Carter's Prize

[LovetoGiveRoses]

Good morning all.

Here's some notes on the Nobel Prize for Jimmy Carter from columnist Helle Dale today:

If that sounds fairly anodyne, listen to Gunnar Berge, the Norwegian head of the committee, who did not mince words as he announced this year's winner. "With the position Carter has taken. . . the award must be seen as a criticism of the line the current U.S. administration has taken on Iraq." Asked by a reporter if this was a "kick in the leg" at Washington, Mr. Berge said, "The answer must be an unconditional 'yes.' "
To be honest, though, this will do more to damage the credibility of the Nobel Committee more than that of the American president. For one thing, it delegitimizes the award given to Mr. Carter, who was honored for his recent criticisms of the Bush administration's Iraq policy, a subject on which he has become a leader in the Democratic Party along with former Vice President Gore. (Perhaps Mr. Gore will be the winner next year?)

 

[SINthysist]

Don't mean to get all soft and mushy, but missed ya!

 

[SINthysist]

Karate ni sente nashi...

There is no first strike in Karate.

I believe that on an interpersonal relationship level, mano y mano...

Not against the theater of world politics. Sometimes the best strategy is attack first. You have to remove the idea of self-defence and replace it with the idea of defending those around you.

 

[LovetoGiveRoses]

Howdy AJ, I've been working more lately. How've you been?

 

[Rex1960]

Translation:

Why can't we just all get along...

VS

Do that again and I'll kick your fawking ass, cause I ain't turning the other cheek for the likes of you...

Thanks for translating your translation. I finally got it (Is there any Nobel Prize for "Stupidity" ?)

I know there's this contrary between Utopia and RL.
I pretty much know we (human beings) have some basics in common like "You shall not kill" or "Don't take what's not yours" or "Treat others like you'd like to be treated".... and I sure know there are people claiming "I just don't care 'cause I can".

Even in Utopia something like law would have to exist, even in Utopia something like law enforcement would have to exist. Otherwise it would be anarchy and chaos and that's just another form of tyrany since there would be at least one single person not being able to defend himself.

I somehow know that Utopia won't happen... but I'm into telling my daughter fairy tales that end like "...and they lived happily ever after."

 

[SINthysist]

Good lawd!

The Happy Police!

LTGR - you're not smiling! That'll be a ten dollar fine and here's your ten dollars! Try to have a nice work day!

 

[LovetoGiveRoses]

The work things have actually been fun. I've been bored not having challenges and there are plenty of challenges now. The only thing I'd additionally ask for is more time in a day. Actually, I could use more time to try to educate the day-dreamers to understand the direction to improve our quality of life.

 

[Rex1960]

Karate ni sente nashi...

There is no first strike in Karate.

I believe that on an interpersonal relationship level, mano y mano...

Not against the theater of world politics. Sometimes the best strategy is attack first. You have to remove the idea of self-defence and replace it with the idea of defending those around you.

wakarimas SIN-san

as far as the interpersonal relationship is concerned.
But why making differences ?

As far as I understand geopolitics there's no difference between those person vs person and those nation vs nation kind of conflicts.

And I believe that the attack first concept is ok on a tactical level, but we shouldn't be that quick when it comes to a strategical level. In my POV politics should include some first strike abilities (in the backhand) as well as counterstrike abilities. You wouldn't send a police officer unarmed into his shift.
I admit, there might come a point of no return, when you have no other option than to get ready for the fight. But now that we're back on this strategical / tactical level what's wrong with "let's think twice just one more time" ? And if there's really no other option than "first strike" ok let's go for it with all our power.

We're somehow way too often prejudging a situation.
And we somehow way too often don't think about options.
And that's why I think we're not clever enough....

"Hence to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting." Sun Tzu

 

[Rex1960]

The work things have actually been fun. I've been bored not having challenges and there are plenty of challenges now. The only thing I'd additionally ask for is more time in a day. Actually, I could use more time to try to educate the day-dreamers to understand the direction to improve our quality of life.

Try sleeping faster ...

 

[SINthysist]

We've given them that second opportunity and more...

Here's a bit of hindsight for you fresh off the press. Somthing that when I read it, to me, vindicates my current unpopular stand:

ENJOY!




Friday, Oct. 18, 2002
Newsweek Admits: Reagan Was Right!

It what had to be a painful examination of conscience, Newsweek has finally admitted what just about every American not a member of the harebrained left has long known: Ronald Reagan won the Cold War, brought the Soviet Union to its knees and sounded the death knell for the Evil Empire.

In a friendly review of Peter Schweizer 's new book "Reagan's War" Newsweek's Andrew Nagorski admits that President Reagan knew exactly what he was doing in dealing with the Soviets and was determined to bring down the Evil Empire.

Noting that the author asserts that Reagan "won the cold war." Nagorski writes in his "Reagan Had it Right" book review: "Today's scholars can dispute the sweeping nature of that claim, but as someone who reported from Moscow and Eastern Europe during this period, I fully agree that Reagan knew more and did more to produce that outcome than any of his predecessors."

At the time, however, Reagan was being pictured as being both a bumbling ex-actor in over his head, and a dangerous war monger likely to bring on a nuclear holocaust with his far right wing anti-Communist policies. His description of the Soviet Union as an "Evil Empire" was greeted by the liberals with horror and derision. After all, America's leftists were wedded to the old Marxist concept of "no enemies to the left," and the idea that somewhere to the left of them lay evil was simply unacceptable.

Foreign leaders openly voiced their skepticism of Reagan's as a Cold War warrior engaged in the hopeless cause of seeking victory over the Soviets, answering the question asked by Barry Goldwater in his book "Why Not Victory" by asking, indeed, why not?

