december’s major purpose was to take a whack at Democrats.
That not withstanding, Rep. Kaptur’s remarks strike me as both stupid and insensitive. One can only speculate that she is desperate to get news coverage.
Revolutionaries have a way of drawing civilians into the crossfire when they take on their target(s). However the deliberate infliction of thousands (and potentially millions) of civilians casualties is a major escalation in terror. Thus Al-Queda is not “very similar” to the Green Mountain Boys as Kaptur is claiming. It is highly offensive to link American Revolutionary War heroes to Osama’s band of fanatical religious killers, and only gives G.O.P. leaders and their allies ammunition to bash the Democratic Party, which does not as a whole confuse understanding the enemy with the sort of “empathy” and “respect” which some deluded folk think we owe Osama’s Brown Mountain Boys.
“And, BTW, for the most part, the reason people join terrorist groups is because there is something they want to see changed, and feel powerless to do so through peaceful means.”
Yes, Gandhi was all wet.
If he’d paid more attention to throwing bombs and screaming “REVENGE!!!” India would be an independent nation now. :rolleyes:
So let’s get to what was so dumb about her comments and how that compares to a doctor saying women can’t get pregnant if they are raped.
The “dumb” part-- the part the Republicans are all up in arms about, is the comparison of Osama to The Green Mountain Boys. The gist seems to be “How dare she say that we can try to understand what motivates Osama by looking at what motivated our forefathers!?”
Of course this is just as dumb as a doctor saying you can’t get pregnant if raped! How could I have not seen this? Because it is moronic beyond comprehension to try to understand your enemy. Everybody knows that the enemy is pure eeeeeviiiiillllll while we are the shining glory of light. There can be no empathy with pure eeeevviiilllll. If you try to ascribe any motivation but pure eeeeeviiiiilll to the deeds of are enemy than you are either in the league with evil or you are dumb.
Not only is december a pot calling a kettle black here (as he so often is), but my response to this is a big “So what?” What’s wrong with her disagreeing with Bush and doubting his motives? Gods Forbid that we have any disagreement in the halls of our government. Oh wait, that’s right… the Founding Fathers didn’t believe in disagreement. :rolleyes:
To continue:
This is a completely unreasonable leap of logic that is, itself, unsupported. Because she made an unsupported comment, Kaptur must be Anti-American “or something”! Of course! The Republican rallying cry since 9/11… “You disagree with the President! You must be Anti-American!” Once again, :rolleyes:
And then he finishes with this gem:
Yes, let’s remove anyone who disagrees with Bush’s view of Islam from public office! That’s the American Way! All disagreement must be quashed, all those who voice their opinion must be silenced!
Please… tell me you’re not supporting this crap, Debaser. It is a ridiculous OP, and it only gets worse as the thread continues. december set the tone of bullshit from his first post, so you can’t try to call him a victim now.
december, what about when Reagan compared the contras to the Founding Fathers? And he went even further than Kaptur-he said they were the MORAL EQUIVALENT of the FF.
The contras. Fucking rapists, murderers and terrorists.
I think december uses Martin Luther King all the time to show he’s really NOT a knee-jerk right wing bigoted asshat. “See? I like MLK!!! I’m not a RACIST!!!”
Except she doesn’t come out and say that she thinks he’s a liar, she states it as a given that’s what the US is going to do. Disagreeing with someone is one thing, implying that they’re a liar is a whole nother. And the thing about “not resolve(ing) the underlying problems leading to political and social upheaval” is a complete strawman- I haven’t heard the Bush administration say that it would.
I call bullshit, especially since your comments completely ignore his call for Rep. Thomas to go. There’s plenty of room for disagreement, but you seem to be arguing for dissent for dissent’s sake, not for a legitimate point of view.
Politicians sometimes lie about their motives and objectives. Are you saying that they don’t, or are you saying that it’s wrong to accuse them of such? I would disagree with both.
Call bullshit on yourself here… as has been pointed out, she has a legitimate point of view, even if she expressed it poorly. Do you agree with december that she should be removed from office for her comments? If not, then what’s your point?
Don Thomas’s comment was more inexcusable, IMHO. Kaptur didn’t match the utter stupidity of a MEDICAL DOCTOR saying what he did. :rolleyes:
Right. She was comparing perhaps the most evil man alive (?) to great American heroes. That’s pretty dumb. You side-stepped the question of how you would feel if a Congressman compared Martin Luther King to Osama bin Laden because they’re both religious leaders. Wouldn’t find that stupid and insulting?
In principle I suppose one could understand OBL, although that wouldn’t mean he wasn’t evil. The stupid part is that she wasn’t really trying to understand him; she was making it up. To really understand OBL one should read all his writings, study his culture, learn Arabic, learn the intricacies and history of the various strains of Islam, etc. She didn’t do any of that. She just made up a motivation, which came across sounding like an excuse. Worse than that, she insulted people who are icons to many old-time civil liberties supporters.
Avalonian, I wish she weren’t an elected representative, but stupidity and igorance isn’t legal grounds to remove someone from Congress.
When Mssr.Lott said some crazy things, the Republicans had the intellectual honesty to see his comments for what they were, and they quickly kicked Lott to the curb. Few were the defenders of Lott.
When Kaptur says something crazy, people are falling over themselves to defend her.
Get a fucking clue, folks. December didn’t make this up. This isn’t some partisan attack. What a bumble-fuck Georgia rep said or did not say has nothing to do with this. Are you people really so reflexively defensive of your hallowed party that you will defend what the whore Kaptur had to say?
I thought I was partisan, but I could take lessons from some of you zealous defenders of the DNC. :rolleyes:
They sometimes do lie, and it’s wrong to accuse them of it when they’re not lying. Are you saying that the US is going to seize Iraq? If that happened, I’d be the first person calling for Bush’s head on a platter. Methinks it’s more similar to the accusations that we were going to seize Afghanistan which we’ve seen were untrue.
I think she should either explain fully what she was trying to say and state whether they were her beliefs or not- no weaselly “one could say…” or “If the US seizes the land…” or “people of faith understand…”- come out and say it, straightforward. And if these really are her beliefs then yes, I think she should be removed from office, the same way Cynthia McKinney and Bob Barr were- by the voters at the next election. She has the right to express herself, and the voters have the right to vote her out of office.
You need to lay off the analogies, december. Seriously.
If you wanted to blast the Rep. Kaptur’s remarks, then you should have done that and we could have started off right at the beginning with the “how dare she empathize with the enemy” crap from the beginning.
I agree with this completely, but it’s not what december said in his OP. Had he said this, I’d have no problem with it.
See the difference between a reasonable case made and a partisan screed? I agree with Jackmannii that december’s purpose in this thread was pretty much to take yet another swipe at Democrats/liberals, and the Don Thomas reference a tacked-on attempt to try to sound fair-minded. Is that wrong? :eek:
That’s not a fair assesment at all. I think you need to re-read the OP- the only time that december gets away from the specifics of what Kaptur said is the intro and the last line- “Can’t we remove from public service Marcy Kaptur, Senator Patty Murray (who made somewhat similar comments), and Don Thomas as a package deal?” which is hardly a “swipe at democrats/liberals” or a partisan screed. And Biggirl I think you need to reread to OP as well- he was blasting specifically what she said from the get-go. The only thing that I disagree with the OP about is that we somehow need to “compensate” for pitting Thomas.
Well, I disagree a whole lot more than you do with the OP. The compensation part was only the biggest point of disagreement.
All of you so in a dither about what she said do know that empathizing and sympathizing are two different things. As are understanding and condoning-- right?
