I'm replying to a bunch of comments in one post, and I think none of them from you, BleachLPB, so don't freak out.

I think it's awfully pretentious and ignorant for any of us to pretend that we can make informed decisions on how to handle foreign policy

I think it's ignorant to think that GWB can make informed decisions on anything.

she is not bound to vote as per the wishes of her constituents

Just as members of the electoral college are not required to vote as per the wishes of their consituents, as seen in Florida a while back.

I think that history, and our current status as the flagship of modern democracy, affords us the right to say, or at least recommend, who gets to have what in terms of weapons. The part I am not on board with at all is Bush's "we'll do it even if nobody joins us" attitude.

This goes back to my problem with making non-illegal things illegal in order to prevent the illegal things. As such, I'm not really sure about all of this. There's certainly a large portion of devil's advocacy in my statements, but they're still, I think, valid points that at least need to be considered by more people.

mind sharing your solution to the global nuclear crisis? Or the situation with Iraq?

The only solution I can come up with for the nuclear crisis is to have sent Oppenheimer back in time to prevent himself from creating the bomb. Obviously, though, someone else would have come up with it, and they could have been more evil than the US. You cannot unknow knowledge.

The situation with Iraq? What situation with Iraq? As far as I can tell, it's been fabricated from nothing. Did you think about Iraq at all three years ago? No? What's changed since then? An unrelated group of Muslims attacked us? I've yet to see any evidence at all that ties Iraq to that. Hell, I could have come up with the plan to fly planes into buildings, if I knew many zealots. Folks were always talking about the immense amounts of planning required to have pulled that off. I'll admit that booking flights is not the easiest thing in the world to do, but it's hardly rocket science. So what would they have needed Iraq for? Not to mention that Iraq isn't an Islamic state, which is largely what al Qaeda is pushing for.

I'd like to ask if this is really "fundamentalism".

Of course not, it's just that that word has come to mean religious extremism of late in reference to Christianity, and they've expanded that to Islam as well. Some people have posited that one of the ways that the Taliban controlled their populace was that the populace was largely illiterate, and all of their understanding of the Qu'ran was from being told by their clerics (I forget now what Islamic clerics are called -- sorry), with no way to verify it.

Hell, jihad doesn't mean holy war

Well, it does and it doesn't. There are three or four jihads. All but one of them are internal struggles with one's self. The last actually is war with the infidels, but it's generally considered to be the least important. I don't know if modern thinking is what made that determination or not (I'm hardly an Islamic scholar, much less a scholar of historical Islam), but that's what I've read.

I have, on several occasions, had my mind changed when I was concerned about an (apparently) ill-advised decision, talked to the representative, and been told a few more tidbits of crucial information that the public simply cannot be privy to for various reasons. (Think privacy and secrecy laws).

I'm calling bullshit on that one. There are very few things that the public should not be privy to. In fact, the only ones I can think of are when there is an imminent attack and ``loose lips'' might ``sink ships''. But that doesn't apply here, since GWB has been poking Iraq for months now. It's not like a sneak attack is really a possibility now.

he tax rebate check we got a year ago

Which we then had to pay back in taxes the next year. The tax instructions claimed it was just a loan or some other bullshit.

there are certain things they do not want the public to know

Like what? I understand that you want to withhold one or two pieces of evidence so that you can verify who's a kook and who's real, but that's easily enough done by changing the wording of the letter or something similar. The media is not hindering the investigation. (Other than generally being in the way, I'm sure.) I mean, do you think that the sniper thinks that people are not looking for him? I cannot come up with much that should be restricted, at least in this case in particular. That doesn't mean that I don't think that the public's prurient interests aren't disgusting, but the idea that they shouldn't be allowed to know, is, well, fascist.