I'm voting republican because... -- Another little squirrel lie
 

On Thu, 18 Sep 2008 20:46:26 -0700, hot-ham-and-cheese wrote:

On Sep 18, 11:24*am, Curly Surmudgeon wrote:
On Thu, 18 Sep 2008 03:50:25 -0700, hot-ham-and-cheese wrote:
Squirrely doesn't or at least says he won't be paying any under Obama.

Cite?

You have a bad memory?

As I thought, you made up more **** out of your fantasies.

No cite, you're lying again.

--
Regards, Curly
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I Love Republicans, They Taste Just Like Chickenhawks
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I'm voting republican because...
 

On Sep 18, 1:10*pm, (Ray Fischer) wrote:
wrote:
On Sep 17, 10:13*pm, (Ray Fischer) wrote:
wrote:
(Ray Fischer) wrote:
wrote:
so you enjoy having average health care for inflated prices?

I enjoy paying my own way.

Even if it costs you half again as much.

Sucker.

Just like when I buy a car. *I could purchase a hundai or a lexus. *Is
anyone driving anything other than a hundai a sucker?

You pay for a Lexus and get a Hyundai.

It's my money. *Yet you insist that I buy us both hyundais.

Because of your greed and selfishness we all end up paying more.

My money. My problem. I can live with it.

Yeh, that whole, ummm, personal responsibility thingy really upsets
some folks.

If you're so in favor of "personal responsibility" then why don't you
insist on higher taxes?

Why don't you pay your taxes?

Such an intelligent response.

Squirrely doesn't or at least says he won't be paying any under Obama.

Gesundheit.

never heard of an HMO did you? they tell you what doctors you'll go
to, what treatment they'll pay for, etc.

I could have selected the HMO route and paid less. *Instead I selected
a Preferred Choice plan.

As opposed to paying your own way?

It is part of my compensation package.

Smirk.

Some people even get a company car...

COMPANY health care and COMPANY car.

*There will always be an
additional "co-pay" to keep malingerers from overtaxing the system.

Doesn't seem to work that way in other countries.

Yet they still come here for services they can't get there.

Yet Americans still go to other countries for services they can't get
here.

But you're a class bigot who hates poor people, aren't you?

Is that what I am?

Is that an admission?

Is that "honest dialog?"

As it stands now, I can change plans and I can change bosses.

And if you get sick or injured and can't work, you can't get any
plan, you can't get any job, and you and your family go broke.

Me? *I keep myself employed. *I make it a point to do so. *I consider
it my "responsibility" to provide for myself and my family.

And what happens if you CANNOT work? *What then?

Short term... sick leave, health insurance. *Long term... workman's
compensation, medical retirement, medicare, savings.

A recent estimate put the lifetime cost of health care for seniors
at $300,000 above medicare. *One major illness and you'll double that.
Workman's comp only applies to on-the-job injuries.

Then let's make sure I get injured off the job so your statistics come
out right for you.

So should I have a catastrophic injury or health event, I'm covered.

No, you're not. *All the health plans limit payouts.

And health care where there are double the number of folks covered
won't be limited?

Health care isn't limited. *Peyments by insurance companies is
limited.

Ahem, it's limited now. That's why I have it and the little squirrel,
the little hawke, and you don't have it and want me to share mine.

The leading cause of personal bankruptcies is medical emergencies.

And making health care free to everyone who doesn't work is going to
make it better for me who is paying the bills? *How?

You are already paying for other people's health care. *The medical
industry raises prices in order to cover the expense of treating those
who cannot pay.

Then what's the problem?

The emergency care that people get when they're really sick is much
more expensive than the routine care they'd get if there was a
national health care.

But you said $300,000 above medicare... and health care is unlimited.

Do you even know what it is your talking about?

Once again: *Health care in the US costs about 50% PER PERSON than it
costs in any other industrial nation. *Administrative overheads,
profits, and inefficiences drive up the cost of health care in the US.

If it's 50% of what other countries pay then we're getting a deal.

50% MORE than then next most expensive.

Oh, more than. Good thing I have a real job and can afford it.

I'm voting republican because...
 

On Thu, 18 Sep 2008 20:38:07 -0700, hot-ham-and-cheese wrote:

On Sep 17, 10:24*am, Curly Surmudgeon wrote:
On Wed, 17 Sep 2008 03:44:13 -0700, hot-ham-and-cheese wrote:
Why can't you grasp the concept of getting your own health care and
quit mooching off of me?

Do you have any evidence that he does?

Only that the little squirrel, the little hawke, and him want to.

Cite? Betcha you're making up lies again.

--
Regards, Curly
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I Love Republicans, They Taste Just Like Chickenhawks
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I'm voting republican because...
 

On Sep 17, 10:15*pm, (Ray Fischer) wrote:
Curly Surmudgeon wrote:

Ray Fischer wrote:
wrote:
so you enjoy having average health care for inflated prices?

I enjoy paying my own way.

Even if it costs you half again as much.

Half? *Try 3x or 4x if health care were truly reformed removing the FDA
and AMA monopolies.

The per capita cost of health care in the US is 50% more than any
other industrial nation.

Are you sure you don't want to go with the little squirrels numbers?
It makes health care sound like it's even more of a problem, which is
his goal. Energize the vote and all that.

