LibertyLee @ 23

I think military power is a key aspect in this war.

Power must be used wisely. So far we’ve seen it wasted.

Our conclusion is our leaders are either wasting it intentionally or they’re stupid and they should be removed.

What other conclusion could we draw?

He [Osama] plays on our disunity.

If he was behind the 9/11 attacks, then it was sheer violence he employed. Everything since then has been hot air that hasn’t hurt us.

I agree we are experiencing great disunity in the political sphere. But, I don’t see ObL having anything to do with it. It’s a political fight going back a long way and based on some fundamental disagreements about power sharing.

… I just want the Unity we all felt after 9/11 to go after these abominations on humanity and destroy them before they do to us what the Huns did to the Roman Empire.

It was the crazy (and illegal) idea of George W. Bush to switch our military from Afghanistan to Iraq which has split American support.

Our conclusion is that he’s incompetent and/or criminal and should be removed.

Do you disagree that an incompetent or criminal leader should be removed?

Ask HIM why he is destroying our Unity!

I believe we need to review 9/11 very very carefully in order to really feel certain we know what happened and who, in fact, is our enemy. There are a lot of questions and some very iffy answers.

I conclude that if you don’t know who your enemy is then everyone you kill is an act of murder.

Are you okay with that?

We’re not okay with murdering and that’s why we want to stop the war in Iraq, aside from the sheer waste of resources and lives.

LibertyLee @ 31

petwrecker @ 26

but, but,….

We NEED oil. We will continue to need oil for about 50 years. We can develop alternative sources while we are still consuming oil. But it doesn’t make any sense to P.O. the Saudi Royals who don’t like bin Laden–indeed are bin Laden’s key target–any more than it does to hurt Musharref…

We began to work on alternative fuels in the 1970s, but the Reagan administration killed those efforts in the early 1980s. If we depend upon the Republicans we’ll never get those alternative fuel sources. After all, they’re oil men (Cheney & Bush).

Are you okay with fighting endless wars to get oil when we aren’t really investing anything in securing an alternative?

If you agree, then why would you support Bush & Co?

LibertyLee @ 44

selise @ 29

no one objects to going after terrorists (well, except the terrorists). i wish we would actually go after them – doesn’t look to me as though bushco is serious about that though.

There is no established evidence except from the Terrorists (or their Fifth Column supporters) that the United States has participated in terrorism.

I suppose that depends upon you feel about our occupation and killing of innocents every day in Iraq. Is it terrorism or something else?

We have been fighting the enemy.

In Iraq it’s been said there are no more than 1500 Al Qaeda types. We have 160,000 troops. Why can’t we defeat them after 5 years? why are we involved at all with the other groups in Iraq? Mostly I’ve heard, including from John Kerry in 2004, that our plan now is to quell violence so Democracy can take hold (the “political solution”). But, then, once in a while we hear about ‘fighting the enemy’. Are we there to fight Al Qaeda types or just to waste military resources and lives?

If you have leaders (political or military) who don’t know the objective and continue to waste resources and lives without any measurable gain, then aren’t they incompetent and/or criminal?

What other conclusion could we come to?

If someone constructively has a better solution for FIGHTING the enemy I have yet to hear it from the Left.

Maybe you’ve heard the words, but haven’t realized that pulling out of Iraq would free us to go anywhere else we found the enemy.

We don’t see much enemy in Iraq and we don’t see our military going after them, so we conclude Iraq isn’t the place to fight. Then, add on top of that, the recent reports show Al Qaeda at pre-9/11 strengths and Iraq seems to be losing the larger war.

What other conclusion could we draw except that we need to leave Iraq if we’re to ever WIN the Global War.

What I am pleading for on this 9/11–before the Election–is to stop the sniping against “Bushco” so we can all work together to FIX the problem of bin Laden and his Islamo-Fascist supporters.

We’re not trying to ’snipe’ at Bush & Co, we concluded they’re incompetent and/or criminal, so we’re trying to remove them. We see them as an obstacle to solving a lot of our problems.

If you agree they’re incompetent and/or criminal, then how could you not want to remove them?

I still believe in my heart of hearts that the Left cannot be as negative against America as it sounds.

Stop associating our talk about Bush & Co with America. Dubya is not synonymous with America.

We love America and are trying to protect it from the incompetent and/or criminal Busy & Co.

If you were to see them as incompetent and/or criminal, then how could you not want to remove them?

