is the US sliding into Fascism? Evidence for and against

You didn’t predict anything. A prediction occurs beforehand. You got caught recommending a website that is contrary to your preconceived firmly held political dogma. You had no choice but to eat crow or declare the source that you recommended to be inaccurate. You choose the later. That’s your opinion, I leave it the readers to make their own decisions. Again, readers can decide for themselves. They don’t need you to tell them whether my arguments have or have not been made. BTW did you budge on anything? Did you stop to consider how extreme your position is? Of course not. And you are the prototypical left wing partisan I always perceived you to be. Glad we understand each other.Good day

Intolerant but clever

Nice rebuttal Tal.It's easy to forget that others wanted Saddam to go by force and not just the "fascist republican administration who wants to take over of the world".

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My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind. ---Albert Einstein

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if frist is pcusa then she supports rule of the church over it's members. the pcusa church holds the authority, by contract, to tell it's members what they can invest in, what they can do, who they can marry... and more. that is why the pca church split off in the 70s. if she's a pcusa member, i'd say it's quite possible that she's a danger to our government.

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I can’t speak for Presbyterians but I’m curious as to the contracts you speak of. I did a quick google search and it seems there are investment vehicles for members who want to fund church growth and ministries. How is this mandatory?How do they pre-select marriage partners? What are the consequences if someone wants to marry their high school sweetheart instead of the "pre-selected church mandated spouse"? Are they burned at the stake?BTW Bill Frist is male and is a member of the National Presbyterian Church

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anyways. by "contract" I mean by becoming a member you consent to a social contract the understanding being that you submit to church rule.

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Well, most churches have bylaws or rules that members adhere to in order to become members of that Church. Is that wrong? For example, my Church has bylaws that contain certain beliefs held by all members. One bylaw is that every individual has the right to interpret the Bible for themselves and communicate with God personally.There is no contract per se, rather the bylaws are there to foster an open understanding of what the Church stands for. I would not have joined the Church if I didn’t have a clear understanding of their contract.

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they take this to mean that if you have, say, helped fund a business or something that they don't like, they can censure you for not ending this financial relationship.

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This seems reasonable to me. If you owned a porn store around the corner, the Church would have every reasonable expectation to censure you.

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they can say that your son should not marry some certain girl. they don't pre-select, they simply say ... no, not that one.

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If my 16 year old son wanted to marry a 12 year old girl, the Church would have every right, including a legal responsibility, to say no.It's not my intention to nit-pick everything in your post and as I previously said, I don’t know much about Presbyterians, but you made is sound as though this organization was some sort of cult that maintained dictatorial rule over the lives of its members.Since Senator Frist is member of this group, your inference is that he is a danger to our government. I don’t see it.

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social contract. as in, not written and signed. it's an oral agreement to understood rules. nothing wrong with it, i just disagree with the particular rules and find it symptomatic of something i feel is dangerous to this country. having a church be able to nitpick over the lives of their members (while contractually legal) is dangerous if the person applies the same mentality to his public policy.

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You are certainly free to abstain from Church membership and if you find Presbyterian bylaws objectionable, then fine. But I don’t see it as dangerous that Bill Frist is a Presbyterian. If he were a member of some extreme cult that supported illegal behavior then yes, it would be dangerous to have a member of that group in power. But you haven’t made the case against Presbyterians other than some vague notions about how they are controlling an unwitting populous.We all live by some form of rule or another whether it be Church morality, atheist morality, or in some cases no morality at all. We live by them and cannot help but be influenced by them. All of us are affected by the rules we live by to some degree or another.85% of the people in Congress has a belief in God. Would you prevent those members from applying their mentality to public policy? If so, we wouldn’t have a government at all. Obviously I am not speaking of legislating Church doctrine. I am saying that you can't separate the beliefs of an individual from their mentality.

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... a person whose personal associations demonstrate a tendancy to commandeering the lives of others has no place in my government.

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Commandeering? I believe you confuse an extreme cult with Presbyterians.

Hi schraf

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Why didn't we invade those African nations, where millions were being butchered?

