Third Party & Independents Archives

David,
I see nothing wrong in President Obama taking the first steps to meet Chavez. What would the Right like him to do? Hide behind a curtain and hope that no one sees him. Or better yet, have do a Smackdown right in the middle of the floor why the whole world is watching.

No, being that they are both Civil Leaders I guess the last one is sort of out of the question; however, is it not funny how the Media is trying to get the Right to take the bone and run with it?

For why I don’t know the Proper Manners for such things, I do believe a handshake is better diplomacy than a closed fist and a loud mouth.

Henry, Bingo!

David, we spoke of this a few years ago about cuba on what a more open cuba would mean to the world even Jack was inclined to say that it would benefit all ,Chavez is tied into cuba and doing a end run around him could have dire consequences on reconciliations we have a little history behind us as Nixon met with china and china was involved with Vietnam during the war as was the former USSR I don’t see it as a sign of weakness it’s called diplomacy .

David,

Limbaugh and his buddies are going to make a big deal about this, and the folks in the trailer parks across America are going to eat it up.

I only have one question for those folks;

Do you truly feel safer today, for America having ignored people like Chavez, than you did Sept. 10th 2001?

Rocky

You know it could be worse than Obama shaking the hand of a socialist leader at a meeting. It used to happen all the time in politics until well…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VO_yB8MI_4E

Rodney, good comparisons.

Rocky, you may be right on Limbaugh and buddies. But, there are some very fine folks living in trailer parks across America.

Cuba and Chavez, may be more amenable to negotiations after there estrangement. Sometimes, you have to find the silk purse in the sow’s ear, or some such cliche. :-)

j2t2, I know of a few Somalians who wouldn’t want to shake Obama’s hand. Not exactly the same thing, though, I suspect.

My feeling is, without Bush, he has nobody who will take the first step of acting like an idiot so he could join in without looking like he was to blame. Bush was a useful idiot for Chavez in that respect.

Now he has to deal with a situation where his previous belligerence and excuses for grabbing power no longer work, and where he stands to be the buffoon if he gets too radical in his response to Obama.

Obama makes things more difficult for the blowhards because of his maturity and calm. Bush and his opponents had a tendency to play off each other for the benefit of their home audiences, each stonewalling and stifling what the other wanted to show how macho they were. Now they don’t have that easy enemy.

One of the talking heads voiced today that President Cheney/Bush might have got up and walked out of the room had Ortega rambled on and on about the evils of America…yeah, he probably would have…but, no one on earth has felt the bare knuckles of America more directly than Daniel Ortega. Our President was wise to suffer through the diatribe. The man, his maturity, his wisdom, his patience, his strength, never ceases to amaze me.

PS:

I’m damned near seventy years old, and here I am gushing like a fourteen year old…no wonder half of those who comment on the right think I’m childish…;-)

David,

“But, there are some very fine folks living in trailer parks across America.”

I am sure there are.

It was a metaphor, and I refuse to use emoticons.

Rocky

It is good to be polite, but no good will come from dealing with Hugo. He is not really much of a threat to us and we can take or leave his friendship, but HE NEEDS to blame the U.S. for his troubles. It is a big part of his dog and pony show and his fun-loving persona. Otherwise, he is just the run of the mill caudillo, who lives off oil revenue.

Funny that the same people who want to hug Hugo reject reaching out to Rush or Hanity. Actually, I am not advocating that you do. Just think about why it might not be worth it. Now think of Hugo and how he makes himself seem important. In many ways, he is also in the entertainment business.

Marysdude

Ortega is now trying to get cash from the U.S. Hugo is tapped out, with oil prices down. Venezuela doesn’t really produce much of anything anymore except oil. Even their previous high end export - beauty queens - is falling out of favor. Hugo’s management plan is working and soon his country will be as prosperous as Cuba.

The interesting thing about Hugo, Ortega or even the Castro brothers is how little they really matter w/o the specter of Soviet power behind them. They are reduced to local menaces. We can sympathize with the people they rule, but nobody really cares anymore what Ortega says or does. President Obama, to his credit, evidently recognizes this.

Rocky,

Being here in the eponymous heart of Texas, I can assure you, many well off and otherwise intelligent people are ditto heads, whether they acknowledge it or not.

There is a certain bootstrap mentality among many westerners and entrepreneurs that seems to me to be linked to their egos in such a way as to justify their own importance, that meshes well with Rushites. It may be racist, it may be simply elitist, but it is hardly restricted to trailer parks or the poor and uneducated.

