overtone

That ostensible interpretation of Christ's words is found among many Christian sects, yes. They don't agree on which things in the OT are the bad ones that Christ overruled, however (stoning adulterers and resting on the Sabbath have little connection with loving one's enemies, after all - the adultery or the rest itself might be more in line with Christ's direct teachings than either the stoning or the not stoning), any more than they agree on the interpretations of his discouragement of public prayer, disparagement of heterosexual marriage, dismissal of loyalty to family and friends, advocacy of dispossession and avoidance of wealth accumulation through work, and cheerful rendering of one's money to the government whose coinage it is regardless of legitimacy or purpose.

Leave me out of that one. I never said anything about any claims of lazyness. What I called bullshit was this: Stick to one story. Most of the immigrants that "made" America, aside from the disaster refugees and slaves and such (which they treated as resources in their own right), came with substantial resources and the aim of using them to become even more prosperous by exploiting "free" land and the untapped wealth found here. That is still more or less the case - with various public resources and stores of wealth supplanting the land over the centuries. The most effective means of improving the lot of those truly poor - nothing but the shirt on their backs, etc - has been government programs and infrastructure, coupled with massive redistribution of wealth - the Revolutionary War, The Louisiana Purchase, the Emancipation Proclamation, the Homestead Act, the Hoover Dam, the GI Bill after WWII, and so forth.

Efficiency at what?

There was no first place. That is the central insight and advance of evolutionary theory. The transition from purpose modified natural objects of increasing utility and socially bequeathed form (something chimps, parrots, dolphins, and corvids can create, even if birds nests and octopus houses don't count) - to the making of blanks, the creation of an unnatural object whose utility is in the ease with which it can be further used or modified in various ways to make a tool it does not itself resemble, appears to have taken something like one million years. The increase in capability necessary was very slow, in human terms, and the presumption pending evidence would be that it was patchy and proceeded by fits and starts.

So you want to create that kind of disaster out of the US, just to get the surviving poor to move to North Dakota? There's what, a few thousand jobs there - that would just about cover the worst of the problem in one ward of Chicago. And then NoDak can set up the kind of quasi slavery abuse that greeted the Irish and wetbacks in the US, with the effect on wages and standards of living for all that such practices have always had - and we can have our very own Brazil, Honduras, Indonesia, Phillipine Islands, plantation era Mississippi, or maybe if very lucky Texas, right here where we used to have America. Congratulations. The whole point of a welfare system is to avoid those kinds of disasters, becuase no sane person wants to chance living through them - not even the rich, if they read their history into the later chapters. Bullshit.

I used to find the concept of smug Americans who thought they had themselves earned their comforts and freedom from oppression by the rich and powerful rather humorous, until they got together behind the corporate elite, installed the Reagan administration, and trashed my beloved country with their unbelievably idiotic meanness. That's not true. They can also be considered poor comparing them to the well off in many other countries and the poor in several. The ignorance of this is kind of baffling - obviously this person has not tried sewing their own clothes, for example, which is not cheap, or squatter gardening (since the poor cannot afford city land) in the lead poisoned dirt of the typical urban slum. No one is "letting them believe" any such crap - the world's most sophisticated marketing operations are putting full time effort into persuading them of it, the laws and regulations of their communities are enforcing it upon them, and it requires considerable effort and ability on their part to escape or avoid it. Two reasons: Because the entire society, including the middle classes and more fortunate people, greatly benefits from the general improvement in the community - no armies of street urchins spreading diseases and harassing everyone who walks down the street, no gutters running with human waste and toxic garbage, a high level of safety of persons and possessions, a low level of hassle in securing one's person and possessions, a clean and safe and comfortable and enjoyable place in which to live. Because there but for the grace of some curbs on the powerful go you: welfare puts a floor under which the rich and powerful cannot drive you by threatening your livelihood, creating a reserve army of the unemployed, gaining control over the supply of necessities you must obtain, etc. Think of it as insurance.