As it stands now, I can change plans and I can change bosses.

And if you get sick or injured and can't work, you can't get any plan, you
can't get any job, and you and your family go broke.

The leading cause of personal bankruptcies is medical emergencies.

Second leading cause, yes!

* * Illness and medical bills caused half of the 1,458,000 personal
* * bankruptcies in 2001, according to a study published by the
* * journal Health Affairs.
* *http://www.consumeraffairs.com/news0...tcy_study.html

Hmmmm? Bankruptcies in 2001 were probably from costs incurred in
2000.

Why didn't Bill Clinton take better care of America?

I'm voting republican because... -- Another HH&C lie
 

"RM V2.0" wrote in message
m...

"Ray Fischer" wrote in message
...
Curly Surmudgeon wrote:
On Thu, 18 Sep 2008 03:50:25 -0700, hot-ham-and-cheese wrote:

Squirrely doesn't or at least says he won't be paying any under Obama.

Cite?

You know neocons - they like to make up facts to justify their
irrational agenda.

--
Ray Fischer



You know liberal- they like to make up facts to justify their
irrational agenda.

Considering who has been in power and destroyed the country, maybe you
should STFU.

Health Care
 

Lets not get sidetracked into the health insurance debate for it masks
the underlying problem. The fundamental problem is that our health
care
system has been hijacked by corporate powers making healthcare too
expensive.

Nonsense. The main thing that makes it so expensive is that medical
technology marches forward, not backward, and there's always more stuff
to
apply to medical problems -- increasingly expensive stuff.

That is one factor but there are many others such as malpractice
insurance
but the overriding component is that a corporate monopoly has seized
control of the industry at large.

Sure, Curley, malpractice insurance is a factor, and there are many other
factors. It's not a single thing that's done all of it. But if you spend
some time sorting out where the costs are you'll see that most of it boils
down to the fact that doctors can -- and do -- employ more expensive
drugs,
procedures, and so on.

I don't agree. It's all about treating a population and most of the
population is healthy and doesn't require a lot of expensive procedures and
medications. I think some amazing amount of health care dollars are spent on
people in the last five years of their lives and something like the last six
months equals more than what they spent on health care in their entire
lives. So most people are not getting a lot of expensive procedures that
cost an arm and a leg. g



Technology has brought down the costs of some treatments but it's
increased
the cost of many more, and added hundreds, or thousands, of completely new
ones. Couple that with the malpractice insurance mess, which leads to
excessive testing and so on, and all of the technology is simply employed
more. Just amortizing an MRI machine results in incredible costs for an
MRI.
I think my last one was $880, and took maybe 30 minutes of machine time
and
the time of two technicians. It's a multi-million-dollar machine and they
charge shop time on amortization, just like in a machine shop. g In the
old days, they'd just apply an educated guess to what's wrong in that
joint
or brain.

An MRI in Japan costs $98. and the machines in the US are built there. If
you stay in a room over night in Japan with three other people the cost is
$100.

The amount being charged for inexpensive procedures in this country is
outrageous. Just going in an ambulance to the emergency room and being
looked at costs thousands of dollars, which is ludicris. The prices people
have to pay for the ordinary stuff is simply the worst rip off I have even
seen. It would be like having to pay a thousand dollars to have an average
front yard mowed by a kid. They are gouging the **** out of us at every
level.


Meantime, here's another one: I have a nice new insulin pump with feedback
sitting in a box next to me, to be stuck into/onto me tomorrow. It cost
$6,000. 35 years ago I had a 25-cent syringe and a $10/month bottle of
insulin, and that was it, pard'. Pumps didn't exist. Neither did home
blood-glucose monitoring. I just took a stab at it -- literally. g I got
lucky and survived it with my limbs, kidneys, and eyes. Good luck for me.

That' isn't a lot of money. I know of people that have gone to the emergency
room and had 12 stitches taken in a finger and the cost was 12,000. The
whole thing is a joke. On us.


And it marches forward because people will pay for it, as an
alternative
to living in misery or dying.

That substantiates my point. Let me give an example:

My daughter had her first yeast infection. A simple anti-fungal yeast
prescription was all that was required yet the doctor/hospital demanded
a
pregnancy test (she was/is virgin), blood panels, hormone tests, etc.
running the price up to $4,600. Then they wanted to negotiate. Note
that
not a single curative action was taken.

Right, but that's only marginally a "corporate powers" issue. That's
mostly
a "we don't want to be sued" issue. Take it up with the tort reformers. We
can sure use some tort reform.

No thanks. When you consider how much malpractice goes on and how many
people doctors and nurses kill every year taking away the right to sue for
legitimate damages is not in the interest of patients. Last I heard 80,000
people a year are killed in hospitals. You don't take the right to sue away
from those people.


Now, if you want to know what I do when I suspect a doctor/hospital is
just
running up my costs to keep the cash flowing to their own lab, I tell them
"please write a prescription for the test procedure, and I'll check around
to see where I want it done." Then I go look up the procedure and see if I
really want to have it done at all.

Most hospitals, particularly, are in desperate cash-flow situations now.
It's not greed that drives it. It's their survival.


In Argentina no prescription is required, just a visit to a local
pharmacy
with a short discussion to an educated pharmacist and a $7 prescription
which I mailed to her. Cured the infection in 3 days.

