I’m a different Christopher Hedges than the Pulitzer Prize winning author — but thanks for stopping by and sharing your thoughts.

Even IF, you are not, I hope my treatise on current political dynamics and Ron Paul were constructive. Good luck with your search to find the candidate that is right for you!

If you are THE Christopher Hedges, I like to thank you for providing an interesting forum, either way!

Cheers, and Good luck!

I think you clearly debunked what a fraud Sam Harris is, at your TruthDig “debate.” The guy brought up useless non-sequitur arguments, set up his own premises and went on to answer them, as if his own questions were first proposed by you. Harris was completely intellectually outnumbered. He talked slow, with gibberish, making silly irrelevant arguments and hypotheticals, delivered with utter condescension and disdain. What a hack! And I am a non-Christian, who believes in the unnamed power of the universe, that we yet have means to quantify. And I knew Harris was a hack, the first time I saw him on Stewart Brand’s the Long Now Foundation’s SALT speech. Though I find the entire motive behind that organization, filled with lingering pseudo intellectuals looking for funding and grants, to be highly suspect, to begin with.

Sam Harris, in your TruthDig encounter, reminded me of a spoiled brat who’s never left his zip code, yet seems to feel adequate in condescending to a world traveler, trying to explain to him what the planet is truly like. Sad part is, I can see that just because you were raised in a judeo-christian paradigm, the audience were already somewhat biased against you. Your did an utter smack down by quoting the passages from his book, exposing what a crooked crypto-neoCON this man truly is.

To me, it should have been clear to the audience that they were in presence of a neoCON interventionist, tyranny-of-good-intentions, naive, who believes suicide bombing happens in a socio-economic-political vacuum. Like a gun, while as a weapon, is inherently dangerous, nothing happens unless a human picks it up to pull the trigger. And neither does any religious text, unless a fanatic quotes it, to rationalize a corrupt, evil act; as you put it succinctly, in an act of “…externalizing evil.”

Occupation by a foreign power subjugating a sovereign populace is the number one reason for suicide bombing, as sited in Robert Pape’s “Dying to Win.” And you correctly pointed out, Tamil Tigers, Hindu, are the ones who pioneered suicide bombing, not muslims in Palestine. The only Presidential candidate who has brought up this fact, in the national debates, is Ron Paul.

I am not sure how you feel about Ron Paul’s brand of Austrian school of economics, but I am certain you’d share far more in common with the Doctor than the Dems, as far as foreign policy is concerned.

As for RP’s domestic policies? Well, regardless of what Federal pork other candidates may be promising, they’re just lying for political expediency, since they have no means of really paying for it. The fact is, we’re broke. We do not have any money. The Congress is debating raising the debt cealing, again! They’ll never be able to pay for what they’ve promised the American people. The Feds are bankrupt; they’re running a fiat Ponzi scheme with the Federal Reserve using plunge protection team to prop up the stock market and bailing out Wall St. with taxpayer funds and call it injecting “liquidity,” while continuing to monetize debt notes and bonds no foreigners are willing to bear, now.

The Feds, continue to devalue the dollar. And as history teaches us, all empires end, when they devalue their own currency, by over producing it or physically debasing it by manipulating metal content in coinage. Along with stretching themselves too thin with wasteful, in our case, unConstitutional foreign occupations and military bases.

So in the end, America, may not have a choice, but to realize that the only economic solution is the ones that Ron Paul is offering; where we pull out 700 military bases in over 130 nations, saving half a Trillion to a TRILLION a year. And while he feels our entitlement programs are unConstitutional, he recognizes that we’ve raised three generations to be dependent on them. So with that money saved from overseas cutting he’ll use that to cushion domestic spending. And consistent with his libertarian background, he will honor the social contract of social security and medicare, while allowing the current generation of youths to opt out.

So unless such bold steps are implemented, there is no way in hell of paying 70 Trillion dollars in entitlements in the next two decades. Only then can we begin to act NOT like an empire, but a Republic built upon peaceful diplomacy and trade. And NOT with arms trade and threatening them colonialistically with military bases.

Sadly, I see too many liberals and progressives buying into a fraud like Obama, as easily as they bought into the lie of a conman, like Sam Harris: I have yet to meet one Obama supporter who actually realizes that he voted to extend the Patriot Act. Or that he voted FOR every single increase in Dubya’s war appropriations. Nor do they realize that he initially voted for the CreditCard industry crafted Bankruptcy reform act, before he voted against it. Nor do they realize that his chief economics adviser, Austan Goolsby, is member of the NAFTA, CAFTA, drafting Council on Foreign Relations, as well as Obama’s wife who is a member of its Chicago chapter.

Austan Goolsby is also a graduate of the bullsh*t corporatist/fascist, military industrial complex brand of University of Chicago school of interventionist, managed “freemarket,” in the vein of Irving and Bill Kristol. NOT like the real freemarket economics, like Mises-Rothbard’s Austrian School of Economics that Ron Paul espouses.