The problem of general American ignorance, heedlessness, and intellectual incapability, is not limited to science and (even more strikingly) math. It's just harder to hide, in those fields. We have, for example, probably a majority of Americans holding the opinion that further cutting of rich people's personal income taxes would "create jobs" in the current US industrial economy - demonstrating a striking failure of the American educational system in history, politics, and economics. (Climate change denial and creationism both have better evidence and arguments opposing more difficult theories and complex circumstances than that opinion.) But this failure is easier to obscure, ignore. If we look to others for ideas on what to do, how to improve things, a couple of points: the best childhood education is found where the most intelligent and well-educated people in the community are often and respectably employed as teachers of children; teaching of children incorporates high levels of activity, doing things, and physically as well as mentally; teaching is personal, with a teacher reacting to the student in real time using the full resources of human communication (not on the phone, by mail, or on a screen); the children learning have food they like, adequate rest, and a lot of time to play; the children also have solitude, peace and quiet, and a chance to do their own work at their own pace and whim; the role of such adult bureaucratic conveniences as standardized tests and similar imposed regimentation not related to child learning is minimized. If we look to ourselves, in the US, for ideas on how to improve things, a couple of points: the strong and even violent anti-intellectual bias of American culture at every level needs public acknowledgment, for its strengths as well as its weaknesses; along that line, a cultural separation of ignorance, anti-intellectual attitude, and stupidity would be great if some genius of public communication could accomplish it (the notion that ignorant people are therefore stupid, the inculcated reaction against acknowledging personal ignorance from its implications of personal stupidity and claims of knowledge for their implications of personal superiority, is my nomination for the single biggest roadblock to raising the general level of physical information and awareness in the US); education is intrinsic to raising children and cannot be separated from it, so factors such as dental health and lead poisoning and threat of violence and diet and playgrounds and parks and books in the home and school distance and start times and racial bigotry and all the rest are part and parcel (i.e. cutting the hours and facilities at the public libraries while buying more standardized testing in the schools is dysfunction itself). The probem of assessment dominating inculcation, credentials replacing capabilities, the Potempkin schooling facade absorbing all the resources while shop class is canceled along with recess time, is as easily exacerbated as ameliorated by expensive new technology aimed at automating education. Education is not job training, and children cannot pay for it. Employers who want educated employees are just going to have to make a choice: educate their employees as adults, or pay taxes and otherwise invest in the community to have others educate them as children.

Just a couple months ago my local paper reminded us (in a story on false confessions) of this - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Park_Jogger_case - several young men acquitted of brutal rape due to new evidence (including conclusive DNA linkage to the real perp), after years in prison. These young men were of course black and poor, a couple with police records, and they had confessed to the crime after extended interrogations by the New York police. This kind of case is pretty common - mistaken eyewtiness, false confessions, shoddy police work, emotional trial atmosphere. And most cases do not have DNA evidence to put the nail in the coffin of the former presumptions. I'm pretty sure they would have been castrated had it been legal to do so. As far as diet, there is no correlation between vitamins and violence. There is a strong correlation between lead exposure in early childhood and violent crime later - a correlation that holds across cultures and time periods worldwide, and tracks the rise and fall of leaded gasoline motor fuel almost exactly with a lag of about 17 years. The Chinese are just now entering their phase of large scale leaded gasoline exposure - the prediction is for serious trouble beginning when the current baby crop hits their late teens.

