Good try, december, but you fail to answer the basic criticism that your use of the superlative is unwarranted. True, military service is no picnic, as you pointed out, but is the only reason you used the word most because you felt that it is needed in order to “convince a large number of people to make such a sacrifice”?
Actually, Tom Tomorrow’s ham-fisted attempts at satire really are that bad. I don’t believe the man exaggerates for the sake of satire or comedic effect. I think he really does see the world that way. (Granted, the man does have to simplify or exaggerate to make his point when he’ s limited to a four panel strip, but Chick could fairly be said to be working with much the same limitations. Two panels a page in a 22 page booklet isn’t much to work with.) Bear in mind I’m not just judging this particular strip, but the dozens if not hundreds of examples of his strip I’ve come across from time to time in magazines and on the Net, and when I compare Tom Tomorrow to Jack Chick, I mean the comparison very literally. Both think in simplistic either-or, black-or-white, all-or-nothing terms. Both are extremely self-righteous and closed-minded, and seem incapable of honest self-criticism. Both seem to think that any admission of doubt or uncertainty would be fatal weakness. Both attack straw men. Both seem to live in fantasy worlds, Chick’s fantasy world being based on theology while Tomorrow’s is based on political ideology. Both believe themselves to be involved in a desperate struggle against absolute evil. Both continually show contempt, sometimes deliberate and sometimes inadvertent, for those who don’t share their world views–Chick thinks everyone who doesn’t share his religion is blinded by Satan, while Tomorrow thinks anyone to the right of Ted Kennedy is a fascist moron. Perhaps worst of all, their attempts at wit and humor seldom actually work.
I admit to a morbid fascination with both cartoonists, as their simple-minded and bizarre views of the world amuse and disgust me at the same time. While Tomorrow’s disconnection from reality is probably not quite as severe as Chick’s, it is still pretty severe, and his mentality is still very simliar. (Though I will make one concession to Tomorrow. On a couple of occasions Chick has literally nauseated me with his mean-mindedness. Tomorrow has yet to do that.)
Here’s an example of a singer named Steve Earle who wrote a song that is accurately described as anti-American.
http://www.nypost.com/news/nationalnews/52924.htm
december, have you listened to the song, or read the complete lyrics? If so, could you provide a link? If not, how can you possibly know that the song can be “accurately described” as anti-American?
Just curious about your standards for “accuracy”.
“[A principal] function of free speech under our system of government is to invite dispute. It may indeed best serve its high purpose when it induces a condition of unrest, creates dissatisfaction with conditions as they are, or even stirs people to anger.” Terminiello v. Chicago, 337 U.S. 1, 4 (1949).
What part of this do you not understand, december?
No benefits? This truly surprises me. You never do business in stores where the clerks are required to be able to read and write and do simple arithmetic (which they learned in school)? You live in a fortress you would be able to defend single-handedly against any conceivable attack, including with thermonuclear or biological weapons? You have never had any occasion to wish for the presence of a policeman or find the actual presence of one reassuring? Your property is totally insured against all possible disasters?
Very true. You have every right to express your views – just as I have the right to debate them.
I support your freedom to do what is best for you. I am a liberal. It is (usually) the conservatives who tend to want to take away your freedoms – check out the ACLU website on cases where they’ve taken stances in defense of personal rights and freedoms and see what proportion of their work was against liberal we-know-what’s-best-for-you-ism vs. conservative you-all-have-the-freedom-to-be-the-kind-of-American-we-think-you-ought-to-be-ism.
This is the classic rationale of every tyrant – that the poor benighted public cannot take care of itself, so he has to for their own good. Let the individual people decide for themselves what is good and what bad.
Ah. So you get to define exactly what a loyal American ought to be, and condemn anyone who disagrees with your definition. That’s reasonable – except that it condemns Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Andrew Jackson, and quite a number of other people that would be “un-American” by your standards.
[quote]
As for what is a commie liberal, that is a fair question deserving of a fair answer. A commie is someone who wants to share the wealth, yours and mine. A liberal is the same thing, they want national health care so that someone else will pay for their care so they can be welfare queens.
