Apparantly, Ben Stein thinks the only reason right wingers don’t critize Islamic terrorists (?) and do critize Bush is because we are afraid the Islamic terrorists will come kill us but we know Bush won’t.
I hope he was kidding.
(Sorry, I can’t find a cite, but he said it on Craig Kilbourn’s show last night)
What was THAT all about?
OK, first of all, It’s LEFT wingers. Second of all, I have NO FREAKIN IDEA how my correction ended up a separate thread.
:: Announcement:: All criticism of Ben Stein has been called off due to extreme stupidity on the part of the criticizer. :: Announcement::
:smack: :smack: :smack: :smack: :smack:
AHA! Disregard my comment in the duplicated, yet incomplete, version of this thread.
Well, ya know…I hadn’t thought of it before, but he may have a point.
Or, they may be afraid that because of Bush, the terrorists will come kill them…a much more likely scenario. Better to have Kerry in office, scampering around the world pleading for help, and when the cowards all decline (with the exception of our courageous allies such as England, Australia, etc.) he can say, "Well, kids, nobody agrees with us. Looks like we’re the ones in the wrong here. Nothing else to do. Sorry…I tried.
Yep. That’s the way to keep terrorists off our ass, all right!
Ben Stein has a pretty good sense of humor, he was probably kidding.
Well we sure showed those terrorists. They thought that since they were trained in Afghanistan, and born and financed in Saudi Arabia, that we would stay in Afghanistan until OBL was caught and then read the riot act to the Saudis. We sure fooled them when we attacked Iraq instead. Personally I’d prefer a president who talked with the French then one who is being buggered by the Saudis. Maybe that’s why he keeps falling off his bike: he’s too sore to sit on the seat.
Oh, and I assume that you and/or your children are putting your lives where your mouth is and enlisting. Or is it only important enough to sacrifice “other people’s children”.
I see you’ve seized on what Michael Moore thinks is his stop-'em-dead-in-their-tracks argument, but it’s a fallacious one. No one (other than the fanatic mothers of fanatic suicide-bombers, that is) wants to send their child off to die! No one!
But the fact of the matter is, sometimes wars have to be fought lest the entire world be run by the Idi Amins and the Saddam Husseins of the world (And of course, even then other people’s children would die in their wars…but then they really would be “other people’s children”… and you wouldn’t have to feel so bad about them, would you? Because, after all, it’d be “foreigners’ children” dying, not your own. Then it’d be okay. Is that what you’re saying?
Of course no one wants to go themselves or send their children, but there are times when people are willing.
W and Cheny thought that the Vietnam war was justifiable, but they themselves were not willing to go. That is the height of hypocrisy. Now they think that the war in Iraq is justifiable; just don’t send their kids or their friend’s kids.
WWII was a shared sacrifice by people across the board. Rich families like the Kennedys and the Bushes did their part. Those at home bought war bonds, underwent rationing, and wrapped bandages. Now days not only don’t rich people go into the Army, they don’t even want to pay the cost for the war. Instead we’ll push a huge deficit onto future generations.
And sometimes those wars don’t have to be fought for rulers to fall. Not everyone agreed on what was required to remove Saddam from power. And now that we know that our intelligence was dead-on wrong, that issue looms even larger. What if we had gone along with France’s reasonable request that we wait two more months to give the inspectors a chance to complete their work?
France’s refusal to join the coalition does not make them cowards. France is a mixture of human beings and a country proud of their most courageous moments just as we are. Do you really think that all courageous countries lined up on one side and the cowards lined up on the other?
What about the people who disagreed overwhelmingly with the choices their leaders made? Are the British courageous because they have troops in Iraq or cowards because the majority of the people are opposed to having troops in Iraq? These are things to consider when labeling people.
Ben Stein probably would not have felt the same way if he had been on Nixon’s enemies list instead of such threats to our country as Bill Cosby and Paul Newman.
(aside to SA) Hey, bud! I never doubt your earnestness. You and I can just agree to disagree and remain open to what the other is saying. I will still respect you in the morning. 
