Obama chooses longtime Sen. Joe Biden

Springfield, Illinois--It's great to be wrong about this choice! Senator Obama has made a much better decision than I thought he was capable of--he's no slouch, and an intelligent man. I do believe he's going to win thanks to this decision. While Biden voted to approve the use of force in Iraq, he was one of the first in the Senate who did so to admit it was a big mistake.

Biden isn't perfect--not by a long-shot--but he's better than most of the other possible choices that Obama could have made. Choosing Hillary Clinton would have been a bad idea of variety of reasons.

Namely, that the Clinton campaign was willing to do anything to defame candidate Obama to win. You cannot trust someone like that as a running mate under any conditions, and it's likely that Mrs. Clinton would have done a lot of back-stabbing.

Considering the new and expanded power of the office of the vice president under Dick Cheney, the damage could have been incredible to an Obama presidency, a potential death-blow (that we wouldn't know the details of for years). The wounds between both camps are hardly healed, but they might be with the voters.

For myself, the real tests will come in the first month of an Obama presidency. Some of the "fixing" is going to require going after the former members of the Bush II administration. I don't expect that there will be any significant or fundamental changes in their economy, their government (not really ours), the damage done to our Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and our illegal presence in the Middle East.

The GOP is not solely responsible for all of this. The Democratic Party and their incumbents in Congress own a great share of the blame for standing down on their responsibility to rein-in a lawless presidency--the most lawless in our history, bar none. These precedents cannot be allowed to stand and their reversal must be part-and-parcel of a genuinely progressive agenda.

Now, the GOP is making all kinds of predictable comments on the Biden nomination that aren't going to float with any but the most ignorant authoritarian, but there are similar threads in the speeches of Obama and Biden that are sometimes troubling. How much they invest in these themes will be borne-out in their policies. But: it's good to be wrong sometimes. Senator Joe Biden voted against the revision of FISA and the telecom immunity provisions. The best part of all of this will be watching Biden beat on the GOP's incumbents. They've earned it, and-then-some.

MISS BIG FAKE BOOBIES, SREBRENICA, IRAQ, AND OJ

"The bombing of Yugoslavia in the spring of 1999 allegedly to stop ethnic cleansing and prevent the Balkans from becoming once again the powder keg of Europe has backfired. Kosovo has become exclusively an Albanian province with the exception of a few stalwart Serbians in the Mitrovica area who live surrounded by barbed wire and are threatened daily with murder and mayhem by their Albanian neighbours. The Balkans, since the end of the bombing, have been in constant turmoil caused by the KLA terrorist activities." --James Bissett, former Canadian ambassador to Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Albania, 1990-1992.

“It's very expensive to be me. It's terrible the things I have to do to be me.” --Anna Nicole Smith


Our Apologist Mainstream Media--Remember the O.J. trial? I do, and I want that memory erased for good. Give me some of that Total Recall erasing, like it was never there. It's good that her tits are big enough to hide the rapidly disintegrating wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but what about "the Juice"?

That moron was used to hide most of the facts of the Balkans war that the Clinton administration was waging, done primarily to dismantle Yugoslavia as a third-path economy, rather than a "humanitarian-invasion." There is no such thing, it's a fiction.

Where was the media coverage of the invasion of Rwanda during that same period? There wasn't much, because the place wasn't seen as strategically important or valuable at that time. But at least we rewarded Osama Bin Laden with a precinct and gave him a Bosnian passport during the Balkans conflict.

Correct, you're a sucker if thought there was really a systematic ethnic-cleansing in the Balkans. Ours--and other NATO forces, along with mercenaries--murdered more human-beings than the Serbs could ever muster. But, our crimes don't exist, only other countries do that. The one thing

Ironically, we can thank George W. Bush for stripping-away this delusion forever, with his openly-criminal usage of illegal rendition, torture, murder--he's given the game away, and there's no more denying that these tactics are common features of our foreign policy. More revelations are coming.

