"dgk" wrote in message

stuff snipped

Harry is often right. Our country is an imperialist power that has
done much good around the world but has also done many horrible things
to benefit the powerful - and that generates hatred. We may have
forgotten our previous interventions in Iraq and Iran, which were to
install dictatorships friendly to corporate interests, but the people
there haven't. They have every reason to hate us - we game them the
Shah and Saddam.

America's addiction to oil has made us get in bed with many very vile and
nasty people and some of them have even done us dirty like 9/11.

Now Libya, let's look at that. Why, Gadaffi promised not to go after
nuclear weapons and we then went in and overthrew him. Do you think
that maybe Iran might draw some conclusions from that?

Are you mad? (-: Expecting a consistent tone from the State Department?

And why Libya and not Syria, where they're killing protesters
constantly? Why, because Libya has oil. And don't think that it was an
uprising by the Libyan people. That isn't to say that Gadaffi was
universally loved by any means, but we orchestrated the uprising. Your
tax dollars (and mine) at work.

I figure after we gave the intelligence agencies close to a trillion dollars
and free reign, and *especially* after they were excoriated for their lack
of human intelligence, we're largely seeing the CIA's handiwork in the
Libyan uprising.

Once upon time I knew many Libyans when they were our friends and I was
helping to build flight simulators to sell to them. I suspect that what's
going to replace Mommar the madman isn't going to be any better than he was,
and probably quite a bit worse. I don't think the US will *ever* realize
that many of these countries are ruled by so-called "strongmen" for a
reason: that's what it takes to keep those countries functioning.

If you really want to know what your country is doing, read Killing
Hope by Blum. Very depressing reading but it should be required in our
schools. Good chance of that happening.

Especially if they follow Texas-style textbook selection rules:

http://trueslant.com/michaelpreston/...can-consensus/

In the last few years, pollsters and political researchers have begun to
document a fundamental shift in the way Americans are thinking about the
news. No longer are we merely holding opinions different from one another;
we're also holding different facts. Increasingly, our arguments aren't over
what we should be doing - in the Iraq War, in the war on terrorism, on
global warming, or about any number of controversial subjects- but, instead,
over what is happening. Political scientists have characterized our epoch as
one of heightened polarization; now, as I'll document, the creeping
partisanship has began to distort our very perceptions about what is "real"
and what isn't. Indeed, you can go so far as to say we're now fighting over
competing versions of reality. And it is more convenient than ever before
for some of us to live in a world built of our own facts.

http://www.amazon.com/True-Enough-Le.../dp/0470050101

"True Enough" is filled with this sort of fascinating and illuminating
detail. Political partisans probably ought to know that Farhad's results
favor the left side of the aisle. Republicans, he shows, are more likely
than Democrats to limit their media intake to sources they already agree
with, a phenomenon called selective exposure. And Reps are more likely to
see a story as interesting (even when not related to politics!) when branded
with a logo of their favorite conservative media outlet.

--
Bobby G.