Banjo

Thank you for your stimulating input on this topic. Deriding another is no substitute for vigourous debate.

Steve Madden. Good luck, engage. Many others have tried and failed on this and other blogs.

Mr Boaz,

You make a good point when you say that all in power (or fighting for it) are corrupt and that there is no squeaky clean alternative (but Jesus). And for what it’s worth, I have always understood that that is the main reason for your Bible quotes (I suspect most others on this Forum don’t).

But the bone I have to pick with Bush and Co. isn’t about the 9/11 conspiracies or simply that the Republicans are a Rightwing party. Fundamentally, my issue with the Bush Administration is that fact that they messed with the heart of democracy: The electoral system.

This is NOT something that is disputed in the US nor is it conjured by 'spin' or 'vested interest'. You can read about it at the following links…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_v._Gore#The_decision
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._presidential_election_controversy%2C_2004
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_United_States_election#Controversy_in_Florida

These three links alone provide 37 pages of full detail about the manipulation, rigging and blatant constitutional breaches over the last two presidential elections, about 5 of these pages are filled with links and references, most of which point to highly credible sources.

Now, occasionally, there have been some questionable circumstances in past elections throughout US history, but most were only claims and most of those claims were never proven - unlike now.

This (along with the unprecedented amount of constitutional breaches by the current Administration) makes your scenario above in regards to the Democrats gaining power (which mind you, are sensationalised and exaggerated) look rather petty. All this being said, I would prefer the Democrats over the Republicans any day.

Alan Grey,

LOL to you too.

” Regime change in Iraq was planned by Clinton's Administration, why wait for early 2001.”

- Err…Yeah…I already knew that. It wasn’t worth pointing out because…

1. Clinton is gone and never actually carried through with it.

2. The main topic here is about the lies of current governments, not former governments.

”Those weapons were degraded, not useless. Less effective but still capable of great damage.”

- Hardly the full-blown WMD program they apparently had.

”You opposition to the war wasn't based on whether or not saddam had such weapons…”

- How do you know that?

My opposition to the war IS partly that, but also that fact that it was started to help make some of the world’s largest multi-national corporations even richer than they already are. Now soldiers who signed-up to defend their country are being sacrificed for the pursuit for profits.

”…but you want to continue to your fantasy world in order to try and label those like Bush and Howard as liars.”

- Fantasy world? Then prove me wrong on any of my claims! My arguments are backed with proof consisting of at least circumstantial evidence; yours are mostly backed with bias.

Considering you are incapable of seeing both sides of the coin, I’d argue that YOU are the one living in a fantasy world.

”Your problem Mr Man is that you can't see past your own huge prejudices.

- You’re hardly one to talk.

”Every move that pushes a country away from the socialist left is somehow a move towards totalitarianism to you. What a joke.”

- LOL! I didn’t even imply that you fool!

If you read that post again, you’ll see that what I said is that extreme Rightwingism will ALSO lead to totalitarianism…

”…extreme Rightwing governments would have the exact same result.” The operative words there being “same result”.

But just to make you happy… Extreme Leftwingism = Communism = Totalitarianism.

Happy?

I still do not have a rational case for what Iraq ever did to us to deserve us persecuting, starving, locking up and bombing them over the past 15 years.

It is all very well to dismiss me as wacky as a way to avoid my questions but I have Iraqi friends who came here escaping Saddam Hussein who were then locked up in places worse than Guantanamo Bay for the "crime" of being refugees who ask me what did it have to do with us. Why did we bomb Iraqi people, why did AWB steal from them while the children died of hunger and so on.

Saddam was not Iraq just one component of Iraq who was being fed very well in deed by our own corrupted regime. Why did 27 million ordinary Iraqi people have to be tormented because of the one person put into power with the assistance of the US?

I asked several of them how many Sunni muslim supporters of Saddam there were and how they could be brought into the umbrella of a peaceful Iraq. They all told me that they would all have to be slaughtered because they would never be with the majority Shia's. That would be 4 million or so people who would have to be killed to bring "peace" to Iraq.

Go and talk to some Iraqis instead of simply deriding me because you don't like the truth.

Iraq and Iraqi people have never done one single thing to us but take a good look at what we have helped to do to them.

You should be utterly ashamed of yourselves falling for the lies and spin and bull from Bush and his lunatic pals.

Philo – I agree with you, but how do we deal with those members of society who are of low intelligence or who refuse to listen to the voice of reason? What if they laugh at ‘sound thinking’? What if they regard all kindness as weakness to be exploited? Germany was regarded as one of the worlds most civilized nations until the advent of Nazism – German Jews counted themselves German first and Jewish second and could not bring themselves to believe that it would all change in a matter of years. The Nazis could never be reasoned with or out-debated, the only thing that could have defeated them was force. And it was superior force that defeated them in the end.

Hence the old adage ‘Sometimes you have to fight fire with fire’. Unfortunately, war is sometimes unavoidable. Surely even Jesus Christ would not have expected us to sit still and allow ourselves to be oppressed or slaughtered. ‘It is godly to fight the tyrant' is also a Biblical truth.

Re invasion of Australia – from the aboriginal point of view, it was certainly an invasion (if a somewhat fractured one) and resulted in the eventual destruction of their way of life. From the British point of view, here was a large unpopulated continent ripe for civilization. They regarded nomadic hunter-gatherers as being almost as low on the evolution scale as animals, although Cook himself was a humane man, well ahead of his time. An ‘invasion’? Hmm. Not quite, according to our definition. A classic ‘invasion’ would be defined as maybe the German invasion of Poland (an attack by enemy soldiers in full force) – but I’m sure the aboriginals did not split hairs on this point.

Its often possible for both points of view to be true and equally valid.