Behold the Wonders of our Press
Wed September 8th, 2004 21:01 MSTThe Boston Globe just happened to finish its story about some discrepancies in George Bush’s National Guard Record the same day that 60 minutes just happened to get a guy (Democrat fixer) to say that he helped Bush get into the National Guard.
We have such an amazing group out there watching for stories. Did they find this in 1994, when Bush ran? No? Why the heck not?
How about 2000? We know they were messing around with the records then. Did they find today’s allegations? No? Why not?
Apparently it takes them three tries to find something. This is the gang who couldn’t write straight.
And, of course, the timing doesn’t pass the laugh test. The Boston Globe is lying through their pointy little teeth about their timing.
This “September Surprise” has been waiting for, well, September. It obviously was long planned.
Ironically, in a truly logical world, none of this would matter. We have had 3 1/2 years to evaluate Bush. Are we going to learn more about him from a few missed drills in the early 70s? Not hardly.
On the other hand, Kerry has virtually no record and ran on his Vietnam service. Those who discovered that he had fabricated documents and shirked his duty - those who had served with him- had every reason to bring it up.
Likewise, his pro-communist activities after he left Vietnam bear scrutiny because they slandered millions of veterans, including myself. Furthermore, they open a door into his character.
But it isn’t a logical world. It’s a gotcha world. The Texas National Guard Gotcha was easily prediictable and the media was ready to do its part: attack the Republican.
If there is anyone on the planet who believes the main stream media even attempts to be unbiased…. phone home.
Ben Barnes is a real piece of work. Will 60 Minutes II bother asking his how he fixed it so Bush could get into the TANG a year before he because Lt. Gov. of the state? How much pull could he have in Texas while in Geneva, Switzerland on a diplomatic assignment? Or will they question his motives, seeing how he’s a big-time fundraiser for Kerry?
Just another example of the “un”biased reporting from the Communist Broadcasting System (CBS) and other MSM……How “convenient” that these documents just now surfaced, and also, how “convenient” that these memos are from a man who died in 1984, so therefore, he is not available to authenticate these memos. The word “lose” is not in Kerry’s or the Dems’ vocabularies, and they are not above employing any unethical or criminal means that they believe would get Kerry into the White House. (We already know Kerry’s reports and citations are being investigated by the Navy for alterations and revisions.) And their “friends” in the MSM will print anything they believe will hurt President Bush. You can be sure that Fox News and the conservative talk radio programs will be investigating this story thoroughly.
Barnes was Speaker of the Texas House of Representatives in 1968. Texas’ government is peculiar, but Speaker is probably a more influential position than Lt. Gov.
Take this influence bit with a grain of salt. Also, don’t fall into the trap of accepting the premise of the idiotic never been in the Army press/Democrats that being in the Guard was tantamont to draft-dodging.
First, the Guard is a state institution. Recommendations count for scarce positions. Is that fair? You can say so, but it is irrelevent. It certainly hasn’t even a hint of corruption.
Second, in the 1960s, there were lots of honorable ways to behave. Being drafted, enlisting (regular or reserve), joining the Guard, getting a legitimate deferment were all legal and honorable. Lying or otherwise gaming the system, like Bent Willie, was not.
Third, the US military had 2.5 million positions in the Vietnam era; only 0.5 million of those were in the SE Asia theatre We couldn’t all be lucky and get to go to Vietnam. Air national defense was one of the vital military missions, and that was the TANG’s mission.
Fourth, I thought the draft dodgers were the REAL patriots, anyway.
Fifth, the Guard understands that many of its members are young men just getting their careers underway and it tries to accommodate professional demands. It is common for members not to satisfy their weekend duty in evely spaced increments. In the ealy 1970s, Vietnam was winding down and their were too many pilots, too many officers. The AF and Navy were glad to let officers leave active duty early. Bush did it. Kerry did it. I did it tho I was just a low-ranking-enlisted-swine. I did only 32 months of a 36-month enlistment because I returned from RVN with less than five months remaining. There was even a program to encourage people to extend their tours a few months in Vietnam in order to qualify for an early out on return.
On the 3rd anniversary of the hijackings on September 11, 2001, the architects of those attacks are still loose, and Al Qaida is still deemed a threat by Colin Powell. It’s time to recognize that the current Administration, through ignorance or apathy, has failed in the first job it undertook after September 11th: to find those responsible, take them into custody if possible and bring them to trial, if not possible, then kill them where they can be found, and protect us from additional attacks at home or abroad.
Jim Finkelstein
Here’s an enlightening- and somewhat chilling- look at the Bush presidency from Ronald Reagan’s son.
The Case Against George W. Bush - by Ron Reagan
by Ron Reagan
It may have been the guy in the hood teetering on the stool, electrodes clamped to his genitals. Or smirking Lynndie England and her leash. Maybe it was the smarmy memos tapped out by soft-fingered lawyers itching to justify such barbarism. The grudging, lunatic retreat of the neocons from their long-standing assertion that Saddam was in cahoots with Osama didn’t hurt. Even the Enron audiotapes and their celebration of craven sociopathy likely played a part. As a result of all these displays and countless smaller ones, you could feel, a couple of months back, as summer spread across the country, the ground shifting beneath your feet. Not unlike that scene in The Day After Tomorrow, then in theaters, in which the giant ice shelf splits asunder, this was more a paradigm shift than anything strictly tectonic. No cataclysmic ice age, admittedly, yet something was in the air, and people were inhaling deeply. I began to get calls from friends whose parents had always voted Republican, “but not this time.” There was the staid Zbigniew Brzezinski on the staid NewsHour with Jim Lehrer sneering at the “Orwellian language” flowing out of the Pentagon. Word spread through the usual channels that old hands from the days of Bush the Elder were quietly (but not too quietly) appalled by his son’s misadventure in Iraq. Suddenly, everywhere you went, a surprising number of folks seemed to have had just about enough of what the Bush administration was dishing out. A fresh age appeared on the horizon, accompanied by the sound of scales falling from people’s eyes. It felt something like a demonstration of that highest of American prerogatives and the most deeply cherished American freedom: dissent.
Oddly, even my father’s funeral contributed. Throughout that long, stately, overtelevised week in early June, items would appear in the newspaper discussing the Republicans’ eagerness to capitalize (subtly, tastefully) on the outpouring of affection for my father and turn it to Bush’s advantage for the fall election. The familiar “Heir to Reagan” puffballs were reinflated and loosed over the proceedings like (subtle, tasteful) Mylar balloons. Predictably, this backfired. People were treated to a side-by-side comparison—Ronald W. Reagan versus George W. Bush—and it’s no surprise who suffered for it. Misty-eyed with nostalgia, people set aside old political gripes for a few days and remembered what friend and foe always conceded to Ronald Reagan: He was damned impressive in the role of leader of the free world. A sign in the crowd, spotted during the slow roll to the Capitol rotunda, seemed to sum up the mood—a portrait of my father and the words NOW THERE WAS A PRESIDENT.
The comparison underscored something important. And the guy on the stool, Lynndie, and her grinning cohorts, they brought the word: The Bush administration can’t be trusted. The parade of Bush officials before various commissions and committees—Paul Wolfowitz, who couldn’t quite remember how many young Americans had been sacrificed on the altar of his ideology; John Ashcroft, lip quivering as, for a delicious, fleeting moment, it looked as if Senator Joe Biden might just come over the table at him—these were a continuing reminder. The Enron creeps, too—a reminder of how certain environments and particular habits of mind can erode common decency. People noticed. A tipping point had been reached. The issue of credibility was back on the table. The L-word was in circulation. Not the tired old bromide liberal. That’s so 1988. No, this time something much more potent: liar.
Politicians will stretch the truth. They’ll exaggerate their accomplishments, paper over their gaffes. Spin has long been the lingua franca of the political realm. But George W. Bush and his administration have taken “normal” mendacity to a startling new level far beyond lies of convenience. On top of the usual massaging of public perception, they traffic in big lies, indulge in any number of symptomatic small lies, and, ultimately, have come to embody dishonesty itself. They are a lie. And people, finally, have started catching on.
None of this, needless to say, guarantees Bush a one-term presidency. The far-right wing of the country—nearly one third of us by some estimates—continues to regard all who refuse to drink the Kool-Aid (liberals, rationalists, Europeans, et cetera) as agents of Satan. Bush could show up on video canoodling with Paris Hilton and still bank their vote. Right-wing talking heads continue painting anyone who fails to genuflect deeply enough as a “hater,” and therefore a nut job, probably a crypto-Islamist car bomber. But these protestations have taken on a hysterical, almost comically desperate tone. It’s one thing to get trashed by Michael Moore. But when Nobel laureates, a vast majority of the scientific community, and a host of current and former diplomats, intelligence operatives, and military officials line up against you, it becomes increasingly difficult to characterize the opposition as fringe wackos.
Does anyone really favor an administration that so shamelessly lies? One that so tenaciously clings to secrecy, not to protect the American people, but to protect itself? That so willfully misrepresents its true aims and so knowingly misleads the people from whom it derives its power? I simply cannot think so. And to come to the same conclusion does not make you guilty of swallowing some liberal critique of the Bush presidency, because that’s not what this is. This is the critique of a person who thinks that lying at the top levels of his government is abhorrent. Call it the honest guy’s critique of George W. Bush.
THE MOST EGREGIOUS EXAMPLES OF distortion and misdirection—which the administration even now cannot bring itself to repudiate—involve our putative “War on Terror” and our subsequent foray into Iraq.
During his campaign for the presidency, Mr. Bush pledged a more “humble” foreign policy. “I would take the use of force very seriously,” he said. “I would be guarded in my approach.” Other countries would resent us “if we’re an arrogant nation.” He sniffed at the notion of “nation building.” “Our military is meant to fight and win wars. . . . And when it gets overextended, morale drops.” International cooperation and consensus building would be the cornerstone of a Bush administration’s approach to the larger world. Given candidate Bush’s remarks, it was hard to imagine him, as president, flipping a stiff middle finger at the world and charging off adventuring in the Middle East.
But didn’t 9/11 reshuffle the deck, changing everything? Didn’t Mr. Bush, on September 12, 2001, awaken to the fresh realization that bad guys in charge of Islamic nations constitute an entirely new and grave threat to us and have to be ruthlessly confronted lest they threaten the American homeland again? Wasn’t Saddam Hussein rushed to the front of the line because he was complicit with the hijackers and in some measure responsible for the atrocities in Washington, D. C., and at the tip of Manhattan?
