Dear TSA:First, I’d like to thank that most esteemed branch of Homeland Security, the TSA (Transportation Security Administration) for visiting my blog yesterday with some frequency. Your, as well as many others, interest in my blog ensures the fact that the site will continue to enjoy its lofty status on Google’s search engine.
It is also comforting to know your dot.gov oversight is ever vigilant in tracking subversive clowns such as I, who sow the seeds of intelligence among the subservient masses. It’s good that you perceive my feeble attempts to stamp out ignorance as a threat to the status quo. After all, the dissemination and perpetuation of fear and ignorance has been critical to the maintenance of your neo-conservative agenda. Keep up the good work.
Yours Truly – General Jack Ripper
PS: Always remember, little brother is watching.
MARQUETTE MINING JOURNAL
LETTERS:
Marchers not patriots
I take exception to the referral that members of Citizens for Peace and Justice in Marquette are patriots. A patriot is a person who loves, supports and defends their country. The CPJ strikes out on all three. I’d go so far to state that members of CPJ would be unwilling to take up arms to defend their country.
Their presence in the Fourth of July parade delivered no credible patriotic message. They have a political agenda to support the most liberal candidates for political positions. For them to be in the fourth of July [sic] was a cynical attempt to display their political outlook. I served 20 years in the army and it gives me no pleasure that I defended these people’s freedoms. If they think God above blesses their shenanigans they need to think again.
Thomas D. Johnson
Marquette, Michigan
To The Mining Journal:
RE: “Marchers not patriots” (7/20/08).
In defining just exactly what a patriot is, Thomas D. Johnson writes, “If they think God above blesses their shenanigans they need to think again.” Before providing a general gloss on Johnson’s disgust with the Citizens for Peace and Justice in the Fourth of July parade, I want to thank him. If it weren’t for people like Mr. Johnson, we wouldn’t know what God thinks.
According to Johnson, “A patriot is a person who loves, supports and defends their country.” In a democratic society, individual citizens, guided by the moral compass they’ve formed through family, education, and community institutions, comprise what a country is. Our willingness to put a generation of young men and women in harm’s way should be something we enter into with caution and wisdom. So when I see a legless young man just back from Iraq visiting his former co-workers at Shopko, I have to ask if he lost his limbs for a just cause. My moral consideration of his hapless state is not predicated upon a “political agenda.”
Since a state’s citizens are what binds a country together, the kind of blind patriotism that follows a “my country right or wrong” dictum is fundamentally flawed. Each citizen has a moral duty, as Thoreau, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King have all pointed out, to first appeal to their private conscience before supporting collective policies that are socially unjust and privately immoral. If you, Mr. Johnson, lived during Hitler’s regime, for instance, would his being democratically elected and implementing genocidal legislation compel you to “support and defend” Nazi Germany?
As for having a “political agenda to support the most liberal candidates for political positions,“ doesn’t your letter imply a “political outlook” that tacitly supports a war that has cost over 4000 young Americans their lives, and left 600,000 civilians dead? Before appealing to an abstract concept like country, state, or nation, every citizen must first ask if the cause is just. Is it worth it?
Randall L. Tessier
Big Bay, Michigan
POLITICS:
(As if everything preceding this weren’t political)
LET”S HAVE A WAR!
There’s too many of us
There’s too many of us
There’s too many
There’s too many
There’s too many of us…
- Fear
In what follows, I will discuss the current state of affairs regarding the political situation involving Israel, the United States, and Iran. Further, I will look at three very different, and I hope to be representative, media publications as a part of this discussion, The Guardian, from Manchester, England, the New York Times, The New Republic, and The Marquette Mining Journal, from the United States.
According to the Guardian, the general consensus among prominent British political academics is that Israel will soon attack Iran, and my guess is that while the lame duck line will be one of restraint and negotiation, the current administration will bestow not only its consent, but its encouragement, for Israel’s pursuing this course. The hidden agenda here is that, much to the administration’s glee, Israel will perform a service, by proxy, that the U.S. has rendered itself incapable of.
In an earlier post I wrote, “it is at our peril that we discount credible sources, like Seymour Hersh, who warn that Bush will be dangerous right up to 11:59:59 of the day he leaves office.” Hersh’s recent article in the July 7 New Yorker, “Preparing the Battlefield,” quotes Admiral William Fallon, who until recently was head of the U.S. Central Command in charge of American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, as saying, “There were constant discussions in Washington and in the field about how to engage Iran and, on the subject of the bombing option.”
It’s no secret that the administration has had Iran in its cross hairs for a long time. But what has happened is that sustaining a military presence in Afghanistan and Iraq has been so costly in terms of logistics, materiel, and public opinion, that even this administration, as arrogant and imperialistic as it is, can’t sell another war. How convenient it is then to simply appeal to Israel’s hawkishness by reinforcing their doctrine of preemption, hence coaxing them into attacking Iran.
Writing in The New Republic (7/30/08), Shmuel Rosner, notes that at the beginning of June, Israel’s deputy prime minister, Shaul Mofaz, flatly told the Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth that, if Iran continues its nuclear program, Israel, ‘will attack it.’” Also consider the following quotes from Benny Morris’s (professor of Middle Eastern Studies at Ben-Gurion University) op-ed piece, “Using Bombs to Stave Off War,” in the Friday, July 18, New York Times:
“Israel will almost surely attack Iran’s nuclear sites in the next four to seven months—and the leaders in Washington and even Tehran should hope that the attack will be successful enough to cause the…complete destruction of that country’s nuclear program.”
“Should Israel’s conventional assault fail to significantly harm or stall the Iranian program, a ratcheting up of the Iranian-Israeli conflict to a nuclear war level will most likely follow.”
“Which leaves the world with only one option if it wished to halt Iran’s march toward nuclear weaponry: the military option, meaning an aerial assault by either the United States or Israel.”
“But as a result of the Iraq imbroglio, and what is rapidly turning into the Afghan imbroglio, the American public has little enthusiasm for wars in the Islamic lands. This curtails the white House’s ability to begin yet another major military campaign in pursuit of a goal that is not seen as a vital national interest by many Americans.”
SO, WHY WOULD MORRIS ADVOCATE RISKING A POTENTIALLY DEVASTATING GLOBAL CONFLAGARATION?
“The alternative is an Iran turned into a nuclear wasteland…savaged by a nuclear strike, or that both Israel and Iran suffer such a fate.”
You’re right on one thing, professor Morris, the American public has lost its “enthusiasm for wars.” Yet in the hinterlands, there still exists a romantic mystique involving waging war to end war. As the motto of the Strategic Air Command says, “Peace is Our Profession, but I think were fast coming to the point of questioning whether we can drill our way out of the oil crisis, and bomb our way to peace.
Which brings me to the Mining Journal’s continued support of a failed White House, and blind adherence to the untenable belief that waging war is wise policy. In endorsing McCain over Obama, and condemning Obama’s emphasis on negotiation as reflective of past diplomats who have insisted that, if only they could negotiate with aggressors, everything could be settled,” the Journal editorial of 7/20/08 contends that the American public should “Rest assured, Iranian leaders are eager to take advantage of a U.S. president whose ego makes him similarly delusional.”
The Mining Journal makes a shrewd, if unintentional point here, it’s time that we choose a leader where “ego” and “delusion” don’t enter into policy decisions that will profoundly affect us, and generations to come.
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