http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0434/barrett.php “10 Ways Bush Screwed New York”

7) What could be worse than lying to GZ workers and residents about the air they were breathing? The original EPA draft of a September 13, 2001, press release, for example, said that the agency considered even the low levels of asbestos that surfaced in their GZ tests “hazardous in this situation.” The final White House version of the release simply scratched out the phrase. And when a September 16 EPA draft warned of “higher levels of asbestos,” the White House changed it to the hot-air hoax that “ambient air quality meets standards and is not a cause for public concern.” The EPA chief of staff conceded in an interview with the agency’s inspector general that the “desire to reopen Wall Street” factored into the releases, saying she did not feel the releases were her own.

NYC will live with the consequences of what the IG concluded were White House efforts to “add reassuring statements and delete cautionary ones” for years, if not decades, to come. Asbestos is a long-term and relentless killer. We have already learned that 2,500 firefighters alone have diminished lung capacity due to inhaling WTC debris. Six hundred have already retired with GZ disabilities or are seeking these costly pensions. Lower Manhattan residents are suing EPA because it left them to fend for themselves, dodging interior cleanup responsibilities until a year after the attack. Eighty percent of the homes have still never been tested or cleaned. Do you think that will be the Bush attitude in a post-hurricane swing state?

Now, I’m not sure how far the cloud of debris went, but let’s say about 1 mile. How many buildings and resident’s live within that area? I’m guessing anywhere from 10,000 – 30,000 minimum (there are more than 8 million people working and living there, right?). This means that children, women, pregnant women (!), elderly etc. were not given the chance to protect themselves; wow, talk about the compassion…

heh, well, you know I’m not really angry. I just think that Roy et. al. have dumped enough vitriol on me and my country that she deserves a little back. As laid out in detail above, her argument rests on a foundation of lies, most crucially and centrally that the Cold War was somehow unjust and Communism wasn’t worth fighting.

Pull out that stick, and it goes Kerplunk…she’s sunk…

I’d hate to see what you’re like when someone really pisses you off. There’s a word for that too…

Ah, but as a self-styled public intellectual, Roy’s greatest sin is to not recognize that the causality is reverse – the people in her state/country are shit poor because socialist attitudes are so common.

She’s digging a deeper hole despite nearly 100 yrs of history providing a clear demo of what lies beneath.

Some intellectual. As they say, the message often says more about the audience than the speaker.

Um, right here: The tired wisdom of knowing that what goes around eventually comes around.

Look, I don’t know why you’re apologizing for her. You excuse the most viciously anti-American rhetoric on her part because she’s just “naive”. She’s not naive – she knows about what the Taliban and the USSR were like. She just chooses to ignore that. There’s a word for that…

Oh, and btw, I should note that the left constantly associates the right with “half century old authoritarian mass murderers in distant lands” for its support of most any issue they don’t like. In this case, though, Vinod and I can draw a pretty straight line between Stalin and Roy: she is what in an earlier time Lenin called a “useful idiot”. She’s someone who just refuses to acknowledge – or, worse, knows and chooses to LIE about – the reasons the United States had to fight the Soviet Union.

In her prattling on and on about Allende and the supposed unjustness of US “imperialism”, she refuses to accept that without the US half the world would still be under the Communist boot – and India would still be finlandized. She’s like someone complaining about the fact that US troops are in France in 1946…ignorant or dishonest about why they were there in the first place.

Naivete is no excuse. She preens as educated, right? So here’s a clue: Communism doesn’t just lead to economic failure, it leads to mass murder. Had Communists taken hold of the Indian armed forces during the Cold War, I have no doubt there would have been a blood bath.

I mean, you understand what the elimination of private property entails, right? It means guys with guns storming into your house, carting you off to a slave labor camp, and expropriating everything you’ve ever owned.

Roy thinks that the US fight against Communism was immoral . That is why she bashes the military bases abroad and why she has her head so firmly planted up her posterior: she refuses to acknowledge the purpose of the Comintern (google it), the nature of the NKVD, the fact that the USSR funded Communist revolutions all around the world, and the FACT that without US resistance that bloody empire would still be extant.

Even aside from her comments re: 9/11 (which would be enough to condemn her to the darkest pits of hell, if there were a God), that’d be enough to damn her. Who really can profess ignorance today about what Communism led to? How many times do we need to run the same reel, from Russia to China to Cambodia to North Korea to Vietnam and on and on and on? I’m sorry, but naivete just doesn’t cut it.

Uh, NO, it’s not.

She’s trying to make the point that the US is an imperial power, killing people and invading countries at random for its self aggrandizement. If asked for specifics I bet she’d babble about “death squads” in Latin America, etc.

That kind of frame on the 1945-1989 period ONLY comes about if you think killing Communists was bad. So, NO, it’s not “ancient history”. As much as leftists would like to deny the Communist Holocaust, unfashionable types like myself and Tacitus will go bashing on about those hundred million bodies till people like Roy ACKNOWLEDGE that the Cold War was a just conflict.

Nobody’s pointed out yet that Roy comes from a socialist state and a poor country? She’s in the mainstream in Kerala, where the Communist Party is in power. She’s from a country where hybrid socialist/capitalist parties dominate at least two provinces, Kerala and Bengal. She’s from a country where the poor really are severely mistreated, where economic opportunity really is hard to come by, where socialist attitudes are common because people really are shit-poor.

GC, you are linking her naive economic proto-socialism, the common, non-genocidal Indian strain, with half century-old authoritarian mass murderers in distant lands as if she were Stalin himself. That’s so off-topic.

You should absolutely be besides yourself that she advocates a system that leads to economic failure. But calling her views genocidal is even more strident than her own writing.

As for ‘blaming 9/11 on America,’ the quote you cited is: the Stygian anger that led to the attacks has its taproot [in]… Where does she say the 3,000 innocents who were murdered, deserved it? The quote says many detest U.S. foreign policy. That’s hardly news. Is she over-the-top in her choice of words (‘military terrorism’)? Yep. She’s a provocateur.

T: she is not a mirror image of Coulter, Hannity or Limbaugh. They are mean spirited people.

When dealing with Romans, speak Latin

Now my buddy was treated unfairly and he was 1) A US citizen 2) Had nothing on him.

He got some flak for it, and it sucked. I did not agree with the treatment handed to him. It was conducted in an unprofessional manner.

The level of scrutiny today is a necessary by product of trying to let the good people in, vs. the bad. The system is not perfect and there have been gaffes. I am also not saying that all policies are correct. But the general idea is right. There needs to be a better filtering process in place. The INS is notorious for inefficiency and also tends to drop the ball quite a bit.

Despite this, I am not yet ready to point a finger at the USA and say we are to blame. We are trying to work out practical solutions feasible for all parties.

Even though I would feel pretty crappy if some Hindu fundamentalists did something bad, I first and foremost consider myself an American and would worry about the loss of American lives, not go on the defensive claiming bais against me or my ethnicity.

Yes, people would be denied visas, and I may get a look or glare, but that is a natural reaction. And again, a Visa is a privilege, not a human right. As a natural law, things will eventually reach an equilibrium again, but it takes time and patience. I work with Egyptians time to time. They don’t really have any issues getting visas. They did mention the process has become more lengthy and time consuming, but they got here.

Either way, I apologize for dragging this off topic.