FINALLY! Someone with a SPINE!! If it had been Dean who had thrown his shoe, I would be renaming my website to ILoveHowardDean.com. At last someone had the guts to be irrational with Perle--now if someone can just have the guts to be rational with him.
It would be so simple, too--in a public forum, simply remind him of his Straussian roots and how Strauss felt that the "masses" need to be kept in line by lying to them about their enemies being much more threatening and bad than they really were.
This is, of course, what Perle and the other neo-cons are doing. Lying to us about outside threats so we stay in line. It's a protection racket and someone's got to call Perle, Wolfowitz, Cheney, Bush, Rice and the others on it in public, to their faces so they can't back down.
I was just musing to myself earlier today about a conversation I had with TheFiancee's step-dad a bunch of years ago. It had to be 1997 or 98. I was telling him how I had read on CNN that there simply weren't that many military incursions going on and those that were were minor compared to the strife the Earth had faced throughout the 20th century.
"You were reading CNN?" he asked.
"Yeah, CNN has a website now."
"Oh."
I went on to explain how, in my opinion, we were done with major wars. All the major threats were gone thanks to capitalism. Capitalism had literally put the USSR out of business (or into it?) and even China looked to be coming to our way of thinking.
My feeling was that while there were a few hotspots around the world, (at the time, Bosnia/Serbia, Israel/Palestine, Latin America, corners of Asia, major wars were over. The world had achieved relative peace. I wasn't aware of the genocide in Africa at that time, but still, I think compared to Vietnam, Korea and even the cold war, the world was doing fairly well.
Don't get me wrong, any war is bad, my point was simply that America had run out of threats. Of course, this was before Bush had been "elected."
Anyway, you hopefully see my point. Certainly for America, the Clinton years brought a significant amount of peace and stability to the world. Not total peace, granted, but compared to even what we had under Bush 41 and Reagan (Iran/Contra, Iraq War I, bombing Libya, Noriega, etc.) the Clinton years were downright tame.
Now the neo-cons are in charge (as they were coincidentally during the Reagan/Bush 41 years) and look where we are.
It's a Straussian wet dream.
And most of us are too stupid to know any better.
Read more about that debate Perle and Dean were taking part in over at MyWay.
Protester Throws Shoe at Richard Perle
Feb 18, 7:37 AM (ET)
By RUKMINI CALLIMACHI
PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) - Howard Dean, the newly minted leader of the Democratic Party, and former Pentagon adviser Richard Perle made clear their opposing views on the war in Iraq during a debate marred by a protester who tossed a shoe at Perle.
Perle had just started his comments Thursday when a protester threw a shoe at him before being dragged away, screaming, "Liar! Liar!"
Perle, who was Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's top policy adviser, was a key architect of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, and Dean is among the war's most prominent opponents.
In his new role as chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Dean has stressed that Democrats are stronger than Republicans on defense.
"Defense is a lot broader than swaggering around saying you're going to kick Saddam's butt," Dean said Thursday, drawing cheers from the crowd in this city that overwhelmingly voted Democratic last November.
Perle said the war in Iraq was justified based on the intelligence available at the time. "Sometimes the things we have to do are objectionable to others," he said.
Dean also said the Bush administration has ignored the mounting threat in Iran and North Korea. "We picked the low hanging fruit in Iraq and did nothing" about the other, more dangerous regimes, he said.
Perle had his own barbs, too. He began his opening comments in the 1 1/2-hour debate by saying Democrats "looked at the Democratic Party and chose a physician to lead them."
Perle, a veteran of the Reagan administration and a former Pentagon adviser, was forced by one of the questioners to recast a comment he made on Sept. 22, 2003, in which he predicted that within one year, there would be "a grand square in Baghdad named for President Bush."
"I'd be a fool not to recognize that it did not happen on the schedule I had in mind," Perle said, adding that he did not deny that the administration had made mistakes in Iraq.
But, Perle added, "I will be surprised, yet again, if we do not see a square in Baghdad named after this president." He did not specify a time.
Dean became chairman of the DNC earlier this month. The former governor of Vermont had been leading the race for the Democratic presidential nomination but failed last January in the Iowa caucuses. His candidacy sparked interest among young voters and attracted millions of dollars, largely through the Internet.
Thursday's debate was part of the annual forum held by Pacific University to honor Tom McCall, a former Republican governor of Oregon.
Copyright 2005 Associated Press
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