Being a war party is not surprising. I’m waiting to hear them come down on the same side as Boehner on this:

Boehner had praise, however, for Obama’s troop surge in Afghanistan and stepped-up drone attacks in Pakistan. He declined to list any benchmarks he has for measuring progress in the nine-year war, at a time of increasing violence and Obama’s replacement of Gen. Stanley McChrystal with Gen. David Petraeus.

Ensuring there’s enough money to pay for the war will require reforming the country’s entitlement system, Boehner said. He said he’d favor increasing the Social Security retirement age to 70 for people who have at least 20 years until retirement, tying cost-of-living increases to the consumer price index rather than wage inflation and limiting payments to those who need them.

All the pieces are there. All we hear lately is “we have to make choices about what gov’t can provide.” Right now most people think that when a Dem says it, like Obama, he/she means that of course we need to raise taxes. I think the days of believing that are numbered.

Conservatives have always hated Michael Steele. He’s gone the day after the election. You can pencil it in.

It’s a long story, and I’ve forgotten the details, but I think Jane expects me to chip in to keep you supplied with pencils. So consider it done.

The Dem statement is sickening. They are so lame.

This war is costing us $ and lives without any end in sight. We should be wise enough to get out of Afghanistan now and save money that could be well spent in the US. It is a wishful thinking that we would “win” this war. Where are the “professional” anti-war movement groups?????????/

I’ve long said that the only difference between the foreign policies of Ds and Rs is that the Ds go to war for humanitarian reasons too.

Which major party is the party of war? They both are. Only those that haven’t been paying attention for the past fifty years would believe otherwise. The sooner we all get over the erroneous belief that there is a substantial difference between the goals of the two major US political parties, the sooner the possibility of meaningful change will become reality.

In the meantime, it’s going to be rough sledding for we poor folks and our children.

I have a theory, fwiw. I believe that the Internet has taken a lot of steam out of movements to take to the streets. Back during Nam we didn’t have this and people had only one way to really express their feelings. Now everyone vents in this way. Not that I don’t like it. I love it because I would not be able to take to the streets so this is my way to be angry.

Though I most definitely have no love for the DNC, I was totally blown away by their statement. It seems like vintage first term W supporter type thing to say. Now people can see that the choice between voting for Democrats and voting for Republicans is a “false choice” (to use Obama’s terms) and they can instead take their votes and their money elsewhere. You don’t have to vote for the corporatist warmonger with a R next to the name nor do you have to vote for the corporatist warmonger with the D next to the name.

I think you are right but I wonder which way is more effective?

It isn’t just the parties themselves that are prowar. How many progressives sites (excluding this one) have actually had the nerve to question anything Dem on this ongoing murder spree in Afghanistan? Very few. When GDubya was still Preznut, it was a daily dose of antiwar. Now? Nary a peep.

My critter, Mazie Hirono, voted for the timeline for withdrawal from Afghanistan, yet, voted only ‘present’ on defunding the war…!

Democratic Party ∩ Dancing Israelis ≠ Ø

Very confused.

That makes two of us…! She is a co-chair of the Progressive Caucus, too…! 8~(

Dear Jon,
There are also tens of thousands of dead Afghans whose lives are no less egregiously ‘wasted’ who I think deserve a mention.

He shouldn’t walk back the statement. Except for the part about PBO starting the war, it was the truth.

I have to admit that part of me is glad the Dems are shoving this crap back in the Republican’s faces. How’s that taste Mr. Steele?

I’m sure somewhere the ghost of LBJ is having a chuckle.

Money wants war without end and Democrats want money without end.

Eli is upstairs!
Through The Looking Steele

A match made in hell.

Perhaps he’s following the Obama roadmap to running for Generalissimo.

Guys, progressives are going to have to LEAVE THIS PARTY. We cannot support them. If we do, we will be chiselling in stone the message that the democratic corporate hogs, just like their compeers in the GOP, can continue to crap on us at their will.

We have to start talking and weighing the pros and cons of purposely taking the party down, even if it puts the repubs back in power temporarily.

I understand all of the concerns about giving them the SCOTUS appointments, etc., but at this point, I’m thinking that we are so screwed, what have we got to lose.

I’m sending Alan Grayson $20 from my next SS check. All things considered, it will be appropriate and fun.

