DAMN this administration for putting the US in an untenable situation

[cantstandbush]

with the Iraq invasion that so many advised against. We are now damned if leave and damned if we stay. Our once loved, admired, and respected nation is now on its way to the dust bin of history as an imperialistic, greedy, and bigoted and heartless super power. It really is a crime against this nation that this administration has committed as our own infrastructure, economy, civil rights, and humanity has been sucked up by the black hole of militarism and corporate greed.

[ixion]

1. every day for the past 25+ years

I've weeped for our once great republic, now disgraced, now a buffoon, now a bully.

:cry:

I say that because I believe where we're at started distinctly with the Ray-Gun presidency.

Remember, before he was even elected, they cut a deal with Iran to hold the hostages until after the election in order to disgrace Carter. It was so obvious. And it was the beginning of the End for the concept of America, IMO.

[cantstandbush]

2. Good point of history. I believe you are correct and I agree. n/t

[ixion]

10. thanks!

someone's gotta bring that up once in awhile. :hi:

[mrcheerful]

3. Your not alone, remember firing workers for striking because of working

conditions and the planes that crashed during the air traffic controllers firing? Remember deregulation and out sorcing and down sizing? All Reagans doings, as well as the start of companies off shoring. May Reagan rot in the 7th level of hell along with those that supported the puke party. They will never redeem themselves for the war crimes they started with their war on workers and the poor, world wide.

[ixion]

9. yep, exactly

so much turmoil, such a crappy economy, so many scandals...

And yet somehow he was a 'great' president?

Yeah. Right. Whatever.

[smomfr]

16. Lets not forget turning out the...........

mentally ill and handicaped being turned out to the street

[camby]

4. The irony is that many people now look back upon

the Gipper as one of the greatest presidents ever - even those who can't stand Bush. Most of these are younger people who have been raised on images of Reagan as a kind of savior. It's more than just politics that launched us down this slope - it's a complicit corporate media.

[ixion]

6. back then I called them the 'Children of Reagan'

Under-funding education created an entire generation of under-educated kids who are now some of the people supporting chimpster, and claiming that Reagan was a 'great president'.


My, what short memories... lest we forget:

- The Savings and Load Scandal
- The Reagan Recession
- The Invasion of most of Latin America
- Iran Contra (selling weapons to buy drugs to fund RW contras in Latin America. Poppy was a big player in that little mess.)
- The so-called 'War on Drugs', which has done nothing except cause the (now privatized) prison population to expand logarithmically.
- And on, and on, and on.

What's not to despise?

[camby]

12. EXACTLY....I do not have fond memories of Reagan

I was talking to a 30-something person recently who claimed to have great memories of the Reagan years. I felt like saying - I have great memories of the Eisenhower years, too, but I was under 10 for Chrissakes. I certainly don't attribute my sense of well-being as a child to Joe McCarthy!!!

[MH1]

19. Don't forget, the complicit corporate media is enabled by

an undereducated, gullible public.

And don't think the internet will necessarily make that better..it may make it worse:

http://www.intelligententerprise.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=181503112

...we live in an information age that has gotten long on information and short on attribution and verification. I blame not the Internet so much as the gullibility of a society that has transferred a sycophantic trust in the printed word to a similar trust in the pixelated word. For too many people, if it's on the Internet, it must be true — common sense and access to the Internet's own powerful tools for verification notwithstanding.

(snip)

In the end, blogs and wikis, like e-mail, have a lot of potential for both good and bad. But we tend not to question the source, and therefore the veracity, of information. This, in a sense, is how spam came to be so successful at cluttering our lives: It started from the fact that people actually believed their problems — sexual, monetary, health or whatever — could be solved by answering an anonymous e-mail that promised something too good to be true.

The integrity of all information — corporate or private — rests on the ability of users to judge the validity of the source. So heaven help us if no one calls the bloggers and wikites on the carpet when they mislead and misinform; degrading information on the Internet will globalize ignorance to an incredible degree. And the last thing anyone needs these days is more global stupidity. We have enough politicians contributing to that problem already.

[camby]

21. You are correct...and the situation is exacerbated by

the fact that most folks are too lazy (or busy, or not interested) to do what's necessary: read a variety of sources, check out the facts as best you can, and then try to discern the truth. When we let others do our thinking for us, we're in trouble.