Maybe I’m naive and my compatriots on the Far Right are more accurate about the motivations of you folks,

If you can see how we arrive at different conclusions, then there’s hope for you to think for yourself and begin to see some flaws in the way people on the Right label us.

but I keep reading Christy and Jane and down underneath it you all SOUND like thinking reasoning people. But where the rest of it comes from, I don’t know…

If you can’t see how our analysis of the situation leads to our conclusions, then God save ya. It’s all pretty simple.

The Everett many-worlds interpretation, formulated in 1956, holds that all the possibilities described by quantum theory simultaneously occur in a “multiverse” composed of mostly independent parallel universes and stuff. This is not accomplished by introducing some new axiom to quantum mechanics, but on the contrary by removing the maxim of the collapse of the wave container: All the possible consistent states of the measured system and the measuring apparatus (including the observer) are present in a real physical quantum superposition. (Such a superposition of consistent state combinations of different systems is called an entangled state – see Virginia, Chuck’s mom, etc..) While the multiverse is “caused” by something and we have no free will, we perceive non-deterministic behavior governed by probabilities (or dumb fucking luck, if you’re Bob), because we can observe only the universe, i.e. the consistent state contribution to the mentioned superposition, we inhabit. Everett’s interpretation is perfectly consistent with John Bell’s experiments and makes them intuitively understandable, even if I’m not. However, according to the theory of quantum decoherence, the parallel universes will never be accessible for us, making them, like Britney Spears, physically meaningless. This inaccessibility can be understood as follows: once a measurement is done, the measured system becomes entangled with both the physicist who measured it and a huge number of other particles, some of which are photons flying away towards the other end of the universe; in order to prove that the wave function did not collapse one would have to bring all these particles back and measure them again, together with the system that was measured originally. This is completely impractical, but even if one can theoretically do this, it would destroy any evidence that the original measurement took place (including the physicist’s memory), so we’re fucked!

It was an act of political terrorism, but what, after all this time, has changed? We still get our oil from the nation that spawned these terrorists. We still act — on a national level — as if there are parts of the world that are our property to do with as we please. We still have thousands of Muslims world wide who wish to do us harm, and that cohort grows every day we are in Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

Those who were murdered on 9-11 are not coming back, and as much as a tragedy that is for the relatives, friends and loved ones, it pales in comparison to the thousands of deaths we witness in this country every year due to gun violence and traffic collisions.

9-11 and its aftermath were a concern for me right up until the time some genius decided that the victims’ families should be compensated for their loss and our craven political leadership decided it was in my best interest to surrender — without my consent — the freedoms I enjoy (and have defended) as a citizen, with the passage of the odious Patriot Act.

The only thing that has changed is that we now have an international debacle on our hands, we’ve created a barbaric situation in Iraq and our leaders are a-hankerin’ for war with Iran, and I’m supposed to reflect on 9-11?

The only thing that changed on 9-11 is that our political leadership gave this dry-drunk cokehead the ability to destroy my nation from within, without a damn bit of help from Osama, Al Zarqawi or any other radical Muslim who wants us all to live in the 7th century.

Namaste, everyone. From the bottom of my heart to the bottom of yours, I love you all.

….I just want the Unity we all felt after 9/11 to go after these abominations on humanity and destroy them before they do to us what the Huns did to the Roman Empire.

Teh stupid, it burns!

The Huns lived next to the Roman Empire, their military technology was in some ways superior, and there were a lot of them. Just how are the “Islamofascist” hordes going to overrun the United States, or even Europe?

You need to remember what Lincoln said:

Theirs was the task (and nobly they performed it) to possess themselves, and through themselves us, of this goodly land, and to rear upon its hills and valleys a political edifice of liberty and equal rights; ’tis ours only to transmit these,–the former unprofaned by the foot of the invader; the latter undecayed by lapse of time. This, our duty to ourselves and to our posterity, and love for our species in general, imperatively require us to perform.

How, then, shall we perform it? At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? By what means shall we fortify against it? Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant to step across the ocean and crush us at a blow? Never. All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest, with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not, by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years.

At what point, then, is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reaches us, it must spring up among us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.

There is even now something of ill omen among us. I mean the increasing disregard for law which pervades the country; the growing disposition to substitute wild and furious passions in lieu of the sober judgment of courts; and the worse than savage mobs for the executive ministers of justice. This disposition is awfully fearful in any community; and that it now exists in ours, though grating to our feelings to admit, it would be a violation of truth and an insult to our intelligence to deny. (source)

http://www.truthout.org/docs_03/050703G.shtml