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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dark Jezter" data-source="post: 1608128" data-attributes="member: 1015">Which is why it's fiction.  Besides, I don't find it as implausable as you do that the US would actually be able to succeed in taking out a hostile leader.  Leaders of organizations and nations are just as vulnerable to bullets and air strikes as everyone else.  If they can be found (and yes, they can be found), they can be killed.  In Executive Orders, the Ryan Doctorine changed the Executive Order created during the Ford Administration and made the killing the leaders of enemy nation states acceptable in times of war.  The reasoning behind it being that if it's okay to kill the young private who is simply obeying orders, why can't it be acceptable to kill the leaders who sent him off to die?The reason the Ayatollah in Executive Orders didn't keep moving from location to location was because he had good reason to believe that there were no American stealth aircraft anywhere near the middle east.  The American military bases in the United States and Europe were all quarantined because of the biological attack on the US.  Unbenknownst to the Ayatollah, a flight of F-117s filled with uninfected pilots flew north of Europe and landed in Russia (because the Russians didn't want him to control the entire Middle East any more than we did).  From the Russian air field, the bombing was staged, with Clark and Chavez on the ground guiding the bombs with laser designators.By the time the bombing happened, however, the war was already decided.  Killing off the leader of the UIR was just the finishing touch in the conflict.So, what is an acceptable number of bad things to happen to Jack Ryan?Al Trent and Sam Fellows are only two of the good politicians from Tom Clancy's Ryanverse.  Roger Durling, the guy who was President before Jack Ryan, was also a generally good guy.  Arnie Van Damm is another career politician who is one of the good guys.Of course, there are greedy, corrupt, and self-serving politicians in the Ryanverse as well.  Edward Kealty being the most obvious example.After Mark David Chapman killed John Lennon, he calmly sat down and started reading Catcher in the Rye.  I'd still call him mad.The JAL pilot who ran his 747 into the Capitol building snapped after his brother and his son were both killed in the brief conflict between Japan and America.  When he decided to attack America, he first killed his co-pilot (a man with whom he'd worked for years) to stop any possible interferance.The two major political parties couldn't add any new candidates to the ballot because their presidential candidates were killed after the primaries.  So Jack was only running against third-party candidates and write-ins.  His election (couldn't exactly call it reelection because he was never elected in the first place) was pretty much a guaranteed successs.The wealthy people I've worked with and known are quite different then the ones you've met, apparantly.  Everybody I've met who has became rich did so by working harder and working smarter than most other people.  They often started out working long hours with a low-paying position, working weekends, doing lots of research into different investments (and more often than not making a few bad investments at some point), carefully keeping track of how they spend their own money, coming into work early and not leaving until after it was time for them to leave, etc.  Even after becoming wealthy, a high number of them still work 10 (or more) hour days and work weekends.They did not spend hours a day surfing the internet, nor did they watch a few hours of TV or play video games every night after getting home from work.  They did not get drunk on the weekends and come into work on Monday morning with a hangover.Granted, there are a few people who become rich easily because of family connections , incredible luck, or shady dealings, but the vast majority got to where they did through lots of hard work, smart thinking, and sacrifice.And I still don't get where you're coming up with the idea that Tom Clancy is saying that wealthy people are immune to corruption (more than a few corrupt, wealthy individuals have appeared in his stories).  I've never seen any such claim in any of his books.  If you can find one, though, I'll be happy to take this statement back.</blockquote>

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