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So you would have supported invading those African nations..eh? I doubt it. Would it have made a difference if the Bush admin had invaded those nations? No, there would have been a uproar against defenseless Africans. The far left would have ignored the butchering by those nations just as they did in Saddam's Iraq

No, it’s not funny that Bush has to be friendly with the Saudis. It’s a matter of necessity and of national interest. Whether you like it or not, the Saudis and in particular OPEC control a significant portion of the world’s oil supply. I don’t like it, Bush doesn’t like it, but that’s the way it is. It is naive to ignore that fact.Many US presidents have had to endure tenuous relationships with the Saudis because of it. This goes back to FDR after WWII:

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Once upon a time, there were solid grounds for a partnership between the United States and Saudi Arabia. After World War II, the kingdom's vast oil reserves and willingness to use its production capacity to ensure moderate and stable world oil prices were rightly judged to be vital to American national security. In return for these strategic assets, the United States pledged to protect the kingdom's oil supplies and obstruct those who would seek to control them, particularly the Soviet Union. Thus, when FDR met with King Abdulaziz bin Saud in 1945, a marriage of convenience was born. Source

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So it is disingenuous for you to imply that the Bush administration is maintaining this long standing marriage of convenience with the Saudis for purely personal reasons and that he is the only US president to do so.This message has been edited by Monk, Thu, 05-12-2005 08:23 AM

What disinformation? Do you deny those quotes were actually quotes? You say only "concerned"? Here, go read them again Message 138Everyone can read those quotes and decide for themselves. There is no need to "interprete" what those folks "actually intended" or what they "really meant" when they said them. Their words are in the record for all to see.

Ok, I know there are other threads where discussing the Iraq war is more appropriate, but I just can’t let your post go by without comment.As usual, you are distorting events, repeating overused talking points, and speaking from a complete lack of historical context. I remember all the news stories in the run-up to the war, all the news accounts of Iraq’s activities during the months prior to the war and all the issues about Iraq in the entire decade of the 1990’s.Where were you? Did you participate in political discussions back then?You would reduce the entire US policy towards Saddam and Iraq over the last 20 years to a single catch phrase — No WMD — No justification for war. Nice and neat, tie a little ribbon around it and call the debate over.Sure WMD’s was part of the justification for war and it is disappointing and not the least bit disconcerting that nuclear WMD’s were not found. But to pin the entire rationale for the war on that one and only one item is to ignore all the history of the conflict in the Bush, Clinton, and Bush Sr. administrations.

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On December 17, 1998, the Congress voted nearly unanimously in support of our troops while they are engaged in Operation Desert Fox.

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The Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 conveyed the sense of Congress regarding U.S. policy toward Iraq. It should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq and to promote the emergence of a democratic government to replace that regime. (Public Law 105-338, October 31, 1998)

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A total of 195 Democrats, 221 Republicans, and one Independent voted to support this statement of policy.Congress, in 1998, overwhelmingly supported removal of Saddam. REMOVE not CONTAIN. This was long before Bush II was in office.Where did the Clinton administration and Congress get the idea that removing Saddam was necessary US foreign policy? From a variety of sources and from the long history of US and Iraqi relations.Chief weapons inspector David Kay testified before Congress that removal of Saddam is the only option.

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The danger posed by Saddam’s development of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons cannot be stopped by international monitoring. The former chief nuclear weapons inspector for the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) and International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), David Kay, testified to Congress on February 25,1998 that it is unreasonable to think an inspection system "can uproot a weapons program that a country is determined to protect with deception, denial, and cheating.

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Bill Clinton most assuredly thought Saddam’s regime posed an immanent danger. In his speech announcing Operation Desert Fox, the President stated categorically that our military action against Iraq was precipitated by Iraq’s refusal to cooperate with UNSCOM, the United Nations Special Commission whose multinational weapons inspectors seek to enforce the disarmament clauses of the Gulf War armistice.

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"[Saddam's non-cooperation] presents a clear and present danger to the stability of the Persian Gulf and the safety of people everywhere.Without a strong inspection system, Iraq would be free to retain and begin to rebuild its chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons programs in months, not years."

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But the weapons inspections were ineffectual: Again, David Kay testifying before Congress states:

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The weapons are inherently small in amount and can be moved around. Uprooting a protected weapons system in a country that is genuinely not defeated, that you don’t occupy, I think is, quite frankly, beyond us. You cannot hope that inspection, just as I do not think you can hope air power, can do it.

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What is required is a political strategy that is designed not to deal with Saddam, but to remove Saddam from power.

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So weapons inspections don’t work, what about the air strikes during the Clinton administration? They were ineffective also:

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Military analysts have likewise cast doubt on the ability of air strikes, on whatever scale, to eradicate Iraq’s decentralized, covert weapons program. Professor Eliot Cohen of Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies told the House International Relations Committee in February 1998, "a military campaign which focuses simply on trying to root out the weapons of mass destruction is not likely to be terribly successful, either in the very narrow military sense or in a broader, political sense." Chemical and biological agents are often small enough to hide anywhere.

