All domestic social progress came to a dead stop until VJ day.

It would have to be the same if we stayed in the Middle East.

And it's simply not our place anymore to "lead the world"...if it ever was.

The world doesn't NEED to be led-it can lead itself.

It doesn't matter if you're personally progressive if, as an officeholder, you can't actually do anything progressive. FDR wasn't even able to desegregate the military at a time when African-Americans and Latino-Americans were fighting fascism and Naziism just as hard as white troops were.

Btw your titke saying she is pro slaughter is garbage.

It can never mean anything humane or socially decent, because people like her don't accept that unrest is ever caused by legitimate human grievances against the existing order.

Perfectly reasonable thing to say.

It does not mean she is looking to start new wars.

by forcing 120,000 Japanese nationals and Japanese Americans to surrender all their possessions and live in concentration camps in violation of the Fourth and Fifth Amendment.

Are you willing to "turn Japanese" should Hillary Clinton decide to do "whatever it takes" to defend this nation?

She's cool with having diplomats spy.

I brought up an example of "whatever it takes" to "defend the nation" by a "progressive President."

Right now, all our phone calls, email, etc. are being collected by a massive domestic surveillance system in violation of the Fourth Amendment. The Holder doctrine has established a precedent that "due process does not mean judicial process" in violation of the Fifth Amendment.

Given that, are you willing to allow a "progressive President" to do "whatever it takes" to "defend the nation?"

Now answer the question: What's Hillary's position on domestic surveillance?

Like, having your cellphone become a beacon for a Predator drone strike because the Administration decided you're a terrorist and you need to be killed without a trial.

You cool with that?

Quit evading the question: What's Hillary Clinton's position on domestic surveillance?

And you have google. I am not here to educate you.

I thought you, as a Hillary supporter, would be able to tell me what her position is on domestic surveillance.

Instead, you either don't know, or don't want to say.

I'm sure the reasons you have for voting for Hillary are important.

Hillary eats at Chipotle, just like meeee.

on the list of Things hrmjustin Is Unfamiliar With.

She's obsessed with looking as "tough" and inflexible as possible.

I am for real.

That came to my mind as well.

FDR could only have built the New Deal in a country with a small military that wasn't in a war.

That's why our leaders have made sure the war budget stayed perpetually massive after 1945. And that's why no president since FDR has been able to be truly progressive.

but won't help the children in poverty, our vets that are being neglected and our seniors that are going to have to sacrifice.

War makes the rich richer and the poor, poorer. Is that the new face of the Democratic Party?

We haven't had progressive domestic policies on much of anything since then.

(the black freedom movement and the gains made by feminist, Latino and LGBTQ activists have been held to a minimum by our foreign policy of perpetual war.)

it was the assertion that "progressives can't be war presidents"...

I didn't say "progressives can't be war presidents"-I said "war presidents can't be progressive. FDR was a progressive individual, but he stopped all progressive policies the moment we entered World War II(something that was totally unnecessary, because it's not as though the South was going to back Hitler if the armed services were desegregated, for God's sakes).

FDR had no progressive domestic policies after we went into the war(yes, the war was necessary, but let's face it, everything good domestically stopped while we were in it.

And the early death of the Great Society programs in the name of funding our involvement in Vietnam vindicates my point again.

If HRC sends troops back in to Iraq and expands our presence in Afghanistan, she'll have to govern as a Republican at home, as LBJ did after the summer of '65.

before fighting WWII.

Johnson is a better example of a president who signed progressive policies into law while taking the country to war.

And we know what happened when he did that.

FDR also didn't do jack shit in his second term - and there was no war excuse for that. FDR didn't just instantly become less progressive because the U.S. went to war. That's just silly talk.

But he was ONLY able to do anything progressive in his first term because, at that point, we were leaving the world alone and not treating force as the default solution to all problems.

Which afforded him the opportunity to pass whatever he wanted. But that doesn't mean he was any less progressive in his third and fourth term (well first few months of his fourth). Nor was Truman, who had Korea, or Kennedy, who was laying the foundation for Vietnam or even LBJ.

You could make the claim that it could detract from domestic policy - but that is not what the poster claimed.

to surrender all their possessions and live in concentration camps in violation of the Fourth and Fifth Amendment is hardly progressive, but YMMV.

BTW, what's Hillary Clinton's position on domestic surveillance?

in the world. Their armies had rolled over most of Europe before the United States entered the war. Nazi Germany truly threatened to extinguish democratic values and common morality from all of Western Europe and other parts of the world. They were an almost unparalleled horror and threat to humanity.

When modern politicians talk about "doing whatever it takes" to ensure America's "safety and security" they're NOT talking about the same thing as Nazi Germany. They're talking about using aggressive military action to stop even the potential for any Americans being harmed.

