And here is why :

http://www.tangle.com/view_video.php?viewkey=0861ff3eabea1ceb73e4

Okay, so lets pretend this video scares the shit out of me, what should be done?

I couldn't see the video but would have to assume it's meant to scare people. Frankly, I'm more scared of the christian taliban here in our own country than crazy people half way around the world.

I'm more scared of the christian taliban here in our own country than crazy people half way around the world.

The Religious EXTREME RIGHT wing-nuts out there scare the living crap out of me....

Waiting for an answer, Kennewickman.

We need to keep funding the U.S. defense of the so called "war on Terror". I think we should have a cabinet level dept along the lines of what we now have in the the Dept of Defense." This body to be proactively assigned to detect and prevent Terrorism , Domestic and otherwise. The term War on Terror sounds like something out of a Spiderman movie. It doesnt sound all together serious, IMO .

Many want to totally forget 911 ever happend and ignore the continued threat, mainly from Islamic extremists. Many want to draw money and energy away from such activity when ( as our friend Mr. Aziz was saying in the video clip ) Terrorists have the ability and motivation and tactical and monetary support to come across easily from Mexico with a biological or a Nuclear weapon to inflict catastrophic damage to our citizenry, more than did the disaster at the Twin Towers.

We need to have this dept beef up our borders and especially our Ports ! Very important, along with damned good INTEL. You heard Aziz...he not only wants to kill the infadels, he wants to persecute his own brothers who write for Newspapers or Journals and work in the Arab Media who advocate a moderate position toward the West and perhaps to Isreal as well .

This guy is also a ' Domestic Terrorist " in his own right. We have seen that behavior in Al Queada and its off shoot groups as they spent a lot of time cutting off the heads of Westerners and blowing up their own people to plunge the region into some kind of chaotic 7th century Islamic Theocracy, with NUKES and Biologics. Judas H. Priest on horseback ! We can wind up with a deadly version of what is developing in Dubai. See the Dubai string for an example of what I am writing about. Tribal people , not yet ready to understand what is reasonable and what isnt in the 21 st century, let alone what passed for civilization in the 7th. Not all Arabs and Islamic people are this way, I know.

Its the extremists that are , and they dont care a fig about any Infadels, they just want us dead. So we need to stay vigilant.

The best way we can fight back , in the long term, is to get our crap together and figure out how to run our vehicles and other energy converters on batteries and or Hydrogen Fuel Cells. Then the mideast becomes a secondary or Tertiary concern to the west and we can give the Arabs what they want, to be ignored by the infadels !

I would add, boost our manufacturing again. Sucks to fight a war with components purchased from China.

Cultivate agreements with other nations to reduce legal and political barriers. Impose sanctions on those nations that won't play ball too.

There are terrorists and then there is the idea of terror.

Any given terrorist may be caught and dealt with. The idea of terror is a more subtle thing.

Basically, a greater global consensus on how to handle it, and cooperation in handling it will sharply diminish the value of doing it.

In the end, that's the real game. Terror is only worth it if it works!

And I've said this before, but Bush really hosed it good. Instead of going down that road, being able to leverage the most global support we've had in a long time, he responded with fear mongering and all the other crap we've seen.

Terrorists commit terror to evoke change. That's it.

We are a shining example! We changed huge! As far as I am concerned, they won that round. Here we are broke ass, paying for wars that didn't address the problem, the culprit free to make tapes.

FUCKING TAPES! My god. How hard can it be to catch the SOB, if he's able to make tapes?

(that worries me)

Of course our own Taliban here loved every bit of it, as FEAR is what they play off of. All of them got stiffies over it, I'm sure.

Ugh...

And it goes on. No need for a full on rant.

So then, not bending over for them, or out of fear of them is the key. This needs to be absolute as we can make it. No reward, and being hunted by as much of the world as we can muster until they are dead, gone.

Totally agreed on alternative energy. That's a biggie, because it seriously limits our options.

If an act of terror does not cause significant change, it's marginalized. That is a big deal, largely because the idea of real change is what they use to recruit Jihadists! (is that a word?)

The other thing they use is revenge based. That means the Iraqis are a ready pool for at least a generation. We did that, and it's like fighting fire with gas.

If we do military things, they need to be very defensible things others can support us on, and with that high ground, we take that recruiting tool away, leaving just the change bit.

Sure, it's easy to be scared and begin to roll back liberties and buy into the idea of security being worth a lot.

But it's better for the nation, in the longer term, to live free or die. Meaning, we don't bend who we are, just because some asshole did some damage.

Kennewickman: Many want to totally forget 911 ever happend and ignore the continued threat, mainly from Islamic extremists.

