Cologne based on ether.
Faint praise, that. Weakening the knees of slow-witted pornographers? Color me unimpressed.
Idn’t he just the cutest little thing you ever did see?
That’s very generous of you considering that it was Poppy Bush, not Clinton, who sent troops into Somalia. They were already there when Clinton took office.
Just for clarity, Bricker is a lawyer. Like the carpenter with a hammer, he thinks all the problems of the world can be reduced to legal terms, not comprehending that impeachment is, obviously, a political process.
Obviously, whether RWR failed to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution by lying to Congress about spending money without their authorization in a military matter is a political question. Equally obviously, a single reading of The Federalist would reveal that this would probably have been considered by the guys who actually wrote that document to be about as impeachable an offense as it gets.
Except if you have legal training, in which case it matters not at all.
As I said before, carry on.
Ah, wadda hell, long as I’m here:
I did not know that. The point still stands. I don’t blame Clinton for the military failure there that he presided over. Catcha my drift?
No, not really. Prhaps you pinpoint a specific decision that Clinton made which led to a “failure?”
How is it his fault that he inherited somebody else’s mess?
[QUOTE=Mr. Svinlesha
George Lakoff argues that ”liberal” and ”conservative” are worldviews reflecting different unconscious structures, derived primarily from different family experiences. These structures ”frame” the way we understand the world at an unconscious, preverbal level. In other words, our political views are, at a deeper (more emotive, less rational) level, an expression of our relationship to the family. According to Lakoff, the ”liberal ideology” is an expression of the ”Nurturant Parent Model,” while ”conservative ideology” reflects the ”Strict Father Model.” (You can read more about Lakoff’s ideas [here]
(http://www.rockridgeinstitute.org/projects/strategic/nationasfamily/nationasfamily/view).)
Now, before my experiences here at the SDMB, I’d probably dismiss Lakoff’s arguments as rather far-fetched. But not anymore. Lakoff’s model explains quite handily why so many people are immune to facts and logic in the realm of political discourse. In the words of Kevin Drum: ”Facts are great, but don’t fall into the trap of thinking that you’re going to win arguments with facts. When facts collide with a person’s worldview, it’s the facts that get tossed overboard, not the worldview.”
[/quote]
Ok, so I’m looking at that link and reading about the nurturant model and the strict father model, and this kind of pisses me off.
Apparently liberals are liberal because they are well-cared for and raised in sunny and optimistic environments that cherish their natures with two strong and progressive parents. Conservatives are conservatives apparently because Daddy beat the shit out of them and tortured them in his dungeon of horrors while their mousy mothers kept silent.
I guess we know where the author’s sentiment’s lie.
Had Lasky been a conservative doubtless the same thesis would be expressed as: Conservatives are conservatives because they are raised in a healthy family with tradittional values and emphasis on morality. Liberals are liberals because of an unnatural attachment to their overbearing and smothering mothers and a desire to return to the womb, and an absence of a male role mother other than a cowed and pussy-whipped wimp of a father.
In either case, Lasky oughtta realize this Freudian shit’s been out the window for about 20 years.
But this Lasky business brings up a thesis of my own.
Why is that so many liberals many argument is simply that Conservatives are evil and bad people?
I try to be out there showing my ideas, testing them. They’re what I’m here to talk about.
All too often, the standard response is the xenophon thing. Instead of engaging my ideas or presenting his own, his counterargument is to tell me that I’m a horrible person and attempt to claim that I am promoting genocide.
Bricker is of course an evil motherfucker as well. So’s Shodan Sam Stone and anybody else who promotes a conservative or Republican idea.
Instead of doing the appeal to reason, or the appeal to fairness, or kindness, instead of doing the “poor me, why are you calling me names” thing, I think it’s about time the truth behind the matter was displayed.
They do it because they’re stupid and don’t have ideas or arguments that can compete. They have no other alternative than to try to paint their opponent as evil, sick, or stupid.
As far as I’m concerned, if all you do is make a bald assertion and attack your opponent that is proof of stupidity. You do it because you have nothing else. It is a concession of defeat.
Didn’t Bush inherit an unstable situation in Iraq from Clinton? How can you blame him for how he handled “somebody else’s mess.”