You can agree or disagree that the potential threat of criminal and ideological terrorist groups in the Middle East justifies violating the sovereignty of Middle Eastern countries and carrying out acts of aggression. But I don't think you can reasonably claim that Middle Eastern terrorists pose an existential threat to the United States in the same way that Nazi Germany did to out allies in Western Europe.

and, at the time, he didn't have a lot of reason to think he would be one.

You might want to edit.

That's a real stretch. You do know that diplomacy is also required.
Believe me, Sanders would say the same. He would do what it takes.

Every Presidential candidate wants to keep America safe. That's their job.

We're just another country(a country I like, btw). We don't have to be the world's policemen, and this century has proven that we're no better at sorting the world out than anybody else is.

We need to let the world lead itself.

It would piss off all the war profiteers who pay for political campaigns.

That the little thing would go on infinitely. My problem with your suggestion is that it would require turning back time and reverse the cheating that got Bush II in, and got us into this colossal mess. intentionally.
I honestly feel dropping massive megaton Valium bombs throughout the middle eastern region, then massively invade from all UN allies and totally disarm the region while they're all asleep would go further at solving our problems than war.
And it could be packaged that the beauty of this for the arms merchants is they would have them to sell to other terrorists all over again.

...and if he did, an isolationist foreign policy would probably give us another Republican landslide.

willingness to stick our noses into everybody else's business.

Libya: In late 2012, the New York Times reported that weapons from a US-approved deal had eventually gone to Islamic militants in Libya. The deal, which involved European weapons sent to Qatar as well as US weapons originally supplied to the United Arab Emirates, had been managed from the sidelines by the Obama administration.

Syria: More than once, American arms intended to help bolster the fight against ISIS in Syria and northern Iraq have ended up in the group's control. Last October, an airdrop of small arms was blown off target by the wind, according to the Guardian. ISIS quickly posted a video of its fighters going through crates of weapons attached to a parachute.

Iraq: American weapons supplied to the Iraqi army have also found their way ISIS via theft and capture. And weapons meant for the Iraqi army have also gone to Shiite militias backed by Iran. This isn't a new problem: As much as 30 percent of the weapons the United States distributed to Iraqi forces between 2004 and early 2007 could not be accounted for.
. . . .

Somalia: In 2011, Wired reported that as much as half of the US-supplied arms given to Uganda and Burundi in support of the fight against al-Shabaab was winding up with the Somali militant group.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/03/pentagon-arms-lost-missing-yemen

As Secretary of State in the Obama administration from January 2009 to February 2013, Clinton was at the forefront of the U.S. response to the Arab Spring and advocated the U.S. military intervention in Libya. She took responsibility for security lapses related to the 2012 Benghazi attack, which resulted in the deaths of American consulate personnel, but defended her personal actions in regard to the matter.


Hillary could not go to these countries and pick up weapons our military lost. But as Secretary of State, Hillary had an obligation to remind the President and our military leaders that after you have finished playing with your toys, you need to put them away neatly. And if you played with them out of your house, you need to make sure that you bring them back in so that no one will take them and so that they don't get wet and ruined.

These incidents happened while Hillary was Secretary of State.

Keeping us safe means making sure we don't leave weapons in the hands of the bad guys.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Rodham_Clinton

[url=http://www.freesmileys.org/smileys.php][img][/img][/url]

It's one of the coolest I've ever seen.

under Violent Smilieys. The top link. http://www.freesmileys.org/

Only 513 more days until the 2016 election

Torture, mass slaughter of innocent people, and even genocide...that was also the Bush policy.

Is that now our policy too?...to dispense with morality for the sake of a false sense of safety?
Have we gone that far down the rabbit hole?

Things that make you go hmmm....

Our whole society is crumbling yet the Oligarchs are worried about their safety. The 99% is worried about poverty, infrastructure, taking care of our vets and seniors. All these take a back burner when the neocons and the MIC take all our tax dollars for continuous wars.

oligarchy!

they wouldn't have done all they could to stop the Arab Spring and keep the old tyrants(including the House of Saud)in absolute control.

All we have ever fought for in the Arab/Muslim world is oil. Nothing else mattered. That's why Afghanistan is still a religious fundamentalist hellhole(and why our leaders were perfectly happy to help create the Taliban back in the Eighties), even though they all knew what the 'ban was about from the very beginning).

lead by example and we fail miserably there. We no longer live in a democracy, but a plutocratic-oligarchy.

"democracy" cannot be imposed as a spoil of conquest-because the conquerors will never allow it to be genuinely democratic. Look at Iraq, where our imperial vizier, Mr. Bremer, imposed constitutional bans on any oil tax above 15% and forced the privatization of the Iraqi oil industry(it is now almost totally under foreign control, and Iraqis no longer get any real share of the oil wealth their labor creates).

