Columnist – John Sammon
This is where we Americans who have failed as a country start to pay the price. It’s pretty simple. If you let one war or two wars drag on long enough, there’s bound to be another trouble spot somewhere else. But we won’t have adequate power if a new war breaks out because we’re still locked in two other wars.

Equipment wears out. Soldiers wear out. Some of our soldiers are in their 19th deployment in Iraq or Afghanistan. We’re stretched to the max now.

What happens if Korea blows up?

We didn’t learn as a people from Watergate. We didn’t learn from Vietnam. There is only so much military power can accomplish. If you can’t win a decisive victory in a war that makes the other guy surrender and give up, then you have to settle it politically somehow and get out.

When Bush and Cheney lied us into war telling United Nations weapons inspectors in Iraq to get out of the way that it was too late, even though the weapons inspectors hadn’t found any weapons of mass destruction. The American people went along with it.

When Bush and Cheney set up torture camps and threw out the Geneva Convention treatment of prisoners. The American people went along with it. Not all of them, but enough of them.

When the wars dragged on and our military ruling élite said things like “be Patient,” and “we’re making progress,” and pushing back “their influence.” The American people went along with it, year after year after year.

They didn’t protest at the White House by the millions. They didn’t engage in the kind of peaceful non-violent protest that gains attention. They just, went along.

   Vietnam Soldiers
Sooner or later, there’s bound to be another war break out somewhere. And we’re overcommitted in two endless wars now, a policy continued by Obama, who uses the same kind of tired statements that always lack specifics like, we’re making “progress,” making “influence,” making “gains.”

Korea is ready to blow.

Our trucks and planes and hardware to make war are worn out.

This is what happens when you don’t demand of your government that they either win a war in a reasonable amount of time, or settle it somehow politically.

We don’t demand accountability of our government. Korea is going to blow and we’re already overcommitted in two wars in neither of which we’ve won a military victory, but allowed to drag on forever.

This is the legacy of Bush. It will become that of Obama.

As long as the American people are like sheep and demand no specifics on how our Middle East wars are to be resolved, the president and the military will make vague statements and drag them on and on forever. In the meantime, a new conflict is brewing, probably Korea.

Our weak economy is struggling to recover. We don’t have the wherewithal for a third war.

Foolish Americans. You didn’t listen to Teddy Roosevelt, who said it’s the duty of every American to criticize their government, and especially members of their own political party. Americans have proven instead that the Watergate scheme and scandal were the wave of the future.

We didn’t learn.

The American people are not up to the challenge of Democracy.

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“I say nuke ‘em”: Conservatives bang the drum for war with North Korea: Following a North Korean attack on a South Korean island, conservative voices have appeared on air and online to promote the use of U.S. strikes against North Korea. [ READ MORE ]

Palin: Does Obama “not want us to be a superpower and allow stability throughout the world — peace through strength?”

Fox’s Napolitano and John Bolton advocate for U.S. intervention “to bring” N. Korean regime “down“

Rove: North Koreans thought they could “get away” with opening fire on South Korea because they see Obama as “weak“

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   Columnist – John Sammon
This little North Korean boy jeering at me with his fist at the Bridge of No Return at Panmunjom in 1972 is the reason North Korea continues to represent a threat to world peace.

The children were brought in on a bus from North Korea and toured the North Korean side of the truce village of Panmunjom. They were told propaganda and twisted facts to inflame their hatred of America. On their departure from the area back to North Korea, they not only made fists and shouted abuse, but pelted myself and two others at Checkpoint Three, called the Loneliest Outpost in the World, with little balls of refined sugar, given them to suck as candy.

I made a joke at the time that they sucked.

This could be a comic moment. I mean, it wasn’t exactly a page of glorious history in warfare to be pelted with candy by children. However, this is near the same spot where a mob of North Korean (grown up) soldiers attacked a party of Americans and chopped two officers to pieces, an ugly incident that has been labeled the “Panmunjom axe murder.”

What is important is that this boy is now about 45 years old and still believes the lies he was told and still hates America. He has no doubt taught that hatred to his own children. I’m not going to maintain America is blameless in the world or not guilty of wrongdoing. We’ve made our mistakes.

But this kid is brainwashed in a closed hermit society in which freedom is impossible, a regimented police state where the cult of the infallible leader (Kim Jong Il) is pervasive. Perhaps no other children anywhere in the world would react the way this boy is without plenty of indoctrination. Hatred is something that has to be nurtured and cultured like growing a plant in a pot.

If it takes root and grows, it will spread.

In our dealings with North Korea, we have to remember we’re dealing with an extremist state and a brutal dictatorship. It’s very difficult to reason with such people. To them, the world is whatever they say it is, and truth is however it can be bent.

To them, up is down, square is round, and black is white.

The Korean Peninsula is still the most dangerous place in the world, more dangerous than the Middle East because two huge armies face each other in an unresolved situation in which a spark or a miscalculation can set off a conflagration.

