Top 10 Questions Progressives Should be Prepared to Answer

Questions from "Democracy Arsenal"

Answers from myself:

1. So? He wasn't a threat. Sure he's a nasty meany, but so are the guys who run Equatorial Guinea, Myanmar, North Korea and China. Get the Middle East moving? Where are they going? Besides, since when is Wilsonianism a Republican idea? Since it lost its mind?

2. Yes. The UN is what we make it. It's time the US led the world again, instead of going off on crazy crusades against it.

3. Work to get rid of EVERYONE's nuclear weapons, even our own. Good grief, the isolationists of the 1920s had the Washington Naval conference. What's wrong with today's unilateralists?

4. Yes, but you can't impose democracy on people. We never imposed it on Germany and Japan, we just gave it back to them. We could start at home by enforcing the 1965 Voting Rights Act and counting our own votes. PAPER BALLOTS!

5. How is it against our interests to be better liked? Most of the anti-Americanism I've experienced is so ignorant it's not funny. Let educate people overseas about American reality. More Fulbrights!

6. Most of the ones I've talked to actually think Saddam Hussein actually had something to do with 9/11. Way to go Faux News!

7. The track record. We haven't had a good foreign policy president since Kennedy, or maybe Carter. Reagan caused the end of Communism? Please, that's classic post hoc ergo propter hoc. Clinton? Didn't have a foreign policy, his Secretaries of State had them for him. Bush I? Hey, he got the world to go along with us. I thought you were implying in your questions that that was a bad idea. Face it, Bush II is blowing the war(s), not making hard choices, and not even understanding what the choices are.

8. As long as we are part of the equation, and the other countries involved are democracies, yes, I think the US should cooperate with the extension of international law.

9. The Kellog-Briant pact is still legally binding. Agressive war against a power that doesn't threaten you is against the law. Tojo got hanged for it.

10. For one thing we have a direct national interest in seeing to it that Mexico becomes developed before illegal aliens overwhelm us. Wingnuts like to organize vigilantes to keep the Mexicans out, but if they had good jobs at home they wouldn't come here. I'd also like to see something done about oppression of workers in China. How come wingnuts get so worked up about Saddam and ignore Red China?