Avalonian, I noticed you skipped this section of decembers OP:
I agree with this. Her comments were insulting and ignorant. Does anybody think that the comparison of OBL to the Green Mtn boys makes sense?
to which Avalonian responds:
Spell it out for me because I just don’t get it. How is he calling the kettle black?
Most people would think that her calling the president a liar about an issue as serious as invading Iraq with the intentions of seizing the land there is way out of line. Sure, she is entitled to say what she likes, free speech and all that. But that doesn’t make it ok to call the president a liar in the eyes of the voters. What she did is dumb. No reasonable person believes that the president is going attempting a land grab in Iraq. Bush isn’t interested in real estate there. Her statements were foolish and worthy of riducule, which is exactly what december was giving her.
C’mon now. Did december make such an argument?
Another straw man here.
Lets forget about the rest of the posts for now. Just the OP alone was enough to get a half dozen monkeys jumping on his back.
December’s first post is tame by pit standards. People attacked him because he is december. I am not going to defend his every word. I don’t know who the three people are who he mentions. I do know that if my elected official said statements as foolish and ignorant as the ones quoted in that article then I would never vote for her again.
Debaser: First of all, you did a fine job pointing out the strawmen in my previous post. They were there deliberately. The reason I put them there was to point out (by example) that the OP was also full of strawmen, in accusing Kaptur of being anti-American and then criticizing her on that basis.
And while we’re at it, this is also why this was a case of the pot calling the kettle black. The OP criticized Kaptur for implying that Bush is lying, an unsupported claim, while it makes the equally unsupported claim that Kaptur is “Anti-American or something.” Did you miss that part? Is being called anti-American somehow preferable to being called a liar? This seems obvious to me.
I agree with this, but again, it’s not what the OP said. You and Mojo may disagree with this opinion, but the OP recommended “removal” from office for the three people he mentioned, simply because of their opinions. He didn’t mention voting them out or the electoral process once. Not once.
You have your spin on the OP and I have mine, but I think it’s pretty obvious either way that it makes some unsupportable claims, and december invited the reception he got. Further, based on his subsequent replies (which you wanted to forget, I know), I think he enjoys it.
So two wrongs make a right? Maybe next time you should let the rest of us in on the secret that you are posting things that you didn’t believe. There is a word for that.
Well, it wasn’t obvious to me.
Also you are clearly mis-quoting him there. He said "Since it has no basis, her assumption shows stupendous ignorance or anti-American bias or something. "
I think that stupendous ignorance would explain her statements. As would anti-American bias. Or it may be something else. What’s wrong with this?
This is the pit. He could have said “can’t we just deport this dumb cunt to antarctica forever?” and it would be OK. Everything we say in the pit must be something that we mean literally?
I do, insofar as she made the comparison. Both the Green Mountain Boys and al-Qaeda are irregular combatants who use guerrilla warfare and terrorism to accomplish their goals. Their goals certainly differ (and I’m in a lot more agreement with the goals of the GMB than the goals of al-Qaeda), as does the scale of the violence used. However, that similarity exists.
Debaser, if you look on page 1 of this thread you will find that several people found merit in her comments. The analogy was not wholly accurate. I don’t think anyone’s arguing that it is. But 1) it had more merit than I think december wanted to give it credit for and 2) it is not part of the democratic process to simply remove from office anyone with whom we disagree, else I’d declare “Everyone out Who Doesn’t Agree with Me” Day and the Senate and House would be cut by about half their members and replaced by dopers.
What’s the same is that in both cases, you have non-military (or maybe para-military is the better word) groups engaging in terrorism against civilians and guerilla action against governmental/military groups to accomplish their goals.
Accuracy is not the issue. I can remember when Senator Joseph McCarthy would look at a Democratic issue and observe that the Communists also supported it. That was literally true, but it was also a disgusting way to lump Democrats together with Communists. It was called “red-baiting.”
Rep. Kaptur did a similar thing to the Founding Fathers, by associating them with OBL. I don’t think she meant to do, but it came out that way.
