Cite please.
It was a question asked by a London media person:
I take John Mace’s point that “Quite a few posters here have said they are fearful of being arrested for talking too opennly against the gov’t.” Still, that POV is more an indictment of said posters than an excuse for the London media people. After all, media people are supposed to be sophisticated and know what’s going on.
I was particularly struck by the word often. The question would have been more reasonable if it asked whether people in America were ever arrested for insulting the president on the Internet. If the actual quote were true, half the GD posters would be in prison. 
The *Guardian *has an article today that addresses Westerners’ eagerness to believe bad things about America.
This is a point conservatives have long believed. I find it noteworthy that a couple of liberals now see the same thing.
TT, the cite from the OP called Europe’s political elites “left-leaning.” I assumed their media was included among the political elites and was left-leaning. Do you disagree?
It’s a bit difficult to compare non-US coverage against actual US conditions. Americans tend not to read non-US media. Non-Americans may not directly know what conditions are like here. I did subscribe to the Economist for a year. Obviously, it’s an outstanding publication. I found them fairly conservative on most issues, but fairly liberal on their US coverage. I would tend to say the same thing about the Financial Times. The point is, even these two moderately conservative UK publications present a liberal view of the US. I suspect that the conservative view of America is barely on the radar scope in Europe.
Nonsense. Even setting aside the obvious example of FDR (you may recall a little dust-up called World War II), Clinton’s military deployments were hardly different from Reagan and Bush the Elder. Reagan had Grenada, Lebanon, and Central America. Bush (in only one term) had Kuwait/Iraq and Somalia. That’s hardly out of line with recent precedent.
“Are people in America often arrested for insulting the president on the Internet?”
This from the guy who last month accused Bush critics of being “anti-American.” :rolleyes:
My point is that a question which unrealistically implies that America is some sort of fascist state appears to reflect anti-American beliefs.
I haven’t been arrested yet.
I keep telling people that GWB asked the President of Brazil if there were Black people in Brazil.
How dumb can he get. I can’t think of a worse insult.
Great White Brain
Dal
Clinton support speaking here: Clinton did send our troops on an awful lot of foreign adventures. On page 13, this report reads, “Presidents have submitted 102 reports to Congress as a result of the War Powers Resolution.” As of December 2002, Ford submitted 4, Carter one, Reagan 14, Bush I 7, Clinton 60, and Bush II 16.
Yes, this clearly does not cover Washington to Nixon, and it does not speak to the number of troops, but the numbers speak for themselves.
I know that no modern president, Clinton included, has pursued an entirely isolationist military policy. I was simply interested in what facts could support MegaDave’s initial comment that Clinton sent more troops to more parts of the world than any prseident before him. I do not know that statement to be false, but it would surprise me if it were true.
I printed that doc off to read on the train home, Ravenman. Thanks. Of course, the portion you cite does not by itself prove MegaDave’s statement. It is possible that Clinton was simply more scrupulous in reporting than other presidents. Or he had more instances involving fewer troops. I’m not saying either of those are the case, but they are possible.
Thanks for your source as well, UncleBeer. I printed it off to read later as well. At first glance, tho, it does not appear to distinguish between the size of various military actions. For example, I wonder if the number of troops committed in Somalia, Haiti, etc. exceeded those in Gulf War I or II. And, of course, even this source dates only to Vietnam. I was astounded by the original statement suggesting Clinton committed more troops
than either world war, Korea, Vietnam, or Desert Storm I.
Finally, the initial statement does not specify the purpose for which troops were sent. Do troops permanently stationed in overseas bases count? Ships at sea? Is there a distinction between “peacekeeping” actions and actions such as Grenada or Panama? Do military advisors count?
I await MegaDave’s citation and clarification.
The problem here is you are mixing and matching to get a liberal bias. Liberals would hardly consider something fiscally conservative as liberal, but you are lumping them into the same group. Just as if i said they were conservative the cons would go all hyper on me. It does seem to me that conservatives are quick to dismiss any media outlet that is not fawning over ultra-conservative politics as biased left no matter what positions that outlet takes. Liberals are guilty of this as well but at a thousandth of the degree i see conservatives commiting it.
It appears to me that many of these “liberal” European media are really centrists, and are just labeled “liberal” by cons repeating the jingoistic battle cry used here (also unjustly in many cases) and using logic along the lines of “They don’t have the strong christian backbone to their society we do, so they must be pinko liberals, after all, they have socialized medicine or whatnot.” I feel the battle cry of the conservative breaks down when the media is examined. I fail to see a liberal slant in The Economist, i do see several different positions on issues that do not fall in a set L/C array. I’d give examples but the issues i actually own are at home now (assuming i could find them).
