ANTI-ISLAM VIDEO

Wednesday, April 9, 2008
ANTI-ISLAM VIDEO

Islam: What the West Needs to Know
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-871902797772997781

I urge Muslims and Non-Muslims to watch this video with a peaceful mind, as a subject that needs to be addressed. It has PM Tony Blair, President Bush, President Clinton's in the introduction. Then they take on the real work - maligning Islam.

I am pleased to see this video... and I hope you are too... This is the first time, I have seen all the "Phobia and Propaganda" pulled together in one single Video. If this is all the problem is, thanks to the producer, it makes our job easy to respond.

They have rounded up all the Islam bashers and have deliberately used the Hilali Translation. Shame on us Muslims for not doing anything about that translations.
http://quraan-today.blogspot.com/2007/12/not-like-jews-or-christians.html

Tell me one gross mistake in it all? One singular big mistake. This is a mistake the Neocons make it over and over again. This is gaining popularity. How long can they misquote Qur'aan? How long the gullible's out there believe in this propaganda? There are many verses in this that need to be addressed, I have addressed 14 of them in this link: http://worldmuslimcongress.blogspot.com/2008/03/wilders-fitna-and-quraan.html

What Walid Shoebat, Robert Spencer and others are saying has a speck of truth in it, but at the cost of the entire truth. It is their personal experience that they are presenting it as the whole truth, they are paid to propagate hate. I wish, they spend that time on building peace, it would be more rewarding. Watch the 6:00 o'clock evening news, what you see is the truth, but not the whole truth. You came home, your spouse is home and your kids made it back for instance in Dallas, where I live, but if you watch the news, it will scare the devil out of you. There is a lot of hate out there, we cannot increase the hate by hate, it has to be through peace for the good of the mankind.

We have to face this squarely and deal with it with reason, logic and peace. To be a Muslim is to be a peacemaker, one who constantly seeks to mitigate conflicts and nurtures goodwill for peaceful co-existence. God wants us to live in peace and harmony with his creation; life and mater. Indeed, that is the purpose of religion, any religion.

Unless we believe in the need to speak the truth, we will take a lot of beating. We have to change this. We have to become the causers of peace in the interest of the mankind and not let the few make the world chaotic.

If you wish me to produce a response,
I need it to be financed to produce top-notch quality film.

Check out these links:

Slay the idolaters:
http://quraan-today.blogspot.com/2007/12/slay-idolaters-95.html

Be ruthless to the infidels:
http://quraan-today.blogspot.com/2007/12/ruthless-to-infidels-4829.html

Not like Jews or Christians - A must read
http://quraan-today.blogspot.com/2007/12/not-like-jews-or-christians.html

Jews turned into Apes:
http://quraan-today.blogspot.com/2008/01/jews-turned-into-apes.html

Neocon Bait on Quraan:
http://quraan-today.blogspot.com/2008/03/neocon-bait-on-quraan.html

Mike Ghouse
http://www.worldmuslimcongress.com/
http://worldmuslimcongress.blogspot.com/
http://quraan-today.blogspot.com/
http://sharialaws.blogspot.com/

Everywhich way Jesus

Everywhich way Jesus
http://mikeghouseforamerica.blogspot.com/2008/04/everywhich-way-jesus.html

Deepak Chopra on Jesus follows my comments;

This is a fascinating account by Deepak Chopra, a cosmic Jesus.

I have expressed time and again the injustice done to the teachings of Jesus Christ. Christians have bottled up his teachings by exclusively owning them, just as Muslims have done with Muhammad or Hindus with Krishna and similar stories go with the believers of different faiths.

It may not be wise to classify or claim the teachings of Jesus as Christian; they are indeed for every human. He was a great teacher who taught us how to attain nirvana or freedom from the bondage of suffering by simple teachings like love thy neighbor, treat others as you would want to be treated and turn the other cheek. This is the stuff for every one, it is pure wisdom.

By making Christ divine and owning him, the Christians have alienated Jesus from making home in the heart of billions of people in the world. He is a guide and whatever anyone wants him to be in their lives. No one needs to insist Jesus has to be one way or the other, he is every which way.

Jesus is a prophet and a great spiritual teacher to me and I will not take away the divinity Christians ascribe to him, he is everything to what any one wants him to be. As a Muslim I was taught to revere Jesus Christ, and Muhammad conveys God’s words that all the teachers are on par. About 25 are listed by name and the others lumped as an infinite number of 124,000, a prophet, a teacher to every community, every tribe and every nation was the promise of the creator.

When Jesus says follow me, to a few Christians it is invoking his name and believing him to be an absolute savior, savior from what? It is saving from going to hell. That works for the believers in that theme; however, others have their own understanding. To me he is a savior from the miseries (hells) of life, as following his teachings like love thy neighbor, treating others as you wanted to be treated, would bring peace and tranquility. The same message of bringing goodness to humanity was expressed in every nook and corner of the world by sevaral teachers.

Following Christ, surrendering to Krishna or submitting to the will of Allah is no different. They mean the same thing; to become like God. When you do that, you do not have a conflict with others, you would treat everything in your embrace and everyone along with you is in his (her or it) embrace. It is conflictlessness, the ultimate in salvation, nirvana, mukti, moksha or any name you would give, it is a blissful state of mind.

Let’s free Jesus, Muhammad, Moses, Krishna, Buddha, Bahaulla, Nanak, Zarthustra, Mahavir and all the great teachers. Let’s look up to each one of them with respect, it will take the conflicts out of us; let’s not own them any more. Please do not look at some one else to begin this, if you don’t begin, don’t expect others to. I am on.

Mike Ghouse
iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii

Deepak Chopra provides a different take on Jesus

Religion in the News By TANIA FUENTEZ, The Associated Press 2008-04-04 10:47:50.0 Current rank: # 8,333 of 8,507 NEW YORK


Before he became known for promoting holistic health and spirituality, Deepak Chopra adhered to traditional Western medicine as an endocrinologist in Boston. He eventually questioned this approach, returning to the centuries-old Indian system of Ayurveda to find a balance between faith and science.

"I wanted to extend my idea of healing," Chopra said in a recent interview. "If you don't understand spiritual experience, you'll never understand healing."
Now, at 61, the physician and best-selling author hopes to extend conventional thought again - even more controversially - in "The Third Jesus: The Christ We Cannot Ignore" (Harmony Books). Chopra challenges Christian doctrine while presenting an alternative: Jesus as a state of mind, rather than the historical rabbi of Nazareth or son of God.

The third perspective - which Chopra calls "a cosmic Christ" - looks at Jesus as a spiritual guide whose teaching embraces all humanity, not just the church built in his name. Chopra argues that Christ speaks to the individual who wants to find God as a personal experience.

"I said to myself, 'Why not write a book that takes Jesus' teachings - and it doesn't matter if you're Christian or not - and learn from this and improve your life,'" he told The Associated Press at the Chopra Center and Spa in midtown Manhattan.

Considered a pioneer of mind-body alternative medicine, Chopra is president of the Alliance for a New Humanity and he has been listed among Time magazine's top 100 heroes and icons of the 20th century. His books have been translated into dozens of languages, with topics that range from aging and sexuality to golf and Buddha's path to enlightenment. In 1995, he co-founded the Chopra Center for Wellbeing with Dr. David Simon, which officially opened the following year.

Fascination with Jesus' life began during his lessons while attending a Roman Catholic school in India, Chopra said. Though his parents were from Hindu and Sikh families, "if you were relatively affluent, education was always in the Christian school because of the missionaries."

He moved to the United States in 1970 after graduating from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences. Chopra did his internship in New Jersey, and residency and fellowship at various institutions including Boston, Tufts and Harvard universities. He also was chief of staff at Boston Regional Medical Center for two years.

His interest in Hinduism and medicine evolved while observing a mind-body connection in his research, and a chance encounter in 1985 with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi at a conference in Washington, D.C.

"I first leaned toward Ayurveda medicine and then actually went on to study other wisdom traditions of the world ... this happened during my training in neuro endocrinology where I saw what happened in consciousness in biology," Chopra explained.

"I was just extending my understanding of healing from physical to mental to social to environmental," he said. "That's what the 'Alliance' is all about ... healing the body politic, healing the world."

Chopra devotes substantial time to his own spiritual development. He meditates and exercises daily, though he occasionally enjoys a triple hazelnut latte.
During the interview, Chopra switches his Blackberry, covered in an orange case, to vibrate as he speaks on faith, politics and a list of projects like a new comic book launched with his son and Sir Richard Branson. The in-demand speaker is at ease quoting Scripture or talking quantum physics. He has studied the Bible closely, reading it hundreds of times.

Though "The Third Jesus" was on his mind for 25 years, it took him six months to complete once he began writing. The next book will be a fictional account of Jesus' missing years.

"Where else do you read a story of the Son of God being executed by their own?" he said. "It is dramatic. It's three years of his teaching and it has shaped the world for 2000 years."

In a review, Harvey Cox, Hollis professor of divinity at Harvard, said "The Third Christ" is "bound to provoke both admiration and condemnation." Chopra references the New Testament and Gnostic Gospels to deconstruct church doctrine and conservative Christianity on issues such as war, abortion, women's rights and homophobia.

"I see blogs every day that are negative and very nasty because this is not a literalist interpretation of Jesus," Chopra said. "My book is about Jesus as a state of consciousness. If I can aspire - maybe not achieve - but aspire to be in that state of mind and if a lot of people were aspiring to be in that state of mind this would be a better world."

"I emphasize this over and over again that whatever we do is about improving ourselves and improving the world."
---

Freedom to be vulgur?

Anything wrong with the following laws?
http://mikeghouseforamerica.blogspot.com/2008/04/freedom-to-be-vulgur.html

Are these laws designed for general good of the society?
Are these laws imposed by a few on the others?

1. You cannot vote until you are 18 or 21
2. You cannot drive over 20 at School Zones
3. You cannot smoke in the public places
4. You cannot burn the flag of the United States
5. You cannot deny employment to any one based on race, religions or gender
6. You cannot deny Holocaust.
7. You cannot drink and drive
8. You cannot perform sexual acts in a public square
9. You cannot buy sex on the street from a willing seller
10. You cannot say ethnic jokes
11. You cannot use N word
12. You cannot sell Marijuana
+

What is wrong if we pass laws making it a;

1. Crime to print and publish offensive material to any group.
2. Crime to publish Muhammad's offensive cartoons
3. Crime to publish or display Jesus in anything but respectful postures
4. Crime to use the Hindu symbols and God icons in disrespectful manner.
5. Crime to show disrespect to other's holy books.

