Appeasement

It's a words thats being thrown around a bit lately, generally in a negative connotation, and understandably so. Giving in to a despot is generally a bad idea, but there's a huge difference between appeasement and diplomacy. Obama has said that he would like to talk to the leaders of Iran and other countries with whom we have rocky relations, no shit. Obviously the first step in foreign relations is to talk to people, why does this piss people off so much? I assume people saw the Chris Mathews video from Hardball where he made a complete ass of some complete ass from the GOP, if not go here. All of us on the left are loving that video, even though we generally aren't very big fans of Chris, but when someone decides they aren't going to allow talking points to go unchallenged then we're going to cheer. Seriously we need more of this, when someone make a historical reference, we should make sure they know what they are talking about. So thank you, on that day Chris you acted like a journalist, congrats, now keep it up.

Now that we've talked a little about appeasement, how about some more on the subject from Pandagon. They also have a big of a laugh about the possible re-making of the right-wing cult classic "Red Dawn." First off I gotta say I used to love that flick. I haven't seen it since I was a kid (which might explain a lot) but I just loved the idea of a band of kids fighting of one of the worlds most powerful armies, how could they do that? Guerrilla warfare, terrorism, whatever it took. Then again if you wanted to re-make it in a believable context then instead of mid-western kids they would probably be Iraqi kids blowing up American soldiers, and somehow I doubt that would go over well. If they still want it to be American kids defending our country from foreign invaders then I'm not sure who the enemy would be, China maybe?? They'll probably make the enemies Arab terrorists because who gives a shit about realism in "Red Dawn" remake? Other than me.

The whole thing is just insane, seriously we now chastise a politician because he wants to try talking to world leaders who we have major problems with rather than do as his opponents and simply shout abuse at them while threatening to bomb, or even nuke them. WTF?!?!?! I've said this many times but it sickens me think think back to being a kid at school and what I was taught about our country and the ideals we were founded on and how 15 years later we are debating which humans have human rights? Do all citizens have equal rights? Is torture acceptable? I think about the pride my teacher had when telling us about how our country has the two longest unfortified borders in the world. That was a point of pride because as a nation we were so loved by our neighbors that we didn't even need to put a fence or (Gasp) soldiers along our borders. It's going to take a whole lot more than a new president to fix the fear we have embedded into our collective psyche. Good luck to us all.