Re: OT: Did we just win?

On 8 Nov 2006 21:44:08 -0800, dagmargoodboat@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

Jonathan Kirwan wrote:
On 8 Nov 2006 15:54:01 -0800, dagmargoodboat@xxxxxxxxx wrote:


I've often disagreed with the President and his policies, but I've
never ever gotten the megalomanic vibe.

To be honest, I have. I won't try and belabor it here, as this would
be about how he has triggered my 'templates' ...

[snip]

I suspect the country just
doesn't understand Texans. Texas is bigger, and Texans are better --
you've just got to understand that going in. :-)

I don't understand Texans, but

Mr. Bush strikes me exactly as any number of colorful, playful, Texan
country folk I have known.

It's not going to do us much good to sit and disagree. I don't see it
your way, you don't see it mine. That's fine. Also, two of my close
friends who have lived in Texas their entire lives (and lived then and
still live completely separate lives from each other) don't think much
of Bush and don't imagine him as Texan, either. So I suspect, like a
lot of opinions there is no shortage of them.

Bush strikes me as a silver-spoon in
the mouth type, with very little understanding or empathy for others.

I don't get that at all. To me he's folksy, and down-to-earth,
direct in a way that city folk and aristocrats find uncouth.

What you see as folksy, I see as doing a poor job of insincerely
trying to talking at the level he perceives others want to see. It's
not even a fair job of it, in my opinion. It's downright demeaning.
What you see as down-to-earth, I see as feigned image. He has very
little in his life to allow him to understand what it is like for
others and pretty much every single action I see from him is
consistent with that.

We see an entirely different man. And I have no idea at all how you
see things your way. We may need to leave it there, unless you want
to take this to email. I don't think we can sincerely investigate our
differences here.

My mom feels the same as you.

hehe.

But she's so against war of any kind,
for any reason, that Mr. Bush can do nothing right in her eyes.

Well, that isn't what is coloring my vision. I'm not that kind of
person.

Because of the war she hates every aspect of him, and everything
associated with or close to him. She hates all his proposals. She
hates his house. She hates his staff, his suit, even his haircut. She
thinks he invaded to establish a Christian theocracy in Iraq...and the
US, and fears he might succeed!

Well, that's a bit extreme for me. I _do_ think he has very little
ability to empathize with others or to sincerely care. But I don't go
to hating his house (a ranch bought for Texan appearances.)

Has he done anything right in your eyes?

That's a good question. Not much, really, but I'm sure I could find
one or two things. Not that I'd care. I'd be happy if you assumed I
find nothing likable about him. It's a close enough approximation for
engineers.

I didn't know him when he first took office, except that I knew he'd
personally been involved in shipping arms to the Contras in violation
of Carter's executive order. He was caught in 1980 and his dad was
immediately asked about it when he arrived at the Miami airport during
the week of this news fracas about it. Quite a splash for about a
week. But that was about all I remembered about him and although I
didn't particularly like his involvement, I could remain open to the
idea of seeing how things went over time.

One thing that may help you understand, is that I have had to hold the
hand of many people who lost their children, their husbands, their
wives, their families due to the weapons shipments the US sent. I was
involved in helping out. One lady I remember the most would wake up
screaming in the middle of the night when a car would drive by.
Anyone, to her, who was wealthy enough to own a car was capable of
raping her or beating her up and even murdering her if they felt like
it. She lost all of her children but one, her husband and her
husband's family and only survived by pretending to be dead along with
them. She was a remote villager type, living on what little arable
lands weren't already in the hands of the few families that controlled
that country. She knew nothing of politics, wasn't educated, and
pretty much just tried to survive in the cracks, like a lot of people.
She was not involved in anything nefarious, at all. But she was a
casualty, all the same.

When you hear the crying at night, night after night; when you have to
help pick up the pieces of this kind of thing, you change some about
this.