So, did she have this infection in the US or in Argentina?


Health Care is essentially unavailable in the US without insurance.
That
is hijacking health care holding Americans hostage.

Actually, that's not the case. Emergency rooms can't refuse you, and many
people use ERs as their primary-care physicians. Then the rest of us pay
for
it.

Yeah, and I hear right wingers bragging about how great our system is. You
call that system great?


There's always a ready market for new drugs and new medical technology.

True, and sometimes the costs are justified. But recognize that a full
60% of new drugs are governmentally subsidized through university
research
then turned over to pharmaceuticals for manufacture and distribution
with
but a bare tithe to the university while Abbott et. al. gains usuary
profits on our own tax dollar.

sigh I'm well aware of how that works. My last job in a medical
communication agency involved a drug on which Sanofi-Aventis had paid
something like $135 million in development costs, and $110 million in
pre-approval marketing costs (which was paying my salary). Then the FDA
decided not to approve the drug. So my company laid half of us off. d8-)

The basic research on that drug was not from a university, however. I know
that a lot of the basic research is done in universities. What you may not
know is that the testing that the pharma companies have to go through
after
some basic-science lab makes a discovery often costs ten times more than
the
basic research.

What you may not know is that after all the money that big pharma has to
invest to come up with new drugs, and it is a lot, they still come out way,
way, way, ahead. Take a look at the balance sheets of the top dozen
pharmaceutical companies. I think you'll find that they are incredibly
profitable. In fact, the have much higher profit margins than the oil
companies do. So don't buy the sad story from pharma about how much they
have to put out to find drugs. In the end they wind up laughing all the way
to the bank.


Generics, Canadian, and other sources are often 90% cheaper.

Of course. Generics just ride on the research, testing, post-marketing
studies and marketing that was done for the original drug. All they have
to
recover is manufacturing costs and quality-control reporting. In Canada,
they have price controls and just refuse to allow the drug companies to
amortize research and development. The Canadians, and the French, and the
Brits, and everyone else knows that they can collect those costs in the
US.

Don't like it? Talk to your congressman. The money has to come from
somewhere, or nobody will have any new drugs.

As long as the creation of new drugs results in billions in profits there
will always be more new ones in the pipeline. I don't see any end to that in
the near future either.


Health care insurance is just another facade by those who have
plundered our economy. Have you tried to get a doctors appointment
without insurance?

Ask Larry.

Non responsive.

Oh, Larry is quite responsive, and he has no insurance. He's the one to
ask.

I guess he's taking the bet that he will not be the one who winds up needing
the expensive health care. Insurance is betting you will be healthy. You are
betting you won't if you pay for insurance. He may wind up the winner. I
think statistically he's got the number in his favor. Of course, it only
takes one biggie to bankrupt him. On the other hand people with insurance go
bankrupt all the time. Maybe he's on to something.


I've had insurance without a break for decades, excepting one gap of a few
months when my COBRA ran out and I was having trouble getting new
insurance.
(My doctors knew it, and took me anyway.) So I don't know what it's like
now.

That means so far your luck is holding. If Obama wins we'll all be winners.
With a Democratic house, senate, and president I think universal health care
will likely be on its way. I hope so. I have to admit I have never
understood why business didn't want it? It will remove one of business'
biggest expenses if we get national health care. I think they are crazy to
oppose it. It would put them on a level playing ground with the rest of the
world. But since most businessmen are republicans it makes sense that they
would be too stupid to know it would be good for them and they woulk oppose
it on principle. You know, like they oppose government intervention in the
markets, unless they are losing a lot of money.

Hawke

I'm voting republican because...
 

wrote in message
...
On Sep 16, 1:22 pm, "John R. Carroll"
wrote:
wrote:
On Sep 12, 5:14 pm, "Hawke" wrote:
CLINTON dropped the ball on this one.

snip

How come you don't address the fact that Clinton could
have gotten
OBL a
number of times but didn't? Was it above his pay grade?
(Good thing
OBL
didn't change his name to "Vince Foster")

Don't confuse Ms Carrol with the ugly truth.

Your "truth" is a lie told originally by NewsMax. Read the
9/11 Commission Report for the truth.

http://www.9-11commission.gov/staff_...tatement_5.pdf
(bottom of page 3):

If you think that by informing our right wingers of the truth about
the subject it will have any effect on their beliefs you are out of
your mind. The point is those guys don't care about the truth so
informing them won't do any good. They believe what they want to
believe and even if you show them they are wrong they still won't
change their minds. That's just the way they are.

Hawke

The truth of your free health care is that I get to pay for mine and I
get to pay for yours.

A study coming out Tuesday from scholars at Columbia, Harvard, Purdue and
Michigan projects that 20 million Americans who have employment-based
health
insurance would lose it under the McCain plan.

There is nothing secret about Senator McCain's far-reaching proposals, but
they haven't gotten much attention because the chatter in this campaign
has
mostly been about nonsense - lipstick, celebrities and "Drill, baby,
drill!"

For starters, the McCain health plan would treat employer-paid health
benefits as income that employees would have to pay taxes on.

