RWNorman's Beer, Food and Politics

Today’s Topic: Not Much of a Way to Remember Those Who Have Served

This is a republication of an article I published on May 29, 2007.

Service to our country can come in many ways, whether it be military service, public office, or community endeavors.

However, I don’t find much in the way Memorial Day is any longer FOR honoring our courageous men and women who have served in the military. No, I find Memorial Day being USED by people for promoting their own agendas in a continuing spiral of degradation of the American way of life.

Admittedly some of what I’m about to espouse isn’t necessarily directly attributable to Memorial Day services and such, but more along the lines of just what can be foisted upon the American public by those whom would use you to gain power. And let me be straightforward about this. Those who would use your fears, heap unsubstantiated slurs or mislead you in order to gain your votes are not people who wish to do a thing FOR you.

Public service in terms of elected officials has become such a power play of gluttony that one wonders how more Americans STILL CANNOT see the forest for the trees.

The trees, in this case, are the oft stumbling presidential candidates and are largely from both sides. Rudy wants to scare you into voting for him, as does John McCain, whilst Mitt Romney is resorting to full scale lies and misstatements designed to do the same thing and hopefully garnering him the religious right’s backing.

During the latest debates, Rudy tried to continue the lies of a Saddam-Al Qaeda tie with 9/11. John McCain's message much presented the same thing, but since he’s been a "Stay the Course" guy with Bush that’s not surprising.

The most surprising of all the statements I found was Mitt Romney’s efforts to scare Americans by lumping in Hamas and Hezbollah, both groups of which are listed as terrorist groups by the United States and yet hold elected political offices in their respective communities. Ah, but what was Mitt trying to do when he added to the lump both the Shia and the Sunni? To quote, Mitt said "They want to bring down the West, particularly us. And THEY’VE COME TOGETHER AS SHIA AND SUNNI AND HEZBOLLAH AND HAMAS AND THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD AND AL QAEDA WITH THAT INTENT."

Either Mitt Romney is just as dangerous of a man to America’s ability to remain a democracy as Bush has been, or he’s just plain stupid. Why? Because he was stupid enough to designate virtually the entire Muslim world as enemies of the United States. And he did this on an internationally broadcast debate.

If you didn’t know before 9/11, you damned well should know now that there are two religious sects to Islam. Those of the Sunni faith and those of the Shia faith. One supports the son of Mohammed as the continuation for the prophet’s teachings and the other supports the brother of Mohammed. It might seem like a minimal difference to you, but perhaps that’s just because you don’t know, don’t want to know, and damned sure don’t want to understand what that "minimal" difference is. And even this lack of knowledge on your part is forgivable and even understandable.

But I cannot say the same thing for people who profess themselves to be the best person for you to elect as president in November of 2008, particularly if they either use information which is not correct and do so on purpose, or they don’t know the correct information in the first place.

You know, I personally don’t care whether a brain surgeon is a bad one, or whether he really doesn’t have the proper credentials. Either way he is not going to do brain surgery on me.

And I am not going to sit back and let more presidential candidates erode the concepts of democracy to serve their own purposes without continually pointing out their misstatements and misconceptions.

So to get back to Mitt Romney’s attempt to make all Muslims our enemies, let me put it this way. Mitt Romney is obviously making a major attempt to play down his Mormonism by kowtowing to the evangelical religious right who played such a strong part in helping George W. Bush to redefine political boundaries whilst attempting to take over the federal government single-handedly.

Since we KNOW the fact that all Muslims are NOT OUR ENEMY, then we have a personal job to do. We have to figure out how to make those of a like mind to Romney’s asinine statement to use their own brains. This is particularly hard to do because they are evangelical Christians who believe that Muslims are indeed our enemy, and that by defeating the Muslim scourge Jesus Christ will return and the Rapture will bring all the faithful to God.

Count on it, this is what they believe, and Mitt Romney wants them on his side so that he can become President. The same can be said for Rudy Giuliani and John McCain, so you can expect increased rhetoric towards the concept of our "Global War on Terror" really being a war of civilizations, but without actually saying that it is.

In other words, they will continue to try to mislead you, to frighten you, to denigrate you if you disagree, to deride you if you disagree in front of them, all the while spouting lies they hope to explain away, or misleading statements they hope to make light of until they can say them again.

President Bush just did this at a Rose Garden press conference last week when asked direct questions about his credibility to discuss the war in Iraq with America, bringing up the fearful image of a couple of the reporter’s children being directly attacked because they asked the questions they did. Now one can parse out his answer as being aimed at all of American children, but it only takes a moment to notice he did not mention threats to anyone else’s children based on the questions they asked.