Plus, Goolsby is a Skull and Bones member, just like Kerry and the entire BushCrimeFamilia. Not to mention the fact that Obama’s foreign policy adviser is none other than the founder of al-CIA-da, who armed Osama bin Ladin in the first place, Zbiegniew Brezinski.

Now, how is ANY of that a “change??”

It is truly a sad day when, after 8yrs of the oligarch’s puppet, GWB, the liberal are so primed for change, yet so brainwashed, that they cannot tell that Obama and Hillary are both big govt, big corporatist, pro-American empire, pro-military industrial-mediatainment-big pharma-private prison complex-run puppets. Neither one is willing to close down the new Baghdad embassy the size of the Vatican. Nor are they willing to completely withdraw the military from Afghanistan or Iraq.

And now Hillary won’t withdraw until 2013, while Obama uses the meme of leaving “some advisory forces” in Iraq and Afghanistan. The same rationale that we used before the Vietnam War began in earnest. Are we not doing this backwards? At least we sent “advisory forces” in late 1950’s to Vietnam, in the lead up to the war, NOT after we’ve unsuccessfully occupied two nations. Though I suppose, one can argue that it was a massive success for war profiteers and oil co, and even perhaps designed to be that way, as Vietnam was; we were never supposed to leave Vietnam as it was the war profiteer’s dream.

Yet, we’re making the same mistakes (or just following intentional plans, crafted by the oligarchs) we did in Vietnam, with another non-existent threat based on fraud of endless “war on terror.” Not to mention utter obliteration of civil rights at home. And yet, Obama and Hillary, not to mention, McCain, are all for the further continued militarization of America at home, and at abroad, if their voting record is of any indication.

The only man who has always consistently stood against the American Empire, has been Ron Paul. Yet, even the alternative media are doing the bidding of MSM, by utterly ignoring him, and ridiculing him, his platform, and his supporters. May be we do deserve the govt we (s)elect.

I hope you have a chance to enlighten the fraud that is Obama, the crypto-neoCON, by simply exposing his actual voting records to your readers. And also digging deeper into Tony Rezko, Nadhmi Auchi, and Felix Rohatyn connection with Obama. Oh it gets deeper.

The only peace candidate seems to be Ron Paul. He has a 20+ years of Constitutional Congressional record to back it up. I hope that at least you can shed some light into this man’s courage.

Funny how the racist smear against Ron Paul, with the “newsletters” were timely released by TNR’s Jamie Kirchick, on the midnight of the NH primary. The New Republic, as you know, was owned by the ultra likudist neoCON, Marty Peretz. Yet, no one seemed to care that this news just happened to be released in the manner that it did, by Jamie Kirchick, a self-professed “liberal” who was in full support of none other than another fellow neoCON, Rudy Giuliani.

Odd how Kirchick contacted the neoNazi Bill White, whom he falsely accused the RP campaign of having intimate connections with, just before the “newsletters” were released midnight of the NH primary. Not any more weirder than the fact that, the said “racist invective” was written by none other than Bill White himself. But that fact was never raised. Nor was White’s reason for giving his own documents to Kirchick, due to some ridiculous perceived fear of zionist influence on Ron Paul by his staffers, several of which happen to be Jewish.

So, while the “RP newsletters” may have been the only perceived stain in his past, everyone, including White and Kirchick admit that Ron Paul NEVER wrote them. Nor has RP ever expressed such sentiments in public, nor in private life. At worst, Ron Paul may have hurt some people’s sensibilities by not tending tho his own publication better. A simple case of business negligence, at worst.

But to put things in perspective, the Iraqi authorization, a Constitutional duty abdicated by the Congress to leave all the blame on the puppet presidency of GWB, voted on by Hillary and McCain, and further war funding increases voted by those two and Obama and the rest of 109th and 110th Congress, ARE DIRECTLY RESPONSIBLE for deaths of 600,000+ Iraqis, thousands of Afghanis, 4000 American deaths, 60,000 American injuries. Not to mention a whole generation of youths destroyed, millions of American losing Constitutional rights at home. We are now known as a nation that tortures, secretly kidnaps its own citizens and rendition foreigners.

So in fact, all “leading” three candidates, are WAR CRIMINALS, period.

Their acts are directly responsible for the world despising America. Though ironically, the Congress and the Dem and GOP candidates, along with GWB, have done more to lift the veil of illusion about America than anyone else in history: like Rome, we’re nothing more than a militant empire, wrapped in pop-culture, and sold to the world via Madison Ave. and Hollywood movie propaganda.

In closing, I’d like to say that I enjoy your work greatly. Please keep up the great work. I would like to thank you personally, for exposing Sam Harris, as the militant, interventionist, crypto-neoCON that he really is. I hope you do the same with Obama, Hillary, and McCain.

With much respect,

Lucky C.

American SouthWest

An Obama – Paul ticket — that’d probably get people very excited (and swooning just at the thought).

I don’t think people really know who they are voting for — I heard a conversation about the GOP vs. Democrats and the person talking had the two positions reversed. Even party labels don’t identify the parties these days when the coverage seems to be personality driven because policy talk is too “wonkish.”