None of this made me feel that war is always wrong or that hostilities
and violence cannot be just. But it raised the bar, for me. A lot. I
have very high standards now that must be met. When you engage in
war, you may kill a lot of innocent people if you don't carry a lot of
risks onto yourself (in other words, if you don't value the lives of
those around you more than you do your own.) This create righteous
indignation (putting it mildly) and justified hate, which leads to
more violence in response, demanding more careless killing of
innocents, and the thing escalates out of control. Iraq has turned
into a class example of this, too. Bush was all sizzle and no meat,
with regard to Iraq and everyone pays the price for this, especially
the Iraqis. Luckily, a majority in the US has seen the truth of this
and acted.

By the way, Carter's executive order that this younger Bush violated
was gradually cast into law in the form of a series of amendments by
Ed Boland of Massachusetts. There was a division in congress about
whether or not to fund weapons to the Contras and Reagan authorized
the CIA to start a covert program of support for them in December of
1981, I recall. Congress initially funded this, but eventually the
primary unanswered question became this: Was the CIA truly trying to
bring Ortega (now, back in power I see) to the negotiation table or
was the CIA really trying to overthrow the Sandinista government? To
prevent this latter undertaking, Boland introduced a series of
amendments designed to limit the use of appropriations. By 1984,
congress gave Reagan a paltry $24 million for the CIA's Contra program
and the amount was quickly exhausted. The Reagan administration,
though, had earlier already responded to the Carter legacy and the
difficulties in getting any measure of firm support from congress by
injecting a banking bill modification in 1982 that would allow them to
use banks in a creative financing scheme. About 1/3rd of the losses
in the savings and loan debacle ($800 billion or so) were due to CIA
off-shore loans on the basis of the 1982 banking bill (which changed
the insurance protection from a per-individual basis to a per-account
basis and allowed the CIA to then approach banks to make loans they
knew they would not get back, but now where they could at least be
told that the "gov't will insure you" on the accounts.) I watched one
particular set of transactions being carefully traced by international
bankers, years later during the congressional hearings on the savings
and loan situation, transactions amounting to about $5 billion. A lot
of these were more difficult to trace, but some mistakes were made on
a few large transaction groups and could be well traced. In this
case, they were able to trace the money as it flowed from a Texan bank
to Colombia and then to Germany. I listened raptly to the testimony
over the span of several days on this one.

It amounted to a difference of opinion, but here those in the Reagan
administration decided that they could "go it alone" and violate the
checks and balances set up by our Constitution and instead take any
method possible to secure the kinds of funds they felt they needed for
their object. It caused a lot of harm in the process, including a lot
of thievery by others in the banking system who decided to just "go
with the flow" and steal for themselves, too. In the end, it cost us
dearly.

Under Reagan, the US when from the world's greatest creditor nation to
the world's gratest debtor nation -- big issue in Time magazine about
that. And there were a lot of folks convicted of felonies, in the
end. Many pardoned by Bush when he took office -- including North and
Poindexter.

I had no idea, one way or another, how this Bush would start. I had
some reason to believe that he would NOT be like his father -- but I
knew nothing much about him and decided to just wait and see. When I
saw him starting to appoint people whose names I knew from the Reagan
years as felons, I think I decided to close the door on the issue at
that point. I knew what these people were like, already. And that
told me a lot more about what to expect.

More of a Marie Antoinette type, I suppose. And definitely seeing
himself in a god-sent role.

But doesn't every other religious person think the same, that they're
here for a reason, whatever that reason might be?

No.

The President is religious. And he's open about it. And, unlike his
opponents and predecessors, he really means it. I don't think that
makes him bad, or overly scary. We have separation of church and
state, and plenty of checks and balances.

I don't care if he means it or not. I look at results, not words;
actions, not beliefs.

There have been NO checks and balances in operation of late. That you
think so tells me you must be young and naive and cannot remember when
those checks actually worked better. This last few years has been, if
it is anything at all, an example of just how weak our system actually
is defending itself from a rogue executive branch. I had always
thought, before, that there was no way our system could permit things
to go quite this far. I've been shown quite wrong in that regard, as
things have gone to a place I couldn't have dreamed of 15 years ago,
not in my worst nightmares. Now I know it can happen and has happened
and that our system isn't up to the challenges and needs some serious
work.

At least the broken parts are manifest, now, and we can see them in
all their glory.

Jon
.

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