Nagorski recalls one incident in 1982 when Germany's Chancellor Helmut Schmidt told Secretary of State Alexander Haig, Schmidt that it was ridiculous for President Ronald Reagan to think that he ould "overthrow the post-World War II division of Europe" by prying countries like Poland loose from Soviet control. "FIVE YEARS LATER, when Reagan gave his famous "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall" speech at the Berlin wall, many Germans-and Americans-similarly scoffed at what they took to be the president's naivete," Nagorski recalls. "They continued to do so right until the moment when Solidarity swept to power, the Berlin wall collapsed and communist rulers were routed all across the old Soviet empire."

Nagoski notes that Schweizer, a research fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution, argued that Reagan understood the Soviet Union far better than the so-called experts. "Relying on the public record, diaries, memoirs and recently declassified documents, he offers an engaging, richly anecdotal account to make his case that Reagan 'won the cold war.' "

While his predecessors in the White House more or less accepted the permanency of Soviet rule over its homeland and the captive nations, settling on the appeasement policy of "détente," Reagan from his early days in Hollywood disagreed, Nagorski writes.

Nagorski writes that the book reveals that Reagan "was deeply troubled by the notion that fear of a nuclear war was producing a consensus for accommodation with Moscow, with the result that the West was more concerned about the rulers in the Kremlin than the people they oppressed."

"He also pinpointed the weaknesses of communist economics, noting as early as 1963 that the Soviet Union and China were "in the grip of modern-day feudalism," a system that would become "unhinged" if it were forced to truly compete with the West.

Thus when Reagan became president, he acted on his long held convictions, "squeezing the 'evil empire' at every opportunity" Nagorski recalls.


He launched his massive defense buildup, including his much ridiculed strategic defense-or "Star Wars"-initiative - a policy liberals still cannot stomach.

He imposed sanctions on the Polish government in response to martial law, and began funneling help to Solidarity, the Polish opposition.

His administration pumped heavy-duty weaponry to the Afghan resistance.

It worked a deal with the Saudis to lower oil prices, which boosted the American economy and hit the Soviets hard.
The result of these much maligned policies? "As former Soviet officials later admitted, the Kremlin suddenly realized it was 'beyond our power' to compete with Reagan's U.S."

According to Schweizer in 1982 Richard Pipes, who handled Soviet affairs at the National Security Council, predicted that such pressures would bring forth a reformer in Moscow who would "favor a more accommodating foreign policy stance in order to increase trade with the West and ease domestic economic problems."

"Three years later," Nagorski recalls, Mikhail Gorbachev took power. "Although the two leaders developed a grudging respect for each other, Reagan wasn't going to help the new man save the system. As Gorbachev told the Politburo after the Reykjavik summit: 'They look at us in the West and wait for us to drown.'"

Nagorski fails to note that at that time, America's liberals recoiled in horror at Reagan's hard-nosed attitude at the Reykjavik summit, warning ominously that the U.S. was moving dangerously towards another risky showdown with the mighty Soviet Union which in reality was coming apart at the seams.

Nagorski, however can't allow the liberal's greatest foe to escape without criticism. He writes that Schweizer admits that the Iran-contra affair was Reagan's "greatest failure," and accepts some of Reagan's positions "too uncritically," citing Reagan's. contention that the United States should have fought the war differently in Vietnam, a viewpoint that "misses the point that the war was a grievous miscalculation from beginning to end." This of course ignores what Reagan was getting at - miscalculation or not, once involved, there was, as General MacArthur once said, "no substitute for victory."

He criticizes Reagan for castigating the 1975 Helsinki accords for allegedly "putting our stamp of approval" on the Kremlin's domination of Eastern Europe, when the accord's human rights' provisions "would prove a vital tool for the dissidents who undermined the system from within."

But on the big picture, Nagorski admits, "Schweizer is correct: Reagan had it right. Those who fought for their freedoms recognized his role even before the communist system collapsed. On a visit to Poland in the spring of 1988, when the riot police were still trying to club the opposition into submission, several Poles asked me wistfully: 'Is it really true that Reagan can't run for a third term?' "

Back home in the U.S. the very idea of a third term for Ronald Reagan would have driven the liberals insane over the thought of four more years in the White House for a bumbling war monger likely to engulf the U.S. in a nuclear war with the mighty Soviet Union.

 

[Rex1960]

We've given them that second opportunity and more...

I know SIN, I know.

 

[SINthysist]

As far as Sun Tzu, I've been of the school of thought that Saddam's people will take him out, or rat him out for a limited tactical nuke or another taste of the new suction-technology bomb that got Osama...



Just to save their own chestnuts, which they've been having to do on a daily basis for years now !

 

[Rex1960]

Saddams anti-american, anti-western, anti-christianity propaganda works pretty good. And somehow we have been an easy target for all those islamic fundamentalists.

Iraqi people trying to take him out ? Would be something like trying to fight a tank with a knife I guess.
Wonder what will happen as soon as the first USMC bataillon is going to cruise Bagdhad's mainstreet. If the Iraqis don't take that historical chance they're not worth to fight for...

 

[LovetoGiveRoses]

There was an editorial in my local paper today that mentioned both GW and Jimmy Carter.

It said something like GW has to stand tough with Iraq, if he's the first to blink, he'll be banished to become an insignificant ex-presidential day laborer like Jimmy Carter.

 

[Unclebill]

Said ever so eloquently

While I share his judgment, I only wish I could have expressed it as eloquently.

http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/sowell101502.asp

While the Nobel Prize continues to be the most prestigious in the world -- and deservedly so in fields like science and economics -- the Nobel Peace Prize has already been given to a terrorist thug like Yasser Arafat, so perhaps Jimmy Carter is a worthy successor to him, even if he is one of the sorriest presidents and ex-presidents in the history of the United States.
Thomas Sowell