One should have freedom with responsibility, is it time to honor the rights of others?
or
Shall we scrap all the restrictions placed in the 12+ items listed above.

Take a look at the following records and render your opinion... if there is enough support to include the additional restrictions in the protection category, we should go after it.

Courtesy of: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment

The First Amendment to the United States Constitution is a part of the United States Bill of Rights. On its face, it prohibits the United States Congress from making laws "respecting an establishment of religion" (the "Establishment Clause") or that prohibit free exercise of religion (the "Free Exercise Clause"), laws that infringe the freedom of speech, infringe the freedom of the press, limit the right to assemble peaceably, or limit the right to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

Sedition

The Supreme Court did not consider a single case in which it was asked to strike down a federal law on the basis of the Free Speech Clause until the twentieth century. The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 were never ruled upon by the Supreme Court, and even the leading critics of the law, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, argued for the laws' unconstitutionality on the basis of the First Amendment, among other Constitutional provisions (e.g. Tenth Amendment). [1]

War protests
The Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren expanded free speech protections in the 1960s, though there were exceptions. However, in 1968, the Court upheld a law prohibiting the mutilation of draft cards in United States v. O'Brien 391 U.S. 367 (1968). The Court ruled that protesters could not burn draft cards because doing so would interfere with the "smooth and efficient functioning" of the draft system. Then again, in 1971, the court found that a person could not be punished for wearing, in the corridors of the Los Angeles county Courthouse, a jacket reading "Fuck the Draft," Cohen v. California (403 U.S. 15).

Anonymous speech

In 1960, the court in Talley v. California, (362 U.S. 60) struck down a Los Angeles city ordinance that made it a crime to distribute anonymous pamphlets. [2]

Flag burning

The divisive issue of flag burning as a form of protest came before the Supreme Court in 1989, as it decided Texas v. Johnson. The Supreme Court reversed the conviction of Gregory Johnson for burning the flag by a vote of five to four. Justice William J. Brennan, Jr. asserted that "if there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea offensive or disagreeable." Many Congressmen criticized the decision of the Court and the House of Representatives unanimously passed a resolution denouncing the Court.[3] Congress passed a federal law barring flag burning, but the Supreme Court struck it down as well in United States v. Eichman (1990). Many attempts have been made to amend the Constitution to allow Congress to prohibit the desecration of the flag. Since 1995, the Flag Burning Amendment has consistently mustered sufficient votes to pass in the House of Representatives, but not in the Senate. In 2000, the Senate voted 63–37 in favor of the amendment, which fell four votes short of the requisite two-thirds majority. In 2006, another attempt fell one vote short.

Obscenity
The federal government and the states have long been permitted to restrict obscenity or pornography. While obscenity generally has no protection under the First Amendment, pornography is subject to little regulation. The exact definition of obscenity and pornography, however, has changed over time.

When it decided Rosen v. United States in 1896, the Supreme Court adopted the same obscenity standard as had been articulated in a famous British case, Regina v. Hicklin. The Hicklin standard defined material as obscene if it tended "to deprave or corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences, and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall." In 1957, the Court ruled in Roth v. United States that the Hicklin test was inappropriate. Instead, the Roth test for obscenity was "whether to the average person, applying contemporary community standards, the dominant theme of the material, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest."

In 1964 Justice Potter Stewart, in Jacobellis v. Ohio, famously stated that, although he could not precisely define pornography, "I know it when I see it."

The Roth test was expanded when the Court decided Miller v. California in 1973. Under the Miller test, a work is obscene if it would be found appealing to the prurient interest by an average person applying contemporary community standards, depicts sexual conduct in a patently offensive way and has no serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value. Note that "community" standards—not national standards—are applied whether the material appeals to the prurient interest; thus, material may be deemed obscene in one locality but not in another. National standards, however, are applied whether the material is of value. Child pornography is not subject to the Miller test, as the Supreme Court decided in 1982. New York v. Ferber, 458 U.S. 747 (1982). The Court thought that the government's interest in protecting children from abuse was paramount.

Yet, personal possession of obscene material in the home may not be prohibited by law. In writing for the Court in the case of Stanley v. Georgia, Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote, "if the First Amendment means anything, it means that a State has no business telling a man sitting in his own house what books he may read or what films he may watch." It is not, however, unconstitutional for the government to prevent the mailing or sale of obscene items, though they may be viewed only in private. Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition (2002) further upheld these rights by invalidating the Child Pornography Prevention Act of 1996, holding that, because the act "[ . . . ]prohibit[ed] child pornography that does not depict an actual child[ . . . ]", it was overly broad and unconstitutional under the First Amendment. Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote: "First Amendment freedoms are most in danger when the government seeks to control thought or to justify its laws for that impermissible end. The right to think is the beginning of freedom, and speech must be protected from the government because speech is the beginning of thought."

U.S. courts have upheld certain regulation of pornography. U.S. courts have found that regulation and banning pornography as a way of protecting children meets the strict scrutiny test. A zoning regulation which restricts where pornography can be viewed is valid if the purpose for the statute is based on secondary effects, the zoning is not related to the suppression of the pornographic content and the statute makes other ways of viewing the content.

Libel, slander, and private action
American tort law creating liability for defamatory speech or publications—slander and libel—traces its origins to English law. The nature of American defamation law was vitally changed by the Supreme Court in 1964, in deciding New York Times Co. v. Sullivan. The New York Times had published an advertisement indicating that officials in Montgomery, Alabama had acted violently in suppressing the protests of African-Americans during the Civil Rights Movement. The Montgomery Police Commissioner, L. B. Sullivan, sued the Times for libel on the grounds that the advertisement damaged his reputation. The Supreme Court unanimously overruled the $500,000 judgment against the Times. Justice William J. Brennan suggested that public officials may sue for libel only if the publisher published the statements in question with "actual malice", a difficult standard to meet.

The actual malice standard applies to both public officials and public figures, including celebrities. Though the details vary from state to state, private individuals normally need only to prove negligence on the part of the defendant.

Content regulation

The courts have rarely treated content-based regulation of the press with any sympathy. In Miami Herald Publishing Co. v. Tornillo (1974), the Court unanimously struck down a state law requiring newspapers criticizing political candidates to publish their responses. The state claimed that the law had been passed to ensure press responsibility. Finding that only freedom, and not press responsibility, is mandated by the First Amendment, the Supreme Court ruled that the government may not force newspapers to publish that which they do not desire to publish.
Content-based regulation of television and radio, however, have been sustained by the Supreme Court in various cases. Since there are a limited number of frequencies for non-cable television and radio stations, the government licenses them to various companies. The Supreme Court, however, has ruled that the problem of scarcity does not permit the raising of a First Amendment issue. The government may restrain broadcasters, but only on a content-neutral basis.

What do you think?
Please write your comments.

Mike Ghouse

Police Video on Diversity

I am pleased to see the video on diversity training.
http://mikeghouseforamerica.blogspot.com/2008/04/police-video-on-diversity.html

There was a convention of Law enforcement officers in Dallas in 2004/05 at Loews Anatole, and thanks to Carmelita Freeman and Department of Justice for training and certifying Harbhajan Singh and I to give diversity training to Law enforcement officers.

It was also around that time, that I worked with the department to include the Jain symbol (the hand symbol, bottom right of Pluralism Logo) in their brochures, which was missing prior to that.

In the following video, Hinduism is introduced to the police officers.

As and when I get the time, I will share similar documentaries on other faiths.

http://www.archive.org/details/gov.doj.ncj.212664.v1.7

Please share your comments at:

Radio Salaam Namaste

http://mikeghouseforamerica.blogspot.com/2008/04/radio-salaam-namaste.html

As a member of the community, I want to thank Dallas Observer and Naomi Zeveloff for highlighting the Desi community in your esteemed weekly.

I would like to add to your style book the Word Subcontinentian, derived from Subcontinent, meaning the people of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka. The traditional word is Subcontinental. The word Subcontinentian has been submitted to the American Heritage Dictionary for inclusion. The other word is South Asia or South Asians and not South Asian continent as reflected in the article.

Mike Ghouse

iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii

Radio Salaam Namaste Signals the Growth of Irving's Desi Community
By Naomi Zeveloff
Published: April 3, 2008

http://www.dallasobserver.com/2008-04-03/news/radio-salaam-namaste-signals-the-growth-of-irving-s-desi-community/

It's 1 p.m. on a Wednesday, and the Irving office of Radio Salaam Namaste has all but emptied out.

The only one who hasn't gone to lunch among the station's Pakistani and Indian staff is DJ Neha Upadhyay, who is spending the hour with her listeners. Dressed in blue linen pants, a black shirt and gold crocheted slippers, the slight 25-year-old hops onto a stool in the air-conditioned studio, undecorated but for a pot of pink fabric flowers and a miniature American flag. She places a pair of headphones over her ears, and leans into the microphone. "Welcome back. You're listening to Lunchtime Special!" she giggles, peppering her accented English with Hindi phrases. "Right now, I'm playing beautiful tracks requested by all of you."

"All of you" is the Dallas-area "Desi" community, made up of South Asian immigrants and their children who settled here from Bangladesh, India and Pakistan, where "Desi" means "countryman." Though Radio Salaam Namaste (KZMP-104.9 FM) broadcasts all over the metroplex, its presence in Irving speaks to the flourishing Desi community in this suburb; at its founding just more than two years ago, the station became the first 24/7 Desi station in the United States on FM radio (another AM station broadcasts out of Richardson).
Upadhyay herself is a recent Irving transplant. She relocated to the city with her husband, a Verizon employee, from their home in Bangalore, India, less than a year ago. After she plays a few moments of Indian pop, a traditional-sounding melody soused with R&B overtones, Upadhyay pulls off her headset to answer the studio's ringing telephone.

"You want to hear 'Ya Ali' from Gangster?" she asks the caller. "You'll have to wait a few minutes. I have a few other tracks lined up."

The most popular songs during the request hour are from Bollywood soundtracks, she later explains, off the air. The Indian film industry's Bollywood imports provide a strong cultural connection for the diverse Desi community. Gangster happens to be an older film, but Upadhyay typically hypes the current movies by giving away tickets to callers who can name a song's film. This way, she drives traffic to Irving's Bollywood shows in Hollywood Theaters, which is operated by the same company that owns Radio Salaam Namaste.

Station owners Mohammad Abbas and Jaipal Reddy got into the radio business four years back, after Reddy had established Hollywood Theaters as a hub for Desi films. The pair dreamed of opening a South Asian-themed mall but knew they had to prove their business mettle to North Texas' most prominent Desi investors. So they took to the airwaves, first with a smaller AM operation, which they moved to FM two years later with the opening of Radio Salaam Namaste. The two form an unlikely duo—Reddy is 40-year-old Indian, and Abbas is a 30-year-old Pakistani—and they named the station for their friendship. "Salaam" is "hello" in Arabic, and "Namaste" means the same in Hindi.