No. I will continue to respond to your arguments and posts as before, calmly and with forbearance as I see fit or take interest, and even attempting to bring your personal rant and slander around to thread relevance. The US was indeed managing the sanctions very badly, much to its own discredit and cost as well as hardship for the Iraqis, after manipulating Iraq into a war that failed to topple Saddam. But doubling down on that rolling atrocity with actual invasion was not the only possible response to having dug ourselves into that hole. Meanwhile, the success of the Iraq War is hardly obvious - what are you talking about? As far as the US: the war has ballooned our debt, damaged our military, ruined our image of capability and destroyed our moral authority on the world stage, handed us thousands of dead and tens of thousands of badly injured soldiers in the prime of life just as our medical care setup is bidding to fall apart, saddled us with a gulag of torture prisons and a thoroughly corrupted foreign policy of secret police and political ignorance, set up the world's most critical oil field to be allied with Iran, driven Turkey closer to Russia in its struggles with the Kurds, provided AQ and other Islamic jihadists with a platform adjoining their major funding sources, etc etc etc. As for Iraq: Saddam is gone, tried in a kangaroo court and hanged by a pack of Islamic fundies under US auspices, yay; the most Westernized Islamic country in the region has been set back a generation into Islamic theocracy (complete with burqas, Sharia law, and sectarian violence); its people have been subjected to murderous ethnic cleansing of neighborhoods and political division into medieval tribal enclaves, its intellectual and cultural elite has been evicted and scattered and largely obliterated from the country, while its economic elite has been thoroughly coopted by the profiteering opportunities of the unbelievably corrupt US war effort; its economy has been handed over to a pirate class of carpetbagging foreigners and organized criminals backed by foreign armies; its infrastructure has been bombed back to pre-French levels; hundreds of thousands of its people are dead or missing; its military can no longer defend its borders; its oil fields even, the best protected and most carefully handled of its economic assets, remain far below their former production or capability; and so forth. How it turned out? It hasn't, yet. It's not too late to improve, but the enemies of Iraq are on its borders and it's otherwise in very bad shape at the moment - the smart money would not be on a bright near term future. We wrecked the place. Now it's wrecked. For the US, given its administration and history, there were no options - probably the only honorable course of action would have been to relax the sanctions on medical supplies and infrastructure parts, and otherwise do nothing except keep the British and Russians out - let non-perpetrators handle things. Maybe the Chinese. The US would never have invaded Iraq if the situation ahd been presented honestly to the US public. So one option would have been presenting the situation honestly to the US public, and going from there - with no invasion possible, other avenues of endeavor would have a better chance. Anything would have been better than what the US did - well, maybe not nukes. It's true we didn't nuke anybody. If it can establish a federalilzed democracy, which is not known yet, it will be an Islamic theocratic version entirely creditable to the violent defiance by the Iraqi Islamic fundies of the attempts of the US to impose strongman rule (Chalabi, etc). I'm not sure that should count as a benefit from the US invasion, even if it does turn out to have been a consequence.

That looks to me like someone demonstrating beyond doubt that they have been drinking deeply of the talk radio koolaid. You apparently have no idea what a lefty is, how they talk or what they think. There is an entire set of schools of lefty intellectuals - from Ken Kesey and Abbie Hoffman to Edward Abbey and the conservationists in general - who regard private ownership of guns as a borderline sacred American right. There is an entire set of factions of rightwing - - - searching for the term - - thinking and opinion, who strongly favor much stricter government regulation and control of private gun ownership than any of those lefties I named or referenced - you can start with the police departments of most large American cities, and work out the ripples of implication from there. It's not a left/right issue. It's a libertarian/authoritarian issue, and they both come lefty and righty. Putting lefties and righties in quotes was smart, because otherwise I could simply point out that Democrat vs Republican in the US does not correspond to left vs right in any reality based sense. I think I will simply point that out anyway, as you apparently think Congressional roll call votes align with libertarian left ideology somehow, and that is talk radio level misapprehension.

I've never seen that actually argued, at least not honestly (without the propaganda "facts"). It is often asserted, but without basis in evidence or genuine argument. The "surge" consisted of bribing certain Islamic and tribal forces, the worst of which we had invited into Iraq and provided with motivated recruits, to quit killing US soldiers. http://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/kipling/dane_geld.html You sound as it you think it turned out better than it might have. What realistic possibilities do you think were worse than this situation? Your implication that AQ was present in Iraq before the US invasion badly misleads - only a few "AQ" (Saudi) associated groups, in small corners protected by US airpower (partly for their role in attacking Iran) had ever had any foothold in Iraq. We also encouraged the 91 war, with an oil industry associated President who had been head of the CIA deftly manipulating the situation to open the door for the US military - which has been stuck there ever since, draining and corrupting both countries. Getting themselves into situations of moral depravity, with no morally or ethically defensible options available, is one of the problems bad people setting out to do wrong things regularly face. That does not make the degradation and horror of military invasion a reasonable option - certainly not under the laughable auspices of benefiting the Iraqi citizenry, or the equally laughable competencies of the US administration running that show. The US could not "fix" Saddam - certainly not the US of the "rightwing military/industrial authoritarian" (we are not allowed to name this political faction) Bush family with its cadre of oil company and secret police and Saudi royal connections. The task was beyond its powers. Other people, other means, or Ecclesiastical time and chance, had to be relied on, waited for. Yes it was a bad scene. Invasion, conquest, occupation, and control was maybe the worst option, on grounds of reason as well as morality and ethics. The Iraq War was sold with lies because the American people, a generally decent lot, would never have supported it honestly presented. And it is defended with lies and revisions of history and denials of fact because the simple facts of its launching and prosecution cannot be faced by its supporters without invoking major personal and political rehabilitation. And that means it was preventable, obviously - it si always possible to not lie to the American public, always possible to not manipulate them into doing very bad things they dont' want to do - and always possible for these people to see through such cons and avoid being swindled. There was nothing inevitable about it. More than 100 Congressmen voted to deny W his war powers - had it been more than 200, the US would be several trillion dollars to the good and acting with a much clearer conscience as a public. So don't read my posts. I, after all, was perfectly clear to any honest reader - I explicitly stated that I was not attempting communication with you, and do not care what you think of my posting (if you ever did get around to actually addressing my posting, content and stuff like that) - your pretense of incomprehension there is yet another example of how I came to that understanding.