Many? Who exactly wants to "forget 911 ever happened?" Can you name anyone? I don't know anyone who has suggested any such thing.

Obama is beefing up our military presence in Afghanistan primarily because of the need to keep that country from returning to the terrorist haven it was before 9/11. He's not ignore the threat at all. But the media is almost completely focused on the economy now.

I dont like the Patriot Act a whole lot, but if the act is modified a bit, I could live with it.

Exacting a change through Terrorism is not new. Our own founding fathers participated in such activity it is argued. The difference was the reasoning behind all of it. Taxation without representation , which evolved from a Boston Tea party and other demonstrations of Independence to a guerilla sniper rout of the British Northwest of Boston and then into an out and out Colony wide rebellion. Again, the reasons for it all ??

The Yanks thought they were justified , so did the British. But there were Terrorist activities in the begining. And it became an out and out war.

Now, our point of view in this day and time is that what ever we did or have done doesnt justify the treatment we got on 911. So the response was to bomb Afghanistan knock out the Taliban and go after Bin Laden. Iraq was supposedly another matter. Supposedly ..

Our " Taliban " as you call the Christian Right, doesnt shoot women for not wearing a head scarf or even for infedlity. Our " Taliban " doesnt prevent little girls from attending school. It is a mistake to equivocate in this instance.

We have a point of view. We need to protect that point of view, especially when the consequences are actually about the survival of our citizens and way of life. As you pointed out, kskd, diplomacy needs to be a large part of all of this and hasnt been particularly , since 911. It is or will be now , we have already seen that.

But there are always the 'bad guys' out there that will take advantage of something like good will and amity and these are the targets of my dept of " Anti Terrorism " or whatever it is we would want to call it.

The liberal side was talking a lot about the War on Terror being a facade and an excuse for intrusions on personal freedoms and so forth, and even some conservatives agreed with this position, actually.

I think Obama or his surrogates made some statements to this effect during the campaign.

The President now has all the INTEL and I am sure has a slighlty different position on this now.

There were those on the Left that questioned the legitamacy of the War on Terror during the run up to the election.

So do you take back your statement that, "Many want to totally forget 911 ever happened and ignore the continued threat, mainly from Islamic extremists?" Because you haven't named anyone who ever said such a thing.

Just because many of us didn't agree with the Bush approach to an endless war on "terror" doesn't mean we don't take the threat from terrorISTS extremely seriously. Conservatives seem to see these things in purely black-and-white terms: if we disagree with their president's approach to fighting terrorists, then we must wish not to take the threat seriously. My way or the highway. Sorry, I just don't see it that way at all.

I think Obama has always taken the threat from terrorists seriously. Show me otherwise.

I'm ok with the intrusions, provided we have oversight and that's in the form of an enduring public record of what happened, how and to who and when and for what.

With that, we can address abuses, and the rest can be made perfectly sound with people safe.

The problem, as implemented, was no oversight and no accountability and it was abused.

There is a difference between increasing security, and doing it without checks. I don't know anybody that is not for the latter. That's a good change in response to terror and they don't win on that one.

Accepting the latter, surrenders a bit of who we are, and that is a bad change in response to terror, and they do win on that score.

NOBODY questioned the war on terror. NOBODY.

What was questioned was the means and methods put into place, and the abuse that followed those acts of very poor and unAmerican governance.

That's at issue, not fighting terror.


And sorry, our Christian Taliban are a problem. You are probably not one, and are probably offended by the idea that Christians can be associated with the Taliban. The Christian right are not ALL Taliban types.

There is a very vocal faction though that are, plain and simple. Sure, they are not killing people, but they are pushing for a theocracy, where their version of a cleric will intrepet the divine word for us, insure the law is consistent with that, and in that kind of society, things escalate to where we are throwing stones, performing witch hunts, and preventing people from going to school.

I'll say the same thing to you, I've said to every other decent religious person I know.

They are harming your cause. They are demonstrating all that is bad about religion and affirming many ugly times in our history as people.

Encourage them to stop, speak out, shun them, and marginalize them. You and I will both be better for it.

But, to say it's not cool to make that association and speak of it is wrong. Sorry, but that's how we do it here. If we permit the bigots a measure of peace, for example, then we condone them being bigots and will then suffer to live among bigots.

The core of civil rights is about discourse and that means honest and frank talk of these matters, and that warrants "Christian Taliban".

Discrimination is wrong. It is a crime against people. I personally won't tolerate it. Of all our founding values, this one is big.

Took us a while to get rolling on it proper. Grant you that. However, once progress has started, there is essentially no stopping it.