"There is a huge rift between the countries," says Abbas, referencing the 1947 Partition of India, which divided the country into India and Pakistan, and pitted Hindus against Muslims. "In America there is not that rift. But there is no way I can conquer the entire market as a Muslim. There is no way that Jaipal can conquer the market as a Hindu. It has to be a combination of 'Salaam' and 'Namaste.'"

Since its debut on FM, Salaam Namaste has become a wellspring of information for the entire Desi community, with shows in English, Hindi, Urdu, Gujarati, Bengali and Telugu. On Fridays, the Zindagi ("life") program airs, with community advocate Dilshad Dayani doling advice to Desi parents befuddled by their Americanized children.

Nearly a decade before beginning her broadcast, Dayani held workshops for parents and made home visits. "I knew how desperately they needed the child development information in this country because of the lack of the support system. They did not have their mothers-in-law to turn to. They did not have their little village where everyone could go and ask what to do," she says. "I realized as I was doing these workshops, there was a medium where I could reach many people at one time."

"They are doing some good programming," says Mike Ghouse, an Indian community leader who started one of the first Dallas-area Desi radio shows in 1996. "They keep the sentiments of home alive, and they do a good job incorporating the entire South Asian continent."

Radio Salaam Namaste, however, managed to alienate some listeners when a DJ spouted anti-Sikh remarks during the station's now-cancelled call-in joke show last year. Though Abbas says that outcry was fanned by his competitor station in Richardson (KHSE-700 AM), he visited a local Sikh temple to speak with its leaders and played a recorded apology on the air the following week.

Despite the misstep, Salaam Namaste has secured the ears—and the dollars—of the Desi community and beyond. During Upadhyay's show alone, advertisements ran for Bollywood Grocery in Richardson, Subzi Mandi market in Garland, the Princeton Review and even Lufthansa Airlines. And, as far as Abbas is concerned, the station has accomplished its original goal. He and Reddy have secured investors for a $35 million Desi mall; construction will start this summer at the intersection of Interstate 635 and the President George Bush Turnpike. Called Everest Heights, the yellow, castle-like building promises to include a six-screen Bollywood theater, dance floors, a banquet hall, retail stores and restaurants. And it's likely to establish Irving—along with the older community in Richardson—as a center of Desi commercial life in North Texas.

Though Irving's Desi upsurge can be attributed to the vigorous IT sector in the region—particularly the Nokia and Verizon operations—the city has long welcomed South Asians. The area's first Hindu temple was built there in 1991.

"The Indian community makes a half-circle, spreading around the north and down to Mesquite," explains Southern Methodist University anthropology professor Caroline Brettell, who has studied the Indian influence in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. "The earliest Indians came and settled in Richardson. The Irving growth is more recent, in the '90s." Most of the Indians in the area are "skimmed off the top," she continues, meaning that they are highly educated, highly skilled workers, who represent the tip of India's economic strata.

Numbers on the South Asian population are difficult to pin down. The 2000 census pegged North Texas' Indian and Pakistani communities at 30,030 and 5,841, respectively. But a report released last week by the DFW International Community Alliance, a group promoting diversity, indicates that Desi leaders see their ranks as much, much larger: 100,000 Indians and 50,000 Pakistanis.

"I can't verify what the community leaders say," says DFW International President Anne Marie Weiss-Armush. "But that is their best guess. It is significant. But it doesn't matter to me if it's 80,000 or 90,000 or 100,000. The family income and the educational attainment of the community are very impressive."

Back at Radio Salaam Namaste, Upadhyay closes out the lunch hour with a song called "Aaye Ho Meri Zindagi Mein," another Bollywood tune, which translates to "You Have Come Into My Life."

She promises her last movie tickets to a caller and readies the studio for the next program: a Punjabi hour. The phone rings another several times.

"I'm so sorry if I can't play your song right now," she says to her listeners. "The time is running."

Mike Ghouse in Asian Texans

Dear Friends,

Author Irwin Tang has included my name in the history of Asian Texans, please note that I am not history yet.



Mike Ghouse


http://www.mikeghouse.net/

http://www.foundationforpluralism.com/

http://www.worldmuslimcongress.com/
iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii





In a message dated 4/1/2008 10:17:37 A.M. Central Standard Time, asiantexans@hotmail.com writes:

Hi, Mike, How are you?



Thank you for talking with me about Indian Dallasites for the book. Your picture made it into the volume. Your help was and is extremely valuable. The book is available at http://www.irwinbooks.com/, if you are interested in owning a copy for your own collection. I will be speaking on the 3rd at UT-Austin. I'm guessing you will be in DFW, but I will be sure to let you know when I will be coming to Dallas for an event - possibly in June or July. I hope things are going well, and thank you kindly for your help and support.



Irwin

The Person of Jesus

The Person of Jesus or Christ-Consciousness?

I read the following article with great interest; it started out almost exactly in the same manner that the article “am I a Hindu” started out.

I was surprised with one comment in particular when I read “pluralism is ultimately an exclusive position as well”. Pluralism is not a position, it is an attitude of openness, it asks one to look for the essence in all ideas, and generally it is the same energy that drives all faiths.

Pluralism is simply accepting and respecting every which way people have come to worship the divine, or not accept the divine as religions have explained.

If we can learn to accept and respect the God given uniqueness of each one of us, then conflicts fade and solutions emerge.

I believe religions do not claim exclusivity per-se; it is the interpreter and the political man in us that claims exclusivity. I have seen the arrogance of humans ascribed to religion – my faith is the true faith, oldest faith, open faith, non-dogmatic faith and other adjectives. Isn’t that sheer arrogance? Isn’t that the reason for conflict? Wasn’t one of the chief purposes of religion was to bring humility and humbleness to us? I believe spirituality and arrogance are inversely proportional to each other.

No one needs to gloat, without any exception you will find bigots in every faith, and act in the name of that faith contrary to what it teaches. A few Muslims and Christian conservatives lack a "refresh" button to their minds. They are stuck with the words or the limit the meaning of the words to what is limitable in the expression of those words.

When Jesus say follow me, Krishna say surrender to me or Allah says submit to my will.... they are not saying different things, nor are they saying to do that literally as the words sound. Indeed, they are asking you to be God like, who belongs to all indiscriminately. That is to take us into the state of conflictlessness, as the barriers of your and mine fade with a change in our attitudes.

Mike Ghouse
www.foundationforPluralism.com
www.WorldMuslimCongress.com
www.MikeGhouse.net
iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii

The Person of Jesus or Christ-Consciousness?
April 5, 2008
http://wessner.ca/?p=20#comment-6
Reaching back into the vault of questions and articles …

“In spite of the religious inclusivity of New Age thinking, in spite of its interest in Oriental religions, and in spite of its criticism of mainstream Christianity, it is still Christ who dominates New Age speculation wherever the need is felt to explain the relation between God and humanity by some mediating principle”[1]

Background


I was recently on a flight and was barely settled in my seat on the plane when the woman seated beside me struck up an engaging conversation which very quickly turned to questions about the Bible, Christian theology, and finally Jesus himself. Although she was interested in my Christian understanding, her theological perspective had developed from a combination of Hindu philosophy, New Age thought and some vague Christian principles,[2] which she freely disclosed. Eventually our conversation began to focus on Jesus Christ and she mentioned that she believed what Jesus said about himself in the Gospels, but the way to the Father[3] was not limited to Jesus alone. To this, I mentioned that I questioned the value of religious pluralism, given the theologically exclusive nature of the Bible and Jesus’ explicit claims to be the only way to God (eg. John 14:6). It is her response and objection to my thoughts on the exclusiveness of Jesus Christ that is the focus of this brief essay.

Three Observations


1) On a very basic level, she was clearly opposed to the theologically exclusive nature of Christianity. It was readily apparent, however, that it was not necessarily Christianity per se that she was opposed to, but any system of religious belief that claimed to be exclusive (ie., I was free to believe in Jesus alone, but I was not free to tell her that she should consider it as well). Not surprisingly, her personal philosophy modeled this perspective, as she had incorporated a variety of Christian, Hindu and New Age thoughts into her own eclectic belief system.

2) She also believed that since the Old Testament (and presumably the New) was written in the context of a specific time and place, it was only truthful in such a context (although she believed that the Bible is right in everything it teaches). That is, Israel’s claim that there was only one God really meant that there was only one God in their world, not that there was only one God in the world that we know today. In the perspective of the small geographic area of ancient Israel, the Israelite God was seen as the only one, and therefore they could say that the salvation of the world came through him only. Currently, in our more ‘modern and enlightened’ perspective, we can see that any ancient claim to exclusivity was simply ignorant of the facts that we know today. As a result, she believed that Biblical Christianity represented an incomplete understanding of both religion and the world.

3) She also suggested that Jesus’ words that “I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” in John 14:6, meant that no one comes to the Father (ie. achieves ’salvation’) except through Christ-consciousness, not through exclusive belief in the person of Jesus Christ. In fact, her Yogi clearly articulated this position by writing “Jesus meant, never that he was the sole Son of God, but that no man can obtain the unqualified Absolute, the transcendent Father beyond creation, until he has first manifested the ‘Son’ or activating Christ Consciousness within creation”.[4] Further, Christ Consciousness is defined as “a state of total enlightenment, love and compassion to which all human beings must aspire … being directly aware of one’s oneness with God”.[5]She proposed that all religions of the world actually lead to God, and the life of Jesus was just one of many examples of how to get there. Speaking of Jesus, Krishna and Mohammed, Paramahansa Yogananda wrote “[w]e revere them because they knew and felt God … [and they had] manifold ways of expressing the truth”[6] and also “as God is one, necessary to all of us, so Religion is one, necessary and universal”.[7] Finally, her position could be summed in her Yogi’s interpretation of Jesus’ words in John 3:5-6, that “unless we transcend the body and realize ourselves as Spirit, we cannot enter into the kingdom or state of that Universal Spirit”.[8]

Three Comments


1) Her opposition to any exclusive system of belief is difficult to accept given that pluralism is ultimately an exclusive position as well. For example, on one hand, orthodox Christianity teaches that there is no other way to God except through the person of Jesus Christ - any other belief is invalid. On the other hand, religious pluralism holds that there are many possible ways to God - again, any other belief is invalid. That is, as each view is intolerant of any other view, each position is, in fact, exclusive (as is the case with every opinion, whether the subject matter is large or small). Exclusivity is not inherently wrong and cannot (and should not) be avoided or feared. In reality, the only option available is the simple choice of which exclusive belief system to hold to.