Well, no.
As Bush’s former Treasury secretary, Paul O’Neill, and his onetime “terror czar,” Richard A. Clarke, have made clear, the president, with the enthusiastic encouragement of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, was contemplating action against Iraq from day one. “From the start, we were building the case against Hussein and looking at how we could take him out,” O’Neill said. All they needed was an excuse. Clarke got the same impression from within the White House. Afghanistan had to be dealt with first; that’s where the actual perpetrators were, after all. But the Taliban was a mere appetizer; Saddam was the entrée. (Or who knows? The soup course?) It was simply a matter of convincing the American public (and our representatives) that war was justified.
The real—but elusive—prime mover behind the 9/11 attacks, Osama bin Laden, was quickly relegated to a back burner (a staff member at Fox News—the cable-TV outlet of the Bush White House—told me a year ago that mere mention of bin Laden’s name was forbidden within the company, lest we be reminded that the actual bad guy remained at large) while Saddam’s Iraq became International Enemy Number One. Just like that, a country whose economy had been reduced to shambles by international sanctions, whose military was less than half the size it had been when the U. S. Army rolled over it during the first Gulf war, that had extensive no-flight zones imposed on it in the north and south as well as constant aerial and satellite surveillance, and whose lethal weapons and capacity to produce such weapons had been destroyed or seriously degraded by UN inspection teams became, in Mr. Bush’s words, “a threat of unique urgency” to the most powerful nation on earth.
Fanciful but terrifying scenarios were introduced: Unmanned aircraft, drones, had been built for missions targeting the U. S., Bush told the nation. “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud,” National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice deadpanned to CNN. And, Bush maintained, “Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists.” We “know” Iraq possesses such weapons, Rumsfeld and Vice-President Cheney assured us. We even “know” where they are hidden. After several months of this mumbo jumbo, 70 percent of Americans had embraced the fantasy that Saddam destroyed the World Trade Center.
ALL THESE ASSERTIONS have proved to be baseless and, we’ve since discovered, were regarded with skepticism by experts at the time they were made. But contrary opinions were derided, ignored, or covered up in the rush to war. Even as of this writing, Dick Cheney clings to his mad assertion that Saddam was somehow at the nexus of a worldwide terror network.
And then there was Abu Ghraib. Our “war president” may have been justified in his assumption that Americans are a warrior people. He pushed the envelope in thinking we’d be content as an occupying power, but he was sadly mistaken if he thought that ordinary Americans would tolerate an image of themselves as torturers. To be fair, the torture was meant to be secret. So were the memos justifying such treatment that had floated around the White House, Pentagon, and Justice Department for more than a year before the first photos came to light. The neocons no doubt appreciate that few of us have the stones to practice the New Warfare. Could you slip a pair of women’s panties over the head of a naked, cowering stranger while forcing him to masturbate? What would you say while sodomizing him with a toilet plunger? Is keeping someone awake till he hallucinates inhumane treatment or merely “sleep management”?
Most of us know the answers to these questions, so it was incumbent upon the administration to pretend that Abu Ghraib was an aberration, not policy. Investigations, we were assured, were already under way; relevant bureaucracies would offer unstinting cooperation; the handful of miscreants would be sternly disciplined. After all, they didn’t “represent the best of what America’s all about.” As anyone who’d watched the proceedings of the 9/11 Commission could have predicted, what followed was the usual administration strategy of stonewalling, obstruction, and obfuscation. The appointment of investigators was stalled; documents were withheld, including the full report by Major General Antonio Taguba, who headed the Army’s primary investigation into the abuses at Abu Ghraib. A favorite moment for many featured John McCain growing apoplectic as Donald Rumsfeld and an entire tableful of army brass proved unable to answer the simple question Who was in charge at Abu Ghraib?
The Bush administration no doubt had its real reasons for invading and occupying Iraq. They’ve simply chosen not to share them with the American public. They sought justification for ignoring the Geneva Convention and other statutes prohibiting torture and inhumane treatment of prisoners but were loath to acknowledge as much. They may have ideas worth discussing, but they don’t welcome the rest of us in the conversation. They don’t trust us because they don’t dare expose their true agendas to the light of day. There is a surreal quality to all this: Occupation is liberation; Iraq is sovereign, but we’re in control; Saddam is in Iraqi custody, but we’ve got him; we’ll get out as soon as an elected Iraqi government asks us, but we’ll be there for years to come. Which is what we counted on in the first place, only with rose petals and easy coochie.
This Möbius reality finds its domestic analogue in the perversely cynical “Clear Skies” and “Healthy Forests” sloganeering at Bush’s EPA and in the administration’s irresponsible tax cutting and other fiscal shenanigans. But the Bush administration has always worn strangely tinted shades, and you wonder to what extent Mr. Bush himself lives in a world of his own imagining.
And chances are your America and George W. Bush’s America are not the same place. If you are dead center on the earning scale in real-world twenty-first-century America, you make a bit less than $32,000 a year, and $32,000 is not a sum that Mr. Bush has ever associated with getting by in his world. Bush, who has always managed to fail upwards in his various careers, has never had a job the way you have a job—where not showing up one morning gets you fired, costing you your health benefits. He may find it difficult to relate personally to any of the nearly two million citizens who’ve lost their jobs under his administration, the first administration since Herbert Hoover’s to post a net loss of jobs. Mr. Bush has never had to worry that he couldn’t afford the best available health care for his children. For him, forty-three million people without health insurance may be no more than a politically inconvenient abstraction. When Mr. Bush talks about the economy, he is not talking about your economy. His economy is filled with pals called Kenny-boy who fly around in their own airplanes. In Bush’s economy, his world, friends relocate offshore to avoid paying taxes. Taxes are for chumps like you. You are not a friend. You’re the help. When the party Mr. Bush is hosting in his world ends, you’ll be left picking shrimp toast out of the carpet.
ALL ADMINISTRATIONS WILL DISSEMBLE, distort, or outright lie when their backs are against the wall, when honesty begins to look like political suicide. But this administration seems to lie reflexively, as if it were simply the easiest option for busy folks with a lot on their minds. While the big lies are more damning and of immeasurably greater import to the nation, it is the small, unnecessary prevarications that may be diagnostic. Who lies when they don’t have to? When the simple truth, though perhaps embarrassing in the short run, is nevertheless in one’s long-term self-interest? Why would a president whose calling card is his alleged rock-solid integrity waste his chief asset for penny-ante stakes? Habit, perhaps. Or an inability to admit even small mistakes.
Mr. Bush’s tendency to meander beyond the bounds of truth was evident during the 2000 campaign but was largely ignored by the mainstream media. His untruths simply didn’t fit the agreed-upon narrative. While generally acknowledged to be lacking in experience, depth, and other qualifications typically considered useful in a leader of the free world, Bush was portrayed as a decent fellow nonetheless, one whose straightforwardness was a given. None of that “what the meaning of is is” business for him. And, God knows, no furtive, taxpayer-funded fellatio sessions with the interns. Al Gore, on the other hand, was depicted as a dubious self-reinventor, stained like a certain blue dress by Bill Clinton’s prurient transgressions. He would spend valuable weeks explaining away statements—”I invented the Internet”—that he never made in the first place. All this left the coast pretty clear for Bush.
Scenario typical of the 2000 campaign: While debating Al Gore, Bush tells two obvious—if not exactly earth-shattering—lies and is not challenged. First, he claims to have supported a patient’s bill of rights while governor of Texas. This is untrue. He, in fact, vigorously resisted such a measure, only reluctantly bowing to political reality and allowing it to become law without his signature. Second, he announces that Gore has outspent him during the campaign. The opposite is true: Bush has outspent Gore. These misstatements are briefly acknowledged in major press outlets, which then quickly return to the more germane issues of Gore’s pancake makeup and whether a certain feminist author has counseled him to be more of an “alpha male.”
Having gotten away with such witless falsities, perhaps Mr. Bush and his team felt somehow above day-to-day truth. In any case, once ensconced in the White House, they picked up where they left off.
IN THE IMMEDIATE AFTERMATH and confusion of 9/11, Bush, who on that day was in Sarasota, Florida, conducting an emergency reading of “The Pet Goat,” was whisked off to Nebraska aboard Air Force One. While this may have been entirely sensible under the chaotic circumstances—for all anyone knew at the time, Washington might still have been under attack—the appearance was, shall we say, less than gallant. So a story was concocted: There had been a threat to Air Force One that necessitated the evasive maneuver. Bush’s chief political advisor, Karl Rove, cited “specific” and “credible” evidence to that effect. The story quickly unraveled. In truth, there was no such threat.
Then there was Bush’s now infamous photo-op landing aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln and his subsequent speech in front of a large banner emblazoned MISSION ACCOMPLISHED. The banner, which loomed in the background as Bush addressed the crew, became problematic as it grew clear that the mission in Iraq—whatever that may have been—was far from accomplished. “Major combat operations,” as Bush put it, may have technically ended, but young Americans were still dying almost daily. So the White House dealt with the questionable banner in a manner befitting a president pledged to “responsibility and accountability”: It blamed the sailors. No surprise, a bit of digging by journalists revealed the banner and its premature triumphalism to be the work of the White House communications office.
More serious by an order of magnitude was the administration’s dishonesty concerning pre-9/11 terror warnings. As questions first arose about the country’s lack of preparedness in the face of terrorist assault, Condoleezza Rice was dispatched to the pundit arenas to assure the nation that “no one could have imagined terrorists using aircraft as weapons.” In fact, terrorism experts had warned repeatedly of just such a calamity. In June 2001, CIA director George Tenet sent Rice an intelligence report warning that “it is highly likely that a significant Al Qaeda attack is in the near future, within several weeks.” Two intelligence briefings given to Bush in the summer of 2001 specifically connected Al Qaeda to the imminent danger of hijacked planes being used as weapons. According to The New York Times, after the second of these briefings, titled “Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside United States,” was delivered to the president at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, in August, Bush “broke off from work early and spent most of the day fishing.” This was the briefing Dr. Rice dismissed as “historical” in her testimony before the 9/11 Commission.
