Taft is usually considered a mediocre president so just out of curiosity what is it that you like about him? Honest question not meant to be snarky.
He was kind of dull, and that's what I like.. I found some quirky facts about him.
Taft was tone deaf and had to be nudged whenever the national anthem was played.
Taft was the first president to own a car. He converted the stables into a garage.
Taft was the last president to keep a cow at the White House to provide fresh milk. Her name was Pauline.
Taft successfully argued for the construction of the U.S. Supreme Court building. He felt that the Supreme Court should distance itself from Congress since it was a separate branch of the government. Prior to then, the Supreme Court heard cases in the Capitol building.
Fears that country is again heading towards civil war as tensions intensify between Sunnis and Shias
Associated Press in Baghdad
guardian.co.uk, Friday 17 May 2013
Bombs ripped through Sunni areas in Baghdad and surrounding areas on Friday, killing at least 76 people in the deadliest day in Iraq in more than eight months. The major spike in sectarian bloodshed heightened fears the country could again be veering towards civil war.
The attacks followed two days of bombings targeting Shias, including bus stops and outdoor markets, with a total of 130 people killed since Wednesday...
Taft is usually considered a mediocre president so just out of curiosity what is it that you like about him? Honest question not meant to be snarky.
He was kind of dull, and that's what I like.. I found some quirky facts about him.
Taft was tone deaf and had to be nudged whenever the national anthem was played.
Taft was the first president to own a car. He converted the stables into a garage.
Taft was the last president to keep a cow at the White House to provide fresh milk. Her name was Pauline.
Taft successfully argued for the construction of the U.S. Supreme Court building. He felt that the Supreme Court should distance itself from Congress since it was a separate branch of the government. Prior to then, the Supreme Court heard cases in the Capitol building.
President William Howard Taft got stuck in his bathtub on his Inauguration Day and had to be pried out by his attendants. He weighed over 300 pounds.
And the sun it may be shining . . . but there's an ocean in my eyes
I don't understand the hatred for Jimmy Carter. I think he was one of our greatest presidents because he was one of the most honest. He was hated because Americans often don't like to hear the truth.
An example of what I mean is highlighted here by writer Andrew Bacevich who had this to say about Carter in an interview with Bill Moyers:
"ANDREW BACEVICH: Well, this is the so-called Malaise Speech, even though he never used the word "malaise" in the text to the address. It's a very powerful speech, I think, because President Carter says in that speech, oil, our dependence on oil, poses a looming threat to the country. If we act now, we may be able to fix this problem. If we don't act now, we're headed down a path in which not only will we become increasingly dependent upon foreign oil, but we will have opted for a false model of freedom. A freedom of materialism, a freedom of self-indulgence, a freedom of collective recklessness. And what the President was saying at the time was, we need to think about what we mean by freedom. We need to choose a definition of freedom which is anchored in truth, and the way to manifest that choice, is by addressing our energy problem.
He had a profound understanding of the dilemma facing the country in the post Vietnam period. And of course, he was completely hooted, derided, disregarded."
(For those of you who believe this to be liberal inanity, I should point out that Bacevich is a well respected conservative.)
"At 4 a.m. on March 28, 1979, the worst accident in the history of the U.S. nuclear power industry begins when a pressure valve in the Unit-2 reactor at Three Mile Island fails to close. Cooling water, contaminated with radiation, drained from the open valve into adjoining buildings, and the core began to dangerously overheat.". . . "On April 1, President Jimmy Carter arrived at Three Mile Island to inspect the plant. Carter, a trained nuclear engineer, had helped dismantle a damaged Canadian nuclear reactor while serving in the U.S. Navy. His visit achieved its aim of calming local residents and the nation."http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/nuclear-accident-at-three-mile-island
3 days after the accident, the President walked into a comtaminated nuclear plant. He didn't get in a plane and fly halfway across the country and wait for the dust to settle. Amazing!
