Occupying Iraq Both Bush and Saddam Were 18o

Saddam Hussein, was a criminal and the world is a better place now that he is gone. The fact that others got away with committing worse crimes doesn’t excuse what Saddam did. Only God can punish every wrong doer. Complaining that the US isn’t God is just complaining for the sake of complaining. Of course those who agree with Saddam’s policies will invent something to complain about.


Saddam’s problem was he started believing his own press clippings. He thought he could taunt the US forever and threaten the Saudis and get away with it. The problem was George Bush would do anything to protect the Saudis including deceiving the American people with the idea that there was an imminent danger of Saddam using a weapon of mass destruction. Bush got the American people to believe what he wanted them to believe knowing full well that what got them to believed was false. Bush deceived people which is on the same moral plane as lying.


Saddam died of arrogance. Saddam knew Bush’s plans to occupy Iraq was bound to fail because it violated the accepted principles of warfare. Bush planned on having the US occupy Iraq with 150 thousand solders when his father used 500 thousand to merely drive the Iraqis out of Kuwait. Moreover the US army was instructed to avoid a fight when ever possible which left the Iraqi Army intact with their weapons. Saddam thought that he would be the one to drive the US out and he would be a hero but that never happens, instead Saddam was found hiding in a hole and ended up being hanged.


Bush has brought shame and dishonor on the US but he couldn’t have done it without Saddam. The anarchy in Iraq is Saddam’s final revenge on the Iraqi people and Bush's revenge on the American people. The one good thing is Muslims see any defeat as God’s will which means that Saddam’s execution will show Muslims
That God was not on his side.

Opposing the Tyranny of the Majority Freedom Plus 180.

The term the “the tyranny of the majority” is a perfect example of the double speak that George Orwell wrote about in the novel 1984. Elitists usually use the same confidence game again and again. First they claim that something bad is possible. Then they argue that it would be good to prevent this bad thing from happening. Then they come up with a nice sounding fallacious solution that hurts the country and helps them. The idea that we should give up our freedom because of “the tyranny of majority” is a perfect example.

The argument against democracy starts with the claim that it is logically possible that the majority might vote for something that would deny some people their basic rights. Then the next step is to say wouldn’t it be nice of someone stopped such acts. Their solution is to have unelected judges who rule for life make the final decisions on everything.

It’s kind of like the old time South American dictatorships where unelected presidents ruled for life; unfettered by the whims of the people. Why have democracy at all if judges make better rulers? What happens in general (not always) is the courts do not prevent the majority from violating the rights of others but instead add to the abuse by violating rights of people on their own with out help from the majority. The Dred Scott decision which took away the right of the people to ban slavery is typical of the court. As is court support for sending Japanese-Americans to concentration camps, protecting criminals from society and using eminent domain to build a shopping malls.

The fall back argument that opponents of democracy use is they just want to prevent the people from making rash decisions. The idea is people will get excited and do something stupid. First of all the argument is really the same as above because the courts don’t slow thing down they stop them completely at least for the generation that they are in power. Moreover the idea that half the electorate, 55 million people, will change faster then half of the number of members on the Supreme Court, 5 Supreme Court Justices is absurd. The courts are the ones who tend to act rashly not the people. In fact we are saddled with precipitant ruling all the time like gay marriage and abortion. The majority was moving in the direction of making abortion legal and making gay marriage or civil unions legal but the court jumped the gun and strengthened the opposition. Of course some people will say those rulings were correct. Which means that supporters of an all powerful judiciary don’t want to slow things up they want to speed them up?

Such people only care about getting their way even if it means subverting democracy and forcing their views on the majority. A majoriety that they don't respect of care about. They like the idea of a dictatorship when the dictator agrees with them but oppose it when the dictator turns on them. When the Supreme Court gave George Bush the election over Al Gore, the same people who supported unlimited judicial power decided that the courts were too powerful. I wonder what the supporters of abortion will say if the Supreme Court rules that abortion is murder and the majority cannot pass laws making it legal. When people take away the freedoms of others they take away their own freedom as well.

New York times Op-Ed On Target + 180

In the history of Op-Ed pieces this one will going down in history because the author makes the case for the other side. It’s fun answering such a piece because it is so easy.




