All The Won needs to do is declare amnesty for 10 million illegals and voila! INSTANT RE-ELECTION, regardless of what those pesky legal citizens have to say…

a reasonable man would have considered that negligent. But not the Leftist media who vilified ENRON ans the poster boy purveyor of corporate greed…

As far as pension funds, Obama seems to be able to do anything he wants to with them — like push fiscal policies which bankrupt them…(e.g. paying cents on the dollar to Chrysler’s creditors, many of which consisted of pension funds…)

That Kenyan Obammy symbolically slapped Great Britain in the face is undeniable. He has scads of protocol advisors which were probably screaming that such a gesture would be taken as an insult,; that the Mp3 player wouldn’t work; etc. If so and he just ignored them, he’s arrogant. If not, he’s not real bright.

That he has now turned on his one-time benefactor (BP) in order to use them as a politically expedient scapegoat is also beyond question. Big Oil and Bush – it’s the ultimate left wing dream bash. I saw an article in a recent Time mag about how Bush “under-regulated” the industry and thereby set us up for the Deep Horizon Spill. Yeah, right.

(It was the wacko enviros who insisted we not drill in ANWR – a vast moonscape in which shutting down an oil blow would have been easy and even if not, it’s a vast wasteland which would have suffered little from any oil spillage. But NOOOOO!! Let’s make oil companies drill a mile deep IN THE MIDDLE OF THE GULF OF MEXICO, AN ECONOMIC, RECREATIONAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL TREASURE!! Thanks a lot Green Peace.)

As far as “caring about what the world thinks,” Art is right: Obamma cares what the Muslim world thinks, just not the Anglo/Western World. Besides all that, who will get the ‘World’s Most Popular Country’ award like in high school was just a Dem stalking horse to beat up Bush with anyway. The world is not a playground: countries don’t have BFF’s and so forth. Countries make and break alliances in their best intersts all the time. What anyone thinks about it is, or should be, tough.

And as for the charge that Churchill “goaded” us into WWII, if he did, which I doubt very much, we should be thanking God everyday for it. Somehow i_m has the idea that an all German, Japanese and American world would have been some kind of prosperous, peaceful place, even assuming we could have beaten them back w/o Great Britain. Are U joking?

Indeed, I’ve considered the possibility that the Brits finally had enough of the O’s arrogance and blew the well themselves – as the ultimate slap in the face to Obammy. They knew it would cost them, but there are likely some Brits who still have both national pride and a backbone. Think about it – it’s the ultimate “Up Yours, Obama.”

Obama doesn’t care about resolving it (spill) because it will eventually create thousands, if not millions, of new gubmint dependents. Also, if it does create a riff between the U.S. and the U.K., how much weaker will our response then be to a nuclear Iran? A: A whole bunch weaker.

So, the dead fish has already spilled the beans – they LIKE crises in order to suspend the law, create dependents and weaken our great country.

“goad” the Japanese into attacking Pearl, which I very much doubt, he had plenty of great reasons to do so.

I can’t believe two such erudite personages as yourselves have fallen for the revisionist version of the proximate causes for our entry into the Pacific War.

Very briefly put, Japan suffered heavily in the Great Depression. A faction of nationalist militants grew up inside the Japanese government. They strove mightily to lead Japan into, first the domination of China, then the war with SE Asia and finally WWII.

After two nearly successful attempts to topple the Japanese govt. by assasination and the institution of martial law, in 1928 they engineered the assasination of Chang Tsolin, the ruler of Manchuria. The Chinese people were made of sterner stuff however, and the incident only served to infuriate them.

By the thirties, the Japanese had launched an undeclared war on China. On Sept 18, 1931, the Japanese Army blew up the tracks of a Japanese-owned railway in southern Manchuria. They then killed some Chines guards and fabricated a story of Chinese saboteurs for the world press. The so-called Mukden Railway incident gave the Japanese all the excuse they needed to invade and seize Manchuria. (If this is beginning to sound eerily similar to Hitler’s excuses for Nazi occupation of the Rhineland and depredations in and seizure of the Sudetenland, you’re beginning to get the picture. You know, the Fuhrer had to “save” or “protect” ethnic Germans from “persecution” in France, Czechoslovakia, etc…)

Of course, this further enraged the Chinese, leading to the beating of five Japanese Buddist priests in Shanghai in ’32 (one later died.) World opinion was then aroused against Nippon, which withdrew from the League of Nations in 1933. Suffice to say, the militarists were fully entrenched by then and the school system, indeed the entire country, began to prepare for global war.