Huh. As a liberal who supports, more or less, health care reform including a means where every person can get a minimum adequate treatment, and who has never been on welfare and sincerely hopes never to be, I think your views here are so totally at variance with reality that you need to reexamine them. I will grant that people who do receive public help tend to vote for liberal candidates, for the simple and logical reason that they would lose the help they need if the conservatives won. However, a large number of people self-identify as liberal, not because they expect to receive personal benefit, but through a sense of desiring social justice for others.
Assuming that this sentence is missing a “not” somewhere, it would depend on which clause it is missing from. IMHO it belongs in the first, as it’s extremely rare (though not impossible) to find a liberal communist nowadays.
Absolutely. Are you as committed as I am to protecting their right to do so, and to say what they think? Or are you inclined to demand allegiance to your POV on penalty of being arrested and condemned as subversive if one says and thinks otherwise?
Well, personally I think that the stance of every president from Truman to Reagan to stand up to the Soviet Union, culminating in Reagan’s willingness to spend heavily to arm this nation fully – with the consequence of trashing the USSR’s fragile top-down economic structure, was what ended the Cold War – but we don’t totally disagree.
…including convicted violent criminals? Don’t even think of giving my five-year-old honorary grandson a concealed weapon – or of refusing him the title his grandfather and father risked their lives to guarantee him of “American”
I am a liberal. I am opposed to Communism. I formally request that you retract that personal slur (since we are not in the Pit).
Ah, the key issue. The right of American businessmen to make money wherever and however they can? I support the idea that our government should protect American businessmen’s rights when they have entered into an honest deal somewhere – and am firmly opposed to using our might to allow the unscrupulous among them to rape other countries’ people of their property and livelihoods.
No, I will not. Because I have exactly the same rights to my opinion as you to yours – and those are protected by the United States Constitution, to which I am loyal. Are you opposed to my expressing my views when they differ from yours? If so, how do you square this with your loyalty to America?
Ah, then we should abolish the Republican Party, which consistently criticized President Franklin Roosevelt during the last declared war we fought.
Note that it is the Congress which declares war – whether President Bush says we’re at war with Al-Qaeda, “terrorism” as an abstract concept, his “Axis of Evil” or whatever makes no difference – by law he needs to ask Congress for a formal declaration to make it a war.
december: […] when some of us call people like Michael Moore 'Anti-American" or “unpatriotic”, what is our motivation? […] I invite you to provide evidence that smearing was the motivation.
You completely missed my point, december. When you made your initial fuzzy generalizations about those terms in your post of 7/19 10:21, I commented that “It’s all a vague subjective judgement of underlying motives, and it looks like just a convenient excuse to smear as “unpatriotic” or “anti-American” any criticism that you don’t happen to like.”
This was before you applied those epithets to Michael Moore, Amnesty International, or any other particular individual or institution, so of course I was not “alleging” that you actually “smeared” them or anyone else. (Remember, I was the one who said in the first place that judging the underlying motivations of people’s statements is tricky, so I’m not about to leap to conclusions about yours.)
What I was doing was pointing out to you that to define terms like “unpatriotic” based only on “vague subjective judgement of underlying motives” looks like just an excuse for smearing. In other words, your criteria for calling something “unpatriotic” or “anti-American” are so arbitrary and subjective that I don’t trust them, and I’m warning you that you shouldn’t be surprised if other people don’t trust them either. See?
Never fear, december, when I actually do make a factual assertion accusing you of smearing or anything else, I’ll put my evidence right there in the accusation. You won’t have to come pestering me in order to find out what it is.
(Poly and others: psssst, folks, taggert’s doing satire, as we’ve seen on a number of threads like this already here and in the Pit. Nothing wrong with pointing out the fallacies, of course, but I don’t want y’all to endanger your blood pressure thinking he’s really advocating this stuff.)
I know that the song favors America’s enemies in time of (more-or-less) war. These are people who murdered 3000 American civilians.
Furthermore, I do not believe the song-writer actually shares al Qaeda’s views, such as stoning gays, killing Jews and taking all rights away from women. The point of the song is to favor those who happen to be America’s enemies. That is, the song is precisely “Anti-American.”