2) From a Biblical perspective, both the Old and New Testaments describe God not only as the ruler of the known nations, but also as the God of the entire created world. For example, the creation account of Genesis 1 presents all of the created world as a work of God - the oft-repeated phrase “heavens and earth” refers to all of creation (both terrestrial - oceans, land, plants, etc) and extraterrestrial (sun, moon, stars, etc), not merely to a few known socio-political states. In fact, the theme of God as the creator and controller of the entire world is evident throughout the Old Testament (the Psalms and Isaiah being prime examples). Additionally, even during and after the exile of the Israelites,[9] God was still seen as the ultimate and solitary sovereign ruler of the universe (eg., Neh 9:6). Finally, the apostle John picks up this theme, via a direct revelation of Jesus, and states that Jesus himself will receive praise from members of all the nations and peoples of the earth (Rev 7:9). Clearly, the perspective of the ancient Biblical authors was not limited to a few ancient Near Eastern communities, but rather the entire created universe is in view, including all the people and nations living on earth.

3) Throughout the history of the Christian Church,[10] it has been consistently understood that Jesus is the only way of salvation. Daniel Clendenin writes that “Christianity inherited from Old Testament Judaism the idea that one religion alone is true … [and the] New Testament portrays Christ as the sole mediator between God and humanity”.[11] Kenneth Cragg adds that the “Christian Christ, after all, is the only one there historically is”.[12] If Jesus Christ is fully God and fully man, as orthodox doctrine teaches, then the exclusivist position is unavoidable (remember the first comment). Clendenin writes, “as [John] Hicks admits, ‘if Jesus was literally God incarnate, the second Person of the Holy Trinity living a human life, so that the Christian religion was founded by God-on-earth in person, it is then very hard to escape from the traditional view that all mankind must be converted to the Christian faith’”.[13] In John 14:6, Jesus Christ said that no one could come to the Father apart from him, not apart from his example, his achievement, or his consciousness, etc. The emphasis of Jesus’ words is not on the “through”, but on the “me”, as repeatedly stated throughout the rest of the New Testament. For example, earlier in the book of John, Jesus stated that whoever believes in him (Jesus) would receive eternal life. It is important to note that the text does not say “whoever believes as he did” or anything that implies that modelling[14] Jesus’ life is the road to salvation. Finally, at the beginning of his book, John declares that it is the person of Jesus who takes away the sin of the world (John 1:29), not the enlightenment or understanding of an abstract Christ-consciousness that takes away sin. Note too that Jesus takes away the sin of the world, not his own personal sin, as would be the case if his Christ-consciousness was his own personal example of the way to the Father. First Timothy 2:5 states that there is “only one mediator … the man Jesus Christ” - not that there is one principle or one example, but one person of Christ. In fact, “the Bible does not draw a distinction between Jesus the man and another entity known as ‘the Christ.’ Jesus is pictured as being the Christ (Greek Christos, ‘anointed one’)”.[15] With regard to Romans 3 and 5, Ronald Nash writes “Paul makes it clear that the one and only ground of human justification before the holy God is the atoning work of Jesus Christ”.[16] Clearly, the Biblical texts teach that it is the actual person of Christ that offers salvation to the entire world,[17] it is not up to each individual to achieve salvation or ‘consciousness’ on their own.

On the other side of the “all religions are the same” coin, is the incompatibility of Christianity with any other religious system. That is, if all religions lead to God/salvation, then why is the concept of God, man, sin, salvation, life after death, etc. different in all religions? For example, if they all ultimately lead to the same place (ie., salvation), would they not all have the same understanding of that place? In Hinduism, salvation is the reality of Nirvana attained by knowledge, devotion and works. In Islam, salvation is achieved through devotion and works. However, in Christianity, salvation is the free gift of eternal life given through Jesus Christ our Lord (Rom 6:23) and occurs after death in which there is no second chance (Heb 9:27). Clendenin concludes that, “John Hicks admits that these conflicting truth claims present ‘an obvious problem’ for the pluralist hypothesis that all … religions are equally valid … [and Harold] Netland, having compared the basic beliefs of five great religions, concludes, ‘it is difficult indeed to escape the conclusion that some of the central affirmations of Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam and Shinto are opposed … they cannot be jointly accepted without absurdity.”[18]

Conclusion
Throughout this discussion, it is important to recognize that there were points of connection between my fellow passenger and myself during our conversation. For example, she had a openness and hunger for the truths of the Bible and she understood the importance of ‘context’ in determining meaning. She also identified the special nature of Jesus Christ, but she had yet to grasp his full significance (either historically or personally). Also, her acceptance of others different than herself is something that many Christians could learn from.The fundamental issue behind her three objections is the exclusive nature of any religious belief. In contrast to her personal interpretation of the Bible, the message of orthodox Christianity is that Jesus Christ is the exclusive “way, truth and life”. Of course, even though salvation is found exclusively through Christ alone, one cannot say that other religious systems have nothing positive to offer to humanity. In fact, our current society’s renewed interested in spirituality is partly responsible for the Church’s re-discovery of its importance to the Christian life. As Clendenin writes, “God’s general revelation to all people affords a rudimentary but nonredemptive knowledge of God”.[19]

In the end, exclusivity is not inherently wrong, nor can it be avoided in Christianity, pluralism, or any other system of religious thought. The Biblical understanding of religion and the world is not incomplete, but rather, it is truly comprehensive. Both Jesus himself and the various Biblical authors claim that salvation and the way to God is available only through belief in the historical person of Jesus Christ.

“According to some people, there are many so-called gods and many lords, both in heaven and on earth. But we know that there is only one God, the Father, who created everything, and we exist for him. And there is only one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom God made everything and through whom we have been given life.” 1 Corinthians 8:5-6, NLT

——————————————————————————–
[1] Wouter Hanegraaff, New Age Religion and Western Culture, p. 189.

[2] She adhered to the teaching of the Self-Realization Fellowship, based in California. Throughout our conversation, she frequently referred to and quoted from the founder of the Fellowship, Paramahansa Yogananda (1893-1952).

[3] Given her Hindu perspective, it was interesting to hear her state that she was a monotheist.

[4] Paramahansa Yogananda, Autobiography of a Yogi, p. 179n.

[5] Hanegraaff, p. 190.

[6] Yogananda, The Science of Religion, p. 52. Point #3 of the Aims of the Self-Realization Fellowship is “to reveal the complete harmony and basic oneness of original Christianity as taught by Jesus Christ and original Yoga as taught by Bhagavan Krishna; and to show that these principles of truth are the common scientific foundation of all true religions.”

[7] Yogananda, The Science of Religion, p. 6. He understood religion to primarily mean ‘God-consciousness, or the realization of God both within and without’, and not just a set of beliefs or dogmas.

[8] Yogananda, The Science of Religion, p. 61.

[9] If there ever was an event that would have caused the people of Israel to say that God was merely a national leader, and a weak one at that, the exile would have been it. However, through both the glory days and the times of desolation, the Lord was consistently seen as sovereign over the entire world. Clendenin writes “[t]here is no God but him in all the earth, and all who come to him must meet him on his terms, not their own (Deut. 4:35-39; 32:39; Isa 44:6; 45:5-6, 18)” (p. 131).

[10] For example, Origen, Cyprian, Fulgentus, the Council of Florence, Calvin, Luther and Lausanne II (see Clendenin, pp. 70-73).

[11] Daniel B. Clendenin, Many Gods, Many Lords, p. 68.

[12] Kenneth Cragg, The Christ and the Faiths, p. 197.

[13] Clendenin, p. 69.

[14] One of the hallmarks of evangelical Christianity is that the only requirement for salvation is belief in Jesus, not the accomplishment of certain deeds or the attainment of a certain spiritual maturity or consciousness. Whereas one’s ability to achieve Christ-consciousness is ultimately centred on self, one’s willingness to simply believe in the gift of salvation is centred on God and his grace.

[15] Richard Abanes, Defending the Faith, p. 87.

[16] Ronald Nash, Is Jesus the Only Saviour?, p. 17.

[17] For example, “Jesus, whom God raised from the dead … He is the one who has rescued us from the terrors of the coming judgment” 1 Thessalonians 1:10b, NLT.

[18] Clendenin, p. 67.

[19] Clendenin, p. 73.

John McCain

http://mikeghouseforamerica.blogspot.com/2008/03/john-mccain.html

Updated, April 5, 2008

Invading Iraq was the biggest mistake our c0untry has ever made. Facts did not matter to them as it was not the issue, the trigger happy Bush, Cheney and by extension McCain were simply hell bent on destruction. Chaos must be their life style as they are jumpping from place to place with their blazing guns, they just cannot sit down and enjoy the peace. We the Americans in return are getting punished with their ugly decisions; 4000 American deaths, Million plus Iraqi deaths, half a million Iraqi women on the streets, a trillion dollar debt, $3.50 Gallon Gas and other ills that were born out of the ugliness. Guess who benefited from it all?

1. Top ten craziest things McCain has said
2. Leauge of democracies
3. John McCain’s Foreign Policy Vision
4. Hot Head McCain
5. John McCain, NeoCons, the Israel Lobby
6. McCain's senior moment

7. 10 things to know about McCain (April 5, 2008)

.

Senator McCain is too eager to pull the trigger, he was going to bomb Iran without verifying the information, then all of them had to shut up after the facts. McCain, tells it with a bold face that Iran is training Al-Qaeda, Leiberman had to correct him on camera. Is this the kind of commander in chief we want? Do we trust him to pick up that phone at 3:00 Am ? Do we trust him to ponder before pushing the button?

iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii

The Top Ten Craziest Things John McCain Has Said While You Weren't Watching
By Cliff Schecter

John McCain has been saying a lot of downright nutty things lately. You've probably come across some of them, such as his admitted lack of knowledge about economics or his excitement at the prospect of remaining in Greater Mesopotamia for the next ten decades. Yet, alas, much of his craziness has been lost in the fog of the ongoing battle between Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination. So here's a recap of some nuggets of wisdom you may have missed -- from McCain's mouth to Bellevue's Ears.

10. Responding to a student who criticized his remark about our staying in Iraq for 100 years, McCain quipped, "No American argues against our military presence in Korea or Japan or Germany or Kuwait or other places, or Turkey, because America is not receiving casualties."
I guess Ron Paul isn't American. Or Dennis Kucinich. Or many others who have questioned the mindset behind keeping our troops abroad forever, which is what an empire does, not a republic. Although, perhaps more people don't argue "against our military presence" in the other spots he named, because, you know, those wars weren't based on 100 percent fabricated evidence and didn't make us less safe after they were done. Just a thought.

