Quote:
Originally Posted by gstelmack
...To me, 9/11 did change everything, including how we view threats that have nothing to do with terrorism....
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To me, 9/11 changed NOTHING.
If it had, we would not still be driving around in SUV's that get 11 MPG with a government that is more willing to ask we shed blood for that right then to change fundamental policies which allow such "freedoms" that happen to make a lot of people very very wealthy upon their exit from public service.
To change everything, we would be asked to alter our lives. Instead, we are asked to continue on as if nothing happened. To mask the hurt and pain, we tab the dead from a terrorist attack "Heroes," instead of opening up the wound that there are men walking this earth that are responsible for the death of nearly 3000 people.
I tend to agree with Cheney in '92 or '94 (whenever he said that) that Saddam was not worth over 3000 American lives. Was he a good guy? Hell no. But removing him has created a mess that has no good remedy. The easy argument is to state that he was funding terrorism, but was he alone in this? Do we replicate what we have done in Iraq in every nation that funds terrorists? Can we?
I fear that this nation is incapable of true "change." As long as you keep a few beers in the fridge and a remote in the hand of the average American, you keep him fat and happy. How has his life "changed?" Oh yeah, he now has a reason to vote for one guy over the other.
Another thing Rove said (in one of his replies that had little to do with the question asked) was that we could not allow Iraq to become a terrorist state, because it sits on the third larges oil reserves in the world and our economy is based so heavily on that energy. This is true, but why should the change we fundamentally make be in attempting to install a government there that is friendly to us? Didn't we have that already, but he turned out to be a bad guy? Why not make changes in this nation that would allow us to be energy-independent from the rest of the world, where if China decided to stop selling us toys covered in lead-based paint that we could just build a lego factory in Wyoming? Wouldn't it be better to spend billions of dollars updating the infrastructure of this nation so the automobile becomes a supplemental form of transit rather than primary?
True change would be telling companies that bleed the American public dry while sending jobs overseas to shove it where the sun doesn't shine... but when the politicians pals happen to be the same guys that get paid hundreds of millions of dollars to retire, we get a superficial "change."