And strong National security. That's pretty much the hallmark of every liberal prez since FDR.

And they damn sure don't want us to keep militarily intervening in the Middle East a region where we've brought nothing but misery.

A HRC war in the Middle East would have to be exactly like a George W. Bush/Dick Cheney war there. No war can ever be progressive or liberating again, and none can ever be feminist.

We should reserve our military solely for protecting our own territory from EXTERNAL attack(and never from domestic protest). That's its only legitimate use.

That doesn't mean we can't trim the MIC budget, I think it will be easy to make the case that we can do both; strong defense and trim the budget. It's no mystery that the budget is bloated and most Americans would probably agree.

Would be to stop the world's poor from rising up and demanding what's theirs-to stop fighting to preserve corporate domination of this and other countries and to let all nations put the human needs of their own peoples ahead of the profits of the Western rich.

Do you think HRC, based on what she said today, would ever even consider doing anything like that?

I'd be pleasantly astonished if she did, but I think we both know what the odds of that would be.

Here's just one example, why all the saber rattling about the Ukraine? The EU GDP is almost $2 trillion more than the US GDP, let them figure out what to do with Ukraine. What defense of the US requires military bases in the EU and Japan not to mention countless other countries?

As for the Middle East? That mess just proves what I like to say, no one wins a war... no one, ever. Some may be able to claim victory but they never come out ahead, never.

The Republicans complain about the Mexican border, well here's a US jobs program they can support, cut the military by 100,000 troops primarily from the EU and Japan, then add 100,000 Border Agents. Win, win, we keep the border secure and the salaries of the Border Agents stay in the US and not contributing to the EU or Japan's economy.

That is the weirdest fucking thing I've read this week.

And I get around.

Last edited Sat Jun 13, 2015, 08:57 PM - Edit history (1)

It's now the unchallengable truth.

War can't liberate women, or free the oppressed anymore, or do anything but protect corporate profits.

No war has had any progressive or humane effects since VE Day-since then, they've all been just "wars of the national interest". And the national interest is always anti-woman, anti-poc, anti-worker, anti-poor, and anti-liberation.

Meanwhile, note that I wasn't actually talking to you. I was laughing at you.

Still am. "None can ever be feminist". I'm dyin' heah!

The use of force played no positive role in that.

Sbrenica proves my point.

As for Kosovo, that mainly ended because the Serbian pro-democracy movement peacefully brought down Milosevic.

Without NATO strikes there would have been no settlement, because there would have been no way to eliminate Milosevic. It was a "war", certainly by your loose (and weirdly trippy) definition(s). We were running the show. The people of BiH were the victors. It was a resounding success.

And, despite it being "twenty years ago" it was well after WWII, yes?

War is organized killing. Even when justified, that's all it ever has been. It isn't about "honor&quot a meaningless imperialist concept) or glory or ideals. It's just death.

That's reality.

What if it had been Eleanor's war?

Not very feminine feminist of her, would it have been?

We will never again fight a war in which "winning" frees anyone. Our rulers have already made sure of that.

Nothing that can happen on any battlefield in the future can possibly be the equivalent of the defeat of Naziism-a defeat Western capitalists essentially nullified by plunging us, as soon as World War II was over and for no good reason, into a forty year fight against "communism&quot something they already knew was never going to reach past East Berlin).

And once that useless conflict died of its own dead weight, having created nothing but decades of misery, a conflict with another alleged "threat"-the mythical ideology known as Islamism-was created to keep the war machine fully funded.

So, anyway, we did fight a war which resulted in "freeing" quite a few people - by dint of an accord which allowed them to live peacefully with their neighbors. You want to dismiss it as a notta war, or a longtimeago thingy, fine. That's your revisionism, by your own standards. If you can live with that, ain't no skin off my back.

BTW, we also fought the Japanese in WWII. Other than their blowing up a few planes and killing a large handful of people, what right did we have to engage them? They were no threat to the Western World. They shoulda fought it out amongst themselves, right?

The Japanese were far less of a threat to us than Nazi Germany(not that I'd have supported them).

The fight in the Pacific was largely a trade war-Japan's objectives were to control the resources of Asia(which the U.S. also wanted to do, and which was also the main reason we sent troops to the unwinnable conflicts in Vietnam and Korea later-btw, you do realize that the Korean War is still technically going on, don't you?).

We technically "liberated" most of the Asian countries from Japanese rule, and then re-oppressed them by installing dictators aligned with us in the Cold War in most of them(other than Japan, where we sabotaged MacArthur's democratization efforts by rigging their electoral system and turning their economy over to people with an essentially samurai mindset).