Now it is a fascist-leaning Islamic theocratic state muddling through the aftermath of one of the world's worst episodes of ethnic cleansing (exactly what somebody above claimed the war was launched to prevent, right?) - with elections, cue the trumpets, established through violent defiance of US pressure. Every sign of hope in Iraq right now is from defiance of the original US agenda. That kind of trajectory being good is of course a damning indictment of what the US brought upon the place, both by success and failure. Take the "open" (undefended) market: Even a market open to the financial pirates of the world is better than the strongman "transtional" state the US attempted to establish (another Saddam, only more compliant with Chevron's interests). The evil that men like Cheney do is not the freaking weather - there's nothing inevitable about it. Just as the invading US did not have to bomb the sewer systems and power plants (and journalist's hotels), set up torture interrogation prisons, and allow the burning of the great library of Baghdad, so the sanctions did not have to include medical supplies and civil infrastructure machinery. They could have been voted out of office, impeached, prosecuted. The NYT could have done its job. The people rigging the "intelligence" could have been subpoenaed and questioned under oath by a diligent Congress. And so forth. The entire war effort depended on its corporate backers not having to pay for it, for another example - simply filibustering the W tax cuts in the Senate under the justification of having to pay for a war would have killed it in the cradle (its backers weren't idiots). Just one possibility. The US government went in there primarily for backing corporate interests's control of the oil fields, secondarily for their pirate/colonial access to the Iraq economy; and that was pointed out well in advance by intelligent, well-informed, and well-reasoned people - including some of the more "intellectual" promoters of the debacle. Rewriting that perfectly sound and subsequently well-supported position as "whining" about where's our cheap gas by hippies who think all war is bad is corrupted, talk radio level, Murdoch press caliber excuse mongering and hiding from what happened. It's slander, of a particularly corrosive and ugly bent. The opposition to the war was made up of people like Molly Ivins and Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman and the like, both popular and ivory tower. These people were not describing the motivation of the war launchers as cheap gas for regular American citizens, or any other benefit for American citizens.

You cannot, however, point to a single specific aspect of my paraphrase that does not fairly and accurately represent what you posted. I was completely explicit, above, in describing exactly where and how and why I paraphrased as I did - you have plenty of material for actual objections and specific error, if any. Whether you "accept" what you said when it is laid out clearly, without your built in confusions and with those "redundant" adjectives put in place, is hardly the point, eh? I can sympathisize with your reluctance - you have been posting some pretty silly stuff, koolaid from the goofiest of the warmongering of ten years ago and excuse pandering of every year since - but it's not my job to bail you out. That's a lie, about what I posted. I said nothing about theism, and you know that. It's the third or fourth lie of that form, twisting words - the one I really noticed was your attempt to banish "invasion" and replace it with "liberation", a Frank Luntz/Newt Gingrich propaganda move that brought your entire body of posting into sudden focus for me. Another lie. I said nothing about your worldview, and you know that. Whether your worldview can be inferred from your posting tactics would be speculation, and in your case we have several possibilities and not much evidence. As far as the Fox Frame term for the questions and phrasing - that's just a label, a handy way to specify the nature of your lack of integrity and avoidance of discussion. Everybody knows what a Fox Frame is by now, regardless of where the perp learned the trick. Here I will cut you some slack - you don't. Your continual flailing misses at describing my views have been merely irrelevancies posted in lieu of responses, employments of Fox tactics in lieu of argument etc, and not the truly contemptible lies they would be if you actually had much of a clue regarding my worldview etc. So? Actual communication with anyone is not why you're here, and communicating with you would be a waste of my time. My point so far is that the Iraq War was obviously preventable, and should have been prevented - the political factions attempting to stop W&Co from launching it failed, were defeated in the US media arena, is all. The warmongering propaganda won the day, and the US citizenry will be paying the price for a generation at least.