"It means your employer is going to have to make an estimate on how much
the
employer is paying for health insurance on your behalf, and you are going
to
have to pay taxes on that money," said Sherry Glied, an economist who
chairs
the Department of Health Policy and Management at Columbia University's
Mailman School of Public Health.

Ms. Glied is one of the four scholars who have just completed an
independent
joint study of the plan. Their findings are being published on the Web
site
of the policy journal, Health Affairs.

http://healthaffairs.org/blog/2008/0...ninsured-cheap...

According to the study: "The McCain plan will force millions of Americans
into the weakest segment of the private insurance system - the nongroup
market - where cost-sharing is high, covered services are limited and
people
will lose access to benefits they have now."

The net effect of the plan, the study said, "almost certainly will be to
increase family costs for medical care."

Under the McCain plan (now the McCain-Palin plan) employees who continue
to
receive employer-paid health benefits would look at their pay stubs each
week or each month and find that additional money had been withheld to
cover
the taxes on the value of their benefits.

--

John R. Carroll
www.machiningsolution.com- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

What did their study show under the Obama/Weasel health care plan?


It showed that even bone heads like you will be better off than you are now
in spite of the fact that you are not bright enough to realize it.

Hawke

I'm voting republican because... -- Another HH&C lie
 

"John R. Carroll" wrote in message
...
BAR wrote:
Ray Fischer wrote:
Curly Surmudgeon wrote:
On Thu, 18 Sep 2008 03:50:25 -0700, hot-ham-and-cheese wrote:

Squirrely doesn't or at least says he won't be paying any under
Obama. Cite?

You know neocons - they like to make up facts to justify their
irrational agenda.


Can you define "neocon?"









--------------------------------------------------------------------------
--
----



February 19, 2006

After Neoconservatism

By FRANCIS FUKUYAMA

As we approach the third anniversary of the onset of the Iraq war, it
seems
very unlikely that history will judge either the intervention itself or
the
ideas animating it kindly. By invading Iraq, the Bush administration
created
a self-fulfilling prophecy: Iraq has now replaced Afghanistan as a magnet,
a
training ground and an operational base for jihadist terrorists, with
plenty
of American targets to shoot at. The United States still has a chance of
creating a Shiite-dominated democratic Iraq, but the new government will
be
very weak for years to come; the resulting power vacuum will invite
outside
influence from all of Iraq's neighbors, including Iran. There are clear
benefits to the Iraqi people from the removal of Saddam Hussein's
dictatorship, and perhaps some positive spillover effects in Lebanon and
Syria. But it is very hard to see how these developments in themselves
justify the blood and treasure that the United States has spent on the
project to this point.



The so-called Bush Doctrine that set the framework for the
administration's
first term is now in shambles. The doctrine (elaborated, among other
places,
in the 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States) argued that,
in
the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, America would have to launch periodic
preventive wars to defend itself against rogue states and terrorists with
weapons of mass destruction; that it would do this alone, if necessary;
and
that it would work to democratize the greater Middle East as a long-term
solution to the terrorist problem. But successful pre-emption depends on
the
ability to predict the future accurately and on good intelligence, which
was
not forthcoming, while America's perceived unilateralism has isolated it
as
never before. It is not surprising that in its second term, the
administration has been distancing itself from these policies and is in
the
process of rewriting the National Security Strategy document.



But it is the idealistic effort to use American power to promote democracy
and human rights abroad that may suffer the greatest setback. Perceived
failure in Iraq has restored the authority of foreign policy "realists" in
the tradition of Henry Kissinger. Already there is a host of books and
articles decrying America's naïve Wilsonianism and attacking the notion of
trying to democratize the world. The administration's second-term efforts
to
push for greater Middle Eastern democracy, introduced with the soaring
rhetoric of Bush's second Inaugural Address, have borne very problematic
fruits. The Islamist Muslim Brotherhood made a strong showing in Egypt's
parliamentary elections in November and December. While the holding of
elections in Iraq this past December was an achievement in itself, the
vote
led to the ascendance of a Shiite bloc with close ties to Iran (following
on
the election of the conservative Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president of Iran
in
June). But the clincher was the decisive Hamas victory in the Palestinian
election last month, which brought to power a movement overtly dedicated
to
the destruction of Israel. In his second inaugural, Bush said that
"America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one," but the
charge will be made with increasing frequency that the Bush administration
made a big mistake when it stirred the pot, and that the United States
would
have done better to stick by its traditional authoritarian friends in the
Middle East. Indeed, the effort to promote democracy around the world has
been attacked as an illegitimate activity both by people on the left like
Jeffrey Sachs and by traditional conservatives like Pat Buchanan.



The reaction against democracy promotion and an activist foreign policy
may
not end there. Those whom Walter Russell Mead labels Jacksonian
conservatives - red-state Americans whose sons and daughters are fighting
and dying in the Middle East - supported the Iraq war because they
believed
that their children were fighting to defend the United States against
nuclear terrorism, not to promote democracy. They don't want to abandon
the
president in the middle of a vicious war, but down the road the perceived
failure of the Iraq intervention may push them to favor a more
isolationist
foreign policy, which is a more natural political position for them. A
recent Pew poll indicates a swing in public opinion toward isolationism;
the
percentage of Americans saying that the United States "should mind its own
business" has never been higher since the end of the Vietnam War.