And the sun it may be shining . . . but there's an ocean in my eyes
0
brianlux
Moving through All Kinds of Terrain. Posts: 42,336
I don't understand the hatred for Jimmy Carter. I think he was one of our greatest presidents because he was one of the most honest. He was hated because Americans often don't like to hear the truth.
An example of what I mean is highlighted here by writer Andrew Bacevich who had this to say about Carter in an interview with Bill Moyers:
"ANDREW BACEVICH: Well, this is the so-called Malaise Speech, even though he never used the word "malaise" in the text to the address. It's a very powerful speech, I think, because President Carter says in that speech, oil, our dependence on oil, poses a looming threat to the country. If we act now, we may be able to fix this problem. If we don't act now, we're headed down a path in which not only will we become increasingly dependent upon foreign oil, but we will have opted for a false model of freedom. A freedom of materialism, a freedom of self-indulgence, a freedom of collective recklessness. And what the President was saying at the time was, we need to think about what we mean by freedom. We need to choose a definition of freedom which is anchored in truth, and the way to manifest that choice, is by addressing our energy problem.
He had a profound understanding of the dilemma facing the country in the post Vietnam period. And of course, he was completely hooted, derided, disregarded."
(For those of you who believe this to be liberal inanity, I should point out that Bacevich is a well respected conservative.)
"At 4 a.m. on March 28, 1979, the worst accident in the history of the U.S. nuclear power industry begins when a pressure valve in the Unit-2 reactor at Three Mile Island fails to close. Cooling water, contaminated with radiation, drained from the open valve into adjoining buildings, and the core began to dangerously overheat.". . . "On April 1, President Jimmy Carter arrived at Three Mile Island to inspect the plant. Carter, a trained nuclear engineer, had helped dismantle a damaged Canadian nuclear reactor while serving in the U.S. Navy. His visit achieved its aim of calming local residents and the nation."http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/nuclear-accident-at-three-mile-island
3 days after the accident, the President walked into a comtaminated nuclear plant. He didn't get in a plane and fly halfway across the country and wait for the dust to settle. Amazing!
Yeah, President Carter! :thumbup:
"Pretty cookies, heart squares all around, yeah!" -Eddie Vedder, "Smile"
Can we gauge this by lives lost can anyone here say IRAQ 4thousand american lives wasted as if we had a surpluss of citizens to be discarded like trash if i go on this BUSH is the worst ever by a country mile ...And how many IRAQI'S DEAD .......and not one weapon of mass destruction found none ....
I really like the Bush Family.
AND I voted for them every time. I still think Clinton was better for the time. What about Garfield ? What did he do? Dwight D. Eisenhower was neato, and so were both Roosevelt's.
Are you letting the media decide your mind? Do you feel like it's "un hip" to think for yourself?
J.F.K. spent a lot of his time cheating on Jakie. How many Kennedy's were corrupt?
I guess Nixon was the Best? This is all opinion. Saddam did worse to that country than the Bush family. Ask anyone from Iraq. PLEASE. I've posted this before, and I don't care to repeat it. Uday .. Saddam Jr. was sniped without any press. He was so EVIL. I compare him to Pablo Escobar . So evil. The Husseins all had body doubles, and Uday's "Twin" was forced to act like him. He was disgusted, and scared everyday.
Yahia was born into a Kurdish family. During his education, Latif claimed to have been classmates with Uday Hussein, and that classmates remarked on his resemblance to Uday.[1]
Yahia says he became Uday's double after the Iran–Iraq War had begun. Yahia's unit received a dispatch ordering Yahia (then 23) to report to the presidential palace. Upon his arrival, Yahia was informed that he was to become Uday's fedai (body double) to make public appearances as Uday whenever a dangerous situation was expected. Yahia initially refused to take the job and was subsequently put in solitary confinement. After his imprisonment, Latif agreed to be Uday's double. He was trained for six months to imitate Uday's speech patterns and manner. He underwent surgery and dental work to make their appearances more similar. During the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, Yahia was used as a morale booster for the Iraqi troops and sent to Basra posing as Uday to meet with troops.
