Of course they’re not going to think he’s non-Christian, because whether legitimately more religious or not, Republicans are better at playing the “We’re so Christian” game than liberals are (just like liberals are better at playing the “We’re so compassionate” game than conservatives are). I definitely think you could find a lot of people who would accuse Bush of the mirror image of the Obama allegations (like that Bush wanted to turn America into a theocracy or, say, that instead of trying to suck up to Muslims that Bush simply didn’t care about black people.)
Personally, my impression is that Obama is not particularly religious. He strikes me as being like so many of our posters on this board - a well-educated liberal who thinks of religion as something for the gullible and uneducated masses. I think he’s smart enough to know that Americans wouldn’t accept a president who wasn’t at least nominally Christian, though, so he has been clumsily trying to go through the motions of being religious. Since it’s not that easy to pretend to believe in something you just don’t, it hasn’t been convincing and has made people suspicious about what “the real story” is.
lavenderviolet,
“Non-Christian” was simply an example. Obviously I don’t think that exactly, literally the same criticisms would have to be uttered for the vitriol to be equivalent. Did you really think I was arguing that?
I did not see large groups of people, covered by the media, making equally insane accusations against Bush. Yes, there were people saying that Bush wanted to make the US into a theocracy, but I did not see anything equivalent to the Tea Party making such claims, and I did not see any Democrats running for federal offices and winning primaries making such claims.
I certainly did not see the Democratic Party establishment trying to take advantage of such claims. If anything they tried to distance themselves from such things.
The video made up a small part of the part of the talk I linked to.
In the rest of the speech Hitchens’ describes observations he’d made and things he’d learned while personally visiting Iraq during Hussein’s reign. If you missed them, and it’s fairly obvious that you did, then you might want to go back and listen again.
And to everyone else I would point out that that particular appearance is pretty interesting as a whole. Hitchens personally visited all three “axis of evil” countries and makes firsthand observations about life in each of them during that appearance. He spends about ten minutes on each, and the speech in its entirety is available from the link I posted.
And yet, while it is possible to link directly to various different places in that talk, you linked directly to the part where he describes the video.
Even when you actually provide evidence for something, you can’t do it properly. Maybe if you actually tried doing it a bit more often, you’d learn how it’s done properly.
I just went back and clicked on the link and Hitchens clearly starts by talking about the video and then goes on to describe other horrific events that he observed, learned about, or experienced during his time in Iraq. It’s interesting, infuriating, and repulsive. You really should watch it. It’s easy…just click on the link and let the video run. You don’t have to do anything else. Don’t click “STOP” when he’s through talking about the video, just sit there and watch. It’s really quite simple.
Well, you see, the problem is that the evidence thing requires two people: one to post the evidence, and one to read or watch it.
I’ve done my part. (And within the rules of the forum, I might add.)
I live in Dearborn where Angle thinks we have Sharia law. I know lots of middleeasterners. The guy across the street from me is Iraqi. He was a poet who was jailed by Saddam. I don’t know anybody who liked Saddam but he was their problem. We have made it worse.
More than half the college students were women when Saddam was in charge. They wore western clothes if they chose to and the majority did. They drove cars and worked outside their homes. Now women have been forced back to the dark ages.
We still have not fixed the water and electricity after 10 years. That is one of the first things they bitch about. All powerful America can not even get the electricity and water flowing.
Many of the Iraqis around me left to escape the war, not Saddam. The society broke down and religious people started fighting each other. They lived together and intermarried before. Now they are fighting for power. The election was 8 months ago and they still have not installed a government. Sects, both religious and secular are fighting for control. It could all fall apart .
Still, I think I’d rather wear religious clothing and forego college than live in fear of prison, torture and execution for the offense of spilling coffee on Hussein’s photo in the paper, or being forced to watch videos of my daugher being mass raped by Hussein’s lackeys, or finding myself or my family mouldering in one of the mass graves that Hitchens describes.
And besides, who knows what life is really like in most of Iraq today? We don’t get accurate information from our anti-war news media. I’ve talked to soldiers who’ve come back from there and they all say a lot of good is being done there that nobody here ever hears about.
The problem here is that this video link is similar to your asinine Google Search Results citation in the evolution/creationism thread. It is a carpet bomb without specificity. If you’re going to link to a 1-hour video, you need to tell people where in that video they can find the evidence you are seeking to present.
I did watch it., but that’s because i actually take my role in debates like this seriously. Had you told me where in the video to find the evidence, i could have gone straight to it, rather than spend time waiting for it.
