Then follow the current Dem "strategy."

Republicans are vicious thugs who will do literally anything to get and keep power.

Power that they then use to screw Americans and enrich the elite.

They will kill the economy for the rest of us, for the rest of the world, so that they can grow richer. They will kill every safety net the American People have. They will start wars of aggression and kill hundreds of thousands of innocents to get what they want. They will torture to get what they want. They will subvert the Department of Justice to get what they want. They will pursue political prosecutions to get what they want, and they will steal elections to get what they want. They will impeach Presidents to get what they want.

There is literally nothing that they will not do to get what they want.

They will even kill the entire planet by refusing to address Climate Change, by questioning that science itself is legitimate.

And the Democrats, including Obama last night, praise them for it. And call them patriots. They reach out their hands in bipartisanship and beg them for their votes. Even as the Republicans lie about Death Panels and refuse to state that Obama is an American and is not a Muslim.

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By David Swanson

FACT CHECK: Is Iraq combat really over for US?
By CALVIN WOODWARD and ROBERT BURNS (AP)
WASHINGTON — Despite President Barack Obama's declaration Tuesday of an end to the combat mission in Iraq, combat almost certainly lies ahead. And in asserting the U.S. has met its responsibilities in Iraq, the president opened the door wide to a debate about the meaning of success in the muddle that most — but not all — American troops are leaving behind. A look at some of the statements Obama made in his Oval Office speech and how they compare with the facts:

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OBAMA: "Tonight, I am announcing that the American combat mission in Iraq has ended."

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In August 2008 Paul Jay of The Real News Network interviewed journalist Naomi Klein about Barack Obama's campaign and promises. Two years down the road we can look back and compare what he said with what he's done.

Obama's foreign policy positions have become indistinguishable from those of John McCain or of George Bush. His campaign for the presidency was virtually built around absorbing, co-opting and quieting the anti-war/anti-fascist/anti-imperialist movements.

How far do you go before winning becomes losing, and becomes just a shiny new paintjob hawked by a very good salesman?

Glen Ford writing at Black Agenda Report said on Wednesday "We Are Cornered: There's No Way Out Without A Fight": "Obama and his Democratic legislative allies have successfully shielded their Wall Street masters from anything worthy of the name financial reform.", and "The pace of finance capital deterioration quickens, accelerating the timetable of the Right's offensive. As the hunger grows, Wall Street's servants become more aggressive and demanding, and there is nothing in the Democratic Party, as presently constituted, to stop them."

Ford closed his essay with: "One truth remains: only a massed people can defeat massed capital. If the American Left is capable of bearing that in mind in the critical times ahead, it might just escape the cul-de-sac and make some modest contribution to the world."

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Apropos of nothing -- except the whole Islamophobia talking point inspired by that community center downtown (or as people who aren't from New York/are directionally impaired/are reality-impaired call it, the "Ground Zero Mosque") has inspired over the last week or two -- here's a nice way to demonstrate just how much of the world's minority are angry, terrified Americans in regards to the world's Muslims.

Via Tumblr user Technipol, click to enlarge the following infographic:

click image to enlarge

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Ever fewer people, particularly those in institutions of power, but also in the general populace in developed countries, most especially in the United States, appear to be aware of, much less devoted to enlightened or humanistic values. Interest in the betterment of humanity, in the hope of minimally ameliorating our worst human impulses, or perhaps peeking at transcendence if only occasionally and imperfectly, or even hypothesizing about potentially preferred realities, is no longer a core concern, having given way to raw economic and military subjugation.

Ever since men became capable of free speculation, their actions, in innumerable important respects, have depended upon their theories as to the world and human life, as to what is good and what is evil. This is as true in the present day as at any former time. To understand an age or a nation, we must understand its philosophy, and to understand its philosophy we must ourselves be in some degree philosophers.

~Bertrand Russell

Major Ralph Peters expressed succinctly and nakedly the dominant philosophy in America today (and across the past two centuries), in his book, Endless War:

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Paul Jay of the Real News Network talks in November 2008 at The Krahl Academy about US foreign policies, blowback, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the concurrent crises of capitalism, of media, of economies, of terrorism, of fascism, of corporatism, of corruption in US political parties, about the sh*t hitting the fan, and about one part of the solution for it all.