Personally, I think George W. Bush has been the greatest danger to America and her children, and any of those who would be president after him are trying to ride the "fear factor" coattails into the White House. So who’s more of a threat?

OK, let’s just discuss the question for a moment. One fact we do know is that Al Qaeda is a threat, and they have no compunction about killing hundreds of thousands or even millions of Americans. Hell, they have no problem killing hundreds of thousands or even millions of Muslims, whether it be by using people as suicide bombers, or blowing up movie houses in Kashmir, as happened early in 2002. In Kenya, 12 Americans were hurt, I believe, but 209 Kenyans were killed or maimed.

If one doesn’t care whether their target is killed or not, then the level of their threat is indeed global and requires careful attention to penetration of the group and a decided effort at dismantling the reasons behind Al Qaeda’s successful efforts to continue to garner new recruits. For now we have a dangerous combination of factors, which is we know that the use of people in suicide attacks can and will take place, and we know that it really doesn’t matter to Al Qaeda’s uppermost echelon who dies.

So we have a question to answer about this last little fact, and that is "What is Al Qaeda trying to achieve?"

Now the current batch of Republican presidential candidates, except for Sen. Ron Paul, have the same stupid words coming out of their mouths, which is "They hate us for our Freedom." This is most decidedly the stupidest piece of analysis ever presented, because they are not attacking other countries having different levels of freedoms. So the answer given cannot be the correct answer.

Senator Ron Paul apparently HAS read the history involving America’s foreign policy and involvement in the Middle East over the past 50+ years. And the fact is when Osama bin Laden tells us his efforts to bring down America are directly tied to America’s foreign policy, it is Osama bin Laden who is not lying to America.

For all practical purposes it has been the American government lying to the American public time and time again over the years. The last President to NOT lie to the American public was Dwight D. Eisenhower, and that was when he gave his outgoing speech about the military-industrial complex.

Prior to the end of World War II America did not have a military-industrial complex because we didn’t have a standing army. In fact, when WWII ended, we still didn’t have a standing army because we brought them all home and reintegrated them into society.

OK, so we had a smaller number of standing army than during the war, but both Germany and Japan needed transition time to turn into world citizens again. Then suddenly we had a military-industrial complex that wished to exploit the economic advantages of having a country at war, large contingents of troops, and military bases throughout the free world. And this is when the true beginnings of the marriage of congress and the military-industrial complex came about through lobbying.

So how does all of this play with what is happening today?

Well, in 1953 the United States, through it’s newly created CIA, caused Iran’s democratically elected but left leaning President to be deposed in a coup, thus allowing the United States to prop up the Shah. Certainly this wasn’t the people of Iran’s will, so strong-arm tactics were necessary to maintain the Shah in power. What did we receive out of all of these efforts?

Two things, at the least. The first was an inroad into the petroleum producing Middle East with an American backed leader of Iran. The second was the development of a long memory in the Iranian public. The prior produced immediate advantages for America in terms of gaining needed low cost petroleum production whilst garnering a large portion of the revenues.

Since the Shah got a lot of money and companies from the United States and Britain got a lot of money, there really wasn’t too much money left for the population of Iran. And the Iranians didn’t, nor shouldn’t, forget America’s foreign policy.

In 1979 as the Shah was ousted and the popular ex-patriot Ayatollah Khomeni returned, students decided that they wanted to get into the American embassy and find whatever records they could to prove that the United States had interfered with legal and democratic elections to the detriment of the Iranian people.

Unfortunately 44 Americans didn’t leave the embassy as they were trying to destroy all the records, and they then became hostages. The rest is a history of distrust between not only the Iranian people and the government of America (not the American people, whom the Iranians like), but a history of such finagling by the Reagan Administration in all of it’s dealings with the Middle East, that as Reagan might be crowed as the one to end Communism, he must also be declared the real reason behind the terrorism of today.

And how not? America has chosen to be an "ally" of Israel when Israel itself has declined to sign any protectionist pact. To the military-industrial complex Israel is a large consumer, and conflicts involving people in the Middle East can easily and quickly be instigated, for certainly there are no shortages of protagonists in the Middle East.

More money, more money.