Tuttle; a question:

Do the democrats doing as Hirono did, really believe that the war(s) is worth prosecuting? Or are they just political cowards like Obama, afraid of the heat from the right?

You’re right as a snake, Mull.

Black republicans are party-jewels, to the GOP. To be worn and paraded around at opportune times when the inconvenience of elections rear their ugly heads, and then, put back in the closet until the next one.

As progressives dealing with Obama’s feckless shit, we should know the feeling.

Well said.

The ship has to go down for any good to come.
Support ‘em and you are supporting the bull crap they have been putting out.What’s the worse that can happen if they go down …..not a damn thing.how many of us have already lost our jobs,lost our homes ….and pretty near loosing our dignity.

Well if you haven’t yet,believe me it’s on it’s way cuz the incompetence & corruption in this WH is on par with the GWBush WH.And those of yous on Social security…well it ain’t long before they start talking about cutting your benefits.

Don’t look now, JW, but, as you may know, we weren’t attacked from Afghanistan. The “we only invaded because we were attacked from there” myth is belied by the official narrative itself. Don’t take my word for it, ask Pepe Escobar, ask William Engdahl.

Excerpted from:
Vietnam-lite is unveiled
By Pepe Escobar
December 3, 2009

Real men go to Riyadh

Obama still says Afghanistan is a “war of necessity” – because of the September 11, 2001 attacks. Wrong. The Bush administration had planned to attack Afghanistan even before 9/11. See Get Osama! Now! Or else … Asia Times Online, August 30, 2001.)

“War of necessity” is a polite remix of the same old neo-conservative “war on terror”; blame it on the “towelheads” and exploit public ignorance and fear. That’s how al-Qaeda was equated with the Taliban and how Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11, according to the neo-con gang.

For all his lofty rhetoric, Obama is still pulling a Bush, not making any distinction between al-Qaeda – an Arab jihadi outfit whose objective is a global caliphate – and the Taliban – indigenous Afghans who want an Islamic emirate in Afghanistan but would have no qualms in doing business with the US, as they did during the Bill Clinton years when the US badly wanted to build a trans-Afghan gas pipeline. On top of it, Obama cannot admit that the “Pak” neo-Taliban now exist because of the US occupation of “Af”.

Taking pains to distance his new policy from the Vietnam trauma, Obama stressed, “Unlike Vietnam, the American people were viciously attacked from Afghanistan.” Wrong. If the official narrative of 9/11 holds, the hijackers were trained in Western Europe and perfected their skills in the US.

And even while he still emphasizes the drive to “disrupt, dismantle and defeat” al-Qaeda and deny it a “safe haven”, Obama is fully contradicting his own national security advisor, General James Jones, who has admitted that there are fewer than 100 al-Qaeda jihadis in Afghanistan.

The myth of al-Qaeda has to be exposed….

These days, there are even fewer al-Qaeda there. So if we weren’t attacked from there, and there aren’t any more bogeymen left (they’re over the border in Pakistan, aren’t they?), then really, WTF are we doing there?

It’s the dominance, dammit! Namely, the full-spectrum dominance.

Zbigniew Brzezinski on Iran Pt3
Zbigniew Brzezinski: An Israeli attack on Iran would be a disaster January 17, 2010

The Afghan war and the ‘Grand Chessboard’ Pt2
Brzezinski: Six months before Soviet invasion, we financed the Mujahideen January 15, 2010

The Afghan war and the ‘Grand Chessboard’ Pt.1
Zbigniew Brzezinski on Afghanistan and the American strategy for Eurasia and the world January 13, 2010

Afghanistan and global dominance Pt1
Engdahl: US-China strategy driving Afghan war, but no real long-range thinking in place January 4, 2010

Why is the USA in Afghanistan?
Engdahl: Key objective is a permanent military presence in Asia December 9, 2009

both parties are the war parties.

I have been stating this for years.

few listen.

americans are imperialists to the core.

a recent survey found only 20% of americans wanted to reduce military spending.

mega military requires wars for profits.

they know if they dont use it they will lose it.

and americans are full of people that want to fight in wars.

it is our national culture.

we love our guns and our wars.

we even have politicans shooting machine guns to win elections.

god bless americans truly we are a christian nation.