His relationship with Uday later deteriorated. According to Yahia, the final straw came when a woman Uday was interested in paid more attention to Yahia. Uday shot at him, grazing him. Yahia fled north, where he was imprisoned by Kurdish rebels, being mistaken for Uday. When his captors realized he was not Uday, he was released and granted asylum in Austria in 1992. After Yahia was attacked in Austria, he moved to London in 1995.
On 10 March 1997, Yahia threatened a refugee official in Norway, showing up at his office with a can of gasoline, pouring it out over the floor, and threatening to light it. The official managed to calm Yahia, who fled after half an hour. He was subsequently arrested by the police. He was released before his trial and left the country, first to Germany, then to Ireland.
I wish I could make this stuff up but I read too many books.
Is this thread a Bush bashing or is it actually headed someplace? I'll pull out Sister Sarah if I need too....
No facts are facts i value every human life 4thousand dead is 4thousand no ? or should we just throw that out the window as if it never happened , i feel for you to have voted for Bush ....
Reagan waged a murderous assault on Central America
Noam Chomsky
June 6, 2013
On Mother’s Day, May 12, The Boston Globe featured a photo of a young woman with her toddler son sleeping in her arms.
The woman, of Mayan Indian heritage, had crossed the U.S. border seven times while pregnant, only to be caught and shipped back across the border on six of those attempts. She braved many miles, enduring blisteringly hot days and freezing nights, with no water or shelter, amid roaming gunmen. The last time she crossed, seven months pregnant, she was rescued by immigration solidarity activists who helped her to find her way to Boston.
Most of the border crossers are from Central America. Many say they would rather be home, if the possibility of decent survival hadn’t been destroyed. Mayans such as this young mother are still fleeing from the wreckage of the genocidal assault on the indigenous population of the Guatemalan highlands 30 years ago.
The main perpetrator, Gen. Efrain Rios Montt, the former dictator who ruled Guatemala during two of the bloodiest years of the country’s decades-long civil war, was convicted in a Guatemalan court of genocide and crimes against humanity, on May 10.
Then, 10 days later, the case was overturned under suspicious circumstances. It is unclear whether the trial will continue.
Rios Montt’s forces killed tens of thousands of Guatemalans, mostly Mayans, in the year 1982 alone.
As that bloody year ended, President Reagan assured the nation that the killer was “a man of great personal integrity and commitment,” who was getting a “bum rap” from human-rights organizations and who “wants to improve the quality of life for all Guatemalans and to promote social justice.” Therefore, the president continued, “My administration will do all it can to support his progressive efforts.”
Ample evidence of Rios Montt’s “progressive efforts” was available to Washington, not only from rights organizations, but also from U.S. intelligence.
But truth was unwelcome. It interfered with the objectives set by Reagan’s national security team in 1981. As reported by the journalist Robert Parry, working from a document he discovered in the Reagan Library, the team’s goal was to supply military aid to the right-wing regime in Guatemala in order to exterminate not only “Marxist guerrillas” but also their “civilian support mechanisms” – which means, effectively, genocide.
The task was carried out with dedication. Reagan sent “nonlethal” equipment to the killers, including Bell helicopters that were immediately armed and sent on their missions of death and destruction.
But the most effective method was to enlist a network of client states to take over the task, including Taiwan and South Korea, still under U.S.-backed dictatorships, as well as apartheid South Africa and the Argentine and Chilean dictatorships.
At the forefront was Israel, which became the major arms supplier to Guatemala. It provided instructors for the killers and participated in counterinsurgency operations.
The background bears restating. In 1954, a CIA-run military coup ended a 10-year democratic interlude in Guatemala – “the years of spring,” as they are known there – and restored a savage elite to power.