Just one year ago Israel chose to initiate another war against Hezbollah, which is a legally elected portion of the Lebanon government. And that’s not real surprising to me, but what is surprising is how quickly the American military-industrial complex was able to RE-SUPPLY Israel with armaments. It seems as if someone was awfully prescient to know that Israel would need a new supply of these weapons for the armaments to have so quickly beome available. Just how long does shipping of massive tonnage of weapons take by sea? Seems there was no ramp up time necessary for production, and virtually no time necessary at all for Israel to receive armaments neither normally in production nor held in inventory.

As has been noted in numerous news articles, one of Israel’s own terrorist actions is to demolish the homes of "suspected terrorists" in the Palestinian terroritories.

One of the greatest gripes by the Lebanese population about Israel’s efforts against Hezbollah were about the armaments being used. We’re not talking about normal run of the mill bombs, but highly accurate yet incredibly devastating bombs whose casing was built to break apart in large chunks of metal fragments big enough and packed with enough power to break the steel and concrete structure of a building and bring it to the ground. And bombs don’t care whether a terrorist is in the building, or an 11-year-old girl hiding from the fighting on the streets.

This is not a weapon one would use to fight a skirmish between some factions of Hezbollah and the Israelis army, but a effort to bring Lebanon to it’s knees by devastating Lebanon’s infrastructure as well as rout the population. In a movie joke Hezbollah would be "Stupid. Always bringing a knife to a gun fight."

In Iraq we have another long history dating from the Reagan Administration, which directly pitted Iraq against Iran whilst negotiating with "terrorists" in Iran to supply weapons in order to gain the hostages freedom. All of the time Reagan was President, the mindset he informed Americans about is that "We don’t negotiate with terrorists", and yet his election team was negotiating with the "terrorists" in Iran in order to ensure his own election. Then when it came down to supporting his favorite "rightist vs. leftist" Central American battle, again with a democratically elected government, Reagan’s people negotiated with Iran to supply weapons (once again) and took the funds and gave them to the Contras.

President Reagan’s appointed people robbed hundreds of millions of dollars from the American treasury by clandestine operations forwarding weapons to Israel who then forwarded these same weapons to Iran. Rather than that money be funneled back into the American treasury, it went to the Contras, with a large number of dollars being siphoned off by a gun running middleman like Manucher Ghorbanifar, who apparently still has inroads into the White House with George W. Bush.

Elliot Abrams, a Reagan appointee was indicted for lying in Congressional hearings for his Iran-Contra work (pleading guilty to a couple of lesser offenses), and who was pardoned by ex-President George H. W. Bush, is currently Deputy National Security Adviser for George W. Bush, as I recall. So if history plays a part in the way the Muslim world views us, then it must be how history shows us from the start to the finish, and the fundamentalist now know we don’t hold our own accountable for their actions.

Now here’s an example of playing both sides part of our foreign policy. While Reagan’s people were taking money from illicit weapons sales to Iran and giving it to the Contras (which Congress had ordered would get no more money from America), we were selling weapons to this new guy in Iraq named Saddam Hussein. And not just planes, bombs and missiles, but precursors to chemical and biological weapons.

As has been bandied about before, the reason we knew that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction is that we still have the receipts.

America has such a large footprint upon the world that our massive military might can be in any corner of the world anywhere from 15 minutes with nuclear missiles to 8 hours with troops on the ground and circling AWAC command and control systems. We can fly bombing missions from the United States to Afghanistan non-stop and have our flight crews home late the next day. We have bases in some 100 plus countries.

We’ve only left the Philippines and Panama after gaining a foothold. And both of those countries weren’t key players because our technology allows us to fly missions to South America within 8 to 12 hours, and Japan and South Korea, along with Guam and Midway allow us military might in the Asian theater within a couple of hours. We no longer need the Panama canal to fight a war and the Philippines could be bombed into submission in a matter of hours.

Diego Garcia allows us quick response to the other areas of the far east, and it appears that we are planning to have a large footprint in Iraq with the addition of four major bases. These bases could easily house tens of thousands of soldiers and airmen, along with armaments enough to decimate the world.

We currently have bases in countries previously inside of the Iron Curtain and Russia knows it. Uzbekistan, Germany, and numerous smaller Balkan states all have American installations or military bases. Numerous other countries are willfully hiding illegal detention centers.

America is poised for worldwide domination and apparently some people don’t like the idea.

Certainly the idea of the current administration and its neo-con friends doesn’t match up to the preamble to the United Nations. We are apparently here to make your day our day.

So who’s lying to whom? Osama bin Laden when he wants America’s nose out of other people’s state of affairs, or America’s government who has all the preparations ready to … well, you finish the sentence.

