Picture of the Day - 1.3 Billion Muslims
Pakistani tribesmen gather to protest against an airstrike in Damadola, 200 km (123 miles) northwest of Islamabad, January 14, 2006. (Reuters)Think about how different our position would be if the US had captured Bin Laden at Tora Bora and not invaded Iraq.
There's a reason the neoconservatives were in the foreign policy wilderness before Cheney and Rumsfeld brought them in to form their "cabal."
Accepting Dick Cheney as VP and trusting him to lead the transition team may have been Bush's biggest mistake. Almost every problem beyond the economic stems from that trust in Dick Cheney.
ALSO: There are very public calls for Musharraf's resignation from the right which is a pretty big deal considering the dictatorship that is Pakistan.
In college, I knew a number of kids from wealthy Pakistani families. My sense is that they would be against this, but I don't have any real feel for the depth of the calls against Musharraf. As usual, the press is portraying 150 million Pakistanis as all believing the same thing, but I have a sense that it is much more like Venezuela where there was a substantial minority of the wealthy, successful, and urban who supported the US politicians. From what I've read, support for the Islamic parties appears to be a majority, but I just don't have any sense of how broad that support really is.
posted by mikevotes at
7:23 AM
2 Comments:
Mike-
You know that there are lots of folks around our nation who don't give a hoot about any wrong-doings of this administration, the Pentagon and the CIA. In fact, on our local Toledo blog, someone published this absurdity: If you havn't noticed, we have not had one attact on US soil since fighting these poor excuses for humans in Iraq. I wonder how you would feel about this war if a smart bomb were to go off near you and your loved ones???
As you have noted, down there in Texas you must deal with this type more often than we do up here in northern Ohio. How do these kind of people become so ignorant, so misguided? I'm beginning to believe that their personality type is a propaganda-sponge, soaking up any and all spurious output of the Pentagon and the Bush administration.
I suspect that a great number of these propaganda-sponges are also enthusiastic customers for those TV hucksters who permeate the cable channels.
By
liberal_dem, at 8:21 AM
Honestly, I don't really run into that many people who are like that. I do run into alot of blinders on Bush supporters, but usually, at least in the circles where I travel, their arguments attempt at reason.
They make the same point, that Bush is conducting the war on terror and that we have to trust him, but I've have noticed a growing defensiveness in their support. I would expect that under pressure, as their reasoning gets more strained to start to hear a more nuanced version of that.
With the falling poll numbers, Bush supporters will get either increasingly more strident, or far more quiet. It's one of those strange cultural facts that organizations under stress tend towards fundamentalism. And in the less understanding, this leads to strident sloganeering, see orwell's animal farm.
I really don't run into many of the working class Pasadena, gunrack Bush supporters. That's just not the circles I run in. Our tastes in restaurants,(theirs fried, mine indian vegetarian) music (country, classic jazz)entertainment(rodeo, art films) don't lead to much overlap.
So, I don't hit much of the "four legs good, two legs bad" crowd, but they do effect an impact on my local media, paper and newscasts.
But it's there.
And you can't blame people for being influenced by propaganda, we all are to some degree, and if my main source of news was my local broadcasts and paper, I would probably be much kinder to Bush. I really can't expect people who work 50 to 60 hours a week with a family and a highscool education to take to the internet and read foregn papers. Yes, they should be more openminded, but they've been hornswaggled by the Republican/country music/Christian myth. I can't really hope to dislodge that.
Mike
Oh, and by the way, congratulations on the troll. They're always sort of a special blogger experience.
By
mikevotes, at 8:57 AM
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