So – he was saying that warfare, such as the Iraqi War, in which people inevitably die because of the war (whether US military, Iraqi insurgents, or innocent civilians as collateral damage) is unethical, but he’s leaving open the question of whether he accepts such unethical actions?
Except that, for the religious argument being posed, all of humanity is not innocent. If you’ve got a soul, it’s a guilty soul.
“Drink Jameson’s Irish Whiskey, and reject the evil Dewar’s!”
But, but, but, he’s so plainspoken. He’s jus’ folks, and he speaks plainly. He’s the most plainspoken president we’ve ever had. That’s why people love him so much, he’s so plainspoken.
And the fact that he has all these helpful advisors who follow him and explain exactly what the things he just said actually mean, that just makes him extra plainspoken.
Ah, c’mon Tuckerfan, do you really expect these guys to have thought through something? After six years you should know that the present administration will go down in history as The Gang That Couldn’t Piss Straight. Tsk, tsk.
Course, their response to this would be, “Better for a million camel jockeys to die than for three thousand innocent, cute, cuddly Americans to be killed by those rascally terrori. . .LOOK OUT! THERE’S ONE BEHIND YOU RIGHT NOW!!” See, when you’re The President you get to decide what is ethical and what is not.
This makes no sense at all, and you would’ve seen that if you weren’t so ensconced in your zealous pursuit of raging moderatism. You covet so much the mantle of the rational, thoughtful, unbiased middle that you fail to realize (in this instance, at least) that there is no middle position at all. Neither the “innocent” nor the “deliberate” qualifications help Bush, not a wit, for two very simple reasons.
1. Innocent people die in every war.
2. The war was deliberately started, despite point #1.
The masses of civilian deaths were a fucking inevitability, one that is produced by every war ever waged, just and unjust unlike. It doesn’t matter that the deaths of those innocents are accidents, nor does it matter that the US’s goals were ostensibly noble, if you’re willing to the give the administration the benefit of so much doubt. They deliberately began an action that they knew would result in the deaths of innocent lives, and they did so because their myriad and contradictory justifications for violence are post hoc rationalizations that are created on a whim in order to salve their consciences after they make the barbaric decisions they wanted to make from the beginning.
Bush very much believes and has amply demonstrated that innocent lives can and should be deliberately sacrificed to save the lives of others. The problem is that he believes this only when it’s convenient for him to do so. Invading a poor primitive foreign country to deliver unto them bombs and democracy is a noble action, and therefore is worth the “collateral damage”, which is itself an unavoidable result of the deliberate attack. But should he wish to justify the veto of a bill that’s unpopular to his base of support, and should he further require a catchy slogan while doing so, then he will contradict himself so blindingly fast that I doubt his own brain even realizes what he’s done.
This is how his mind works. Hell, this is how all of our minds work, it’s just that some of us are better at recognizing this tendency and fighting it than others. We make our decisions first, and only afterwards do we come up with clever ways to justify what we’ve always wanted to do. It’s the great person who can balance internal beliefs and external facts instead of compartmentalizing contradictory beliefs in separate parts of the brain. And it’s been obvious since the early years of his presidency that Bush is not that person. He has no qualms whatsoever about providing the most convenient excuse for whatever he most desires at the moment.
He. Doesn’t. Even. Try.
This is, I suppose, to be expected from politicians to a certain extent, but not when innocent lives are at stake. This latest quote is just another example in a long history of the same. And John, I not only disagree with your (frankly) ridiculous conclusion where you attempt to provide some sort of rational coherence to the man’s thoughts (it’s like you’re pretending that Swiss cheese doesn’t have holes), I also believe that you’re being actively unhelpful because you’re obscuring a problem in our illustrious leader that many people have been pointing out for, literally, years.
Maybe I was a bit harsh in that first paragraph of mine, but I’m not going to retract it because first, what the hell, it’s the pit, and second, it’s not just the people frothing at the mouth who are interfering with reliable assessments of our president, it’s also people who rush to defend him on false grounds. And yours is a false ground.
A chief quality of the authoritarianism that’s gripped the far-right in this country is that very compartmentalized mind that Bush suffers from. These people are, to a large extent, the same who believe the Bible has no errors even though they haven’t read it. These things are, in fact, highly correlated. This is not a coincidence, and this is not a mistake, and we need to see these blatant contradictions for what they are.
This is a good pitting for that reason.
I agree it’s sloppy, but I just find it to be a very common kind of sloppiness, so it’s not hard to add the missing pieces. It’s like when someone says “I could care less”, and you know they really mean “I couldn’t care less”. You hear it all the time.
Hmm. I’ve never heard a self described libertarian called a moderate. But, whatever.