As you look into the face of this boy remember. They remain our committed enemy, and attempting to reason with them should take this into account.

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   Columnist – John Sammon
Obama’s long expected decision to escalate the Afghanistan War is based on the dubious conclusion that if decisive military victory over the Taliban isn’t possible, some kind of honorable (for us) chastisement of them is, by holding more ground, as well as retraining a corrupt regime in Kabul to be more honest.

It demonstrates a sad fact.

Some change in the status quo in the way America is, is possible. But not much. Not enough.

Obama ran his candidacy on a call for change. His supporters voted for him in part based on that promise. He was elected on that premise.

Unlike the war-making, torture-mongering wire-tapping crooks Bush and Cheney, Obama is a decent and honorable man. He is attempting to change some things, health care for one. But the public should understand that no matter who holds the office, the United States is not truly of and by and for the people, but a conglomerate geo-political-military-industrial ruling elite whose first priority is to maintain monetary power and influence, material and energy wealth.

Obama, nor anyone else, will be able to change these:

  1.  The US will continue to make war on or meddle in the affairs of much smaller, Third World impoverished countries, because of political differences, or we want their natural resources, those who lack a navy, air force, shoes on their feet and refrigerators. We’ve been in Afghanistan eight years, and killed a number of them, but it’s not enough, enough revenge. We have to triumph over them, or at least appear to. No attempt will be made to reach a political settlement until enough people have died. Just from the standpoint of size and firepower, the US comes off looking like an imperialist bully, but its people many of them nonetheless for some reason have great pride that we are sometimes able to defeat these impoverished pygmy countries.

  2.  The US will just as assiduously avoid military attack on small countries that have a nuclear capability, like Iran and North Korea. Any country, even a small one, that could strike back and cause us great harm, we will treat with caution and seek a political solution.

  3.  The US will continue to back Israel to run wild in the Middle East pushing Palestinians out, treating them like dogs, sometimes murdering them, and building new settlements on formerly Palestinian land, which over decades is what led to the anti-American sentiment and 9-11. There’s a huge difference between defending Israel’s right to exist, and equipping them with sophisticated weapons so they can expand at the expense of others who have also lived in the area for centuries. There is a very powerful pro-Israel lobby on Capitol Hill and championed by the likes of Joe Lieberman that makes any objective discussion of the situation impossible.

Anyone, including Obama, who criticizes Israel, is immediately branded an anti-Semite. Americans never look in a mirror when it comes to understanding how a problem came to be. They believe they are always innocent, noble, incapable of error, and that bad evil countries picked on them for no reason at all.

  4.  The US government and the priorities of the country will continue to be influenced by corporate lobbyists whose loyalty is to their industry and profits and not the American people. Thus, ruthless, dishonest corporations of the kind that nearly destroyed the economy will continue to hold sway. Money talks.

  5.  America will continue to be domestically the most violent country in the history of the world, a nation of child abusers, rapists, serial and spree killers, drive-by back shooters and gangs. Media will express shock and ask “why?” at each new atrocity, and then run the usual nightly shit entertainment programming glorifying violence, beautiful Hollywood models and cool-dude guys with their perfectly arranged hair pointing hand guns in prime time, acting tough and yelling “freeze!” Right before a Viagra commercial.

This is a sick country with twisted values, and will remain so.

  6.  Americans, using religion and the military, will continue to believe they are better than other people. You never hear a Frenchman say God bless France, or a Honduran say God bless Honduras, like you hear “God bless America.” This fantasy supposes that the creator of all life, the God of all people, would select for special reverence a nation above all others with an artificial border created by European immigrants who purchased or out-rightly conquered it from its former owners, while also performing the extermination of its original native inhabitants.

  7.  Racism will continue.

  8.  So will sexism.

  9.  There will be no standard flat and fair tax for Americans, but a system that bleeds the middle class and rewards the few richest.

10.  The destruction caused by global warming will race ahead of any president’s attempt to deal with it, and any president who does, will face the anger of the people who will call him a traitor.

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   By: Joe Conason
Like a seasonal flu, the verbal virus that is sometimes called Clinton derangement syndrome has struck again, beginning only moments after the 42nd president of the United States appeared on television screens around the world with the two journalists he had helped to rescue from prison in North Korea. And like certain viruses, the syndrome tends to hit hardest among a very specific segment of the population. Most Americans appear to be immune most of the time, as do the majority of human beings on the planet, so this pathology will probably never become a global pandemic.

But pundits everywhere — from the newsrooms of the “liberal media” to the blogosphere to the Republican noise machine — seem to be the preferred hosts of the pathogen. While not lethal or physically disabling, it troubles their minds — and strikes the same people over and over and over again. Symptoms include the recitation of dull sexual japes, sour reflections on celebrity, mindless pronouncements on foreign policy, false accusations of grandstanding, and even furious attacks on innocent individuals who dare to express admiration or gratitude to Bill Clinton (on this particular occasion for saving their lives).