What’s odd is that none of these lies were worth the breath expended in the telling. If only for self-serving political reasons, honesty was the way to go. The flight of Air Force One could easily have been explained in terms of security precautions taken in the confusion of momentous events. As for the carrier landing, someone should have fallen on his or her sword at the first hint of trouble: We told the president he needed to do it; he likes that stuff and was gung-ho; we figured, What the hell?; it was a mistake. The banner? We thought the sailors would appreciate it. In retrospect, also a mistake. Yup, we sure feel dumb now. Owning up to the 9/11 warnings would have entailed more than simple embarrassment. But done forthrightly and immediately, an honest reckoning would have earned the Bush team some respect once the dust settled. Instead, by needlessly tap-dancing, Bush’s White House squandered vital credibility, turning even relatively minor gaffes into telling examples of its tendency to distort and evade the truth.
But image is everything in this White House, and the image of George Bush as a noble and infallible warrior in the service of his nation must be fanatically maintained, because behind the image lies…nothing? As Jonathan Alter of Newsweek has pointed out, Bush has “never fully inhabited” the presidency. Bush apologists can smilingly excuse his malopropisms and vagueness as the plainspokenness of a man of action, but watching Bush flounder when attempting to communicate extemporaneously, one is left with the impression that he is ineloquent not because he can’t speak but because he doesn’t bother to think.
GEORGE W. BUSH PROMISED to “change the tone in Washington” and ran for office as a moderate, a “compassionate conservative,” in the focus-group-tested sloganeering of his campaign. Yet he has governed from the right wing of his already conservative party, assiduously tending a “base” that includes, along with the expected Fortune 500 fat cats, fiscal evangelicals who talk openly of doing away with Social Security and Medicare, of shrinking government to the size where they can, in tax radical Grover Norquist’s phrase, “drown it in the bathtub.” That base also encompasses a healthy share of anti-choice zealots, homophobic bigots, and assorted purveyors of junk science. Bush has tossed bones to all of them—”partial birth” abortion legislation, the promise of a constitutional amendment banning marriage between homosexuals, federal roadblocks to embryonic-stem-cell research, even comments suggesting presidential doubts about Darwinian evolution. It’s not that Mr. Bush necessarily shares their worldview; indeed, it’s unclear whether he embraces any coherent philosophy. But this president, who vowed to eschew politics in favor of sound policy, panders nonetheless in the interest of political gain. As John DiIulio, Bush’s former head of the Office of Community and Faith-Based Initiatives, once told this magazine, “What you’ve got is everything—and I mean everything—being run by the political arm.”
This was not what the American electorate opted for when, in 2000, by a slim but decisive margin of more than half a million votes, they chose…the other guy. Bush has never had a mandate. Surveys indicate broad public dissatisfaction with his domestic priorities. How many people would have voted for Mr. Bush in the first place had they understood his eagerness to pass on crushing debt to our children or seen his true colors regarding global warming and the environment? Even after 9/11, were people really looking to be dragged into an optional war under false pretenses?
If ever there was a time for uniting and not dividing, this is it. Instead, Mr. Bush governs as if by divine right, seeming to actually believe that a wise God wants him in the White House and that by constantly evoking the horrible memory of September 11, 2001, he can keep public anxiety stirred up enough to carry him to another term.
UNDERSTANDABLY, SOME SUPPORTERS of Mr. Bush’s will believe I harbor a personal vendetta against the man, some seething resentment. One conservative commentator, based on earlier remarks I’ve made, has already discerned “jealousy” on my part; after all, Bush, the son of a former president, now occupies that office himself, while I, most assuredly, will not. Truth be told, I have no personal feelings for Bush at all. I hardly know him, having met him only twice, briefly and uneventfully—once during my father’s presidency and once during my father’s funeral. I’ll acknowledge occasional annoyance at the pretense that he’s somehow a clone of my father, but far from threatening, I see this more as silly and pathetic. My father, acting roles excepted, never pretended to be anyone but himself. His Republican party, furthermore, seems a far cry from the current model, with its cringing obeisance to the religious Right and its kill-anything-that-moves attack instincts. Believe it or not, I don’t look in the mirror every morning and see my father looming over my shoulder. I write and speak as nothing more or less than an American citizen, one who is plenty angry about the direction our country is being dragged by the current administration. We have reached a critical juncture in our nation’s history, one ripe with both danger and possibility. We need leadership with the wisdom to prudently confront those dangers and the imagination to boldly grasp the possibilities. Beyond issues of fiscal irresponsibility and ill-advised militarism, there is a question of trust. George W. Bush and his allies don’t trust you and me. Why on earth, then, should we trust them?
Fortunately, we still live in a democratic republic. The Bush team cannot expect a cabal of right-wing justices to once again deliver the White House. Come November 2, we will have a choice: We can embrace a lie, or we can restore a measure of integrity to our government. We can choose, as a bumper sticker I spotted in Seattle put it, SOMEONE ELSE FOR PRESIDENT.
Finklesteinie:
Comrade F. Why do you bother posting ?
You have already stated that you dont care if kerry was a draft dodger, or ran away under fire you would still vote for him.
You have no argument. Your facts are hollow and forged . Now you are quoting ron reagan, you have really reached the bottom and are starting to dig.
This is EXACTLY the reason liberals CAN NOT be trusted with the National Security of the United States.
What you should do since you HATE this country so much . Go to Canada become a citizen, then you can represent all the Al Quida prisoners you like and have no shame then you can claim you are doing it for justice.
You have no shame and no honor.
Intellectual Morons : How Ideology Makes Smart People Fall for Stupid Ideas
by DANIEL J. FLYNN
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1400053552/qid=1094926972/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/104-9029275-2662302?v=glance&s=books
Finklestien:
I have read all I can from you. Now I need to say something. Can you not get to your point without writing a book? Are you a closet novelist? If so, I have a suggestion. Use fewer words.
It is clear you aren’t interested in discussion, only in expostulating and seeing your words in print. As my kids used to say–Talk to the hand-no one else is listening.
Since the title is “Behold the Wonders of our Press” I thought it might be instructive to see what the Atlanta Journal Constitution’s Vent contributors had to say about our current political situation. As for the last comment on this page, well, if the shoe fits…
If Iraq gets hit by a hurricane, they already have the Florida National Guard stationed there and ready to help.
I guess this proves Clinton has a heart. Now for Bush to prove he has a brain.
John Kerry will get the votes of the thinking people. Unfortunately, he needs a majority.
Republicans cultivate followers the way you grow mushrooms — keep them in the dark and feed them manure.
We might be leaning toward the wrong man to lead this country, but we’re sure as hell kicking the right man out.
Saddam Hussein was never worth the lives of 1,000 American soldiers.
W stands for Without Leave.
My American dream is waking up and finding out the last four years were just a nightmare.
After seeing the latest SAT scores, Democrats realized there is no chance to reason with Georgians.
Great minds think alike. Alas, so do the stupid ones.
Here’s an analysis by UCLA Professor Harold Cole of Al Qaida’s ultimate goals, its rationale, and the strategy and tactics it has employed to get there. It fits my theory that if Osama bin Laden could decide the coming election, he’d go for Bush, because without needlessly provocative actions like the invasion of Iraq, Osama and Al Qaida would not have become as popular in the Arab and Muslim universe. Bin Laden can only hope that Bush, if re-elected, will keep Iraq in turmoil with an American military presence (as opposed to Arabic speaking Muslim peacekeepers, which was my proposal as well as Colin Powell’s). Of course, Bush needs the complicity of Useless Fools in order to accomplish his goal of being re-elected, and Bin Laden and Al Qaida obviously need them as well. (This really is an aptly named, self descriptive, website. I’m impressed with your candor.)
Harold L. Cole
Professor of Economics
U.C.L.A.
Saturday, September 11, 2004
September 11 and Its Aftermath
In order to evaluate the aftermath of September 11, we first must understand that event. What did al-Qaeda intend to achieve? Only if we understand that can we gauge their success or failure.
From the point of view of al-Qaeda, the Muslim world can and should be united into a single country. They believe that it once had this political unity, under the early caliphs. Even as late as the outbreak of World War I, the Ottoman state ruled much of the Middle East, and the Ottoman sultans had begun making claims to be caliphs (Muslim popes) from about 1880. In the below map, blue indicates heavy Muslim populations, green means medium, and yellow means the Muslims are a significant minority.
From al-Qaeda’s point of view, the political unity of the Muslim world was deliberately destroyed by a one-two punch. First, Western colonial powers invaded Muslim lands and detached them from the Ottoman Empire or other Muslim states. They ruled them brutally as colonies, reducing the people to little more than slaves serving the economic and political interests of the British, French, Russians, etc. France invaded Algeria in 1830. Great Britain took Egypt in 1882 and Iraq in 1917. Russia took the Emirate of Bukhara and other Central Asian territories in the 1860s and forward. Second, they formed these colonies into Western-style nation-states, often small and weak ones, so that the divisive effects of the colonial conquests have lasted. (Look at the British Empire and its imposition on much of the Muslim world, e.g.:)
The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was not an unprecedented event from the point of view of Bin Laden and his followers. Far from it. It was only the latest in a long series of Western predations in Muslim lands. The British had conquered Palestine, Jordan and Iraq, and had unilaterally opened Palestine to Jewish immigration, with the colonized Palestinians unable to object. The Russians had taken the Caucasus and Chechnya in the early nineteenth century, and had so brutally repressed the Muslims under their rule that they probably killed hundreds of thousands and expelled even more to the Ottoman Empire (now Turkey).
From al-Qaeda’s point of view, the Soviet attempt to absorb Afghanistan was the beginning of the end of the colonial venture. They demonstrated that even a superpower can be forced to withdraw from a Muslim land if sufficient guerrilla pressure is put on it.
Bin Laden sees the Muslim world as continually invaded, divided and weakened by outside forces. Among these is the Americans in Saudi Arabia and the Israelis in geographical Palestine. He repeatedly complained about the occupation of the three holy cities, i.e., Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem.
For al-Qaeda to succeed, it must overthrow the individual nation-states in the Middle East, most of them colonial creations, and unite them into a single, pan-Islamic state. But Ayman al-Zawahiri’s organization, al-Jihad al-Islami, had tried very hard to overthrow the Egyptian state, and was always checked. Al-Zawahiri thought it was because of US backing for Egypt. They believed that the US also keeps Israel dominant in the Levant, and backs Saudi Arabia’s royal family.