More than any other group, it was the neoconservatives both inside and
outside the Bush administration who pushed for democratizing Iraq and the
broader Middle East. They are widely credited (or blamed) for being the
decisive voices promoting regime change in Iraq, and yet it is their
idealistic agenda that in the coming months and years will be the most
directly threatened. Were the United States to retreat from the world
stage,
following a drawdown in Iraq, it would in my view be a huge tragedy,
because
American power and influence have been critical to the maintenance of an
open and increasingly democratic order around the world. The problem with
neoconservatism's agenda lies not in its ends, which are as American as
apple pie, but rather in the overmilitarized means by which it has sought
to
accomplish them. What American foreign policy needs is not a return to a
narrow and cynical realism, but rather the formulation of a "realistic
Wilsonianism" that better matches means to ends.









The Neoconservative Legacy



How did the neoconservatives end up overreaching to such an extent that
they
risk undermining their own goals? The Bush administration's first-term
foreign policy did not flow ineluctably from the views of earlier
generations of people who considered themselves neoconservatives, since
those views were themselves complex and subject to differing
interpretations. Four common principles or threads ran through much of
this
thought up through the end of the cold war: a concern with democracy,
human
rights and, more generally, the internal politics of states; a belief that
American power can be used for moral purposes; a skepticism about the
ability of international law and institutions to solve serious security
problems; and finally, a view that ambitious social engineering often
leads
to unexpected consequences and thereby undermines its own ends.



The problem was that two of these principles were in potential collision.
The skeptical stance toward ambitious social engineering - which in
earlier
years had been applied mostly to domestic policies like affirmative
action,
busing and welfare - suggested a cautious approach toward remaking the
world
and an awareness that ambitious initiatives always have unanticipated
consequences. The belief in the potential moral uses of American power, on
the other hand, implied that American activism could reshape the structure
of global politics. By the time of the Iraq war, the belief in the
transformational uses of power had prevailed over the doubts about social
engineering.



In retrospect, things did not have to develop this way. The roots of
neoconservatism lie in a remarkable group of largely Jewish intellectuals
who attended City College of New York (C.C.N.Y.) in the mid- to late
1930's
and early 1940's, a group that included Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell,
Irving
Howe, Nathan Glazer and, a bit later, Daniel Patrick Moynihan. The story
of
this group has been told in a number of places, most notably in a
documentary film by Joseph Dorman called "Arguing the World." The most
important inheritance from the C.C.N.Y. group was an idealistic belief in
social progress and the universality of rights, coupled with intense
anti-Communism.



It is not an accident that many in the C.C.N.Y. group started out as
Trotskyites. Leon Trotsky was, of course, himself a Communist, but his
supporters came to understand better than most people the utter cynicism
and
brutality of the Stalinist regime. The anti-Communist left, in contrast to
the traditional American right, sympathized with the social and economic
aims of Communism, but in the course of the 1930's and 1940's came to
realize that "real existing socialism" had become a monstrosity of
unintended consequences that completely undermined the idealistic goals it
espoused. While not all of the C.C.N.Y. thinkers became neoconservatives,
the danger of good intentions carried to extremes was a theme that would
underlie the life work of many members of this group.



If there was a single overarching theme to the domestic social policy
critiques issued by those who wrote for the neoconservative journal The
Public Interest, founded by Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer and Daniel Bell
in
1965, it was the limits of social engineering. Writers like Glazer,
Moynihan
and, later, Glenn Loury argued that ambitious efforts to seek social
justice
often left societies worse off than before because they either required
massive state intervention that disrupted pre-existing social relations
(for
example, forced busing) or else produced unanticipated consequences (like
an
increase in single-parent families as a result of welfare). A major theme
running through James Q. Wilson's extensive writings on crime was the idea
that you could not lower crime rates by trying to solve deep underlying
problems like poverty and racism; effective policies needed to focus on
shorter-term measures that went after symptoms of social distress (like
subway graffiti or panhandling) rather than root causes.



How, then, did a group with such a pedigree come to decide that the "root
cause" of terrorism lay in the Middle East's lack of democracy, that the
United States had both the wisdom and the ability to fix this problem and
that democracy would come quickly and painlessly to Iraq? Neoconservatives
would not have taken this turn but for the peculiar way that the cold war
ended.



Ronald Reagan was ridiculed by sophisticated people on the American left
and
in Europe for labeling the Soviet Union and its allies an "evil empire"
and
for challenging Mikhail Gorbachev not just to reform his system but also
to
"tear down this wall." His assistant secretary of defense for
international
security policy, Richard Perle, was denounced as the "prince of darkness"
for this uncompromising, hard-line position; his proposal for a
double-zero
in the intermediate-range nuclear arms negotiations (that is, the complete
elimination of medium-range missiles) was attacked as hopelessly out of
touch by the bien-pensant centrist foreign-policy experts at places like
the
Council on Foreign Relations and the State Department. That community felt
that the Reaganites were dangerously utopian in their hopes for actually
winning, as opposed to managing, the cold war.



And yet total victory in the cold war is exactly what happened in 1989-91.
Gorbachev accepted not only the double zero but also deep cuts in
conventional forces, and then failed to stop the Polish, Hungarian and
East
German defections from the empire. Communism collapsed within a couple of
years because of its internal moral weaknesses and contradictions, and
with
regime change in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, the Warsaw
Pact
threat to the West evaporated.



