That's too funny... The Boobs of Truth.

Nanna

Originally written by John Bunch on August 2, 2008 12:37 AM we cannot say that Bush's efforts have led to or allowed terrorism. The U.S. has not been hit by terrorists since 9/11. Yes, from a moral and legal point of view, Bush's actions might be wrong, but from a pure security point of view, I think you can argue that they have been successful.

Excerpts from a review of

Indeed, since 9/11, the Bush administration has undertaken only one genuinely strategic gambit – rolling the dice on Iraq and inviting al-Qaeda and other jihadists to make their stand there. But this is a post-hoc rationale: the Bush administration obviously undertook the Iraq war on a very different strategic basis.

The Bush administration’s numerous critics ridicule US counterterrorism policy in great measure within the same narrow framework that the administration has used. Sometimes the cost-benefit analysis would scarcely pass muster in an undergraduate economics class – the political scientist John Mueller, in his bestselling Overblown (2006), or the journalist James Fallows, each breezily announcing that the chances of getting killed in a terrorist attack are less than getting struck by lightning, or that 9/11 killed 3,000 people whereas 40,000 Americans die each year in automobile accidents and, ergo, well what? ...

Leaving aside the frequent starting assumption that the Bush administration has illegitimately grabbed executive power, and that this, rather than terrorism, is the primary thing against which to protect, the fundamental factual claim is that the probability of a successful attack has been seriously exaggerated. How to interpret, in other words, the fact that the US has not been hit on its territory since 9/11: as evidence of the effectiveness of the anti-terrorism efforts, or evidence that the threat was always more chimerical than real? Thus, in Barack Obama’s reckoning, Islamist terrorism is just one threat among so many: climate change and poverty, genocide and disease. The task is to learn to do as Western European countries do, and manage terror and terrorism, preferably within the existing confines of the criminal justice system. A certain amount of terrorism is normal, because a certain amount of criminality is normal. ...

As a believer in liberty and consent, I should greatly like to share Philip Bobbitt’s hopes for the market-state. It does not take a conservative to wonder, however, whether this is enough to sustain liberal democracy in the face of spiritual threats. A long tradition of what Lawrence Solum has called the “left Burkeans” – Christopher Lasch, for example, or Zygmunt Bauman – has argued that the market is as much socially corrosive of the values of liberal democracy as it is materially supportive. ...

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article4384048.ece

I guess now you all know why I am so depressed and quote glorious periods of the past and don't read newspapers or watch the news anymore. I can go to Rome and be sure not to be mugged in the streets by the poor, the junkies, the dispossessed, the hungry: I am being robbed by the men in suit and ties in Parliament, in the banks, in the centres of power. The billionnaire who sends the troops to round up the poor people in the streets, annuls all trials for corruption and tax evasion against himself and his friends, keeps a stableman , who is a member of the mafia, and protects him from the accusation of belonging to organized crime and having taken part in the murder of honest magistrates in Sicily (the same region that voted the horrible man almost unanimously).

Honest magistrates give up or are killed; a man who associates with starlets and is shown courting them, so much that his wife (Veronica Lario) refuses to be seen in public with him and asked for public apologies from the pages of a well known magazine, this man, who was an entertainer and singer ( a clown) on ships and became a billionaire because his friend Craxi, ex- prime minister, lend him OUR tax money to build a horror of a city called Milano 2, Craxi who died in exile in Hamamet, to escape being arrested and tried for corruption and appropriation of funds, this tasteless, vulgar man, covers "nudities" of masters he does not even understand and is going to change a Constitution, which is, when respected, a jewel.

As for you Nanna, I am surprised at your worries because you were detained for an hour at the border. At most you would have been taken to Guantanamo, where the cells are dry, the food is as good as any american restaurant (read post 152053, by John Bunch) and, if you had been detained for three years without being charged with a crime or seen a lawyer, still you would not have been tortured ( not as much anyway) as if you had ended up in the hands of the Horrible Frogs, the French. As for the americans and the english Abu Graib was an exaggeration of the media and even if something happened it was not to nice clean Danish people, but to wogs who probably were guilty anyway and were used to it, having being mistreated already by the troops of Satan Saddam Hussein.

Gemma, more and more depressed.

If this can be of any consolation, Gemma, I begin to detect first signs of depression in some French and American friends too who have otherwise been bearing up so far...

Jacek

Speaking of our historical heritage (where was that???),

"Since the rise of the clever cavalier Silvio Berlusconi, who has now appointed the government for the fourth time and whose policies have done irreparable damage to the country's institutions and political culture, there has been ... a dramatic leap - admittedly backwards - in terms of the quality of preservation so that [Italy] is now facing the complete sell-out of its cultural assets. Berlusconi casts himself as a moderniser: the country, he says, should get rid of as much old rubbish as possible. But apparently this includes not only its traditional cultural values and the beauties of Italy's landscape, which are being sacrificed to encroaching commercialisation and privatisation, but also its monuments and cultural assets - particularly in those cases in which they can be turned into lucrative sources of income for the state which then uses the proceeds to fill the gaps in its budget or reward its loyal voters." Süddeutsche Zeitung (Germany) http://europe.courrierinternational.com/eurotopics/article.asp?langue=uk&publication=05/08/2008&cat=CULTURE&pi=1#1

Gemma,

Maybe once appointed for the fifth time to do the job, the Cavalier will do it in a more satisfactory way? He is only 72 so Italians still have plenty of time to keep testing him.

Good luck!

Jacek

This article is part of a package on the expanding power of the US presidency:

http://www.utne.com/2008-09-01/Politics/Supreme-Warlord-of-the-Earth.aspx?utm_source=iPost&utm_medium=email