Our stock market’s 1/2 year performance gives us an opportunity to see who investors believe in (who’s benefitting from Obama & team’s policies.) I hope Progresives are irate that the very money center Banks that trashed our economy for the next generation are about the ONLY sector doing well! Thank Obama, he made them whole by burying us for the next generation with THEIR debt!
Excerpted from Doug Noland, “Prudent Bear” 07/02/10:
“… the S&P500 (down 8.3% y-t-d), the Dow (down 7.1% y-t-d). The S&P 400 Mid-Caps (down 3.4%), and the small cap Russell 2000 (down 4.2%). The Morgan Stanley Cyclicals (down 7.8%), and the Transports (down 4.1%). The Morgan Stanley Consumer index (down 5.7%), and the Utilities (down 9.3%). The Banks (up 5.3%)….”
Happy 4th, “Clarence Thommas” Obama. But, I doubt your give-aways will gain you admittance to their club. They’re the elite, you’re just a one-term wannabee who shafted all those who desparately believed your message of “hope” & “change”.

Gotta agree, researcher. What’s so surprising about perpetual war among peoples who believe life itself is a holy war between good and evil? If that’s the way you want to be in the world, don’t come crying to me about always being at war.

Here’s a thought: maybe life isn’t a perpetual motion bogus holy war cash machine. Maybe we’re not lifeless puppets, Newtonian voodoo dolls, mere appetites on two legs, oh so easily jacked.

Maybe we’re organisms who’ve strangely come to believe in themselves, and their source: nature itself, as mechanisms, the behavior of which, ever and always, is to be determined by outside forces applying ever greater leverage.

Maybe, just maybe, if we stop using war metaphors for life itself, and stop using machine metaphors for living, growing, human beings, just maybe, we might someday see an end to war as the American way of being in the world.

(From my diary yesterday, on Pepe Escobar’s most recent article in Asia Times Online:)

Here’s the crux of the problem of being an American in the world today. WTF is up with the bizarre assumption, that everyone else’s wars are for religious reasons, but our Pentagon is just a perfectly logical, rational, force of nature, and its high priests of god-like kinetic activity are only meteorologists? What makes us think our science, economy, and military themselves aren’t religiously inspired? Unless we downloaded “the American Way of Life” via a direct link to the freakin’ Vulcan Science Academy, how could they not be?

My project is akin to getting us to look at the lenses through which we look at everything else. Our mythos functions as the anamorphoscope that shapes the world in which we act prior to our acting in it.

Ours is the 19th-century Newtonian myth of the cosmos as a construct, a mechanism, the behavior of which ever and always is determined by that holiest of holies, leverage. But we’ve neglected the obvious conclusion.

That’s why we see our military men as weather men. They are the high priests, complete with fancy robes, of the temples of God’s own levers. War, this mythos believes, is the way the world is made to work. Got a problem, any problem under the sun, sea, or earth? The religion of this belief system has only one commandment: apply more leverage.

Bad news, my friends and kin (by the principle of universal common descent, we’re all kin, baby, kin). If the cosmos is just a machine, to be bullied about by our endowments of limitless leverage, then so, too, are we humans, we’re just lifeless Newtonian voodoo dolls, oh so easily jacked, and the masters of war are perfectly justified in treating us the way they do.