Al-Zawahiri then hit upon the idea of attacking the “far enemy” first. That is, since the United States was propping up the governments of Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, etc., all of which al-Qaeda wanted to overthrow so as to meld them into a single, Islamic super-state, then it would hit the United States first.
The attack on the World Trade Center was exactly analogous to Pearl Harbor. The Japanese generals had to neutralize the US fleet so that they could sweep into Southeast Asia and appropriate Indonesian petroleum. The US was going to cut off imperial Japan from petroleum, and without fuel the Japanese could not maintain their empire in China and Korea. So they pushed the US out of the way and took an alternative source of petroleum away from the Dutch (which then ruled what later became Indonesia).
Likewise, al-Qaeda was attempting to push the United States out of the Middle East so that Egypt, Jordan, Israel and Saudi Arabia would become more vulnerable to overthrow, lacking a superpower patron. Secondarily, the attack was conceived as revenge on the United States and American Jews for supporting Israel and the severe oppression of the Palestinians. Bin Laden wanted to move the timing of the operation up to spring of 2001 so as to “punish” the Israelis for their actions against the Palestinians in the second Intifadah. Khalid Shaikh Muhammad was mainly driven in planning the attack by his rage at Israel over the Palestinian issue. Another goal is to destroy the US economy, so weakening it that it cannot prevent the emergence of the Islamic superpower.
Al-Qaeda wanted to build enthusiasm for the Islamic superstate among the Muslim populace, to convince ordinary Muslims that the US could be defeated and they did not have to accept the small, largely secular, and powerless Middle Eastern states erected in the wake of colonialism. Jordan’s population, e.g. is 5.6 million. Tunisia, a former French colony, is 10 million, less than Michigan. Most Muslims have been convinced of the naturalness of the nation-state model and are proud of their new nations, however small and weak. Bin Laden had to do a big demonstration project to convince them that another model is possible.
Bin Laden hoped the US would timidly withdraw from the Middle East. But he appears to have been aware that an aggressive US response to 9/11 was entirely possible. In that case, he had a Plan B: al-Qaeda hoped to draw the US into a debilitating guerrilla war in Afghanistan and do to the US military what they had earlier done to the Soviets. Al-Zawahiri’s recent message shows that he still has faith in that strategy.
The US cleverly outfoxed al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, using air power and local Afghan allies (the Northern Alliance) to destroy the Taliban without many American boots on the ground.
Ironically, however, the Bush administration then went on to invade Iraq for no good reason, where Americans faced the kind of wearing guerrilla war they had avoided in Afghanistan.
Al-Qaeda has succeeded in several of its main goals. It had been trying to convince Muslims that the United States wanted to invade Muslim lands, humiliate Muslim men, and rape Muslim women. Most Muslims found this charge hard to accept. The Bush administration’s Iraq invasion, along with the Abu Ghuraib prison torture scandal, was perceived by many Muslims to validate Bin Laden’s wisdom and foresightedness.
After the Iraq War, Bin Laden is more popular than George W. Bush even in a significantly secular Muslim country such as Turkey. This is a bizarre finding, a weird turn of events. Turks didn’t start out with such an attitude. It grew up in reaction against US policies.
It remains to be seen whether the US will be forced out of Iraq the way it was forced out of Iran in 1979. If so, as al-Zawahiri says, that will be a huge victory. A recent opinion poll did find that over 80 percent of Iraqis want an Islamic state. If Iraq goes Islamist, that will be the biggest victory the movement has had since the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan. An Islamist Iraq might well be able ultimately to form a joint state with Syria, starting the process of the formation of the Islamic superstate of which Bin Laden dreams.
If the Muslim world can find a way to combine the sophisticated intellectuals and engineers of Damascus and Cairo with the oil wealth of the Persian Gulf, it could well emerge as a 21st century superpower.
Bin Laden’s dream of a united Muslim state under a revived caliphate may well be impossible to accomplish. But with the secular Baath gone, it could be one step closer to reality. If you add to the equation the generalized hatred for US policies (both against the Palestinians and in Iraq) among Muslims, that is a major step forward for al-Qaeda. In Saudi Arabia, al-Qaeda has emerged as a dissident political party. Before it had just been a small group of Bin Laden’s personal acolytes in Afghanistan and a handful of other countries.
Although the United States and its Pakistani ally have captured significant numbers of al-Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan and Pakistan, a whole new generation of angry young Muslim men has been produced. Al-Qaeda has moved from being a concrete cell-based terrorist organization to being an ideal and a model, for small local groups in Casablanca, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia and elsewhere.
The US is not winning the war on terror. Al-Qaeda also has by no means won. But across a whole range of objectives, al-Qaeda has accomplished more of its goals than the US has of its.
I just got back from the Kerry Lied rally in D.C. C-SPAN broadcast it live and CNN was there. I didn’t see John Moore, but I got thrown out of the rally and made a young girl (a Kerry campaign worker) cry. Maybe by tomorrow night I’ll get something up at Logomachon.
If nothing else, this “Finklestein” person is proof beyond a reasonable doubt that this blog is truly unmoderated.
Consider this particular pair of Fink’s oh-so-biting barbs:
“W stands for Without Leave.”
“Great minds think alike. Alas, so do the stupid ones.”
Taken together they are beautifully ironic, n’est-ce pas?
This professor he cites ( econ??? ) is a hoot too:
“In order to evaluate the aftermath of September 11, we first must understand that event.”
Priceless! Never before reading this lofty opus did I ever even consider that I could have been mistaken about what happened on that day! The scales have fallen from my eyes…
Of course finkingstein says the United States is losing the War. This is what he wants to happened, Why ? because he and his minions HATE AMERICA it is that simple.
Madiline Halfbright said it on TV, the Clintons trusted the North Koreans but the NKs tricked the clintons, hmmm, now how did that happen ? Either the clintons are stupid or ‘you just cant trust any communist. This is another reason why the Kerrys Kennedys or the finkelsteins can NOT be trusted with National Security. They continue to screw it up.
Why ? Because they just want to get along with the rest of the world and show them that we are nice people.
We tried that and then 9-11 happened. We cant trust the islamofacist nor can we trust the liberals with killing our enemies. These people have not clue number one about what is really going on and the American people are figuring that out and THAT scares the hell out of any liberal worth his Soy-Milk. (anyone ever try that shit anyone to drink that crap has got to be a putz)
The only way they can attempt to level the playing field is to lie and forge documents and then swear ‘oh no they are authentic’, These morons are going down big time . And Dan ‘the whistler’ Rather is going to lead the way.
This blog is moderated. Slightly. Anyone posting a comment might want to look at the rules at the top.
I’ve been out of town (Kerry Lied Ralley in DC), which makes it hard to moderate, plus I’m too busy for now.
If anyone truely wants me to moderate someone, drop me a ling.
Just got back myself from a nice vacation and see that Finkelstein remains as dense and fixated as ever. This man is living proof that there is no intellectual life after the infections of Leftism set in, with the faculties mortified and deadened by the stupidities and fixations of the past. That he sought public office (Senator) is either morbidly funny or frightening, or both.
Finkelstein is truly an embarrassment, even to the Democratic Party. I earlier thought that Finkelstein was a September 10th person, meaning that he lacked the vision and intellectual breadth
to comprehend the world as it is today, was maybe a little too full of self-adulation, but probably had a good heart. But he doesn’t, and it’s worse than that.
The chaotic and disorganized world view of a Finkelstein have no cohesive outlets at all, which accounts for these rambling, banal and inane monlogues full of demonology and evil spirits. This man is truly a political clown, an amateur, who just demands to be ignored.
Just read further into this blog and find that Finkelstein is doing another core dump elsewhere with his magnified lunacies. He has also yet to answer anything said in response to whatever deranged opinions he is holding at the moment. He can’t. How could he? The belief system is so fragile that the introduction of doubt would be catastrophic.
There is a useful and funny side to this too, because he demonstrates, as Mark said, every reason why Lefties should be excluded from power at every level, always and permanently. Not only in matters of national defense, but in EVERY area.
And visitors here can see the Left at its very best…excluded from power and dancing on the edge of rationality because of it. He actually thinks he’s being taken seriously. What a joke.
It’s impossible to improve upon zeppenwolf’s post concerning James Finkelstein. You simply cannot read Fink’s posts without laughing. My hunch is that he was a late-born Red Diaper baby who hasn’t left home yet.
Rather keeps saying he believes these documents,.. Of course what else is he going to say, he is the only one in the whole country that believes they are real. Even the DNC is accusing the Republicans of planting these documents, if the DNC says they are Fonies, and they of all people should know what a Fony is, afterall look at the Dirtbag they have as a candidate, John “The F stands for Fony” kerry.
CBS has no viable witnesses, there only ace in the hole has recanted his statement saying RAther mislead him.
To Fink your people are going down,, like a lead weight.
I don’t think Finkelstein has any “people”, unless it is the loons on the hard Left who rant about “cabals of right wing justices” and “old white men” and suchlike. Call them Finks. They don’t number very many, which makes them lonely, edgy and fearful.
The Finks probably represent the same proportion of liberals that madmen represent among the general population, although I can’t prove it. You see them mumbling to themselves at newstands, shaking their fists at banks and running for Senator.
The reason nothing can be argued or concluded with Finks is that they have a second reality, out of reach of reason, agreement or good will. Finkelstein’s convictions have all the velocity of a cotton ball flicked off a mouse’s privates, and about as much value to human understanding.
We need them, though. As bad luck keeps the universe of good luck in balance, Finks keep Reason on its toes and helps us flex our collective sense of humor.
What Rather is doing to himself, in the manner of Walter Cronkite, is stepping away from the monitor, mike and prepared sheets and speaking extemporaneously. With the result that he has exposed himself for the honking lightweight halfwit he has always been, but which is been cloaked by publicity and the star machine.
In two days Rather has said (1) that the documents couldn’t be forged because it takes a lot of talent to forge documents. The logic in this is that the documents would have seemed authentic if they had been BETTER FORGERIES! (Has this moron has a brain embolism somewhere along the way, or is he just being himself?)
(2) Rather insists that the “authenticity” of the documents doesn’t matter, the “contents” matters.
This is so sh**head lame that only Rather could say it. In other words, virtually ANY document with significant content is true entirely because of the weight of its contents…even if it is forged.
You can’t count the ways in which this event will change CBS, the blogosphere, and probably the campaign, as it will eventually be shown that Terry MacAuliffe slipped Rather the docs.