Let us reason together.
No President starts with a clean slate. They inherit the ongoing situations of their predecessor and the ongoing situation that exists in the world.
I don’t blame Clinton, but I consider it his responsibility since most of the bad stuff happened on his watch. He could have pulled out, instead of turning things over to the UN, or he could have handled the situation differently. Personally, I think the mistake was that he should have either pulled out, or made a larger commitment. The half-measure in an unstable area didn’t work.
Doubtless what happened was that the military told him that the presence that they had along with UN support was a positive and calming influence and that our troops could handle a peacekeeping mission there, and that a pitched battle was unlikely because of our ability to project force. They were wrong, and they couldn’t stop a genocide.
The failure is an inability to project the course of future events and all possible outcomes with 100% certainty. There were bad tradeoffs and tough decisions to be made. Hindsight presents better courses, but that’s hindsight.
Um…no.
Is that a trick question?
Indeed. There was the time Henry Clintonger back-stabbed the Kurds to support Shah Reza Pahlavi. Then there was the time George Herbert Walker Clinton encouraged the Shia to rebel against Saddam, and then hung them out to dry.
Yeppers, Clinton all the way.
I’m surprised you find the premise that the situation with Iraq was unstable when Bush took office is an unreasonable one.
That the situation was unstable was, in fact, a premise of the outgoing administration, and was presented as such to the incoming Bush administration as well as being a matter of policy.
I could go and fetch my copy of Plan of Attack and cite you the public policy and statements issued by the Clinton administration as well as the quotes and descriptions of the transition… but I honestly suspect you’re just being difficult with me and you can read the book just as well yourself and let me know if you disagree.
However, the instability of Iraq around 2000 and our policy towards this problem is a matter of public record and I consider it a reasonable given. Frankly, if I can’t get agreement over that premise as a given I don’t think we have enough common ground to have a discussion on the subject.
There was nothing going on in Iraq which was of any urgent concern to the US. There was certainly no reason to invade it. And before 9/11, Bush himself said that Iraq was nothing to worry about, that the sanctions were working and that there was no evidence that Iraq was manufaturing banned weapons (see fahrenheit 9/11 for an excelect selection of clips from pre-9/11 press conferences in which various Bushies such as Rice and Powell all publicly pooh pooh the situation in Iraq).
So no. Bush did not inherit any significant problems in Iraq. The current trainwreck is completely of his own making.
Oh, he means Colin Clinton and Condoleeza Clinton!
I think that I am beginning to understand, Scylla. It seems as though you see the mistakes that have been made, but believe that they were difficult strategic decisions and so nobody needs to be held accountable (or at least not anyone at a high level); also, you hold that the good decisions have outweighed the bad.
I disagree strongly, but I am relieved to finally know the thought process.
However, I don’t think you recognize how much of the difficulty is a result of this administration itself.
For example, Chalabi was not highly regarded before the Bush team started accepting disinformation from him, giving him tens of millions of dollars, grooming him for installation in Iraq, and allowing him to steal classified information from us.
Before any of this went down, the CIA had already told the Bush team that Chalabi was unpopular in Iraq, that he was lying to them, that he had compromised previous missions. It was no secret.
Yet the Bush team chose to trust Chalabi instead.
They chose to trust the guy that told them what they wanted to hear. Who told them that Iraq had WMD. Who told them that Iraqis would welcome the US with open arms.
Of course they got burned. They were stupid. It wasn’t such a “difficult decision”, it was just that they heard what they wanted to hear. Dissenting voices were ignored.
And now you say this:
How? The same people are still in charge, and they still haven’t admitted their mistakes, nor corrected them.
Indeed, by most accounts it looks like the Bush team is increasing their dismissal of dissenting voices. Those who are not loyal to Bush are getting kicked out of positions of power to be replaced with loyalists.
Most of the Bush team’s mistakes were a result of hearing only what they wanted to hear.
They are now making sure that this pattern of mistakes continues well into the future.
At some point, don’t you have to hold them accountable, instead of explaining it away as “difficult decisions”?
