Are there any right-wingers who’ve been pushing to allow Iraqi refugee immigration at present?

Wow, blast from the past – I haven’t seen anyone using ROT13 since the late 80’s. I thought the name meant “Nabal’s best boy friend.”

Mass murder, as a strategy, worked in WWII. The Axis Powers were also willing to bomb civilains, and develop weapons of mass destruction. The world has rejected the strategy of partial or complete genocide. What happend to Germany – WWII – proves an adage that must not be fogotten. A bad-ass may be able to beat up anyone on the blook, but he can’t whip EVERYONE on the block. How well would the US economy survive sanctions & embargos if the world united against us?

I have friends who wouldn’t blinnk a moral eyelid at turning all of Iraq to glass.

But the other comments in that column; that Bush needs to play Caesar at the Rubicon and declare himself president for life, so we can engage in genocide… that’s the part they would quail from.

They have come to the decision that the present administration is anti-american, and that column proved some of it’s more influential supporters are in favor of those policies.

It was lifting the veil.

Not many dilettantes, a lot of students (available time and newly fired up minds), Nam vets, mothers (I), fathers, grandparents, priests, other religious, nuns, pacifists, show-offs and the just plained bored…Of course the mix grew and diversified as the war continued, but revolutionaries or marxists? If there were any, they weren’t going around shouting workers of the world unite.

I wouldn’t dream of asserting that there were no marxists or marxist leaning participants in the antiwar crowd during Vietnam, although I suspect many if not most were dilettantes playing at being revolutionaries.

But my personal recollections and everything I have read support the conclusion that most members of the antiwar movement were simply that; antiwar.

It is no different today. I haven’t seen anyone who would defend Saddam Hussein or his regime. He was an evil tyrant and his sons were even worse.

But a common meme of the chickenhawk crowd is to equate being against our invasion and occupation of Iraq with being pro-Saddam.

I suspect however, that there is a growing group of people who see Saddam more favorably than they used to, and who long somewhat nostalgically for the days when he was in power.

That group are the Iraqis who we “rescued” from the frying pan and put into the fire.

Like Vietnam, Iraq was a mess we should have stayed out of, not because the people we fought were noble and good, but because our involvement was only going to make things worse.

The interesting thing for me is how Vietnam fits so nicely in how the right live by myths. While I’m not old enough to remember it, from the history I’ve read I have always concluded it was a civil war and the U.S. had no business being there. The entire domino theory was just a great absurdity without any connection to reality. However, since the right can’t think critically anymore, due to years of listening to Rush Limbuagh, and more recently, watching fixed news, the right has hooked on this myth that the “victory” in Vietnam was just around the corner and it was all the liberal societies fault we lost.

Therefore a great portion of our nation have become un-critical “dittoheads” who are nothing more than robots for the Republican party. Democracy is a great thing huh?

Worse than radioactive clouds heading our way, using nukes would seriously up the ante, turning a medium sized, relatively contained war – “just keep shopping, America” – into potentially something truly horrifying, truly deserving of the name “World War III”. It greatly risks the killing of millions instantly, while risking serious shocks to the world economy, while turning the whole world against us.

Bloodthirsty rightwingers would finally learn the lesson that what goes ’round comes around. They think America is all powerful because of our nukes, and they also think that the rest of the world would and should tremble before us – because that’s how they themselves relate to power – they project their same fear-based relationship onto others.

In 2003, when Bush was amassing his invasion fleet on Iraq’s doorstep, the space shuttle Columbia blew up on reentry. A right wing coworker – convinced that Saddam was hiding WMDs per the propaganda – suggested that this would be an excellent time for Saddam to send condolences to Bush. I looked at the clueless idiot, and replied that, if I were Saddam, I would take this as an omen that Allah is on my side, and reply to Bush: “fuck your dead astronauts, America”. The doofus right winger could not comprehend a Saddam who was not cowed by America’s power, because this is how the right winger relates to power, as a compliant, submissive coward.

The big argument argument against the neocons’ aggressions in my mind always was what the CIA called “blowback” – and this is not referring to radioactive clouds. Using nukes would worsen the blowback exponentially.