One way simply MUST be that for thirty years, a bloviating dimwit named Dan Rather has had the public’s trust and attention, filling the shoes of an even lower form of bloviating dimwit, Walter Cronkite. Brokaw is just as bad, and Jennings is beyond contempt.
Now we need to check Finkelstein’s documents too.
“… they have a second reality, out of reach of reason, agreement or good will. Finkelstein’s convictions have all the velocity of a cotton ball flicked off a mouse’s privates, and about as much value to human understanding.”
Sheesh, reminds me of the bad old days when Soviets and Americans would look in the mirror when describing the other side. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black…
By the way, if I own stock in major U.S. corporations, would that mean I have to resign my membership in the “hard left?” Not to be confused with the soft left (those who eat dolphin safe tuna and drive minivans instead of SUV’s- neither of which desribes moi, anyhow.) By the way, the totally hot babes (Sharon Stone- who actually endorsed me in an election, no foolin’- Drew Barrymore, Susan Sarandan, et al.) go for us left wingers, and you’re stuck with Katherine Harris and Phyllis Schlafly. Or Ann (shudder) Coulter.
Anyway, for those of you who can reason only through induction (i.e. anecdotes, the staple of right wing politics since Ronald Reagan), here are a couple stories from Bob Harris that may be a bit hard for those with short attention spans (too much TV at an early age was bad for you), so I’ll give you the short hand version:
We invade another country, kill people there, including small children and infants, and other people like them begin to hate us and want to kill us. The more people we kill, the more people who hate us.
Now here’s the longer, more subtle version:
by Bob Harris)
“Yesterday, I’m working and unpacking, and I’ve got CNN on in the background. And I hear Wolf Blitzer, barking in that constant breathless get-the-kids-excited-for-Christmas, here-comes-another-shiny-pebble pacing of his, mentioning a video of a civilian journalist, Mazen al-Tumeizi, and about a score of other civilians (reports vary) getting killed in a U.S. airstrike. About 60 other civilians were injured.
I didn’t actually see the report live — Wolf had already moved on to his next story — but I was struck by how casual this was: innocent civilians killed in a U.S. airstrike, and it wasn’t even the news hook; the death of the reporter was. (CNN doesn’t have a transcript up for the report I saw. They do, however, have one for a later, similar report. Scroll down, or just search for the words “I’m dying.” The entire mention of the U.S. inflicting over 70 civilian casualties is exactly four sentences long. The Batman guy, meanwhile, got thirty.)
So, through the miracle of TiVo, I rewound. And there it was.
Video.
Civilians.
Being killed by a U.S. airstrike.
Non-combatants. Celebrating on a disabled U.S. vehicle, granted. But civilians nonetheless. Certainly not in combat against any U.S. troops.
In the foreground, a reporter just doing his job, frowning over some little technical glitch, maybe something he forgot to do…
Bang, boom. No warning. Just an incoming U.S. aerial attack. “To prevent looters from stripping the vehicle,” the Pentagon later says, classifying everyone within thirty feet as “looters” and sentencing them to summary execution.
Blood splashes on the lens. The camera spins. Tiny glimpses of terrible carnage.
Without a beat, without reflection, without even a moment of minimal thought, Wolf Blitzer moves on. As do we, collectively.
And that’s that. America kills innocent civilians. Lots of them. And it’s no big deal now. Not controversial. No reason to ask questions or rationalize or even pretend to soul-search like the national media once did. America kills civilians. Lots of them. Just part of the fabric of things now.
Happens every day.
The military isn’t pressed and can’t be bothered for a detailed explanation about the incident, other than to blame the victims themselves. “Great care should be taken by all to avoid and keep a safe distance from any active military operation as unpredictable events can occur,” the U.S. spokesman says.
“Unpredictable events,” they say. Like an earthquake or a lightning strike. Like an unprovoked attack from an Apache helicopter, firing on unarmed civilians, on tape, recorded for all the world to see.
Nobody’s responsible. These are “unpredictable events.”
I say this next as the most articulate, precisely-worded response I can muster right now, summing up all my emotions quite clearly: FUCK.
And yet there’s no sizeable outrage in this country I can find. Not in the mainstream, and not even much in the blogosphere, except for a few posts.
We are numb now.
We are killing. We are killing in large numbers. And we are numb to what we are doing.
That’s it. Game over. We have lost.
Not the war. Ourselves.
The war and much more will follow, soon, if we can’t wake up from our savage numbness.
PS — I was going to leave it at that, but there’s more to say.
In the past year, I have personally visited three of the six biggest Muslim countries on Earth, and I have spoken at some length with ordinary Sunnis and Shia on four continents. This week I have just returned from Egypt, where I listened to lots of perfectly average people on the street, in trains, shops, and cafes.
This is true, I swear: we have hundreds of millions more potential friends than America realizes right now. And we are losing them for a generation or more. I promise you that on my soul.
Seven days ago, I was in Alexandria, watching waves break against the rocky shoreline with a 20-year-old named Mahmoud who loves Bruce Lee movies and wants to visit China and study in the footsteps of his hero. He’s a devoted Muslim who playfully tried to talk me into converting; he also thinks Bin Laden is (his words) “against Islam.” You’d like this guy, I promise. And he’d like you.
Mahmoud wanted very much to know was if Kerry is a good man, and if he would stop the killing, and how Americans could possibly support what is happening in Iraq.
I still don’t know all the answers to his questions. But that’s what they were.
An hour earlier I was accosted by a tall and angry fellow shouting “I hate America!” over and over, in a tone half-accusing, half-demanding-an-explanation. But he wasn’t a mugger or anything; actually, he was well-dressed and clean-shaven and looked more like an accountant out for a stroll who was just pissed off about the news and took it out on the white guy. I nodded and gestured for him to join me as I was walking, letting him vent. Which he did. (Hoo-boy.) I think he assumed I was German, since that’s the language we wound up butchering the most for a while. I didn’t stop him for a good stretch. When it was my turn, I struggled with the words, so I eventually pointed at the sole of my shoe (the dirtiest part of the body) while saying the word “Bush,” then mentioned Iraq and mimed my own broken heart. (Both of these gestures were entirely accurate, I think.) And then, feeling safer once he understood I wasn’t his enemy, I reaffirmed that I was an American.
You should have seen this guy’s face — a blank look for a moment, a cursor while his hard drive spun… and then the anger was completely gone, replaced with curiosity and a little, I dunno… hope, even. It was apparently news to him — good news — that Americans don’t all support Bush, and all he wanted to know was how many more of us there were. (Yes, the media there sucks even worse than it does here.) Oh, man. Suddenly he didn’t hate “America” anymore. He certainly didn’t hate me. He freakin’ wanted to buy me a meal, people, just to hear more.
I could go on, (and I intend to, in a book I’m trying to find time to write, called Almost Seven Wonders about this last trip). But the point is, we have many, many, many friends in this world who are reluctantly — reluctantly, I tell you — becoming enemies, and furious enemies at that.
It’s not just about Bush, although he is almost universally disliked and/or little-respected, my hand to God, not just in the Islamic world, but damn near everywhere, once you leave these borders. (I think it’s fair to guess that Bush has become the most widely-despised president in all of U.S. history, and probably by a wide margin. I certainly can’t think of a precedent that comes close.)
Bush got us into this mess, and he deserves all the scorn he gets. But what happens next is up to us.
Last week, as you might know, I got lost in a dodgy section of Cairo. Soon, five bright and delightful boys decided to adopt me for a while and walk me to where I was going.
Unless things change, those same boys might want very much to kill me — and you — when they grow up.
Dear God. What’s coming…”
****
By the way, I read John Moore’s bio. Sounds like quite a guy. I have a second home in the Phoenix area (yup, I’ve got real estate as well as stock; don’t tell my hard left cadres) and when I get out there again, I’d enjoy having a conversation. Talking to people who agree with all my political positions is boring. And yes, there are more than a few of us out there who can see the flaws in the current Administration as well as the flaws in John Kerry without losing our objectivity, and weighing the two, will go for the candidate (Kerry) who will do the less amount of harm to the country and the world. Probably 40 or 50 million of us will be voting in about 6 weeks…
Fink you talk of objectivity, Where is that included in any of your post. You have listed day after day all the dim o crat, talking points, the hoopla for John Fony kerry, Objective can you even honestly define that word.
You belong to the hate America first crowd, so what could you even care about being objective.
You prefer to believe Dan Rather rather I guess that makes two of you who believe the Docs to be real. The rest of the country knows better. Even your own faithless party knows the ,’said’documents are pure fraud.
You are truly a piece of work.
Documents? We don’t need no stinking documents…
Last I heard there’s a $50,000 reward for anyone who saw Bush performing service in the National Guard in Alabama. So far, it’s unclaimed. And Bush never denied losing his flight certification for skipping the physical back in 1972 when random drug testing was first introduced. Here’s a quick summary, courtesy of Kevin Drum at the Washington Monthly, for those who care (I don’t, except that the lack of character in 1972 presaged the lack of character from 2000 through 2004- no discernible changes in 30 years in Bush’s character that anyone has detected)
FROM KEVIN DRUM:
“1. Former Texas Speaker of the House Ben Barnes pulled strings in 1968 to get George Bush into the National Guard so that he could avoid the draft. This isn’t something Barnes just cooked up recently for Dan Rather, either. He testified under oath about it five years ago.
2. In early 1972, with two years still left on Bush’s Guard commitment, something happened. Nobody knows what happened, but for some reason he started flying again in training jets that he had graduated from two years previously; he began putting in simulator time; he had trouble making landings; and in April 1972 he made his last flight. He then refused to take his required annual physical and was subsequently grounded.
3.In May 1972, Bush left for Alabama and disappeared from the Guard. He showed up for NO drills for the next five months, and, contrary to White House statements, he never made up these missed drills.
4. Bush returned to Texas in late 1972, but in May 1973 his superior officers in Houston (one of whom was the now famous Jerry Killian) refused to rate Bush, saying he “has not been observed at this unit” for the past 12 months.
Oddly, though, official payroll records show that Bush was getting paid for attending drills during this period. The problem is that the payroll records documenting his attendance are completely screwy: Bush is credited for the wrong kind of attendance on some dates, he’s given the wrong number of points for others, and weekday duty is frequently confused with weekend duty. What’s more, even when you add it all up, Bush’s attendance still didn’t meet minimum National Guard standards.