I hope I don’t sound snide or flippant here but if you really want to know what I think, I think that after two months France would have wanted another two months, and then another two, and then another two, and so on, ad infinitum. (And I think the same about the U.N. It would have been content to issue resolution after resolution till the end of time before it would have taken action.) Not only were Chirac and Hussein long-time bed partners, with a lot of financial and technological back and forth going on, but I honestly believe Chirac would have opposed us regardless just to buck the U.S. and show us he’s not our puppet. He doesn’t really care about right and wrong, he just cares about opposing us. He cared nothing for the welfare of the Iraqi people; he cared nothing for the suffering Hussein inflicted on them; he cared nothing for U.N. sanctions and did business with Hussein behind the U.N.'s back; and he cared nothing for the safety and welfare of America. I truly believe him to be an arrogant and stubborn man who is almost totally lacking in morals as we know them.
It’s customary to refer to a country based on the action it takes as an entity. Certainly there are courageous people in France and cowardly ones in England and so forth.
Quite possibly. But then when you are as deeply unlikable as Nixon was for most of his career prior to the '72 election, and when you have as many enemies as he truly had…especially in the press and television media (look at the difference in the way they treated him vs. the way they treated Kennedy)…a list is probably necessary just to keep straight who’s who. 
Indeed. And just for the record, I will say that if only everyone in the world were like you the world would not only be a better place, but a much better place at that. 
I get the impression from previous discussions that perhaps you were one of the “flowers in the soldier’s gun” types of people in the sixties. And you’ll probably be surprised to hear this, but I’d love it if that kind of approach to life was universal. Unfortunately, in the overall mix, people like you make up only a small percentage and it’s the people like we read about in the papers every day, here and abroad, that force me to conservatism. One of my favorite quotes is the one that says, “People sleep safe and warm in their beds at night because rough men stand ready to do violence in their behalf.” It has always been thus, and it seems to me that conservatives are much more aware of this than liberals.
But believe me, I would much, much prefer a world in which such protection wasn’t necessary…but unfortunately it is.
Aw, shucks…I bet you say that to all us conservatives.
That’s how things had worked for the previous 12 years and I don’t recall any problems with that system so dire they an invasion.
Change two or three words in there and I think that appies to the guy who started the war as well. :rolleyes: And it’s very charitable of you to assume this had much of anything to do with the safety and welfare of America.
Regarding Ben Stein: he’s funny and I like him, but he probably wasn’t kidding. He’s pretty conservative and was a speechwriter for Nixon and Ford.
Uh…how about 9/11 and the absolute need to prevent such a thing from happening again?
I know you don’t think there was a threat of al-Qaeda obtaining WMD from Iraq, but I do. (And yes, Iraq may not have had WMD, contrary to all the world’s intelligence agencies and even Bill Clinton, but it was known they working to acquire the technology.) We’ll just have to agree to disagree, because neither of us will change the other’s mind.
Starving Artist
Of course no one wants to send their child off to die in a war.
That’s why in the 1960’s if you knew the right people, you could move WAY up a very long waiting list and join the National Guard.
Don’t knock the NG - a lot of the poeple who joined were shipped out, especially air units… GW’s unit was training people and shipping them out, for example.
I’m continually astonished at how easy it is for people to justify sending others off to war based on “what I think” with no evidence backing those thoughts.
It wouldn’t make any difference how long we waited. Iraq was not an immeditae threat to the national security requiring preemptive action. There were no WMD. There was no nuclear program on the verge of producing a bomb. There wasn’t even anything to that after-the-fact claim of a Saddam-al Qaeda link tied to 9/11 Dick Cheney’s huffing and puffing notwithstanding.
I guess those inconvenient facts just won’t sink in.
As long as we’re tossing around opinions; my opinion is that 9/11 happened because a handful of zealots were under the protection of Saudi Arabia, and the Sauds are a chink in the U.S.'s armour. As long as the U.S. is buddy-buddy with the Sauds, the U.S. will remain vulnerable. No matter which dictators are thrown down by diplomacy, sanctions, democracy or war.
So if we’d invaded Iraq in, say, 1998, September 11 wouldn’t have happened? I’d prefer to stick to related events, like terrorism.
In order for Iraq to give the weapons to Al Qaeda, they would first have had to actually have them. This doesn’t seem to have been the case, so even neglecting the reluctance of the leaders to work together I don’t see why you think there was a risk.
Given the complete lack of evidence that there were any weapons, I think it’s really about time we dropped the “may” from that sentence. I don’t see why Bill Clinton or anybody else is an issue here (probably because he, and they, are not one). The intelligence that Iraq had weapons was weak and once people went in there and looked, hey, turns out there weren’t any.
And that almost, vaguely, resembles one of the justifications for the war. :rolleyes: