Maybe he’s listening to McCain, or to the words that Saakashvili’s paid for lackey, was told to put into McCain’s mouth in his role as McCain’s foreign policy advisor.
The United States Shares the Blame for the Russia-Georgia Crisis
- Thread starter blackascoal
- Start date
Maybe he’s listening to McCain, or to the words that Saakashvili’s paid for lackey, was told to put into McCain’s mouth in his role as McCain’s foreign policy advisor.
Dixie - In Memoriam
New member
Obviously you didn't read the article because you've challenged no conclusion in it and haven't presented any counter evidence. Perhaps you haven't thought through the issue yourself.
Some of us operate on facts not ideological "patriotic" whimsy that ignores them.
I'm sure you think George Bush is a great president.
When/if you conjure up some facts that support your whimsy .. I'd sure like to hear it.
Well, here's my whimsy, skippy... Over the years, American politicians have done what they though was in America's best interest, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. Promises and commitments are made by one party, and broken by the next, and then remade when the other party regains control. This has gone on for years, and has created somewhat of a distrust on the part of people we make promises and commitments to.
Fundamentally, the conviction of America is to stand for Liberty and Democracy, to defend it and protect it whenever and wherever we can. However, there is also an underlying agenda to revive Socialism and undermine Democracy, and it has permeated one of our major political parties, so our fundamental core convictions are no longer as clear as they once were. Now we are bombarded with hate-rhetoric and relentless attacks on what is supposed to be our core beliefs as Americans. We are told by people like yourself, and the pinhead who wrote the article you posted, how everything is America's own fault and we are to blame.
It is America's fault and we are to blame, because we are the leaders of the free world, and pretty much what we say goes, or we make it go. The resulting conflicts and problems are because of inconsistency in how America understands and comprehends its manifest destiny. If and when we defeat the Socialist elements permeating our politics, we will see a dynamic change in the world, and how the world views us. As long as we remain 'wishy-washy' and go back and forth with these competing ideals, we will continue to see adversity and conflict in the rest of the world.
Epicurus
Reasonable
Agreed
blackascoal
The Force is With Me
You mean this guy ...
McCain adviser got money from Georgia
WASHINGTON - John McCain's chief foreign policy adviser and his business partner lobbied the senator or his staff on 49 occasions in a 3 1/2-year span while being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars by the government of the former Soviet republic of Georgia.
The payments raise ethical questions about the intersection of Randy Scheunemann's personal financial interests and his advice to the Republican presidential candidate who is seizing on Russian aggression in Georgia as a campaign issue.
McCain warned Russian leaders Tuesday that their assault in Georgia risks "the benefits they enjoy from being part of the civilized world."
On April 17, a month and a half after Scheunemann stopped working for Georgia, his partner signed a $200,000 agreement with the Georgian government. The deal added to an arrangement that brought in more than $800,000 to the two-man firm from 2004 to mid-2007. For the duration of the campaign, Scheunemann is taking a leave of absence from the firm.
-- more at link ..
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080813/ap_on_el_pr/mccain_lobbyist;_ylt=AmHDDzhexu4gpzDB3lukmRas0NUE
How about these statements ..
McCain called Saakashvili again on Tuesday. "I told him that I know I speak for every American when I said to him, today, we are all Georgians"
On Tuesday, McCain told Fox News that "as you know, through the NATO membership, ... if a member nation is attacked, it is viewed as an attack on all."
blackascoal
The Force is With Me
I thank you sir for at least presenting an argument that those of us who don't do Foxworthy can understand.
However, your argument is fundamentally flawed on virtually every level and it exposes the greatest failure of right-wing ideology .. it's failure to adapt to a dynamic world and society. Your thoughts are rooted in the past and requires to world to remain static for them to have any sense of credibility .. or for that matter, sense at all.
You expose why the right is shrinking .. but you don't know that.
Let's not talk about America's "conviction" or America on paper .. let's deal with facts.
America just invaded and mass-murdered hundred of thousands of innocent people in a small nation thousands of miles from our shores that presented no threat to America and we did it based on lies and distortions .. and we did it for profit. Feel free to swim around in Hollywood illusions and patriotic platitudes all you want .. but those who use intelligence rather than emotion to arrive at logical conclusions know those to be the facts.
Your failure to recognize even the most obvious elephant sized truths limits the level of where this discussion between you and I can go. We can't talk about facts or truth because you don't recognize either .. or at least you can't talk about facst or truth. You'd much rather spend your time looking out the window for scary enemies rather than looking in the mirror for where we are at fault. Introspective is considered anti-american in the world you live in.
"Defeat the socialist elements permeating our politics" .. there is simply no intelligence to that sir. NONE.
If you'd like to engage in debate about the situation in Georgia .. sans patiotic platitudes and on papr thoughts about "conviction" .. none of which has anything to do with what is happening in Georgia .. I'd sure like to hear it.
How about these statements ..
"McCain called Saakashvili again on Tuesday. "I told him that I know I speak for every American when I said to him, today, we are all Georgians"
On Tuesday, McCain told Fox News that "as you know, through the NATO membership, ... if a member nation is attacked, it is viewed as an attack on all."
Wow, well on that first one, whenever I look at pictures of the dead in these wars, including in our wars, I see a fellow human being. I don't see nation-states, or waiving flags...just horrible waste and cruelty.
"McCain called Saakashvili again on Tuesday. "I told him that I know I speak for every American when I said to him, today, we are all Georgians"
On Tuesday, McCain told Fox News that "as you know, through the NATO membership, ... if a member nation is attacked, it is viewed as an attack on all."
Wow, well on that first one, whenever I look at pictures of the dead in these wars, including in our wars, I see a fellow human being. I don't see nation-states, or waiving flags...just horrible waste and cruelty.
blackascoal
The Force is With Me
We agree.
