Left speechless

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I am out of touch.

I am guilty. Okay. I stopped following the news reporting back home 18/7 when the election was won, and certainly once the new president was installed in office.

Here I am, writing about frogs and flowers, the trials of growing up and familiy, and in the United States, we're debating the pros and cons of torture as acceptable US military and intelligence practice.

No, wait. You're out of touch. This isn't a discussion over here, regardless of whether Europeans are just pansies because they prefer peace-keeping to invasion and regime changing. They've good reason. They noticed in all the wars fought because of the maps drawn at the end of World War II that it doesn't work. They lost them, and so did we, and no one particularly felt like escalating to the scale of WWII to win any of them.

Do you think the US military and its soldiers would have been revered after the end of World War II had it come out that they practiced waterboarding rather than placing enemy soldiers captured in military prisons and treating them according to the Geneva Conventions and proceeding with the Nuremburg trials?

Is this what you want your sons and daughters doing to other peoples'? Oh, it's okay. I forgot. They are the bad guys. We're the good guys. It's okay for the good guys to do really inhumane things to bad guys because they are -- the bad ones. Guess what? That's what they think of you, and who's to say they aren't right and you're wrong? Maybe they're just badly informed.

Practicing "enhanced interrogation" methods on them should help set things right, and to hell with the Geneva Conventions.

What kind of a world do you want to live in? One where we live by the principles we preach, or one in which we get to behave like those we fight, while justifying it because they don't live by our principles?

US politics resembles professional wrestling more than anything else. Don't teach history in school, and look what happens: we get to live it over and over again.

The election of Obama to the presidency in a landslide sent a reassuring signal to the world about an US out of control. The problem with the right being perfectly deaf is the time wasted and the fears whipped up among the stupidest among us, and the image we continue to broadcast to the world.

Wait, maybe it was never any different. I feel better.
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