The combination of these two things bears all the marks of someone backdating payroll records but doing a sloppy job. The likeliest explanation is that in mid-1973, after his superiors refused to rate him, someone pulled some strings and a bunch of payroll records were submitted for the previous year. However, the person who did it just checked off a few days for each month, instead of carefully making sure that the dates and duty types actually matched up the way they would if they were real.
5. In October 1973 Bush was discharged from the Texas ANG and moved to Boston to attend Harvard Business School. Although the Bush campaign said in 1999 that Bush transferred to a unit in Boston to finish up his service, they now admit that isn’t true. Bush never signed up with a unit in Boston and never again attended drills.
There are plenty more reasons to be skeptical about Bush’s National Guard service, but leave those aside for the moment. What we know for sure is that Bush began having problems flying in 1972; refused his physical; was grounded; disappeared for five months; probably disappeared for an entire year; failed to sign up with a unit in Boston for his final year of service; and got an honorable discharge anyway.
And he’s never come clean about it. We don’t need CBS’s memos to remind us of that. We already knew it.”
****
In all honesty, Bill Clinton’s record during the same period wasn’t much better- which Clinton candidly admits, putting himself in league with both Bush and Cheney, as well as Saxby Chambliss. And Clinton’s draft dodging presaged his lack of character as President just as much as Bush’s did his. I used to do TV commentary for a local Fox station (no joke!) back in late 1998 and early 1999- it was a point-counterpoint program with a Republican on the “conservative” point of view and with me on the “liberal” point of view. I publicly called on Clinton to resign for the good of the country. You’ve got to give Joe Lieberman credit (and a Shanah tova to you, Joe) for having the courage to say the same thing on the Senate floor in 1998.
So where’s the courageous Republican Representative or Senator who will call for the impeachment or resignation of Bush? Doesn’t Bush’s violating his oath to support and defend the Constitution mean anything? Of course, many of them, like the other posters to this website, think that the emperor is wearing a marvelous new suit…
Finkelstein:
Like a dung beetle you can hide yourself in a mountain of offal, in this case your manneristic self-advertisement and perverse need to live in a cage of quotation marks, but you’re still just not up to the task of living in the open.
You might have made of yourself a minor author of potboilers or airport lounge brochures, but you’re an intellectual bottom-feeder. Without secondary references and your puerile snit about Bush, you’d be mute. In this armor of bullshit you’ve arranged for yourself, you haven’t developed an original or creative thought once. I know, because I’ve forced upon myself the dreadful task of reading the crap you dropped here. It’s a grueling and thankless job, but you need to know what a jackass you are and I’ll tell you. Brevity might help you, but not much.
You also will someday need to subtract your tedious and inflated personality from what is laughingly called your belief system. If you were smarter and less facile, you might add up to something someday. Having built an identity through political and literary parasitism, you now have “something to say” (none of which is yours), but thinkers are not derivative, and you are derivative.
Your infantile and slyly prurient claims about the females in your political stable is an accidental condemnation about the IQ points on your side of the paddock, not including a few of yours. A bag of oats is smarter than any of the babes you mention, and we need to know nothing about your lurid interest in these dopes. You should, first of all, RUN from them.
Speaking of running, you run from the charge of leftism, when most of what you said puts you on the electroshock side of liberalism; and your too-cute-by-half comparison of me, and America with the Soviets is so off-the-rack academia political mucosa that I need to offer you a tissue. I guess red-baiting from the Left is okay.
What you do as a matter of habit is grab at all these old accusations (right wing nuts, that sort of thing) and think you’ve found an opposable thumb that will give you the power to hold a tool. This is the empty dream of the simian Left, of which you are a minor alpha male.
Whoever confirmed you in your own egomania has a lot to answer for.
Finkelstein:
Forgot this. You should try to understand, too, what a stock phrase is. Without them, your own thoughts, minus your stories and quotes from other people, would be reduced to two or three words.
I’ll even give you a clue: “The pot calling the kettle black” is a stock phrase.
Also, your presence on a local TV station, which is cred-dropping, must have made for compelling TV.
Rather Concedes Papers Are Suspect
CBS Anchor Urges Media to Focus On Bush Service
>>>>”(Really ??. They were copied at KINKOS)”
One of the problems of dealing with Finkelstein is the contradictions in his own narrative. Take his position on Bill Clinton. F called for Clinton’s resignation and so demands that similar courage be shown by Republicans in calling for Bush’s impeachment.
This bizarre thinking is habitual on the left. The streaming on non-sequential thoughts. The first has nothing to do with the second except in F’s mind. Even if it did who the hell is James Finkelstein and why does his thinking matter? It doesn’t, except, again, in his own mind. He just thinks he’s right all the time.
And more, this is Finkelstein’s way of being on stage stating his opinions, and simulataneously offstage whispering that he doesn’t really believe in everything he says. Watch for this stuff in his stream of consciousness. It’s very disturbing because he’s not aware of it.
Another contradiction: Finkelstein thinks like Noam Chomsky and pretends to be Adam Smith. He coyly and sarcastically remarks that he doesn’t want his “hard left cadres” to know he’s part of the spec real estate and investor class, which isn’t as delicate a pose as it seems.
The “hard left cadres” are precisely from the middle and upper middle classes (”whites” in Finkelsteinian) inhabited by the likes of James Finkelstein…those for whom the September 12th world is just too uncomfortable, and spoils the Merlot just when you need some good political news from Dan Rather or a chat with Hillary.
The proletariat everywhere and at all times, unless coerced by lies or guns, has routinely rejected the world and visions of the left once they understood what it meant.
The only diligent and committed leftism today is among the upper classes, the elites, the “Ivy League” and its imitators in the more expensive state universities, the arts, media and lower rungs of the educational bureaucracy. And of course, The Law.
Finkelstein probably swims in this fishbowl and doesn’t recognize it, still claiming the fiction that the “hard left” consists of those who deprive themselves or have nothing to begin with.
“…who the hell is James Finkelstein and why does his thinking matter?”
I’m just a guy who believes that in America we have a First Amendment right to speak our minds, and we should use it or lose it. I’m no more and no less important that any other human being. You can debate my ideas on their merits, or failing that, you can attempt to attack me personally. Go back and re-read what you have written, and you will realize that to a neutral outsider you have frequently conceded the lack of potency in your arguments for Bush or against Kerry by resorting to personal attacks on Kerry, Dan Rather, etc.
And yes, I was good on television. That’s why after my taped commentary gig ended (my counterpoint qualified to run for Congress in early 2000 and under equal time rules the station had to drop him) I was invited back to do live commentary on the South Carolina Republican primary between Bush, Keyes, and McCain. I’m still good on television. You can see for yourself at http://www.gpb.org/gptv/programs/index.asp?progid=370
click on July 18th Senate Democrat debates.
So here’s your question for the Jewish New Year, which started at sundown last night:
Is the world safer or more dangerous because President Bush invaded Iraq? In other words, is it more or less likely that an organization or a country will develop or obtain a nuclear weapon and use it to kill a large number of human beings? You already know my answer, and it’s based in part on the same reasoning Professor Coleman used in his essay:
“Bin Laden’s dream of a united Muslim state under a revived caliphate may well be impossible to accomplish. But with the secular Baath gone, it could be one step closer to reality. If you add to the equation the generalized hatred for US policies (both against the Palestinians and in Iraq) among Muslims, that is a major step forward for al-Qaeda. In Saudi Arabia, al-Qaeda has emerged as a dissident political party. Before it had just been a small group of Bin Laden’s personal acolytes in Afghanistan and a handful of other countries.
Although the United States and its Pakistani ally have captured significant numbers of al-Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan and Pakistan, a whole new generation of angry young Muslim men has been produced. Al-Qaeda has moved from being a concrete cell-based terrorist organization to being an ideal and a model, for small local groups in Casablanca, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia and elsewhere.”
What’s your answer to the question, and what are the facts that back it up?
Finkelstein:
At last, a coherent post. Once we get past the “just plain Jim” quality we find in your first paragraph…which BTW was in response to a RHETORICAL question used to deflate your previous contention and non-sequitur…we find the usual bit of puffery. First point you intentionally misconstrue and the second, well, there’s no jury to impress here so stop it.
Moving on, you have never responded to our previous deconstruction of your silly question and answer games; your careless and often ignorant characterization of us a “wannabe warriors”, right-wing nuts, lovers of anecdote, your faulty constructions, prejudices, snide remarks and other off-hand references, you are now injured that you have the response your previous tomes have provoked. I still find your exploitation of tragedy opportunistic and cynical.
The horrors you describe in Iraq you have already approved of in Afghanistan, so your soft and pliable heart merely responds to guts and gore where you don’t approve of the policy. And again, I have three sons in this mess too, which I understand to be a mess, so you get no sympathy from me. Vietnam was also no picnic. Neither was Dresden, but the response is, so what?
As for your question, it will be answered when I am ready to answer it, but not on your terms. We earlier remarked in this way that you, and those who share you world view do not believe that peace should be achieved. You believe it should be maintained. This is the post WWII mentality of stasis, of multinational organizations, bureaus, deals, treaties…”realism” or Realpolitik. Stability at any cost. That world is gone forever, and neo-isolationists like you have’t gotten the message.
You also believe that, as it was put, bad people remain inertly bad if you leave them alone. A frightful bit of self-delusion that should at least have ended when Leon Klinghofer got pushed overboard in his wheelchair, but the idea goes back at least as far to Munich, and before that Wilson and even back to the first internationalist President, and troublemaker, TR. Some of them got the message.
For some reason you AGAIN fall back on someone else’s ideas (Professor Coleman’s, whoever the hell he is) and launch into a limited essay on the “caliphate”, which by the way is The Third Caliphate, posited by Bin Laden a long, long time ago and you apparently think dropping it here like an Autumn leaf is going to scare me off.
That the Third Caliphate is undermined by the end of the Ba’ath Party is seriously dumb, since it is independent of local secularism and is to derive from Pan-Arab or Pan Muslim ideas maturing all at the same time. Maybe you ought to read a little more about what Coleman has to say, Finkelstein, before you leap into an idea you don’t understand. Two paragraphs from Coleman is the best you can do?
