You’re welcome.
Yeah, just like how on planet whacko Bush wasn’t able to get away with Gitmo cos he was a Republican. Speaking of planet whacko, say, weren’t you the one recently still parroting the claim that [del]UN[/del] US sanctions (makes the US much more ebil if it wasn’t UN) killed millions of Iraqi babies? You know the absurdly hyper inflated figure that was quickly disavowed by the writers of the flawed study in the Lancet that claimed it? In any event, kindly go piss up a rope.
Thank you, MEBuckner. Please note that supporting a war against the Taliban in Afghanistan doesn’t imply support for the feckless way GWB and company pursued that war.
I don’t know how to respond to Condescending Robot’s post beyond:
Great post/username combination!
[Moderating]
Telling other posters to fuck themselves is a violation of the Pit’s language rules. Please avoid doing this in the future.
[/Moderating]
Prisoners of war tend to be granted more expansive rights than domestic criminals from what I understand. Their status is covered under the Third Geneva Convention. Of note under Article 103 of the third part (judicial proceedings).
The terminology is interesting, reminds me of this:
We didn’t feel we needed Mr. Chomsky’s approval, we went ahead and did it anyway. And if that’s lunacy, what good is sanity?
The claim is that “was one of the very few Senators who opposed escalating the Afghanistan misadventure into the Trillion Dollar Fiasco of Iraq.” Unless you are claiming that the poster really meant (inaccurately, and for no apparent reason) to make a list of the “very few state senators,” he’s not being ambiguous about who was or wasn’t in office at the time, he’s just horribly misinformed and has bought into some myth about Obama valiantly leading the crusade against the Iraq war from the Senate floor. Even better, there are people actually defending this and acting oh-so-offended at this extremely basic misunderstanding of recent history being pointed out.
So to get a couple of things straight here that have already been brought up:
Mitt Romney winning the Presidency would have (or had a higher chance of) stopped the kinds of human rights abuses the OP sees/is concerned about?
Obama’s position and actions on this particular issue should have been the primary or sole determinant for a voter’s decision?
Duly noted.
The election is over. All “we can’t afford to take any sort of stance about our country murdering people on a daily basis because staying on your parents’ health care plan until age 26 is obviously more important” stuff is no longer relevant. Now that the possibility of losing the election is obviated, what are the Obama cheerleaders doing to stop these awful policies, other than defending them and calling anyone who questions or notes them crazy?
What had you in mind, weeping and gnashing of teeth? Or will simple sackcloth and ashes do?
Riddle me this: if you were to publicly lay out a plan of action, rather than a litany of harsh criticisms, would the majority of the people stand with you? Or with him? If we are determined to leave and our enemies are determined to punish us by any means available, what do we do? As we draw down our forces, do we depend upon our allies to cover our exit with their own soldiers? What’s your plan for covering our “retreat”?
Was against it from the git-go, said so in these very pages, and got the earliest and most thorough shellacking ever herein. Man, did that ever piss people off! Have you forgotten how nuts we were all were then?
Getting into a fever swamp is easy, getting out isn’t, and if you do get out, you won’t get out clean.
Uh, but it was during the election, and the OP (whom I acknowledge is not you, but still) specifically condemned Obama voters for voting the way they did.
Sorry, it wasn’t clear from the snippet, but Chomsky discusses the serious peace movement during the 60s elsewhere, of which he and Howard Zinn were a part (and he’d presumably consider the teenagers the revionists denigrate as a major constituent of the serious peace movement). He’s discussing the revisionism towards the peace movement, where those that initially funded and supported it are given credit for their principled objections. He describes giving talks in Churches where there were like five members and the police had to prevent an angry mob from storming in. When three hundred professors were polled, only three claimed the US invasion of Vietnam was “morally wrong” (paraphrase from memory) rather than “a mistake”. According to him, public opinion on Vietnam only really shifted when Wall Street came to the conclusion that the wars were not cost-effective. I’ve seen recent attempts of historic revisionism, where protests were characterised as “violent”: while violence played a part, by all accounts I’ve read, those arguing for peace were the recipients of it.
You really are fucking condescending there, Robot. There are hundreds of topics about which I’ve forgotten more than you could ever learn in a thousand years, but personality politics isn’t one of them.
I’ve known and forgotten a few times that Obama’s Senatorship began after the Iraqi invasion. Thanks to you, now I’ll probably never forget this (for me, almost irrelevant) detail again. 