Jay's talk is about 40 minutes. Watch the video. It's worth your time, and beats TV all to hell. I guarantee it.

"If I'm not doing the thing I feel is most significant, then I feel empty inside."

--Paul Jay

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"Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) today challenged the notion that removing 'combat brigades' but leaving 50,000 U.S. troops in Iraq constitutes an end to combat operations, let alone an end to the war", a press release issued by Kucinich datelined Washington, Aug 19, 2010 and published on the Congressman's house website stated. The release continued with:

"Who is in charge of our operations in Iraq, now? George Orwell? A war based on lies continues to be a war based on lies. Today, we have a war that is not a war, with combat troops who are not combat troops. In 2003, President Bush said 'Mission Accomplished'. In 2010, the White House says combat operations are over in Iraq, but will leave 50,000 troops, many of whom will inevitably be involved in combat-related activities."

"Just seven days ago, General Babaker Shawkat Zebari, the commander of Iraq’s military, said that Iraq’s security forces will not be trained and ready to take over security for another 10 years. One story is being told to the military on the ground in Iraq and another story is being told to their families back home."

"You can’t be in and out at the same time."

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Originally published at TomDispatch.com

In September 1998, I was handed a submission for a proposed book by Chalmers Johnson.  I was then (as I am now) consulting editor at Metropolitan Books.  9/11 was three years away, the Bush administration still an unimaginable nightmare, and though the prospective book’s prospective title had “American Empire” in it, the American Empire Project I now co-run with my friend and TomDispatch regular Steve Fraser was still almost four years from crossing either of our minds.

I remembered Johnson, however.  As a young man, I had read his book on peasant nationalism in north China where, during the 1930s, Japanese invaders were conducting “kill-all, burn-all, loot-all” operations.  Its vision of how a revolution could gain strength from a foreign occupation stayed with me.  I had undoubtedly also read some of Johnson’s well-respected work on contemporary Japan and I knew, even then, that in the Vietnam War era he had been a fierce opponent of the antiwar movement I took part in.  If I didn’t already know it, the proposal made no bones about the fact that he had also, in that era, consulted for the CIA. 

I certainly turned to his submission -- a prologue, a single chapter, and an outline of the rest of a book -- with a dubious eye, but was promptly blasted away by a passage in the prologue in which he referred to himself as having been a “spear-carrier for empire” and, some pages in, by this passage as well:

“I was sufficiently aware of Mao Zedong’s attempts to export ‘people’s war’ to believe that the United States could not afford to lose in Vietnam.  In that, too, I was distinctly a man of my times.  It proved to be a disastrously wrong position.  The problem was that I knew too much about the international Communist movement and not enough about the United States government and its Department of Defense.  I was also in those years irritated by campus antiwar protesters, who seemed to me self-indulgent as well as sanctimonious and who had so clearly not done their homework [on the history of communism in East Asia]… As it turned out, however, they understood far better than I did the impulses of a Robert McNamara, a McGeorge Bundy, or a Walt Rostow.  They grasped something essential about the nature of America’s imperial role in the world that I had failed to perceive.  In retrospect, I wish I had stood with the antiwar protest movement.  For all its naïveté and unruliness, it was right and American policy wrong.”

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Facing a changing demographic and a population slightly more educated about Republican fear campaigns has forced the GOP to try to go "over the top" on fear mongering.

It is now apparently the mainstream Republican position that it was NOT .... NOT ....19 fanatics guided by Osama Bin Laden and Khalid Sheik Mohammed who flew planes into to World Trade center....but all of Islam.

Every single Muslim in the world attacked New York on September 11th.

All 1.6 billion Muslims flew those planes.

The Global War on Terror, as it turns out, is not a war of the 99.99% percent of the civilized, thinking people of the world versus the .01% of radical murdering terrorists who happen to claim they are true Muslims.

As it turns out, (now that an election is near) it is a Holy War of Christians vs Muslims.

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