In the 1990s, international organizations conducting inquiries into the fighting reported that since 1954 some 200,000 people had been killed in Guatemala, 80 percent of whom were indigenous. The killers were mostly from the Guatemalan security forces and closely linked paramilitaries.
The atrocities were carried out with vigorous U.S. support and participation. Among the standard Cold War pretexts was that Guatemala was a Russian “beachhead” in Latin America.
The real reasons, amply documented, were also standard: concern for the interests of U.S. investors and fear that a democratic experiment empowering the harshly repressed peasant majority “might be a virus” that would “spread contagion,” in Henry Kissinger’s thoughtful phrase, referring to Salvador Allende’s democratic socialist Chile.
Reagan’s murderous assault on Central America was not limited to Guatemala, of course. In most of the region the agencies of terror were government security forces that had been armed and trained by Washington.
One country was different: Nicaragua. It had an army to defend its population. Reagan therefore had to organize right-wing guerilla forces to wage the fight.
In 1986, the World Court, in Nicaragua v. United States, condemned the U.S. for “unlawful use of force” in Nicaragua and ordered the payment of reparations. The United States’ response to the court’s decree was to escalate the proxy war.
The U.S. Southern Command ordered the guerillas to attack virtually defenseless civilian targets, not to “duke it out” with the Nicaraguan army, according to Southcom’s Gen. John Gavin testimony to Congress in 1987.
Rights organizations (the same ones that were giving a bad rap to genocidaire Rios Montt) had condemned the war in Nicaragua all along but vehemently protested Southcom’s “soft-target” tactics.
The American commentator Michael Kinsley reprimanded the rights organizations for departing from good form. He explained that a “sensible policy” must “meet the test of cost-benefit analysis,” evaluating “the amount of blood and misery that will be poured in, and the likelihood that democracy will emerge at the other end.”
Naturally, we Americans have the right to conduct the analysis – thanks, presumably, to our inherent nobility and stellar record ever since the days when the continent was cleared of the native scourge.
The nature of the “democracy that will emerge” was hardly obscure. It is accurately described by the leading scholar of “democracy promotion,” Thomas Carothers, who worked on such projects in the Reagan State Department.
Carothers concludes, regretfully, that U.S. influence was inversely proportional to democratic progress in Latin America, because Washington would only tolerate “limited, top-down forms of democratic change that did not risk upsetting the traditional structures of power with which the United States has long been allied (in) quite undemocratic societies.”
There has been no change since.
In 1999, President Clinton apologized for American crimes in Guatemala but no action was taken.
There are countries that rise to a higher level than idle apology without action. Guatemala, despite its continuing travails, has carried out the unprecedented act of bringing a former head of state to trial for his crimes, something we might remember on the 10th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
Also perhaps unprecedented is an article in The New York Times by Elisabeth Malkin, headlined “Trial on Guatemalan Civil War Carnage Leaves Out U.S. Role.” Even acknowledgment of one’s own crimes is very rare.
Rare to nonexistent are actions that could alleviate some of the crimes’ horrendous consequences – for example, for the United States to pay the reparations to Nicaragua ordered by the World Court. The absence of such actions provides one measure of the chasm that separates us from where a civilized society ought to be.
Yinz are like a baby birdies, mouths agape swallowing what you are fed and happily ignorant to any other possibility. It's quite sick the influence media has over youzes brains. Bush can be considered a prez who could have been better. "He could have been better" because he was inherently good; his problem was not that he was too "right wing" his problem was that he was recklessly swayed by the congress gearing up for an Obama presidency.
Obama, the worst thing that has ever happened to the US, kept the destructive policies of Bush and added a sympathy for the enemy. Then took the bail out Mountra of Bush and threw borrowed money at anyone who would take it.
The current douche bag in the White House literally (and I mean literally) got all the money in the world and didn't do one lasting positive thing. At least FDR had some good ideas; BHO has zero, zilch, nada.