Chavez is the ELECTED president of Venezuela. Although American presidents have done a lot more than shake hands with lots of dictators, Chavez does not fall into that category. He has been the target of a concerted campaign of demonization in the US even though at his behest,Cit-go, the Venezuelan oil company has been providing free heating oil to poor Americans etc. He had the temerity to strike hard bargains with international oil conglomerates. That does not make him an enemy in my book. He has also been accused of using oil revenues to help improve the live of people other than the oiligarchs,damn the man. As for his comments about Bush,hell, I’d shake his hand just for that.

We have fought wars with boogy-men much like the ones disparaged by Christine as less than Hannity and Limbaugh. Can you remember the name of the Viet Nam leader who was so important that we gave up fifty-eight thousand Americans for? Was Noriego not less important than Anne Coulter? Had Saddam actually done more direct harm to America than Beck?

Marysdude

I really have to wonder about your point of reference when you seem to hate fellow Americans so much that you claim that some American journalists and commentators cause more harm than Saddam Hussein.

I didn’t disparage the Castros, Ortega etc so much as point out that they just don’t matter very much anymore. I mean that in a comparative case.

Think of someone like Robert Mugabe. He matters a lot to his region and his people are suffering horribly, but he is not a geopolitical player.

One of the many bad things during the Cold War was that the tensions elevated local concerns to international prominence because of super power rivalry. Little guys like Ortega were important because they could be used by the Soviets to create bigger openings.

Today among the nearly 200 countries and countless regions of the world, who controls Nicaragua or Cuba is not a big impact compared to many others. In fact, many firms or even individuals have a much greater impact.

If you really figured it out, the Ortega is about as important to us as the head of a large Indian steel company. Because of his control of oil, Hugo may rise to the level of a CEO of a major company or a financier, but he is not as important as Warren Buffet or George Soros, for example. Fidel today is of only historical interest. He is merely a celebrity and a nearly dead one at that.

Have you ever heard of Lakshmi Mittal? Look him up. Now that I think about it, he is more important than all three of the little Latin leftists combined. I bet you $20 most of your friends have never heard of him.

They say that the opposite of love is not hate. It is indifference. I think that Ortega, Hugo and Fidel long for the days when they were the object of real interest. But we - and they - are better off when such as them remain obscure.

Christine, you seem to miss the point about Chavez. As I said in the article: “Leadership amidst adversaries, good will and common ground, carries.”

The U.S. and Venezuela have some common interests, and to the extent we can cooperate on those, both countries can benefit. We don’t have to like Chavez nor trust him, when negotiating matters of mutual benefit and interest.

Pushing Chavez to deal with China has not been in our long term interests, which was the net outcome of the Bush/Chavez relations.

Christine, Afghanistan was never a major world player either, until 9/11. That little insignificant country cost Russia the Cold War in part, and has now cost the U.S. 100’s of billions of dollars, and still counting.

There are no insignificant countries in the world today, to be dismissed and ignored as non-major world stage players. Little places like Palestine, Taiwan, Afghanistan, Somalia, and a host of others, all have the potential of becoming flash points for confrontations which could cost the global economy enormous sums, which it is now ill-prepared to carry.

Diplomacy, common ground, and good will, aside from being relatively very cheap, also hold out the greatest potential for averting, mitigating, or alleviating crises.

That is like saying a peaceful neighborhood is just as well off if someone moves in who drives fast through the streets and plays loud music at all hours. Why would it be better to leave that neighbor alone than to recognize getting to know him and using quiet diplomacy might solve the problem. What is the cost compared to the result?

In the past we’ve found it more in keeping with the American way to make enemies of our own neighbors than to seek other, perhaps better, results. We may have finally decided it is more fruitful to find out the neighbor’s agenda, see if that agenda is harmful to us, negotiate some agreement, and end up with good neighbors…who knows?

There have always been bad peoples on the earth, and all too often those bad people have done great harm. Shaking the hand of someone who is not a threat to us (your opinion), cannot be as much trouble as shaking a fist or ignoring them. As we glean better neighbors, perhaps we can concentrate more fully on those who we prefer NOT to shake hands with. What is that old saw??? Put your own house in order, before you find fault with someone else’s abode…We find fault with many international leaders, for any number of things, but we cannot in good conscience, go for their jugular unless we first become better than them. We have to reduce our exploitations, get a handle on our civil and human rights issues, and regain some moral high ground…then when we speak against an evil or dangerous leader somewhere, perhaps others will then take us more seriously.

