An American Original Leaves Voluntarily

Sir;... God bless them all... I don't know if I have ever been scared when I was supposed to be...When I felt it the danger was passed, and no reason was left to run... There were many times I should have been plenty scared; but it is simply a whole different matter to be scared day in and day out, and have some one living with the sole purpose of ending your life... I read history... I visit civil war battlefields... My family have fought on some of them... My father was Navy in the South Pacific...To only be able to imagine a battle is the greatest blessing that brave men and women can offer their people... Standing between the weak, the unwilling, the spiritual, and the cunning and all those who would hurt them, for a good cause or ill, by choice, or by the demand of their government -are the stuff of democracy... Not the least of human activity can be prosecuted without courage... Too often courage is discouraged... Thanks God for brave people, for this is a dangerous world made deadly by the cowardly... It may not go unnoticed that I often abuse people about their political beliefs... It is essential for nation that we find common ground... We are no true nation of people sprung from the same ancestral womb... If we have an Alma Mater, a soul mother, it is justice and liberty for all...Our mother will not survive a moment without the willingess of people to defend her... I salute the brave, even if bravery means rolling out of bed, putting feet on the floor, and facing reality... Let us try to remember when we fight that we are fighting for each other, disputing only which way to go to reach our common goal...
Thanks...Sweeney

Of course, Romney didn't serve. Nor did Bush, nor did gun-happy Cheney, nor did any of those other war-mongering hypocrites. The ones who counsel caution are usually those who have personally experienced the pain and grief of war.

Thankfully, Obama seems to understand how fortunate he is to have been spared the misery of war and has no ambitions to be the next American conquistador.

Re: Masako;... Now if he would just get off droning people he might be classed as a human being... I have done some hunting, and I have killed deer; and it is enough to give you as sense of the inhumanity of humanity, how much life depends upon death, and it is good to take a moment to mourn with the doomed the losing of their lives which only precedes the loss of our own, and consider life, in all its futility...
A drone makes death too distant, and too easy... Like that confederate said at Fredricksburg, and I paraphrase, that it is good war is so horrible, or we should grow too fond of it... The destruction of a human life is never a cause for celebration, and should be reason for universal mourning... What are we fighting over, really??? What does it matter- if the killing of those you disagree with becomes too easy, and their death's become too distant... If you take from a person something no person can replace, then you should at least do them the honor of witnessing their agony, and recognizing their humanity... If you do not notice their wounds, and smell their warm blood, and see their eyes hollow and sense their spirit leaving with life, there is no hope for any of us... Killing human beings ought to be dangerous, but it should also be defining, and leave the murderer less willing to kill, a better man, or woman...
All that killing from cube farms so clean and distant from the scene of the crime is a threat to human freedom, and people everywhere... It is estimated that only a fraction of those killed are priority targets for the military, and all the rest are collateral damage...
I think they are dragons teeth... I think we are sowing the wind... I think we are bring down the vengeance of an injured humanity upon us, and we should be aware... What our government will do to them to keep their power, their wealth, and their positions -they will do to us... There is no safe amount of immorality we can allow and not expect injury...From the point of view of our enemies, any of us will do to satify revenge... If you could ask those killed on 911 if life were fair; how would they reply... If we want fairness we must offer it... If we want justice we must give it... If we want respect we should show it...
War is never cost effective, but genocide can be... Without the cost of war, there will never be a reason to seek peace... You may find that those who will exploit others will dispossess them, and then they will kill them to have their titles unassailable...Today we pity them... Tomorrow we are them...
Thanks...Sweeney

Dear Mark:
I enjoy reading your column and your appearance on the PBS Newshour. I usually also enjoy reading comments from others, except on this forum. Is there any way you can block Sweeney? His tedious opinions and aggressive replies to others surely scare off more thoughtful people from commenting. I believe this is why so few people reply to your column compared to others I read.

Re: John Koble;... If they are thoughtful, really, is their thought not worth the force of expression??? Really John... Don't like it... Don't read it; but what sort of tyranny will you not support once you have enforced silence???
Thanks...Sweeney

Re: James A, Sweeney. They "droned" people in the bombing of Dresden. The city was burned to a crisp. There is no such thing as "honorable" war. You fight to win, as the middle east terrorists have demonstrated in spades.

Personally, I don't relish the thought of speaking German as a first language. I might be doing so if we had lost that war. I would like it if our president could do war better, but to be honest, I don't have any realistic idea about how he might do that.

I will tell you one thing--I don't want our women hiding their faces, I don't want them being subject to Sharia "law" ("voodoo" is perhaps a more accurate word), I don't think adulterers should have their hands cut off, and I don't think we should have a legal system that allows people to be tried for "crimes" that might even be treated as capital because someone accuses them of desecrating the Koran.

Salman Rushdie has endured almost two and a half decades of having to live with thugs trying to collect on a reward for his scalp because some Muslim asshole declared him an enemy of the Muslim "god," and screw any concept of respect for other nations' laws, let alone for basic humanity. You get to a point where you would like to continue being kind, but reality intervenes as it always inconveniently does, and you do what you have to do.

Think Battle of Stalingrad, where no prisoners were taken. That's about where we are. What do you do when your enemy is willing to brainwash innocent kids into becoming suicide bombers? For me, drones are just fine. Let machines get shot down instead of human beings.

Re: James A, Sweeney
Thank you, Mr. Sweeney. I believe the proper response is: Q.E.D.

Re: Masako W. Bush made the skys of Texas safe during the Vietnam conflict in the Air National Guard, so I guess you can't say he didn't serve. He did, however, fail to make the Iraqui oil fields safe for Halliburton.