This doesn’t make sense. If our goal was to prevent WMD from being used on our invading soldiers, we could have accomplished our goal by not having any invading soldiers.
The fact that we invaded at all indicates that our goal was to prevent Iraq’s WMD from falling into the hands of terrorists. Instead, we let most of the suspected WMD sites be looted. The army complained that it didn’t have enough men to come close to securing the sites.
Does this not indicate a serious lack of planning? I don’t see why I shouldn’t hold the Bush administration responsible, especially since their uncritical acceptance of disinformation from sources which the CIA already warned them were unreliable led to the formulation of their failed plans.
Scylla:
I agree with you that the presentation of the two models is terribly slanted (in favor of the progressives) and in addition a massive simplification. After all, earlier in this thread many of us lefties objected to being told that we couldn’t/didn’t understand conservatives, and pointed out that we were, ourselves, raised in conservative environments, by conservative adults. So I also reject the notion that one’s political views are directly determined, in any sort of linear fashion, by the structure of one’s earliest family life, except possibly in a sort of diffuse, global manner.
I suppose we could dig in and see what we could find that holds true, and doesn’t hold true, with regard to Lakoff’s specific ideas. But one thing that does hold true, it seems to me, is that people are uniquely immune to facts when it comes to determining their political worldview – as Nighttime is demonstrating quite clearly vis-à-vis you.
Let’s see if I can separate the wheat from this chaff.
There may be people here who believe that you and Bricker are evil motherfuckers. I don’t. Nor do I think that “anybody else who promotes a conservative or Republican idea” is an evil motherfucker. Consider that both Collounsbury and Simon X are extremely conservative – Simon’s even an active member of the Republican party. Yet not only do I not consider them evil but I would be willing to bet that very few on the left here consider them evil.
Why not? Well, my answer is that, while both C and SX profess a conservative point of view, they do so on the basis of….hmmm… can we call it, “a shared reality set”? That is to say, the “reality” that Simon and Collounsbury perceive is very similar to the “reality” that I perceive. In that reality, for example, Chalabi was a known con-artist and shyster years before the neo-cons tapped him to be the titular head of Iraq.
I don’t know if I’m communicating this idea very clearly; so help me out if you don’t get it.
I am not a post-modernist, at least not in any “total” sense. I am a realist, in that I assume a real world beyond discourse (that makes me a modernist). Facts are facts. Facts do not change just because a person is a liberal, or progressive, or conservative, or whatever. I don’t object to the promotion of conservative “ideas.” I object to the promotion of conservative “facts,” as if somehow the world was infinitely malleable, and as if some facts – facts that fail to support a conservative worldview – aren’t facts. I object to the promotion of the view that some “facts,” which are facts, aren’t – that they’re just liberal “ideas” dressed up as facts. To the promotion of the view that other “facts,” which aren’t facts, really, are facts, because they support a conservative worldview.
Just as an example, consider the Bush administration’s promotion of view that global warming isn’t occurring – or that it isn’t influenced by human activities. Now, that’s just a flat out lie. When I say that global warming is occurring, that doesn’t make me a liberal. I’m simply stating a fact, as expressed by the overwhelming consensus of scientists who study global climate change. Global warming is occurring regardless of whether I’m a liberal or a conservative. But many conservatives seek to push the idea that global warming isn’t occurring, and argue that belief in global warming is just a so much liberal hogwash. (The Bush administration only recently admitted that there really was such a thing as global warming.)
Sam is a particularly egregious offender in this regard. For example, he recently referred to an estimate of civilian deaths in Iraq, published in the respected medical journal The Lancet, as “laughable.” Why? Well, certainly not because of the study’s methodology, which is generally agreed upon as sound. Rather, Sam thought the study was “laughable” because it came to a conclusion which did not support his worldview.
So the problem I have doesn’t stem from people who promote conservative “ideas.” Rather, it derives from the tendency to support conservative ideas with conservative “facts,” in a calculating and disingenuous manner. I don’t know if I would call Shodan or Sam evil; but I say that I find them both dishonest and dishonorable, and worthy of little more than contempt. This is not a conclusion I reach lightly, or gladly, especially with regard to Sam. But I’ve given him the benefit of the doubt way too long, now.
