YES WE CAN...what?

[Wylde Abandyn]

What comes after the initial YES WE CAN slogan? Looking for the unspoken follow up to this phrase, both positive and negative. Call it the fill in the blank game. Here are some examples:

YES WE CAN...say one thing and do another.
YES WE CAN...vote to raise everyone's taxes and not pay our own.
YES WE CAN...fan the flames of racism rather than judge people by the content of their character.
YES WE CAN...screw things up just as much as the Republicans, but in a different way.
YES WE CAN...what?

[Wylde Abandyn]

That's right, pickleallen. If we're nice to them, they will be nice to us. And then we will all frolic merrily about the meadow, picking daisies and chasing butterflies. Good plan!

[P.A.]

as usual you chose to read a post as you wish to. I never said be nice to them I said don't become them. If we become them then we lose and they win.

[Wylde Abandyn]

Yes, as usual, I chose to read a post as I wish to. Just like everyone else. Perception and perspective drive that sort of thing. Funny how that works, isn't it?

[P.A.]

No, just very strange how you misquote and then defend it.

[Wylde Abandyn]

I didn't misquote...in fact I didn't quote you at all...I interpreted your words based on my perception of you and filtered through my perspective. You're so silly, pickleallen. I'm sure you mean well, but your approach simply protects the enemy and puts the rest of us at risk.

[P.A.]

And your approach shows a lack of reason and clear thinking. Your way creates enemies instead of defeating them.

[Wayne L. Christensen]

I am reminded that we live in a nation made up of people from all over the world.
All but the Native Americans and perhaps if we go back further, even they were strangers here. Still, well after 200 years there are those who cannot see beyond the color of skin, or the clothing someone may wear, too say nothing of religion. There are people who choose to maintain a narrow perception and perspective, because it feels safer and supports any biases they may have. Still, I wonder, as I watch why is it people who use diplomacy, and dialog reach a broader number of people, than those whom act like the bully on the playground. Sometimes, your greatest enemy is the one person who looks just like you.

[funesthememorious]

If you want to work out, you need a gym.
If you want to torture, you need a gulag.

From the Washington Post:

The CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe, according to U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement.

The secret facility is part of a covert prison system set up by the CIA years ago that at various times has included sites in eight countries, including Thailand, Afghanistan and several democracies in Eastern Europe, as well as a small center at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, according to current and former intelligence officials and diplomats from three continents.

[...]

While the Defense Department has produced volumes of public reports and testimony about its detention practices and rules after the abuse scandals at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison and at Guantanamo Bay, the CIA has not even acknowledged the existence of its black sites. To do so, say officials familiar with the program, could open the U.S. government to legal challenges, particularly in foreign courts, and increase the risk of political condemnation at home and abroad.

Well, we can't have any of those foreign legal challenges from quaint organizations like the International Court of Justice in the Hague or queasy countries that might go rubbery to having our torturing outsourced to "black sites" within their borders. And, my oh my, we certainly cannot disclose anything like mini-malls of super-double-secret made-in-America gulags because, hey, that might lead to "political condemnation." Now there's an embedded syllogism Socrates would love:

-- We can detain and torture enemy combatants without impunity in hidden foreign locations.
-- Political condemnation might put a stop to such illegal, unethical, or immoral activities.
-- Therefore, shut your trap so we can do whatever the fuck we want.

How logically democratic and so very like us -- we have now become the old Soviet Union.

Let's climb in the Wayback Machine and remember Russia's rationale for gulags. From Anne Applebaum's Gulag: A History:

The Gulag had antecedents in Czarist Russia, in the forced-labor brigades that operated in Siberia from the seventeenth century to the beginning of the twentieth. It then took on its modern and more familiar form almost immediately after the Russian Revolution, becoming an integral part of the Soviet system. Mass terror against real and alleged opponents was a part of the Revolution from the very beginning -- and by the summer of 1918, Bush Lenin, the Republican's Revolution's leader, had already demanded that enemy combatants "unreliable elements" be locked up in black sites concentration camps outside the United States major towns.

Authorities gotta have extraordinary police powers to combat fanaticism, right? That's why Dick Cheney is lobbied lawmakers to exempt the CIA from an amendment that would ban torture and inhumane treatment of prisoners, including those in clandestine prisons. After all, people incarcerated in hush-hush Gitmos are evil, right?

A gulag is a gulag is a gulag is a gulag...

If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
-- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

[Wylde Abandyn]

Sounds like they're doing their job of protecting us.

[z100]

YES WE CAN... Tie our shoes

[darroll]

Now the Post Office is getting a bailout.
Every program that they run, (the government)

fizzles.

Maybe they should take over UPS.

[Wylde Abandyn]

If healthcare is a RIGHT, then why isn't food a RIGHT, and clothing and housing and transportation? Why not just let the government take over EVERYTHING?