Conclusion for the “don’t read long things crowd”: European media is not as liberal as advertised.
Man, you’ve got to travel more.
Not to be a jerk, but they ARE apparently considering executing prisoners (as discussed in other threads).
Sure, and one can reasonably question whether the trials and punishments will be proper, lawful, called-for, etc. One can question whether these people should be released. One can question whether their official status should be changed to “POWs.”
But, Gitmo is nothing at all like a concentration camp. Gitmo conditions are outstanding (as prisons go.) Gitmo prisoners get far better medical care than they had back home, access to Islamic religious materials, and the best of diets. I read somewhere that the average Gitmo prisoner had put on something like 13 pounds.
AFTER a trial. It’s not like they are just going to line them all up along a mass grave and put a bullet in their heads.
I’d like to move the debate forward by following up on a comment from the Guardian column I cited. I should say, meant to cite, since I failed to provide the link The article says
Today the Washington Post agreed
The American press gave a lot of attention to the original (false) accusation, but somewhat less coverage to the corrections. However, the right-wing press (talk radio, Fox News, WSJ op-eds, internet) warned not to believe the early reports. And, when the reports turned out to be wrong, they trumpeted their I told you so’s.
What was the coverage like outside the US? How much attention was given to the original accusations? How much to the correction? How many were not ever told by their local media that the actual number missing was actually in the neighborhood of 33?
I don’t think failing to tell people that the actual number was significantly less is evidence of bias. The real cause, I think, is that 33 stolen artifacts is just not that interesting, whereas 170,000 is.
What an unfortunate name, that guy sounds like a cartoon villian!
I guess they were too busy believing the early reports of WMD and Florida election results.
Didn’t we go over this museum stuff weeks ago? And i think the world’s press, like ours, should be more concerned with WMD and whether the president is a liar than the number of missing museum pieces.
Um, there are still more than 33 missing. That 33 is the number of the most valuable pieces. There are still more than 3000 other pieces missing.
What about a man who sent troops to fight and police other people’s civil wars, who who promised to attend the University of Arkansas after attending Oxford in order to serve through the ROTC program instead of being drafted under 1-A status and inexplicably having his induction notices either cancelled or postponed well beyond the normal time frame (twice that of average, and more than five times that of men of comparable elligibility, who never lived up to his promise to attend the University of Arkansas, who lied regarding preferential treatment or lobbying to have strings pulled although urging from Senator Fullbright prevented the full draft board in his area from considering his induction until after classes started at Oxford and repeatedly delayed his induction physical, who denies anything out of the ordinary despite the fact that he got a Navy Reserve assignment for which there were no open slots at the time, meeting with the one person in Arkansas who could rescind a draft notice, Col. Hawkins, agreed with Col. Hawkins that he would attend law school at Arkansas but, inexplicably Senator Fullbright exerted pressure to ensure that he was not in Arkansas, but back at Oxford the following fall, a man who swaggered all over his employees on buisness trips and on 21 year-old interns in the Oval Office, who denied the due process of law to a fellow citizen by lying under oath in a deposition, who attempted to bully an intern into lying under oath and would have gotten away with it if not for a meddling middle-aged woman, whose total involvement in a real estate scandal has yet to be known and whose interest in FBI files and IRS aduits of those who would testify against or investigate him bordered on the obessive? Do you love him?
Do you stand by what you said, or do you only hate the trigger-happy, swaggering, draft dodging, lying Republican bullies?
I haven’t heard that extimate of the number (33) of treasures missing from any other source. Since I have heard claims of 170,000 and 14,000, and 3,000 and 33 and 25, do you think that we might agree that no one knows for sure how many pieces are still missing? The last time that I saw a figure from you, it was 25 pieces still missing. That was a short time before they found the 11,000 that had been hidden.
Bill Clinton is in my age group. It was often the case that students opted for schooling rather than for fighting the war in Vietnam. For someone to do otherwise was the exception. Considering his intelligence and his political views, his acceptance of the Rhodes scholarship is perfectly understandable. Why should he have fought in a war that he didn’t believe in when he could be studying at Oxford? That choice shouldn’t be all that hard to understand.
Bush, on the overhand, joined the National Guard and then went AWOL. It’s a cinch he wasn’t studying at Oxford.
According to Webster’s, Guantanamo fully fits the definition of “concentration camp.” So far as we know, it is not yet a death camp:
concentration camp n 1901 : a camp where persons (as prisoners of war, political prisoners or refugees) are contained or confined