All I ask is that you remember all of this when you stand in the voting booth in November 2008 and contemplate just which candidate matches your idea of what America means. Not what the candidates tell you it means. What you grew up with, what you learned in school, and how it makes you feel to know that someone else wants to hurt you and you don’t know why because the government won’t tell you the truth.

All of the truth is out there. Your duty as a citizen is to determine just what that truth is.

American Exceptionalism

Geez, What Are You Smoking, And Where Can I Get Some?

It is my intention to discuss a number of items under this heading, the number of which I do not know.

However, I'm pretty certain that there will be widely cast subjects both old and new, hence this may again become one of my haphazard series.  Hopefully there will be at least some decent articles coming out of the series, but we'll just have to see.

In part I will be bringing in some of my previous articles on such topics on which I have before written if indeed my prognostications have been proven correct, or at least not proven wrong.  In some cases I will use portions of my own writing to expand upon a topic with a new slant.

In no case am I intending to use other people's ideas to support my own and then call the series my own writing.  I've hated this form of writing, and I really hate the research required for footnoting.  If I use quotes from other people, in some cases I will have the quoted source, but in others it is likely that everyone know who said what when, and I will leave that aspect up to some easily accomplished internet research.

I will include this prelude to each of my articles because I don't want to make everyone go back and find out what I was doing, as many blogs force you to do.  I will do the research on my own material and include it, as much of what I've written over the last 10 years is actually printed out because no blog site properly did backups and I didn't trust them.

So this is just the introduction to this series.  I've written a series before, and unfortunately I never got back to some of the topics I had desired to talk about, so these won't be numbered.  They'll just be super titles.
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After watching Meet the Press today with Newt Gingrich on Meet the Candidate segment, I have major questions.

Not only questions about Newt's ability to be the President, but his concern for American Exceptionalism as if it is something pre-ordained by some higher power.

The question doesn't become whether there is such a thing as American Exceptionalism, but rather whether the term is so biased as to ignore that other nations in the world have, in fact, helped to build the world we have.

What is American Exceptionalism?  And if such a thing is possible, just where do you point to in history to explain the continued concept?

I highly doubt the concept, other than those of the Greatest Generation who ended up giving both life and limb to support Western Civilization against Nazi aggression, but rising to the call isn't the defining event.

No, American Exceptionalism comes from some type of hubris exhibited by the Bush administration in it's exuberance to go beyond the protection of the people to determining who was good or bad.  The concept of pre-emptive attacks comes down to a number of different methods, not just dumping troops and military hardware into a country.  But is this what American Exceptionalism is supposed to be?

First off, I'd have to say that there is no such thing as American Exceptionalism other than the name.  For some reason we become the end all and be all of the entire world by such a declaration.

But one has to question just what such a declaration involves. 

Honestly I believe the term is a sham, a method to make American voters think there are certain circumstances which put us above the level of any other country when we should recognize that we are simply one nation amongst a number of other nations.

The concept of American Exceptionalism is a negative to the perception of America in other countries, and ultimately makes us more likely to have problems in the perception of our country as a whole.

But this is nothing new.  I've written about this some 8 years ago and nothing has changed.  We have a high opinion of ourselves yet we have people representing us who have no idea of what their job is.
They didn't get elected to do the job as they saw it, but to do the job as the electorate saw it.  And there is plenty of fault to go around, none of it exemplifying American Exceptionalism.

The presumption of the elected to do their jobs the way they see fit became apparent during the Easter break when Paul Ryan's own constituency found major faults with his budget proposal which eliminated Medicare over the next 10 years.

The Republicans created such a fervor over the Affordable Health Care Act by declaring that $500 Billion in waste management was a cut to the program, yet two years later come up with a method to kill Medicare in the same time frame.

Is American Exceptionalism only available to the other countries of the world, based upon a concept of pre-emptive military action?

We are far behind the rest of the world in multiple avenues, and there cannot be such a concept as American Exceptionalism when we are so far behind the curve that we don't even educate our children well enough to get out of High School with a knowledge of how the world works.

If America is exceptional in any aspect it is in failure over the last 30 years to protect the people that made this country.  We have 47 million people without health insurance.  We have some 30 million either without jobs or with inadequate jobs, or even multiple jobs.

I remember a George W. Bush town hall meeting where he praised a woman for holding three jobs to make ends meet.  Her story was the sad point, his response was the really sorry point of misunderstanding her plight.