On display in the wake of his successful effort to secure the release of journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee is the purest and most virulent form of a disorder all too familiar to anyone who lived through the Clinton presidency.

Here was an effort that exemplified the best of America — a society that values the lives of its citizens enough to send a former head of state, with all the power of government behind him, to the aid of two women in distress. Here was a happy reunion, bringing wives home to their husbands and a mother back to her little girl, that surely uplifted the spirit of anyone who actually believes in family values. Here was a moment of pride and joy.

But not for Gordon Liddy, the demented felon and radio bigot who cackled about “Ling Ling and Wee Wee being locked up for nine hours in an airplane with Bill Clinton.” Not for Rush Limbaugh, the obsessive guttersnipe who wondered aloud whether Clinton “hit on those two female journalists on the long flight home.” Not for Andrea Peyser, the curdled tabloid columnist who insisted that “the whole shebang was nakedly scripted and staged as a device to help rehabilitate the image of former President Bill Clinton” (and who neglected to mention that Clinton did not speak to the eagerly waiting press corps and has given not a single interview on the North Korea mission). Not for Times columnist Maureen Dowd, who predictably seized on Clinton’s mission as an opportunity for gratuitous and ugly insults to his wife, weirdly imagining that the prisoner release was “some clever North Korean revenge plot, giving the limelight to Daddy to punish Mommy.” And not for the editors of the Huffington Post, who posted a very strange headline — “Bill Upstages Hillary … Once Again” — on an Associated Press story that didn?t mention her at all.

Liddy tells joke about “Ling Ling and Wee Wee” “being locked up for nine hours in an airplane with Bill Clinton”

Here is Watergate THIEF G. Gordon Liddy: Obama Was Born in
The Kenyan Slum of ‘MUMBASA.’ Mombasa! ..Idiot!

On Greta, Eagleburger chides Fox coverage of Clinton’s North Korea visit: “I thought they were going to wet their pants”

Analysts have long speculated on the sexual envy that may or may not predispose the syndrome’s sufferers to say these things. What seems clear, however, is that no matter what humanitarian acts Clinton may perform in his post-presidency, he cannot do anything without provoking such inappropriate and embarrassing outbursts. The result, of course, is that their remarks always reveal more about them than about their intended target.

Consider the reaction of the former president’s former advisor Dick Morris, who still pontificates on the Fox News Channel airwaves as a Clinton expert, although he hasn’t spoken with either of them for more than 10 years. Denouncing Clinton’s trip as “awful” and “ridiculous,” he suggested with a sickening grin that Ling and Lee should instead have been left to “live with the consequences of their acts” — essentially a death sentence in a hard labor camp. (Is that what any Fox commentator would say in the unlikely event that any of their colleagues had the guts to try to report on life in North Korea — and got arrested?)

John Podhoretz didn’t go quite that far in Commentary, but he too felt deeply disturbed by Clinton’s achievement. As a “journalist” who spends most of his life watching television and eating ice cream, he felt moved to mock Ling and Lee for seeking to expose the dark side of the North Korean regime — and to throw in a few bitter words about Al Gore for employing them at Current TV. If that sounds bizarre coming from a self-styled hard-liner, it is simply another symptom of the mental imbalance induced in some people by the sight of Clinton (and Gore).

Finally there are the “serious” commentators, most notably former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, the former diplomat best known for disdaining diplomacy and rattling the atomic saber until he was mercifully relieved of public responsibilities. In him the syndrome’s most noticeable effect is a severe case of amnesia. On the pages of the Washington Post, he complained that despite “decades of bipartisan U.S. rhetoric about not negotiating with terrorists for the release of hostages, it seems that the Obama administration not only chose to negotiate, but to send a former president to do so.” Leaving aside the question of whether this situation in any way fits that description, Bolton has clearly forgotten the Iran-Contra affair, when his colleagues in the Reagan administration, all the way up to and including the president, negotiated with Iran’s leaders to release hostages in exchange for deadly missiles — violating statute and policy. He also seems to have forgotten how he tried to help cover up that outrage as an assistant attorney general.

But perhaps this latest outbreak should be considered mild, when compared with the devastating episodes of years past. Nobody is claiming that Clinton murdered or drugged anyone on his trip to Korea, that he profited by selling a real estate parcel there, or that he is a secret agent of the Dear Leader.

They’re saving all that for Barack Obama.

About The Author(s): Joe Conason is national correspondent for The New York Observer, where he writes a weekly column distributed by Creators Syndicate. He is also a columnist for Salon.com, and the Director of the Nation Institute Investigative Fund. His books Big Lies: The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How It Distorts the Truth, and The Hunting of the President: The Ten-Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton, with Gene Lyons, were both national bestsellers; his latest book, It Can Happen Here: Authoritarian Peril in the Age of Bush, was released in February 2007. His writing and reporting have appeared in many publications, including Harpers, The Guardian, The Nation, and The New Republic. He also appears frequently on television and radio (notably as a regular Friday guest on Air America’s The Al Franken Show). He lives with his wife in New York City.

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