If i make an argument, and use as the basis of my argument a specific piece of information from a 300-page book, it’s not good enough to simply point you in the direction of the book and say, “It’s in there somewhere.” That’s why footnotes references and other evidentiary signposts contain things like specific page numbers.
If you actually spend some more time learning to deal with evidence in an honest and forthright manner, you might come to realize some of these things.
Of course, your whole reference to Hitchens, and to the evil of Saddam Hussein is, in itself, further evidence of your dishonest style of debate. It’s a non-sequitur, because it implies that those who opposed Bush’s war in Iraq were somehow sympathetic to Saddam Hussein, or unaware of his brutality. That is simply and utterly false. There is barely a single American, among all the millions who opposed the war in Iraq, who denied that Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator.
I know that your own memory goes back at least to the 1950s, so maybe you will recall that there were liberals and leftists in the United states who were criticizing Saddam Hussein back in the 1980s, when Donald Rumsfeld was happily shaking hands with him as Ronald Reagan’s Special Envoy. In fact, conservative opposition to Saddam’s brutality actually came quite late, after the invasion of Kuwait in 1990.
As for the Iraqi populace being safer after the US invasion, even if it is that does not excuse the invasion itself. The two things are, in a fundamental philosophical sense, unrelated. You don’t get to invade another sovereign country just because you think it would be better off under your control. That’s the sort of monarchical, tyrannical thinking that is, supposedly, antithetical to America’s founding principles.
Not so, in either case. The Google Results link was not a citation so much as a gateway, posted for the reasons I explained at the time.
If you’ll notice in the area below the video itself, the talk that Hitchens gave is broken down into various segments, with the segment on Iraq being number three on that list and labeled “Iraq: The Republic of Fear”. I clicked on that segment and posted the resulting link. Thus the video starts at exactly the point where Hitchens begins to talk about Iraq.
I did watch it., but that’s because i actually take my role in debates like this seriously. Had you told me where in the video to find the evidence, i could have gone straight to it, rather than spend time waiting for it.
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You did go right to it, because I posted a link that would take you right to it. The link as provided takes the reader to precisely the point in Hitchens ‘axis of evil’ presentation where he begins to talk about Iraq.
As much as I appreciate your exposition on such obscure literary phenomena as footnotes, et. al, I must point out again that the link I posted takes the reader to the exact point in Hitchens’ speech where his presentation on Iraq begins.
Oh, wait…now I’m beginning to get it. You are trying to split hairs over whether Hitchens’ comments on Hussein’s murderous takeover of Iraq are pertinent to daily life in Iraq under his rule, probably in an effort to conceal the fact that you simply jumped the gun in concluding that I had carelessly linked to the wrong place in the video. Perhaps in the future you will come to realize that anger and bias toward other posters can cause you to leap to erroneous conclusions.
I hardly need advice from you on how to be an honest and forthright poster. But thanks for playing.
No, it isn’t. As we’ll see just below.
It implies no such thing. It illustrates (or probably more accurately, suggests) exactly what I said it did when I posted it, which is that despite the unfortunate number of civilian casualties, the Iraqi populace is far safer and better off now than they were prior to the war. Now you can disagree with that, and I’m sure you will, but you are simply way off base when you try to claim that it implies opponents to the war were sympathetic to Hussein or unaware of his brutality.
That’s correct. But what are you saying…that just because we’ve overlooked brutality at some point in the past, we should therefore overlook it permanently?
Nor was it the primary reason for the invasion itself. Nor was it my contention that it was the primary reason for the invasion itself. It’s just a happy by-product that in my opinon, especially when combined with the very good likelihood of a great many more deaths in the future under Hussein and his sons, more than offsets the civilian casualties that occurred as a result of the war, and which was my point to begin with.
I will make note of that just as I have about footnotes and so on. You are a veritable fount of obvious information. However in all fairness, I should make note of the fact that I never said they were.
Yeah, and for the millions and possibly billions of people in this world living under tyranical and sadistic regimes, that is a crying shame. Still, it wouldn’t be workable even to try, so the point’s moot.
Again I ask, what’s your point, since I’ve never advocated that we should go around invading other countries because we think they’d be better off under our control in the first place?
Still, my heart bleeds for the millions and millions of people around the world who wish the U.S. would come to their aid and free them from the torture, oppression and poverty that they are being subjected to by their own corrupt and dictatorial regimes. It must be agonizing to know that the U.S. could wipe out their tormentors without breaking a sweat, and yet it refrains from doing so because of some high-minded principle that dictates that its better to let them suffer than it is to violate the sovereignty of their evil and sadistic oppressors.