Eight years of vastly inappropriate administrative direction, political invasions, and policies which were politically established rules for government service will end up costing us 25 more years of questioning government.  So how can we say that we have some type of Exceptionalism that can withstand the test of time?

Either you are really good at what you do, or you are not.  But even those whom aren't really good at what they do might actually come up with an idea.  Does this equate to some level of being better than any other societies?

I find it a non-starter as a question.  Just as everyone can somehow come up with a good idea, the end appraisal shouldn't be that the person is infallible.

We take too much stock in the fact that we have many ideas, but we don't seem to be proactively working on those ideas.

We have become the country amongst other countries, and in doing so we have lost some of our stature amongst the countries of the world, but we have become a more greatly appreciated country by the obviousness of losing our American Exceptionalism.

This means that all of these politicians who desire to present America as the great savior of the world are lying to the American public.

We have our good days and our bad days, just like any other country in the world.

There is no one on the entire planet that thinks whatever America does in the world is absolutely OK with them.  And this defines us regardless of whether Americans understand the scope of the problem or not.

There is no American Exceptionalism.  It is a lie, a manner to distort one's support for their country, and misdirection in just how much politics play a part in the uninformed.  Find a product and support it whether it exists or not, and most of America will accept the product whether it does the job or not.

We're talking about the utilization of advertising to promote a concept that doesn't exist anywhere else in the world, yet Americans feel that somehow we are Exceptional.  No, we are not.  We won't be exceptional until we wake up and determine for ourselves what we consider to be exceptional.

Audy Murphy was exceptional.  Newt Gingrich isn't.  Audy probably understood what was necessary to be exceptional, although never would have touted it, whilst Newt thinks he is exceptional and could make America exceptional again. 

He's wrong.

I'm not saying that America can't again become exceptional, I'm just saying let's stop naming ourselves and work towards those of the world calling us such.

We're missing all the important points.  Politics play too much of a part in all of our endeavors and we, the American people, continually lose.

Politics take the fact out of facts.  By defining America as something it hasn't been since WWII, we define ourselves as impossible to beat.  Yet we can be defeated by our own misconception of just who we are.

So I'm not willing to allow Newt Gingrich to define whom I am by suggesting that I subscribe to his ideas of a non-existent society.

I don't care how well he can devise plans for returning to power, his plans do not include the American people, but the return of an non-existent American Exceptionalism, obviously based upon his own appraisal of himself.

I Can't Make This Stuff Up

Geez, What Are You Smoking, And Where Can I Get Some?

It is my intention to discuss a number of items under this heading, the number of which I do not know.

However, I'm pretty certain that there will be widely cast subjects both old and new, hence this may again become one of my haphazard series.  Hopefully there will be at least some decent articles coming out of the series, but we'll just have to see.

In part I will be bringing in some of my previous articles on such topics on which I have before written if indeed my prognostications have been proven correct, or at least not proven wrong.  In some cases I will use portions of my own writing to expand upon a topic with a new slant.

In no case am I intending to use other people's ideas to support my own and then call the series my own writing.  I've hated this form of writing, and I really hate the research required for footnoting.  If I use quotes from other people, in some cases I will have the quoted source, but in others it is likely that everyone know who said what when, and I will leave that aspect up to some easily done internet research.

I will include this prelude to each of my articles because I don't want to make everyone go back and find out what I was doing, as many blogs force you to do.  I will do the research on my own material and include it, as much of what I've written over the last 10 years is actually printed out because no blog site properly did backups and I didn't trust them.

So this is just the introduction to this series.  I've written a series before, and unfortunately I never got back to some of the topics I had desired to talk about, so these won't be numbered.  They'll just be super titles.
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Just days after I decided to do this series of columns, I get John Ensign tossed into my lap.

Today, I got Osama bin Laden thrown into my lap as a pornmeister.

I don't know whether to laugh or cry, split them up into two different columns, or run them as one. 

The similarities are so ridiculous that one's mind bogles.

Ah, but the similarities don't stop there.

Let's take Allende's overthrow by Agusto Pinochet and the aftermath of his demeaning.  Seems he was a cocaine addict, a cross dresser, and had a beautiful red dress to prove it.  Then Noriega became that cocaine addict, cross dresser, and lo and behold, a photo of the same red dress.

Uday Hussein apparently loved to work out in his opulent gym, but he had full sized posters of the Bush twins on the wall.

Now Osama bin Laden is a porn addict.

Surprise, surprise.