None of this is to say that there isn’t room for a legitimate debate about the facts of a matter, when those facts are in doubt or are otherwise unclear.
So, to come full circle: this shit has got to stop. Argue from a conservative point of view if you wish, but please stop making shit up to support your argument. Because that’s what really pisses me off.
And yet some people are evil, sick, and/or stupid. Am I required to pretend otherwise after they’ve rubbed my nose in it?
What would you have me do?
Excuse me?!?
What facts does it seem I’m impervious to in determining my worldview?
So you think the cruise missiles defeated Saddam and accomplished regime change prior to Bush entering office?
Plan of Attack explains the untenability of the containment policy quite well.
Try this logic:
We were at war with Iraq during the Clinton administration in a very real and ongoing manner. We engaged in cruise missile attacks and we were commanding Iraq’s airspace.
As we were enforcing the “no fly zone” our planes were being shot at every single mission They were getting better at it, and it was only a matter of time until one of our planes was shot down.
Do you know what the plan was if a plane got shot down and a pilot captured? It was to invade Iraq to recover the pilot with, IIRC correctly, 600 men stationed in Kuwait. If those men were attacked or killed during the operation we were going to repeat Gulf war I.
Finally, let us not forget that there is a game of chess going on in the Mideast. Being engaged in a low-level war with Iraq meant that we were hamstrung and could not operate in the Mideast without giving Saddam the opportunity to invade Kuwait once we were committed elsewhere. Or, he could invade Saudi Arabia, or Israel, or attack our troops committed elsewhere.
So, when you say “Bush did not inherit any significant problems in Iraq,” I find it difficult to engage with you. We don’t have enough agreement about the most basic facts.
And Svin is telling me that I’m impervious to facts.
No. Some things are mistakes. Some are strategic trade offs or consequences of other issues. I’m not sure what you mean by “held accountable.” If you mean the mistakes and problems should be brought into the light of day, examined, rectified if possible and learned from if not, then yes.
If you think they prove something collectively, then no. It seems to me that all possible courses of action are prone to undesirable consequences and less than perfect execution.
That depends upon how you look at it, and your expectation is of the role of President. If you expect a President to try to keep things together and defer unpleasantness to any extent possible, than I guess you were pretty satisfied with what Clinton did.
I found this tactic to be less than satisfactory. After 8 years of minimal action deferring unpleasantness, the Korean situation escalated, global terrorism escalated, and the Iraq situation got steadily worse. I suppose the plan was to just try to keep these things contained and address them minimally in the hopes that they would resolve themselves or go away. ::shrug:: Sometimes problems do just go away.
These didn’t.
Allow me a metaphor:
Clinton inherits a kitchen. There are some rusty pipes, broken appliances, peeling wall paper, and linoleum full of wholes. On top of that there’s maybe a firetrap by the old oven. Clinton’s strategy was to keep an eye on the oven and basically live in the kitchen as it is. Things gradually got a little more decrepit, but most things were serviceable.
Bush takes over the kitchen is warned about the oven, and all of a sudden the dishwasher starts an electrical fire that does even more damage. So Bush decides to remodel. The remodelling is a huge mess. It costs tons of money. Problems that were only minor come to the forefront. People are unhappy with the remodelling plan and think it could be better. Mistakes are naturally made and have to be rectified.
Now people who look at the kitchen and favor the “live with it” strategy point at what a huge unholy mess it is, how much it costs, all the problems that occur, and they blame it on Bush. Things were a lot better with Clinton. The kitchen was serviceable.
People who favor the remodelling strategy, are focussed on the goal and beleive that having a safe and serviceable kitchen is worth the hassle, and danger and cost of the remodel.
So, when you point to the Chalabi thing and say “look at that plaster, look at that plumbing. What a mess! This is your fault!” I say “No, we tore out the wall and look at what we found. We have to fix that, too.”
In the course of remodelling your kitchen, your basement may get trashed as work may have to be done there to run electrical lines, fix plumbing.
When you undertake such a project, it is inevitable that things will get a lot, lot worse before they get better. As always, the tear out is quick. The rebuilding is slow and difficult.