Charlie Rose

isl80  04/09/2012 03:05 PM Report

I would like to know just how fair a trail Staff Sgt Bales will get in the military. I also would like to know why the Ft Hood shooter has not yet been charged? Sgt Bales has served his country at every calling,four to be exact. In his last he was injured and sustained a documented head injury yet when he advised the Army that he could not handle a fourth tour in combat they sent him anyway. Bring back the draft so that those volunteers will not have to be abused the way they have been.

tabs  03/20/2012 04:05 PM Report

The following is an e-mail sent to Mr Rose while he was in Cairo during the Egyptian sic Arab Spring. One should note the questions Mr Rose asked on that evening show, especially during the second segement where he was interviewing an Egyptian Journalist.

What we are seeing in Egypt

Friday, February 11, 2011 2:50 PM

What we are seeing in Egypt is an undermining of the jihad's ideology as the only means of seeking an equitable society of fairness and justice under the laws of Allah. If one remembers it was Mohamed Atta the Egyptian who could not find a job at home with the higher education he had attained that flew one of the planes into the WTC on 911. If Atta had felt that he had control over his destiny in his own country than he would not have felt the need to grab it back by taking the Martyrs road. This Egyptian Revolution is defusing the fury that the Islamic jihad feeds on, for now the destiny of the people is in their own hands and not that of an authoritarian regime whether it be secular or religious. With these events in Egypt every two bit dictator, religious fanatic or tyrant from Timbuktu to Beijing should be afraid.

TABS

ShalomFreedman  03/20/2012 10:15 AM Report

With all due respect the evaluation by General Dempsey of 'the Arab Spring' totally ignores what has happened there. The 'Arab Spring' is the Muslim Brotherhood spring. The hostility expressed to the U.S. is not a matter of 'opinion' but of fundamental world- view and outlook. The Islamists are taking over in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya. They are eagerly watching and pushing for the U.S. exit from the Middle East.

On the Iranian nuclear question General Dempsey was clear about the goal, preventing a nuclear Iran from coming into being.

A minor point. I enjoyed General Dempsey speaking about his literary background and its importance for his military work.

BENEZRAA  03/20/2012 10:12 AM Report

TABS, YOU ALMOST GOT IT RIGHT...

It is the world beyond Iran, however, that is the "mouse'; and it is Iran under it's present megalomaniacal leadership that is the paranoid, temper-mental, riotous "elephant". General Dempsey did indeed choose his words carefully, and while you are right to quibble with his usage of the word "rational", I suggest to you that, if you will "read between the lines", you may understand the deeper meaning of his usage. Remember, who it is, with whom he is negotiating; it is not with you or I, nor is he submitting a paper to us that we ought to grade for perfect grammar.

SharkswithfrikingLazers  03/20/2012 04:00 AM Report

DEMPSEY: I think there’s a couple of things that limit them. It’s a nation (Pakistan) of 170 million people with mind-numbing economic challenges. They still believe that India poses their greatest existential threat, although we’ve been pulling them closer to our view, which would suggest that terrorism is as much a threat to them as it is to us.

Yes mind-numbing economic challenges and they share with us terrorism as an equal threat?

Sorry . . . not going to fly. Gotta eat before I will fight terrorists and if I can't eat I may have to become a terrorist.

SharkswithfrikingLazers  03/20/2012 03:51 AM Report

ROSE: And prevent the Taliban from achieving power that they had in Afghanistan before the 9/11 attacks?

Charlie, Charlie, Charlie--we have to look in the mirror for that power:

http://www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=a120497texasvisit#a120497texasvisit

Four and half minutes and at the 1:25 mark THE TALIBAN ARE IN HOUSTON, TEXAS

http://youtu.be/gDsq4et834E

Tally:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afghanistan_War_%282001-Present%29#Cost_of_war

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/09/08/us/sept-11-reckoning/cost-graphic.html

(George Clooney said at the table last week it is always about oil even in the Sudan.)

SharkswithfrikingLazers  03/20/2012 03:45 AM Report

Burning Korans, urinating on dead bodies, Army Sergeant goes nuts and kills 16, collateral damage during night raids, told to get out of the villages by next year . . . sounds like someone really isn't winning any hearts and minds.

tabs  03/19/2012 11:45 PM Report

The only time the Afghans stop shooting at each other is when they have foreigners to shoot at. Even Alexander himself could not make a difference nor anyone since then. So what makes Americans think that they can run contrary to history? For to be successful one has to run with the current of history and not against it.