As I stated and explained above, explicitly, I paraphrased - a necessity because of your vagueness, which was deceptive and question-begging. I was taking the question-begging as a personal tactic or quirk, but am beginning to suspect the deception is deliberate. You explicitly agreed with that perception of vagueness, terming the clarification "redundant" and thereby validating my paraphrase as well as demonstrating the necessity of it. So that's settled, and you can read your own previous post for the quote. There's a part where I point out that you are lying, in your phrasing of some of your questions. As you are introducing the topic of ethical affront, I will note further that people are often paid to write as you do, and post propaganda as you post, in public fora. This is a known tactic of the rightwing authoritarian think tanks in the US and the Zionist faction of the Israeli lobby, among others. You are missing a shot at a side income, given your talents and displayed ethical standards - or you aren't. The impudence of someone who posts as you do demanding apologies from honest people is noted with amusement, but why should I care whether you ever read any of my posts?

Many shellfish would have been unsafe for inland folks inexperienced with the tides and seasons and different kinds of shellfish, and not because they are disgusting in their diet (nothing is more disgusting in its diet than a tomato or a chicken) - because some kinds are periodically infused with poisonous algae ("red tides") and can kill you during those periods. The rest of the time they are good healthy food - very good, very healthy food (omega 3s and all that). An inland desert people would be wise to avoid eating them on those uncommon occasions when the possibility came around, but the rest of us are OK. Obviously the religious law was written for a particular culture in a particular place, to deal with questions of cleanliness, public health, and tribal economics, in various situations of temptation. It isn't really God's fault if modern Chesapeake Bay residents mistake themselves for ancient Israelis.

I said all that? Yep. Your admission that you omitted those adjectives because you think them redundant is welcome - it justifies my paraphrase, which I found necessary instead of quotation because of the wiggle room you provided yourself by your vagueness and confusion. Note my observation that Iraq under Saddam, while definitely Islamic and fascist, was not theocratic, was one my calls on your bullshit - in particular your attempts at Fox Framing the Iraq war. Giving up on the terrorist support dishonesty? Good. Saddam posed absolutely no such threat to me or mine or anyone compatriot, so self defense as claimed by you and the W%Cheney administration is bs. His atrocities toward others, especially the Kurds who had taken up armed rebellion and other theocratic Islamic insurgents as well as "communists" within his borders, were long supported by the US and certainly no motive for military invasion, conquest, occupation, and control as launched by W&Co. No. And Fox Questions are considered lies, on discussion forums such as this. The PLO faction as represented by Zoudain (just to emphasize, even that an example of refuge rather than operational support) are the wrong kind of terrorist for supporting your claims and attempted argument. And you have no other examples. If you didn't mean to claim Saddam was (suicidally) supporting Islamic jihad terrorism against Western influence and Western secular government, you can clarify now - perhaps your new and amended assertions will be more useful in justifying the invasion of Iraq. Although the issue of the inevitability of that debacle remains over the horizon - the answer to the OP is still "Yes, of course".

