With her speech today, HRC made herself the pro-slaughter candidate.

[Ken Burch]

182. I'd at least expect them to say "I won't launch the nukes first"

or "I won't bomb Iran".

We can't just take their lack of word for it that they won't be monsters.

Aren't there any limits to what you think should be done in the name of "defense"?

The nation doesn't need to be completely open-ended and unbound by any standards of morality, humanity, and international law when it comes to defense.

Neither Afghanistan nor Iran nor even Putin's Russia(a country that mainly just wants a defensive perimeter, as Russia's leaders have always wanted since time immemorial) are going to try to attack and wipe out the U.S. Neither is North Korea, a country that is doing a perfectly good job of disintegrating on its own.

"Saving the country" is not more important than retaining some semblance of decency. Once your nation has killed on a massive scale, it can never truly do anything good and beautiful again. It can never be truly moral again. It can never really be free again. It can just be "a great power"-and all great powers, all superpowers, have to turn into empires. There have to be some limits-or else we end up in a land that can never be anything but heartless, arrogant and hateful-a land where poetry, music, and joy can't truly exist anymore.

"Winning a war' can never be worth losing your soul-or your nation's soul.

World War II was a situation that will never recur-so was the Cold War. We will never need to do the things we did in those situations again. We're past that, and our leaders need to admit it. HRC refuses to admit it-refuses to admit that anything is different at all.

HRC doesn't want our country to present a humane, non-imperial face to the world. She wants us to go on being a "superpower"- a role in the world that can never be progressive or positive. And I have no reason to believe that she doesn't want us to stay in the Arab/Muslim world for the rest of eternity.

Essentially, she buys into Dick Cheney's fascistic "it is still a dangerous world" concept-the idea that nothing in foreign policy can ever be questioned or debated, that compromise and openness can never be permissable, that war can never be a thing of the past.

I'll back her if she's nominated, but why shouldn't I see her approach to the world us ugly and life-crushing?

I won't dignify your comments about Bernie and his family...because we both know that's not what I was talking about and that World War II was part of a whole different stage of history. That was the last just war, the last use of U.S. force in history that actually made anyone's life(other than the economic life of war profiteers) any better anywhere.

(my use of the "slur" was a satirization of the Bush/HRC/Kerry attitude on Iraq, and of the decision not to count the Arab dead, because our leaders all believe that the lives of Arabs are of no value. If they cared about them, Kerry and HRC would have insisted that those deaths be counted).

You need to accept that when the U.S. uses force, it's no more virtuous or "righteous" than any other country's use of it. And that there are fewer and fewer situations when using force can actually solve anything.

It's solved nothing in Afghanistan, and never can solve anything there.

Same in Iraq. It would be the same in Iran(in fact U.S. use of force to overthrow the secular democratic government of Iran in 1953 is pretty much the only reason the mullahs ever ended up in power there).