The most important thing that Gen Dempsey said was that, "Words are important and that he chooses them very carefully." It wasn't much longer before one understood that Gen Dempsey is an intellectual who is able to think in abstract terms. Later in the interview it came out that Gen Dempsey was a Professor of English at the Point. So it is that the Chairman of the JCS is "The Professor" who does not have a box that he needs to think outside of. Case in point is Gen Dempsey's observation that it is through a peoples literature that one can understand how they think and live their lives.

If this is presumably so, then General Dempsey will understand that the first line of this critique is ones calling card. As it is that words create images that symbolically resonate with the intellect and the heart. It is through ones choice of words that one can craft the desired meaning for ones audience which will resonate within.

General Dempsey used the terms "reasonable" and "rational." One does not have an argument with the use of the term "reasonable" as what is reasonable to oneself may be unreasonable to another. Yet it with the use of the term "rational" that one thinks that Gen Dempsey's definition maybe unsound. For the General thinks that if one has a discernible pattern of behavior under a set of circumstances or parameters that is rational behavior. There maybe method to ones madness, but that does not make it rational behavior. For "rationality" has an element of assessed reason and or calculation in ones actions.

The question then becomes are the Iranians "rational" actors or not? To answer that question one has to look to the character of the men who hold the reigns of true power in the country. For this one has to look at the Supreme Leader and his Advisers. Adviser Larijani has come to America and has been interviewd by Mr Rose, thus he does have some understanding of American capacity. Further one always thought that Adviser Larijani and other persons in the Iranian leadership were thoughtful about how and what they said in their interviews with Mr Rose. As they were concerned about how their message was going to be perceived. This has required an element of assesment and calculation on their part. So it just maybe that the Iranians are more rational actors than the Americans, who seem distracted and confused by what the real intentions of Ahmadinehjad's blustering rhetoric is?

Here it seems appropriate for the parable of the mouse and the elephant to be told. The mouse when in the same room as the elephant is keenly aware of every move that the elephant makes, for its very survival depends upon it. The elephant for its part should not only understand the reason for the mouses awareness of the elephants every move but what the mouse subscribes the intentions of the elephant to be in making a move? Then one can determine whether or not the mouse is accurate in its assessment of the elephants motivations. In other words one thinks that Iran is paranoid about Americas real intentions towards Iran. Either that or America really is trying to thwart Iranian self determination?

Gelles  03/19/2012 10:08 PM Report

I do however support either the President OR the Congress, depending on which of these supports equity over debt, zero taxes (unless they really help end poverty and war), full employment, Judeo-Christian Zionists (to the extent they vote for Israel's existence), high wages, income and wealth for everyone in as high an amount as possible, preventing crime - corruption - terrorism - and violation of the Golden Rule. If Whig does not fit. OK. I never use the word myself.

Gelles  03/19/2012 09:59 PM Report

From Wikipedia:

In particular, the Whigs supported the supremacy of Congress over the presidency and favored a program of modernization and economic protectionism.

This name was chosen to echo the American Whigs of 1776, who fought for independence, and because "Whig" was then a widely recognized label of choice for people who identified as opposing tyranny.

The Whig Party counted among its members such national political luminaries as Daniel Webster, William Henry Harrison, and their preeminent leader, Henry Clay of Kentucky.

In addition to Harrison, the Whig Party also nominated war heroes generals Zachary Taylor and Winfield Scott.

Abraham Lincoln was the chief Whig leader in frontier Illinois.

=====end Wikipedia=====

It seems to me that REMant calls me a Whig and has no respect for our policies and proposals.

He is right.

But he ought to respect us because we are right.

I am a modern American Whig and I have no idea where REMant stands on my issues. It is true the Whigs disappeared after the Civil War -- split in two.

In all events, the word is useless in today's controversies. Is far better to make a proposal, like NO TAXES (except to protect us from counter-productive hyper-inflation). Modest inflation is good because it is simple and defeats DEBT a little. Best, in my longer proposals at www.ustaxreform.us -- also called Electric Money.

Gelles  03/19/2012 09:39 PM Report

"Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad."

So says REMant after explaining other people's errors in judgment, interpretation, taste, economics, politics, etc.

Sharks (as I remember it -- or err) wrote a very nice paragraph on fear of death to begin the comment on Greenbelt's comment on his own book, "Swerve: the making of the modern world" .

I, too, commented on the conversation -- not well, as I re-read it.

Maybe I'll redo it here -- later.

Gelles  03/19/2012 09:01 PM Report

http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/11977

listen to Greenblatt

Gelles  03/19/2012 08:21 PM Report

From the WW Web courtesy Google and others:

=====Begin copied text=====

"On the Nature of Things", by Lucretius--a beautiful poem of the most dangerous ideas: that the universe functioned without the aid of gods, that religious fear was damaging to human life, and that matter was made up of very small particles in eternal motion, colliding and swerving in new directions.

