Used to be that we’d celebrate Lincoln’s b’day on 02-12, then Washington’s b’day on 02-22. Then Congress gave us President’s day (third Monday in February). Anyway, California has pretty much always given the schoolkids Lincoln’s b’day as well as President’s Day. Some school districts, who’ve really bought into the whole Monday-is-the-best-day-to-have-a-holiday-on, implement this with two consecutive three-day weekends; others apparently take an opportunity for a four-day weekend, when the twelfth falls on a Friday.
My 4th Grader has monday and tuesday off for some damn reason.
Amen Jeff Lebowski! There will always be terrorists. Always have, always will.
Osama is dead, Hussein is dead and the only terrorists left will never have a public trial. Which they should be guaranteed in this country. They will be executed so who is left to refute the truth?
What is the truth?
Ah. I assumed everyone just observed the federal holiday. I only got Monday off (work) - which is probably more than most people got.
Typical defeatist, post-modernist shades of grey “we’re no better than they’re” nonsense. Thankfully such sentiment rarely has triumphed in History. We can only win if we keep a clear sense of moral resolve.
By a clear sense of moral resolve, do you mean saying over and over, “America does not torture”, like Bush said, or does a clear moral resolve mean actually not waterboarding people hundreds of times, and not farming people out to nation’s that’ll do the torturing for us?
That’ll all got pretty murky under Bush, so are you saying that his actions ensured our eventually defeat, or is just talking about moral values enough to keep us on the path to win?
First of all, Gyrate, you are correct. The link was never clicked, apols, and well played.
Perciful, I’m not sure that you’ve read the thread correctly. You see, Curtis LeMay was saying that the United States should have made some sort of military campaign, or at least some commando type of strategical attack in an attempt to get Al Qaida, and possibly Bin Laden, in the last few months of the year 2000, and that collateral civilian damage in this fantasy of CL’s really didn’t matter because we need to make a better world for our grandchildren.
Gyrate made a joke that I missed, and my r.o. impelled you to hand me an amen, which I don’t deserve nor seek.
You’re treading some dangerous ground there. Do you have any concept of how many people have been killed in the name of such “moral resolve”? I know you mean well, but the statements you make above could have been made by virtually any authoritarian regime over the last several centuries. Heck, it’s the sort of sentiment that both built and destroyed the British Empire. History laughs at such ideas.
The world exists in shades of grey. Seeing it in stark black and white requires you to lie to yourself about a huge amount of it, and “denial” is not a sound foundation on which to build a worldview.
History is the triumph of those with the ability to apprehend subtlety and nuance over those who cannot.
Great cheerleader, lousy leader. Reagan is the president that came closest to getting me killed. There is still (I think, it’s been three years) anti-Reagan graffiti in Edmonton, a city not even a little bit in the U.S.
Are we morally perfect? No but we’re better than the terrorists which is my point.
This is not really to add or to detract to the man, but it is accepted fairly broadly (i.e. beyond just those politically interested in defusing Reagan’s role) that Reagan had little or nothing to do with the collapse of communism, (as did the pope, for that matter).
There’s just no evidence that the SU was in a crippling crisis causing it to collapse and that this was brought on at least in part by Reagan as a result of military build up. Sure, the Soviet Union and the Soviet Block was struggling economically and could provide very little for its people, but still far more than most third world countries - and those countries don’t typically collapse all the time. In fact, while the communist command economy sucked, it did so fairly regularly, and it did not all of a sudden start sucking worse during the 1980s. That’s why the ‘it would have happened anyway’ part of the explanation that you attribute to liberals is also probably not true. There was discontent but no widespread resistance that pressured Gorbachev into doing what he did, nor was there a crisis that necessitated what he did. As far as we can tell, Gorbachev decided to open up the system out of a genuine effort to improve it - which to him meant bringing it closer to Marxism-Leninism. Had he not started reforms, the SU might have muddled through for much longer. As someone I work with recently put it: ‘the Soviet Union died on the operating table during plastic surgery’.
To say that it collapsed because it was unjust is bullshit. It’s a fallacy to associate the persistence or collapse of social phenomena to whether they’re moral or not. Crime continues to persist, and that almost by its very definition is unjust.
ETA - I realize this now has very little to do with Reagan’s birthday but I just had to contribute this.
Well, that’s setting the bar rather low. I’d like to aim a little higher and try for liberty and justice for all, if that’s okay with you.
I’m also going to assume, based on your statement above, that you objected to the abduction, detention without trial and torture of several hundred people at Guantanamo Bay, and were not one of those people who justified it by saying “Well, they’d do the same to us!”.
In what way? We’ve killed more innocent people by far. If anything we are worse.
Crime isn’t the same kind of thing as a government; you can’t destroy crime the way you can destroy a government or a political movement. Comparing a particular organization or ideology to a general social phenomenon doesn’t work very well. You can’t destroy crime for the same reason you can’t destroy terrorism; it’s not a thing, but a tactic.
And yes, the fact that Communism was/is unjust mattered, because that’s why the people under it bothered in the first place to resist it, work around it, and overthrew it most places.
Only as long as we behave better than they do (no torturing, no indiscriminate killing of civilians as though their lives don’t matter; that kind of thing).
Than we get into over-idealism if we act too pacifist… We must always strongly have a undercurrent of realpolitik in our foreign policy.
As for Gitmo a lot of the people there were captured on the battlefields.
Most modern wars have seen large amounts of civilians slain.
The term “a lot” is rather non-specific. Since you appear to have the facts right at your fingertips, could you give us something a bit more quantified? How many were “captured on the battlefield”? How many were released without any action taken against them? May we presume that they were released because they presented no threat to America or her interests, or have you better information on this?
And a lot were random passers-by who happened to be at the wrong checkpoint at the wrong time.
That’s a mighty low moral bar you set for us there. Are you certain bin Laden’s 9/11 attack on us doesn’t clear it too?