reply to AKDoc

Submitted by Ron Thompson (United States), Sep 25, 2013 at 21:56

Mr AKDoc,

I can't tell if your tag means you're an MD (see below)

First of all, I entirely agree with your comment that Obama erred mightily when he refused to support the Iranian popular revolt of 2009.

But then I read just today a story in the New Yorker by Dexter Filkin on how George Bush's disastrous strategic blunder in invading Iraq removed Iran's worst enemy and not only invited the Mullahs to reach for regional hegemony and a nuclear capacity that destabilizes the world, but created a Shiite Iraq that now provides a broad highway for them to support Assad and perhaps further endanger Israel. (I won't go into the other levels of this perhaps worst foreign policy blunder in US history, like blowing $2 trillion dollars, and crippling our ability to start a justified preventive war)

With all his many faults, Obama hasn't accomplished anything like this yet.

Second, I wonder if you can complete the following sentence for me, as I have asked of others: "America shows its greatness by, alone among the developed nations of the world, refusing to provide health care insurance for all its citizens, BECAUSE …." I wish to be as much a champion of American Exceptionalism as anyone, but not for this reason, unless someone can tell me why this is something to be proud of. For all I can see in the behavior of the embarrassing 'tea party' and other Republicans is a callous mean-spiritedness, not to mention an action that detracts from the just example we have often presented to the world, if considerably less so in recent decades.

I of course am sorry if you feel personally inconvenienced by the law and would prefer to see 25,000,000 or more of your fellow Americans at the mercy of for-profit insurance companies or the humiliating use of overworked emergency rooms. For myself, neither my wife nor I have any such worries. Indeed, if we did, we might even feel slightly ashamed (did you complete the question above?)

More practically at the geostrategic level, it seems to me that the union of opposition to Islamic imperialism with these ferocious republican attacks on the legitimacy of the one government in the world ultimately capable of dealing with the threat from totalitarian Islam, may not only weaken that government in confronting the threat, but actually turn off public awareness of that threat by this domestic extremism. And what happens when those who claim to oppose Islam actually turn the Government into a financial deadbeat when they cause a default on its financial obligations, which I fully expect them to do?

Have you really considered the effect of the union of those polices in the minds of the Public? That those who oppose the ACA (since we never called Medicare Lyndoncare, I choose not to refer to the ACA as O…………) also, at the same time, want to do all they can to weaken the government and demoralize its employees (including stopping paychecks to its fighting soldiers and social security to 40,000,000 elders) in the face of the growing threat from Iran in particular and Islam in general.

I have many complaints about Obama, but these profoundly incompatible polices of the Republicans don't even seem Sane to me.

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