

Using your logic, the cubans would be more than “justified” for bombing the U.S. for harbouring Posada.

Adriana

“After 9-11 we were justified in going after the
perpetrators, who happened to be holed up in
Afghanistan, with the connivance of the government
there.”

If you bothered to research the facts surrounding 911, you would quickly understand that the official conspiracy theory is a sham and that men in caves in Afghanistan were quite incapable of conducting the events that unfolded. For example, how do you organise the complete stand-down of the US air defence and the inactivation of the Pentagon’s missile defence system from a cave in Afghanistan? Please stop repeating such drivel until you bother to learn some of the basic facts surrounding the events of 911.

Conservatives talk big but 95% will pull the lever for McCain/Hucklebuck or McCain/Loserman in November. See Buchanan 2000.

Obama or Hillary will win a landslide similar to the 1996 election.

Why not join me and vote the Constitution party in November? Join the few, the proud, the 0.3%?

I can’t McCain having a chance this fall. I foresee two ads torpedoing his campaign:

(1) One will show the clip of McCain singing “bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran” followed by an ominous voice asking “Is this really the person who should lead our country?”

(2) The second will show the clip of McCain saying we should stay in Iraq for another hundred years if that’s what it takes to get the job done, followed by an ominous voice “McCain - your candidate for endless war.”

If he gets elected this fall, this county deserves whatever it has coming to it.

As for a McCain victory in the end harming the Neocons, that is pure fantasy. As long as a Neocon or Neocon-light is in the White House we will be in Iraq. Once someone else gains the Presidency then the post-withdrawal debacle will give them someone to blame. But then who cares? This only plays for the nut bag right however - just like after ‘Nam.

@Kari

I am all for forgiving my enemies, but in national relations,
it is better to forgive them after defeating them.  Notice that
in Napoleon’s case they did not get generous with France until
Nappy was on its way to St. Helena.

We have a right to self-defense, and Christian charity does
not demand that we commit suicide.

McCain may be close in the polls now but the mass media - with the exception of Fox - are giddy at the prospect of a woman or a black (African-American) as president. McCain will be overcoming a lot if he can overcome their cheerleading.  Also, if it’s true that 70% of Americans want the war in Iraq ended, would they then vote for a guy who wants to do the same thing to Iran that was done to Iraq?  Could be, since apparently more anti-war Republicans voted for McCain than for Ron Paul. Republicans got what they deserved in McCain so maybe Americans at large will too.

Adriana,
Keep in mind that the British went all the way to accommodate Napoleon.  He was first demoted to King of Elba (Or something.  I’m writing from memory.), and only when that did not work was he shipped to St. Helens.  To realize how much we have changed, compare the old British approach with how the Nuernberg trial would have dealt with Napoleon.

I fully agree with the idea that we should not commit suicide.  The disagreement is about what is the best way to avoid that end.  According to traditional Christian morality, your approach of trying to crush everybody who looks like an enemy will increase violence, and thus ends up producing that very self-destruction you want to avoid.  Old religious texts contain a abundance of material on this counterproductive effect.

Do note that there is no disagreement about the goal.  The disagreement is limited to the ways how to reach that goal.  On this point, there is a great deal of historical evidence which suggests that the methods that have effectively brought an end to violence have been extremely counterintuitive indeed.  (Look at Steven Pinker’s recent work on violence in history, particularly his puzzlement about the reasons for the decline of violence in modern West.)

There is another factor that could tilt the race to McCain or McCain-Lieberman. To the best of my knowledge, the California Supreme Court is poised to rule this term on same-sex marriage--likely in favor of it. Since California, unlike Massachusetts, allows out-of-state couples to get married in the state, the issue of same-sex marriage will really take off--and not to the benefit of the Dems. By the way, Options, the new book by Fake Steve Jobs, has an absolutely brilliant riff on Hillary Clinton. Don’t miss it.

I lot of the preceeding conversation is analogous to alice playing chess in woderland, totally divorced from the real world. Here is the message brought by a pigeon in the real world:

1. Our economy defines what we can do:
Termites infected the economic base as the knights of Bushido sent Ninjas called Datsun and Sony to avenge Hiroshima and Nagasaki. By the 90’s the house had been eaten and the structure was held together by paint and capital inflows from the rest of the world.
A deep depression is now being averted by continuing deficits that keep war industries running to provide employment while the rest of the economy has been abandoned without even a whimper from the lambs being led to the slaughter.
The coming financial markets, stock market, and $ collapse will make all this talk moot.
Whether neocon liebermann or Poddy or any permutation of the worthies comes to power is irrelevant.
The wars have all been lost. U.S. army officer in afghanistan said need 400,000 troops to “win”. In Iraq The U.S. has all the watches while the Iranians have the time.
Russian bombers are buzzing U.S. aircraft carriers and putin has said an attack on Iran will be considered an attack on Russia. Cinanis keeping its powder very dry, but trust me any further neocon (or Adriana) inspired attempts to destabilize the region will result in oil going Off the menu.
That we have learned doctors writing about a Mcevil ?Lieberneo govt as if it was quite an ordinary event is writing like Mr. McGoo whistling past the graveyard when the chickens from the last 60 years have only begun to come home to roost… is mind boggling.

The choice is whether we will go gracefully into the sunset or start a project like the Nazis did to bring about their own demise. Neo Military deficit keynesianism will not save us from the inevitable, no matter what combination of neoclowns is handed the baton. They will just hurt themselves with it.