"It is pure idiocy that Congress will not open our borders — as wide as possible — to attract and keep the world's first-round intellectual draft choices in an age when everyone increasingly has the same innovation tools and the key differentiator is human talent."
After every major terrorist incident, the excuse makers come out to tell us...why the terrorists acted. These excuse makers are just one notch less despicable than the terrorists and also deserve to be exposed. When you live in an open society like London, where anyone with a grievance can publish an article, run for office or start a political movement, the notion that blowing up a busload of innocent civilians in response to Iraq is somehow "understandable" is outrageous. "It erases the distinction between legitimate dissent and terrorism" Mr. Rubin said, "and an open society needs to maintain a clear wall between them."
We can’t afford to keep being this stupid! We have got to get our groove back. We need a president who will unite us around a common purpose, not a common enemy. Al Qaeda is about 9/11. We are about 9/12, we are about the Fourth of July ... which is why I hope that anyone who runs on the 9/11 platform gets trounced.
"Like it or not, we are at war with the Serbian nation (the Serbs certainly think so), and the stakes have to be very clear: Every week you ravage Kosovo is another decade we will set your country back by pulverizing you. You want 1950? We can do 1950. You want 1389? We can do 1389 too."These statements were criticized by British media analysts David Edwards and David Cromwell, who wrote "The thrill of this for Friedman lies in discussing the devastation of a nation as if he were a salesman offering a range of services."
The French position is utterly incoherent. The inspections have not worked yet, says Mr. de Villepin, because Saddam has not fully cooperated, and, therefore, we should triple the number of inspectors. But the inspections have failed not because of a shortage of inspectors. They have failed because of a shortage of compliance on Saddam's part, as the French know. The way you get that compliance out of a thug like Saddam is not by tripling the inspectors, but by tripling the threat that if he does not comply he will be faced with a U.N.-approved war.
What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, um and basically saying, "Which part of this sentence don't you understand?"
You don't think, you know, we care about our open society, you think this bubble fantasy, we're just gonna to let it grow?
Well, Suck. On. This.
..We could have hit Saudi Arabia. It was part of that bubble. Could have hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could. That's the real truth...
.. and sometimes it takes a 2-by-4 across the side of the head to get that message.
The stated reason for the war was that Saddam Hussein had developed weapons of mass destruction that posed a long-term threat to America. I never bought this argument...
The WMD argument was hyped by George Bush and Tony Blair to try to turn a war of choice into a war of necessity.
The right reason for this war, as I argued before it started, was to oust Saddam's regime and partner with the Iraqi people to try to implement the Arab Human Development report's prescriptions in the heart of the Arab world. That report said the Arab world is falling off the globe because of a lack of freedom, women's empowerment, and modern education. The right reason for this war was to partner with Arab moderates in a long-term strategy of dehumiliation and redignification.
If they the Sunnis won't come around, we should arm the Shiites and Kurds and leave the Sunnis of Iraq to reap the wind.
Whether for Bush reasons or Arab reasons, democracy is not emerging in Iraq, and we can't throw more good lives after good lives.
[Thomas Friedman is]...regularly denigrating Arabs for their qualities of emotionalism, unreason, and hostility to democracy and modernization. His classic remark, in the same interview in which he lauds the proxy terrorism model, was that we mustn't go too far in forcing Palestinian concessions because, "I believe that as soon as Ahmed has a seat in the bus, he will limit his demands." As always, the implicit assumption is that the problem is excessive Palestinian demands, not any unreasonable actions or demands by the Israelis. But the racist language is telling. A remark about "Hymie" made Jesse Jackson a moral outcast for the NYT and media establishment; but Friedman's "Ahmed" remark is not reported or criticized in the mainstream, which reflects the normalization of anti-Arab racism in the United States.
Friedman does not propose ending (US financial and military) support (to Israel), which itself is a massive intervention in this conflict, and is given to the stronger side. When he suggests that the US withdraw from the conflict, he is actually saying: let the Israeli government do what it is doing — continue the occupation, set up new settlements, withdraw the land from under the feet of the Palestinian people, go on with the murderous blockade that denies the 1.5 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip — men, women and children —almost all the necessities of life.
This is a monstrous suggestion ... If (Obama) accepts, God forbid, Friedman’s advice and leaves the picture, the vision will turn into a nightmare. The Israeli government will increase the oppression, the Palestinians will turn to unbridled terrorism, the entire world will be dragged into bloody chaos.
Some advice.
Scott McClellan himself has come and out and said, "You know what, [the Iraq War] was a bad idea. This Iraq War was a misconceived strategy." And, yes, you have these very prominent gentlemen, and sometimes ladies, of the press who have not been able to make an equivalent mea-culpa. I think example number one has got to be Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, who embraced what he called "a war of choice," which, you know, in my view is just the euphemism for a war crime. And he's never been held accountable for it.
Thank you for your patience