| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"" |
| Date: |
29 Dec 2005 04:15:08 PM |
| Object: |
Re: Terrorists Will Destroy the USA this Christmas Day |
Freedom Fighter wrote:
"Religious" and "insane" seem practically synonymous.
Perhaps because you're a heathen? If that's the result from your
fighting for freedom, then you've pretty much lost the fight.
Prayer For Peace Of Mind:
Lord, Jesus Christ, I'm upset and disturbed and I pray that you will
grant me the grace of inner peace. As you commanded the storm winds at
sea to be calm, command the storms of my passions and, by your grace,
calm my proneness to love created things too much. Give me a love of
suffering for your sake. Make me kind and tolerant to others, that I
may avoid quarrels and arguments. Teach me to seek after and acquire
that perfect resignation to the Father's will which alone brings peace
of mind and peace of heart. Amen.
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| User: "Mark K. Bilbo" |
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| Title: Re: Terrorists Will Destroy the USA this Christmas Day |
29 Dec 2005 07:07:58 PM |
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In <1135894507.935679.195610@g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>,
"vivapadrepio@aol.com" <vivapadrepio@aol.com> wrote:
Lord, Jesus Christ, I'm upset and disturbed
I can believe the "disturbed" part...
--
Mark K. Bilbo
--------------------------------------------------
So much for that "storm of the century" excuse
http://makeashorterlink.com/?A3992495C
NO held hostage by oil corporations,
ANWR demanded as ransom
http://makeashorterlink.com/?J5C92195C
White House balks at spending on US citizens,
needs more billions for Iraq!
http://makeashorterlink.com/?G1D93595C
(Tell me again how much we spent bailing out the S&Ls?)
http://www.nola.com
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| User: "serwad" |
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| Title: IT IS MAGIC, THE ***** OF BUSH! |
29 Dec 2005 07:18:13 PM |
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The Magical Victory Tour
While Iraq burns, the president keeps playing the same old song
December 7th, 10:44 a.m., the sixty-fourth anniversary of Pearl Harbor day.
I've just woken up with a line of drool on my face in the back row of a
ballroom at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, D.C., where any minute
now President George W. Bush will give the second address of his barnburning
four-speech "National Strategy for Victory in Iraq" tour.
There are no T-shirts for this concert tour, but if there were, the venue
list on the back would make for one of the weirder souvenirs in rock & roll
history. U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, November 30th, no
advance publicity, closed audience: check. Here at the Omni, December 7th,
again no advance warning, handpicked audience, ten reporters max (no one
else knew about it), with even the cashiers in the hotel's coffee shop
unaware of the president's presence: check. Dates three and four, venues and
dates unknown for security reasons: check and check.
This is how President Bush takes his message to the people these days: in
furtive sneak-attack addresses to closed audiences of elite friendlies at
weird early-morning hours. If you want to catch Bush's act in person during
this tour, you have to stalk him for days and keep both ears open for
last-minute changes of plan; I actually missed the Annapolis speech when I
made the mistake of briefly taking my eye off him the day before.
Here at the Omni I showed up early, determined not to repeat my mistake. I
was not going to miss the National Strategy for Victory in Iraq, no sir. But
for all my preparations, I did almost screw it up again. I fell asleep an
hour before the event and only awoke in the middle of the introductory
remarks by Richard N. Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign
Relations, the stodgy, status-quo think tank hosting the event. I pried my
eyes open just in time to see Bush, looking spooked and shrunken, take the
stage.
Bush in person always strikes me as the kind of guy who would ask a woman
for a hand job at the end of a first date. He has days where he looks like
she said yes, and days where the answer was no.
Today was one of his no days. He frowned, looking wronged, and grabbed the
microphone. I pulled out my notebook . . .
A few minutes later, I felt like a hooker who's just blinked under a blanket
with a prep-school virgin. Was that it? Is it over? It seemed to be; Bush
was off the podium and slipping down the first line of the crowd, pumping
hands for a minute and then promptly Snagglepussing toward the left exit. By
the time I made it five rows into the crowd, he had vanished into a sea of
Secret Servicemen, who whisked him away, presumably to return him posthaste
to his formaldehyde tank.
I looked down at my notes. They indicated that Bush had opened his remarks
by comparing the Iraq War to World War II ("We liberated millions, we aided
the rise of democracy in Europe and Asia. . . . "). From there we learned
that we were fighting an enemy without conscience, but all was not lost,
because the entrepreneurial spirit is alive and well in Iraq. Of course
there had been setbacks, because in the past after we took a city, we left
it and the terrorists would just take it back again. But we've stopped doing
that now and so things are better. In conclusion, Sen. Joe Lieberman visited
Iraq four times in the past seventeen months and, ***** it, he liked what
he saw.
