...really I do - I try so hard to bite my tongue when people that I otherwise like and respect run off at the mouth about stuff about which they are so clueless that they have no idea what unadulterated idiots the prove themselves.

Carter's recent Nobel Peace Award would be a case in point. What eggzackly did he do to win this award?

Did he bring peace to the Middle East?

Did he liberate the folks living under the tyranny of the Warsaw Pact?

After the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, he boycotted the 1980 Olympics. That really left a mark.

Ronnie RayGun spent the USSR into bankruptcy, stood on the Berlin Wall, and demanded that Gorby tear the sumbitch down. Doing so, he put into motion forces that made the communist nations stand down, which liberated millions of folks, all now willing, no, begging, to suck any appendage we wanna unzip to join our oppressive capitalist worker's dystopia.

Carter seems to have won the award for brokering a nuclear non-proliferation deal with N. Korea that the Ultimate Leader proceeded to promptly ignore, all the while enjoying the economic benefits of the agreement he flagrantly violated.

Since there were no effective inspection or enforcement aspects to the deal Carter negotiated under the auspices of the Clinton administration, the only way we found out that Kim Il Dung was violating the treaty was when Bush43 scared the shit outta the rest of the planet with his statements regarding such activities as sending WMD technology to rogue nations, and vowing to hold such regimes responsible.

Surprise, surprise, the Koreans wet their pants falling all over themselves to come clean, lest we come and Saddamize them too.

I actually like Carter as a man. He means and meant well.I volunteered in his campaign for President. Too bad he was an idealistic, utopian, useless, idiot.

Today, I listen to many folks try and blame the US for all the world's ills. Our colonialist, imperialistic tendencies have been the root cause of our present conflicts.

I wonder where, or if, even, they went to school, and if said school made them take a history class.

Virtually all, certainly most, of the planet's current most intrangible conflicts are the result of Europe's colonialist adventures, and they have left us to sanitize the messes they left behind when they cut and ran to leave their former colonies to their fates.

Case in point: Afghanistan.

This nation came into it's miserable situation as the result of the Brits and the Russians fighting over access to a possible warm water port in SW Asia.

Case in point: All of Africa.

The various Euro powers carved out swaths of this continent ignoring reasonable geographic or tribal boundaries, putting into motion the intense fraticidal warfare that survives today. The entire continent is a charnel house. The US had nothing to do with turning it into such, unless you would fault us for not invading it, and imposing imperial rule on the Sub-Saharan continent about a century ago.

Case in point - The entire Middle East

A Compleat Clusterfuck, left when the Brits and other Euros cut and ran after they decided they couldn't afford to administer the lands they had conquered by the end of WWII.

India and SW Asia - see above. The precipitous abandonment of India by the Brits in the post WWII era gave immediate rise to the India-Pakistan wars, (over Kashimir) which remain troubling, as both nations are considered to have nukes.

Those, my friends, are the roots of the those conflicts, not US Imperialism, Big Oil, the military/industrial complex, McDonald's, the right-wing radio talk shows, SUV's, or our supposed lack of an ability to understand the cycle of violence, root causes, yatta-yatta-yatta.

I hereby throw down the gauntlet to the whole damn world of the blogosphere - prove that any of those statements concerning the roots of those wars are wrong.