We’ve used the UN for our own agenda so many times it has started shaking its head every time we speak. We say the organization is ineffectual, but in reality, it may just be a matter of it saying, “once burnt, twice learnt”.

Obama is good for America, because he ACTS more American.

Gergle,

“It may be racist, it may be simply elitist, but it is hardly restricted to trailer parks or the poor and uneducated.”

It’s quite possible that there are PHDs and rocket scientists living, right this minute, in a trailer pack near you.

The metaphor has less to do with education or financial status than it does to do with those that accept, at face value, information given to them with no curiosity about the veracity of its is truth.
It’s a mentality, it’s the “I agree with everything you say” attitude of the “dittoheads”. Merely being a dittohead is group-think at it’s worst.

Christine,

Mittal may have been able to do direct short term harm to the American economy, but in our (America’s) desire to Democratize the planet, placing people like Noriega, Pinochet, Saddam, the Shah, Marcos, et al, in power, and supporting them to the detriment of the people of the countries they ruled, has helped to shape the world into the mess we all see today.

America is not a safer place for all of this meddling.

Rocky

David

I agree with your proposition that we should reach out to Hugo. I just don’t think anything good will come of it. He has a vested interest in being anti-American. He profits from it politically. I don’t think he will give it up. I hope I am wrong, but I don’t think so.

Hugo broke the relationship, not us. He can restore it any time.

Diplomacy is great, but sometimes you have fundamental disagreements. I was reading somewhere about Francis I king of France who was fighting Charles V. Somebody asked him if he and Charles didn’t have a common interest. He answered that, yes they did. They both wanted to control Italy.

I think we should keep an eye on everything, but if you have 200+ priorities, you have no priorities at all. Ortega just is not near the front the long and Fidel is essentially dead.

Rocky

During he Cold War we supported lots of bad guys who promised to fight the Soviets. They did the same. It was a bad time. We have tried to change that policy since 2000, but you can already see the future criticism.

If we approach the rulers of Iraq - and “support” them, sooner or later the people of Iran will hold it against us. The same goes for Hugo, Ortega, Castro etc. When you lay down with dogs, you come up with fleas. Much of the world is run by bad guys with appalling human rights records. Do we shun (let’s count), Iran, Syria, Cuba, Russia, Saudi, Pakistan, North Korea, China, Burma, Sudan, Libya … well you get the picture.

If we only talk to morally pure states, we are probably left with Finland, Norway & New Zealand, and there are clearly problems even with them. We are so big and powerful that our mere presence is “meddling.”

You know we meddled very little in Iraq under the Baathists and our “support” for Saddam came because of “realism”. He was a Soviet creature and we were encouraged to open a dialogue with him. (We had no diplomatic relations with Iraq from 1967-1984 (so much for U.S. support, BTW). We reopened relations and it didnt work out all that well.

Pinochet, BTW, stepped down voluntarily. No matter what you think of him in general, that is remarkable among dictators.

To Rocky

If we approach the rules of IRAN … the people of Iran will hold it against us.

We talk so much about Iraq that my fingers reach for those letters.

I think the point is valid that many of the world’s countries are ruled by despots. Any reaching out to them is a compromise with morality. We just don’t have a clean choice.

I may add that we should just wait on Cuba until Fidel goes to his ultimate reward. It will not be long and we don’t want to get in there at the very end and be called complicit on his myriad human rights violations, as we bought into Saddam. A prudent person would just wait for the grime reaper.

I’m going to be away from the Internet for a couple of months but wanted to get one last shot in. The following article offers another reason why we should work on population control. Also, there was an article on the natal news this pm relating that major fisheries around the world will be depleted by 2038. From AP: “As part of its ongoing PharmaWater investigation about trace concentrations of pharmaceuticals in drinking water, AP identified 22 compounds that show up on two lists: the EPA monitors them as industrial chemicals that are released into rivers, lakes and other bodies of water under federal pollution laws, while the Food and Drug Administration classifies them as active pharmaceutical ingredients.
The data don’t show precisely how much of the 271 million pounds comes from drugmakers versus other manufacturers; also, the figure is a massive undercount because of the limited federal government tracking.
To date, drugmakers have dismissed the suggestion that their manufacturing contributes significantly to what’s being found in water. Federal drug and water regulators agree.
But some researchers say the lack of required testing amounts to a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy about whether drugmakers are contributing to water pollution.”