Is the world safer? No. But before we get to that, forget Al Qaeda. There are hundreds of more or less dangerous such groups, the worst being Hezbolah or Hizbolah, which is more organized and bureaucratic. Finkelstein obsesses about Al Qaeda because it is a buzz word, and reveals nothing about terrorism but a lot about neo-isolationists.
The answer to your question lies in the run-up to September 11th, when ALL administrations - the worst being Reagan’s - back at least to Carter, failed to deal decisively with the SELF-RENEWING AND SELF-GENERATING disease of Islamofascism in the Middle East as an issue separate from the Arab-Israeli and Palestinians issues, which are and always were a smokescreen for Americans AND Arabs(and Iranians, who are not Arabs).
I will return with a recount of the progression of events to 9/11 and beyond, not in any hope that you will be convinced…your views are too firmly lodged together by habit and ideology to be moved, but enough to convince me that we are in the first stages of WW IV, and it will at times be very bloody, costly and prolonged, but that that it must be fought.
Finkelstein:
Paragraph seven should read that the Third Caliphate would be “more likely” rather than undermined.
You are also sounding more and more like an attorney who tagged himself as “Thugge” a while back…in fact, your style is too similar to be coincidental…and you intentionally misrepresent things that we said, just as old Attorney Thugge.
You claim that we’ve conceded the lack of “potency” in our arguments by attacking Kerry, Rather, etc. This is more of your filler for posts where you can’t quote someone else.
The thread was about the press, which certainly makes Dan Rather pertinent,and about a thousand other blogs of all kinds are discussing Dan Rather. Could it be that Rather is a hero of yours? Probably. And Kerry? This entire blog is largely about Kerry, so it seems to follow that we would discuss him.
This is really the best you can do.
Finkelstein:
Correction again. I casually referred to the Third Caliphate, when I meant Third Jihad leading to the Grand Caliphate. Since I’m under such severe pressure to please you and reverse your urge to appeasement, I get a little nervous.
Okay Finkelstein: Here it is with the “facts to back it up”. Take it or leave it. Everything that follows here existed against a background of chaos, poverty, abuse, tyranny, tortune and agony among Middle Easterners, for no fault of The West.
Since at least 1970, European fascism exploited a structural weakness in Islam, and the result Islamism or Islamofascism is as dangerous and nihilistic as its analogue in the 1930’s. We need to kill it. Period. Iraq is part of the Bush Doctrine, which you clearly don’t understand, but maybe you ought to study it.
The Grand Caliphate crap is the result of the end of the Third Jihad, which seems to have commenced with the overthrow of the Shah. You fixate on Al Qaeda, when Wahhabism is the danger, not a specific terorist organization. Consider the result of your form of “constructive engagement” in the Middle East, and this doesn’t even include acts of violence against Israel.
1970-75 - Several American diplomats killed in Sudan and Lebanon by PLO and PFLP.
1979 - Iranian hostage crisis. Carter’s shining moment.
1982 - Routine kidnappings, murders of Americans in Lebanon.
1983 - Truck bomb, American Embassy Beirut. 63 killed, 120 wounded.
1983 - Marine barracks. 241 dead.
1983 - American Embassy Kuwait bombed.
1984 - CIA guy David Buckley kidnapped. Videotaped being skinned alive; tape sent to Langley.
1984 - Kuwaiti airline hijacked. Two Americans murdered.
1985 - Achille Lauro. Abu Abbas captured, let go in Italy. Do I need to mention Klinghofer?
1985 - Rome,Vienna airports bombed. Five Americans killed.
1986 - German dischoteque bomb. American soldiers killed.
- Quadaffi attacked by Reagan. Abu Nidal kills three Americans in retaliation.
1988 - Lockerbie. Need I say more?
1993 - World Trace Center I. Six killed, 1000 injured.
1993 - Somalia. Al Qaeda involved here too.
1993 - Attempt to kill Bush I in Kuwait.
1995 - Karachi. Two American diplomats killed, one injured.
1995 - Car bomb Riyadh. Five Americans killed.
1996 - Khobar Towers. 19 airmen dead, 240 other American injured.
1998 -Tanzania, Kenya car bombs. 200 dead, 12 Americans.
2000 - USS Cole. 17 sailors dead, 39 wounded.
2001 - World Trade Center II. 3000 dead.
During all the above years there were random killings, kidnappings and ransoms by Islamists that fit no particular event. In 1970, war was declared on The West; we just didn’t know it, and it took 30 years of murder and abomination to bring it home. The catalogue of outrage, tied to a specific group with shared interests, is so unimaginalbe, so gruesome, vicious and inhuman, that I would support ANY effort to eliminate it.
Iraq makes sense in this new world. Maybe not to you, but it splits the Middle East, contributes to the surrounding of our worst enemies there with societies more open than ever seen in that region, and is a beginning in the long hard slog to defeat these animals.
Your argument that there are more terrorists because we choose to fight them is just a little too strange and entirely too convenient as a case against Bush. Yeah. That’s what you get when you choose to fight people who hate you. Some of them choose to fight back. What a revelation.
And oh yeah. I happen to like Israel a lot. They took a wasteland and made a modern society in a single generation. They occupy an unimaginably small sliver of land in the region and are hated for it. They are brave, they are resistant, they are productive, they are forgiving and they are Western by tradition and habit.
Without the products, the ideas, the intellectual and moral courage of The West, excluding some of the declining Western European countries (Holland), the entire world would be a wasteland.
This makes me a neocon even though I don’t qualify as to the forms and standards of anti-semitism growing so malignantly in the American Left.
Liberals believe they found the sorcerer’s stone with the claim that the world is more dangerous now because of the Iraq invasion. It is inarguable to the extent that wars solidy and organize competitors, so the reality is: There’s more fighting. The same could be said of an advertising campaign or a domestic dispute. People get involved because the conditions for action are already there. And this is James Finkelstein’s great truth? His punishment of George Bush?
A persistent reality is just another tool of deconstruction for liberals and another piece of propaganda at the same time. Take a normal event and attach a sinister meaning. Maybe Finkelstein instead of demanding an answer on this one, should provide an original one of his own, rather than Professor Coleman’s. Finkelstein seems to have few, if any, novel ideas himself, so he’s looking for an answer here.
Arab and/or Muslim hatred for the US is, for the most part, overt at any given time. The causes are complicated, but any state of mind which can be reasonably tipped into the desire to kill the object of your hatred won’t respond to the types of palliatives beloved of liberals. It’s already too late. The Middle East was invaded a long time ago, by so many suicidal convictions that you couldn’t list them all.
James Finkelstein’s shameful use of the facts of war to nail his argument to the door is more of the same stuff. He is very dishonest. For thirty years or more Americans were murdered without compunction by Islamists, all during the period of multilateralism, UN “power” and the continuous “peace process” between competing parties. The situation grew more intolerable every year, and whatever the intermediate cost, the situation must be changed.
DanRon, or Rathergage is growing more absurd every day. Funny too.
The inimitable Burkett, who I see sitting in a darkened room wearing a bandolier, helmet liner and aluminum foil uniform, has called upon the Democrats to attack Republican “dirty tricks” about HIS documents.
On the other side, ignoring for the moment that Rather obviously considers a Walmart jug of windshield washer as valuable as a Ming Vase (because they are both containers), CBS claims it will cling to “journalistic ethics” in not revealing the documents’ source.
Well, there is no legal or First Ammendment protections afforded to forgers or fakers. None. So CBS’ courageous stand has to mean that the source itself is so incriminating that Rather AND CBS, already painted as rubes, liars and fools, will now have a gilded frame around the portrait.
Also, and somewhat off the subject, Rather claimed in his biography that he had been a Marine, but he spent forty days only at Parris before he dropped out. This explains a lot.
Rhod:
Is that right he was ‘booted’ out from Bootcamp ?
He has always claimed he was ‘in’ but I guess he never said for how long, This guy is a real piece of work, 40 days, it dont take those DIs too long to figure out they had a real ShitBird on their hands, this is too funny. I wonder if he was sent to ‘Motivation Platoon’, that was out by the rifle range, and all the S.B.s were sent out there for an attitude adjustment. I meand they beat the crap out of those guys, reville for normal ‘Boots’ was 0530 but they were up at 0400 pounding the grinder, when we were on the rifle range they would be running by our barracks and wake everyone up. That was a place you wanted to avoid like the plague, that and the ‘Fat-Man’ platoon,(I remember we would be coming back from the firing line and those poor slobs, were out on the baseball diamond with a full Seabag, rifle, pack, ie their whole house and double timing around and around the diamond but that was the last resort if you flunked out of that forgeeeeeeit, you were done and that meant a General Discharge.
But the real tragedy is this is all too typical of the liberal mindset.
So this sumbag Rather with a General Discharge has the nerve to use forged documents against a Man who served honorably and this SOB couldn’t even complete 2 months of Bootcamp.
Rather deserves a stay in the old Cross-bar hotel, where bubba and shorty would be his roomies.
addendum:
I can hear it now, “House Mouse bring me my clip board” Housemouse returns with the clip board, “Ok, listen up, all you maggots whose name I call are going to Motivation,,,,,Rather,, Rather.. where is that Asshole.”
“Sir, Private Rather is in the Head , Sir”,
“IN THE HEAD ? who told him he could sh*t without my permission, this is why he is on his way to Motivation, Here in My Marine Corps you do it by the numbers, and on my say so.”
Now it makes perfect sense, why C—BS is what they are.
(Note: this will be my last comment on this weblog. Instead of a dialogue you will have an echo chamber. But that’s your choice, and if it is more comforting to hear only opinions with which you agree- like a pre-screened Bush “rally”, then so be it.)
*******
When I was in college I remember seeing a New Yorker’s map of the United States. Everything around “The City” (it was never “New York”, just “The City,” as if none other existed) was huge, and the rest of the country was about 1/10th the size of New York. The point being, of course, that their perspective was totally warped. Their little bailiwick was the universe, and everything else unimportant surplusage.
Which is pretty much how Americans are about terrorism and the threat from radical groups who want to affect our policies and our presence in their region. We’re pretty late to the party- this stuff has been going on internationally since the early 1970’s, most notably the Munich Olympics in 1972, which was the first big event. Ironically enough, that one wasn’t about religion. For all I know, the Black September group were atheists or indifferent to religion. But terrorism continued in Europe, and it was as much about nationalism (the IRA) or ideology (the Red Brigades, Baader Meinhof, Carlos the Jackal) as anything else. Radical Islam was also a latecomer to the international terrorism party.