Op-Ed Contributor
Our Founding Illegals
By WILLIAM HOGELAND
Published: December 27, 2006
William Hogeland is the author of “The Whiskey Rebellion: George Washington, Alexander Hamilton and the Frontier Rebels Who Challenged America’s Newfound Sovereignty.”


EVERY nation is a nation of immigrants. Go back far enough and you’ll find us all, millions of potential lives, tucked in the DNA of our African mother, Lucy. But the immigrant experience in the United States is justly celebrated, and perhaps no aspect of that experience is more quintessentially American than our long heritage of illegal immigration.

So the Pilgrims were illegal immigrants surly you jest? Are we to believe that everyone or most everyone who came here came illegally? Hogeland argues that because the descendants of illegals who came to the US became a good people that we should support an illegal invasion of the US and law breaking. The English of today are the descendants of various Germanic invaders including the Vikings. The invaders plundered, raped and murdered their way across the British Isles. Their descendants, the British, eventually became an ok people, I guess, but the victims of the Germanic invasions were hardly amused.

You wouldn’t know it from the immigration debate going on all year (the bipartisan immigration bill-in-progress, announced this week, is unlikely to mention it), but America’s pioneer values developed in a distinctly illegal context. In 1763, George III drew a line on a map stretching from modern-day Maine to modern-day Georgia, along the crest of the Appalachians. He declared it illegal to claim or settle land west of the line, all of which he reserved for Native Americans.

Wait a minute Hogeland was going to make the case that everyone who came to these shores came illegally and now he is talking about people crossing the Appalachians? It seems clear that people already had to have been in the country legally before they could cross the Appalachians. So some people who were here legally, broke a law by settling in a certain part of the country. So they weren’t illegal immigrants at all rather they broke a proclamation by a King not a law that was based on the will of the people. Hogeland must be joking if he is proposing that the proclamations of tyrant should have the force of law.


George Washington, a young colonel in the Virginia militia, instructed his land-buying agents in the many ways of getting around the law. Although Washington was not alone in acquiring forbidden tracts, few were as energetic in the illegal acquisition of western land. And Washington was a model of decorum compared to Ethan Allen, a rowdy from Connecticut who settled with his brothers in a part of the Green Mountains known as the Hampshire Grants (later known as “Vermont”). The province of New York held title to the land, but Allen asserted his own kind of claim: He threw New Yorkers out, Tony Soprano style, then offered to sell their lots to what he hoped would be a flood of fellow illegals from Connecticut.


Now he is claims that King George not only made it illegal to cross the Appalachians he is claiming that it was illegal to settle in Connecticut and Vermont and that Ethan Allen was no different then Tony Soprano. Surly he jests. Does Hogeland think that we should support drug trafficking, prostitution and contract killing because Ethan Allen engaged in such practices?


Meanwhile, illegal pioneers began moving across the Alleghenies and into the upper Ohio Valley, violating the king’s 1763 proclamation and a few more besides. (George would today be accused of softness on immigration; he kept shifting the line westward.) Immigrants from such déclassé spots as Germany and Ireland violated the laws and settled where they pleased. The upper Ohio was rife with illegal immigrants, ancestors of people who, in country clubs today, are implying a Mayflower ancestry.


They didn’t violate the law they violated an illegal proclamation of a tyrant. Clearly Hogeland believes that a proclamation of a tyrant is more binding then a law passed by the people. Of course Hogeland doesn't like democracy and perfers a King. We can't let the people make decisions because the people are evil especially Amerians. However the main point is one every parent dreads hearing, “Why can’t I do it Johnny’s mother lets him do it.” Are we to believe that because the Nazis committed genocide that everyone should be allowed to commit genocide?


Parallels to today’s illegal immigration are striking. Then as now, it was potentially deadly to bring a family across the line. But once across, illegals had a good chance of avoiding arrest and settling in. Border patrols, in the forms of the British Army and provincial militias, were stretched thin. The 18th-century forest primeval, like a modern city, offered ample opportunities for getting lost. Complex economies thrived in the virgin backwoods, unfettered by legitimate property titles.


There seems to be no end of Hogeland’s silliness No one is shooting illegals for being illegal. The only deadly part is caused by the fact that the area between the US and Mexico is mostly desert and people sometimes run out of water. No worry Americans are standing by to give illegals water.


