the point where the way left and the way right meet

Discuss this with your brother-in-law over the turkey on Thursday if you dare. I guess it all comes down to "framing."

Funny how when it comes to war and anti-war, true patriots from the far right and true patriots from the far left come to the exact same conclusion: the flag wavin' tax payin' "mythical little guy"* in America is repeatedly getting reamed by the elites.
(Just the rightwingers really don't care if they get reamed as long as they get to wear a uniform to look manly.)

First they spilled your kids' blood (all the while picking your pocket) and when the rape and pillage of Iraq was over, now the media mantra is "shared sacrifice."

I thought we were supposed to go shopping, Bubbie.

(* Texas representative Cornyn's term for us flesh and blood schmucks. I about puked when I heard him say it, uncontested, on the Floor of Congress and vowed to never forget it. This is what the elites think of their fellow Americans. )

***

I nailed it. The October Surprise this year was the post election November Surprise -inside the beltway talk has been ramped up about our options in Vietraq: "go big, go long, go home." Hah.

You all didn't count on this, did you, when you voted to "change" your leadership... you thought we had to "bring the troops home", or "support the troops and win the war", but did you ever dig one layer farther down to figure out just exactly what the hell that media mantra you were repeating means?

Cause you should know Go Big means sending in that extra 20 thou troops, which will fail, thus setting up the "shared sacrifice" drumbeat to ESCALATE for REAL after the Manchurian Candidate McCain or Neocon Jeb is annointed in 2008. GO BIG means WE GO BIG the day after election day 2008, unless we somehow, coincidentally, tin-hattedly, get the New Pearl Harbor we need to ramp up the date.

And you should know Go Long means we ain't abandoning any time forseeable the string of 14 permanent bases- hegemonic- anti-Califate Magino line we are drawing in the Iraqi dust, or the biggest embassy in the world, a VaticanCity- sized fortress with 3-foot thick walls.
Paying a pretty penny, are we, for the price of oil. On your charge card for your grandkids to pay. Won't they bless your memory. GO LONG means you will be paying for a militaristic war economy FOREVER. I thought the rightwingers were opposed to paying for big government. I guess that was a lie.

And you should know, Go Home isn't an option for the Bush Dynasty this time. It's just there like the parsley on the turkey platter. So you'll think the Butterball has something to do with anything. Think Bush serving that plastic turkey to the troops. A photo op, loaded with meaning and signifying nothing.

We, Pat Buchanan and I, knew Bush would get handed the backing he sorely needs to salvage his legacy from both the Rats and the Reptiles.

Yep, yesterday the Love Me I'm a Liberal crowd on Air America was arguing for Charley Rangel's draft resolution. Repeating that stomach turning "shared sacrifice" media mantra.
Randy Rhodes doesn't seem to get that we have been fighting completely ginned-up media-garnished and glamorized wars for corporate interests since the Civil War, or you might say, since the Spanish American War.
There aren't "just" wars, Randy.

And Thom Hartmann, usually a great thinker, was actually arguing with clear-eyed callers for a draft over cutting funding as a way to ending war. Never imagining that we don't need to set up either option as a straw man, we can do BOTH, Thom!

From two weeks ago, (although I think he is clarly naive about our reasons for being in the Ukraine... short version - it's business, Pat, done for the benefit of corporations. The American military is a protection racket.) :

More Troops—or Less Empire
by Patrick J. Buchanan
November 6, 2006 Issue
The American Conservative

"[W]e are stretched too thin and need a larger military," argued The Weekly Standard in a recent editorial entitled "More Troops."

"Researchers at conservative think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation call for larger ground forces, as do thinkers at centrist and liberal organizations like Brookings, CSIS, and even the Center for American Progress."

And why do we need more troops?

Because the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are going badly for lack of U.S. troops, and because, says the Standard, President Bush needs to have the strategic option to put ground forces into "Iran, North Korea, Somalia, Lebanon, or wherever the next crisis erupts." The Standard wants the U.S. Army increased by 250,000.

Post-election, this issue will be debated in Congress and should provide the occasion for a larger debate on the issue: do we truly need more troops, or do we rather need fewer U.S. commitments to fight in places where no vital interests are imperiled? Is it not time, 15 years after the Cold War's end, to begin dissolving old alliances and shedding commitments dating to a time when a Soviet Empire bestrode Europe and Asia like a colossus?

Case in point: South Korea. Why are 30,000 U.S. troops tied down on that peninsula half a century after the Chinese left North Korea and 15 years after the Soviet Union expired? If the 60 million Koreans, North and South, were raptured up to heaven, how would America be imperiled?

In the Korean War of 1950-53, the United States sent an army of a third of a million men. One thousand U.S. soldiers died every month in Korea, compared to the 1,000 who die each year in Afghanistan and Iraq. Americans are not going to send another army to fight for South Korea. Nor should we.

The Cold War is over and South Korea, with an economy 40 times the size of the North's, with twice the population and the latest in U.S. weapons, should undertake its own ground defense.

Before plunging into Vietnam, LBJ said, "American boys ought not to be doing the fighting that Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves." That was a valid argument then. Why not now?

If the United States gave Seoul notice that all U.S. troops would be off the peninsula in a year and we were exercising our right to withdraw from the 1950s mutual security treaty, those U.S. troops could be returned home, and we would find Seoul suddenly far more receptive to Bush's diplomacy than it has heretofore been.

Case in point: NATO, Ukraine, and Georgia. Until the Orange Revolution went sour, these two ex-republics of the USSR were advancing toward membership in NATO. Once in, any conflict between either nation and Russia would bring us in militarily. For the NATO charter reads that an attack against one is an attack against all. Is there a more insane idea floating about right now?

Kiev and Moscow have clashed over the pro-Western orientation of the new government and the Crimean peninsula that is home to the Russian Black Sea Fleet. Khrushchev ceded the peninsula to Ukraine. But eastern Ukraine is Russified in language, culture, and ethnicity, and different from the Orthodox center and Catholic west.

How is the United States strengthened by a commitment to go to war with the world's second nuclear power, should a Russian-Ukrainian collision deteriorate into a shooting war?

Alliances are the transmission belts of war. While alliances can strengthen nations, they carry the risk of dragging their members into unnecessary wars. How would an alliance with Georgia, now in a nasty brawl with Moscow over Russian spies and the breakaway Georgian provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, strengthen America? Fifty years ago, Ike refused to risk war with Russia to save the Hungarian Revolution. Now we are going to fight Russia over Georgia?

When the debate over expanding the U.S. Army begins in 2007, there need to be voices raised calling for withdrawal of U.S. ground forces from Korea and Central Asia, where they do not belong, and a bottom-up review of all U.S. war guarantees.

This will be denounced as isolationism. But was it isolationism for the Russians to go home from Cuba? Just as we wanted the French, British, Spanish, and, finally, Russians out of our hemisphere, other nations bristle at U.S. troops stationed just over their border.

We have more than enough soldiers to defend the United States and our vital interests and allies. If we will pull up the old trip wires we put down in the Cold War and bring home the troops manning those trip wires, we will also find that, suddenly, we have fewer quarrels and fewer enemies than the administration has managed to make for us.