The dude only kept one campaign promise...he reversed global warming; it's fucking freezing here![/quote]
It's clear to me that you have no idea how foolish you come across on these boards.
That is all.[/quote]
Depth of understanding only seems foolish to a fool.
Yinz are like a baby birdies, mouths agape swallowing what you are fed and happily ignorant to any other possibility. It's quite sick the influence media has over youzes brains. Bush can be considered a prez who could have been better. "He could have been better" because he was inherently good; his problem was not that he was too "right wing" his problem was that he was recklessly swayed by the congress gearing up for an Obama presidency.
Obama, the worst thing that has ever happened to the US, kept the destructive policies of Bush and added a sympathy for the enemy. Then took the bail out Mountra of Bush and threw borrowed money at anyone who would take it.
The current douche bag in the White House literally (and I mean literally) got all the money in the world and didn't do one lasting positive thing. At least FDR had some good ideas; BHO has zero, zilch, nada.
The dude only kept one campaign promise...he reversed global warming; it's fucking freezing here![/quote]
It's clear to me that you have no idea how foolish you come across on these boards.
That is all.[/quote]
Depth of understanding only seems foolish to a fool.[/quote]
It took you over a month to come up with this as a response?
Funny, but I thought that your goofy, frat-boy President, George W. Bush was undoubtedly the most incompetent President your country has ever had.
I mean, I think it's clear to any reasonable person that Dubya was an idiot. He wasn't a leader. And he just did what he was told - even then, with great difficulty. Didn't he break the record for the least amount of public appearances, and foreign travel, of any President before him in the age of t.v? He was such a complete moron that even his puppet masters were afraid and embarrassed to wheel him out onto the public stage.
To deny this means you a are a fucking imbecile. Pure and simple.
The 'worst president' portion of this thread should have been done with the very first responder simply stating the obvious. Everyone else should have said, "Okay. Well... the second worst president then."
The best president can definitely be up for debate.
A clown; a fool. One is down; one drools. Down with the truth or drool for a man? You are cool I'm schooled.
And this bit of poetry is too cool for school.
I'm still trying to process this. I've got to be able to do it in less than a month or... I'll be eating crow after laughing at Otter for his slow response!
This place drives me batty sometimes. Why can't everyone think like me? Wait... no, not me... you!
brianlux
Moving through All Kinds of Terrain. Posts: 42,336
I'm currently reading Henry Rollins' book A Dull Roar, written in the midst of the George W. Bush reign of idiocy. Henry hammers W. big time, repeatedly. It's an excellent chronicle of a totally fucked up yesterday- a time we might, as a country, well look back on in shame. History will certainly bear that out.
"Pretty cookies, heart squares all around, yeah!" -Eddie Vedder, "Smile"
I think that the best/worst argument can be seen from different perspectives depending on what one is looking at. Lets take a look at Clinton, one of the best politicians ever. He had his agenda just like every president does but after the 94 mid-term when Democrats lost both the House and the Senate he worked with the other side. Some may forget, that Clinton tried to do nation building just like W did. Clinton sent troops to Somalia, Haiti, Kosovo, Bosnia and also bombed Iraq under the pretense that Hussein had WMD's. He also bombed Afghanistan to go after Al-Qaeda. On the domestic front, he re-made the welfare system but also should share the responsibility of the financial calamity that occurred towards the end of W's second term. It was the Clinton Administration the repealed the Glass-Steagall Act which contributed to the meltdown.
As for W, I am not a big fan of his. I think he was lead to Iraq and once there listened to the wrong advisors, Rumsfeld for one.
"worse" is not this guy. maybe not THE best, but not far from it.
If I had known then what I know now...
Vegas 93, Vegas 98, Vegas 00 (10 year show), Vegas 03, Vegas 06
VIC 07
EV LA1 08
Seattle1 09, Seattle2 09, Salt Lake 09, LA4 09
Columbus 10
EV LA 11
Vancouver 11
Missoula 12
Portland 13, Spokane 13
St. Paul 14, Denver 14
Comments
He was kind of dull, and that's what I like.. I found some quirky facts about him.
