Oh My Goff

I’ve been emailing back and forth with a friend of mine about the state of things in Iraq, Iran, North Korea, and politics in the USA. I thought I would share a couple of excerpts.

Email from my friend: “that’s strange considering they hide so much of what really goes wrong over there also… there’s tons of legitimate news happening over there that other countries play without editing and dispense straight up. If our liberal media really wanted to convince the public we’re failing in Iraq they should run more of those stories. Has the Iraqi disposition changed back to favoring us anymore if that much or their goverment, social and public service structure is intact as your statistics say? Do you feel we’re actually accomplishing anything in Iraq or just trading one problem for another, stable tyranny for unstable quagmire? Death toll on both sides keep rising, troops are spread too thin, Iraqi’s are still inable to fully control their country without us and our troops on the front lines suffer the most with staffing and equipment deficiencies due to political delay and incompetence. Meanwhile the countries that actually pose a WMD threat go untethered…North Korea and Iran anyone?”

My response: “I don’t believe that the so-called “legitimate news” that other countries run are real stories. In general, most other countries have liberal philosophies and political systems and run stories meant to depict the USA in a bad light because of GWB. I often frequent the BBC and Al Jazeera sites to see what kind of stuff is being published, and honestly, it’s hogwash. Al Jazeera is a biggest propaganda machine I’ve ever seen or heard of. BBC isn’t too bad, but even a lot of stories we see in our own media are biased and if read through carefully, it’s obvious that the journalists seem to side more with insurgents and terrorists rather than our own soldiers and ideals. Less than 1000 Iraqi civilians that have died since Operation: Iraqi Freedom started were killed by American errant bombs or gunfire. The rest (about 12,000 or so) have been killed by insurgents, suicide bombers, etc. I HIGHLY encourage you to read this website in its entirety. Be sure to click on “click for details” throughout the page. http://www.logictimes.com/flowchart.htm Please do so with an open mind, and if you like, I absolutely encourage you to attempt to prove anything on the site wrong. I tried to pick it apart and I couldn’t find any errors, nor any flawed logic. The facts are there, and when one sees the entire picture with the real numbers, you realize that things are going pretty damn well over there, all things considered. It’s way too early in the game to be making any judgment calls on how the occupation is turning out anyway. While of course I wish we weren’t there, because war sucks…we’re there and we need to be given the proper resources to do the job. Vietnam went bad because our hands were tied and we were not allowed to use the full force of our own strength. Liberals continue to try to put this war on the same wavelength as Vietnam, even at the cost of more U.S. soldiers’ lives. They want us to pull out of Iraq immediately, declaring defeat, and allowing them to then make a more convincing comparison to Vietnam in that we turned tail and ran home. The difference here is that Vietnam wasn’t our conflict. The Iraq war is. The fact that there are so many terrorists fighting us there is simple proof. While obviously Iraq was not responsible for 9/11, nobody ever said they were. GWB never said Iraq caused 9/11 or Saddam caused 9/11. The decision to end Saddam’s regime was to preemptively lower the terrorists’ ability to wage war against the USA. Notice how there hasn’t been any more attacks on U.S. soil? That’s no coincidence. You can bet that the Iraq war has contributed to safety of our civilians here at home. Apart from the rest (by the way again PLEASE go to that website that I linked you to, do yourself a favor , talk to some soldiers that have been there…as many as you can, in fact. Ask them about what’s going on and what the people think of America and what we’re doing over there. I guarantee you’ll be surprised. It will be a mixed bag to be sure, but overall I think you’ll be shocked at how differently the media portrays progress over there (they don’t) versus what our young men and women in the armed forces are seeing every day. Oh and about NK and Iran…North Korea right now is realizing that they’re in hot water and are faced with a pretty big decision of whether or not to launch this test missile. If the US shoots it down, it will surely cause both NK and the international community to realize that the US is not a force to be trifled and taunted. North Korea has several times refused to talks with the group of nations that it was supposed to. By going forward with their plans, they have essentially lined themselves up on the chopping block. The US doesn’t need to invade or attack them to show Kim Jong Il that his hopes of being a major power will never be realized. He is an insane dictator that hogs all the money from his land and would rather watch his people all starve and die so that he can have his precious 1950′s technology missile. He’s just a rogue…the country is so impoverished nothing will ever happen over there. There aren’t any terrorists, except Kim Jong Il himself. I encourage you to read up about North Korea and how bad off they are. It’s pretty sad. With Iran, talks will get us nowhere. Regardless of any deals that are made, we all know that Iran will continue, secretly or not, to develop its nuclear weapons program. Eventually this will come to a head and I’m not looking forward to it. Hopefully by then we’ll have more troops available if the need arises. Lessons learned in Iraq will be valuable if the Shah of Iran pushes the envelope. By no means am I hoping for another prolonged occupation of a middle eastern country. I just know that unless something big changes over there, it will continue to escalate until the issue is forced. And for the record, yes I do believe there is major progress happening in Iraq.”

Something that has been bothering me for awhile just surfaced and I need to address it. It isn’t that our political system is any better or worse than the next random country’s out there. It’s that our system is failing us and shows no signs that there will ever be any sort of improvement.

      For a moment, let’s forget the democrat (notice i didn’t say democratic) and republican parties. Let’s think about the direction we want our country to go in as a whole. It’s my belief that the current arrangement of separation of powers creates a bureaucratic nightmare out of ANY sort of bill, law, or proposition that attempts to do anything to alleviate or change a system that isn’t working. It seems that any time the public vote on a proposition, the outcome is trivial because within minutes after the final votes are tallied, someone is off appealing it to a judge who will then suspend the proposition and call it unconstitutional. Seeing as the constitution is open to all kinds of subjective interpretation, it doesn’t take a crystal ball to see that the way of democracy isn’t really working in the United States of America.
    Another example of our political and judicial systems failing us is the ridiculous number of frivolous lawsuits coming from every direction for the most inane reasons known to man: A group gets together at a park and sings the national anthem to commemorate a fallen comrade or to celebrate a patriotic event. A man in another location of the park hears the song, becomes offended because it’s ”infringing on his liberties”, and he files a lawsuit. What the heck? I’m sooo tired of one person getting offended by something stupid and then ruining it for everyone. I could go on for hours listing different lawsuits that have actually been filed just in recent months, but I’m sure anyone reading this will get the picture.

The worst part about all of this is that this is but one of many issues facing America that has no solution in sight. Everyone in congress and the senate are too busy taking polls, being partisan just for the sake of shooting down the other side, and taking money from people they shouldn’t. Heck, even if a few people got together to try to do something good, it wouldn’t happen! Just look at the current immigration bill being pushed through the senate…it’s a simple rehash of what went through during the Reagan administration (which we all know didn’t help matters any) except THIS time, it’s going to allow between 60-250 MILLION new immigrants into the country in the next 20 years. Umm, does anyone else see anything wrong with this? The current population of the USA is close to 300 million.
How on earth would our economy support a 1.5x increase in population? Consider the fact that most of the immigrants coming would not be bringing skilled labor. I just don’t understand the reasoning behind it.

Enough for now, but I’m fired up and the worst part about it is that I know I can’t really make any sort of a difference to fix one bit of it.