Re: Masako... Just a couple of things... When Dresdon was burned it was only an impediment to the Russians, and of very little stratigic value...It was an artifact of medieval art, archetecture and learning...More men, women and children are estimated to have died there than in the Nuclear attacks on Hiroshima or Nagasaki...Under German law. the names of married couples had to be inscribed inside of wedding bands... When the Russians arrived, there were two five gallon bucket filled with wedding bands for them...
What was that to them??? They were as inhuman to their own people and soldiers as the Germans were... It is estimated that half the Russian soldiers in the battle of Berlin were under a death sentence... If soldiers were ordered to take a position by Stalin's birthday, and didn't they were found guilty... What Shwartzkopf said of Saddam Hussain, that he was no general is true also of Hitler and Stalin...
Only if you look at the natural inclination of people for revenge, and see what proportion of our air crews died by the Germans, then does Dresdon make sense... Turning the war against civilian populations did not work for the Germans, and it did not work for the allies...It makes more determined enemies of less determined enemies...
What it takes to have war, and killing -is the dehumanizing of other people... If you see how that went in our civil war, how long it took to run most people up to that point, and how long it took people to get some respect for the other side as courageous and honorable, you may understand...
To dehumanize people is easy... We do it all the time with our labels which people cling to rather than reject... I understand the sense of identity it gives, and of purpose to be a republican, or a democrat, which is all good fun so long as people do not lose sight of their humanity...Well, democrats are too inclined to think with their hearts and republicans are inclined to not think at all... Is that fair??? It is easy to say, but republicans manage their lives and affairs, so clearly, they must think... Math as a tool of reason which you see in so much of republican thought has always been used to deny the humanity of people... Racial profiles were always based upon sound pseudo science complete with measurements and statistics to prove it... History reveals another side of humanity; a moral side.... There were occasionally people, human beings, good SS Men, who killed themselves because regardless of all the pseudo science and propaganda and proof behind the notion of stuffing perfectly living human beings into gas chambers, they could not do so...

The destruction of humanity is a hard job requiring hard people who are capable of scientific rationalization... Obviously, all wars are a contest between cultures... Looked at from our point of view, and with some knowledge of culture, is it plausible to think that we will actually beat the people of Islam with our tactics of terror??? Do you beat terror with more terror??? Just the way it is, that one country, Afghanistan is as big as Texas... Imagine how large it would be if it were rolled out like cookie dough... It is not, and for them it is the perfect battle field and for us it is just a desert version of Vietnam where we have surrendered the choice of battlefields and given interior lines...Now you suggest that Drones are acceptable... I suggest they are the most ineffective of possible weapons, if our ultimate goal is peace...
There is no possible victory in Afghanistan... Victory is what one knows over another... We cannot possibly beat their culture with our own...And a defeat of one culture by another is a defeat of all cultures which are the sum of human knowledge... Their culture is incapable of change from without or within, but it must serve something of their purposes to survive at all...Our culture has taken some things from them, added some things and become us...
God plays an insignificant part in our thoughts and less for those who profess knowledge of God, since no one thinks about what they know... But; droning only makes us seem less human, more distant, more devilish; and so defeats our ultimate purpose of having them view us with respect as human beings... Men fighting men alone or as a group as representatives of their culture put on display their physical fitness, their intelligence, their courage and their honor... Ultimately, it is this honor people hold that makes all peace and all deals hold fast...

Much maligned as General MacArthur was, he was a great general who understood his enemy and his own men... He lost his job for threatening the use of nuclear weapons, but the Chinese did not take the threat seriously, because their use would not in the least have been decisive against a people with a dispersed industry and a peasant economy... It is to his credit that he recognized the inhumanity of nuclear weapons...
War as an honorable contest between individuals and groups of men is a thing of the past, and now it is what it always was, and contest of cultures; but before we will ever have such people respect and accept our culture we must prove ourselves honorable, and this we cannot do because at heart, we are not honorable to each other, or to anyone...
We threaten the world with our technology, but the more we rely on our technology to fight our wars the less honorable we appear...Since the price in money for technology is as high as the political price paid for soldiers killed by our pointless adventure -we will go broke before we know victory...We destroy the very people we must bring around to have peace, and lose the respect of all... Broken financially, and without the will to continue, and yet having poor Muslims forever bringing bloodshed to us we get closer and closer to the use of nuclear weapons...
-That is why they struggle so hard for nuclear technology... They are proud and we want to humiliate them, which is to say: they are human and we are trying to dehumanize them... Their pride in their culture and accomplishments are no greater than our own...We simply refuse to acknowledge these people as our equals...
Thanks...Sweeney

Seeing pictures of Gov. Romney holding protest signs against those who protested against the Vietnam War made me a little nauseous given his own deferments. I didn't have money, so being married with a small baby and studying at a university did not keep me from the draft in 1968. I guess I should have gone to France.

Re: Mike Ohr... It is always a good idea to be born rich... I wish I had had it... Some times... If I could be rich without being stupid or otherwise entirely out of touch with reality, I would go for it... They are all so many Marie Antoinettes with that: let them eat cake line in mouth... Now that they have exported all we need to survive on, how are we going to make it doing each others wash... Pass the cake...Please...
Thanks...Sweeney

I'm sorry Senator Webb is packing it in. The Senate needs him.

Re: Bruce Strickland... Every honorable man is a curse to every dishonorable man... The Senate may need him; but they will never want him...
Thanks...Sweeney