Again, tremendous hero for what he did in those Vietnamese prison camp hell holes. But……..

My flippant comment about your being allowed to vote was just that, flippant. I was referring to the fact that mentally deranged individuals usually cannot/do not vote. Granted it was hyperbole, but for you to hear that flippant comment to mean that I or any other group is looking to take away your right to vote is, well, paranoid.

Florida and Michigan? Not going to rehash all that stuff, except to say that, from a lot of outsiders, it was pretty clearcut: the DNC set rules, Florida and Michigan (for whatever reasons) didn’t follow the rules, and they got punished. Was there politics at play there? You bet. But again, it’s not some underground conspiracy to eliminate people’s vote.

Now, moving on. I’m sorry that you cannot see how it may not be a good thing for our President to invade a foreign country until false premises(lying to his own countrymen to boot). It’s way off-pooint to ask “which of our cities do you want attacked first?” because that’s not the issue. Who says that invading Iraq ensured that none of our cities would suffer another terrorist attack? That wasn’t why Bush went into Iraq; that was a fall-back way-after-the-fact rationalization for why we invaded Iraq, when WMDs weren’t there as he claimed.

We went after al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, and we were having some success, and then suddenly Bush decided we had to divert our attention and go after a paper lion in Iraq. If anything put one of our cities at risk, it was that decision.

As for your closing rant on Obama the Politician, I agree, at least in part. He is a man seeking to be elected President and, like anyone else seeking that position, he wants to say and do things that will increase his chances (at least according to his own estimation). But how does that make McCain a better option? The longer this campaign goes, the more it seems that time has passed McCain by, and that he simply doesn’t have the cognitive capacity to do the job anymore.

All this is way behind the point, however, which was the silliness of many posters who feared Brownshirts in the Obama closet. On that, I believe, we can agree. The rest of the philosophical debate will play out in the next few months… and then you may have four or eight more years to rail against Obama’s policies.

It’s great to be an American.

Group virtue is not the same as collective virtue. as a collective, it’s surely lacking, but to CorbinKale’s point, that’s really NOT the point of what he’s saying.

CorbinKale says:

“I look forward to Senator Obama’s clarification, but I am not holding my breath. From my first post, you can see that I believe he was just throwing out what he thought the crowd wanted to hear, and he has no intentions of delivering anything that could be called a civilian national security force. Call me Cynical.”

Keep waiting.

You keep ignoring two inconvenient truths, Iraq was ALREADY a mess, and the U.N. voted to sanction the invasion due to Saddam’s failure to comply with the U.N. resolutions. I am not ’suggesting’ we took advantage of the situation, I am TELLING you we took advantage of the situation. You may cringe and wring your hands at the harsh realities of the world, but the alternative was more attacks in America. I may be a paleolithic hardass, but I don’t think we are perfect, and I believe you love your country. I just think you have a simplified world view, which could be remedied by a study of human nature.

You seem to be saying that the U.S. is guilty of not being moral and nice, and we need to be punished by being taken down a notch from our exalted position. Which of our cities do you want attacked first? Make it a good one so we can regain some of that world sympathy you put so much store in. And then what? I believe Heinlein once said,”It may be better to be a live jackal than a dead lion, but it is better still to be a live lion, and usually easier.”

Back to the topic at hand, you can bet Obama is trying to pull a fast one. He has no intention of doing anything he says. He wants to be President, so he is working overtime telling different groups what he thinks each wants to hear. He can’t be impeached for lying during the election, so what does he care? If he loses, he probably won’t be the candidate next time, so he is going all out. He is, certainly, the agent of ‘Change’. He has changed his position on every major issue since the Primaries. Integrity and consistency are qualities we need in a President, and those are qualities of which Obama has none.

Surely you cannot be suggesting that it is perfectly OK for us to invade another country (Iraq) so that we can create a mess in their backyard instead of our own? Because that’s about as immoral as it gets, and to even begin to think that we may have sunk so low, supposedly in the name of “democracy”, makes it pretty clear that we no longer deserve our exalted status. If that is what you believe we did in Iraq, how can you then say we’re not bullies? Under such circumstances, calling us “bullies” may be the best treatment we could expect!

And as for the Archie Bunker reference: sorry, but the “love it or leave it” BS doesn’t deserve better than Archie Bunker. Why is it so damn difficult for paleolithic hardasses to realize that some of us love our country well enough, but we’re not so arrogant to think we’re perfect and justified in whatever we do, and that we need no improvement? I’m not comparing America to another country that’s better, up and down the line, although there are some things that other countries do better than America does. But I am asking my country, America, to be all it’s capable of being.

But that’s not the issue here, anyway. It’s whether or not Barack Obama was trying to pull a fast one by suggesting that, if he got elected, he’d surreptitiously establish a fascist Brownshirt corps to deprive us of our freedoms. If you believe THAT, then I wonder if YOU live in this world with other humans.

1. We live on Earth.
2. We are dealing with humans.

Failure to realize that human nature is the primary factor in ANY interaction on this planet, will lead you to a faulty conclusion, every time. Utopian fantasies are the classic example of such deficient reasoning. They sound like great ideas, but they never survive human contact.

Archie Bunker? I never expected you to respect me, or my opinions, but there is no call to insult me. While you disparage my right to vote, I have taken an Oath to defend your rights. I am under no delusion that I will influence your world view, but there may be some who will benefit from our discussion.

When you cooly suggest that Iraq was a really convenient place for us to attract terrorists, so that they wouldn’t attack us here in the U.S. — without any regard as to whether or not Iraq might not appreciate being volunteered to act as a battleground for a battle that wasn’t theirs…

When you, in your best Archie Bunker imitation, suggest that “America, Love It or Leave It” is a “fantastic sentiment”….

your rants got all the respect they deserved.

None.

Contact Clinton for your bombing missions. I think there is another aspirin factory in Sudan.