I remember when the democrats actually were the war party. JFK,LBJ anyone? Until the 1968 election when Nixon won on a peace in Vietnam platform. Then it all changed, the republician party morphed into the eternal war party and the democratic party became the peacenik party, the party of wimps. Down to today when we have the democrats urging eternal war, right next to the rethuglicians urging eternal war.
But neither party is really telling the truth, are they. The truth of the matter is that congress, both parties, is simply doing-and voting-what they are told to do by their paymasters. The corporations that have been sucking all the money out of the treasury are the ones behind the eternal war. The military-Industrial complex(or is it the military-congress-industrial complex)is out to sell more war toys, congress is always ready to push money for war toys and so our money disappears into the pockets of the corps and from them into the pockets of our corrupt congress and the corrupt bureaucracy that is DoD procurement. In return we get major cost over runs(example, Navy ship San Antonio, $1B cost over run on original contract, after ship removed from ship yard and taken over by Navy still more cost to repair faulty construction-$750M, after emergency stop on first deployment requires a 40 man team to repair leaky oil cooling system cost-3 weeks and $150M, now sitting at Norfolk unable to deploy due to massive problems that will take months and probably another $1B to fix. And who was the contractor? A privately ship yeard that had never built a large ship won the contract with a low bid and then sold out to Northrup Grumann which moved the unfinished ship to a bigger yard that did have the experience needed to build a large complicated ship. Who in the Navy agreed to the original contract? The shipyard was in Louisiana so its congressional group pushed hard to get the lowest bid approved-see bush DoD. Once more the MIC complex wins. Massive overruns and in the end no one, except our soldiers and sailors, pays the price for shoddy workmanship or total failure of the war toy. As the USMC will be finding out shortly when they next deploy to A’stan with an unproven squad automatic weapon(SAW). Just like they did in Vietnam when they turned in all their M-14s for the “new, better” M-16-in one instance an entire company turned in the old for the new and went out on patrol, only to discover that none of the M-16s worked.(oops) lucky for them they were not attacked by VC/NVA and with the assistance of their unit snipers-who still had M-14s-they made it safely back to base camp.
I really hope that this one turns out better, but fear that it will not.(They are turning in a belt fed-american made- SAW for a foreign H & K design that fires a 30 round clip instead,resulting in a much lower rate of fire and the need to carry lots more ammo. note the power of the mega corps) Back in the day(vietnam) there was a Stoner that was belt fed that used a 250 round clip. I often wonder why that was never issued outside the SEALS.

Supporting Democrats is a serious political disorder, like alcoholism or returning again & again to an abusive spouse who repeatedly lies to you. It’s easy to fall off the wagon, to make excuses & rationalizations for it.

Even many whose views are developed enough to recognize such truths as the fundamental rottenness of the 2-party system & the complicity of Democrats in all of the Republicans’ major crimes, are still unable to draw the logical consequences of these insights. (Those so naive that they still conceive of Democrats as being the “opponents” of Republicans are another case altogether.)

The central point is this: capitalist society permits the Democrats to be one of the 2 allowed parties for a very definite reason. It’s not because the Democrats “serve the people.” It’s because in a subtle but effective way, they help the capitalists keep the populace under control by providing them with the illusion of possible change. TPTB don’t want the people “served.” They want them managed, or controlled.

It is the job, the central social function of the Democrats to always be dangling before the people’s noses vague pseudo-hints of possible change, so as to keep them from bolting from bourgeois politics altogether. It is the Democrats’ intention to never deliver meaningful change, but rather to keep dangling hints of it alluringly forever. This produces control — a populace habituated to remain safely within the lines required by ruling class interests.

This is why the Democrats NEVER paint a picture of US history that’s the slightest bit accurate — they want a brainwashed population every bit as much as the Republicans do. This is why they NEVER are willing to set forth an honest socioeconomic analysis of why things are as they are — they much prefer that people not understand such things.

As long as a large chunk of voters can be deceived by the seemingly “nicer guy” act of the Democrats, there is no hope whatever of coming to grips with the core problems of our society. The most dangerous trends — a wasteful consumer society, environmental destruction, grotesque social inequality, and an uncontrollable propaganda/war machine — cannot even be approached within the framework of bourgeois politics, because they all serve ruling class interests. This is what is really being protected, when people opt to support Democrats just because they seem less blatantly cruel on TV.

Remember in your support of the Dems that means you are implicitly supporting their policies which means you are complicit in large-scale atrocities.

The record is long and very public. It is a tremendous leap right over the historical record for anyone to think supporting the Dems is in any way meaningful unless your concept of “getting things done” means rubber stamping Empire Lite.

There is no “party of war,” both parties are war parties. They both get kick backs, they both will endlessly fund the wars, 90% of them have stock in Boeing, Raytheon, or whatever.

Its just like there is no “little people” party, they are both pro-corporate, pro-war, only concerned with the profits of the ruling class in minds.

Just vote 3rd party or don’t vote at all. I’m sick of this “choosing the lesser of two evils” bullshit. Either I’m represented or not, I don’t care anymore, I’m not “picking the winner” I’m picking the person who will never win because they are who represent my interests.

Democrats: We believe excactly what the GOP believes, only slightly less.

This is for KnowBuddhau@31 ,These are some beautiful Carl Sagan remix video’s to brighten the day! War Sucks!

http://www.symphonyofscience.com/videos.html