@ 103 “allowed” ? Bisnezz is biznezz, right? America sold them a lot of weaponry and some nuke tech was stolen.

@113 JFK made a lot of enemies in a very short time. Demanding Israeli inspections probably didn’t help — not that I believe they were on “the grassy knoll”. Anyway, Executive Order 11110 didn’t help either.

Since it’s known America sold chemical and biological WMD to Saddam, it’s not a stretch to remember “biznezz is bidnezz”.

America played a role in Israel’s birth, and has made numerous commitments to her. For its part, Israel has been a staunch ally and a democracy. Support for Israel is in America’s strategic interests. It is not based upon some fairy tale. (I presume you mean religion.) The Holocaust was real, and it is the reason Jews established a state in the ancestral homeland of the Jews and the eternal capital of the Jewish people.

I don’t know — and I don’t care — what is the underpinning of the Xianist support for Israel. But even a blind chicken gets an occasional kernal of corn. They can be wrong on everything else, but right on this.

Israel has nuclear weapons, although they have never said so publicly. That’s why they don’t sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. There is no evidence that they have biological weapons. The allegation is a slander that ought not to be repeated here.

“”eternal capital of the Jewish people” hogwash! Just because a bunch of Jewish guys wrote a book called the Bible and claimed that territory as Jewish territory does not make it so or gods word (who ever god is) Those Jewish guys who wrote the bible were early propagandist, master spinners and real estate brokers..

Giuliani, another pockmarked face of the Hydra.

But what enables his ilk to gain and retain power?

How about a great nation morphing from producer to overfed, indolent, complacent consumers…A process decades in the making, and occuring with the full acquiescence of the majority?

A nation so beguiled by forbidden lusts and the pursuit of subjective happiness that it could not excise the political cancers at its core…In fact, allowing them to grow in power again and again, through inertia or selfish direction?

…that trumpeted enshrined freedoms in a self-congratulatory way, yet supported the worst sort of dictators and corrupt politicians available in far flung countries as a method of exerting and retaining global hegemony…And destroying them when they became less compliant?

…And so consumed with unspoken xenophobic fears that one day of catastrophe was all that was needed to justify discarding two centuries of societal touchstones, so that the masses could feel ’safe’ in a world that they barely cared to understand anyway?

‘We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.
Power is not a means, it is an end.
One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.’

And so it goes.

That’s it in a nutshell.

For those of us who watched, say, NY1 during the Rudy years, that’s almost an axiom. The guy did a great job of showing up at whatever was on the news and looking “in charge”. I don’t think anyone would deny he is absolutely excellent at that. From there… well, there’s a lot to argue about and a lot of substance behind the criticism, from a huge variety of players.

But if we are faced with defeating Rudy, we absolutely have to tar and feather him with “attention whore”, because it will stick; it’s true, and it tells us why he shouldn’t be president. Start looking for clips of Rudy preening and cue “I feel pretty”.

Please visit the Schapira blog, ”What we know so far …”

”… and tell ‘em Big Mitch sent ya!”

The exception that proves the rule is Defending Israel in the war against Hezbollah and a couple others from August 2006.

I stand by my defense of Israel.

Please visit the Schapira blog, “What we know so far …”

“… and tell ‘em Big Mitch sent ya!”

“Now Giuliani is running for president — as the hero of 9/11. George Bush has balls, too, but even he has to bow to this motherfucker.”

I plan on not brining up Rudy’s realtionship with the organized crime figure Bernie Kerik, or the fact that Rudy pays his wife to be a wife and has her under contract, or Rudy the G’s apparent aversion to family values, a lot.

My ex-wife was part of the detail that was charged with taking care of the kids during the pre-divorce days…schlepping them to the movies because Hanover was out trying to make a buck because Rudy wasn’t giving her any money and Rudy was too busy going through his mid-life whatever that he had no time for the kids.

In essence, they were props but the cops who were responsible for them were amazed at the amount of time they were left alone; not in the sense of not having someone around because the Intelligence Division people were there, but it was the parental absence that was glaring.

At the same time the commanding officer for Manhattan North tried to get us to order our cops to arrest homeless people sleeping on the benches along Fifth Avenue in the wee hours of the morning because when the Police Commissioner (Bratton) came home from Elaine’s after a typical night he didn’t want to have to see homeless people. None of my cops ever moved or collared anyone.

But that was New York under Rudy. Zealous cops were arresting people for trespass who just happened to be sitting on their own stoops when they wouldn’t disperse after being told to do so…until I had the sergeants and lieutenants instruct them on the importance of being involved with the community instead of occupying it.

But that was the impression that was conveyed from the top….even though “those people” live there, it’s your precinct, do something about it. When the PC and Mayor’s office perceived resistance, they flipped.

Rudy would be much, much worse than Bush because he’s a middle class guy who got to where he is by scheming and lying instead of the scion of a connected family.

Ed*ard Teller says
June 3rd, 2007 at 12:41 pm

The site listed in Mitch’s name I don’t think is correct. I about fell out of my chair when I saw that, but I noticed the misspelling in the url.

And as cited here by the IAEA: Nuclear Power Production: – no data available -