Who?
He was saying that there is a lack of international confidence and trust about our actions in the ME, not that those things are the cause of our problems in the ME.
It was pretty clear anyway that he was itemizing a bunch of things which have damaged our image internationally. Trying to parse his syntax to find a grammmatical non- sequitur really doesn’t prove anything about his intent, and it’s something we could do all day with Bush (but there’s almost no sport in doing it with Bush anymore. That’s pretty much a canned hunt).
Fishing with dynamite.
No. Actually he said Kyoto and Aids duplicity and hypocrisy set a message that gives the crisis in the middle east.
You can pretend that he said something else, and he may have meant something else, but what he said was stupid.
He’s a politician. A paid public speaker. It’s his job to be clear and succinct. I find it silly to beleive that we are not to take his words seriously and interpret them to mean something completely different from what he actually said.
It’s funny you mention that. Bush does make a lot of stupid gaffes and things to make fun of him about.
Say whatever else about him that you want, but I think you have to admit that it’s usually very clear about what he’s saying.
Let me put it another way. During the last election we had tons of Debates about what Kerry said versus what he meant trying to parse meaning out of lurch’s cryptic rhetoric.
Bush on the other hand is uncomfortably straightforward. We really don’t argue about what he means. It might have been a better presidency had he been a little more circumspect in his words and actions.
There’s an understatement.
But I hope you’ll take my point fairly about Lurch. I’m still scratching my head trying to figure out how our lack of commitment about AIDS in Africa (No nation has done more to help) created the duplicity and hypocrisy that led to the crisis in the Middle East. I think we are very credible on AIDS in Africa. I can only wish we were equally as credible about WMDS in the Mid-East as we are on AIDS.
So, I think you’re wrong here.
He said we have a "crisis of confidence [about our actions] in the ME. Not that those things gave rise to the conflict itself. You’re leaving out the direct object in that sentence and substituting the prepositional phrase.
NEWSFLASH
Fox News has amended their story regarding John Kerry’s recent comments.
We hope this clears things up a bit. We apologize for any pain this has caused the Kerry family.
I didn’t say “conflict” I said “crisis.” A “crisis of confidence” is a crisis. I have not substituted anything. You have. I didn’t say “conflict.” You did.
All this is besides the point which is that Kerry’s head is up his ass concerning our lack of credibility on AIDS in Africa and from that fallacy trying to draw some tenuous connection about that creating a lack of credibility in the Middle East.
Only if you can prove that credibility is compartmentalized in some exclusive way. If a man will cheat you on a used car, would you trust him on real estate?
Same difference. You omitted a word which changed the meaning of the sentence.
If you agree that he was talking about international confidence about our actions, then you have to admit that what he said was true. The world doesn’t truts us. Our feet dragging on AIDS in Africa has contributed to that and so has our irresponsibility in walking away from Kyoto. Not as much as Bush lying us into an illegal war, but they’ve contributed.
I think **Scylla **is right. How could he be talking about “our actions” in the M.E. when he immediately follows that with “in the world, really”?
He’s saying that the rest of the world lacks confidence about our actions and intentions in the ME. What’s so complicated about this?
Because that’s the point? That a lack of credibility in the specific aggregates to a lack of credibility in the larger context?
You know, only at the SDMB do people split hairs so precisely. I am no Kerry fan, but I think we all know what he meant. He suffers from diarrhea of the mouth, running on far too long to make his point.
What he meant is we have taken a once respectable reputation and squandered it. We are now a pariah. People don’t like us because we have behaved in a manner people find distasteful.
If we were in high school, no one would ask us to the prom.
If we were a character on “The Office” we would be Dwight. And in the episode he would be caught buggering a small boy. He would also reveal that he had implanted small nucular (sic) devices in the rectums of the entire staff. He would allow people to chastise him and complain about the buggering, but if anyone attempted to hold him accountable they would know they would disappear in a teeny tiny mushroom cloud.
We are “Rocky V”.
If we were religious TV, we would be the “Gay Priest Network”.
We are the Mississippi debutant who brings marries a black man.
After the hurricane, we are the guy on television carrying a plasma screen and a 12 pack of Heineken.
We are whores in church.
We slipped Grandmas rings off just before they closed the casket.
So parse his phrase any way you like. But his point is people dislike us because of our behavior. Fuck Fox. We ARE fucking pariahs. So roast JK for saying it, or roast GWB for causing it.
There’s nothing complicated about that, but it’s not what he said. He’s saying that we are not in sync with the rest of the world (eg, not participating in the Kyoto treaty) and that we are duplicitous and hypocritical, so other countries don’t have confidence in us-- not in the M.E. or anywhere.
Assuming that’s exactly what he meant, is there any part of that which isn’t true?
Are you kidding?! My first thought when I read the OP was that this is some intentional strategy, to make Kerry a target. If the right-wingers are aiming bullets at him, they can’t be attacking Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. It’s a form of stealth campaigning.
. . . or maybe not. What Kerry said is not beyond reason, and he might just be spouting off his own views. If the Democrats were smart they would’ve worked out a strategy whereby he does something that outrages the right-wingers every week so they are so fixated on him they forget about Clinton.
Of course, that theory assumed the Democrats are both smart and have guts. Experience has shown that both are rarely true at the same time. :rolleyes:
Amen. This is why I have utter contempt for the Republican Party, and for most of the slackjaws who support it. It’s one thing to passionately disagree, it’s another to hysterically demonize your opponent and make everyone lose respect for the system and all parties involved at the same time. When anyone who expresses an opinion is shouted down it creates an environment where debate–the underpinning of an open, democratic society–is impossible. It’s THESE assholes who are hurting America.
Does ANYONE still take Fox News seriously?
What about Clinton? I was watching the end of American Dad and there was the “headlines” for the upcoming Fox News. They hinted that Hillary Clinton had said something offensive in a speech. I’m not actually going to watch Fox News (or trust them to report the story accurately) but I checked some online news sites and can’t find any mention of what she supposedly said.
It’s an exaggeration, of course. We’re an easy target because we’re big, but every country could be characterized in pretty much the same way. But I wouldn’t say that “we are irresponsibly slow in moving toward AIDS in Africa”, whatever that is even supposed to mean anyway. It’s not the responsibility of the US to solve every problem in the world, and the current condition of Africa has a lot more to with what the Europeans did in the last 150 years than anything we’re doing now.