B Defends Himself from an Attack on the Right

A Red Mind In A Blue State responded to my last post. I respond in kind.

The energy crisis is easily solved, and the jobs and prosperity that solving the energy crisis would bring would solve many of the economic ills you mention, if we brought the same national resolve to solving that problem as we do to insuring that the oil lines are made safe for Haliburton and the Carlyle Group.

I have said this before as a joke, but I also mean it seriously. Just solve the energy crisis, and give all the patents to Haliburton. But at least that way, we wouldn't have to go through this whole business of pretending we care about one problem in the Middle East when we really care about another problem entirely.

The choice is not between sending kids to the Middle East and having grandma freeze in the winter while you can't find a job. Half the people I know don't have jobs now. The choice is between whether we send kids over to protect the price of cheap oil, or whether we develop alternative solutions here in the United States, and find a way to fairly apportion what may (or may not) be the greater cost of domestic energy.

Iraq has to be a working democracy, not a kind of democracy, not the Phillipines, because the United States has staked its reputation and prestige in making it one. And what democracy and freedom means in the United States is a whole different thing entirely from what it means everywhere else.

If all you want from Iraq is all you say you want, if the United States does not want or need a true election or a working democracy in Iraq, then there was no reason that France and all those other morons in the United Nations couldn't have had a say in when and how we get Saddan.

Anyone could have replaced one corrupt dictator with another corrupt ruler more to its liking. The United States went in alone because it did not, and should not, trust other people to set up American-style freedom properly. But if we are not going to set it up properly, if we were going to compromise our values anyway, we could have compromised them at the United Nations in March 2003 just as easily as Rumsfeld seems to want to in January 2005.

Unless, of course, we went in for the oil.