9. John McCain is "very proud to have Pastor John Hagee's support."
Just FYI, John Hagee makes Jeremiah Wright seem like Richard Simmons. Hagee has called the Catholic Church the "Great Whore," an "apostate church," the "Antichrist," and a "false cult system." And let's not even get into what he has said about Jews.

8. "In the shorter term," said McCain, "if you somehow told American businesses and families, 'Look, you're not going to experience a tax increase in 2010,' I think that's a pretty good short-term measure."

This is McCain's statement in suport of making permanent the tax cuts he voted and railed against in 2001 and 2003. Back then they were only a giveaway to the rich and "budget-busters." Now that we are much further along in borrowing our economy from the Chinese, and the rich have become even richer, they are a way to stimulate the economy by putting money in the hands of working Americans.

7. "This is a Catholic Voter Alert. Governor George Bush has campaigned against Senator John McCain by seeking the support of Southern fundamentalists who have expressed anti-Catholic views. Several weeks ago, Governor Bush spoke at Bob Jones University in South Carolina. Bob Jones has made strong anti-Catholic statements, including calling the Pope the anti-Christ, the Catholic Church a satanic cult! John McCain, a pro-life senator, has strongly criticized this anti-Catholic bigotry, while Governor Bush has stayed silent while seeking the support of Bob Jones University. Because of this, one Catholic pro-life congressman has switched his support from Bush to McCain, and many Michigan Catholics support John McCain for president."
This was a John McCain for president campaign robo-call in 2000. Today, as we pointed out, he hangs with the Rev. Hagee who thinks Catholicism is a "cult" and the "Antichrist." How romantic.

6. "Everybody says that they're against the special interests. I'm the only one the special interests don't give any money to."
Here are some examples of Sen. McCain's epic battle with special-interest money: According to the Center for Responsive Politics, McCain has taken nearly $1.2 million in campaign contributions from the telephone utility and telecom service industries, more than any other senator. McCain sides with the telecom companies on retroactive immunity.
McCain is also the single largest recipient of campaign contributions from Ion Media Networks -- formerly Paxson Communication -- receiving $36,000 from the company and employees from 1997 to mid-year 2006.

5. McCain listened intently, pausing a second before delivering what could be a defining answer. "The other one will do just fine."
For what important reason was Sen. McCain interrupting an explanation to the press of his positions on Iraq and national security to take a cell phone from an aide? Why his wife needed to buy them a new barbecue grill.

4. During a Nov. 28, 2007, Republican debate Sen. McCain angrily denounced torture and offered unmitigated support of the Army field manual's restrictions, saying they "are working, and working effectively."
So naturally and quite logically, he voted against applying these same standards to the CIA. Apparently these rules won't work effectively for spooks, just the men and women on the front lines.

3. McCain, while speaking at a town hall meeting in a suburb of Philadelphia, was asked if he had concerns that anti-American insurgents in Iraq might commit increased acts of violence in September or October with a plan in mind to tip the November election to the Democrats. "Yes, I worry about it," McCain said.

How did he figure out what the insurgents -- which his policies in Iraq have helped create -- are up to? When they attacked us on 9/11, and the warning signs were all ignored by President Bush and his then National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, he was punished with winning a second term. So, of course, militants, who follow john McCain's campaign like Republicans do the signs of the Rapture, are closely planning their events because they know the exact opposite will be the result this time.

2. Let's go back to the videotape: "I'm the only one the special interests don't give any money to."
Not only have we proven this false, but perhaps many can't give money because they all work on his campaign. His campaign manager, Rick Davis, lobbyist. Top advisor, Charlie Black, lobbyist. The operative currently running his Senate office, Mark Buse, former lobbyist. And so it goes. Here is what one observer had to say. "It's an interesting dichotomy. On the one hand, he's presenting himself as the crusader against special interests and yet, on the other hand, he's surrounded himself with senior advisers that are lobbyists," said Sheila Krumholz of the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan, non-profit research group focused on money in politics.
1. And finally, McCain's craziest, coolest, most unstoppable McCain Moment: The senator said, while in Jordan, that it was "common knowledge and has been reported in the media that al-Qaeda is going back into Iran and receiving training and are coming back into Iraq from Iran, that's well known. And it's unfortunate." A few moments later, Sen. Joseph Lieberman, admiringly gazing at McCain until that moment, stepped up and whispered something in the presidential candidate's ear. McCain then blurted out: "I'm sorry, the Iranians are training extremists, not al-Qaeda."

Phew. Glad trusty Joe Lieberman was there to explain to the man of "experience," a man who wants to lead the free world, that Sunnis (Al Qaeda) and Shia (Iran) not only don't work together but are in direct conflict. We have only been at war there for five years, so I wouldn't expect Sen. McCain to concern himself with such trivial matters.

Cliff Schecter is the author of The Real McCain: Why Conservatives Don't Trust Him And Why Independents Shouldn't.

jjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjj

A Century in Iraq, Replacing UN with “League of Democracies,” Rogue State Rollback?
A Look at John McCain’s Foreign Policy Vision

http://www.democracynow.org/2008/3/26/a_century_in_iraq_replacing_un

We speak with investigative reporter Robert Dreyfuss about Senator John McCain’s vision for foreign policy. “McCain is drawing up plans for a new set of global institutions,” Dreyfuss writes, “from a potent covert operations unit to a ‘League of Democracies’ that can bypass the balky United Nations, from an expanded NATO that will bump up against Russian interests in Central Asia and the Caucasus to a revived US unilateralism that will engage in ‘rogue state rollback’ against his version of the ‘axis of evil.’ In all, it’s a new apparatus designed to carry the ‘war on terror’ deep into the twenty-first century.” [includes rush transcript]

Guest:
Robert Dreyfuss, investigative reporter and contributing editor at The Nation magazine. He is author of Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam.

AMY GOODMAN: Republican presidential candidate Senator John McCain might have attracted some ridicule last week when he falsely insisted Iran is training and supplying al-Qaeda in Iraq. McCain corrected himself after independent Senator Joseph Lieberman stepped in and whispered in his ear.

SEN. JOHN McCAIN: Well, it’s common knowledge and has been reported in the media that al-Qaeda is going back into Iran and receiving training and are coming back into Iraq from Iran. That’s well known. And it’s unfortunate. So I believe that we are succeeding in Iraq. The situation is dramatically improved. But I also want to emphasize time and again al-Qaeda is on the run, but they are not defeated.

SEN. JOSEPH LIEBERMAN: [whispering] You said that the Iranians were training al-Qaeda. I think you meant they’re training in extremist terrorism.
SEN. JOHN McCAIN: I’m sorry, the Iranians are training extremists, not al-Qaeda, not al-Qaeda. I’m sorry.

AMY GOODMAN: Senator McCain made the comment in Jordan, while on a trip to the Middle East last week. While the media focused on the gaffe, there has been little serious analysis of McCain’s foreign policy. In fact, when it comes to the Middle East and establishing US power in the world, McCain might even be more in line with neoconservative thinking than President Bush. That’s the argument in investigative reporter Robert Dreyfuss’s latest article in The Nation magazine. It’s called “Hothead McCain.” It outlines the Republican presidential candidate’s foreign policy vision.

Robert Dreyfuss joins us now from Washington, D.C. Welcome to Democracy Now!
ROBERT DREYFUSS: Thank you so much, Amy. It’s really great to be here.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s good to have you with us. You cite Brookings Institution analyst Ivo Daalder as saying, quote, “If you thought George Bush was bad when it comes to the use of military force, wait ’til you see John McCain.” Can you explain?

ROBERT DREYFUSS: Well, what I did in putting this piece together was look at McCain’s own writing and speeches, his article in Foreign Affairs, and I spoke to a number of his advisers, including Randy Scheunemann, who is his chief foreign policy strategist. I spoke to John Bolton. I spoke to Jim Woolsey. I spoke to a number of people who are neoconservative in thought who have now clustered around the McCain campaign and see his effort to become president as a way for them—that is, for the neoconservatives—to return to the position of power they had in the first Bush administration from 2001 to 2005.

McCain has an instinctive preference for using military power to solve problems overseas. And when you couple that with a kind of hotheaded temperament, with a kind of arrogance and really a tendency to fly off the handle, I think we have a lot to fear, if he were ever to have his finger on the button, because he’s a man who I think would try to solve a lot of the very delicate foreign policy problems that we have around the world by a show of force. And, of course, you start with Iran in that context, but I think you could include many other problems, as well.

AMY GOODMAN: You talk about—or John McCain talks about “rogue state rollback.” Explain.
ROBERT DREYFUSS: Well, this is a theory that he developed way back in the 1990s, and he began speaking about it probably around ’96 or ’97, but it crystallized in 1999 in a famous speech that he gave, where he talked about the need to look around the world and figure out these states, and you can make up the list as easily as I. At that time, it would have been Iraq, Iran, Syria, Cuba, various countries in Asia and Africa that were under various kinds of rebellion, whether it was Somalia or perhaps Burma, perhaps Zimbabwe. I mean, a lot of countries were being put in the category of rogue states. Some of them were on the State Department list of countries that supported terrorism.

McCain looked around the world, and he said, OK, our job is basically to force regime change in all of these countries. And he signed on early to the issue of going into Iraq and forcing a regime change there, long before anybody really had any kind of concerns about al-Qaeda, long before Iraq’s connection to terrorism seemed important. It was simply a principle that any state that didn’t conform to an American view of democracy was liable to be rolled over or rolled back, in McCain’s view.

Many of his advisers, including Randy Scheunemann, who’s now running his foreign policy task force, were engaged in that. Randy was then a chief staffer for Trent Lott. He wrote the Iraq Liberation Act that the neoconservatives and Ahmed Chalabi championed and pushed through Congress. He, Scheunemann, founded the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq in 2002 with White House support. He was also a founder of the Project for a New American Century, which was the sort of ad hoc think tank that the neocons put together. All of this is a sign of—and the fact that McCain would name him as his chief adviser—that McCain, in a way that Bush never did, is a true neocon.

He is someone who in his soul believes in the use of American military power, and as he said in his rollback speech, not just to deal with emergent threats to the United States, but even to enforce the prevalence of what he called American values—that’s a codeword for democracy—so that countries whose internal functioning—let’s say Russia today, under Putin and Medvedev—that countries like Russia that don’t seem as democratic as we like would then become ostracized or sanctioned or subject to various kinds of hostile, both political and military, sanctions. So this is what I find extremely troubling about McCain.

