Draining money from America’s hard working families to destroy a country that couldn’t have threatened Rhode Island was sanctioned by voters like you, the kind of voters who are more concerned with being spoken to in a PC manner than in the substance of what is being said. Our leaders are always a reflection of we the voters (when our votes are actually counted, that is), although we Democrats may be a cut or two above, say, the morons who got us into this mess. Going on five years after 9-11, tens of thousands of lives and $200 billion down the drain, the Republicans have achieved… chaos.

And while Republicans are concerned with such things as gay marriage and the heavy burden of the estate tax on the rich, the rest of us are more concerned about the war, jobs and the economy, the environment and global warming, and corporate corruption which has infiltrated and subverted the Constitutional democracy right here in our own country.

And I’m sorry if that’s too complex or “nuanced” for half our voters to figure out, so I’ll put it as simply as I can: the only real questions anyone really needs to ponder, no matter what issue we’re talking about are “Who’s getting screwed?” and “Who’s doing the screwing?”

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Pardon me, I guess I should take a lesson from the “you’re either with us or against us” diplomacy school.

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I’m not trying to “win” any people over to my way of thinking, and after the last 6 years, I really don’t care if you don’t like my attitude. I’d prefer that people begin to think for themselves rather than spout vague talking points like a bunch of unfeeling robots who fancy themselves the morality police. Geopolitics is not a team sport, no matter what the cheerleader-in-chief might have us think. What’s done in foreign policy affects real people all over the world whose blood is just as red as yours and whose tears are just as wet.

And as for alliance-building… if you look outside our borders, I think you’ll find that much of the world believes we need to change course, even when their governments succumb to political and economic pressure out of fear, not respect.

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Aside: Moron may refer to an idiotic or foolish person, it’s not necessarily referring to stupid.

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Wikipedia: Moron.

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Fools “got us into this mess.” Some of us weren’t fooled.

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So many, though reluctant to admit it. Shun clever men, and rather suffer fools. – Ivan Krylov

I don’t suffer fools lightly, but I am amused at how you try to twist the words of others to suit your sense of the so-called persecuted majority.

The majority is never right. Never, I tell you! That’s one of these lies in society that no free and intelligent man can help rebelling against. Who are the people that make up the biggest proportion of the population — the intelligent ones or the fools? – Henrik Ibsen

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a) The war distracted top officials from domestic preparedness, which remains in organizational chaos. – Evidence of a lack of domestic preparedness followed hurricanes Rita and Katrina (2005). – The antiterrorism effort, sprawls across at least 16 separate intelligence bureaus within our government. The most visible being the CIA, the FBI, the DIA, the NSA, the intelligence bureau of the State Dept., and the Department of Homeland Security.

b) The war diverted resources: active duty troops, guard and reserves; linguists and translators; materiel and weaponry. All of which might have been better used to contain the various groups within al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, and might have resulted in the capture of bin Laden at Tora Bora.

c) The occupation of Iraq repeats a direct American occupation of a Muslim nation; the thing that triggered bin Laden to begin this Jihad was the presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia after the first Gulf War. Our occupations of both Iraq and Afghanistan are the basis for terrorist recruitment that is now taking place not only in those countries, but in others around the world. This does not make us safer in the US after 9-11, just as it didn’t make our allies, Great Britain and Spain, any safer.

d) The war undermined foreign cooperation against terrorists. Our pre-emptive strike against Iraq, our violations of international law and treaties, our secret renditions, the incidents of torture, the cherry-picked intelligence, etc. have all undermined our trustworthiness in the eyes of other nations, and among the people of the Islam religion.

e) The former 9-11 commissioners issued several “report cards” reviewing how the commission’s 41 recommendations have been implemented, and gave the government five failing grades of F — including one for not providing adequate emergency communications. The overall gpa of the final report in December, if you count all 41 grades equally and ignore the incompletes given by the commissioners: 1.7. Not even a “C” average. Fortunately Mr. Bush did a bit better at Yale.

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Those anthrax attacks of 2001 are still an unsolved mystery. Those occurred over the course of several weeks beginning on September 18, 2001 (a week after the September 11, 2001 attacks).

And if we’re talking domestic terrorists, and not just generic “al-Qaeda” groups, the number of hate groups in America rose 33% from 2000 to 2005.

Still feel “safer”?

There is one God as there is one universe.

Me:

National religion: in practice, only the gods of one’s own nation are significant to the devotee.

It is impossible for any individual to exemplify all the possible ways of being human. So why assume that it is possible for a ‘being’ to exemplify all the possible ways of being divine? Why think, in other words, that there aren’t different and mutually exclusive ways of exemplifying divinity — being Allah as depicted in the Quran, for example, or being the triune God of Christianity, or the Vishnu of the Shri Vaishnavas, or the triune Goddess of the Pagan Celts?

From a Newsvine thread.