The copying and translation of this ancient book-the greatest discovery of the greatest book-hunter of his age-fueled the Renaissance, inspiring artists such as Botticelli and thinkers such as Giordano Bruno; shaped the thought of Galileo and Freud, Darwin and Einstein; and had a revolutionary influence on writers such as Montaigne and Shakespeare and even Thomas Jefferson.

=====End copied text=====

I guess REMant is a fool. The archives ought to tell.

Gelles  03/19/2012 07:08 PM Report

Published in September 2011, Stephen Greenblatt's story of the wisdom found in ancient literature that foretold much of what futurists then and now would like to know, convinces our scholar at the apex of our force personnel structure, whose operational authority is beyond measure since the invention of the hydrogen bomb, to add to science and history a keen appreciation of the powers of reason, imagination, literature and intellectual bandwidth, etc.

In other words, the discussion we heard of American strategy and concern, to keep the human race alive and well, and not encourage the worst brains on Earth to shorten the reign of the best of the human race.

Hitler tried to destroy the human race and would have succeeded if he had put the Jews to work for his irrational and unreasonable dream instead of pushing them away to work for England, America and their English speaking comrades in California, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, etc., and the American Army.

New Hitlers are born everyday. Stalin was never one -- he held the hydrogen bomb in his arsenal, but was not interested in committing suicide as a means for having his own way.

General Dempsey wants to obey the American Constitution, which in its Preamble gives the means for implementing the Golden Rule to allow the human race to follow nature's God not the Devil's, and I would like to join the General -- he spoke with the wisdom of Lincoln, albeit not with his cadence or economy.

I cannot imagine George Marshall conversing with Ed Murrow for my benefit when I was between 17 and 20 roaming the Pacific Ocean in an LST and learning how at several training facilities. But, we did not know until Hiroshima anything like what we know today. In today's world, Dempsey is a blessing and Marshall would be doing what Dempsey does.

I copy below from Amazon some of their advice on the book and the story Dempsey mentioned.

"One of the world's most celebrated scholars, Stephen Greenblatt has crafted both an innovative work of history and a thrilling story of discovery, in which one manuscript, plucked from a thousand years of neglect, changed the course of human thought and made possible the world as we know it.

"Nearly six hundred years ago, a short, genial, cannily alert man in his late thirties took a very old manuscript off a library shelf, saw with excitement what he had discovered, and ordered that it be copied. That book was the last surviving manuscript of an ancient Roman philosophical epic, On the Nature of Things, by Lucretius—a beautiful poem of the most dangerous ideas: that the universe functioned without the aid of gods, that religious fear was damaging to human life, and that matter was made up of very small particles in eternal motion, colliding and swerving in new directions."

You may enter the Internet through Google on your task bar as I did with "Greenblatt Swerve" or any words you chose. You may enter Dempsey's cerebral challenge from an infinite variety of reasoned paths -- but try to avoid the nonsense of nitpicking that some of us seem to consider as preferable to survival and even prevailing in a coming age of abundance.

REMant  03/19/2012 11:35 AM Report

Seeing these army guys running around in "dress blues" seems to me a tad ridiculous, as if they Civil War re-enactors or trying to outdo some of our marines and supercilious fly boys. It used to be said Americans had no need of that kind of stuff, the implication of which ought to be clear enough, tho my guess would be that what the Pentagon really had in mind was to get away with wearing fatigues 99% of the time. But they might want to rethink all those prizes for participation they're giving out these days, too. And if I were C-in-C I'd give serious thought to not commissioning anyone before he'd spent two years as an enlisted person in a combat MOS, but I digress...

The next thing I'd like to point out is that no matter what anyone thinks about traditional means of governance, which admittedly had frequent recourse to physicality to keep otherwise rather unruly, if not always bad, folk in line, the presently favored alternative, running a "protection" racket, is hardly the equivalent of just powers derived from the consent of the governed. And, if life gives you lemons, it makes little sense to be trying to make strawberry shortcakes.

Last, Stephen Greenblatt's book, as I remarked when he was on, is not only ignorant, but also biased, not even living up to his own supposed historical objectives, and I hope the general is better versed in the art of war. To answer the question, tho, Army officers are usually initially trained in one of the staff areas as well as one of the combat arms. For example, infantry and logistics, artillery and personnel. Gen Dempsey's such specialty was apparently in education and training, hence he was sent to Duke for a master's in English. He was graduated from West Point, and someone has to teach there. Others might be sent to B-school, or for a degree in poli sci. At various later stages they go to schools preparatory to command, for instance, Ft Leavenworth prepares for battalion command and division staff positions. So if he found English useful as preparation for command, it was somewhat incidental.