Taft was tone deaf and had to be nudged whenever the national anthem was played.
Taft was the first president to own a car. He converted the stables into a garage.
Taft was the last president to keep a cow at the White House to provide fresh milk. Her name was Pauline.
Taft successfully argued for the construction of the U.S. Supreme Court building. He felt that the Supreme Court should distance itself from Congress since it was a separate branch of the government. Prior to then, the Supreme Court heard cases in the Capitol building.
Well this explains the votes for George W.
So when will you be taking a holiday over there then?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/ma ... unnis-iraq
Bombs targeting Sunnis kill at least 76 in Iraq
Fears that country is again heading towards civil war as tensions intensify between Sunnis and Shias
Associated Press in Baghdad
guardian.co.uk, Friday 17 May 2013
Bombs ripped through Sunni areas in Baghdad and surrounding areas on Friday, killing at least 76 people in the deadliest day in Iraq in more than eight months. The major spike in sectarian bloodshed heightened fears the country could again be veering towards civil war.
The attacks followed two days of bombings targeting Shias, including bus stops and outdoor markets, with a total of 130 people killed since Wednesday...
President William Howard Taft got stuck in his bathtub on his Inauguration Day and had to be pried out by his attendants. He weighed over 300 pounds.
"At 4 a.m. on March 28, 1979, the worst accident in the history of the U.S. nuclear power industry begins when a pressure valve in the Unit-2 reactor at Three Mile Island fails to close. Cooling water, contaminated with radiation, drained from the open valve into adjoining buildings, and the core began to dangerously overheat.". . . "On April 1, President Jimmy Carter arrived at Three Mile Island to inspect the plant. Carter, a trained nuclear engineer, had helped dismantle a damaged Canadian nuclear reactor while serving in the U.S. Navy. His visit achieved its aim of calming local residents and the nation."http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/nuclear-accident-at-three-mile-island
3 days after the accident, the President walked into a comtaminated nuclear plant. He didn't get in a plane and fly halfway across the country and wait for the dust to settle. Amazing!
Yeah, President Carter! :thumbup:
-Eddie Vedder, "Smile"
No facts are facts i value every human life 4thousand dead is 4thousand no ? or should we just throw that out the window as if it never happened , i feel for you to have voted for Bush ....
Ronald Reagan's Secret, Genocidal Wars
Reagan waged a murderous assault on Central America
Noam Chomsky
June 6, 2013
On Mother’s Day, May 12, The Boston Globe featured a photo of a young woman with her toddler son sleeping in her arms.
The woman, of Mayan Indian heritage, had crossed the U.S. border seven times while pregnant, only to be caught and shipped back across the border on six of those attempts. She braved many miles, enduring blisteringly hot days and freezing nights, with no water or shelter, amid roaming gunmen. The last time she crossed, seven months pregnant, she was rescued by immigration solidarity activists who helped her to find her way to Boston.
Most of the border crossers are from Central America. Many say they would rather be home, if the possibility of decent survival hadn’t been destroyed. Mayans such as this young mother are still fleeing from the wreckage of the genocidal assault on the indigenous population of the Guatemalan highlands 30 years ago.
The main perpetrator, Gen. Efrain Rios Montt, the former dictator who ruled Guatemala during two of the bloodiest years of the country’s decades-long civil war, was convicted in a Guatemalan court of genocide and crimes against humanity, on May 10.
Then, 10 days later, the case was overturned under suspicious circumstances. It is unclear whether the trial will continue.
Rios Montt’s forces killed tens of thousands of Guatemalans, mostly Mayans, in the year 1982 alone.