But don't these misteps and miscommuncation remind you of the same misteps and miscommunication from the Bush 1 administration that led Saddam to believe he could invade Kuwait and the US wouldn't get involved?
What are you getting at exactly? Because I always thought that there was a good chance those signals were sent to Saddam on purpose, back in 91. Do you believe this was purposeful?
blackascoal
The Force is With Me
It's a thought that occured to me when I was talking to you .. but then I remembered seeing an article by Scheer that I skipped over .. so I went back and read it.
Georgia War: A Neocon Election Ploy?
Is it possible that this time the October surprise was tried in August, and that the garbage issue of brave little Georgia struggling for its survival from the grasp of the Russian bear was stoked to influence the US presidential election?
Before you dismiss that possibility, consider the role of one Randy Scheunemann, for four years a paid lobbyist for the Georgian government, ending his official lobbying connection only in March, months after he became Republican presidential candidate Senator John McCain's senior foreign policy adviser.
Previously, Scheunemann was best known as one of the neoconservatives who engineered the war in Iraq when he was a director of the Project for a New American Century. It was Scheunemann who, after working on the McCain 2000 presidential campaign, headed the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, which championed the US Iraq invasion.
There are telltale signs that he played a similar role in the recent Georgia flare-up. How else to explain the folly of his close friend and former employer, Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili, in ordering an invasion of the breakaway region of South Ossetia, which clearly was expected to produce a Russian counter-reaction. It is inconceivable that Saakashvili would have triggered this dangerous escalation without some assurance from influential Americans he trusted, like Scheunemann, that the United States would have his back. Scheunemann long guided McCain in these matters, even before he was officially running foreign policy for McCain's presidential campaign.
In 2005, while registered as a paid lobbyist for Georgia, Scheunemann worked with McCain to draft a congressional resolution pushing for Georgia's membership in NATO. A year later, while still on the Georgian payroll, Scheunemann accompanied McCain on a trip to that country, where they met with Saakashvili and supported his bellicose views toward Russia's Vladimir Putin.
Scheunemann is at the center of the neoconservative cabal that has come to dominate the Republican candidate's foreign policy stance in a replay of the run-up to the war against Iraq. These folks are always looking for a foreign enemy on which to base a new cold war, and with the collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime, it was Putin's Russia that came increasingly to fit the bill.
Yes, it sounds diabolical, but that may be the most accurate way to assess the designs of the McCain campaign in matters of war and peace. There is every indication that the candidate's demonization of Putin is an even grander plan than the previous use of Hussein to fuel American militarism with the fearsome enemy that it desperately needs.
McCain gets to look tough with a new cold war to fight while Democratic presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama, scrambling to make sense of a more measured foreign policy posture, will seem weak in comparison. Meanwhile, the dire consequences of the Bush legacy McCain has inherited, from the disaster of Iraq to the economic meltdown, conveniently will be ignored. But it will provide the military-industrial complex, which has helped bankroll the neoconservatives, with an excuse for ramping up a military budget that is already bigger than that of the rest of the world combined.
What is at work here is a neoconservative, self-fulfilling prophecy in which Russia is turned into an enemy that ramps up its largely reduced military, and Putin is cast as the new Joseph Stalin bogeyman, evoking images of the old Soviet Union. McCain has condemned a "revanchist Russia" that should once again be contained. Although Putin has been the enormously popular elected leader of post-Communist Russia, it is assumed that imperialism is always lurking, not only in his DNA but in that of the Russian people.
How convenient to forget that Stalin was a Georgian, and indeed if Russian troops had occupied the threatened Georgian town of Gori, they would have found a museum still honoring their local boy, who made good by seizing control of the Russian revolution. Indeed, five Russian bombs were allegedly dropped on Gori's Stalin Square on Tuesday.
It should also be mentioned that the post-Communist Georgians have imperial designs on South Ossetia and Abkhazia. What a stark contradiction that the United States, which championed Kosovo's independence from Serbia, now is ignoring Georgia's invasion of its ethnically rebellious provinces.
For McCain to so fervently embrace Scheunemann's neoconservative line of demonizing Russia in the interest of appearing tough during an election is a reminder that a senator can be old and yet wildly irresponsible.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080818/scheer2
It doesn't mention Bush 1, but I don't put anything past the neocon cabal that has taken control of the Repblican Party.
Why would the Georgian President start a conflict he was sure to lose?
FUCK THE POLICE
911 EVERY DAY
Ideally Israel should not have nukes. I realize they are surrounded by enemies but they are just destabilizing the situation further by building them. It just means their enemies will be forced to build them. Israel should be treated like how it's acting in this regard: a rogue nation.
I'd love to get rid of all of our nuclear missiles, but that would leave us in a precarious position with nations like Russia and China that would never consider getting rid of them. It's a difficult position to be in. I'm not sure we'll ever be rid of the bomb, and that's a difficult pill to swallow considering how idiotic human beings are and how many more milleniums we have for us to pull the trigger that we've brought to our head.
Epicurus
Reasonable
Issues like this are about the only area where you are remotely reasonable anymore.
FUCK THE POLICE
911 EVERY DAY
Yeah, I need to stop being deliberately extremist. I don't really hate guns or corporations. I don't really mind the death penalty. I respect Scalia because he's definitely the brightest mind on the bench, even if I agree with Ginsberg more often.
I don't really believe in anything.
Dixie - In Memoriam
New member
It's okay Darla, don't worry, I'm sure you'll be just fine. Go lie down for a bit, or have a nice hot cup of cocoa and a warm bubble bath. Try putting cold compresses on your forehead, and take a couple of Tylenol. The sight of the American flag sometimes has this effect on Socialists, I understand.