As the major source and base of the Islamic jihad terrorist problem in the locale, Pakistan would have been the target of an invasion honestly and dominantly motivated by a desire to stomp on Islamic jihad. Pakistan actually contributed to 9/11, for example - money and people and effort from the government, military, powerful and wealthy citizens, large proportions of the population and countryside: the country itself - unlike Afghanistan, which as a country and government had nothing to do with it. You said Saddam was supporting the Islamic jihad terrorism that was at war with the US, the AQ type, the Islamic theocratic fascists and their terrorist minions. You then claimed his housing of terrorists, plural, as an example of this support. One PLO anti-Israeli nationalist terrorist given refuge from Italian law does not support those claims. He's the wrong kind of terrorist, there's only one of him, and he was not supported by Saddam during those terrorist operations. I would not, say, use Florida's housing of the nationalist anti-Castro terrorist airplane bomber, the nationlist anit-Sandinista terrorist hospital and bus bombers, and so forth, as evidence of Florida's support of Islamic jihad terrorism. I instead refer to the employment of Florida land and facillities and financial institutions and pilot training facilities and so forth, by the 9/11 terrorists, as evidence of Florida's use by Islamic jihad terrorists as a training base for 9/11 - somewhat similar to, although more significant than, Afghanistan's use for that operation. Islamic jihadists, especially those with Saudi or Iranian (so either Sunni or Shia) connections, were not welcome in Iraq under Saddam (as some are, now, especially Shia) for the very good reason that they were violently opposed to Saddam's rule and targeting Saddam as an ally of Western secular corruption, a consorter with infidels, and an enemy of the true faith. This despite Saddam's repeated attempts to repair his image in the Islamic world, theatrically emphasize his opposition to all things Israeli and so forth, ostentatiously back this or that symbol of Islamic purity and truth, and otherwise make some allies or dupes locally as his Western backing became increasingly convinced he was no longer reliably cooperative in the oil business. But you knew all that, right? Heads of State who are genocidal madmen in Saddam's manner (occasional wholesale slaughter and State terrorism of terrorist and violently rebellious ethnicities both domestic and foreign) are a dime a dozen in that region - most of them, like Saddam himself, installed as strongmen with the backing of the Western powers and especially the international oil, gas, and mining industry. Most of them US allies. We are talking about military invasion, conquest, occupation, and attempted control, of the single most important oil field on the planet. Full scale aggressive military war, launched at US discretion and timing, fought on borrowed money, against a country that presented no military threat to us. The question as whether that war was preventable. The answer seems fairly obvious to me - don't let W&Co launch it, it doesn't happen.

It's familiar. Now try giving us a reasonable post, an argument, discussion from evidence, recognition of reality, apology for backing jingoistic nonsense with personal insult, etc - something useful and relevant and at least resembling honest discussion.

No, he wasn't. He was killing them. As the most secular and Westernized of the Islamic oil field governments in the region, Iraq and its ruler were prime targets of Islamic terrorism both foreign and domestic, and the enemies of the theocratic terrorist supporting States on Iraq's borders. Removing Saddam, purifying Iraq of its Western corruptions, and installing theocratic Islamic governance in Iraq has long been a desire of the hard core Islamic fanatics - the US was most cooperative, one hopes unwittingly, in the realization of this dream. Unfortunately the exact form and sectarian allegiance of the new Islamic ruling cadre had not been agreed, and vicious civil war with ethnic cleansing turned out to be the negotiating tactics of choice, but they were probably not the first religious fanatics to find themselves disappointed in the reality of their hopes. "We" didn't launch a military invasion of Pakistan, we didn't start a war. Maybe we learned something, between 2000 and 2012. That has been obvious for some time.

That's what Saddam was doing, until interrupted. Good for him, right? You support the continuation of his endeavors? You would be firmly opposed to removing Saddam from power and handing the key oil fields on the planet to Islamic theocrats? "They" are a large and motley grab bag of terrorists and religious fanatics and organized criminals scattered all over the planet, from the drug cartels in Mexico, to the boon companions of Exxon and the Bush family in Saudi Arabia, to the heirs of the Khmer Rouge in the rain mountains of SE Asia, to the mangrove swamp mystics of backwater South Pacific islands. How many wars, invasions, aerial bombing raids, drone assassination operations, wholesale bad guy killing operations launched by US military, for how many years on end, debt rollovers in sequence, governing needs postponed, did you have in mind?

The dinosaurs didn't starve to death. They were wiped out because they didn't have a space program.

Yeah, you would be on his side. That is what you are. On your best day... at your most noble... you are a supporter of a terrorist. When simple and accurate description of the historical record is described as "supporter of a terrorist", one would expect a moment's reflection on the implications of that. Among those claiming a "leftist approach" to the discussion of invasions launched on propaganda by authoritarian rightwing military/industrial governments, at least. The US administration that launched both those invasions, launched two land wars in Asia while exempting its domestic military/industrial support from even the taxes necessary to pay for them, claimed self-defense for both ot them, dubiously in the first case (military invasion not obviously the appropriate response, Afghanistan not clearly the most crucial target or attacking party), flat out dishonest warmongering propaganda in the second (Iraq was not attacking or threatening the US with violence) and screwed both of them up relative to its declared goals, advancing the interests and enriching the persons of its corporate support and by its efforts nobody else to date, were and are theocratic fascists, politically. Unlike Saddam Hussein, who while fascist was not theocratic, and was himself historically and at the time in often violent conflict with both neighboring theocratic fascists who had brought armies to his borders, and domestic theocratic fascists who had brought terrorism and the threat of terrorism to his country. Are you part of the "we" that is "at war" with the various theocratic fascists who had targeted non-theocratic Iraq and Saddam, or do they get a pass? Are you sure, metaphorically speaking, that the battle against arsonists is best fought with flamethrowers?