Another good article from the Wash Post today: “Murtha, dubbed “the king of pork” by his critics, consistently directs more federal money to his district than any other congressman - $192 million in the 2008 budget. His pattern of steering millions in earmarks to defense contractors who give to his campaign and hire his allies as lobbyist is being scrutinized by the FBI as part of an investigation of a lobbying firm led by one of Murtha’s closest friends.”

The John P. Murtha airport sits on 650 acres and has received $200M in funds over the past decade. Murtha has secured at least $150M for the airport. That’s the way the Corpocracy game is played. Get your person elected and make sure you keep him there for a lifetime career. Once that person becomes a senior legislator they just keep on giving and giving of taxpayer money for your cause or your use. Corporations can do that because under ‘Corporate Personhood’ law corporations have many of the same rights as humans. And, under the ‘money is free speech’ law it is legal for corporations to dump large bucks into political campaigns, junkets, and myriad ways of taking care of your person in Washington. Your tax dollars being lavishly spent for bridges and airports to nowhere. Only way I know to stop that is to support a third party with a different political attitude where members serve as oversight for elected/appointed officials. Check it out at www.republisentry.com.

Otherwise, we have the Corpocracy we deserve.

Roy, that is the great conundrum of the American Constitutional system, as it now stands. This marriage between the federal government and corporations which constantly compromises the federal government’s elected officials in their responsibility to safeguard the nation’s and people’s future.

The awareness by the voting public of this money influence in D.C. as protected speech dilemma, has never been higher. Hopefully, the American voters will design a solution of their own to this conundrum in the next couple elections that will leave corporations and politicians alike trying to figure out whether it was Mack Truck or a Freight Train that just knocked them out cold.

Christine,

“Do we shun (let’s count), Iran, Syria, Cuba, Russia, Saudi, Pakistan, North Korea, China, Burma, Sudan, Libya … well you get the picture.”

and,

“If we approach the rules of IRAN … the people of Iran will hold it against us.”

Has shunning the above countries made the world any safer?
America doesn’t have to support a dictator (to the detriment of that country’s people) to have a dialogue with them.
Not having a dialogue with North Korea and Iran has gotten us nowhere, and, point of fact, has actually made these countries positions stronger as they could be seen as “standing up” against us.

I’m not talking about capitulation, or “appeasement”.

Think Teddy Roosevelt.

All this chest thumping has not made the world a safer place.

Rocky

Rocky

I am on your side about approaching these guys. I just am pointing out that when we have done similar things in the past we have been criticized around the world.

Maybe ten years from now the Mullahs will be gone. Then various liberals on Watchblog, if it is still around, will bemoan our lack of morality in approaching a racist like the Iranian president.

There is a moral dilema when dealing with tyrants. Many people on this blog are shocked about the past. I just recognize what we are doing now and in the future will sometime be the “shocking” past. Some future critic of the U.S. will show pictures of President Obama shaking hands with Hugo or smiling with the Mullahs. It is not fair, but that is how we are treated.

Anytime we don’t oppose the dictator,it is seen as support later on. I remember reading an article in Foreign Affairs when I was in college. The experts were criticizing the U.S. for NOT being realistic enough to get closer to Saddam.

Yes - talk to Iran, Syria, N Korea etc, but know what you are getting into.

I would wait to talk to Cuba. The Castro era may end soon and we don’t have to sink into that particular moral morass if we wait a few years.

There are no guarantees in life. The time to begin talking is now. Who knows who might take over in Cuba after the Castros…little brother ain’t exactly a spring chicken…and the next guy might just be a REAL do-baddy.

PS:

The US has been hot about Fidel all these years, mostly because he kicked out the US anointed and appointed Batista regime. If he hadn’t shown such chutzpah as to win against our choice of Cuban leadership…well…he did, and we didn’t…and now the question…do we or don’t we recognize that we’ll never rebuild the casinos, hotels, and whore houses we had there…and, we’ll never be able to take over the sugar plantations again like we did before…so, why not talk to them?

Cubans are great people extremely talented and gifted and resourceful and caring and often forgotten, Power and legacy is often overrated.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/10-Countries-in-Deep-usnews-14971805.html?.&.pf=real-estate 10 Countries in Deep Trouble .