Well here we are 5 yrs. after 9-11, I thought the world was safer.

[Philosoraptor]

Five years since nine eleven, and W said over and over again that the world is safer with Saddam behind bars and Osama on the run. I thought democracy was spreading across the middle east.

Is this all part of the original PNAC global domination plan, 5 years in? Are we and the world safer now? Is terrorism defeated now? Is Osama reigned in now?

Funny how the whole world is about to implode now that the republicans are firmly in their glory, and the November elections approach. What a glorious 5 year anniversary of 9-11 we'll have this September.

[kenny blankenship]

1. No not safer. That's not really the goal nor can it be.

the underlying belief of conservatives/Fascists is that the world is full of irreconcilable enemies all eternally bent on our destruction. They hate us because we're so perfect. They cannot be negotiated with, and time won't work to ameliorate our fatal differences. They won't forget their hatred and they can't be persuaded to like us. The world as such will never be safer, that's categorically impossible; but WE can be safer by preemptively taking the fight to our enemies, and bombing them in their villages and nurseries.

Accordingly we are engaged in a war of genocide over there, so we won't have to incinerate them all over here. See?

[Deja Q]

2. Then why be 100% in support of offshoring over there?

[Union Thug]

3. That's a good question

Is it that there is a split in the business class (ie. the oil and energy fascists vs. everyone else) or is it that they think the wars can be contained and their precious offshoring partners can be protected. Or something else?

[kenny blankenship]

5. More excuse for taking the fight to the enemies because it makes more

friction with them. And at the same time, "flattening the earth" and extending the cash register transstate to the limits of the flattened world is a prime motive for us hating them and for them hating us. The cash register state where every value is reduced to a price is incompatible with traditional religion and its worldview and its non exchangable values. I don't mean the plasticized Kmart religion of "tradition values Xtians" in America, which is thoroughly coopted by materialism, but the wholly alien, "medieval" religion that continues to hold its validity for people in the Middle East and a few other places on the globe, the kind of religion that secular liberal Americans like to call "the other" and conservative religious Americans like to call "evil, Satan-spawned". The incompatibility of western materialism and any religion of the old-school type makes them hate us, especially since we are shoving that materialist mode of consciousness down their throats. The desire to expand markets (the pursuit of GROWTH--that term intoned with echoing hints of sacredness 200 hundred times a day on TV news shows) and "to open markets" and wring ever greater profits from the meters² of global realestate owned by other people drives us into military expansion and makes us hate them. It also "obliges" the xenophobic conservative to ship jobs (or to assent to the claimed need and right of capitalists to export jobs) overseas where the work can be done cheapest.
Is there a contradiction between the conservative view of the nation beset on all sides by implacable threatening swarms of bearded foreignness--on the one hand--and, on the other hand, their economic motives that goad them to conquer the world? Of course there is. Like anybody else though, they are capable of effortlessly separating the contradictions in their beliefs and attitudes into compartments to keep them from reacting with each other and exploding. When they are talking about economic policy and the justice of shafting the American working class through globalization, one set of assumptions and images are used (the world is our petri dish waiting to receive our spores). When, however, they are talking about military policy and why liberals should be put in jail for talking about how Bush is erasing Constitutionally protected liberties, another set of assumptions and images is activated (the set in which even Canada could be cavorting with terrorists and plotting to destroy us)

[rodeodance]

4. The WashingtonPost has a good aricle about this (last evening).

[Justice Is Comin]

6. If only we could have sold them ports to the United Arab Emirates.