Well, I guess I'm going to write about both John Ensign and Osama bin Laden in the same column.

Sorry John, but you brought it upon yourself.  You can bet that bin Laden understands your urges and even your tenacity since he has multiple wives or those he would like to have as wives too.

I mean, what's the damned difference in this circumstance?  A man desires a women, pursues her to abandonment on her part, and then professes love when he was getting all the milk from the cow without owning the cow.

Our sexual mores are somewhat askew when we choose to have a tryst with another man's wife rather than actually taking sexual relief in readily available porn, but it defines the difference between one man who was the most despicable man to the free world, and a man of the free world who did despicable things.

I'm not certain I like where this is going, but let's just wait a minute.

Do I consider John Ensign to be equal to Osama bin Laden?  No, not at all.

What I'm talking about is that when one has the ability to sway people's opinions regardless of some level of moral depravity, then they have full ability to do what they want. 

In both cases. 

Ms. Hamilton was beholding to John Ensign and he took full advantage of the situation, to the detriment of his entire family, the Hamiltons' entire family, and the voters of Nevada who re-elected him based on a lie.

We're only talking a matter of scale here, and a difference of application.

However, let me get back to bin Laden's library of porn.  I don't care.  It has nothing to do with the reason he was killed, nor do the American people need to know about his personal proclivities anymore than they need to know what their neighbors are doing behind closed doors.

I'm tired of the United States finding "additional" reasons for someone to be taken out, particularly if the government did that in the States, then there would be massive murder going on.  Just who does this government think is watching porn?

While not everyone is watching porn, do we actually want to know who is?

Should the US run rampant throughout the US and kill all the guys and gals watching porn?  Is it only worth killing for if they are watching right at the time, or is having watched any porn at all at any time in their life worthy of the death sentence?

Osama bin Laden's personal library of porn was his own business and that of his wives if they had that right to gripe.

John Ensign, on the other hand, forced his Chief of Staff's wife to have sex with him because he had the power as an employer and as a "supposed" friend of the family who paid for their children's private education and paid a $96,000 bribe to be quiet.

And if the Hamiton's had not decided to talk they would have been yet bought again for the paltry sum of $96K.  I mean, even if you only make $48k per year would it be worth the pursuit of the federal government for 2X your yearly salary?  I'd want millions in bearer bonds, which goes to show the loyalty of the Hamiltons.

How much more beholden to anyone could a person become without papers for indentured servitude or outright ownership?

John Ensign enslaved his Chief of Staff's wife by holding both of their jobs over their heads whilst he committed adultery with an unwilling participant.

I wonder if John has a beautiful Red Dress?

To Ross Douthat, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and the other Usual Suspects

Geez, What Are You Smoking, And Where Can I Get Some?

It is my intention to discuss a number of items under this heading, the number of which I do not know.

However, I'm pretty certain that there will be widely cast subjects both old and new, hence this may again become one of my haphazard series.  Hopefully there will be at least some decent articles coming out of the series, but we'll just have to see.

In part I will be bringing in some of my previous articles on such topics of which I have before written if indeed my prognostications have been proven correct, or at least not proven wrong.  In some cases I will use portions of my own writing to expand upon a topic with a new slant.

In no case am I intending to use other people's ideas to support my own and then call the series my own writing.  I've hated this form of writing, and I really hate the research required for footnoting.  If I use quotes from other people, in some cases I will have the quoted source, but in others it is likely that everyone knows who said what when, and I will leave that aspect up to some easily done internet research.

I will include this prelude to each of my articles because I don't want to make everyone go back and find out what I was doing, as many blogs force you to do.  I will do the research on my own material and include it, as much of what I've written over the last 10 years is actually printed out because no blog site properly did backups and I didn't trust them.

So this is just the introduction to this series.  I've written a series before, and unfortunately I never got back to some of the topics I had desired to talk about, so these won't be numbered.  They'll just be super-topics.

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In Ross Douthat's New York Times opinion column of today, 5/9/2011, titled "Who's Foreign Policy Is it?", I'd have to say if you have to ask, you don't know either.

Now why is that?  Perhaps because you don't know who was making the policies in the Bush administration, or that you have no clue of just what these policies where?

Is it possible to assess that President Obama is just following his predecessor's policies, or that you believe those policies were in place when Mr. Obama took office?

