Isn’t he the one that Reagan referred to as a “drunk”?

What can you say about a man who can’t even run a baseball team, and trades away Sammy Sosa.

Why is it every time we get a Republican in office for more than 2 terms, the economy goes to hell?

Iran is a case in point of American hypocrisy. The US began interfering in the region to secure oil interests to the larger Middle East and prevent the Soviets from gaining anything. When a somewhat democratic Iranian government decided to give an oil concession to the USSR — in addition to already having been forced to grant one to US and UK oil companies — the CIA engineered a coup in 1953 to overthrow the Iranian government and impose the Shah of Iran; he was a weak monarch before, but the US elevated him and supported him financially in suppressing the people, torturing and brutalizing and murdering people for decades in the name of fighting “communists”; the US did the same throughout Latin America, by the way, especially in places like Guatemala, where Indios who shared the land were forced into indentured servitude by the US United Fruit Company. The only movement capable of overthrowing the Shah arose in 1979 with some Islamic fundamentalists who took some US hostages. However terrible it was, they were released alive. The Reagan administration reacts by funding Saddam Hussein in his 8-year war against Iran and supplies him with chemical weapons to do so — the very same “weapons of mass destruction” the US uses has an excuse to attack Iraq in 2003.

Still, Iran was moving forward and the very pro-American youth were making progress, however slowly. When 9/11 happened, a million Iranians took to the streets in Tehran in mourning and in support of America; I can’t think of that many proportionate numbers of Americans taking to the streets to mourn those of any nation, except Israel. The Bush administration, supported by the American people, gives his Axis of Evil speech threatening Iran needlessly. In the midst of the invasion of Iraq and the fears of the same happening to Iran, the Iranian leadership restricts election choices and the people select Ahmadinejad; he’s a bit of a fool in making some threats, but he’s done nothing. Iran decides to build up its nuclear program, and is perfectly within its rights to have a nuclear weapon because that’s the difference between how the US treated Iraq and how it treated North Korea. Don’t you get it? Iran is scared and there’s no reason to trust America to have that kind of monopoly on power when its people have behaved so ruthlessly. The Bush administration claims to care about Iraqis but there’s no evidence of this; he wouldn’t refuse to build permanent bases and made it so that the oil wouldn’t be ensured for Iraq’s future, but so American oil companies could come and profit from it. US tactics in Iraq are terroristic; thousands have died at the hands of the US military and private contractors like Blackwater and Haliburton. Do you even care?

If all you care about is America and want to keep blaming Muslims, then you’re no different from those who form Al Qaeda. They use terrorism, while your approach has killed millions across the world for decades to protect US economic interests. How is this moral. If we’re going to move toward peace, we must have leaders who understand that “the other” is just as capable of kindness and cruelty as we are and doesn’t just excuse American crimes because they’re by us and look for excuses to attack “the other”. Barack Obama is the most likely of the major candidates to do this. Palin still thinks the Vietnamese were evil to torture McCain, but wants to do the same to suspected “terrorists” (when most of those in Guantanamo Bay and Abu Graib are innocent), but she calls McCain heroic; this is hypocritical. McCain was dropping bombs and helping to kill millions of Vietnamese! Thousands still suffer from the birth defects from Agent Orange. The North Vietnamese were fighting to unite a Vietnam independent of US or French colonial rule; maybe it wasn’t the best form of government, but Ho Chi Minh had been begging for US aid for decades before.

This madness has to stop and, until you realize it, the rest of the world is going to keep hating the kinds of Americans that keep wanting to hurt others for their own selfish gain, using bogus claims of morality as an excuse.