Look, there are tons and tons of things I’m pissed at Bushed about. I support precious few of his policies (including this one) and can’t wait until the man is out of office. I just don’t get upset over trivial slip ups like this. You know exactly what he meant, and he’s far from the only person in this country who feels that way. This subject is just as silly as the one where someone is called a hypocrite because they’re “pro-life” but support the death penalty. Good fucking grief, it’s just a label.
So go ahead and parse the words all you want and pretend you don’t understand what he meant if you need some recreational outrage. This is, afterall, the place for it. Meanwhile, I’ve been busy blasting Bush and Gonzales in GD over their position on the presidents power to deny habeas corpus to US citizens.
There’s a difference between being upset at what someone does and being upset at a slip of the tongue. At least in my book.
I thought original sin was a Catholic-specific (?) thing, and that for the other divisions of Christianity, “everyone’s a sinner” just means that everyone who’s lived for a while has committed a sin, even just a minor one, at SOME point?
You responded to none of the substantive points I made. Just the sniping. I admit, my sniping was pretty lame and it did begin the whole thing, but I’m thinking you shouldn’t skip the rest of my argument, or read so casually that you entirely miss my points. I might dislike the way you write, but I am paying attention to what you’re saying.
So yes, I do know exactly what Bush meant by his statement. I even agree entirely with your revision of his statement.
But this is not at all the same as someone complaining about “pro-life” death-penalty advocates being hypocritical; I also agree that those particular complaints of hypocrisy are counterproductive and stupid. The first point I made in the first post was simply this:
Innocent people die in war because of the deliberate choices made by those to start the war.
This is directly contradictory to even your interpretation of the president’s words. Bush is deliberately destroying innocent human lives in the hopes of saving others in the future. That is what he’s doing.
I’m not pretending anything. I understand perfectly what he said, and it still doesn’t make sense.
I had no need for RO. You’ve seen that as a new pit buzzword, but I’m not sure you know exactly what it means when the other posters use it. I’m not complaining about a horrific tragedy, the likes of which happen every day on sensationalist cable news programs. I didn’t even call Bush a Nazi or a fascist. He is neither. My strongest rhetoric was actually all for you, right at the beginning.
Do you want a cookie for this?
Seriously, you’re near, what, 25K posts? I know you’ve criticized the president before. I’d have to be blind to miss it. I also know that you’ve done a good job in GD with the habeus stuff. I do read GD, and I do appreciate the arguments you have personally made in defense of one of the oldest rights in Western law. No sarcasm. No irony. I really mean that. One of the reasons I post so little is because others often make the points that I want to make, and you are sometimes one of the others. But I’m not gonna let you slide in the pit when you’re wrong. There have been good debates here, too, and I’m not gonna let your shallow correction of the president obscure the larger issue.
It wasn’t a slip of the tongue that I’m upset about, as I’ve repeatedly made clear by now.
If you want to go down the stupid Bushism path, I can tell you that I say “nucular” myself (midwesterner here), and I get pissed at others who think the way the man pronounces a word is some divine insight into the quality of his brain. The issue at play here is much worse than a simple nonstandard pronunciation or some slip of the tongue. In fact, I’m bothered by something much broader than the president himself, as I explained near the end of my post. I’m gonna quote myself, because it was the conclusion of everything I’d written:
And I stand by that. You made the point that a lot of people believe as Bush does, and that is of course itself the real problem here. We absolutely need to see their blatant contradictions for what they are.
What this is about, in a much broader sense that I didn’t talk about in the first post (but you will probably find as an obvious extension of those thoughts) is the authorities that people are using in their lives as substitutes for their own minds. If you’re familiar with John Dean’s book Conservatives without Conscience, it was based on decades of psychological studies of authoritarianism. The original researcher has himself written a book that summarizes his research (and his related political opinions) available for free online.
This is a good pitting not because it, in and of itself, is proof that the president is incompetent or has done bad things. One of your GD threads is proof enough for that.
This is a good pitting because it is one entry in an incredibly long series of obvious contradictions relating to the war. This pitting doesn’t work by itself; it works in conjunction with everything else we know. It’s one more piece of the jigsaw puzzle to realize that the president, when he deliberately chose a course that has killed tens of thousands (and perhaps eventually will kill hundreds of thousands) of innocent people, did so without having thought through the moral implications.
This is an even better pitting because of the people who are going to stand by him despite the obvious hypocrisy.
I would agree with you that this is, by itself, a lesser issue than habeus. But the reason we’ve lost habeus right now (for certain groups of people) is that the people who support Bush support him regardless of what he does and says. They, like him, are able to rationalize away the words that come from his mouth, no matter how obvious the meaning (and that includes your interpretation). They do this because he is The Leader. They are frightening when they do this, because if they’re allowed to continue down this path (and it seems more and more like they won’t be), then our country will be in serious danger.
