Freedom’s Just Another Word

Every time President Bush wants to get all moist in one of his speeches, he talks about freedom and how he wants to spread it to the world.
I wonder if he even knows what it means. His idea of freedom is to do what America wants. It’s the freedom to obey us, or else.
9/11 didn’t change the world nearly as much as nuclear weapons did. These wretched things are what drives our foreign policy. They are the worse case scenario, short of a biological attack that unleashes a pandemic. These beasts are so deadly, they have us acting like animals at the watering hole again: The rule of law is quaint and irrelevant as we turn to might and killer instincts to run the world.
So how are we approaching the bomb? Our policy is that we can have them, but you can’t. Oh, if you’ve already got them, there’s nothing we can do about it, but if you want the freedom to get a nuclear bomb, we will attack you and kill you. But you’ll be free.
What the United States most resembles now is the strong-arming leader of a criminal gang. Bush supporters were excited that Iraq led to Libya changing for the better, but that was the result of an implied threat. That was Tony Soprano putting one of his gangster rivals in line.
Nuclear deterrence worked because each country with the bomb knew if they launched an attack, they would be hit so hard their country couldn’t take it. In a way, that was closer to freedom than the Bush model. He wants us to have them, and you not to, and by the way, if we even think you’re thinking about it, we have the right to kill you.
Oh, and the first time we tried out our new policy, we got all the facts screwed up. Sleeping better yet?
One thing I’ve noticed is that when people live under a constant threat - and that’s what the United States now is - they become resentful. They try and scheme their way to a better position. The big question is whether these strong-arm tactics will bring on the very situation that we're trying to avoid. It's also downright embarrassing how arrogant we've become. George acts like he was asked to run the world by God, but with none of the fabled peace intiatives that also come with Christianity. I mean we're trying to run the world like a Mafia don would, and sometimes that doesn't work out. Looking at a country with reckless leaders like ours, knowing we have many, many weapons of mass destruction, and you have none, must provoke a lot of feelings. I don’t believe the feeling of being free is one of them.