It should be clear what I meant when I wrote, “Can’t we remove from public service [the 3 elected officials] as a package deal?” Obviously there is no serious way to have a “package deal” removing a Congresswoman, a Senator and a State Senator. My coment was obviously a dramatic way of expressing contempt for these three officials.
It looks like people are to me. RickJay’s lengthy post on the first page seems to argue that.
No, it really doesn’t. Her comments throughout the entire artilcle were foolish and silly. Her analogy of the Green Mtn Boys to Osama Bin Laden is offensive and innacurate.
december has already stated that he didn’t mean this literally.
Like I said before: this is the pit. december could have said lets banish her to Antarctica if he wanted.
So, as Mojo pointed out: one could say that anti-abortion crusaders who kill abortion doctors are like EMTs, because they’re both trying to save lives.
Or, Stalin was like Bill Clinton because they were both heads of state.
This is silly. Just because an analogy has some shred of truth in it doesn’t mean it has merit.
If the fact that “you have non-military groups engaging in terrorism against civilians and guerilla action against governmental/military groups to accomplish their goals” is the only similarity then why didn’t the good congresswoman compare the terrorists to the VC in Vietnam? Or the rebels in Chechnya?
How many civillians did the Green Mountain Boys target to kill? None.
Glad we cleared that up.:rolleyes:
Who’s claimed that they don’t understand why the terrorists do what they did? Who is she making these justifications to?
Well, she could have compared them to either group. But why does it offend you she compared them to the Green Mountain Boys and wouldn’t offend you if she compared them to the VC or Chechens? Is it just because you admire the Green Mountain Boys and not the VC or Chechens?
So far I can’t find anyone the GMB killed, although they did flog Benjamin Hough pretty severely.
In the article, it says that she and her priest are going to be in this seminar about Catholic responses to the war, and I guess they’re going to be talking about the power of religion there.
Is she trying to lose the next election? In addition to comparing the Founders to OBL, she now wants the US to follow France and Germany’s foreign policy. Does she think voters feel positively toward France and Germany right now? :rolleyes:
By the way, note her comment that it would be “a mistake to believe that defeating Iraq and capturing top al-Qaeda leaders will be enough to quiet the turmoil in the Middle East.” From right after Sept. 11, 2001 on, President Bush has said that this will be a long war, because we will have to deal with various terrorists all over the world. I guess she just wasn’t paying attention. :wally
The point is that comparing them to any of these groups is ridiculous.
Can somebody explain to me how the members of the international terrorist organization led by Bin Laden are being repressed in a similar way that the founders of the US were. Their agenda is the removal of all US troops from the middle east. This demand is unreasonable and not comparable to the American colonies being taxed by the English without representation.
If you want to compare Bin Laden to someone try Timothy McVeigh, not Thomas Jefferson. Anyone who cannot see this may have some sort of axe to grind with America, or has some sort of twisted sympathy for Bin Laden.
december, there are many people on this board where, reading there posts, I believe it is acceptable to infer from what they are saying. Poly, for example, is one, because I know that when I infer something from one of his posts, I can pretty generally tell if he meant for what he said to sound like that.
With your posts that is not the case. For me, anyway. I can’t always tell, for example, if you mean to slam democrats in something you say or if it’s just the way you wrote it. And I am certainly not going to assume, given your sometimes-inflammatory posting history, that you were not serious when you said something … such as your remarks about removing people in government with whom we disagree.
Regarding hyperbole and such (MHO, anyway:)). If someone is otherwise serious in a thread, and they make a remark about “removing [someone] from public office,” and it is not easy to see that they are joking, then I personally do not believe it is a valid defense to say it was “just for effect.” I do not see how it is obvious that december was not serious about his comment. If, OTOH, december had been using hyperbole and “for effect” statements in his OP, then it would be valid to say that he was not serious. But given how much of the OP was serious, I don’t buy that it was for effect, or we were meant to infer that he wasn’t serious.
Consider them from the perspective of English citizens and royalty and such circa 1760s to … well, really early 1800s.