The way the cold war ended shaped the thinking of supporters of the Iraq
war, including younger neoconservatives like William Kristol and Robert
Kagan, in two ways. First, it seems to have created an expectation that
all
totalitarian regimes were hollow at the core and would crumble with a
small
push from outside. The model for this was Romania under the Ceausescus:
once
the wicked witch was dead, the munchkins would rise up and start singing
joyously about their liberation. As Kristol and Kagan put it in their 2000
book "Present Dangers": "To many the idea of America using its power to
promote changes of regime in nations ruled by dictators rings of
utopianism.
But in fact, it is eminently realistic. There is something perverse in
declaring the impossibility of promoting democratic change abroad in light
of the record of the past three decades."



This overoptimism about postwar transitions to democracy helps explain the
Bush administration's incomprehensible failure to plan adequately for the
insurgency that subsequently emerged in Iraq. The war's supporters seemed
to
think that democracy was a kind of default condition to which societies
reverted once the heavy lifting of coercive regime change occurred, rather
than a long-term process of institution-building and reform. While they
now
assert that they knew all along that the democratic transformation of Iraq
would be long and hard, they were clearly taken by surprise. According to
George Packer's recent book on Iraq, "The Assassins' Gate," the Pentagon
planned a drawdown of American forces to some 25,000 troops by the end of
the summer following the invasion.



By the 1990's, neoconservatism had been fed by several other intellectual
streams. One came from the students of the German Jewish political
theorist
Leo Strauss, who, contrary to much of the nonsense written about him by
people like Anne Norton and Shadia Drury, was a serious reader of
philosophical texts who did not express opinions on contemporary politics
or
policy issues. Rather, he was concerned with the "crisis of modernity"
brought on by the relativism of Nietzsche and Heidegger, as well as the
fact
that neither the claims of religion nor deeply-held opinions about the
nature of the good life could be banished from politics, as the thinkers
of
the European Enlightenment had hoped. Another stream came from Albert
Wohlstetter, a Rand Corporation strategist who was the teacher of Richard
Perle, Zalmay Khalilzad (the current American ambassador to Iraq) and Paul
Wolfowitz (the former deputy secretary of defense), among other people.
Wohlstetter was intensely concerned with the problem of nuclear
proliferation and the way that the 1968 Nonproliferation Treaty left
loopholes, in its support for "peaceful" nuclear energy, large enough for
countries like Iraq and Iran to walk through.



I have numerous affiliations with the different strands of the
neoconservative movement. I was a student of Strauss's protégé Allan
Bloom,
who wrote the bestseller "The Closing of the American Mind"; worked at
Rand
and with Wohlstetter on Persian Gulf issues; and worked also on two
occasions for Wolfowitz. Many people have also interpreted my book "The
End
of History and the Last Man" (1992) as a neoconservative tract, one that
argued in favor of the view that there is a universal hunger for liberty
in
all people that will inevitably lead them to liberal democracy, and that
we
are living in the midst of an accelerating, transnational movement in
favor
of that liberal democracy. This is a misreading of the argument. "The End
of
History" is in the end an argument about modernization. What is initially
universal is not the desire for liberal democracy but rather the desire to
live in a modern - that is, technologically advanced and prosperous -
society, which, if satisfied, tends to drive demands for political
participation. Liberal democracy is one of the byproducts of this
modernization process, something that becomes a universal aspiration only
in
the course of historical time.



"The End of History," in other words, presented a kind of Marxist argument
for the existence of a long-term process of social evolution, but one that
terminates in liberal democracy rather than communism. In the formulation
of
the scholar Ken Jowitt, the neoconservative position articulated by people
like Kristol and Kagan was, by contrast, Leninist; they believed that
history can be pushed along with the right application of power and will.
Leninism was a tragedy in its Bolshevik version, and it has returned as
farce when practiced by the United States. Neoconservatism, as both a
political symbol and a body of thought, has evolved into something I can
no
longer support.









The Failure of Benevolent Hegemony



The Bush administration and its neoconservative supporters did not simply
underestimate the difficulty of bringing about congenial political
outcomes
in places like Iraq; they also misunderstood the way the world would react
to the use of American power. Of course, the cold war was replete with
instances of what the foreign policy analyst Stephen Sestanovich calls
American maximalism, wherein Washington acted first and sought legitimacy
and support from its allies only after the fact. But in the post-cold-war
period, the structural situation of world politics changed in ways that
made
this kind of exercise of power much more problematic in the eyes of even
close allies. After the fall of the Soviet Union, various neoconservative
authors like Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol and Robert Kagan
suggested
that the United States would use its margin of power to exert a kind of
"benevolent hegemony" over the rest of the world, fixing problems like
rogue
states with W.M.D., human rights abuses and terrorist threats as they came
up. Writing before the Iraq war, Kristol and Kagan considered whether this
posture would provoke resistance from the rest of the world, and
concluded,
"It is precisely because American foreign policy is infused with an
unusually high degree of morality that other nations find they have less
to
fear from its otherwise daunting power." (Italics added.)