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Despite the ineffectiveness of the air strikes, we continued to pour money down the drain in a futile containment effort. An effort that had been in place for many years:

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The Clinton administration had to ask Congress for a $600 million supplemental appropriation just to cover the costs of the February mobilization against Saddamone of three in 1998 alone.

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That’s 1.8 BILLION dollars spent by the Clinton administration in 1998 alone in support of a failed containment policy.So what else can we try? What about assassination? Been there, tried that. Clinton tried a botched covert CIA operation in 1996 to assassinate Saddam:

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In early 1996, after years of delay, the President authorized a $100 million CIA covert operation to unseat Saddam Hussein. But the President personally decided to take no action when later that year Saddam sent ground forces into the Kurdistan "no-fly" zone and seized Irbil, the region’s capital and the center of the CIA-sponsored resistance.

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Iraqi secret police dragged hundreds of CIA-recruited Iraqis and Kurds from their homes to torture and execution. The Clinton administration left them helpless. Far from weakening Saddam, the covert action, as a result of the administration’s failure to support it, allowed Saddam to reassert direct control over Kurdistan for the first time since the Gulf War.

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After this, Clinton was very reticent to initiate actions against Saddam despite Congressional appropriations to liberate Iraq:

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As of 1998, the economic embargo was rapidly disintegrating in the face of rising international opposition, and Iraq’s weapons program was continuing to expand despite periodic spasms of U.S. military reaction whose timing is quite obviously controlled by Saddam himself.

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The US congressional House policy committee concludes the following in 1998. Note here that the House committee was recommending removal of Saddam BEFORE he acquires WMD’s. All of this was long before the Bush administration took office.

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The crisis in the Gulf today is only the latest episode in a cycle of Iraqi defiance and U.S. response that spans the entire Clinton presidency. Yet there is no reason to believe that this pattern can continue indefinitely. The three pillars of the Clinton policyeconomic sanctions, the UNSCOM weapons inspection program, and periodic military mobilizations and strikesare buckling.
Saddam Hussein has now effectively obstructed weapons inspections for 400 days.

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At some point, he will succeed in breaking out of the Gulf War peace agreement and acquiring both weapons of mass destruction and the means to deliver themif he is left in power.

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Only when Saddam is replaced by a government willing to live in peace with its neighbors and with the people of Iraq will this threat be lifted. A U.S. policy to do thatand not simply half-measuresis what we urgently require.

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So all the intentions were there to remove Saddam on the part of both Congress and the Clinton administration, but it didn’t get done. Why? If you remember, the late 1990’s were good economic times.It was much easier and safer for Clinton to not rock the boat and pass that messy problem on to the Bush administration. Bush, on the other hand, met the challenge head on and we are all the safer for it. Source

I disagree. There was a question as to what would or would not be found in Iraq. Until we went in there no one knew for certain what would be found, not even the inspectors. There was no way the inspectors could adequately cover a country the size of Iraq with Saddam obstructing every move.Saying that it wasn't even a question slants the issues in light of post war results that WMD's were not found. It's easy to say that now and be confident that no nukes would be found because we are living in post war times where none have been found. Monday morning quarterbacking at it's finest.So I take it that your point is we should have continued the failed UN inspection strategy despite repeated and flagrant violations by Saddam.Then perhaps we should have continued the decade long failed containment policy in the hopes this would be adequate to prevent development of weapons dangerous to the world at large.Or maybe we should have continued to maintain the decade old no-fly zone policy in the hopes of preventing the continued development of the Iraqi military infrastructure.Or maybe we should have initiated another failed covert CIA operation to eliminate Saddam as Clinton did which served no purpose other than to embolden Saddam and cause him to commit atrocities against the Kurds.Or MAYBE we should have done exactly what Congress, the Clinton administration, the Bush adminstration and many others have been saying all along and that is the best solution in Iraq was the forcible removal of Saddam Hussein.

Yea, just walk away eh? No problem, simple.... simple disaster

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Iraq is a threat to the other nations in the area. It is really they who need to make a few decisions about what will happen there. We need to stop being one who makes such decisions.

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In theory yes, at times it would be nice to revert back to US isolationist policies of the 1920's and 30's. These policies helped delay our entrance into WWII to the benefit of our soldiers but to the detriment of Europe. Some republicans occasionally speak of a return to America's traditional policies of nonintervention, but in reality, traditional American isolationism is obsolete.

There's tons of messages in your link, be specific

So, what does that prove? That enemies can at one point in the past appear as friends? Here's one of FDR and Churchill having fun with Stalin.