[Newsbot]

<strong>Filibuster Cartoon</strong>
<strong>Title: </strong> <a href="http://www.filibustercartoons.com/archive.php?id=20070112" target="_blank">Back from the grave</a> (click to view)
<strong>Date: </strong> January 12, 2007

Daniel Ortega was sworn in as President of Nicaragua yesterday, returning to a job he first held 17 years ago. Back then he used to be quite the little communist, and the American government, under Ronald Reagan, spent millions of dollars trying to depose him. <br> <br>This puts the US in a sort of awkward position today. On the one hand, the Bush administration has been very keen to establish good relationships with all countries of the Southern Hemisphere, including Nicaragua. But on the other hand, if the US now admits that Ortega is not such a bad guy, what does this say about the foreign policy wisdom of men like Dick Cheney, who in a previous life argued that Ortega was one of the most dangerous men in the hemisphere? <br> <br>If you have not already...

[Kjorteo]

Personally, I take this as further proof that the United States should spend less time playing topple-the-regime with other people's countries. I am reminded of a quote from NYT columnist Tom Friedman about how "we will never win the war on terror if we keep on financing both sides," possibly a reference to how Al Qaeda got a lot of its munitions from when we wanted to help them kick the Red Army out of Afghanistan. (Or not--I confess hearing the quote secondhand and not having actually read the column in which he said it.)

[Psudo]

I haven't read that column either, Kjorteo, but it seems more likely to me that he was referring to the US dependency on middle-eastern oil.

Guess one of us could, I donno, read the article to find out. But that sounds like work. I live in a desert, and we're getting snow today! That takes precedence. =]

[Kjorteo]

Ooh, that's also a very good theory!

I actually got curious and employed Google. I didn't expect it to work, since searching for that exact quote completely failed last time. I then had the realization that perhaps the site on which I heard the quote had paraphrased, and a slightly fuzzier search might find what the man actually said. I found this:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/13/opini ... 38;ei=5088

Tom Friedman wrote:

By adamantly refusing to do anything to improve energy conservation in America, or to phase in a $1-a-gallon gasoline tax on American drivers, or to demand increased mileage from Detroit's automakers, or to develop a crash program for renewable sources of energy, the Bush team is - as others have noted - financing both sides of the war on terrorism. We are financing the U.S. armed forces with our tax dollars, and, through our profligate use of energy, we are generating huge windfall profits for Saudi Arabia, Iran and Sudan, where the cash is used to insulate the regimes from any pressure to open up their economies, liberate their women or modernize their schools, and where it ends up instead financing madrassas, mosques and militants fundamentally opposed to the progressive, pluralistic agenda America is trying to promote. Now how smart is that?

So it seems you were totally right on that. +Awesome points for you, and don't mind me.

(Not that we didn't give the group that would eventually become Al Qaeda munitions to help them kick the Red Army out of Afghanistan, of course. I guess that's a separate issue from that quote, but it does tie in to my original point in response to JJ's cartoon.)