So is President Obama following Dick Cheney's energy policy forum suggestions or not?  How do you know?  They were secret meetings, so you don't know what the energy policies of the Bush administration were, but we do know that Dick Cheney supplied all of the policy forum attendees (who apparently shall remain nameless under classification) with maps of Iraq's massive untapped oil reserves in 2001.  This is before 9/11, before our incursion into Afghanistan and certainly before America even considered Iraq a part of the terrorism problem.

Most notably was attendee, Kenneth Lay, CEO of Enron, whose company in December of 2001 would collapse into a devastating bankruptcy which would take 6 years to iron out and leaving 800 employees with no value in their company supported stock purchasing program.

If one assumes that I am using the "guilty by association" tact, then yeah, you're probably right.  But not so much.  There is always a taint of one thing when trying to define another.  That's why you don't use the word you are defining in the sentence you use to define that word.

So let me define President Bush's policies in a single word.  Secrecy.  This desire for secrecy started out within the first month of President Bush's administration via an Executive Order that all Presidential records were under classified restriction and that the order was retroactive to previous Presidents.

You may find a Minority Congressional Special Investigations Division report at http://www.fas.org/sgp/library/waxman.pdf.

I'll get to President Obama in a little while for the major differences, but in this particular case, he rescinded Bush's original Executive Order.

In the case of a Supreme Court decision on the Energy Policy meetings, the Bush administration won and did not have to supply the American people with the information of who the participants were, therefore leaving us with no knowledge of what those policies might be.

However, President Obama has drawn up a guide to what he'd like to see as a legislative plan to include nuclear, clean coal, wind and solar as a solution, which doesn't place Big Oil in the center of possible decisions made to invade oil rich countries.

Now I say this because of Congressional testimony by Marine General Smedley Butler, Expeditionary Forces in the late 1890s and early 1900s, that he resigned because of his distaste for the US military being used to support corporate American.  Essentially his expeditionary force was used throughout Central America to force other countries to provide product to America, although ostensibly to provide support for corporations under siege by these countries.  This was a byproduct of the Monroe Doctrine, which stated that we would "protect" both hemispheres of the Americas as if any attack was upon the USA.

The real idea of the Monroe Doctrine was to stop European expansion in the Americas, but obviously was used to provide cover for Dole and others exploiting the populations and governments of Central and South America.

After the testimony of General Butler, pretty much the concept of interfering with sovereign countries fell apart in terms of overt actions.  Until the CIA.

But we're not here to talk about that.  We are here to talk about why someone like General Butler wouldn't fight for corporations, and why the Bush administration would.

Now Dick Cheney, who "searched" for an appropriate Vice Presidential candidate for George Bush and decided that he'd be the best person for the job, was in control of the Energy Policy committee meetings.  He presented these attendees with a map of the potential profits of oil futures with the invasion of Iraq.  And he did so long before the concept was presented to the American people.

One not need blame Dick Cheney alone.  There's plenty of blame to go around, and plenty of information to make one cringe on how these people got away with only one charge of obstruction of justice against "Scooter" Libby by a Special Council investigation in a totally different area of secrecy. (Valerie Plame, Joe Wilson, CIA NOC, YellowCake, Iraqi nuclear weapons).

Now I'm already going long on this one article, and I haven't touched the concept of our current President following all the policies that were instituted under George W. Bush, but the fact is that every instance of the above policy decisions have been negated by either the openness with which President Obama has committed his response, or the immediate negation of Bush's policies enacted by Executive Order.

Now the one point I want to make is that IF President Obama hasn't attacked these Executive Orders in toto it is because there are so many over the 8 years of the Bush administration that even the lawyers don't know what is effective and in effect or ineffective and yet in effect.

I'm not talking about the FBI Letters which allowed them secretly to invade an average American's life in their banking and other personal endeavors, nor the right to invade the American's home protest meetings by police authorized to incite violence.

I'm not talking about Bush policies to CAGE protest speakers, thus making them look like they were in jail, miles away from where a protest should really be held.

I'm not talking about the New York Republican Convention in 2003 where hundreds of Americans were held without charge for up to days in cages in parking garages.

I'm not talking about Republican passed laws which made it illegal to be a "subversive" in a place where the President was to speak, regardless of whether it was before or AFTER the event.

All I'm saying to Ross Douthout is show me the money.  It all its aspects.  Show me where the money went.  Show me where the $19 Billion flown to Iraq on 123 pallets went.  In testimony in Congress the people in charge said "The Iraqi don't give receipts but we know the money went to the right places."

Show me where the money went.  Halliburton with contested services received $7 Billion in contracts, and their subsidiary, KBR provided Iraq troop drinking water in oil tainted tankers.

