Former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage speaking at Missouri Boys State in Hendricks Hall on the campus of the University of Central Missouri.
....Question: ...I have two questions. My first one was, is that, as you know, a lot of what we sell, er, buy comes from China and Japan and the Asian countries. Uh, you can't really pick up anything without seeing 'made in China', Japan, Korea there. Do you think this affects anything at all, like our economy, or do you think this is a good thing or a bad thing? What are your thoughts?
Richard Armitage, former Deputy Secretary of State: That's the first one, what about the second question?
Question: And the second one was, what is Persepodas? You said that, uh, the Persians, when you cut them and bleed, they bleed Persepodas, or something like that, and we wanted to know what that was.
Richard Armitage: Okay. The question of, when we buy cheap goods from China, it's, used to be from Japan, not, not much anymore, theirs are kind of high tech goods. Uh, I don't think it bothers us much. We're not doing the manufacturing. Uh, we've benefited immensely of, uh, of the Chinese products that we were buying here before. Now exports are way down.
What does have a big effect on our economy is the number of treasury bills that China holds. China, Japan hold enormous amounts of our treasury. I think the image that you should have of the three of us is of three people in sort of a circle, each with a gun at the other's head. If China pulls out their t-bills our economy falters terribly, but their bills are not worth very much. The same is true of Japan. So, they kind of have to keep us rocking along to keep the value in the treasury bills. So, I think at this point in time, uh, we're still all, in the words of, uh, Ben Franklin, gonna have to hang together or else we'll hang separately on this...
And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand people, maybe more.
People talking without speaking,
People hearing without listening,
People writing songs that voices never share
And no one dared
Disturb the sound of silence.
Fools said I, you do not know
Silence like a cancer grows. Hear my words that I might teach you,
Take my arms that I might reach you.
But my words like silent raindrops fell,
And echoed
In the wells of silence
Here are the rules.
Yesterday George Will, of all people, was comparing Obama refusing to prosecute Bush and Cheney to Ford pardoning Nixon.
If a far right crazed wingnut can get it right, why can't the rest of us?
This comparison is one that we can use to good effect, but only if we do it continuously and loudly.
A friend of mine this morning, a nearly unquestioning Obama supporter, said to me, and I quote:
No argument from me.
Ford should have been stood against the wall and shot for that pardon.
Nixon cooling his heels in the clink for a few years would have prevented this mess, no doubt.
Ford's pardon of Nixon was the beginning of the end of any hope Ford had of being politically effective, and absolutely killed his future chances for reelection.
So let's see... if Obama doesn't want a political blood bath that might define his first term as him being a bush enabler and a torture excuser and might drown him, then he'll tell Holder to appoint a Special Prosecutor, and answer Fertik's question directly himself, instead of hiding behind excuses and Joe Biden, since according to Biden it is not the job of the president or the vice president, but of the Justice department.
Bet you didn't know that Cheney had been held accountable for his role in arranging that the United States involve itself in torture. When a questioner at Claire's "Kitchen Table Talk" in St. Louis on Thursday asked the senator what she thought should be done about recent revelations, Claire said ... well, let's let her say it. (The video begins partway through the questioner's remarks. The woman, a single mother struggling with two mortgages, is nevertheless concerned about more than just the economy.)