When conflicts developed between the first and second waves of illegals, some salient social ironies arose, too. By the early 1770’s, George Washington had amassed vast tracts to which his titles were flatly invalid. The Revolution rectified that. With British law void, Washington emerged from the war with his titles legal by default. But he acquired another problem: low-class illegals were squatting on his newly authenticated, highly valuable property.


I guess the point is we should let illegals to squat on our property. Actually I doubt that Hogeland or the Times believes that Americans can own anything. His point is Americans are no good so we should just get out and make room for a better people.

Washington harbored no fond feeling for breakers of laws that he too had recently flouted. “It is hard upon me,” he lamented without irony, “to have property which has been fairly obtained disputed and withheld.” He went to court to have the squatters evicted, complaining that they had “not taken those necessary steps pointed out by the law.” He was appealing to righteousness from atop a high but wobbly horse.


Now Washington wasn’t perfect, far from it but nothing Hogeland says here makes him a crook. Washington believed that he gained control of the land legally becausae he never believed that the tyrant King George had the right to restrict his owning the land in the first place. Hogeland has rewritten histroy according to the rules of left wing PC, making Washington and every founding father a crook. It may be PC to vilify Americans but does he think that people will agree to have their land taken by telling them that they are crooks who don't deserve to own land in the first palce.

Descendants of the great immigration experiences of the 19th and 20th centuries visit the Ellis Island Immigration Museum to learn of the tribulations of ancestors who risked much to become Americans. Those of us whose ancestors risked everything as illegal immigrants, and in the process helped found a nation, owe our forebears a debt of gratitude, too. Without their daring disregard of immigration laws, we might not be here today.


If Hogeland favors illegal immagration as he seems to then he is 180 degrees off course with his argument. If he claims that illegal immigration is analogous to Americans breaking King George's law then he is supporting the views of those who are most against illegal immagration. Remember Hogeland said that King George sought to prevent immigration so as to protect; the Indians. The Indians were the people who were living in the area before the invasion took place. They had their culture and their economy destroyed and were driven off of their land by the illegals. Then as Mr. Hogeland relates in his book about the Whiskey Rebellion, the illegals broke the law by selling an illegal drug, alcohol, and then eventually rebelled against the US government. If Hogeland believes that violating King Gorge’s proclamation is analogous to illegal immigration that is taking place today then he must believe that the illegals will destroy the culture and the economy of the US, drive people who are living here off of their land, sell illegal drugs and eventually make war on the US government. Now that may seem like a good thing to him and the New York Times but I doubt the rest of us will be amused.

The Good Shepard

Good Shepherd is a Boring Waste of Time

The Good Shepherd is the story of Edward Wilson a bright, sociopathic ambitious, rich little white boy. He starts off by betraying his mentor a poetry teacher at Yale so he can get a job with the government in intelligence. Later he has the poor guy brutally murdered because the government didn’t like his choice of friends. His next betrayal is getting the sister of his politically connected “friend’ pregnant and marrying her. Every step along the way the character betrays everyone not for God and country but for himself and himself only.

They say that this picture is the Godfather picture of the CIA. In the Godfather we have the Al Pacino character start off as a young idealistic solder just back from WWII who is changed by events into a cynical uncaring mob boss. Here we have a cynical uncaring Yalie turn into a cynical uncaring CIA apparachnik. In the Godfather we also learn a lot about the history of the Mafia in an interesting way and we also learn why the mob does the things it does. In this movie there is no history of the CIA only a few incidents told in a confused boring way. As for learning about the CIA the film provides no explanation or understanding only examples of mindless people doing evil.

Every critic will tell you that if a movie has any chance of being good then one must care about the main character. I didn’t care about the Mat Damon character in this story. Actually Arnold Swirtchanager in the Terminator was more interesting and articulate then this character. I don’t blame Mat Damon for being boring. He was asked to play a boring character and he nailed it. Robert De Niro deserves all the blame for taking an all star cast and wasting them by turning them into boring drones. Spy movies are inherently exciting but through hard work De Niro took an interesting story and made it into a boring one.

What we have is De Niro selling out to the critics because he knew that any film that made the CIA look bad would get a good review. And then we have the reviewers put their political views ahead to the interests of their readers. The movie stinks and any rating above a C is a sell out.