I’m going to do now what i promised previously and stop treating you as if you are interested in honest debate, because that sentence just about says it all. Sayonara.
Edit:
I admit that this might occasionally happen. It is, i admit, somewhat different from your problem, in which the thing that causes you to leap to erroneous conclusions is simply entering a conversation.
Well, if I were you I wouldn’t take that promise too seriously because I would know that I would be likely to break it again just like I’ve done so many times before. The temptation to fling shit masquerading as an attempt at honest debate will ultimately prove to be too strong. And just like before, you’ll eventually lose your cool and start to lie about what you’ve said and then you’ll start to show your ass by losing your temper and jumping to erroeous conclusions because you’re too angry to think straight, and then you’ll bail from the thread by proclaiming that you’ve given up once again on trying to have an honest debate with me.
In short you’ve become predictable, and with regard to these promises you’re always making to yourself, if I were you I wouldn’t believe a word I said.
This is an easy view to hold. You don’t have to do any sort of thinking or evaluation to say it. You can just declare that both sides are equal and that’s that. And it makes you seem above it all.
While it’s true that partisan roots run deep and people become blind and stupid on the issue, that doesn’t make both sides equally guilty. It’s clear to anyone with any sort of neutrality on this issue that the hatred for Obama runs deeper and - more importantly - started on nearly day 1 of his campaign, before he ever had a chance to ever actually do anything. There might’ve been derision for Bush in the campaign season (that he’s an idiot or whatever), but there was nothing remotely equivelant to the secret muslim communist sleeper agent who wants to destroy the US stuff that Obama got right off the bat.
Starving Artist has done a good job of hijacking the thread and changing the point, as he often does. Whether you think Iraq was good or bad, it’s certainly an issue on which you can criticize and even hate Bush over. It was something that Bush actually did - something that caused massive amounts of harm (even if you think it’s a net good) - so for someone to criticize Bush after starting an elective war, or after cheerleading the Patriot act, is nowhere near equivelant to someone hating Obama with every fiber of their being from early 2008 onwards. Not only did they instantly hate Obama before he could even articulate a policy position or actually do something as president, they largely aren’t criticizing him for real things - they’re criticizing him based on secret muslim communist sleeper agent that wants to destroy America stuff.
If you see the hatred for Bush and hatred for Obama as equivelant, then you’re just taking the “oh both sides are equal” position because it’s dogma to you - either because you support the side with more guilt and this is a way of handwaving away legitimate criticism, or because assuming equality is just the easier position to take - it takes no evaluation of the facts at hand.
Edit: I’d like to point out that I voted for Bush in 2000, so presumably my partisan leanings would suggest that if there were any huge, unjustifiable Bush hatred in that era, I would’ve been sensitive to it. I had no such feelings.
I don’t believe the above analysis captures everything in play.
For one, I would suggest that the initial hatred is underplayed, and that the underlying communication fabric is different. The post suggests that Bush hatred had no real legs until the Iraq War, but there was plenty of initial hatred against Bush, stemming from the persistent belief that he “stole” the election. To this day, people on this board believe – and will loudly say – that Bush’s 2000 election was illegitimate. And there are a few diehards who contend that he also stole the 2004 election.
Neither is true. The 2000 election was simply too close to call. Florida was the decisive state, and the vote margin was so razor-thin it was within the margin of error. The Florida Secretary of State made a call that was legal – undoubtedly partisan-influenced but legally within her discretion nonetheless. And if you agree that the Florida Supreme Court can step in to correct errors of law, then you have no basis for denying the Supreme Court of the US can do likewise. In short, Bush’s election was legitmate, and the hatred that arose from it undeserved. But it was every bit as white-hot as that directed at Obama.
Now, if you’re reading this and saying to yourself, “Bullshit, Bush DID steal the election but Obama is not a socialist!” then I suggest you’re not, in fact, “anyone with any sort of neutrality on this issue.”
I read a lot of magazines, websites and liberal blogs and I never read this. Not once.
A charge frequently leveled was that GWB lacked intellectual curiosity. Have you read Price of Loyalty, a description of GWB per Paul O’Neil ? For fighting ignorance, reading that would be time better spent than writing vacuous posts for SDMB.
I may have seen this a few times, but only in the most moronic blogs. Unless you regard FoxNews and speeches by major politicians to be equivalent to moronic blogs, you’re making a false comparison.
I read a lot of magazines, websites and liberal blogs and I never read this. Not once.
I read a lot of magazines, websites and liberal blogs and I never read this. Not once.
I may have seen this once or twice in a moronic blog.
I do think you’re on the right track with this comment. I’d elucidate but this isn’t BBQ Pit.