In the Obey Your Thirst/Image Is Everything era of American politics, Bush's
National Victory campaign is a creepy innovation. It features the president
thumping a document -- the "National Strategy for Victory in Iraq" -- that
was largely written not by diplomats or generals but by a pair of academics
from Duke University named Peter Feaver and Christopher Gelpi. Essentially a
PR document, the paper is basically a living political experiment, designed
to prove that Americans will more readily accept military casualties if the
word "victory" is repeated a great many times in public.
"This is not really a strategy document from the Pentagon about fighting the
insurgency," Gelpi told The New York Times. "The document is clearly
targeted at American public opinion."
In other words, this was really a National Strategy for Victory at Home. It
was classic Bush-think: Instead of bombing the insurgency off the map, he
bombs the map -- in lieu of actually fighting the war, a bold strategy, to
be sure. But would it work?
Both the record and my notes indicate that the audience applauded on two
occasions. The first came after the line "And now the terrorists think they
can make America run in Iraq, and that is not going to happen so long as I'm
the commander in chief." My notes say, "Scattered but by no means unanimous
applause." The second time came at the end of the speech, after the last
line, "May God continue to bless our country." This time the reaction was
more enthusiastic, but at least one person -- me -- was clapping because it
was over.
The Council on Foreign Relations was good enough to pass out a list of the
expected attendees at the speech. Here are some of the names that one could
find in Bush's audience: Frank Finelli, the Carlyle Group; Adam Fromm,
Office of Rep. Dennis Hastert; Robert W. Haines, Exxon Mobil Corp.; Paul W.
Butler, Akin Gump Strauss Hauer and Feld LLP; Robert Bremer, Lockheed Martin
Corp.; Scott Sendek, Eli Lilly and Co.; James H. Lambright, Export-Import
Bank of the United States.
The point is obvious; Bush's audience was like a guest list for a Monster's
Ball of the military-industrial establishment. And even in this crowd full
of corporate lawyers, investment bankers, weapons makers, ex-spooks and, for
Christ's sake, lobbyists, the president of the United States couldn't cook
up more than two tepid applause lines for his Iraq policy -- and one of
those was because he was finishing up and, one guesses, freeing the audience
to go call their brokers.
God bless George Bush. The Middle East is in flames, and how does he answer
the call? He rolls up to the side entrance of a four-star Washington hotel,
slips unobserved into a select gathering of the richest fatheads in his
dad's Rolodex, spends a few tortured minutes exposing his half-assed
policies like a campus flasher and then ducks back into his rabbit hole
while he waits for his next speech to be written by paid liars.
If that isn't leadership, what is?
Not many people in the Omni audience hung around to be interviewed when it
was over. The few who did make themselves available tried to put a brave
face on the situation.
"Well, he did the best he could under, uh, difficult circumstances," said
council member Jeffrey Pryce.
Did he detect anything new in the new strategy?
"No," he said, shrugging. "But he's in a tough spot."
***
I'd been following the national tour for more than a week. If the reception
at the Omni was stale, that was nothing compared to how it was going over in
the White House briefing room. On the day before the Omni speech, I actually
worried that gopher-faced administration spokescreature Scott McClellan
might be physically attacked by reporters, who appeared ready to give
official notice of having had Enough of This *****.
In fact the room at one point seemed on the verge of a Blazing Saddles-style
chair-throwing brawl when McClellan refused to answer the cheeky question of
why, if we weren't planning on torturing war-on-terror detainees in foreign
prisons, we couldn't just bring them back to be incarcerated in the United
States.
"I think the American people understand," McClellan said, "the importance of
protecting sources and methods, and not compromising ongoing efforts in the
war on terrorism . . ."
When a contingent of audibly groaning reporters pressed, McClellan shrugged
and tried a new tack: "I'm not going to talk further about intelligence
matters of this nature," he said.
A reporter next to me threw his head back in disgust. "Oh, fuckin' A . . ."
he whispered. The room broke out into hoots and howls; even the usually
dignified Bill Plante of CBS started openly calling McClellan out. "The
question you're currently evading is not about an intelligence matter," he
hissed.
I looked around. "Man," I thought. "This place sure looks better on
television." On TV, the whole package -- the deep-blue curtains, the solemn
great seal -- suggests majesty, power, drama. For years I'd dreamed of
coming here, the Graceland of politics.
But in real life the White House briefing room is a grimy little closet
that's peeling and cracking in every corner and looks like it hasn't seen a
bottle of Windex in ten years. The first chair in the fifth row is broken;
the fold-up seat doesn't fold up and in fact dangles on its hinge, so that
you'd slide off if you tried to sit on it. No science exists that could
determine the original color of these hideous carpets. Reporters throw their
coats and coffee cups wherever; the place is a fucking sty.