That is correct. If someone finances a terrorist residing in New York and that terrorist commits an act of terror then the money came from New York. ?! Ohh - kaaay. And here I thought I had reduced the absurdity to something too obviously stupid even for you - never underestimate the impudence of someone attempting to justify war, would be the lesson. So was Florida. So was Germany. So was the Philippines. Essentially: None of the money, people, plans, organization, means, ends, or information, came from the country of Afghanistan, either its population or its government. You can't say the same for Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Florida, San Diego, or Germany. Light dawns. I apologize for overestimating your literacy. You meant to say " inside Afghanistan" or " within Afghanistan", and I should have known that. Of course the existence of a separate state would undermine your attempted justification of the launching of war, against the other one. So 7 of the least skilled and least trained of the 19 hijackers got some of their introductory training - none of the special mission oriented stuff or anything particular to 9/11, which happened somewhere else, just a general intro to AQ - ("first" underwent, meaning there was a "second" and "third", right?) in Afghanistan, without involving the Afghan government or its people (It was at this "State within a State" place). So? I said this: And apparently you agree. In other words, the actual State, government, and people of Afghanistan were not much involved - bearing much less responsibility for 9/11 than, say, the US as a country bears for Basque separatist terrorism, or the depredations of the IRA. Then the US should have attacked that one, and left the innocent unbombed. Actually OBL declared self-defense, and blamed the declaration of war on the US among others. In this he is generally supported by the historical record. But I do appreciate how the Iraq invasion - my major issue here, the war of the two I have emphasized as obviously preventable and both tragic and absurd in not haveing been prevented - has dwindled from your posting. That shows common sense.

That plausible sounding line of argument is why the right to keep and bear arms was written into the Constitution - so that any future government attempting to accrue to itself the power to decide who is "responsible", what features would characterize "responsible" gun ownership , etc, would hit the wall of the explicitly granted right. You don't have to prove that you are responsible to speak freely, assemble peaceably, rest secure from search and seizure in your own home, etc. Having to prove oneself "responsible" according to some government functionary's criteria is exactly what enshrining a right in the Constitution forestalls.

And financing routed through New York or Florida came from New York or Florida? Don't be silly. The financing for AQ's international terrorism did not (and does not) come from Afghanistan. The training of the pilots, and the critical Western familiarization of the thugs, would have been impossible in Afghanistan had it been attempted, which it was not. What little training was done in Afghanistan was not sponsored or financed by Afghans or the government of Afghanistan. No people, no money, no expertise, no contribution to 9/11 whatsoever, has ever been traced to Afghanistan. Germany, Florida, and California made bigger and more significant contributions to 9/11 than Afghanistan. You seem to have the Taliban and AQ confused - OBL and AQ was never even in the government of Afghanistan, let alone running the country. They were honored guests, influential and respected foreigners who had brought money and weapons and dedication of their own lives to help the cause, not Afghans. OBL's ethnicity alone, viewed with suspicion by Pashtun, would have prevented him from assuming a governing role in that country under the Taliban. The CIA did a great deal to put Saddam Hussein in power, backing the winner as the US chosen anti-communist strongman in Iraq. Most people with a "leftist" perspective regard that as common knowledge by now - multiple eyewitness accounts, a great deal of circumstantial evidence, Saddam's role in punishing Iran for deposing their US backed strongman, his role in ridding Iraq of "communists" (with US help), the US tolerance of things like his massacres of the Kurds, the long line of events and connections in the region, make any other hypothesis dubious at best. We have reasonably solid evidence that he was on the CIA payroll, even, in the early going. But you know all that, right? Why are you spending so much time posting irrelevancies, instead of responding to the arguments you seem to want to address? You didn't get that stupid bs from anything I said. Why are you avoiding what I actually posted, above? People who actually do oppose violent fascism could, conceivably, have succeeded in preventing the W&Cheney military disasters. They didn't, they lost the political battle in the US, but that loss was not inevitable. 135 US Congressmen voted against givng W his green light, for example - that number could have been considerably larger, surely?