And if you look at his broad policies that he’s outlined, he has suggested point blank that we’re in a long-term, almost unending struggle with al-Qaeda and various other forms of Islamism. And as a result, he wants to create a whole new set of institutions to deal with those. One of those institutions would be what he calls the League of Democracies, which is basically a way of short-circuiting the UN, where Russia and China, in particular, but also various non-aligned countries often stand up to the United States.

Also, he wants to create a new much more aggressive covert operations team. He says he wants to model it on the old Office of Strategic Services, the World War II era OSS, and to create this out of the CIA but include into it psychological warfare specialists, covert operations people, people who specialize in advertising and propaganda, and a whole bunch of other kind of—a wide range of these kind of covert operators, who would then form a new agency that would be designed to fight the war on terrorism overseas and to deal with rogue states and other troubling actors that we—or McCain decides he happens not to like at that moment.

AMY GOODMAN: And kick Russia out of the G8?
ROBERT DREYFUSS: Yeah. And that’s a really important issue. I mean, his attitude toward Russia seems not to be based on any explicit Russian threat to the United States, but simply the fact that he doesn’t like the way Russia operates internally. So he’s said we’re going to expand NATO to include a number of former states in the Russian space—that is, former Soviet republics, notably including Georgia—and he wants to include not only Georgia in NATO, but some of Georgia’s rebellious provinces, which is a direct affront to Russia. He’s a hardliner on Kosovo. He says he doesn’t care what Putin thinks about us putting air defense system missiles in Eastern Europe. He wants to kick Russia out of the G8. And all of this would obviously create much more hostile relations between Washington and Moscow, and that makes it impossible to solve the biggest problem that we face: namely, how to deal with Iran’s nuclear program.
If we’re ever going to get a deal with Iran, if we’re ever going to have some sort of diplomatic solution to Iran, which McCain says he wants, it’s literally impossible if you don’t get the Russians on board. If you can’t get a deal with Russia to approach Iran and try to negotiate a peaceful resolution to their nuclear program, then the Russians will simply stand back and say, OK, it’s your problem. And that would almost guarantee that McCain would face the choice of having to either attack Iran or to accept Iran having a nuclear bomb at some point in the period in his eight-year term as president. So the idea that you can isolate Russia in that way and take this aggressive anti-Moscow strategy means that you’re not going to get Russian cooperation on key problems like Iran and like other problems in the Middle East and Afghanistan that we’re going to need their help on.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Robert Dreyfuss, investigative reporter, contributing editor to The Nation magazine. His latest piece is called “Hothead McCain.” I want to talk more about McCain’s advisers in a minute.
[break]

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Robert Dreyfuss, investigative reporter, contributing editor at The Nation magazine. His latest piece is called "Hothead McCain.” McCain famously said that US forces might end up staying in Iraq for 100 years. What role did John McCain play in the surge and in shaping, if he did, any part of President Bush’s policy in Iraq, the war?
ROBERT DREYFUSS: Oh, I would say that of all the politicians in the United States, McCain was number one in a crucial moment, when the President, President Bush, had to decide whether to accept the Baker-Hamilton report, which called for phasing out US combat forces over a period of sixteen months or alternatively escalating the war. And at that time, McCain was the number one voice in calling for an escalation. He had traveled to Iraq. He had said we need more troops. I believe he was calling for at least 50,000 troops. He worked closely along with Senator Lieberman, who’s now his traveling companion. McCain and Lieberman spoke at the American Enterprise Institute and worked closely with Robert and Frederick Kagan, who—Frederick Kagan, in particular, who is at AEI and was the author of the report that led to the surge and was brought into the administration by Vice President Cheney, who went over to AEI and consulted with them. It was that team—Kagan, McCain, Lieberman and Cheney—who convinced the President to go with the escalation a year ago in January.

And McCain was not only advocating the surge, but really pushing, and is today pushing, for a long-term presence by the United States in Iraq, using Iraq as an aircraft carrier to support American power throughout the Persian Gulf and the Middle East and Central Asia. And his advisers told me so. When I spoke to Randy Scheunemann at length, he said, in fact, yes, we want to stay in Iraq for a long time, not just to stabilize Iraq, but because we may have to deal with many threats from the region. And of course you have to include Iran as among the possible threats that we’d have to deal with, according to McCain.

So I would say that McCain and the surge are almost identical, and it’s McCain who we have to thank for the fact that two years ago we didn’t start withdrawing from Iraq, but in fact escalated to the point where the next president will have probably 130,000 troops on the ground when he or she takes office.

AMY GOODMAN: And the others in the neocon circle, the advisers, like, for example, Bill Kristol, like Max Boot, tell us about their involvement.

ROBERT DREYFUSS: You know, it’s very interesting, Amy. If you look at the list of people who say they’re advising the McCain camp, you find a broad range of people. You find people like Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft, Larry Eagleburger. These are the traditional kind of Nixon-era realists, many of whom certainly wouldn’t be considered liberals, but who certainly are realists. But when you look at McCain’s positions, his views on things, you don’t find any of the influence of people like Eagleburger and Scowcroft.

What you see instead is that the rest of McCain’s advisers, and you named several of them—James Woolsey, the former CIA director, who has been traveling and campaigning with McCain and who I interviewed for this piece; Bill Kristol, who’s very close to McCain for probably a decade and has been kind of an angel sitting on his shoulder and whispering in his ear all that time; people like Scheunemann; people like Max Boot; Ralph Peters; there’s a long list of people who have joined the McCain advisory team—and it’s these people whom McCain listens to when it comes to foreign policy. He certainly hasn’t expressed anything in any foreign policy area that you would identify with the Republican realist camp. He’s much closer to the neocons.
And he seems to be, as I said earlier, the true neocon himself, someone who, after early in his career in the ’80s being kind of suspicious about some foreign interventions that happened at that time, at the end of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union collapsed, McCain seemed to have felt unburdened, like now American power can express itself. And that’s when he attached himself to the neoconservative vision that America, as the sole superpower, could throw its weight around, could remake the world in its own image and that there would be no effective opposition to it.

When I look at McCain, though, I have to say, I go back to Vietnam. This is a man whose father and grandfather were extremely conservative, even rightwing admirals, who served in Vietnam until he was shot down and held as a POW, conducting air raid missions, dropping napalm on Hanoi and other cities in North Vietnam, who learned from that and became convinced that American military power, if it’s constrained by politics, was unable to win that war. And so, he took out of Vietnam not the lesson that we shouldn’t get into land wars in Asia or that fighting guerrilla counterinsurgency efforts might not be the task that America’s military is most suited for; what he learned in Vietnam is that we need to take the gloves off, that the politicians need to get out of the way and let the military do its job.

And that’s precisely the message that he’s adopted in approaching Iraq. I think to this day, McCain thinks that the Vietnam War could have been won if we had just stayed another five or ten or fifteen years, and he seems exactly prepared to do that in Iraq, despite all evidence to the contrary that we can’t do anything in Iraq other than sit on a very ugly stalemate that, you know, continues to blow up and flare into violence.

AMY GOODMAN: Robert Dreyfuss, you got your title, “Hothead McCain,” from a Republican senator. You’re quoting Republican Senator Thad Cochran, who said, “The thought of his being President sends a cold chill down my spine. He is erratic. He is hotheaded. He loses his temper, and he worries me.”
ROBERT DREYFUSS: Yes, I use that quote, and it says immediately after that that shortly after saying that, Thad Cochran endorsed McCain. So it’s clear that the Republicans are gathering around their leader, despite the fact that many senators, not just Cochran, but many Republican senators view McCain with alarm and not because he’s some sort of closet liberal—it’s true that on some domestic issues he lined up with some Senate liberals—but on foreign policy, they’re are scared of him. And on a personal level, McCain has had a tendency over the years—this is so well known on Capitol Hill—to erupt, to explode, to scream and yell at his colleagues in the Republican caucus, in closed-door meetings behind the scenes, and sometimes even in public. So he has scared a lot of his colleagues, who I’m sure are supporting him, like Cochran did, out of party loyalty, but who’ve said, as Cochran did, that they’re extremely concerned about his temper and his apparent willingness to explode.

And I’ve met McCain up close. I rode around the bus with him nine years ago when he was campaigning in New Hampshire. I found him scary up close. I think when you see him two feet away, he looks like somebody whose head could explode. He’s got a very barely controlled anger underneath his sort of calm demeanor that he seems to almost grit his teeth to keep inside. And I found him very scary personally. And I’m always shocked, I’m always stunned, when media who cover McCain don’t bring that across. He’s not a jolly fellow. He’s not somebody who you want to sit down and have beers with, where I could see people think that about President Bush—he’s kind of an amiable dunce, as someone said about an earlier president. McCain is not somebody I want to have a beer with. I think he’s a really scary guy.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we’ll leave it there, Robert Dreyfuss, investigative reporter, contributing editor at The Nation magazine. His book is called Devil’s Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam.

jjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjj

Hothead McCain
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080324/dreyfuss

by ROBERT DREYFUSS
[from the March 24, 2008 issue]
If you've followed Senator John McCain at all, you've heard about his tendency to, well, explode. He's erupted at numerous Senate colleagues, including many Republicans, at the slightest provocation. "The thought of his being President sends a cold chill down my spine. He is erratic. He is hotheaded. He loses his temper, and he worries me," wrote Republican Senator Thad Cochran, shortly before endorsing McCain.
You've heard about his penchant for bellicose rhetoric, whether appropriating a Beach Boys song in threatening to bomb Iran or telling Russian President Vladimir Putin that he doesn't care what he thinks about American plans to install missiles in Eastern Europe.
And you've heard, no doubt, about McCain's stubbornness. "No dissent, no opinion to the contrary, however reasonable, will be entertained," says Larry Wilkerson, a retired army colonel who was former Secretary of State Colin Powell's top aide. "Hardheaded is another way to say it. Arrogant is another way to say it. Hubristic is another way to say it. Too proud for his own good is another way to say it. It's a quality about him that disturbs me."

But what you may not have heard is an extended critique of the kind of Commander in Chief that Captain McCain might be. To combat what he likes to call "the transcendent challenge [of] radical Islamic extremism," McCain is drawing up plans for a new set of global institutions, from a potent covert operations unit to a "League of Democracies" that can bypass the balky United Nations, from an expanded NATO that will bump up against Russian interests in Central Asia and the Caucasus to a revived US unilateralism that will engage in "rogue state rollback" against his version of the "axis of evil." In all, it's a new apparatus designed to carry the "war on terror" deep into the twenty-first century.

