Now THIS is a statement I could agree with.  Far to often I see it stated that THE LEFT hates the troops.  Which is a stupid thing to say. 

You'd be losing SAT points for that answer....
They don't hate the troops? Then why would they go to a recruiting center and call the guy who runs it (who they never met) a liar? Why would they write "Assassin" (spelled incorrectly because the group is uneducated) and numerous other things on the windows and sidewalks in front of the center? Why would they call soldiers killers? Why would they call American soldiers terrorists? Why would they try to run military recruiters out of town? Why would they say "We'll be coming in here every weekend to protest you until you leave"? Why would they deny that the American military has given them free speech and proteced that right?
They insulted and disrespected American soldiers. They hate soldiers and they hate the military. Their actions and words have proven that. To deny that is complete and utter partisanship.
I also don't think giving $600,000 to insurgents in Fullujah counts as "supporting the troops".

P.S. I never said it was a "leftist position to be against the war". But come on man, you're really going to deny that this is a lefty org?

Phelps in right wing? Why is that? Because they are religious? Nice stereotyping. I'm an athiest and right wing. Because they hate gays? Nice generilizations. I'm right wing, and I don't hate gays: I want them to have the ability to marry their significant other. Phelps isn't a lefty or a righty. The guy is simply a kook who wears a tin hat... He goes to military funerals and protests for heavens sake. You call that RIGHT WING?

Come on buddy. Have anything else to say?

To draw a correlation between Phelps and the right wing because of one similarity is completely dishonest, especially when you look at how Phelps treats the military.

I'm sure you won't like the source, but feel free to search the net about this. It's everywhere... http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1312014/posts

Yes I would call Pat Roberts far right. But Phelps is simply a loonie who has no support (except for his brainwashed family).

It isn't simply about supporting the troops. It's about someone going and degrading the service of fallen soldiers.

You're spinning the truth, Oswald. Who do you think you are? Bill O'Reilly?



Actually, I really would like to know how being against the war became being against the troops... and how people just ate it up for a little while. Fortunately people are starting to look around a little so this phrase has mostly died away.

Well... except in Congress, but it's not like I was expecting better or anything...

I'm assuming you understand then why lefties might take offense at the implication that they hate America, right? I'm a bit of lefty myself, and hate neither America, nor our soldiers. I don't care for the generalizations any more than you do.

To think that one day Osama Bin Laden woke up in his cave and thought, "I'm going to hurt the Americans... for ALAH," is ignorant, at best. Now, as I keep having to say when this topic comes up, we did not DESERVE September 11th and NO ONE is saying we did, but to think SOMETHING wasn't coming was an incredible oversight in the foreign intelegence industry.

Our policies in the Middle East pissed off a lot of different people, including our military support of Israel, our installment of the Shah in Iran, our military support of Suddam Hussein to fight Iran, our support for Turkey...

All these things create a very strong anti-American thought process, a thought process which inspires many radicals to strike back... VIOLENTLY. This is why we had the hostage crisis in Iran and September 11th.

So again, I have to wonder why people are surprised that radical Islam strikes back, especially when you look at the way we meddle in the Middle East.

If we do good the Arabs will like us?




I posted this quite some time ago.


Interesting question, and I can already tell most of you are getting ready to hit that reply button to trot out the normal answers (even answers I normally give), you know, fanatacism, or the evil empire syndrome of the US, both sides have their talking heads, blurbs that generally are spewed back at us on a nightly basis in our thirty minute news flash of what is happening in the world. Lately I have been doing some reading. Here are some thoughts to add to those 30 second flashes of news.
For a number of years the US has been villified for several reasons, support of Israel and support for unpopular Arab regimes run by despots. This, many assume came to a boil on 9-11. Now while we know that anti Americanism is fairly widespread it really doesn't tell us why and its seems a bit misleading. I find it difficult to reconcile Arab and Muslim hostility towards the US with US policy. US policy has actually been very very pro-Arab and pro-Muslim so I believe that this anti Americanism is actually a product of self interested manipulation by key groups inside of Arab society. I believe it is important to identify such an action for the following reason:

If Arab anti Americanism is grounded in the domestic issues of Arab society and not the "evil" deeds of the US, then no amount of public relations or any real change in US policy will change that perception. As a matter of fact, changing US policy to meet this manipulation within Arab society will only make it worse. US attempts at meeting the internally designated evils of America will be seen as an "appeasement" of a weaker nation and encourage radicalism to go even farther.

Seems to me that for the past decade or two anti US sentiment has always been the "last resort" of despotic political regimes whose failed systems have tried to prop up their own standing and diverted attention away from their domestic failures. By assigning faults or shortcomings of their own systems on the US many Arab leaders hope to distract their people from the real problems, so instead of pushing for greater privatization, equality of women, democracy, a rule of law society, freedom of speech, due process, (note how lacking all of these items are in the Arab world), it is better to use the US as a whipping boy (think Schroeder doing this over several decades to win elections).

What is so interesting about this tact is how it flies in the face of reality if one were to look at the factual history of US policy. The US has always favored a policy in its own interests, but those interests have also generally coincided with those of Arab leaders and their people.

Kuwait

The US saved Kuwait from annexation by Iraq's secular dictator in 1991, mainly to preserve cheap oil to be sure, but it was still in effect a pro-Kuwaiti, pro-Muslim and pro-Arab. It would have been easy for the US to sieze Kuwaitis fields and demand lower prices or even political concessions. Instead we, well, we just left while we sought the highest level of political support for our actions among Arabs and Muslims.

Conflicts in general

When the US has become involved in a regional dispute (often at the pleadings of Europe) it is usually during fights between moderates and secular Arab forces or radical Islamist groups that even most Muslims consider too far in one direction. The US has generally backed groups with a strong claim to Arab or Islamic legitimacy. You can see this going all the way back to the 1950's. Look at Egypt, Syria and Iraq, while dictatorships friendly to Moscow they menaced Jordan, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia. Even during the 1950's the US wanted good relationships with Nassar and we even prevented his overthrow by the UK, France and Israel in the 1956 Suez War. The US continued to woo Egypt, we accepted Syria's hegemony over Lebanon and really during that period the US did little to punish state sponsored terrorism. The US even acted as a protector of Islam during that time since we viewed traditional Islam as a counter to secular communism which had, at the time aligned itself with radical Arab nationalism.