Can we just banish this meaningless phrase from the SDMB lexicon? It’s nothing more than inciteful jargon used to excuse oneself from a dispassionate analysis of American history and a rational study of the facts in evidence. “Traditional American values” seems most often to mean “social mores which I believe without evidence will be destructively altered by what my current ideological opponent proposes.”
It’s a shorthand excuse for sustaining one’s ignorance.
And I should quickly add that I am in no way singling out Liberal for his use of that phrase here. It just happens to be the nearest example. So, let me apologize beforehand to you Lib, for using your post as exemplum.
Not wilful damn ignorance. If you feel informed enough to shout your mouth off you should be informed enough not to ask dumb or more probably, disengenuous, questions.
I agree with Rove, inasmuch as I am sure the enemies he is talking about are liberal Democrats.
They are just the same - the parallels are exact.
Hitler took over Germany and ruled by fiat. Bush conspired with his cronies on the Supreme Court and took over the US. Hitler staged the Reichstag fire to garner political support. Bush allowed 9/11 to garner political support. Hitler consolidated his power by intimidating his opponents. Bush used widespread election fraud to rig the 2004 elections.
Hitler faked the evidence for an excuse to invade Poland. Bush faked the evidence for an excuse to invade Iraq. Hitler was funded by the industrialists of Germany. Bush is funded by the Saudi royal family. Hitler put homosexuals into death camps. Bush oppposes gay marriage. Hitler hated Jews and murdered them by the millions. Bush hates all brown-skinned people, and murders them by the millions.
Himmler = Karl Rove. John Ashcroft = Horst Wessel. Auschwitz = Gitmo.
And rounding up millions and starving and torturing them to death is exactly the same as putting enemy combatants into a prison. Placing the Qur’an on top of a TV is exactly the same as hanging people up by piano wire and dropping them into ice water to see how long they live.
Isn’t it obvious?
Regards,
Shodan
PS - sarcasm is also a rhetorical device.
And willful ignorance is also a dodge.
And stupidity is an impairment.
And credulity runs high.
Your post contains more straw than a scarecrow convention. Scroll up and read the actual list of abuses. Pretending it’s only about Korans is either uninformed or deliberately dishonest.
One more time, because some of our Bush fans seem to be a little slow on the uptake.
DURBIN DID NOT COMPARE AMERICAN TROOPS TO NAZIS. He said that some of the specific abuses sounded more like Nazis than Americans.
I’ll ask again for anyone who wants to attack Senator durbin. If you heard about an invading army shoving glowsticks up the asses of captured civilians, siccing dogs on them, shackling them to the floor for days in sweltering condictions, videotaping the rape of teenage boys, etc. Would you be more likely to guess that it was Americans or Communist Chinese.
Actually, I’d be most likely to guess that it’s the latest reality series on FOX.
However, if enough righty liars say that he did enough times people will think that he did.
There’s no fucking way I’m going to abandon the best things this country has going for it to make you feel better about supporting torture.
The rhetoric that this country was founded on and continues to expound is an expression of the most liberating values that any country has ever been built on. From the beginning, we have never lived up to those ideals–the document that proclaimed an unalienable right to liberty for all was written by slaveowners. But that doesn’t make the the values and rights put forth as a statement of our country’s values meaningless any more then a murderer makes a murder statute invalid. Our flaws don’t invalidate our ideals.
This isn’t some insipid partisan debate over where the tax brackets should be, or how social security should work or some other banal policy matter being debated by egotistical politicians who disgrace themselves by invoking the early rhetoric like some kind of magic spell that legitimizes their “social mores.”
This is us acting unambiguously contrary to those “traditional American values.” How can anyone who’s every pledged liberty and justice for all look at a concentration camp full of people being held indefinately without trial and not see an abomination? There are innocent people in that camp who were trying to eek out whatever happyness they could in their shitty little war-torn corner of the world before we stuck them in a chain-link cell thousands of miles from their homes and families.
Camp X-Ray (and other prisons in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other places) represents a massive failure of this entire country to live up to its values, and I’m not going to retire the phrase “traditional American values” to dampen the dissonance.
Where did I say he did?
Regards,
Shodan
Especially with the “abused spouse” mainstream media unwilling to stand up and call a lie a lie.
Looks law some lawmakers on the right are preparing the groundwork to tell the ICRC to go ahead and pound that sand.
Nice try. Why DO you have to compare it to anything at all? Why not simply point out the abuses and how they violate US law. That is the only standard that matters.
Because the comparison is the only way to get most people to take notice and to get the media to look into it.
Which one is going to get more attention:
1)Senator Durbin says Guantanamo Prison violates laws X,Y,Z.
2)Senator Durbin alleges human right violations on par with nazis, etc.
It’s politics Vegas style: big names, neon lights, and strippers.
And before anyone else says it, yes. What happens in Gitmo stays in Gitmo.
I read a quote at another website (I’m on a dailykos kick these days) that suggested that the real point here is not how similar we are to Nazis, but whether we are sufficiently different from them. I think that is exactly what Durbin’s statement was getting at, and I think it is a worthwhile question to keep in mind.
I think John Mace, that it has been amply demonstrated that merely pointing out how a behavior violates U.S. law these days is kind of an academic exercise. People really don’t care. The Valerie Plame incident illustrates this pretty well, among a sackful of other examples. Comparisons like this that call not only our codified notion of who we are, but also our emotion-laden beliefs about who we are and who we are not, I think, are at times more useful for generating movement.
All of you who parrot the phrase “Geneva Convention” as if it was the holy grail might want to actually read the damn thing. It applies to the treatment of uniformed combatants of signatory nations. If an enemy combatant attacks our troops while wearing civilian garb, there is a way to deal with them that is perfectly within the bounds of the GC.
Wanna know what that way is?
That photo generated outrage, but General Nguyen Ngoc Loan acted completely within the bounds of the Geneva Convention.
Perhaps you might want to base your arguments on something that actually applies to the situation at hand? I think that these men should have been processed through the legal system a long time ago, but pressing for a strict application of the GC would have allowed them to be stood up against a wall and shot. That didn’t happen, of course, because Senator Durbin and the lockstep loonie left notwithstanding this is not Nazi Germany, but they could have been by the terms of the Geneva Convention.
Eh? Where in the wide, wide world of sports did this “supporting torture” garbage come from? I’m genuinely puzzled what basis you have for attributing such a reprehensible view to me.
In any case, were we to accept that “the best things this country has going for it” are “traditional American values,” if that is what you’re saying, then just what are those “traditional American values?” 'Cuz I’m pretty sure there’s a wide gap between what the dominant political parties in the U.S. would claim they are. Even if the parties were in agreement, if the words are not borne out by our actions over history, just what makes 'em so “traditional?” If a guy keeps mouthing platitudes but his actions don’t match his words, would those words then be the “best thing he’s got going for him?” Or is he just a hypocrite?
I agree totally, John Mace. I have been of the opinion for a while now that the military tribunals are well established by U.S. and international law, so they should be constituted and the prisoners should be processed. Then they will have an unambiguous status, at least, as they will have a sentence imposed upon them by that tribunal, or they will be a legitimate POW, or they will be freed.
This problem, though, in no way measures up to the abuses of the dictators Durbin mentioned. The comparison isn’t warranted at all, in my opinion, an opinion shared by a lot of people that I respect generally.
Senator Warner, not known for being one of the Senate’s nutcases, denounced Durbin’s comments in the strongest terms you’ll generally hear a Senator say. The national head of the VFW denounced them as well.
This is as it should be, as these comments really aren’t defensible, except to the extreme partisans here on this board.
IOIADDI.