As that bloody year ended, President Reagan assured the nation that the killer was “a man of great personal integrity and commitment,” who was getting a “bum rap” from human-rights organizations and who “wants to improve the quality of life for all Guatemalans and to promote social justice.” Therefore, the president continued, “My administration will do all it can to support his progressive efforts.”
Ample evidence of Rios Montt’s “progressive efforts” was available to Washington, not only from rights organizations, but also from U.S. intelligence.
But truth was unwelcome. It interfered with the objectives set by Reagan’s national security team in 1981. As reported by the journalist Robert Parry, working from a document he discovered in the Reagan Library, the team’s goal was to supply military aid to the right-wing regime in Guatemala in order to exterminate not only “Marxist guerrillas” but also their “civilian support mechanisms” – which means, effectively, genocide.
The task was carried out with dedication. Reagan sent “nonlethal” equipment to the killers, including Bell helicopters that were immediately armed and sent on their missions of death and destruction.
But the most effective method was to enlist a network of client states to take over the task, including Taiwan and South Korea, still under U.S.-backed dictatorships, as well as apartheid South Africa and the Argentine and Chilean dictatorships.
At the forefront was Israel, which became the major arms supplier to Guatemala. It provided instructors for the killers and participated in counterinsurgency operations.
The background bears restating. In 1954, a CIA-run military coup ended a 10-year democratic interlude in Guatemala – “the years of spring,” as they are known there – and restored a savage elite to power.
In the 1990s, international organizations conducting inquiries into the fighting reported that since 1954 some 200,000 people had been killed in Guatemala, 80 percent of whom were indigenous. The killers were mostly from the Guatemalan security forces and closely linked paramilitaries.
The atrocities were carried out with vigorous U.S. support and participation. Among the standard Cold War pretexts was that Guatemala was a Russian “beachhead” in Latin America.
The real reasons, amply documented, were also standard: concern for the interests of U.S. investors and fear that a democratic experiment empowering the harshly repressed peasant majority “might be a virus” that would “spread contagion,” in Henry Kissinger’s thoughtful phrase, referring to Salvador Allende’s democratic socialist Chile.
Reagan’s murderous assault on Central America was not limited to Guatemala, of course. In most of the region the agencies of terror were government security forces that had been armed and trained by Washington.
One country was different: Nicaragua. It had an army to defend its population. Reagan therefore had to organize right-wing guerilla forces to wage the fight.
In 1986, the World Court, in Nicaragua v. United States, condemned the U.S. for “unlawful use of force” in Nicaragua and ordered the payment of reparations. The United States’ response to the court’s decree was to escalate the proxy war.
The U.S. Southern Command ordered the guerillas to attack virtually defenseless civilian targets, not to “duke it out” with the Nicaraguan army, according to Southcom’s Gen. John Gavin testimony to Congress in 1987.
Rights organizations (the same ones that were giving a bad rap to genocidaire Rios Montt) had condemned the war in Nicaragua all along but vehemently protested Southcom’s “soft-target” tactics.
The American commentator Michael Kinsley reprimanded the rights organizations for departing from good form. He explained that a “sensible policy” must “meet the test of cost-benefit analysis,” evaluating “the amount of blood and misery that will be poured in, and the likelihood that democracy will emerge at the other end.”
Naturally, we Americans have the right to conduct the analysis – thanks, presumably, to our inherent nobility and stellar record ever since the days when the continent was cleared of the native scourge.
The nature of the “democracy that will emerge” was hardly obscure. It is accurately described by the leading scholar of “democracy promotion,” Thomas Carothers, who worked on such projects in the Reagan State Department.
Carothers concludes, regretfully, that U.S. influence was inversely proportional to democratic progress in Latin America, because Washington would only tolerate “limited, top-down forms of democratic change that did not risk upsetting the traditional structures of power with which the United States has long been allied (in) quite undemocratic societies.”
There has been no change since.
In 1999, President Clinton apologized for American crimes in Guatemala but no action was taken.