Do you now support half of WWII?


Never mind, dude. I've given up on taking you seriously.

G'night!

that nothing I've posted here has been a personal attack on you. Sad that you felt it necessary to lower yourself to that level.

I said I no longer take you seriously. That's an observation about me.

Otherwise, I suspect that there are a lot of differences between us.

Sleep tight!

I never said anything personally denigrating or dismissive about you.

This is about the candidates and the issues-not about me. Or you.

Check it:

If a black family moves into the 'hood, the way to respond is NOT to burn a cross on their front lawn. The way to respond is to go introduce yourself and invite them over for cocktails (or whatever).

The KKK would see cross-burning as "keeping the 'hood safe," but really they're creating a problem where none exists.

Hillary's foreign policy is all about creating problems where none exist.

We can only have a progressive country if we stay out of foreign wars.

Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.

This much we pledge--and more. - JFK

That's what "pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any 'friend'" means. It means(and can ONLY mean)perpetual and perpetually unwinnable war.

And such war is always pointless and unjustifiable-just like everything the U.S. has done in the Arab/Muslim world since 1991 or so.

We need to totally break with that part of the Democratic foreign policy tradition...we need to admit that war no longer achieves much of anything, and that the U.S. shouldn't try to lead the world.

Leading the world is just a code phrase for imperialism.

Or do you see the party as the only realistic vehicle to your objectives?

Why does that matter? It's not as if party loyalty requires a person to be a militarist.

Not about party loyalty but more about standing in opposition to many objectives that have always been Democratic policy.

Last edited Sat Jun 13, 2015, 09:50 PM - Edit history (1)

Unless it's now "ideological" to say that it's a bad thing to go to other countries and kill people there.

I express my party loyalty by opposing things that are bad for the party-like the permanent war economy.

It's about making the party stronger and better by freeing it from bad things.

If this was 1860, would you argue that I was being disloyal to the party if I opposed slavery, the defense of which had "always been Democratic policy" until then?

If this was 1935, would you argue that I was being disloyal to the party in backing the Wagner Act, when opposition to the labor movement in any but its most timid and neutered forms had "always been Democratic policy" until then?

If this was 1964, would you argue that I was being disloyal to the party if I supported the seating of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party against LBJ's pointless insistence on seating the segregationist and pro-KKK regular Mississippi delegation?

And weren't you being disloyal to things that had "been Democratic policy" for over seventy-five years when you supported the anti-labor, anti-black, anti-poor and anti-activist Democratic Leadership Council in its project of turning the Democrats into a "centrist&quot read right-wing)party?

It's sad when Hillary Derangement Syndrome carries you this far over the edge.

So was Howard Zinn. So was Pete Seeger.

Not all World War II veterans lived out their days as implacable militarists.

I never bought that PT109 fabrication of heroism. Those Japanese destroyers were not sound proof and in fact were very noisy tin cans. Even in the pitch black of night he and his crew should have heard it coming. Maybe they drank too much of JFK's old man's booze.

no exceptions.

nt

being a convincing or useful argument, if your aim is to drive people away from Hillary Clinton. Anyone who listened to the speech did not come away with anything like a "pro-slaughter" sentiment (she talked about bringing all the other diplomatic and economic powers to bear), and your statement that a "war president can't be progressive" is patently absurd: I thought of FDR immediately, too.

Indeed, I watched Bernie Sanders on Charlie Rose the other night, and he sounded pretty hawkish, by your standards. He was asked if he agreed with Obama's decision to send 450 more troops as advisors. He started to agree and then said he hadn't fully studied it, but that (insert positive things here about Obama's policies in that regard) we needed to defeat ISIS. "Slaughterer?"

Hyperbole is not effective argumentation. Distorting speech isn't effective argumentation. Any presidential candidate is going to have to say they will keep this country safe. If you see blood dripping out the sides of their mouths, that's your problem. The rest of America will see it as a kind of basic requirement.

Fail on the attempt to scare people.

since scaring people just might not have been the poster intended. Do you think that's there is any possibly that poster was expressing their opinion?

By cherry picking half a phrase from a speech, my impression is that the OP didn't actually listen to it, but went to scour for something to be derogatory and alarming. The hair-on-fire hyperbole speaks for itself.

But that's just my opinion.

that you're unwilling to extend to others?


Well, I'll give it to both of you. I think you mean well, but when it comes to winning people over, I think you're mistaken.

She obsessed on labeling other countries as enemies and on defining our role in the world as nothing but a land if war, She said nothing of working for peace...nothing of diplomacy and negotiations...nothing of even trying to reduce global tensions.

George W. Bush could have given the exact same remarks on foreign policy.