"We created a number of institutions in the wake of World War II to deal with the situation," says Randy Scheunemann, McCain's top adviser on foreign policy. "And what Senator McCain wants to begin a dialogue about is, Do we need new structures and new institutions, both internally, in the US government, and externally, to recognize that the situation we face now is very, very different than the one we faced during the cold war?" Joining Scheunemann, a veteran neoconservative strategist and one of the chief architects of the Iraq War, are a panoply of like-minded neocons who've gathered to advise McCain, including Bill Kristol, James Woolsey, Robert Kagan, Max Boot, Gary Schmitt and Maj. Ralph Peters. "There are some who've moved into his camp who scare me," Wilkerson says. "Scare me."

If McCain intends to be a shoot first, ask questions later President, consider a couple of the new institutions he's outlined, which seem designed to facilitate an unencumbered, interventionist foreign policy.

First is an unnamed "new agency patterned after the...Office of Strategic Services," the rambunctious, often out-of-control World War II-era covert-ops team. "A modern day OSS could draw together specialists in unconventional warfare; covert action operators; and experts in anthropology, advertising, and other relevant disciplines," wrote McCain in Foreign Affairs. "Like the original OSS, this would be a small, nimble, can-do organization" that would "fight terrorist subversion [and] take risks." It's clear that McCain wants to set up an agency to conduct paramilitary operations, covert action and psy-ops.

This idea is McCain's response to a longstanding critique of the CIA by neoconservatives such as Richard Perle, who have accused the agency of being "risk averse." Since 2001 the CIA has engaged in a bitter battle with the White House and the Pentagon on issues that include the Iraq War and Iran's nuclear weapons program. The agency lost a major skirmish with the creation of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which put the White House more directly in charge of the intelligence community. And now McCain wants to put the final nail in the CIA's coffin by creating a gung-ho operations force. Scheunemann, who credits Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations with the idea, says the new agency is urgently needed to "meet the threats of the twenty-first century in a time of war, much as the OSS was created in a time of war." And he disparages the CIA as a bunch of has-beens. The new agency would eclipse "an organization created to meet the needs of the cold war and hang out in embassies and try to recruit a major or two or deal with walk-in defectors," Scheunemann told The Nation.

But John McLaughlin, a former deputy director of the CIA who retired in 2004, is more than skeptical, and he worries that McCain doesn't understand the need for Congressional controls over spy agencies. "You need to have Congressional oversight and transparency," he says. "I would not recommend a new agency that is set up parallel to the CIA.... All of those things can be done within the boundaries of the CIA." Told about McLaughlin's comments, Scheunemann says, "Anyone who thinks that the agency today is a nimble, can-do organization has a different view than Senator McCain does."

The UN, too, would be shunted aside to make room for McCain's new League of Democracies. Though the concept is couched in soothing rhetoric, the "league" would provide an alternate way of legitimizing foreign interventions by the United States when the UN Security Council won't authorize force. Five years ago, on the eve of the Iraq War, McCain said bluntly before the European Parliament that if Security Council members resisted the use of force, or if China opposed US action against North Korea, "the United States will do whatever it must to guarantee the security of the American people." Among the targets McCain cites for his plan to short-circuit the UN are Darfur, Burma, Zimbabwe, Serbia, Ukraine and, of course, Iran--and he has already referred to "wackos" in Venezuela. According to Scheunemann, it's an idea that bubbled up from some of McCain's advisers, including Peters and Kagan, but it alarms analysts from the realist-Republican school of foreign policy. "They're talking about a body that essentially would circumvent the UN and would take authority to act in the name of the international community, sometimes using force," says a veteran GOP strategist who knows McCain well and who insisted on anonymity. "Well, it's very easy to predict that the Russians and Chinese would view this as a threat."

McCain seems almost gleeful about provoking Russia. At first blush, you'd think he'd be more nuanced, since many of the foreign policy gurus he says he talks to emanate from the old-school Nixon-Kissinger circle of détente-niks, including Henry Kissinger himself, Lawrence Eagleburger and Brent Scowcroft. Their collective attitude is that as long as Moscow doesn't threaten US interests, we can do business with it. But there is little evidence of their views in McCain's policy toward Putin's Russia. "I think it's fair to assume that he's most influenced by his neoconservative advisers," says the GOP strategist.

"We need a new Western approach to...revanchist Russia," wrote McCain in Foreign Affairs. He says he will expel Russia from the Group of Eight leading industrial states, a flagrant and dangerous insult, one likely to draw stiff opposition from other members of the G-8. He refuses to ease Russian concerns about the deployment of a missile defense system in Eastern Europe, saying, "The first thing I would do is make sure we have a missile defense system in place in Czechoslovakia [sic] and Poland, and I don't care what [Putin's] objections are to it." And he's all for rapid expansion of NATO, to include even the former Soviet republic of Georgia--and not just Georgia but also the rebellious Georgian provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Since Kosovo's declaration of independence on February 17, which was opposed by Russia, Moscow has said it intends to support independence of the two Georgian regions, making McCain's goal of expanding NATO provocative, to say the least. "McCain says [NATO] ought to include Abkhazia and South Ossetia, which are not under the control of the current Georgian government," says a conservative critic of the Arizona senator. "Which, if not a prescription for war with Russia, is at least a prescription for conflict with Russia."

Earlier in his Congressional career, McCain was reluctant to engage in overseas adventures unless American interests were directly threatened. He opposed US involvement in Lebanon in the early 1980s, and in Haiti and the Balkan conflicts in the early 1990s. But as the post-cold war environment seemed increasingly to promise unchallenged American hegemony, McCain took up the neocons' call for interventionism. His views crystallized in a 1999 speech, when he called for the United States to use tough sanctions and other pressure to roll back "rogue states" like Iraq and North Korea, adding, "We must be prepared to back up these measures with American military force if the existence of such rogue states threatens America's interests and values." In referring to "values," McCain indicates his support for the notion that a selective crusade allegedly on behalf of freedom and democracy can provide a rationale for an aggressive new foreign policy outlook.

"He's the true neocon," says the Brookings Institution's Ivo Daalder, a liberal interventionist who conceived the idea of a League of Democracies with Robert Kagan. "He does believe, in a way that George W. Bush never really did, in the use of power, military power above all, to change the world in America's image. If you thought George Bush was bad when it comes to the use of military force, wait till you see John McCain.... He believes this. His advisers believe this. He's surrounded himself with people who believe it. And I'll take him at his word."

Not surprisingly, the center of McCain's foreign policy is the Middle East. "He's bought into the completely fallacious notion that we're in a global struggle of us-versus-them. He calls it the 'transcendental threat...of extreme Islam," says Daalder. "But it's a silly argument to think that this is either an ideological or a material struggle on a par with [the ones against] Nazi Germany or Soviet Communism." For McCain, the Iraq War, the conflict with Iran, the Arab-Israeli dispute, the war in Afghanistan, the Pakistani crisis and the lack of democracy in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan are all rolled up into one "transcendent" ball of wax.

More than any other politician, McCain is identified with the Iraq War. From the mid-1990s on, he and his advisers were staunch supporters of "regime change." Scheunemann helped write the Iraq Liberation Act in 1998, which funded Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress; joined Bill Kristol's Project for the New American Century; and helped create the neoconservative Committee for the Liberation of Iraq in 2002, with White House support. Together with Joe Lieberman, Sam Brownback and a handful of other senators, McCain emerged as a major cheerleader for the war. Like his fellow neocons, McCain touted what proved to be faked intelligence on the threat posed by Iraq. Echoing Vice President Cheney, McCain said on the eve of the war, "There's no doubt in my mind, once [Saddam] is gone, that we will be welcomed as liberators." He pooh-poohed critics who argued that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's war plan was too reliant on technology and too light on troops, saying, "I don't think you're going to have to see the scale of numbers of troops that we saw...back in 1991." When Gen. Eric Shinseki warned, a month before the war started, that occupying Iraq would require far more troops, McCain was mute.

Today McCain portrays himself as a critic of how the war was fought, but his criticism did not emerge until long after it was clear that the United States faced a grueling insurgency. From the fall of 2003 onward, against a growing chorus of critics who called for US forces to withdraw, McCain repeatedly called for more troops to secure "victory." By late 2006, when the bipartisan Iraq Study Group called for pulling out all combat brigades within fifteen months, McCain, Lieberman and a hardy band of neocons, led by Frederick Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute and joined by Cheney, persuaded Bush to escalate the war instead. Asked if McCain directly lobbied Bush to reject the ISG's recommendations, a McCain aide says, "There were many encounters with the President's senior advisers and with the President on this issue." Fred Kagan, the surge's author and Robert Kagan's brother, told McClatchy Newspapers, "It was a very lonely time. He went out there for us."

In January McCain famously said US forces might end up staying in Iraq for a hundred years. It's clear that for McCain the occupation is not just about winning the war but about turning Iraq into a regional base for extending US influence throughout the region. According to the original neocon conception of the war, as promoted by people like Perle and Michael Ledeen, Iraq was only a first step in redrawing the Middle East map. Gen. Wesley Clark said recently that on the eve of the war he was shown a Pentagon document that portrayed Iraq as the first in a series of operations to change regimes in Iran, Syria, Sudan, Libya, Somalia and Lebanon.

When The Nation asked Scheunemann why US forces would have to stay in Iraq so long, he explicitly linked their presence to the entire Middle East. "Iraq might be stable, but what about the region?" he responded. "Other countries could be in turmoil; other countries could be threatening Iraq. It could be an external threat that we need to have troops there for, à la South Korea, à la Japan." He added, "I understand your readers may think it's some sort of malevolent imperialist conspiracy." Conspiracy or not, it's clear that McCain sees our presence in Iraq as a permanent extension of US power in the oil-rich Persian Gulf.

McCain has made no secret of his belief that using force against Iran is the only way to prevent it from acquiring nuclear weapons. "There is only one thing worse than a military solution, and that, my friends, is a nuclear-armed Iran," McCain said. "The regime must understand that they cannot win a showdown with the world." He supports tougher sanctions against Tehran, but critics note that implementing them would require Russia's consent. McCain's provocative anti-Russia stand, though, makes such a deal less than likely. And he rejects direct US-Iran talks.
In the end, McCain seems almost reflexively to favor the use of America's armed might. "He would employ military force to the exclusion of other options," says Larry Korb, a former Reagan Administration defense official. Scion of admirals (his father and grandfather), a combat pilot in Vietnam who continued to believe long after that war that it might have been won if the US military had been allowed free rein, McCain presents the image of a warrior itching for battle. He is the candidate of those Americans whose chief goal is an endless war against radical Islam and who'd like nothing more than for the Arizona senator to clamber figuratively into the cockpit once more. Like his former aide Marshall Wittman, currently a top aide to Senator Lieberman, McCain sees Theodore Roosevelt, the Bull Moose interventionist President of the early twentieth century, as his role model. And that attracts neoconservatives.

