Worked for the Swiftboaters, didn’t it?
Aiyiyi. Too much at once, and I haven’t had coffee yet. I’ll slog my way through the rest of it, but I have to comment on this one now.
This is humbug. I’m anit-Bush, and I don’t think it was a mistake to go to Afghanistan. If they needed some over-age guy with destroyed knees to fly a Black Hawk for them, I would have said ‘Sign me up!’ In my opinion attacking Afghanistan was justified and appropriate. But then he goes on to link 9/11 with Iraq. One has nothing to do with the other! If he can’t understand that, then he won’t understand anything. The Bush Administration did a very good job of linking Saddam with the 9/11 attacks. But even they came clean and admitted this was not true. (They still slip it in occasionally though.)
The Nation has a cover story this week on “The New Right-Wing Smear Machine” – “new” in that it is based not on mass media or even blogs, but forwarded e-mails, which can be used to propagate and repeat and reinforce any lie even long after it has been publicly debunked. ambushed’s friend appears to be an eager participant.
The part I’ve underlined seems to me the most telling portion of the whole diatribe. If your relative, as implied here, really believes that Hussein was responsible for 9/11, then he’s bought into a whole self-supporting mythology that it may impossible to argue him out of.
ambushed writes (quoting from an E-mail):
> On to Hillary. Little has been said about her college education. She had
> professors who were, and still are, Marxists. Many have said that she is a true
> believer. That’s probably a little too much. However, I do believe that she firmly
> believes in big government and big taxes. I do not. I understand what Gerald
> Ford meant when he said that “a government big enough to give you
> everything you want, is also big enough to take it all away.”
This paragraph is truly a despicable piece of garbage. In what sense has little been said about her college education? It’s quite well-known where she studied, who she studied with, and what courses she took. What’s a Marxist for the purposes of this claim? Do they have to claim to be a Marxist, or does the person who wrote this E-mail think that anyone even slightly more liberal economically than himself is a Marxist?
The notion that there were significant numbers of Marxists either as professors or students in universities in the late 1960’s or early 1970’s, when Hillary Clinton was an undergraduate and a law student, is wrong. I was in college in the early 1970’s, at a college that was considered distinctly “hippie-weirdo-freak-commie-fag-junkie” (really, that was what the locals thought of us as), and Marxism was definitely a fringe view. The middle political position was slightly liberal. They were some conservatives and some libertarians, and they outnumbered the few students who would consider themselves in any sense to be Marxists (and there were no professors who declared themselves to be Marxists).
Hillary Clinton would have presumably encountered no more Marxist professors at Wellesley and Yale Law School than George Bush would have encountered at Yale and Harvard Business School. The writer of this E-mail makes no attempt to specify which professors he thinks are Marxists, let alone prove that Hillary met them or was in any way influenced by them. This is a ridiculous guilt-by-association argument.
A person who believes in “big government and big taxes” is not thereby a Marxist. Both conservatives and liberals believe in big government, just in different parts of the government being big. Wanting to raise taxes doesn’t make you a Marxist either. It may mean, for instance, that you want avoid increasing the federal deficit. The writer of this E-mail hasn’t even made any attempt to show that Hillary believes in big government and higher taxes.
Good point. I should have added that whoever wrote that junk is a True Believer-- someone who will NEVER agree with any Democrat and is just looking for whatever excuse he can find to justify (ha!) his political position It really is a waste of time debating with someone like that.
I don’t think my experience in Nashville was all that unique, but I had no trouble finding Marxists and hardcore Socialists during the Seventies. I was acquainted with one who ran for a national office. Her ex-husband was a friend and had met my first husband through their shared political interests. One of my teaching colleagues was a Marxist. Her students (and most of the other teachers) had no idea. Her political beliefs were not something that she discussed in the classroom.
At present I know a young woman who completely lives her Communistic ideals. She is the daughter of the person who ran for national office.
None of these people are into the violent overthrow of the government. The only reason they tend to be so quiet about their beliefs is that people make automatic assumptions about their character and beliefs when the label “Communist” is used. It becomes “Commie” and they become the red-eyed evil enemy with fangs and talons.
Bush I ordered the invasion, then left office and left Clinton holding the bag. That is leadership?
The US has enemies, sure enough. It also has traditional friends. But GWB has pretty much managed to make himself despised even among friends, which makes it much tougher for any government to align themselves with the US. When he leaves, overseas governments will at least have the option of cooperating with the US without having to defend themselves (too much) to their electorate.
To be fair, though, it’s not like he just quit being president and Clinton had to come in an clean up. There was an election, and he lost. Although he sent the troops in after the 1992 elections (just barely), was he supposed to pull them out just because he was leaving office in Jan? You might argue that it was foolish to send them in originally, but it’s not evidence of lack of leadership that the deployment extended into Clinton’s term.
Leadership would have been displayed had Clinton actually displayed some.
:rolleyes:
What does that even mean, ManiacMan? I’m honestly confused, here.
I agree that you’re not going to change the mind of someone who’s chosen to accept falsehoods to justify their hatred.
However, I think it’s important to confront such crap when it’s spewed at us. If other people are reading (or listening), a rational, well-documented rebuttal can work wonders in defusing the slander.
And although rebuttal can be done with humor, simply ridiculing the crap can obfuscate the fact that it’s a lie.
As for ignoring it, that’s what the swiftboaters of the world want you to do.
And antidemocratic forces in the ME in general are loving it. We’ve managed to convince enormous amounts of people that “democracy” means “chaos and mass death”. Consider Syria :
All of those dead bodies are being supplied by whom?
Us. We are the ones responsible for the devastation in Iraq.
This is rather a pointless comparison. The claims (debunked in earlier posts) were that the Clintons stole furniture when leaving the White House in 2001. Until GWB leaves office, one cannot estimate his furniture-stealing tendencies.
Perhaps I wasn’t clear, but I meant on a one-to-one basis. Sure, if someone posts that junk on a message board, it should be shot down. But it’s unlikely you will convince a “true believer” that he is wrong.
Well, it often doesn mean “chaos and mass death”-- especially when practiced in a country that was artificially created in the first place. Bush et all just weren’t smart enough to realize that. Actually, it’s hard to think of many countries that came into existence without lots of bloodshed. Canada? Czechoslovakia split up pretty peacefully. I’m sure there are a few more, but they are the exception, not the rule.
I’m afraid that much of the M.E. will have to, at some point, go through what Europe went through in the last few hundred years-- lots and lots of wars until people are generally OK with how the borders are drawn. Should Iraq be one country or 3, or 10? Only time will tell.
Don’t you mean that radical islamic terrorists are responsible?
The ones that had no power in Iraq before we leveled the place ? Radical Islam had no power in Iraq before we gave it that power. Saddam was a secular dictator.
And radical Islam is only one contributor to the death and suffering in Iraq. We’ve killed plenty of people directly, turned the place into an anarchy so that every little political faction or criminal can kill as they wish, destroyed the infrastructure so they suffer and die from plain old physical needs, and so on.
What about all those people Saddam killed to take power and all those people he killed (along with his sons) to keep power? They seemed to be pretty radical to me…