Comments on: Addicted to Fear – Cowardice Has Become the Source of Republican Power

By: Jim

Jim — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 20:12:04 +0000

In addition to the Cowboy MYTH, Repubs and Neocons love the following:
Goldilocks: Our opponents are too shrill or too weak but we are always just right.
Chicken Little: The sky is falling and only we can save you.

By: The BRAD BLOG : Mukasey Confirmed in Senate 53-40

The BRAD BLOG : Mukasey Confirmed in Senate 53-40 — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 14:28:25 +0000

[...] end to their agony — in order to perpetuate the atmosphere of fear Bush requires in to keep his terror-addicted base of dim-witted paranoiacs and Christian nationalists in line: Now, if that is what this is all about, [...]

By: bogi666

bogi666 — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 22:40:34 +0000

Bush and the Republicans have elevated cowardice to hero worship status. The apt historical context is comparing OBL, and the 9/11 nineteen hijackers that defeated American, is to Pancho Villa’s declaration of war on the USA and his invasion of New Mexico where their were casualties. Villa was pursued by Gen. Black Jack Pershing just as OBL was and both escaped capture. On a per capita basis the 19 hijackers were less than McVeigh’s 169 victims.Their was more incentive for the Bush administration to have the hijackers succeed so that they could implement their agenda of a soviet-fascist type government for the USA. Cheney changed the hijacked aircraft intercept authorization on 6/1/07 from a decentralized to a centralized authorization system. This resulted in delays for the authorization to intercept hijacked aircraft since it had to go thru Wash.,DC. A decentralized intercept authorization would have resulted in the 9/11 hijackers being intercepted preventing or stopping the attacks. The intercept authorization reverted to the decentralized system in December 2001, and this whole scenario was niver reported in the MSM.

By: Paul

Paul — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 22:22:42 +0000

Wonderfully said. You put their cowardice in perspective and by doing so shined light on their chickenheartedness for all to see.

Thank you.

By: singleton

singleton — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 20:46:56 +0000

veracity:

In Coogan’s Bluff, Lee J. Cobb bugs Clint Eastwood’s character by calling him “Tex”, when he knows he’s an Arizona Deputy Sheriff.
This is an example of how some Arizonans regard Texans.

“Author Michael Lind made a similar observation in his book â€œMade In Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeove of American Politicsâ€.
Lind explains that. far from being the rugged individualists of western cowboy legend, the dominate Texas ideology is that of the Southern neo-Confederate autocracy”

By: Empircal Conservative

Empircal Conservative — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 16:08:58 +0000

Agree with this except where he says the Israelis cope with the terrorist
threat. They don’t “cope”, they react disproportionately, killing with impunity in reaction to stones being thrown at them, imposing collective
punishment on the Palestinians, etc. Our reaction is very similar to theirs: conflating the inevitable blowback of unjust policies into an existential threat with racist/religionist overtones. Where freedoms have been overtly impinged
upon by the US, it has been applied to foreigners or Arab/Muslim Americans and
to a lesser degree to more strident political opponents of the Bushies. Meanwhile, other liberties are slowly eroded for the rest of the population. This ubermenschian practice is just like of Israel, who we are becoming more and more like every day.

By: veracity

veracity — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 14:13:45 +0000

AIPAC conference, Washington DC March 2007, cheers for Vice President Cheney's "bomb Iran now" rhetoric... Wonkette grabs the full flavor of the AIPAC/Cheney alliance but there are dozens of sites including official WH site that capture the full text of Cheney's speech. Senator Joe Lieberman, on CBS "Face the Nation" urges US to bomb Iran... Lieberman urges General Petraeus to use US forces in Iraq to attack in to Iran during Petraeus' senate testimony, 9-11-2007

By: veracity

veracity — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 13:43:38 +0000

re <>
Ahh, Mr. Ponder, that is the million dollar question.. And, unfortunately, the answer is not a pleasing one to hear for millions of Americans. It is the alliance of the “serious” (as opposed to “extremist”) wings of the three major faiths in America today, the Protestants, Catholic, and Jewish hard-core (if not fundamentalist) clannish identities. It was 5 Catholic judges who voted to uphold Florida’s (Jeb Bush/Katherine Harris)voter disenfranchisment scheme (Florida law was very clear: “in event of an winning election margin of less than .5%, ALL VOTES SHALL BE RECOUNTED at request of losing candidate.”) The Catholic, ‘conservative’ judges on the USSC happily trampled this state law, and thousands of minority votes (and thereby millions of Democrat voters) to install their man in the White House. And every two years, the Vatican in Rome (a foreign government) spends millions of dollars in money & effort to influence American elections. NY Times columnist Wllm Safire got hot and stuffy about a $20,000 donation to Al Gore & Dem campaign in 1996 from a Buddhist temple here in America; but we collectively ignore the millions that the Vatican spends trying to criminalize abortion (and on other “religious” issues) here in America.