The ultra-nationalists finally provoked a full scale war with China in 1937 when a Japanese Army regiment stationed in Tientsin created yet another excuse for armed conflict. This time they instigated unrest by shelling the Chinese fort of Wanping on another fabricated pretext. As we know, actually conquering China proved much more difficult than drumming up a few “outrages.”

Although the Japanese military leaders had boasted that they could conquer all of mainland China in three months, in reality, it took twice that long just to secure the city of Shanghai. By then, Japanese troops were in an ugly and vengeful mood.

In late November of ’37, three columns of Japanese troops advanced on the city of Nanking. What occurred in the next six weeks was so horrible it has become known down through history as “The Rape of Nanking”. It is a story of the grossest horror one can imagine. Just to give you an idea of the depravity that went on, John Rabe, the Nazi party leader of the town, protested the cruelty to the city’s population by the Japanese Army to HITLER.

If you want the sick details, read a book called, “The Rape of Nanking” by Iris Chang. Let me warn you beforehand, it is brutal, bestial and beyond sadistic. And it was just the bginning. All Japanese were not eradicated from the country until 1945.

So, please, no modern day analogies about how we cut off poor Japan’s oil. We did not butcher millions of innocent people. We did not have imperialist designs on half the globe. We did not cut off their oil on a whim.

And BTW, as long as I’m preachin’, we also did not drop the bomb on Nagasaki and Hiroshima because we were racists. Another book which might enlighten the curious is E. B. Sledge’s “With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa”. These guys fought two of the most horrific land battles ever fought in modern times and were not even on the Japanese mainland yet. And believe me, neither they, nor would have you, wanted to endure an amphibious landing on the home islands of Japan. Casualties were estimated to be over a million American men. Read “Hell to Pay: Operation DOWNFALL and the Invasion of Japan, 1945 to 1947″ by D.M. Giangreco. There is such a thing as evil.

is – “to cause somebody to act: to provoke or incite somebody into action.” Since, by your own concession, Japan was going to attack anyway, they needed very little “goading”. One might give FDR “credit” for allowing certain events to go unnoticed or un-acted upon, but that is a far cry from “goading”. Besides what should he have done?

As I pointed out, Japan was using her oil to subdue and brutalize a peaceful nation. An argument could easily be made that had we not shut off the gas pumps to Japan, we would have been morally complicit in the attack on and subjugation of China. If you will recall, the U.S. was accused of just that by contemporary Jewish voices who declared that the U.S., by ignoring the Jews plight in Europe in the late ’30′s and early ’40′s (a contention with which I disagree) and by not acting sooner was morally responsible for Jewish deaths up until the camps were liberated.

As I said, to me it is a ridiculous accusation. It took a World War to free the Jews and end their suffering. And, although heavily criticized for the Europe first strategy, which didn’t make sense to many people since the Japanese had attacked us, not the Germans, one likely reason FDR pursued it was to allow liberation of the Jews ASAP.

And you’ll notice, I never mentioned PH either. Having been on the boards here at RS for over five years, I’ve read too many, indeed been down too many, frothy rhetorical paths involving what FDR knew and when he knew it…

Of course, all this could be said for FDR, Churchhill and every head of state in pre-war Europe as well. They all knew Hitler was re-militarizing. They all knew what his intentions were. One could say, by your reasoning, that with Chamberlain ignoring the obvious and the others acquiescing to his “Peace in Our Time” fantasy they provoked (or goaded) Hitler into invading Poland in ’39. Indeed, many scholars make exactly that point today.

Churchilll alone stood athwart the juggernaught of Hitler’s ambitions and raised the cry of warning which went unheeded for at least a decade. He was ignored and even ridiculed and WWII in Europe was the result. The European powers in extant at the time could have crushed Hitler as late as ’38 had they acted in concert.

I realize you were not accusing FDR or Churchill. However, I must set this public record straight. There are too many dilettantes out there with modern day political agendas who are all too anxious to bash DWM (Dead White Men) for not knowing better, not doing better, not caring enough and on and on ad nauseum. I refuse to give them ammunition…

could they have possibly attacked which would have made any difference strategically? To believe, “their only interest … was the Orient” — is horribly naieve.

Who, exactly, do ya think they were attacking “in the Orient”? Singapore (British), East Indies (Dutch), Vietnam (French), Australia, etc. You seem to be buying in, at this late date, to the cynical Japanese propaganda of the “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” and “Asia for the Asians!” It was nonesense then and it’s nonesense now.

In other words, you are conceding that their only choice was to attack us or Britain (which they were already doing.) So that leaves the “option” that they were going to attack us. I don’t see any contradiction there…

And you failed to address any of the major points concerning the moral implications of failing to cut off their oil…

Things are not as simple as they seem…