What I don’t understand is your exact point, KellyM. Please explain what you wish to prove by this quote, and I will be happy to respond.
You know this… how?
december, it seems quite obvious that you are against speech inviting dispute about the competency of a war-time president. Isn’t that inconsistent with the sentiment expressed in the quotation?
Thanks for the clarification, KellyM
No, I have not said I opposed speech criticizing a wartime President. What I meant to say was that when certain speech is unpatriotic, it’s OK to label it as such.
I do believe that certain criticisms of the President during a time of war would hurt the country and could be labeled “unpatriotic.” E.g., it was mindless fun to call Bush a moron during peactime, despite his high SAT scores and his Yale and Harvard degrees. But, it would be harmful to the country’s morale to spout this nonsense during a time of war.
OTOH I strongly support the value of expressing valid disagreements over the conduct of the war and specific policy choices. E.g., although I favor a military invasxion of Iraq, there’s nothing unpatriotic or anti-American about arguing against such an invasion.
The irony is that the point of the song is to challenge the labelling of certain views as “anti-American”. From a Reuters article:
It seems to be a new tactic of the left: Cry ‘They are suppressing my speech!’ whenever they themselves are criticized.
That ding-bat McKinney (sp) tried to pull that after she recieved some flak for her outlandish conspiracy garbage she spouted after 9-11.
Too many people do not see the difference between being cynical and being critical.
Have you noticed that you’re the person on this thread who keeps bringing up freedom of speech? It’s like you’re having your own argument in your head.
Well the bottom line is if you are participating in the public debate either in official or unofficial capacity you care about this country, and are inherintly American.
december, you haven’t answered my question, so I’ll repeat it. How do you know that the song you’ve characterized -you think accurately- as “unAmerican” favors America’s enemies in time of -you believe however halfheartedly- war?
I’m inviting you to actually think about your judgements (and, quite obviously in this case, your prejudgements).
december: *I do believe that certain criticisms of the President during a time of war would hurt the country and could be labeled “unpatriotic.” E.g., it was mindless fun to call Bush a moron during peactime, despite his high SAT scores and his Yale and Harvard degrees. But, it would be harmful to the country’s morale to spout this nonsense during a time of war. *
While I have always agreed that exaggerated insults serve no useful purpose, I think that this is a pretty silly reason to avoid them. If it doesn’t hurt the country for someone to call the President a moron in peacetime, I don’t see how the damage is greater in war. In fact, I would be pretty suspicious of any war, or any other national undertaking, that is seriously endangered by some exaggerated insults thrown at political leaders. If a cause is truly right and just, it ought to be able to survive some hostile criticisms.
That doesn’t mean that such comments need to go unchallenged, of course; but ignorance, IMHO, is always more successfully fought by being exposed than by being suppressed. That’s why I think arguments about whether something is or isn’t unpatriotic or ought or ought not to be said are pretty futile, war or no war.
If you object to Bush’s being called a moron, then point out specific evidence to the contrary (as you just did). If you think a political commentator or songwriter or anybody else is saying something that is factually inaccurate, straighten them out on the facts. Seems to me that’s a much better use of everyone’s time than quibbling about whether such remarks do or don’t violate currently accepted standards of patriotism, and how you ought to define those standards, and so on and so forth.
“You’re not supposed to say stuff that might be bad for morale” sounds pretty lousy on the lips of a free people. “You’re wrong, and here’s why” sounds pretty damn good.
And wouldn’t it be great to actually find out what the other party has claimed before you begin to prove them wrong?
xenophon41, there are those who agree with your POV. Here’s a quote from instapundit
I don’t buy the excuse that Earle was merely writing a song expressing Lindt’s (presumed) thoughts and feelings or that it was merely about freedom of speech. Try this analogy:
Suppose that during the height of the civil rights struggles, someone wrote and performed a song expressing the beliefs of some notorious racist – say Martin Luther King’s assassin. Suppose the song had racist lyrics, justified as expressing James Earl Ray’s feelings. Would you find such a song racist? I sure would.
Kimstu, would you apply this standard to race? I wouldn’t. I think exaggerated racial insults should be actively discouraged, not just refuted.