#2. The Protestant “hard-core” who form the base of the Bush-Cheney-GOP – people such as Falwell, Dobson, Robertson, Kennedy, and Haggard (etc.) – also have a reactionary ideology that is not far removed from the bible-thumpers who defended first slavery, and then segregation. No one is calling them out on the clear and obvious similarities between their current dogma and the discredited racist-themed dogma of not too distant past. Which brings us to the “conservatives” in the Jewish faith. Author Michael Lind speaks of the “neo-Confederate takeover of American politics” that is the Bush-Cheney-Republican Party. He also details how the American Jewish community has ALLIED with the neo-confeds, i.e. the neo-conservative/neo-confederate alliance. While neo-Confederates are anti-intellectual (look at the 30-somethings law-school grads from Christian Universities that Bush stacked the Justice Deptartment with during “Purge-gate”, women who, contrary to 200 years of American jurisprudence, actually believed that if the president told them to do something, it was legal!), they are now close allies with neo-con Jewish intellectuals such as Wolfowitz (John Hopkins Intl. Studies chair), Perle, Fieth, Wurmser, Kagan, Kristol, Safire, Sulzberger, and other neo-con ‘deep thinkers.’ The New York Times (owned by the Jewish Sulzberger family) signed on to the neo-con/neo-Confederate alliance an entire decade before 9-11. They relentlessly helped Republicans amplify and exaggerate every charge against the Clinton Democratic White House (eg, “Lincoln bedroom ’scandal’!” – as if the president of the United States can not invite guests to spend the night!), they pushed the “Whitewater” investigation of a routine real-esate flop into a $70 million Ken Starr Republican salvation, and they cheered madly when Mr. Starr jumped his prosecution from a financial investigation into a “Monica- did she, or didn’t she?” impeachment rally. Along the way, the NY Times helped make the impeachment of Bill Clinton more important than getting back at Osama bin Laden for the US embassy bombings in 1998, Clinton accused of “Wag the Dog” for going after bin Laden by every Republican within reach of a microphone (with the consent of the Times, Post, and network media)! (The book, “The Hunting of the President” by Gene Lyons and Joe Conason, is practically a compilation of the Times’ and Post’s awful ‘reporting’ from this era.)

Finally, in 2000, Joe Lieberman sealed the deal. By refusing to drop his senate campaign, he signaled to all America that he was not going to put his all into the Gore 2000 presidential campaign. Lieberman was fully signed on to the PNAC NewAmericanCentury.org (which see) agenda to ATTACK IRAQ AT EARLIEST POSSIBLE MOMENT (see first two documents at that website), and he knew that that”ATTACK IRAQ” agenda WOULD come to fruition under a Bush-Cheney administration, and NOT under a Gore-Lieberman administration. Former Secretary of Treasury John O’Neill confirmed that “Iraq was priority one” at the Bush administration’s earliest cabinent meetings, as one would expect of and a cabinet and government led by Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, and other senior Bush admin. officials had signed that PNAC “attack Iraq at earliest” agenda in the PNAC manifesto. And today, AIPAC is the Bush administration’s biggest cheerleaders for the “bomb Iran” agenda, the March 2007 AIPAC conference in Washington, DC, literally standing and cheering for VP Cheney’s most bombastic “bomb Iran now” rhetoric.

The Democratic Party, and US press/media, have no answer to confronting the reactionary agenda of these ‘conservative’ or fundamentalist religious agendas. To stand up to any of these groups is to invite a massive retaliation. In addition, of course, big business is also allied with the right-wing agenda, for the tax breaks, concentration of power (eg media consolidation, necessity of politicians to curry media favor and purchase campaign commercials), and government contracts that throw billions to businesses and their K St. lobbyists. ( Executives of top 34 Defense & oil companies rake in one billion dollars in pay)
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0831-01.htm

Because of the hidden alliance of the neo-confederates (Protestant theocratic pre-desegregation agenda) with the Vatican and the AIPAC “bomb Iran, Iraq, Syria, and any other country we want” agenda, America is now drifting towards exatly the society that Luftwaffe and Gestapo chief Herman Goering once spoke of “the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. [i.e. led to war.] That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to greater danger. It works the same way in any country. [even in America with a nominally 'free press' and "free speech."]

By: Alan Willis

Alan Willis — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 12:58:33 +0000

If the Republicans are cowards, what are the “let us know when we can cave in” Democrats?

By: Salvatore DiChristina

Salvatore DiChristina — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 10:15:57 +0000

The former Marine from Cal. who is running for President and has little hope of attaining such a goal, chastised all those State Department Employees who are protesting being ordered to Iraq and suggested they be fired for lack of courage and send wounded soldiers to Iraq in their place. I would think this patriotic so and so would resign from Congress, give up his small hope of being president and offer to become a State Department employee in Iraq. That brave erstwhile soul who has no compunction about calling State Department employees cowards, bravely volunteers the wounded GI’s at Walter Reed, who have already injuriously survived the perils of Iraq, as he volunteered their journey into harm’s way at the onset of this war brought on by a bunch of lies that he considerably helped spread. Yes, Duncan Hunter, resign the Senate and volunteer to serve in Iraq as a State Department employee.