I have now. Sounds like a problem that should be addressed… but I don’t see what it has to do with our discussion about advice from intelligence agencies.
Do people just not know what tu quoque is anymore?
If your argument is “the other side does it, too,” you have no argument. Your argument has to rest on its own merits. It’s perfectly possible the other side is bad, too. That’s completely immaterial.
And getting caught up and allowing the discussion to change to defending the other side, isn’t good, either.
If you want to defend a Muslim ban, which is what this thread is about, you have to do so without any reference to what others have done. Obama could literally be Hitler himself, and it would not matter in the slightest.
Before I get heated, I’ll take a step back. HurricaneDitka, I was attacking your specific point that liberals should somehow be pleased, because somehow this represents Trump listening to intelligence agencies.
That struck me as an incredibly weak defense, and a poor attempt at a “gotcha” at liberals. Unless I’m missing a big piece of data (like, perhaps, Trump presenting a redacted CIA memo in which they recommend a policy very similar to the new policy for these 7 countries), then to me it’s ridiculous to try to link this policy to advice or recommendations from intelligence agencies. Considering what Trump said on the campaign trail, and what Giuliani specifically said just a few days ago about Trump asking him to convene a panel about how to legally do a Muslim ban, it’s not credible to me that this policy is based on recommendations from the intel agencies, rather than meeting his campaign promises and doing what Giuliani’s panel suggested.
let me rephrase …
Taking Kimstu’s response a step further, I’d urge you to give that advice to one Donald J. Trump, who throughout his campaign and nascent Presidency has been the Queen of All Drama Queens. Has there been any political figure who so constantly stirred things up? Not in this country during my lifetime.
If the point of the order is to screen out poor uneducated brown non-Christians (which I think it really is), then I don’t expect that the moratorium to be lifted anytime soon.
Read the text of the order. For example, section 5(c) suspends immigration of Syrian refugees indefinitely; that moratorium gets lifted only when Mr. Trump decides that admission of Syrian refugees “is consistent with the national interest.” Given his rhetoric and that of other members of the administration (notably Mr. Bannon), do you honestly expect he will ever make that decision?
In fact, from my reading of the text, NONE of the clauses will automatically expire in 90 or 120 days–they’re all dependent on somebody in the administration deciding that whatever is implemented is “good enough.”
If the point of the list was that it was suspicious that people travelled to these countries then it’s not reasonable to repurpose the list to be suspicious of people who come from those countries. If I was searching for computer programmers, I would look at people visiting or moving to Silicon Valley, not people born there. If I was looking for homosexuals I would look at people who visited Fire Island not people born there. You see the importance of this distinction?
I suspect that the length of the moratorium will be precisely the time it takes for Assad and Putin to wipe out the opposition and put anyone who opposed him along with their families to death, giving Trump and effective final solution to the refugee crisis.
:eek:
To be fair, if the choices had been arbitrary some clueless staffer probably would have accidentally included a country where The Donald has business interests.
And to make clear regarding my last post: that’s not an issue of “too wide a net”, it’s about a poorly aimed net. The intelligence community has a bunch of terror related lists. Perhaps a better list would have been the “where do most foreign terorists come from” list.
While I, like many others here, have a very negative view of George W. Bush, here is a speech he gave after 9/11 at Islamic Center of Washington, D.C. [since it is not copyright I am quoting it in full]. Obviously Trump would have reacted very differently:
Sorry iiandyiiii, I wrote a lengthy post to you, but the Internet gods were against it, and it got lost in the ether. I don’t have time to re-type it now. Best of luck to you.
Sorry to hear that. Use a separate word processor program, at least for long posts!
This. It’s hardly surprising that a search through the plethora of documents generated by any administration would produce a “Bible Code” match for any desired political-cover objective.
Yes, I understand the distinction. People who make explicit efforts to travel to these places deserve a closer look, but it’s also not exactly unprecedented to give people from “countries of concern” a closer look as well. The point of Trump’s EO is to pause things until they get a good system in place for doing that. To extend your search for computer programmer analogy, it’s kind of like saying, “we’re not taking any more applicants until we get a really good list of job requirements from the IT department”.
No, it’s kind of like saying all the computer programmers we’ve met are from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia but let’s take a closer look at the people born in Silicon Valley. They might be computer programmers too.
Is this an analogy trying to say that no terrorists come from these seven countries?
Yeah, but keeping that nice Dr. Ali from coming home if he visits his mother in Tripoli is a different thing. We already stopped terrorists. This is economic persecution of people seen (by Steve Bannon) as unacceptably “foreign.” Hence the Nazi comparisons.
Hey, right wingers! Glad you could show up? Got your talking points now? 