Had my post replaced “Senator” with “(then-or-future) Senator” you’d have had no conceivable objection. Instead you need to demonstrate your lack of sphincter control with “bought into some myth about Obama valiantly leading the crusade” – a claim unrelated to any sensible interpretation of my post, which was simply about Obama’s views, not about any “crusade” he may or may not have led.
Anyway, good choice of username there, Condescending. The Robot fits well too, since your response to me appears like what a programmed Eliza-type bot might come up with, rather than a sentient being responding to relevant ideas.
This is some pretty weak attempt at spinning the fact that you are posting abut the formulation of American foreign policy and Obama’s views on same despite, obviously and, bizarrely enough, PROUDLY, having no idea who holds political office in America or when Obama began to have influence on the policy. I mean, Jesus, you put Obama into the Senate a full two years early, to cast him in your recollection of the Iraq war debate. This isn’t ancient history, this was the difference between ten years ago and eight years ago, and you’re wildly wrong about it. What explanation for your tenacity in defending this unbelievably simple mistake can there be?
Let me ask you: what are you doing about it, other than complaining bitterly on the internet?
It doesn’t make it right.
The RIGHT thing to do is NOT to hold people indefinitely without a trial.
This is EVIL. Plain and simple.
Dress up the circumstances with some Hollywood flare, CGI, and a sci-fi backdrop, and Americans would all pay their $18 to watch the “good guys” destroy the “evil empire” that locks people up and throws away the key.
Ironies of ironies.
Is there any answer to this question that won’t get me branded a terrorist?
Yes, Obama handed down an executive order banning torture, which Romney wanted to reverse.
And furthermore, there’s no reason to believe that Gary Johnson would have been especially peace-nik in practice: who would be his Secretary of State? Pat Buchanan? Who would head the National Security Council? Ron Paul? He would be busy dismantling the Fed, the IRS and the mental health division of the NIH. Who would make up their staffs? The Libertarian movement is devoid of foreign policy expertise as they prefer posturing to study of the issues.
Article in today’s NY Times. The Obama administration is busy trying to codify its drone policy.
[QUOTE=President Barack Obama]
“One of the things we’ve got to do is put a legal architecture in place, and we need Congressional help in order to do that, to make sure that not only am I reined in but any president’s reined in terms of some of the decisions that we’re making,” Mr. Obama told Jon Stewart in an appearance on “The Daily Show” on Oct. 18.
In an interview with Mark Bowden for a new book on the killing of Osama bin Laden, “The Finish,” Mr. Obama said that “creating a legal structure, processes, with oversight checks on how we use unmanned weapons, is going to be a challenge for me and my successors for some time to come.”
The president expressed wariness of the powerful temptation drones pose to policy makers. “There’s a remoteness to it that makes it tempting to think that somehow we can, without any mess on our hands, solve vexing security problems,” he said.
[/QUOTE]
Always nice to talk to a total stranger over the Internet who knows me better than I know myself. :rolleyes:
I support these things? Wow, I didn’t know that! I thought I was against 'em! What else can you tell me about myself that I hadn’t previously realized?
Well, you seem to care a great deal about me. I mean, it’s hard to imagine that you could know me so much better than I know my own self without at least caring enough to put in the effort required to do so.
But more seriously, you fail to distinguish between “I support even the worst things that Obama does” and “I voted for him because, despite those things, he’s still way better than the other guy, who would almost certainly do those terrible things too, and then some.”
It’s almost mathematical: let A and A’ are Obama’s and Romney’s positions on these issues we’ve been discussing, and B and B’ are their positions on everything else. Let ‘>’ be ‘is better than.’
Let’s say that as best as we can tell, A > A’ though maybe not by much, and B > B’ by a country mile. Seems pretty obvious that I ought to vote for Obama over Romney, but you’re saying that I ought to vote against Obama simply because A is bad, even though A’ is probably worse, and that B and B’ should count for nothing.
Because how are things ever going to improve unless I protest against ‘bad’ by improving the chances of ‘worse’ to win the election, I guess. At least, that’s the best I can figure here. And if I don’t do that, I’m an Obamabot who changes his positions to support whatever Obama is doing.
I don’t think I need Yoshimi to defeat this garbage.
Arty, I’m sure there is a good reason why you put that link into my brain. That I cannot imagine what it might be is my own failing, I guess.