A landslide in the House and – be still my heart – some good chance of a Senate win (despite Mr. George “macaca” Allen’s partisans best efforts to “guide” voters to the correct polling location)…
As the Democrats now prepare to regain control of the Legislative branch, let’s wish for a mutually beneficial cooperation across party lines, an era of prosperous bipartisanship with the best interest of all constituents at heart, where the winners can look past petty disagreements and work along with the losers and… and… mwahahahaHAHAHA… Right.
Bury them. Tear their electoral balls off. Declaw, spay and neuter the lots of them. Let congressional hearings rain. Open a can of Check’n’Balance whoopass on their collective thieving ass. Time to scrub the place clean.
And when it’s all over, don’t forget to unplug Cheney’s cryogenic night-preservation chamber on the way out.
And, Mr. Rumsfeld, please shut off the lights on your way out….
I came to tell you how fabulous Spam Karma 2 is (after I just deleted some insane number of spams eaten by it) and found when I arrived that you are an expatriate. Well, in that case, I have a dual purpose: I thank you BIG TIME for the job well done in helping to control spam in the world AND I will put a link to your blog on my blog since I am gathering links to posts by expats about the election in the USA.
Thank you…and meilleurs vœux!
I also hope the Democratic Congress will undo all those laws passed by Bush to curtail American freedom (Patriot Act, etc) and hold Bush, Cheney, Rice, Bolton, et al accountable for all the international conventions broken and ignored.
I also hope they dismantle those military bases in Iraq. America should get out of Iraq and Afghanistan now.
I also hope they get Bolton out of the United Nations.
I also hope they get the Jewish lobbies out and hold Israel accountable for all the atrocities they have inflicted on neighbours. I hope they scrutinise all lobbies and see if their interests do not infringe on what is right and proper.
I also hope they redefine America as a humble first-world nation that co-operates with the international community.
I also hope they re-organise the CIA to exclude that branch that operates in foreign countries to provoke and cause dissent in order to protect American interests abroad.
They have alot of work to do!
Cher docteur,
I am completely in agreement with your less-than-conciliatory feelings about how the victorious Democrats should treat their Republican counterparts, who, as we have seen, possess no great delicate sympathy for the role of the opposition, whom they gleefully have called “traitors” and “America-haters.” You know, however, how important it is to most Americans to appear to “play nice” — and Speaker Pelosi will do just that, until, that is, some nasty bit of business comes up, like another Bolton nomination to some position, and then let’s hope all hell breaks loose.
# Israel may be a racist/murderous state. But so are its neighbours. Let’s be fair about apportioning the blame.
# The Democrats don’t exactly have a different >>exit strategy>now
…would actually be irresponsible, given that the USA did start the bloody thing.
Hey Doc – congrats on the result. Btw., any plans to write a Spam Karma version for poor over-spammed souls wallowing in the world of Blogger.com
blueVicar
Thanks. Though it bears repeating I am not a US citizen, only a concerned citizen of the world.
Daphne
You had me until the part involving some vast Jewish lobby conspiracy, I guess… These are dangerous ideological waters to thread in, and in fact, quite inaccurate ones at that, considering the jewish community has always massively voted Democrats (and particularly so this time). Support for Israel’s right to existence has always been one of the most unambiguous bipartisan policy. Now, loose ideological and personal connections between right-wing fringes of both country: that is another matter (US GOP on one side, Likhud on the other: both equally fanatical, both equally non-representative of their respective countries).
Plus, Ms. DosCentavos has a point: few people have exclusive rights to the popular brand of religion-fueled fanaticism that flourishes in this corner of the world.
As for the rest (an end to CIA covert ops and all), I can only agree, even if I very much doubt it’ll ever happen outside of pipe-dream make-believe politics…
Cher Édouard
So I hope, so I hope. Though paint me an unbeliever until some results are in. Dems have been too ridiculously silent these past 6 years (or worse yet: voicing some support to GOP’s policies at times) for me to expect miracles now. Jon Stewart, I believe, brilliantly summed up their strategy all these years as: “slowly and silently backing up out of the room as mum and dad scold older brother for setting the garage on fire”…
I will be happy enough if they just manage to clean up some of the mess left by a decade of GOP’s legislative and judiciary orgies…
DosCentavos
Indeed, there isn’t such a thing as an “Exit strategy” now. And even though it isn’t something I have had a chance to discuss here, my personal position is that the US ought to stay and clean up their own mess… Which is about the least popular option of all right now.
Regarding SK for Blogger.com: I am afraid it isn’t anywhere near a possibility. Even assuming I was still spending much time on such developments, Blogger is an entirely different beast from WordPress and only the Blogger people are in any position to do something about spam there. I can only recommend you consider getting your own domain and blog set-up, so as to be in full control of such things.