It is hard to read these lines without irony in the wake of the global
reaction to the Iraq war, which succeeded in uniting much of the world in
a
frenzy of anti-Americanism. The idea that the United States is a hegemon
more benevolent than most is not an absurd one, but there were warning
signs
that things had changed in America's relationship to the world long before
the start of the Iraq war. The structural imbalance in global power had
grown enormous. America surpassed the rest of the world in every dimension
of power by an unprecedented margin, with its defense spending nearly
equal
to that of the rest of the world combined. Already during the Clinton
years,
American economic hegemony had generated enormous hostility to an
American-dominated process of globalization, frequently on the part of
close
democratic allies who thought the United States was seeking to impose its
antistatist social model on them.



There were other reasons as well why the world did not accept American
benevolent hegemony. In the first place, it was premised on American
exceptionalism, the idea that America could use its power in instances
where
others could not because it was more virtuous than other countries. The
doctrine of pre-emption against terrorist threats contained in the 2002
National Security Strategy was one that could not safely be generalized
through the international system; America would be the first country to
object if Russia, China, India or France declared a similar right of
unilateral action. The United States was seeking to pass judgment on
others
while being unwilling to have its own conduct questioned in places like
the
International Criminal Court.



Another problem with benevolent hegemony was domestic. There are sharp
limits to the American people's attention to foreign affairs and
willingness
to finance projects overseas that do not have clear benefits to American
interests. Sept. 11 changed that calculus in many ways, providing popular
support for two wars in the Middle East and large increases in defense
spending. But the durability of the support is uncertain: although most
Americans want to do what is necessary to make the project of rebuilding
Iraq succeed, the aftermath of the invasion did not increase the public
appetite for further costly interventions. Americans are not, at heart, an
imperial people. Even benevolent hegemons sometimes have to act
ruthlessly,
and they need a staying power that does not come easily to people who are
reasonably content with their own lives and society.



Finally, benevolent hegemony presumed that the hegemon was not only well
intentioned but competent as well. Much of the criticism of the Iraq
intervention from Europeans and others was not based on a normative case
that the United States was not getting authorization from the United
Nations
Security Council, but rather on the belief that it had not made an
adequate
case for invading Iraq in the first place and didn't know what it was
doing
in trying to democratize Iraq. In this, the critics were unfortunately
quite
prescient.



The most basic misjudgment was an overestimation of the threat facing the
United States from radical Islamism. Although the new and ominous
possibility of undeterrable terrorists armed with weapons of mass
destruction did indeed present itself, advocates of the war wrongly
conflated this with the threat presented by Iraq and with the rogue
state/proliferation problem more generally. The misjudgment was based in
part on the massive failure of the American intelligence community to
correctly assess the state of Iraq's W.M.D. programs before the war. But
the
intelligence community never took nearly as alarmist a view of the
terrorist/W.M.D. threat as the war's supporters did. Overestimation of
this
threat was then used to justify the elevation of preventive war to the
centerpiece of a new security strategy, as well as a whole series of
measures that infringed on civil liberties, from detention policy to
domestic eavesdropping.









What to Do



Now that the neoconservative moment appears to have passed, the United
States needs to reconceptualize its foreign policy in several fundamental
ways. In the first instance, we need to demilitarize what we have been
calling the global war on terrorism and shift to other types of policy
instruments. We are fighting hot counterinsurgency wars in Afghanistan and
Iraq and against the international jihadist movement, wars in which we
need
to prevail. But "war" is the wrong metaphor for the broader struggle,
since
wars are fought at full intensity and have clear beginnings and endings.
Meeting the jihadist challenge is more of a "long, twilight struggle"
whose
core is not a military campaign but a political contest for the hearts and
minds of ordinary Muslims around the world. As recent events in France and
Denmark suggest, Europe will be a central battleground in this fight.



The United States needs to come up with something better than "coalitions
of
the willing" to legitimate its dealings with other countries. The world
today lacks effective international institutions that can confer
legitimacy
on collective action; creating new organizations that will better balance
the dual requirements of legitimacy and effectiveness will be the primary
task for the coming generation. As a result of more than 200 years of
political evolution, we have a relatively good understanding of how to
create institutions that are rulebound, accountable and reasonably
effective
in the vertical silos we call states. What we do not have are adequate
mechanisms of horizontal accountability among states.



The conservative critique of the United Nations is all too cogent: while
useful for certain peacekeeping and nation-building operations, the United
Nations lacks both democratic legitimacy and effectiveness in dealing with
serious security issues. The solution is not to strengthen a single global
body, but rather to promote what has been emerging in any event, a
"multi-multilateral world" of overlapping and occasionally competing
international institutions that are organized on regional or functional
lines. Kosovo in 1999 was a model: when the Russian veto prevented the
Security Council from acting, the United States and its NATO allies simply
shifted the venue to NATO, where the Russians could not block action.



The final area that needs rethinking, and the one that will be the most
contested in the coming months and years, is the place of democracy
promotion in American foreign policy. The worst legacy that could come
from
the Iraq war would be an anti-neoconservative backlash that coupled a
sharp
turn toward isolation with a cynical realist policy aligning the United
States with friendly authoritarians. Good governance, which involves not
just democracy but also the rule of law and economic development, is
critical to a host of outcomes we desire, from alleviating poverty to
dealing with pandemics to controlling violent conflicts. A Wilsonian
policy
that pays attention to how rulers treat their citizens is therefore right,
but it needs to be informed by a certain realism that was missing from the
thinking of the Bush administration in its first term and of its
neoconservative allies.



