Juan Cole today: Informed Comment Bush is on vacation, his favorite place to be during a major crisis. The August retreat is the only open admission he makes that Cheney and Rumsfeld are actually running the country, and he just doesn’t need to be in his office. The only difference between his stonewalling of Lebanon and the way he let Continue Reading
There is much more I want to blog about this book…..I’m almost done with it, and it has quite a few things which get me into a theo-political blogging mood. There were some comments of the author about John Foster Dulles, who was a man author Kinzer describes as “a man of profound faith”…..and yet the way he describes Dulle’s Continue Reading
The book I’m reading, Overthrow by Stephen Kinzer, which I just mentioned in my last post, is forefront in my mind again as I read yet further in Juan Cole’s post from today: Informed Comment Iran is no credible military threat to the United States, though US warmongers are always depicting it as such, rather as they manufactured ramshackle 4th-world Continue Reading
Stuff like this (hat tip to Bruce Prescott) is horrifying. It’s like a continued, intensified sequel to the book I’m in the process of reading, Overthrow by Stephen Kinser. NPR did an interview with him (On Terri Gross’s Fresh Air), which caused me to pick the book up a few times in the bookstore while browsing, and I eventually bought Continue Reading
This question, shortly following my previous quote from the same post by Juan Cole, identifies a scary thought: Informed Comment And, why was Condi Rice’s reaction to the capture of two Israeli soldiers and Israel’s wholesale destruction of little Lebanon that these were the “birth pangs” of the “New Middle East”? How did she know so early on that this Continue Reading
Juan Cole compares the EVIL factor between the Iranian president and the Israeli leader: Informed Comment The difference between Ahmadinejad and Olmert is that the Iranian president is a blowhard. The one who had practical plans to wipe a country off the map was Olmert. Not to mention the irony of the insistence that Iran cannot be allowed to have Continue Reading
It has past the point where anyone who is slightly human, Christian or not, God-fearing or not, has to say this is INEXCUSABLE; this is EVIL. Informed Comment NaharNet writes, “Twenty-six of the civilians killed in Friday’s air raids died when Israeli aircraft bombed the village of Qaa in the Bekaa Valley near the Syrian border, police and Red Cross Continue Reading
Informed Comment the Israelis are engaged in collective punishment on a vast scale. They maintain that rocket launching sites are embedded in these villages. But since Hizbullah keeps firing large numbers of rockets, it does not actually appear to be the case that the Israelis are hitting the rocket launchers. They are demonstrably hitting civilian houses and apartment buildings in Continue Reading
Again I ask: How Long? Informed Comment Israeli war planes scored a direct hit on a building in the Shiite village of Qana where destitute farming folk, including old people, women and children, had taken refuge in the basement from Israeli bombing raids. At least 54 are dead, as bodies are pulled from the rubble. 19 children are confirmed dead Continue Reading
How long? ???? How much of this does it take for the world to see the absolute folly of this? How can any sane individual actually believe that this is any kind of sane response, directly feeding into more of the same? Rice Postpones Lebanon Trip After Israeli Strikes Kill 54 – New York Times At least 54 people were Continue Reading
Pastor John had two posts over the past day or so that really pack a whallop. Here are some highlights, but do go and read these. Valuable insights for us. (Of course, I have comments interspersed), and in my previous post, I also draw from these same posts from Pastor John. Pastor John Wright (quoting from a speech by the Continue Reading
Pastor John expresses outrage over the “Christian” lobby for war in the Middle East; this so-called “theology of the end times”. Pastor John Wright conservative evangelicals Christians in North America have mobilized to lobby for increasing the violence, and legitimating the violence. They seem to think that violence involving the state of Israel (very different from the Jews and the Continue Reading
The folllowing sentence from a previous quote I pulled from a Hauerwas book (the post url is the link at the start of this quote) gives me an additonal flash of something like an insight into the discussion Eric and I had last week over the issue of what I called then “abaondoning the world to the chaos” (which, at Continue Reading
The following, a quote from Hauerwas, lays it out….and it seems to be such an obvious and no-brainer first step, start from here, type of response to Jesus’ life and message that I can only shake my head as I see “theologians” such as Al Mohler just plain ignore the whole thing. NEVER mentions “peace” except as that “inner peace”, Continue Reading
This post from 9th street Records links to this clip that I remeember seeing a while back, before Steven Colbert went “undercover” as a Bush-ditto-head (and he’s just as funny in that , even more so sometimes, as he was before…..great stuff) 9th Street Records: WORDS I’ve been wondering what seeds are being sown right now. This segment from the Continue Reading