Voice from the Commonwealth Commentary, World Views and Occasional Rants from a small 'l' libertarian in Massachussetts
"If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest for freedom, go home and leave us in peace. We seek not your council nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen." - Samuel Adams
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Praise for Voice
"A smart fellow...I do like, recommend and learn from Barbera's blog." -Roger L. Simon
"Your blog is bullshit"- anonymous angry French reader.
I just got around to the D'Souza column in the Christian Science Monitor. He does an excellent job discussing the rational why at times the US finds itself in a position of having to support tinpot dictators. It is an unsavory thing and we don't have to like it, and shouldn't be content with it when there is no overwhelming strategic reason for it. But it underscores what Hutchins wrote in his article in Dissent. The radical and discontented left will never attain power becasue they don't accept the need to act responsibly with power when making decisions in a democracy.
There are times we need to do things we should not be proud of or cheer about. And despite the image of Americans outside America, most of us know this. When the Taliban ran we did not cheer in the streets and hold up signs calling for death to Osama Death to Mullah Omar. When Moussaoui, Zubayda and the other 'collaberators' (the guys who helped falsify documents for the terrorists) were captured, armed groups did not show up to the places they were being held to demand we be allowed to drag their bodies through the streets so that our children could spit on them and pose for photos with their dead bodies. We have to stop accepting the worldview that we're childish brutes that constantly need to be held in check. No country has done more good in the past 225 years and more often than not when we have done wrong it was in an attempt to do the right thing. And the times we have done wrong we listened to outside scrutiny with open acceptance and looked within our own systems for the reasons that it did happen. Not too many other countries can claim the same.
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