We need in the first instance to understand that promoting democracy and
modernization in the Middle East is not a solution to the problem of
jihadist terrorism; in all likelihood it will make the short-term problem
worse, as we have seen in the case of the Palestinian election bringing
Hamas to power. Radical Islamism is a byproduct of modernization itself,
arising from the loss of identity that accompanies the transition to a
modern, pluralist society. It is no accident that so many recent
terrorists,
from Sept. 11's Mohamed Atta to the murderer of the Dutch filmmaker Theo
van
Gogh to the London subway bombers, were radicalized in democratic Europe
and
intimately familiar with all of democracy's blessings. More democracy will
mean more alienation, radicalization and - yes, unfortunately - terrorism.



But greater political participation by Islamist groups is very likely to
occur whatever we do, and it will be the only way that the poison of
radical
Islamism can ultimately work its way through the body politic of Muslim
communities around the world. The age is long since gone when friendly
authoritarians could rule over passive populations and produce stability
indefinitely. New social actors are mobilizing everywhere, from Bolivia
and
Venezuela to South Africa and the Persian Gulf. A durable
Israeli-Palestinian peace could not be built upon a corrupt, illegitimate
Fatah that constantly had to worry about Hamas challenging its authority.
Peace might emerge, sometime down the road, from a Palestine run by a
formerly radical terrorist group that had been forced to deal with the
realities of governing.



If we are serious about the good governance agenda, we have to shift our
focus to the reform, reorganization and proper financing of those
institutions of the United States government that actually promote
democracy, development and the rule of law around the world, organizations
like the State Department, U.S.A.I.D., the National Endowment for
Democracy
and the like. The United States has played an often decisive role in
helping
along many recent democratic transitions, including in the Philippines in
1986; South Korea and Taiwan in 1987; Chile in 1988; Poland and Hungary in
1989; Serbia in 2000; Georgia in 2003; and Ukraine in 2004-5. But the
overarching lesson that emerges from these cases is that the United States
does not get to decide when and where democracy comes about. By
definition,
outsiders can't "impose" democracy on a country that doesn't want it;
demand
for democracy and reform must be domestic. Democracy promotion is
therefore
a long-term and opportunistic process that has to await the gradual
ripening
of political and economic conditions to be effective.



The Bush administration has been walking - indeed, sprinting - away from
the
legacy of its first term, as evidenced by the cautious multilateral
approach
it has taken toward the nuclear programs of Iran and North Korea.
Condoleezza Rice gave a serious speech in January about "transformational
diplomacy" and has begun an effort to reorganize the nonmilitary side of
the
foreign-policy establishment, and the National Security Strategy document
is
being rewritten. All of these are welcome changes, but the legacy of the
Bush first-term foreign policy and its neoconservative supporters has been
so polarizing that it is going to be hard to have a reasoned debate about
how to appropriately balance American ideals and interests in the coming
years. The reaction against a flawed policy can be as damaging as the
policy
itself, and such a reaction is an indulgence we cannot afford, given the
critical moment we have arrived at in global politics.



Neoconservatism, whatever its complex roots, has become indelibly
associated
with concepts like coercive regime change, unilateralism and American
hegemony. What is needed now are new ideas, neither neoconservative nor
realist, for how America is to relate to the rest of the world - ideas
that
retain the neoconservative belief in the universality of human rights, but
without its illusions about the efficacy of American power and hegemony to
bring these ends about.



Francis Fukuyama teaches at the School of Advanced International Studies
at
Johns Hopkins University. This essay is adapted from his book "America at
the Crossroads," which will be published this month by Yale University
Press.







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John R. Carroll
www.machiningsolution.com


You need to forward this to Sara Palin. She's going to need to know this if
she expects to put on a good performance in her coming debate. It would also
be helpful to know this stuff when she is being interviewed.

Hawke

I'm voting republican because... -- Another HH&C lie
 

"RM V2.0" wrote in message
m...

"Ray Fischer" wrote in message
...
Curly Surmudgeon wrote:
On Thu, 18 Sep 2008 03:50:25 -0700, hot-ham-and-cheese wrote:

Squirrely doesn't or at least says he won't be paying any under Obama.

Cite?

You know neocons - they like to make up facts to justify their
irrational agenda.

--
Ray Fischer



You know liberal- they like to make up facts to justify their
irrational agenda.


Can't think of anything to say all by yourself? The best you can do is alter
what others say? Not very original, are you? You're a right winger!

Hawke

Curly admits to being a neocon
 

"Curly Surmudgeon" wrote in message
. ..
On Thu, 18 Sep 2008 18:31:21 -0500, Jerry wrote:



"Curly Surmudgeon" wrote in message
. ..
On Thu, 18 Sep 2008 13:10:44 -0400, BAR wrote:

Can you define "neocon?"

In one word, "liar."

My but you're having a real tantrum today aren't you? If it bothers you
so much getting caught in lies the solution is simple, don't do that...


Hardly. You are the one who is lying. I'm enjoying pointing out the lies.