There are countries that rise to a higher level than idle apology without action. Guatemala, despite its continuing travails, has carried out the unprecedented act of bringing a former head of state to trial for his crimes, something we might remember on the 10th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
Also perhaps unprecedented is an article in The New York Times by Elisabeth Malkin, headlined “Trial on Guatemalan Civil War Carnage Leaves Out U.S. Role.” Even acknowledgment of one’s own crimes is very rare.
Rare to nonexistent are actions that could alleviate some of the crimes’ horrendous consequences – for example, for the United States to pay the reparations to Nicaragua ordered by the World Court. The absence of such actions provides one measure of the chasm that separates us from where a civilized society ought to be.
Fundamental.
The people who live in the country we lived in will experience a fundamentally different country.
Good luck.
Yinz are like a baby birdies, mouths agape swallowing what you are fed and happily ignorant to any other possibility. It's quite sick the influence media has over youzes brains. Bush can be considered a prez who could have been better. "He could have been better" because he was inherently good; his problem was not that he was too "right wing" his problem was that he was recklessly swayed by the congress gearing up for an Obama presidency.
Obama, the worst thing that has ever happened to the US, kept the destructive policies of Bush and added a sympathy for the enemy. Then took the bail out Mountra of Bush and threw borrowed money at anyone who would take it.
The current douche bag in the White House literally (and I mean literally) got all the money in the world and didn't do one lasting positive thing. At least FDR had some good ideas; BHO has zero, zilch, nada.
The dude only kept one campaign promise...he reversed global warming; it's fucking freezing here![/quote]
It's clear to me that you have no idea how foolish you come across on these boards.
That is all.[/quote]
Depth of understanding only seems foolish to a fool.
Yinz are like a baby birdies, mouths agape swallowing what you are fed and happily ignorant to any other possibility. It's quite sick the influence media has over youzes brains. Bush can be considered a prez who could have been better. "He could have been better" because he was inherently good; his problem was not that he was too "right wing" his problem was that he was recklessly swayed by the congress gearing up for an Obama presidency.
Obama, the worst thing that has ever happened to the US, kept the destructive policies of Bush and added a sympathy for the enemy. Then took the bail out Mountra of Bush and threw borrowed money at anyone who would take it.
The current douche bag in the White House literally (and I mean literally) got all the money in the world and didn't do one lasting positive thing. At least FDR had some good ideas; BHO has zero, zilch, nada.
The dude only kept one campaign promise...he reversed global warming; it's fucking freezing here![/quote]
It's clear to me that you have no idea how foolish you come across on these boards.
That is all.[/quote]
Depth of understanding only seems foolish to a fool.[/quote]
It took you over a month to come up with this as a response?
Clown.
These things.
Done.
And this bit of poetry is too cool for school.
-Eddie Vedder, "Smile"
I'm still trying to process this. I've got to be able to do it in less than a month or... I'll be eating crow after laughing at Otter for his slow response!
This place drives me batty sometimes. Why can't everyone think like me? Wait... no, not me... you!
clinton - the best
gw bush - the worst
"what a long, strange trip it's been"
W:orst
-Eddie Vedder, "Smile"
As for W, I am not a big fan of his. I think he was lead to Iraq and once there listened to the wrong advisors, Rumsfeld for one.
Worst: Franklin Pierce (pretty boy)
"worse" is not this guy. maybe not THE best, but not far from it.
Vegas 93, Vegas 98, Vegas 00 (10 year show), Vegas 03, Vegas 06
VIC 07
EV LA1 08
Seattle1 09, Seattle2 09, Salt Lake 09, LA4 09
Columbus 10
EV LA 11
Vancouver 11
Missoula 12
Portland 13, Spokane 13
St. Paul 14, Denver 14
FDR
Lincoln
Washington
Jefferson
Kennedy
Worst..Obama
dick cheney
Washington
Lincoln
FDR
JFK
Carter
Obama
Worst:
Buchanan
Nixon
G.W. Bush