Can we truly afford to return to the destructive view that America is the real source of the world’s troubles?

BBC headline: “Pope in Visit to Religious Relic.” Coals to Newcastle.

Jonathan Cook provides a good demolition of Israeli lies and exaggerations about the late unpleasantness, including claims that over a billion Israelis were forced to flee their homes because of Hezbollah rockets, while another 1.7 trillion were in bomb shelters. Some of these lies are about pretending to have suffered more than the Lebanese, and some are because the Israeli government intends to stiff the Israeli Arabs who are half the population of northern Israel and suffered a disproportionate number of deaths, damaged buildings etc.

We’ve been hearing a bit lately about military families winding up paying usurious rates on payday loans, which effects security clearances. The California state senate rejected a bill to cap those interest rates at 36%.

Secretary of War Rumsfeld had an op-ed piece in the LA Times today. As always, he had a lot of questions and they were all rhetorical, designed, he said, “to guide us during this struggle against violent extremists.” Here are those questions:

• With the growing lethality and availability of weapons, can we truly afford to believe that vicious extremists can somehow be appeased?

• Can we really continue to think that free countries can negotiate a separate peace with terrorists?

• Can we truly afford to pretend that the threats today are simply “law enforcement” problems rather than fundamentally different threats requiring fundamentally different approaches?

• Can we truly afford to return to the destructive view that America — not the enemy — is the real source of the world’s troubles?

Let the great debate begin! I like how each one has that “can we really” or “can we truly” phrase, as if someone had already said yes and he’s responding, No, can we troooly blame America first (a phrase he’s been very fond of recently)? Rummy says the question is “whether we believe that the defense of liberty is worth the cost.” Gee, I’m pretty sure that’s a trick question.

To which you can respond in the comment link below. I haven’t gotten HaloScan working, but I can cobble together comments links individually. It’s just a pain in the ass and it may disappear if I ever do get HaloScan functional.