Show me where the money went.  Custer and Battles, another Iraq contractor was tasked with providing trucks to support transport of necessary items, and they supplied trucks that didn't operate at all.  And yet they got another contract.

Show me the money, mofo.  And then tell me that President Obama has followed the policies of George W. Bush.

You have no legs to stand on.

No Americans Were Harmed.

I'm not certain that this statement could possibly be true, given the history of our military over the past 10 years, but taken strictly in the context of President Obama's notification to American that Osama bin Laden was dead, I guess I'll leave that for another article.

“No Americans were harmed,” Mr. Obama said. “They took care to avoid civilian casualties. After a firefight, they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body.” Muslim tradition requires burial within 24 hours, but by doing it at sea, American authorities presumably were trying to avoid creating a shrine for his followers. - New York Times, 5/2/2011

Well, I hope they have video of Osama being killed, because even my wife, who isn't the type to believe in conspiracies, said "If they don't have video, then Osama is still alive and the government is lying to us."

I agree in principle, but I disagree because I'm a Veteran myself, and I know in my heart what went on in the field.

Osama was not killed in a firefight as the slant put onto the words of President Obama above.  President Obama is a Constitutional Scholar and he doesn't parse words.

He said, "...After a firefight, they killed Osama bin Laden..." and that means a captive man was shot at point blank distance.  And this is why they won't have any video, and also why, even if Osama was brought to justice in word, there was no real justice done.  Justice, in the eyes of the world is either taking down a man fighting to kill his attackers (supposedly the good guys), or he's put into chains and taken to a court of law.  It appears that neither of these things occurred.

Now don't get me wrong, and there are two points here I'd like to make. 

Osama deserved to die as Al Qaeda is a ruthless organization likely to continue to take thousands of lives for no real purpose.  They aren't religious fanatics, at least at the top, but they are perfectly willing to use the religious fervor of their members to harm anyone, even while wasting the lives of those who believe.  And that's their problem.  They don't discriminate nor even try to create something new and simply have a misguided methodology to get a seat at the table.  They just kill indiscriminately, even those of their own religion, whether old men, women or children, which is forbidden by the Quaran.

So I am unconcerned that Osama bin Laden is dead.

I am concerned that the words President Obama undoubtedly deliberately used show me a picture of something I haven't thought about our military and government doing since Vietnam.  And that is point blank murdering an unarmed man, and then throwing his body out of a helicopter into the ocean.

And considering this was a group of Navy Seals, then undoubtedly the helicopters used were Marine, and the point of departure for the operation was from the Indian Ocean.

There were two reasons for this, but only one matters.  No information of this operation was absolutely known by anyone in Pakistan, therefore there could be no leaks.  There could be no such attack from Afghanistan because any information on the movements of troops or equipment would travel at the speed of light, whilst the helicopters have a slightly slower speed of travel.

And the obvious thing is "buried at sea" is a decided attempt to misdirect questions because you aren't buried at sea if your dead body is tossed out of a helicopter over the ocean.  You are fish food.

Buried at sea has a historical connotation of death under valorous conditions, and thus is a solemn undertaking with a great amount of respect for the dead.  We can be pretty certain that there was no respect for the dead in this case, and probably no one wanted any information about a 9mm bullet in bin Laden's brain, so his body had to be disposed of before getting back to the ship.  Otherwise other rules and regulations come into effect, along with official reports by officers not directly involved with the assault, and probably a coroner's report.

Again they can't have any video footage of just such events, or if they do, they cannot show them because the Muslim world would become incensed at such disrespectful treatment of the dead.

But there is video, of this I am certain.  It is just that we will never be able to see the video because what President Obama said, when taken literally, will show a captive man shot in the head, execution style at point blank range, his body thrown into the helicopter, and dumped into the sea before the helicopter got back to the ship.

I'm sorry if this offends anyone, but I listened to President Obama and heard him say exactly this.  When the media spins the story that bin Laden, an ill man needing dialysis every few days, was fighting to the death, then I have to wonder how gullible they are.  By this time, bin Laden probably couldn't even lift a weapon, much less try to shoot his way out of an assault by Navy Seals.  I'm just as certain that bin Laden thought he might get his day in court where he could continue his fanatical messages, and that itself suggests that my analysis is correct.

And still I am unconcerned that Osama bin Laden is dead.

Now can we get back to the job of continuing to bring down our force levels, get our Vets the help they need, and get the innocent people out of Gitmo and back home to their families?