Let's stop letting our Government lie to us. About time someone in the mainstream speaks up... And, btw.. Except that... they're not. A "small" number will NOT leave Iraq at all, and a portion of those that do are not going "home" unless home is Kuwait. Is anyone else getting pissed off by Obama's bull****? How does this guy get a Nobel Peace Prize?

I thought we established long ago on this site that the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize was in fact the 2009 Not George Bush Prize?

sarn! didn't you get the memo?? it doesn't matter what Obama does, its all bushes fault anyways.

Your government is becoming a fascist dictatorship while we all watch, that's why they won't tell you the truth.
If enough Americans cared to vote in a third party this would be a avoided, but welp.

I don't see much to get riled up about, here. Nothing stated in the video is new or enlightening. On some level we already know all that.

The only people getting angry here are people who expected us to completely abandon Iraq, which most of us knew would never happen. The bulk of our presence is coming home, but getting angry at the government for portraying it in the most favorable way is kinda like getting mad at birds for flying. Or grasshoppers for hopping. Or fish for swimming.

(Note: I'm not saying that anger is unwarranted for the invasion in the first place. It was a mistake, sure. I'm talking about the current situation.)

What annoys me the most is the inability of the average person to thoughtfully consider the reasons for the war (instead of knee-jerk partisan and 'moral nobility' crap.)

There is one school of thought that says the U.S. invaded Iraq because it was unwilling to allow OPEC to switch its international transactions from dollars to euros — something Iraq actually did shortly before the war. By gaining an advantage over Iraq, the United States would more easily prevent this from happening.

Now —
if our government had come right out and said this was what they were doing, do you suppose we would have had nearly the support for the war that we did when they claimed Saddam had WMDs that posed a threat to our country? Assuming this scenario is true —

From one point of view it's very easy to see why they had to lie to us. We're all too soft to act in our own best interest, so they had to lie to us and do it for us anyway. Now, it's easily conceivable to me that a bunch of people with a lot of power in the U.S. believed that this was the preferable action to take. Sure, they could have been mistaken, and perhaps if we had not invaded, the euro could have crashed on its own and we would have been fine. Or higher gas prices wouldn't have been the end of civilization as we know it, etc.

My point is — someone probably did what they thought was best for this country, amidst the corruption and carnage and ugliness even. Perhaps there was a modicum of legitimate concern that went into the decision.

But people don't talk about this stuff at all. They can't ever seem to have an honest discussion, and it's easy to see why people unwilling to have an honest discussion preclude the government from doing the same.

Think about it. People would never have supported an invasion for economic advantage. They must be able to think of themselves as pure, untainted. The few people who can honestly say "yeah, I don't want my standard of living to drop, let's do it" may be *******s, but maybe they're one reason your life doesn't suck more than it already does (at least, if you live in America).

Hell, maybe the real reason wasn't for economic advantage at all. Maybe it was X or Y or Z. But you won't find the average American talking about these things. It's incredibly rare to find someone who is capable of imagining the people who make these decisions as human. Nope, it's all knee-jerk, knee-jerk, knee-jerk.

The truth? We can't handle the truth. Imagine the people who made the decision offering their honest rationale for the invasion. What's more likely? They're tarred and feathered by unthinking individuals incapable of empathizing with another person's logic? Or they're hailed as heros in the first step toward creating a more transparent, truthful government? Har.

So Freelancer, are you saying then that it's justified for a government to lie to it's people to achieve a goal because in the eyes of the majority the ends won't justify the means? That sounds like pretty dangerous talk to me.

I'd rather not know what my government does. I just imagine what I would do if I was the puppetmaster and assume some equally evil **** is occuring.

how about you dont invade and kill for money, ever.

Tibby, not a fan of History? Pretty much any government that was capable of invading and killing for money did so.

seriously! there should only be an invasion if one of our allies was invaded and then we went to war with the aggressor, then we "won" set out terms for a cease fire, and then the original aggressor repeatedly violated those terms in multiple ways! ...oh... wait.

on a moral level i do agree with you tibby.

I would take it a step further and say we have no business invading for any reason other than retaliation from an aggressor. Why can't we just build a strong missile defense program (arguably we have one already), then pull our troops out and use them to defend our country, instead of only "claiming" that we're using them to defend our country. In reality we're the aggressors, and we're invading other countries and killing hundreds of thousands of people and spending billions and billions of dollars without even a declaration of war.

