RE: I honor them, even though I may not honor those who have lied or
illegally encouraged wars.

Oh, and if anyone wants to accuse me of using Memorial Day to make a
political point... maybe you should join me in honoring their deaths
by doing the same

Most Americans do join you. However, the word hero is too often used
as propaganda.  War is a business just as the manufacturing
automobiles or hula hoops is a business. War employs more people than
any other industry and is very useful to political leaders who seek
fame and a place on Mt. Rushmore and to satisfy the plutocrats that
made the politician come alive and do well for himself or herself.

http://www.secularhumanism.org/library/fi/kurtz_20_4.html

War is the good times for many Americans who understand the need to
control Washington. They are the real heros of Wall Street.

In times of peace, we usually ignore the State in favour of partisan
political controversies, or personal struggles for office, or the
pursuit of party policies. It is the Government rather than the State
with which the politically minded are concerned. The State is reduced
to a shadowy emblem which comes to consciousness only on occasions of
patriotic holiday.

Government is obviously composed of common and unsanctified men, and
is thus a legitimate object of criticism and even contempt. If your
own party is in power, things may be assumed to be moving safely
enough; but if the opposition is in, then clearly all safety and honor
have fled the State. Yet you do not put it to yourself in quite that
way. What you think is only that there are rascals to be turned out of
a very practical machinery of offices and functions which you take for
granted. When we say that Americans are lawless, we usually mean that
they are less conscious than other peoples of the august majesty of
the institution of the State as it stands behind the objective
government of men and laws which we see. In a republic the men who
hold office are indistinguishable from the mass. Very few of them
possess the slightest personal dignity with which they could endow
their political role; even if they ever thought of such a thing. And
they have no class distinction to give them glamour. In a republic the
Government is obeyed grumblingly, because it has no bedazzlements or
sanctities to gild it. If you are a good old-fashioned democrat, you
rejoice at this fact, you glory in the plainness of a system where
every citizen has become a king. If you are more sophisticated you
bemoan the passing of dignity and honor from affairs of State. But in
practice, the democrat does not in the least treat his elected citizen
with the respect due to a king, nor does the sophisticated citizen pay
tribute to the dignity even when he finds it. The republican State has
almost no trappings to appeal to the common man's emotions. What it
has are of military origin, and in an unmilitary era such as we have
passed through since the Civil War, even military trappings have been
scarcely seen. In such an era the sense of the State almost fades out
of the consciousness of men.

With the shock of war, however, the State comes into its own again.
The Government, with no mandate from the people, without consultation
of the people, conducts all the negotiations, the backing and filling,
the menaces and explanations, which slowly bring it into collision
with some other Government, and gently and irresistibly slides the
country into war. For the benefit of proud and haughty citizens, it is
fortified with a list of the intolerable insults which have been
hurled toward us by the other nations; for the benefit of the liberal
and beneficent, it has a convincing set of moral purposes which our
going to war will achieve; for the ambitious and aggressive classes,
it can gently whisper of a bigger role in the destiny of the world.
The result is that, even in those countries where the business of
declaring war is theoretically in the hands of representatives of the
people, no legislature has ever been known to decline the request of
an Executive, which has conducted all foreign affairs in utter privacy
and irresponsibility, that it order the nation into battle. Good
democrats are wont to feel the crucial difference between a State in
which the popular Parliament or Congress declares war, and the State
in which an absolute monarch or ruling class declares war. But, put to
the stern pragmatic test, the difference is not striking. In the
freest of republics as well as in the most tyrannical of empires, all
foreign policy, the diplomatic negotiations which produce or forestall
war, are equally the private property of the Executive part of the
Government, and are equally exposed to no check whatever from popular
bodies, or the people voting as a mass themselves.

The moment war is declared, however, the mass of the people, through
some spiritual alchemy, become convinced that they have willed and
executed the deed themselves. They then, with the exception of a few
malcontents, proceed to allow themselves to be regimented, coerced,
deranged in all the environments of their lives, and turned into a
solid manufactory of destruction toward whatever other people may
have, in the appointed scheme of things, come within the range of the
Government's disapprobation. The citizen throws off his contempt and
indifference to Government, identifies himself with its purposes,
revives all his military memories and symbols, and the State once more
walks, an august presence, through the imaginations of men. Patriotism
becomes the dominant feeling, and produces immediately that intense
and hopeless confusion between the relations which the individual
bears and should bear toward the society of which he is a part.

The patriot loses all sense of the distinction between State, nation,
and government.

_Randolph Bourne
War Is The Health of The State

We are like the bees .We have our hive with its queen and we have our
workers and soldiers who protect the queen and her court and will die
for her in wars to provide for her wants. Bees have become so highly
specialized in their functions that no individual bee, including the
queen, is capable of establishing a new colony alone

Bees are called social insects. So are most Americans. This means they
live in very organised groups called colonies. We call them red and
blue states. A bee colony has one queen, some drones and many workers.
They do different jobs. A bee colony lives in a hive. It is totally
dark inside the hive. Bees are  like most Americans, almost deaf, so
touch is the sense they rely on for communication. The humming sound
we hear is the sound of their wings beating. We call this the
primaries.

The queen, or president, is the largest bee in the colony and she/he
is the only one. much like Bush, that lays eggs. Drones are male bees.
They do not work or sting. Their only job is to mate with a queen bee
so that she can lay eggs We call this the cabinet

Bee stings
A bee can only sting once. It stings, flies away and dies, like
Rumsfeld and Powell but leaves the stinger behind.... Rice.  The
stinger has tiny hooks and a poison sac. The stinger keeps on pumping
poison until it is removed.

Vote to remove the cause of of future stings from big bees like Cindy
McCain's jingo husband.....Warmonger John. Clean the hive of killer
bees and make honey instead of war

Vote for change. Don't get stung.
L'Shalom
---------------

Weather?????????

<snip>

.
Stow the talking points.

On May 26, 4:30 am, "Don't Taze Me, Bro!" <N00One...@NoWhere.Com>
wrote:

I served in Iraq and when did I say soldiers get to chose where they fight?
You clearly did not read the post and clearly skimmed over it.

Next time, read!

Yes, I am doing this all for the attention, Joe. You caught me.

Don't you have a funeral to go to in order to make fun of some of your
co-workers? i.e. "I wish that were you in the box, Bob!"