[FloridaPat]

5. Just about everything in the * admin is from the Ray-gun one.

It amazes me how clueless the American public has been.

[ixion]

8. yep... same playbook, but now with lame actors...

The cast had a bit more (not much, mind you) going for them back then, but they were still idiots on the Grand Scale.

[NNN0LHI]

7. "We are now damned if leave and damned if we stay. " WTF?

I was told exactly the same thing about Vietnam a few decades ago.

We found out that was a big lie back then.

It still is.

We won't be damned if we leave.

Bush and his minions will be damned because they were the idiots who started it all.

But we won't be damned.

Don

[Anna Lee]

11. Imagine how the Iraqi people feel; damned by history?

[NNN0LHI]

13. I think they realize that there are certain Americans with the...

..."White Mans Burden" mentality. They know our history. I just hope they understand that we are not all that way.

Don

[sweetheart]

20. Does it make us apologists then.

Don't hate americans, cuz there are some good ones!!

And all the while, we *know* that the people who tax us are pursuing a global empire to
control the entire planet, to break and weaken the fringe nations that they are all too
weak to every challenge US power, ever. And when we bring the guns home, they'll send
the corporate globalists again, and they'll call in the army again, cuz the corporate globalists
are running the place and they have every intention of breaking all, pardon the very racist
term, but i've heard it, just so people know the kind of mentality that lurks in the
basement of the real american empre, "nigger nations."

The white supremecists are behind the american nazis, very very discretely, and they
are doing the same shit, killing darker skins for sport. I no longer believe there is
any good in the US government at all. It has degenerated so incredibly far, that every
single agency will pursue the same racist policies of corporate overpopulation pandering
and yellow journalism... its not empire collapse.. just "crash".

I'm praying that foreign nations realize how far gone the drunk is, and how close the
drunken nation is to starting a big fight, or passing out.

Yes, tabloid racism and greed. Maybe the reason russia is our new friend, is cuz
both countries have now put down their slave rebellions, and the whole last 2 centuries
of middle class slaves is to be eschewed for the old model, and it seems, as business
schools across the planet stamp out friedman clones, the old model is a lockin.

Coup for the monarchy, and we've been bypassed entirely, the political process and its
powers just a sham veneer on unfettered dangerous drunken corporatism.

Goddam, i wish i didn't know better sometimes, i wish that i could forget all the
racists and racism i've seen institutionally, and pretend it does not exist, but then
we are taxed for it, we are compelled by violent racists to do our part... and i am
sickened to the bone that it has gotten this far.

That thousands of people are killed from a momentum of racists that was as predictable
as the sunrise, far beyond coup 2000.

(emotional meltdown of upset)

[NNN0LHI]

14. Almost forgot. Welcome to DU

I hope you like it around here. Take care.

Don

[teryang]

15. Cost benefit analysis requires us to leave

if we leave, we can cut our military expenditures by hundreds of billions and stop the killing and crippling of our soldiers FOR NOTHING. What is the perceived benefit of staying when the situation worsens daily? Iraq imports everything now, and the American taxpayer pays for it. The country has disintegrated. Only Iraqis can put it back together.

The notion that our staying there serves some greater purpose is nonsense. It is merely a domestic political purpose of covering up the fact that the war is a miserable failure. Defeat in war is the unpardonable political sin inevitably followed by the fall of the government which conceived the war. Since the war was a bipartisan effort of corporate representatives they cannot face the curtain being swept aside on their war crimes and illegitimacy. Their solution, is the mistaken notion that the huge military complex they built in Iraq to augment their fortunes cannot be moved and cannot be forced out. They are as tragically mistaken as they were in Vietnam.

[wildwww2]

17. You said exactly what I thought. Thank you. Bu$h has tried to damn

us along with himself and his warmongering buddies. We are only damned if we are stupid enough to believe that nonsense. Bu$h and his gang should go to the Hague. A good place for the damned idiots whom started this war crime.
Peace
Wildman
Al Gore is My President

[berni_mccoy]

18. The ENTIRE Bush Administration is directly responsible ===>

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=364x1339030