What bothers most people, but doesn’t bother me, is that they dumbed it down for the american people. *shrug* sometimes you have to talk to people at their level.

But if you like dubya, you forgive a lot. Imagine Clinton going in on the basis of WMD and not finding them. You guys would have been all over him, not because of the fabrications (which you seem to swallow quite happily), but just because you hate Clinton. And he probably would have gone into Iraq after 9/11, just because it is a good idea for an oil-consuming imperium to have control over the richest oil fields in the world.

That’s what this is really about: the ultimate goals of republicans and democrats do not differ that much as to warrant this amount of polarization.

The problem with this sort of reasoning is that it presumes that America has the power and stamina needed to support its overwhelming national arrogance. Well, maybe we really will be the first imperial power that figures out how to enjoy the hubris without suffering the nemesis. More likely, like the four year old who kicked his uncle in the shins one too many times, we’ll discover that the victims of our aggression can kick back. So “Imagine if…” is a very relevant theme, indeed.

But even if it was the only argument, how does the fact that it wouldn’t work back on us mean we shouldn’t have used it? The whole idea of the cartoon is preposterous. If somebody wanted to invade the US, it’d probably be because we are a global hegemon and they consider it a danger to security and freedom to let us continue to have such influence. Do you think the anti-war people in that county (let’s say it’s sri lanka) would make cartoons, saying “Imagine if somebody called us a global hegemon and said we were a threat to freedom and security?”. No, it’s stupid. The whole thing is ridiculous.

Perhaps I have been listening to a different Bush administration than you have. I certainly have, if you’ve been going on Bush’s silly speeches designed for illiterate america.

If you want to learn more about the way the Bush administration really thinks, and especially how it thought leading up to Iraq, you could start here. This document was released about a year after September 11.

As for the politics on this blog, I guess I shouldn’t have used the word “vote”, but I was referring to Sean’s lurker day post where he asked people to comment on the blog. To my memory–and a quick scan verified this at leats in part–there were quite a few negative comments about the politics here.

-David

p.s., haha, I just read my original post. I shouldn’t have said ‘vote’; and I certainly shouldn’t said ‘overwhelming’. But hey, I get excited too sometimes =).

The “group of countries claiming the U.S. possessed weapons of mass destruction”, etc. is obviously a reference to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The first three panels are thus classic cold-war conservative fearmongering.

The second panel seems to imply that a dangerous country that claims to possess WMDs might actually be found to have WMDs. Nobody to the Left of J. Edgar Cheney believes that anymore!

And the final three panels are obviously a NRA-style appeal for more private gun ownership.