"I'm an old-fashioned, Scoop Jackson--I guess you'd now say Joe Lieberman--Democrat, and he's a Teddy Roosevelt Republican, and they're pretty close in their views, so substantively there's a lot of overlap between us," says James Woolsey, a former CIA director who's endorsed McCain and has campaigned with him this year. "I think John's style is very TR-like. It's very much about speaking softly but carrying a big stick."

We're still waiting for the "speaking softly" part. "There's going to be other wars," McCain warns. "I'm sorry to tell you, there's going to be other wars. We will never surrender, but there will be other wars."

jjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjj

John McCain, NeoCons, the Israel Lobby

and Weekly Standard (USS Liberty and Ron Paul mentioned): http://neoconzionistthreat.blogspot.com/2008/03/make-people-aware-subscribe.html Here is a tiny URL of the above one: http://tinyurl.com/358b8c Here is the direct link for the youtube of it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfLeZXrluZw Be sure to also access both pages of http://neoconzionistthreat.blogspot.com/ (click on the pictures).

6 Signs the U.S. May Be Headed for War in Iran http://www.itszone.co.uk/zone0/viewtopic.php?t=71055&start=670 Here is a tiny URL of the above one: http://tinyurl.com/39qkun

iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/opinion/viewpoints/stories/DN-goodman_29edi.ART.State.Edition1.4651f51.html

Ellen Goodman: McCain's senior moment
If airline pilots are subject to cognitive tests, why not presidential candidates?
10:48 AM CDT on Saturday, March 29, 2008

It was probably not wise for the 64-year-old Brit Hume to describe the 71-year-old John McCain as having a "senior moment." A blip would have been better. Or a gaffe. But when the traveling senator confused Shiites and Sunnis, when he conflated al-Qaeda with all extremists, the "senior moment" phrase uttered by the Fox newsman got Velcroed to the story of The Man Who Would Be the Oldest President in American History.

Age? Ageism? Or realism? We've been holding a heated conversation about race and gender all season. But age has been relegated to a late-night laugh line by the likes of David Letterman, 60, who described Mr. McCain as "the kind of guy who picks up his TV remote when the phone rings."

The candidate, no slouch in the self-deprecation business, refers to himself as "old as dirt," although he travels with his 96-year-old mother as a genetic ambassador. And when a New Hampshire high schooler asked Mr. McCain whether he might die in office or get Alzheimer's, he answered, "Thank you for the question, you little jerk."

Nevertheless, it's worth assessing this senior's moment in politics. The polls suggest that Americans are more reluctant to vote for a 70-year-old than for an African-American or a woman. Before you attribute this to prejudice, remember that only 24 percent of Americans under 35 think Mr. McCain is too old, while 40 percent of those over 65 believe it. Do they know something we should know about a man who would be 72 on Inauguration Day and 80 at the end of two terms?

The cheery cliché of the moment is that 70 is the new 60. In fact, mental fitness has increased along with physical fitness. But at the same time, a new study shows that one of every three Americans over 70 has some cognitive decline.

I'm willing to bet that Mr. McCain is in the lucky two-thirds of this population. And senior moments are not just for seniors. Did Hillary have a middle-aged moment about the sniper attack in Bosnia that never was? Did Barack have a junior moment when he wrote about reading a Life magazine article on a man who tried to lighten his black skin – an article that never ran?
We know about Mr. McCain's war injuries and his melanoma, his cholesterol and his allergies. We expect full assessments from every doctor except, well, neurologists. If airline pilots, some judges and people in other occupations are subject to cognitive tests, why not presidential candidates?

The subject is as uncomfortable as talking to an aging parent about giving up the car keys. Even the feelings among the experts on the elderly are mixed.

On one hand, Laura Carstensen, who heads Stanford's Center on Longevity, offers the good news that as people get older, their knowledge generally increases, as does their ability to regulate emotions. Yet as a voter, she says, "I see better reason to know about someone's cognitive health than medical health."

Even the author of that study on the high rate of cognitive impairment talks about a "gray area." Duke University's Brenda Plassman warns that we can diagnose cancer or diabetes with great certainty, but "there's no real biomarker for cognitive decline." Nevertheless, isn't there information citizens want to have as politicians get their senior moment in the sun? At 60? 70? 80?

I can name many wise elder statesmen, from Winston Churchill, prime minister at 80, to Nelson Mandela, who retired at 81. Yet my memory is still good enough to conjure up Ronald Reagan, whose Alzheimer's disease may well have begun while in office.

I sincerely hope that 70 will be the new 50 before I get there. But for the moment, my favorite line belongs to former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meier. "Being 70 is not a sin," said this septuagenarian. "It's not a joke either."

Ellen Goodman is a Boston Globe columnist. Her e-mail address is ellengoodman@globe.com.

iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii

10 things you should know about John McCain (but probably don't):

1. John McCain voted against establishing a national holiday in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Now he says his position has "evolved," yet he's continued to oppose key civil rights laws.

2. According to Bloomberg News, McCain is more hawkish than Bush on Iraq, Russia and China. Conservative columnist Pat Buchanan says McCain "will make Cheney look like Gandhi."

3. His reputation is built on his opposition to torture, but McCain voted against a bill to ban waterboarding, and then applauded President Bush for vetoing that ban.

4. McCain opposes a woman's right to choose. He said, "I do not support Roe versus Wade. It should be overturned."

5. The Children's Defense Fund rated McCain as the worst senator in Congress for children. He voted against the children's health care bill last year, then defended Bush's veto of the bill.

6. He's one of the richest people in a Senate filled with millionaires. The Associated Press reports he and his wife own at least eight homes! Yet McCain says the solution to the housing crisis is for people facing foreclosure to get a "second job" and skip their vacations

7. Many of McCain's fellow Republican senators say he's too reckless to be commander in chief. One Republican senator said: "The thought of his being president sends a cold chill down my spine. He's erratic. He's hotheaded. He loses his temper and he worries me."

8. McCain talks a lot about taking on special interests, but his campaign manager and top advisers are actually lobbyists. The government watchdog group Public Citizen says McCain has 59 lobbyists raising money for his campaign, more than any of the other presidential candidates.

9. McCain has sought closer ties to the extreme religious right in recent years. The pastor McCain calls his "spiritual guide," Rod Parsley, believes America's founding mission is to destroy Islam, which he calls a "false religion." McCain sought the political support of right-wing preacher John Hagee, who believes Hurricane Katrina was God's punishment for gay rights and called the Catholic Church "the Antichrist" and a "false cult."

10. He positions himself as pro-environment, but he scored a 0—yes, zero—from the League of Conservation Voters last year.10John McCain is not who the Washington press corps make him out to be. Please help get the word out—forward this email to your personal network. And if you want us to keep you posted on MoveOn's work to get the truth out about John McCain, sign up here:

http://pol.moveon.org/mccaintruth/?id=12407-6812817-bT9woY&t=232
Thank you for all you do.
–Eli, Justin, Noah, Laura, and the MoveOn.org Political Action Team Saturday, April 5th, 2008
Sources:

1. "The Complicated History of John McCain and MLK Day," ABC News, April 3, 2008 http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2008/04/the-complicated.html
"McCain Facts," ColorOfChange.org, April 4, 2008 http://colorofchange.org/mccain_facts/

2. "McCain More Hawkish Than Bush on Russia, China, Iraq," Bloomberg News, March 12, 2008 http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=aF28rSCtk0ZM&refer=us
"Buchanan: John McCain 'Will Make Cheney Look Like Gandhi,'" ThinkProgress, February 6, 2008 http://thinkprogress.org/2008/02/06/buchanan-gandhi-mccain/

3. "McCain Sides With Bush On Torture Again, Supports Veto Of Anti-Waterboarding Bill," ThinkProgress, February 20, 2008 http://thinkprogress.org/2008/02/20/mccain-torture-veto/

4. "McCain says Roe v. Wade should be overturned," MSNBC, February 18, 2007 http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17222147/

5. "2007 Children's Defense Fund Action Council® Nonpartisan Congressional Scorecard," February 2008 http://www.childrensdefense.org/site/PageServer?pagename=act_learn_scorecard2007
"McCain: Bush right to veto kids health insurance expansion," CNN, October 3, 2007 http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/10/03/mccain.interview/

6. "Beer Executive Could Be Next First Lady," Associated Press, April 3, 2008 http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5h-S1sWHm0tchtdMP5LcLywg5ZtMgD8VQ86M80
"McCain Says Bank Bailout Should End `Systemic Risk,'" Bloomberg News, March 25, 2008 http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aHMiDVYaXZFM&refer=home

7. "Will McCain's Temper Be a Liability?," Associated Press, February 16, 2008 http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=4301022
"Famed McCain temper is tamed," Boston Globe, January 27, 2008 http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2008/01/27/famed_mccain_temper_is_tamed/

8. "Black Claims McCain's Campaign Is Above Lobbyist Influence: 'I Don't Know What The Criticism Is,'" ThinkProgress, April 2, 2008 http://thinkprogress.org/2008/04/02/mccain-black-lobbyist/
"McCain's Lobbyist Friends Rally 'Round Their Man," ABC News, January 29, 2008 http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=4210251

9. "McCain's Spiritual Guide: Destroy Islam," Mother Jones Magazine, March 12, 2008 http://www.motherjones.com/washington_dispatch/2008/03/john-mccain-rod-parsley-spiritual-guide.html
"Will McCain Specifically 'Repudiate' Hagee's Anti-Gay Comments?," ThinkProgress, March 12, 2008 http://thinkprogress.org/2008/03/12/mccain-hagee-anti-gay/
"McCain 'Very Honored' By Support Of Pastor Preaching 'End-Time Confrontation With Iran,'" ThinkProgress, February 28, 2008 http://thinkprogress.org/2008/02/28/hagee-mccain-endorsement/

10. "John McCain Gets a Zero Rating for His Environmental Record," Sierra Club, February 28, 2008 http://www.alternet.org/blogs/environment/77913/

Support our member-driven organization: MoveOn.org Political Action is entirely funded by our 3.2 million members. We have no corporate contributors, no foundation grants, no money from unions. Our tiny staff ensures that small contributions go a long way. If you'd like to support our work, you can give now at:

http://political.moveon.org/donate/email.html?id=12407-6812817-bT9woY&t=241