Of course we won’t learn from past mistakes.
We should just pull out and bring all the troops home.
It was 23 years ago today that the Soviet occupation forces finally gave up on a bloody decade-long war in Afghanistan, limping out of the country with their own economy in tatters, and the Soviet-backed Afghan government on the brink of collapse.
If that sounds familiar, it should, according to the Taliban’s latest statement. A decade into their own bloody occupation of Afghanistan, NATO and the United States are in a bad way, and the Taliban is predicting the “same future the Russian invaders faced in the past.”
The Taliban statement urged the US to learn a lesson from the Soviet defeat and to stop fighting a “meaningless battle,” instead withdrawing as soon as possible. They also presented the US agreement on talks as evidence of their eventual victory.
The lesson could well have been learned long ago, but despite Taliban confidence there is little sign NATO is “getting it” in Afghanistan, as US officials negotiate to keep troops in the nation through 2024 even as they present limited power transfers to the war-weary voting public.
“Republicans have created this completely fictional President: his name is Barack X, and he’s an Islamo-socialist revolutionary who’s coming for your guns, raising your taxes, slashing the military, apologizing to other countries, and taking his cues from Europe — or worse yet, Saul Alinsky! And this is how politics has changed: you used to have to run against an actual candidate. But now, you just recreate him inside the bubble and run against your new fictional candidate. That’s how Bush won in 2004 — by running against John Kerry, a French war criminal. And speaking of Bush, I know conservatives are saying ‘Oh Bill, come on — Democrats did the same thing to him.’ No. Say what you will about the left’s hating of Bush, (but) at least we were hating on the real guy. We didn’t invent a boogeyman who tanked the economy, took us to war on false pretenses, and tortured prisoners — that was the actual guy. But run down the list of complaints about ‘Fantasy Obama’. He ‘wants to raise your taxes,’ even though he’s lowered them; ‘confiscate your guns,’ even though he’s never mentioned it; and ‘read terrorists their rights’ — yeah, like he did Tuesday in Somalia. …You see, the difference is the Republicans’ hatred of Obama is based on a paranoid feeling on what he might do; what he’s thinking; what he secretly wants to change. Anger with Bush was based on what he actually did. What Bush was thinking didn’t matter — because he wasn’t.”—
BILL MAHER, Real Time
Sally Denton, author of The Plots Against the President: FDR, a Nation in Crisis, and the Rise of the American Right — Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Those Who Hated Him, by Tierney Sneed (via usnews)
via AlterNet - December 13, 2011 |Over the weekend, struggling Republican presidential candidate Gary Johnson reminded MSNBC viewers that GOP frontrunner Newt Gingrich had once to called to punish some drug offenders with death.
“Newt Gingrich, in 1997, proposed the death penalty for marijuana — for possession of marijuana above a certain quantity of marijuana,” Johnson explained. “And yet, he is among 100 million Americans who’ve smoked marijuana.”
“I would love to have a discussion with him on the fact that he smoked pot, and under the wrong set of circumstance he proposed the death penalty for, potentially, something that he had committed. I have troubles with that,” he added.
Johnson, a former New Mexico governor who has advocated for marijuana legalization since 1999, is at least partially correct about Gingrich’s position.
As Speaker of the House, Gingrich introducedthe “Drug Importer Death Penalty Act of 1996.”
The bill would have required a “sentence of death for certain importations of significant quantities of controlled substances.” It would have applied to anyone convicted more than once of carrying 100 doses — or about two ounces — or marijuana across the border. Defendants would have had a window of 18 months to file their one and only appeal.
“If you import a commercial quantity of illegal drugs, it is because you have made the personal decision that you are prepared to get rich by destroying our children,” the Georgia Republican said at a fundraiser for Rep. Charlie Norwood (R-GA) in 1995. “I have made the decision that I love our children enough that we will kill you if you do this.”
“The first time we execute 27 or 30 or 35 people at one time, and they go around Colombia and France and Thailand and Mexico, and they say, ‘Hi, would you like to carry some drugs into the U.S.?’ the price of carrying drugs will have gone up dramatically.”
U.S. law already allows the death penalty in the cases of large-scale drug operations — or continuing criminal enterprises — that result in murder.
Gingrich charged in 1994 that 25 percent of President Bill Clinton’s White House staff used drugs, but at the same time admitted that he had also smoked pot 25 years earlier.
“That was a sign we were alive and in graduate school in that era,” he explained.
“See, when I smoked pot it was illegal, but not immoral,” Gingrich reportedly told Wall Street Journal reporter Hilary Stout in 1996. “Now, it is illegal AND immoral. The law didn’t change, only the morality… That’s why you get to go to jail and I don’t.”
fine bit of hypocrisy