It's cute how republicans are anti-war now.

It's cute how Antony thinks I'm a republican.

Oh, you're not a republican? I always thought you were.

I wasn't aware that your awesome stupidity had nothing to do with political affiliation.

My perceived stupidity probably has very little to do with political affiliation and everything to do with the fact that I'm a moral conservative posting on a board full of outspoken and in my mind often irrational liberals.

Are spoiler tags the new strikethrough or something?

no they're the new parenthesis.

Or maybe because you just aren't very smart? It's not the end of the world to be a simp.

Eh. It's enough to know that people with the capability to do something will often enough find their own justification for doing it. Whether you or I think it's morally unscrupulous has nothing to do with whether it can be done.

Freelancer, the NDAA is the very reason why your politically-apathetic thought process is incredibly dangerous.


Here's your prize. It's now legal for the government to accuse you of being a terrorist, come to your home with no warrant, arrest you, and hold you INDEFINITELY without a trial.

And this is the new bad post.

You are the government, genius. The "government" doesn't storm your house and arrest you... soldiers and police officers do. People like you and JLee.

The government wouldn't be able to enforce unconstitutional laws if people like you have the strength of character and moral fortitude to refuse illegal orders.

I wish I had a nickel for every time someone on the government payroll throws a right-wing ****fit over how wasteful, incompetent, and evil the government is.

When good, honest American citizens decide to do something about their government (i.e. choose the 'ammo box' option) Sarn_Cadrill will be the one firing the cruise missiles to keep the corrupt politicians in power. Remember that, Massassi.

He's not stupid. He's just a "moral" conservative on a radical leftist website!

I am so outraged that I am posting several times in a row.

Sorry, don't know how to play this video :(
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=X7dFMbubxr4#t=6s

I'm well aware of this law. (Apathetic my ass.)

I already explained this. The lawmakers do what they want. This law passed despite OUTRRRAAAAAAGGGGEEE from pretty much everyone. So all of that outrage goes to waste. It's a waste of my energy. Work smarter, not harder.

Our system requires us to perform a death star trench run to keep ideas from becoming law. Sure the battle is the NDAA now, but tomorrow it'll be something else. Our corpus of law was designed to expand beyond comprehension.

If you want people to care about the law: limit them in number, make them as difficult to create as amendments, and mandate clarity in their language (sorry lawyers, no free jorbs to be had by intentional obfuscation).

That **** started back when they started locking up people in Guantanamo Bay. Only difference is, back then nobody cared because they were ter'rists even though they didn't get a trial that proved they were.

Never stop posting.

So the only real difference is we keep them in normal prisons instead of "offshore holding facilities"? Cool.

Sorry, Congress needs to be able to pass a budget without a ****ing constitutional convention.



Yeah, I've always thought the reason the public isn't interested in reading bills is that they aren't long enough.

Stipulating every corner case in a language citizens can't understand is not how you do clarity. Lawyerspeak doesn't exist out of necessity; it exists so lawyers can position themselves as middlemen.

When you talk about "clarity," are you talking about readability or the elimination of ambiguities? Because, you know, there's a tradeoff involved.

Freelancer, have you considered that maybe laws are complex because they are inherently a reactionary proscriptive list of things bad people do and bad people are very creative?

Durr, Jon`C, you are retard. The 10 Commandments were simple and we used to use those!

We also celebrate Christmas because it's Jesus' birthday!

I got impatient.

Hey that's not a bad idea. I would read many pages of Jon`C arguing with himself.

Oh, excuse me. I didn't realize that just because I'm in the military, I had to be in 100% agreement with the government's policies. Fact is, most military will be the first to say the warmongering the US is doing is wrong, because they are seeing and being forced to participate in it first hand.
And I'm gonna ignore the rest of what you said cause you're just trying to incite some kind of "righteous anger" response which you're not going to get.

Moving on:

Freelancer, being "aware" of the problem doesn't preclude you from apathy. The fact that you are aware of it and take an attitude that says "Well I can't do anything about it anyway, so I might as well pretend it doesn't exist and hope it doesn't affect me," is basically the very definition of apathy. The problem is this attitude is rampant in America right now, and when so many people believe it to be true, it is effectively true.

the USA needs to be burnt down, blown up, and rebuilt.
come get me NDAA, I support the violent overthrow of the US government.