It's a raggedy-***** old stage, and the act that plays on it isn't getting any
fresher, either. All partisan sniping aside, this latest counteroffensive
from the White House says just about everything you need to know about
George Bush and the men who work for him.
Up until now this president's solution to everything has been to stare into
the cameras, lie and keep on lying until such time as the political problem
disappears. And now, unable to comprehend that while political crises may
wilt in the face of such tactics, real crises do not, he and his team are
responding to this first serious feet-to-the-fire Iraq emergency in the same
way they always have -- with a fusillade of silly, easily disprovable
*****. Bush and his mouthpieces continue to try to obfuscate and cloud
the issue of why we're in Iraq, and they do so not only selectively but
constantly, compulsively, like mental patients who can't stop jacking off in
public. They don't know the difference between a real problem and a
political problem, because to them, there is no difference. What could
possibly be worse than bad poll numbers?
On this particular day in the briefing room, it's just more of the same
disease. McClellan, a cringing yes-man type who tries to soften the effect
of his non- answers by projecting an air of being just as out of the loop as
you are, starts pimping lies and crap the moment he enters the room. He's
the cheapest kind of political hack, a greedy little bum making a living by
throwing his hat on the ground and juggling lemons for pennies.
Putting his hat out for the Strategy for Victory, he says nothing new --
there is no real strategy, remember, just words -- and it quickly becomes
clear that the whole purpose of this campaign is not to offer new
information but to reinforce the administration's most shameless and
irresponsible myths about the war: that we invaded to liberate Iraq, that
Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11, and so on. McClellan does this even in the
context of responding to angry denunciations of this very tactic.
For instance, when a reporter asked why the administration still insists on
giving the impression that Saddam Hussein was behind the 9/11 attacks,
McClellan answered, "I don't think that [it] does. But I think what you have
to understand about September 11th is that September 11th taught us some
important lessons: one, that we need to take the fight to the enemy and
engage them abroad . . ."
Implying, in other words, that the enemy who attacked us was in Iraq. Same
old *****.
After hearing McClellan talk for what seemed like the thirtieth time about
our continuing efforts to spread democracy, I finally felt insulted. Giving
in to the same basic instinct that leads people to buy lottery tickets, I
raised my hand. I figured I'd ask nicely, just give him a chance to come
clean. C'mon, man, we know you're lying, why not just leave it alone? I
asked him if he couldn't just admit, once and for all, that we didn't go to
Iraq to spread democracy, that maybe it was time to retire that line, at
least.
"Well," he said, "we set out the reasons we went to Iraq, and I would
encourage you to go back and look at that. We have liberated 25 million
people in Iraq and 25 million people in Afghanistan . . ."
"But that wasn't the reason we went --"
"Spreading freedom and democracy," he said, ignoring me. "Well, we're not
going to re-litigate why we went into Iraq. We've made very clear what the
reasons were. And no, I don't think you define them accurately by being so
selective in the question . . . that's important for spreading hope and
opportunity in the broader Middle East . . ."
"Just to be clear," I said, exasperated, "that's a different argument than
was made to the American people before the war."
"Our arguments are very public," he said. "You can go look at what the
arguments are. That's not what I was talking about."
He smiled at me. There's your strategy for victory in Iraq: ***** all of
you -- we're sticking to our story.
MATT TAIBBI
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| User: "Viator" |
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| Title: Re: Terrorists Will Destroy the USA this Christmas Day |
29 Dec 2005 05:40:12 PM |
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Prayers don't give peace of mind,
they only make you less mentally stable,
as proven by your ravings.
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| User: "" |
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| Title: Re: Terrorists Will Destroy the USA this Christmas Day |
29 Dec 2005 06:14:48 PM |
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Padre! You'll have to excuse us if were not completely accepting of
your words. You guys talk about family values and then sodomize the
children in your church.
And to top it all off you seek to missionize nonmembers to come and
join you hellish religion. NNNNNOOOOOOO!!!!!!!! Thanks!
Gordon
PS You religious people really are hypocrites!
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| User: "" |
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| Title: Re: Terrorists Will Destroy the USA this Christmas Day |
30 Dec 2005 04:17:07 PM |
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Viator wrote:
Prayers don't give peace of mind,
they only make you less mentally stable,
as proven by your ravings.
Prayer For Mental Stability:
St. Dymphna, powerful patroness of all who are afflicted mentally and
emotionally, ask our Lord to grant us, please, an untroubled heart,
peace, calm and rest. Help me to learn how to entrust all my fears and
worries into His hands, and to place all my confidence in Christ's love
for me.
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