Look at Dafur: has anyone invaded them to stop a real genocide? War crimes are a part of war, but the atrocities in Srebrenica--all Bosniak Muslims--amounted to the murders of 8,000 people. Sorry, but as bad as this sounds, that's nothing compared to the death tolls in Iraq, and that's just one example of American war crimes. All "ethnic-cleansing" did was to provide a pretext to invade, which NATO knew would occur when Croatia and Slovenia notified them through Germany that they wanted to split from Yugoslavia: "Germany granted recognition to Slovenia and Croatia on 18 December 1991, while other European community members and the US followed suit," states the Nations Encyclopedia.

This is also from www.nationsencyclopedia.com, and is followed by what is the standard line on NATO involvement with this sentence: "The international community stood firmly in support of the preservation of Yugoslavia."

Strange, since everything they did in the run-up to the Balkans war made this an impossibility.

At the same time, though, where are the leaders of the international community who also helped to bring events in the Balkans about? Have we ever heard one word of apology or acknowledgement of failure or responsibility from anyone in leadership positions of Unprofor, the United Nations or the major governments that they got it wrong? ...We are rightly looking for full accountability from the parties in the region. I am sorry that we are not doing the same for ourselves. (William D. Montgomery was special representative of the U.S. president and secretary of state for Bosnian Peace Implementation in 1996-97, U.S. ambassador to Croatia from 1998 to 2000 and ambassador to Serbia and Montenegro from 2000 to 2004.) (IHT, 07.12.2005)

NATO charter members at that time knew full-well that the atrocities were coming, and merely allowed a force of 375 UN peacekeepers to defend the village and its inhabitants. But the Serbs suffered greater-losses at the hands of NATO:

If what happened to Kosovo Albanians and Bosnian Moslems was genocide, what of the treatment of Orthodox Serbs? After NATO's air war, 200,000 were driven from Kosovo. Most who remain cower behind barbed-wire barricades in Mitrovica. Altogether, 2 million Serbs were expelled from Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo, and 240 of their churches were destroyed. When this happens to anyone else, it's called ethnic cleansing and cultural genocide. The tragedy has its roots in the early 1990s, when the West decided Bosnians and Croatians were entitled to their own states. (Free Republic, 12.03.2001)

Yeah, but what does this have to do with Anna Nicole Smith and OJ? They provide media "white-outs", a distraction. Yes, you take a the disastrous lives of worthless celebrities who are on-hand at that particular historical moment, and you make them a SHIBBOLETH. Anyone like these vermin will do, just so long as they're vulnerable due to their own behaviors and their infliction on others. Feel inflicted? Manipulated? I do. If O.J.'s head exploded, or he was run-over by a truck, I wouldn't care.

Anna Nicole Smith? Her life was worthless compared to someone who's being put-upon by our troops in Iraq, or anywhere our foreign policy has dominion. That's right: American foreign policy needs people like this to function nowadays, pathetic. And why do think Hillary Clinton won't apologize for her vote on authorizing the use of force in Iraq?

Has her husband ever apologized for the murdering of 500,000 Iraqi children during the 1990s? Taken together, Clinton's and Bush's policies towards Iraq amount to attempts at genocide, yet nobody bats-an-eye. America gets the world it deserves. They get Joe Lieberman (who called Muslim extremists fighting Serbs "freedom fighters") and George W. Bush.

Revised 08.31.2008

Free Republic on Bosnia/Croatian war:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/582809/posts

International Herald Tribune on Srebnecia's 10th Anniversary:
http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/07/11/opinion/edmont.php

Former Canadian Diplomat James Bisset's Take on the KLA:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/BIS111A.html

Nationsencycolpedia.com on Croatia:
http://www.nationsencyclopedia.com/Europe/Croatia-HISTORY.html

A Serbian Take on Osama Bin Laden and the War on Terrorism (From 2001):
http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/News/Trifkovic/NewsST091901.htm