Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, religiously appointed figure head of Iran, reaches out to Noble Americans. Judging by the content of the letter, I think he meant Ignorant Americans. To the unwiiting, to the bleeding hearts, I’m sure the letter will warm their……

We received your letter the other day and have only one reponse to say to you. In the words of our long departed WWII Hero General McAuliffe during the battle of Bastogne.

“NUTS!”

Have a great day!

Mrs. Kia K. Jones, United States of America

gee honora, i thought you liberals don’t believe in God. i mean you liberals are trying to get rid of christmas & other christian holidays/ want “One nation under God” taken out of the Pledge of Alleigance / want to take out “in God we trust” in all currency

Gee starblazer, I thought someone’s belief in God was determined by their personal choices, not by their political affliation but I guess I am wrong. Now that I think about, when I registered Democrat I was forced to take an oath renouncing God.

And again, removing “God” from currency and the pledge is a fringe belief held by very few members of either party. Even so, one could be a firm believer in God and still want His name removed from the pledge and our money because not every American believes in God and this country was founded on a seperation of church and state.

gee honora, i thought you liberals don’t believe in God.
Starblazer on November 30, 2006 at 12:47 PM

You were wrong.

They are so twisted by their dogma into anti-human poses (wishing for their Mahdi-Utopia varient of the Worker’s-Paradise-that-never comes”) that the only answer back to their apocalyptic threats is rational force fro our side.

To prevent these homicidal irrationalists from pursuing their nihilistically delusional Perfect state.

…while I have my doubts about GregH, I don’t think that Honie or Connie are “more loyal to the terrorist cause than they are loyal to this country”. They have different visions of what the country should be, is all. You can talk with such a person. As I said, GregH excites my doubts, and I would hope that he accepts this in the spirit in which it is offered.

One thing that I *WOULD* question some folks about — Honie and Connie possibly — is being loyal first to the *IDEA* of this nation and then, and only after, to the nation itself. The idea, the theory of what the nation is or might be or what one has come to think that it is — sort of like that think RFK used to quote (from Shaw?), “I see things the way they might be and say why not” — is a very slippery thing, and a very inhuman thing, as well.

The nation isn’t what it might be, or what it started out to be. The nation has been sold as many sorts of things to many sorts of people. What the nation has *BEEN* is a concrete thing. It’s open to interpretation, but they’re interpretations of facts on the ground, not opinions in a coffeehouse or student union somewhere.

One must be loyal to America’s past, to its traditions, and to those who’ve built the today we’re standing on. This is honoring *REAL* people — parents, grandparents, uncles and great aunts — who did real things, good and bad. We honor the good and perpetuate it, spread itif we can; and we learn from the bad, and try to recognize it when it tries to surface again.

We can’t allow ourselves to be more loyal to an idea than to people. Ideals have a way of festering. Minds have a way of changing at the first whiff of difficulty. One is taught that America was founded upon ideals, but that’s mythological claptrap. It was founded on the notion that the government should do just enough to allow the citizen to make and grow and transport and sell his goods, build his house, and have a say in things.

What is more, history tells us that those who build nations on ideals beyond the welfare of the citizen and the ability of the citizen to tend his vine and fig tree have been some of the most intrusive, harsh, incompetent, imperialistic and murderous regimes to come along.

We need to be loyal to the nation, which is ultimately being loyal to our neighbors. There are lots of ways of doing it right, and a few iron-clad ways of doing it wrong, chief among them being the assumption that you know better how to spend your neighbors’s money, teach his kids, direct his affairs and fight his fights than he does himself.

The other guarenteed way of betraying your nation and your neighbor is simple: fix upon an idea and hold to it, fixedly. Usually that leads to whatever that idea *WAS* being replaced with a universally bad idea: that your neighbor is a villain.

Once we’re going down that road, there won’t be a nation to be loyal *TO*.

Puritan1648 on November 30, 2006 at 12:14 AM

I am not sure I completely understand this, but IMO, my first loyalty to God and my family, my second loyalty is to my country. I think the “idea” of the nation is important; we should support our leaders when they are leading us towards the ideal, we should not when they are not. The ideal is therefore in a sense more important that people–people come and go, people are good or bad–but the ideal remains. If you don’t agree America was founded on ideals, as you state, well you obviously won’t buy into this.

I think the idea of connection with the past, family, friends, neighbors, is more of an emotional thing–I love my country based on that. Loyalty is different from love though.

Anyway, I wax (poorly) philosophic long enough.

You got the essence of what I was getting at. The longer the dilly dallying continues, the higher the cost.

I don’t pretend to know that much about history, but that reference sounds rather Churchillian.

It is. The quote, which he spoke to Chamberlain after he signed the Munich pact with Hitler was:

“You were given the choice between war and dishonor. You chose dishonor
and you will have war.”

Krydor’s point lies in the second sentence of the quote.

Recall that after Arafat’s rejection of Barak’s last offer of almost everything the Palestinians had demanded in exchange for a genuine peace agreement with Israel, Clinton had no choice but to blame Arafat and the Palestinians for the failure, since it was obvious that the Palestinians were not – and had no interest in – negotiating in good faith for genuine peace with the Israelis. That was then – this is now: The Hamas leadership threatens Israel with a “new” Palestinian intifada if Israel doesn’t agree to every Palestinian demand within the next 6 months. But one side asceding to the other’s demands is not “negotiation.”

As for your anti-Semitic hate, if you’ll let me know the next time you’re in New York, I would enjoy meeting you one-on-one, so that I can fully respond to your hateful remarks in the only way you’ll understand.

Dear Mahmoud

So, the insulated Iranian President ventured out away from his hard-line handlers and sent a letter to the people of the United States. What an accomplishment, sir! This must be your first real contact with a common American since you took part in the terrorist attack on our Embassy in 1979. The years have been kind to you, Mr. President; you still have that spark of stupidity running through your veins. I trust you will encourage your people to write to us, too. We can be pen pals and exchange stories about the freedoms we enjoy in our countries.

Your people enjoy blowing themselves up and we enjoy blowing you up. You would think we would all get along better.

Of course he is.

A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear. [Marcus Tullius Cicero]

’bout time somebody got a li’l “cranky”!!!

Bite my crank.

-America

So, what he’s saying is that America has a choice between dishonour and war. Hopefully, the rest of that paraphrase is known, and to whom the credit belongs.

Krydor on November 30, 2006 at 1:29 AM

I believe you’ll find, if you read carefully, that the choice is between reality and idealism.

To quote our younger set: GET REAL!