But the Europeans somehow managed to survive without panicking the way Americans have. We have acted as if it all started September 11, 2001. And as if the world changed on that day. It certainly did for many Americans, only because the ocean had been an insulating blanket that kept us from having to deal with the reality that the U.K., France, Italy, Spain (the Basque separatist movement) and Germany had experienced for almost three decades.
I distinctly remember thinking, a long time ago, how lucky we were that we had never had a terrorist incident in this country in my lifetime, while Europe and Israel were living with it on a day to day basis. And we didn’t much care about it, because it had never been brought home to us. A few months after I returned to the U.S. from school in London in 1971, the IRA set off a bomb in the London Post Office tower, which initiated terror attacks in England for the first time in the IRA’s campaign. That event shook me as I realized I hadn’t been so far from where that blast took place at one time or another, and the cozy cocoon of London, which I thought the most civilized city in the world in the Fall of 1971, wasn’t so cozy anymore.
So I have to ask: why are the Europeans so much more capable of dealing with their terror attacks (heck, the Red Brigades killed the head of the Christian Democrat Party, Aldo Moro, back in 1978)than we are? They have nothing like the panic, paranoia, and general loss of common sense that Americans have. Certainly, none of those countries felt that a military invasion was a useful or effective strategy against stateless groups which attempted to use terror as a tactic to get their message before the world.
Baader Meinhof is gone. Likewise the Red Brigades. After 3 decades, the IRA appears to have discontinued violence as a tactic- I can’t remember the last terror attack in mainland U.K., and when I was there last year, fear of a terrorist attack was never apparent anywhere. When I was in a London underground train with my wife in 1993 (we were on our honeymoon) the entire train had to disembark about a block from a Parliament stop (St. James, I think). Everybody quietly and calmly exited the train and the station. We never found out exactly what the threat was, but no one panicked. All in all, European countries, unlike the U.S., have dealt with the groups without describing the attacks as a global terror war.
If we were smart- we being the United States government- we wouldn’t describe our current situation as a “war on terror” and we would use our military rarely, and only in situations, like with the Taliban in Afghanistan, where conventional policing was not feasible. We would treat it as criminal acts by different individuals, bring them to justice, try them, and convict them. It’s what we did in 1993 and again in 1995. I don’t recall us invading and bombing the “militias” that spawned Timothy McVeigh. Had President Clinton bombed a militia encampment, killing innocent men, women, and babies, the Republicans and Democrats alike would have called him mad and impeached him for real. It’s noteworthy that we haven’t had another domestic terror attack since 1995, so our “mollycoddling” of our domestic terrorists by not bombing or strafing their encampments can’t be described as wimping out or a failure.
I’d like to see the answers if you could hook Bush’s handlers up to polygraphs and ask them a yes or no question: “if you could pacify every radical Islamic terrorist with a simple action (like pulling our troops out of Iraq, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia) and be 100% sure that we would never be attacked again, would you do so?” The answer would be “no” because the safety and security of Americans is not their priority. The “war on terror” has been their wonderful excuse for all kinds of follies and a convenient distraction at the same time. Witness Zell Miller’s comment about the Democrats’ manic obsession with bringing down the Commander in Chief during wartime. Well, the manic obsession is called democracy, and we had elections in 1812, 1864, 1944, 1952, 1964, and 1968. I don’t recall hearing that any Republican or Democrat running against the incumbent in those war years ever made the kind of absurd claim that Zell Miller made. Perhaps Zell thinks we can have a 100 year war on terror and skip all elections in the interim, turning our country over to George Bush and his descendants?
Meanwhile, the Patriot Act is all about politics and not about making America safer. Another attempt from the far right to use the “War on Terror” as an excuse to empower government at the expense of individual freedoms.
Whatever happened to Ronald Reagan’s “the government is the problem, not the solution” slogan of the new wave Republicans? For that matter, whatever happened to the 1994 contract with America and the proposed balanced budget amendment because profligate “tax and spend” Democrats couldn’t balance a budget? Now we’ve got “borrow and spend” Republicans running unimaginable deficits ($400 billion is more than our whole budget was for years up through the 1970’s).
What happened to the word “conservative?” The only people who want to “conserve” anything are the Sierra Club and Democrats who champion alternative energy sources, who want conservation of oil through higher CAFE standards and applying them to SUV’s and pickups, and who oppose pumping out ANWAR but prefer saving it for a really rainy day.
Anyway, I’m a liberal and a Democrat and proud of it. The candidate I’m voting for in 2004 did not ignore threats of terrorism on his desk, invade the wrong country, avoid military funerals while attending fundraisers, politicize intelligence gathering and analysis, cause the deaths of thousands of innocent people, run the economy into the ground while proposing more tax cuts for the wealthiest (estate taxes only apply to estates valued in excess of a million dollars). The candidate I will vote for won’t appoint judges who have no respect for the Bill of Rights. And that’s good enough for me.
That’s about it. Bye!
Meanwhile, the Patriot Act is all about politics and not about making America safer. Another attempt from the far right to use the “War on Terror” as an excuse to empower government at the expense of individual freedoms.
The Above is posted by Fink aka, ‘The ‘F’ stands for fraud.
How can you, a slip and fall lawyer say that about the patriot act, it is used to protect individual freedon, but in the same breath say it is ok to use The RICCO statute for Anti-Abortion rallies. You liberals are two faced phonies , no ifs no ands or buts about it.
No double standards in the liberal think tank is there.
I will enjoy seeing your whole world as you USED to know it come crashing down around you.
Too bad Joe McCarthy died we could sure use him today,, pity.
Fink
First of all he is the President of the United States and as anyone with an ounce of grey matter understands that the President doesn’t have time to go to funerals.
FDR never went to funerals, Truman never went to funerals IKE never went to funerals. Again your argument is hollow.
If you are so stupid or ignorant of the facts and believe that PRESIDENT BUSH invaded the wrong country then you dont even understand the basics.
And indeed there is no hope for you, and so flaunder in your sea of self-pity.
So you would rather vote for a man that betrayed his fellow ‘Brothers in Arms’ had private meetings with the enemy, and hung around with KNOWN communists, active agents against YOUR own government, that is your choice to do so here in this country but dont try it in any other country.
YOU are indeed as much of a traitor as John Kerry is.
Dear Mr. Finkelstein:
Delineating all the mistaken assumptions, false hopes, errors of judgement and plain old wrong-headedness in your post would take a while, so I won’t do it. For one, it’s a lost cause, for another, having done it several times before, it’s clear that you have no interest in a synthesis of ideas. You charge US with solidified thinking too. Oh well.
Among the fatal flaws in your written arguments - I don’t know how you are in oral combat, is your silly self-importance, your flag-wrapping and lachrymose patriotism…specifically where it attaches itself to your ideology like a bright and colorful parasitic flower. That’s all it is, too, because you are too idiosyncratic to be the broad and concerned American you pretend to be.
You’re too narrow, too impacted and too prejudiced.
You have angered me not because you believe what you believe…we could argue that…but because of the essential dishonesty in your arguments. We have caught you countless times with false constructions, non-sequiturs, charges to emotion, evasions, revisionism, nastiness, false accusation and downright bigotry. This is the problem. Not what you think, but the disguises, shilling and ego you bring to what you think. You don’t want to arrive at new conclusions, you borrow old ones from other thinkers, use them as weapons, and declare victory.
You asked me to back up the last argument, which I did, “with facts” as you asked, and having lost the argument, you fall back on the sympathies of the jury and a long and tedious drama of storytelling.
You haven’t arrived in the current century. You and your party are reactionary, frozen in the failed instruments of the Cold War…your bright and shining moment, when liberals attributed our victory to THEIR ideas, and you haven’t moved on.
We can’t discuss anything further because you never set the conditions for discussing anything at all. Bye.
P.S. to James F:
Your urge to revisionist history took a new turn when you attempted in your last post to revise the history of the last two weeks.
In you last post you claim to have looked for an “open dialogue” here. Let’s review the recent past:
You orignally arrived here with a trumped-up question and answer game for “dummies” (us) to which YOU provided both the right and wrong answers. Our choices were to accept YOUR correct answers or reveal ourselves as “dummies”. You REQUIRED us to answer the questions as a condition of answering your post.
When we quickly and easily destroyed your little game, you next lapsed into your martyred lawyer routine and claimed that you were attempting to introduce a little “dissonance” into our petrified ideas about the world, but obviously we were too low on the evolutionary scale to comprehend that.
The vanity of introducing dissonance implies:
A) You’re looking for a truth for yourself and others, and are willing to be honest. Or,
B) You’re the arsenal of truth yourself, and you condescend to the destruction of the lower forms of truth held by others…in order to refute them.
Since (A) is impossible with you, whatever is left, surely very probable, is (B). Open dialogue my foot.
And as for London, who cares? I was almost killed there in 1973 or 1974 when a terrorist bomb blew out the windows of the East India building. NOT the IRA. Shortly before I was about to cross Tower Bridge in 1995, an IED was discovered in the north bank staircase. So what? If this kind of story amplifies your life, good for you, but it doesn’t amplify your ideology.
If you need to discuss the cozy cacoon of The West, and the end of these fantasies, any one of us here can talk about Vietnam, or my list of terrorist acts above.
James Finkelstein isn’t annoyed because he isn’t being answered; he’s annoyed because he IS being answered and he can’t cope with it.
He describes himself as a “liberal Democrat”, but I haven’t seen him over at Roger Simon’s blog, where he wouldn’t last as long as he did here. Lots of the commentary there is from liberal Democrats. Some of them, including Roger, from the really old anti-war crowd and maybe even the coffee house political swamp of Alan Ginzubrg days who have bright and clear eyes today.
What Finkelstein IS, is hard to define. A little bit of Jacobin, a cup of 1949 Republican, a pint of paleoconservative, a dash of Henry Wallace progressive, a little evangelist, a little Yippie, probably lots of Yuppie and who knows what else?
I’m glad it’s over.
Rhod
Finks idea of ‘open dialogue’ is he tells us how it is and we agree. Fink dont know what an honest exchange of ideas is. He also doesn’t know how to handle when most people disagree with him. Which is really contrary to the Liberal mantra about how open minded they are, they are not open minded they are opinionated and