Cheers.
Yes, There’s an Israel Lobby: … the Mearsheimer-Walt conclusion that the U.S. “has set aside its own security in order to advance the interests of another state” and that “the overall thrust of U.S. policy in the region is due almost entirely to U.S. domestic politics, and especially to the activities of the ‘Israel Lobby.'”
Israel and its lobby and the U.S. arms industry work hand in glove to advance their combined, very compatible interests. The relatively few very powerful and wealthy families that dominate the Israeli arms industry are just as interested in pressing for aggressively militaristic U.S. and Israeli foreign policies as are the CEOs of U.S. arms corporations and, as globalization has progressed, so have the ties of joint ownership and close financial and technological cooperation among the arms corporations of the two nations grown ever closer. In every way, the two nations’ military industries work together very easily and very quietly, to a common end. The relationship is symbiotic, and the lobby cooperates intimately to keep it alive; lobbyists can go to many in the U.S. Congress and tell them quite credibly that if aid to Israel is cut off, thousands of arms-industry jobs in their own districts will be lost. That’s power. The lobby is not simply passively supporting whatever the U.S. military-industrial complex wants. It is actively twisting arms very successfully in both Congress and the administration to perpetuate acceptance of a definition of U.S. “national interests” that many Americans believe is wrong, as does Chomsky himself.
Clearly, the advantages in the relationship go in both directions: Israel serves U.S. corporate interests by using, and often helping develop, the arms that U.S. manufacturers produce, and the U.S. serves Israeli interests by providing a constant stream of high-tech equipment that maintains Israel’s vast military superiority in the region. It’s in the nature of a symbiosis that both sides benefit, and the lobby has clearly played a huge role in maintaining the interdependence.
http://www.aipac.org/briefing/
AIPAC: America’s Pro-Israel Lobby
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article15591.htm
Israel’s influence of US policy & the Israeli lobby
Scott Ritter describes Israel’s role in shaping U.S. Foreign policy
(a 4-minute video)
Doc – I hear ya. Staying would be the right/moral thing to do, unpopular “idea” though it is. Unless a rosy scenario with anarchy, civil war and sliced-up Iraq of mini-nations is what they’re interested in (which is not to say that it is not happening already, regardless), of course.
Oooh, too bad about the WordPress/Blogger differences. I am far too IT-illiterate to maintain my own domain, unfortunately. If I do drown in spam, I’ll just hold you responsible.
Oyasumi.
Daphne – it’d be far easier to cite what/which lobbies don’t exist to influence the White House in whichever/however way.
The American Administration have more to benefit from coddling the Israelis than in dollar terms, in any case. For one, keeping the largely pro-Chinese Middle East weak is an indirect strategy to contain the emerging superpower in China. Anywayyy…
Daphne
I think Miss DC above sums it up best: having a lobby in Washington is not really a sign, much less a proof, of yet another vast dark conspiracy behind it, merely a reflection of the fact that every cause with fifty people and enough millions, is represented in DC.
I certainly do not question the fact there are strrrrong pro-military and pro-Israeli lobbies in Congress (dozens of the former, in fact)… But, there are a few missing points from your analysis:
1) There are equally strong pro-Arab lobbies there. With possibly more money and at least as much convincing power in terms of what they bring into the balance.
2) Pro-Israel lobbies do not necessarily coincide with pro-military ones.
3) Talking of a pro-Israel lobby and a Jewish lobby, is two entirely different things. Both in people, in facts and most of all, in what they raise to mind. One has to be particularly careful when dealing with such notions. Especially when one pushes the idea that lobbying is akin to conspirating (which I do not entirely agree with, even though I am fiercely against the lobby-system).
4) Similarly, talking about Israel as a whole, with complete political unity, is dearly misunderstand its inner workings: current policies are decided by a government, that belongs to a party which, by all internal and external appraisals, is right-of-center. This party has strong ties with a similarly right-of-center party in the US. These ties are fairly independent from general pro-Israel (as in, acknowledging its right to existence and self-defense) sentiments in the US and most of the Western world. It doesn’t preclude a strong Israeli opposition from existing and that pro-peace opposition to periodically wrest power from the Likud.
So all in all, I doubt one can really hang all of the general sentiment of solidarity towards Israel’s right to existence, only to underground lobbying, much less so to a hidden conspiracy reined in by Jewish magnates pouring money in the Congress.
I have in the past pointed my opposition to Israel’s current policies in occupied territories, but I don’t think the right of one people (the Palestinians) to exist and live peacefully precludes the right of another to do so. Religious fanaticism and strong-headedness abounds in near-equal measures on both sides. Only the power to enforce either one’s nasty extremist visions periodically changes hands…
Yep, it is also the time to get out from our deadlock in Iraq.