Re: [Gnu-arch-users] [OT] the poetry of donald rumsfeld

[Tom Lord]

    > From: "Pierce T.Wetter III" <address@hidden>

    >   Its not kosher for the "President" (by which I mean, Bush, Clinton or 
    > Bush) to say:

    >    "Saddam is crazier then a sackful of weasels. He has to go."

I agree.   On the other hand, I think it would be kosher for the
president to say "Fuck it.   This is out of control.   We need to
dominate this region in military terms."

    >   Something about not having the leader of your country insult the 
    > leader of
    > another country, or something. We could probably say it now, but no one 
    > cares.

Right.   The hypocracy of the divergence between internal intention
and public justification is intolerable and dangerous.

    >   The focus on the WMD issue irritates me, because I took the time to 
    > read all the state department briefings rather then be told what to 
    > think by the media, not to mention pages and pages of personal 
    > research. Our decision to go into Iraq was quite complicated and 
    > agonizing, 

I don't think so.  I think the decision was based on "they're weak
enough we can do it" and the agony was entirely over "how to sell it".


    > and there was more then one reason. Worries about WMD was a 
    > good chunk of it, but the briefings made it clear that it was 
    > _uncertainty_ about WMD, coupled with certainty he was crazy. The media 
    > kind of lost that in the process of editing things into sound bites.

WMD is a serious, serious topic -- we're all engineers here and should
be aware of that.   WMD was not the real reason we did this shit.

    >   In fact, its too bad that all of the issues in our society that can't 
    > be boiled down into sound bites end up as problems. The political 
    > campaigns aren't helping either, since their messages boil down to "us 
    > good, them bad". The reality is shades of grey. You can pick any issue 
    > (women, environment, terrorism) and any president (Clinton, Bush), and 
    > they are neither completely good or completely bad.

Love and friendship is the only thing that can save humanity.
Sometimes that will mean killing this or that fucker.   Sometimes it
will mean that innocents die tragically.  Let's all kill the Bush
administration not because they've done anything _wrong_ -- but
because what they've done out of necessity is so f'en ugly.


    >   What I found most interesting was that Madeline Albright's criticism 
    > of Bush was not that we invaded Iraq, but rather that we didn't handle 
    > the UN as well as we could have. Though considering all the jokes about 
    > Texans and Frenchmen, I don't understand why everyone was so 
    > surprised...

Yup.   By the time you boil it down to that level of detail, you've
found your reason to vote for Kerry even though it doesn't make all
that much difference.

-t