[Anyone] shameless and dangerous republicans:

[Thos Myers]

This country needs and deserves wiser and more level headed people as
elected leaders.  The Shootout at the OK Corral makes an entertaininng
movie and story about the 1800's in the wold, wild West, but the weapons
have changed and now we have the capablility and, with republicans, the
will and desire to destroy the planet.

It is time for a major change in elected officials in our government to
end this mad race to annihilation.

Does the word "negotiation" appear in any republicans brain?

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/01/opinion/01herbert.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin

Rambo and the GOP
By Bob Herbert
The New York Times

Saturday 01 December 2007

I don't know if children should be allowed to watch the Republican
presidential debates.

There's so much talk of violence and mayhem as the solution to our ills.
The candidates seem so eager to flex their muscles and engage the nation
in conflict: Let's continue the war in Iraq. Let's show them what we're
made of in Iran. Let's round up those immigrants and ship 'em back where
they came from.

It's like watching adolescent boys playing the ultimate video game, with
no regard for the consequences. Rudy, the crime-fighter and terror maven,
says he's tougher than Mitt, who actually had illegals working on his
property. Mitt begs to differ and says he'd like to double the size of the
Guantnamo prison.

Are we electing a president or a sheriff?

Representative Tom Tancredo of Colorado wants to stop all immigration,
legal and illegal. Too much immigration brings problems, he said. Among
other things, "it makes it difficult for us to assimilate."

(The bludgeoning of logic is yet another form of violence coming out of
the debates.)

We've got the thunderclouds of a recession heading our way. We're in the
midst of a housing foreclosure crisis that is tragic in its dimensions.
We've got forty-some-million people without health coverage. And the city
of New Orleans is still on its knees.

So you tune in to the G.O.P. debate on CNN to see what's what, and they're
talking about - guns.

Former Mayor Giuliani, once a gun-control champion, has swallowed the
party's Kool-Aid straight from the packet, not even bothering to mix it
with water. "People will be allowed to have guns," he said. "I'm not going
to interfere with that."

It can be scary for small children to watch the former mayor of New York
morph into Wayne LaPierre on national TV.

I'll concede that it's difficult to have a thoughtful exploration of
complex issues in a format that allows a candidate just 90 seconds to
answer. But the Republicans, far more than the Democrats, go out of their
way to present themselves as 21st-century Rambos - a childish, cartoonish
posture that solves nothing and can easily lead to tragedy in a world that
is in fact quite dangerous.

You'd think that a presidential campaign would be the perfect venue for a
serious discussion about Iraq, the greatest foreign policy debacle in the
republic's history. But even John McCain, who frequently seems as if he is
the class of this G.O.P. field, followed up his comment about appeasement
allowing Hitler to flourish with the following simplistic reference to
Iraq:

"I just finished having Thanksgiving dinner with the troops, and their
message to you is, the message of these brave men and women who are
serving there is: 'Let us win.' "

How is that helpful or enlightening? What does he mean by "win?" And win
at what additional cost to human life and other resources?

The Republicans running for president are embarrassed to mention George W.
Bush. But with few exceptions - Mr. McCain's principled position on
torture is one - they want to continue Mr. Bush's failed, often
belligerent and sometimes sadistic policies. (On immigration, an issue
ripe for demagoguery, most of the howling G.O.P. pack has sprinted away
from Mr. Bush, preferring a more macho, politically exploitive approach.
Mr. McCain is again an exception.)

The incessant drumbeat of brute force as the favored solution to difficult
problems serves to normalize state violence to the point where we hardly
notice it. Before his widely reported crack about Jesus being too smart to
run for office, former Gov. Mike Huckabee talked proudly about the tough
challenge he faced in "carrying out" the death penalty in Arkansas.

"I did it more than any other governor ever had to do it in my state," he
said.

The Republican Party has won a lot of elections in recent years. So maybe
this crop of candidates knows something about American voters that many us
would rather not acknowledge, that too many of them are small-minded,
fearful, bigoted and too shallow to recognize policies that are against
their own - and their country's - best interests.

Or maybe that's not the case at all. Maybe this lot of Republican
presidential candidates is misreading the public, and placing its bet on
the wrong side of history.

I hope it's the latter. Maybe voters in the early primaries will deliver
the message that a more thoughtful, insightful, inclusive and constructive
style of campaigning is desired.

Maybe then we can finally get issues like torture off the table (Mr.
McCain and Mr. Romney had a testy exchange over waterboarding the other
night) and squarely address the concerns so many voters have about the
deteriorating economic climate here at home and America's diminished
standing abroad.



http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/printer_120207G.shtml