We all are equals here and we all are born who we are and do not choose in those things. Gay, black, smart, dumb, ugly, beautiful, etc...

These things are just artifacts of us as people.

As for the religion, there is NO evidence that would stand the test of a court of law or peer review that confirms any matter of faith.

This is why we call it faith.

So then, as equals in this world --peers, we are free to believe what we will and act on that, so long as those things don't infringe on others, or bring material harm.

Material harm is physical harm of the person --as in the person is diminished as a result of the harm.

Being offended is not a material harm as the person is not diminished as a result. ie: You are only as pissed off at words and beliefs as you want to be.

These things combine to make a theocracy a crime against the people so governed. Not cool. We Americans are free people. Either we suck it up and live by that, or we don't.

The Taliban have religion inserted into the law and judge others with that combination, making moral decisions essentially criminal ones. They employ clerics, and have a PARTICULAR religion --even a sect, embodied in the law, and this is done without mutual consent of the people.

America is founded on the principle of self-governance. Simply put, we accept being governed because it means greater use of our freedom and the promise of equality.

A Hindu living here sees the same law as the Christian, Athiest, or anyone else.

That same Hindu, living in a Taliban style nation, a theocracy, doesn't experience that equality, despite there being no hard evidence that would justify such discrimination.

That's the crime.

When people walk around and say, "This is a Christian Nation", they are wrong. That's theocracy, and that's not what we do here. Obama at least had the strength to out and say it globally. Good on him for it.

I've a friend, who is Hindu by the way, who now is an American, because he wants that promise and worked his ass off to realize it for him and his family.

The Christian Taliban would destroy that for their own self-interest and because of that, deserve to be equated directly to the Taliban, because though the faith they want to see placed above others and be law is different, the result is the same; namely, the loss of our hard won free status.

I'm sorry if that rubs wrong. I do not believe you are one of these people. Like me --and we are equals in this, you share the burden of keeping them in check, or risk both the credence of your faith, and your freedom to practice it as you see fit.

Heady stuff, but that's really how it is.

What I believe can be summed up pretty much with this analogy :

I wish that today's Conservatism was more like the brand of Wm F. Buckley than that of Pat Robertson.

And (I) dont see this problem as black and white. That is why I made the proposal above to drop the Hollywood - War Drama term " War on Terror" in lieu of an actual Cabinet level Dept in the Federal government named something entirely different than anything with War in it . Lets make this a permanent and serious endeavor and drop some of the dramatics of the past.

I dont take my statement back about ' Many of us" because during the run up to the election, I kept hearing watching, mostly Democrats or Liberals, ( some Ron Paul supporters ) making statements to the effect that the War on Terror" was either an excuse for something else, it was based on poor INTEL and then examples cited regarding our poor INTEL about WMDs etc etc, or it was a smoke screen for some other undesired Govt activity designed to take our personal freedoms away. And some of these folks talking trash about he War on Terror were movers and shakers in the Democrat Party. I believe now that I think about now, was Howard Dean.

That was also in the context of Iraq, which was not a war on terror. What that did was breed terror. We hosed it up there.

And it was bad intel, and a lie and all those other things.

Yeah, conservatism needs a re-brand, and QUICK! THe 23 percenters are putting it on par with gourmet dog shit.

The "War on Terror" was just a Bush Administration excuse to increase presidential power that Cheney and others wanted to increase even before 9/11. Really, can you tell me what the "War on Terror" even was??? I am and was very much in favor of going after al Qaeda terrorists in Afghanistan and elsewhere, but the "War on Terror" seems to have included a lot of things that had nothing to do with terrorism (e.g. invading Iraq).

What's the matter Kennewick, did you run out of godless commies to chase?

I agree conservatism should be intellectual, but it isn't, never really has been and I don't think ever will be. The right has always been controlled by extremist nuts and idiots which is why I call it cracker conservatism.

The righties will always be able to grab power by fear, the reds 50 years ago, terrorists in recent years. However, once they grab power, they will lose it again simply because they will fuck it up worse than they accuse the other side of doing. They can blame McCarthy in 54, they can blame Bush now. Idiot leaders. If you want long term power, you have to stop making intellectualism a dirty word. I believe you called it elitism in the past.

It's like Bill Maher said I don't want some just like me to be president. I want someone smart.

I dont understand why a Conservative cant be an Intellectual. We do have a lot of knee jerk Neo-Con crackerasses around.

However, we have what amounts to the same thing with the Far Lefties who might be intellectuals of a sort, but have the same knee jerk emotional self deprecating, back flogging , its all our fault' , America the bully attitude. I get tired of that too !

I don't think there are any Far Lefties in this forum.