If you are unable to see that your “correction” does nothing to remove the president’s hypocrisy in this instance (which is entirely different from the lame abortion/death-penalty thing), then I have nothing more to say. If you can see the hypocrisy, but still believe that it’s no big deal, because it’s just words and not actions, then I will simply have to remain in strong disagreement with you. Words matter, too.
And that’s it. I’m not upset about a language slip-up, or a mislabelling, or because of some inner need for RO. I’m concerned by the broader implications of his hypocrisy, and I’m glad that Tuckerfan documented yet another case of dishonesty.
It’s a little thing by itself, but these little things add up.
Agreed. But what Bush does is say one thing at one time and one thing at another in a morally bankrupt fashion in order to sound definite and strong on any given issue, with no attempt coherence or avoidance of contradiction.
What Bush is quoted as saying in the OP was not a slip of the tongue. It was a carefully crafted comment, probably pored over for a substantial amount of time by his scriptwriters.
One cannot be a Pres who deliberately adopts a simplistic homey style so as to avoid any consideration of the awkward subtleties that might make one’s policies look inept, while also expecting a free pass on the basis of supposedly implied but carefully unexpressed nuances to your position.
Hear, hear, sir. Extremely well-put. And with a pair of cojones to add, apparently lacking in most of those that oppose this madness.
Deliberate. That says it all, no?
May your post-count stay low. We need a closer around here and you impressed moi (not that that’s saying much, as my rep around here – if any – is rather er…ill-perceived? Or burn the fuckin’ socialist. Take your pick.*) as being quite apt for the role.
Mr S’s jr. partner?
*You (general sense) needn’t worry about my getting on the cross, I’m an atheist thus it’s rather an inapplicable retort. Been posting the same way since I arrived here anyway. Guess you could say I didn’t come looking for love 
Having said that, I do love and admire the candor and courage of the Americans and Britons (pppst…remember HLS is everywhere) that dare speak The Naked Truth.
Apparently, though slowly wakening, the message is getting through. And THAT most of all is what matters to me. Sick of all this bullshit about you need to “behave this way or that one, when speaking to those that oppose your views.” Shit, that’s the case and I am sure we unwashed lefties could’ve come up with enough roses to flood the WH. Not like “liberal = dogpound” just in case some of you may have forgotten
Think that would have made a difference? Neither do I.
And by-the-by John, you likely and rightly not giving a shit and all, but could you lose the balance act just for once? Might come as a total surprise to you what with your all-saving equanimity, but there are times when wrong is just that. Fucking wrong. Period.
Yes, GW is righteously opposed to the deliberate taking of an innocent human life, provided the taking was of those innocent human lives were created after a certain date. For those innocent human lives created before that date the taking is perfectly OK.
I don’t understand why that doesn’t make sense to everybody.
Its kinda like having an expiration date, we start going “bad” as soon as we’re out of storage. Explains his attitude toward Medicare and SocSec too.
Normally **elucidator **would jump in here with this comment, but let me see if I can beat him to the punch…
And you know this how?
Kendall Jackson: The simple matter is that people like Bush think a human embryo is a human being. They really do. And if you think that, then killing an embryo, even to save another life, cannot be justified. Why is that so hard to understand? Do you think Bush doesn’t want to fund embryonic stem cell research because he likes to see people suffer? There is no logical contradiction if you accept the premise. Now, you and I don’t accept the premise, but that doesn’t make the premise wrong, objectively.
So maybe you’re right that it wasn’t a slip of the tongue. But it was a statement made in the context of medical research. If I say that I don’t understand why Bush doesn’t support this research when almost everyone else does, you would know that I meant “every other American” and that I wasn’t talking about people in India. It’s the same thing here. He’s talking about taking a life (as he sees it) for the advancement of medical research.
So, if you and **Tuckerfan **want to get all bent out of shape because of this, fine. This is the right forum to do it. But it’s also the right forum for me to say you guys are action like a bunch of Jr High school kids playing “gotcha” with someone because the think you’ve found some profound logical contradiction.
You may have the last word. I’ve already spent more time on this subject than it is worth.
Well to start with, do you disagree that it was a prepared speech? I’m guessing that Bush isn’t up with the relevant research to a degree sufficient to make even the fairly superficial comments on it that he made, off the cuff.
Great minds think alike. Twisted ones as well, it would seem.
But I take the point, hassling Bush for rhetorical weaknesses is like criticizing Jeffrey Dahmer for his table manners.
I really think it’s about more than rhetorical weakness: I think it’s about total contempt for any rationality or consistency. This is not a fact based administration and all that.