That would be an interesting point if anybody (other than you, of course) ever said that.
Among other things, we seem to be hearing a lot less about torture now that we’ve discovered a number of Democratic big shots knew all along about waterboarding and such. Obama promised to close down Gitmo, but now he’s realized that, even though everybody wanted Gitmo closed down, nobody wants to accept any of the prisoners. Nobody seems to want to make a fuss about it, and there now seems to be a lot less noise about Gitmo. Obama authorizes raids into Pakistan, and there’s scarcely a peep from the anti-war crowd. A contestant in a beauty pageant gets trashed by the Ku Klux Kweers for saying in the wimpiest, most mealymouthed way that she couldn’t condone same sex marriage, and yet that’s exactly the position that Obama has taken.
So, yeah, it really is painfully obvious that lefties don’t really care about what’s said and done, they only care who says and does it.
I said here, probably close to a year ago, that I was pissed about Obama’s stance on gay marriage. The response was mostly crickets mixed with a few half-hearted "he has to do what he has to do to get elected"s.
I think Shodan’s post is emblematic of the OP and really frustrating. Shodan, you have a lots of great posts and make lots of valuable contributions to the board. There is often a level of subtlety and nuance in your positions that gets overlooked in the shitslinging between two tribes of retarded monkeys. “You’re saying this,” “no, I’m actually saying that; please understand my point and get beyond semantics,” “oohhh too late to clarify, you r the suxorz” and so on. Sigh. It would be so much better to understand a position rather than find ways to disagree.
But then again, you sometimes post dumb shit. Unnuanced, unflavored, nutless and refined useless crap. Sometimes the temptation to pull your Limbaugh gets the best of you and drivel ensues. “***Lefties ***hereabouts hate…”? Um, and the natural position and inclination of a righty is good and pure? “You people do this kind of thing all the time.”? What a load of childish, banal crap. “IOKIADDI”? “Go ahead and deny it”? Did you even read the OP? This isn’t a right/left thing, it’s unthinking 4chan-like inanity.
People on both sides post such base gobbledegook all the time. The OP came in to decry a small corner of it. But I guess when you have the runs, you can’t pause to read and understand the OP’s point, you just have to shit. Again, it doesn’t happen to you all the time, but can you imagine what your overall diarrhea level would be if more poster’s took the OP to heart?
Except that he is closing down Gitmo. We knew long before the election that it would be difficult to find countries willing to take some of the prisoners - the Bush administration had the same problem with some of those they knew to be innocent - and Obama has had some limited success in forcing some of the countries who had been making the most noise to put up or shut up and take some of the detainees. As I recall, Obama also set a timeframe for closing Gitmo (a year, wasn’t it?). If that comes and goes without a result, you’ll hear some “noise”.
I don’t feel I have enough info on the Pakistan situation to comment, but the beauty contestant was being largely ignored by the left; it was the right who turned her into the Poster Martyr du Jour. It was only when she teemed up with NOM, who was already on the left’s hitlist, that people started picking apart her life. And, as has already been said, Obama’s statements on SSM have not remotely gone without criticism.
And finally: since we’re talking about hypocrites, why is it that the Obama supporters are being forced to defend themselves against charges of “It’s okay if Obama does it” when the right – media and a substantial number of Dopers alike – have adopted such a strident tone of “If Obama does it, it’s wrong/evil/certain doom for America”? Have you even glanced at Fox News lately? Pot, kettle, etc.
Motive is important.
In a messageboard debate, you generally start from the position that the opposing side is fair-minded and arguing in good faith. Without this assumption, most debates are useless; if you have no hope of a valid argument changing your opponent’s mind, why debate?
For this reason, it’s relevant to ask if criticism (or praise!) of a policy is motivated by good-faith support of that policy, or an ad hominem dislike or like of the actors involved. If a rhetor supports an Obama policy but criticized Bush for similar actions, it suggests that he’s not open to arguments about the validity of the policy – indeed, although his words say, “I support this policy and think it’s a good idea,” his actual meaning is, “I support Obama;” arguing against the policy falls on deaf ears, since that’s not the underlying belief at issue.
Now along comes the OP, and says, “Hey, I’m human! I’m allowed to operate this way!”
Well, yes, in the sense that no one will lock you in the village square stocks for doing so. But here, where the currency is ideas, a bald-faced admission that your support for a policy is conditioned upon who executes it instead of what it does makes you a bad-faith debater.
Even if our impulse leans us in one direction or another, we ought to make every effort, to bend over backwards, as it were, to try and separate our political allegiance from our analysis. Otherwise we end up with, “Well, President Bush is a Christian, and so I’m sure he wouldn’t do anything wrong,” or similarly-useless analytical efforts.
Except it’s pretty unhelpful to just complain about other people’s views on the issues without, you know, stating a position on them yourself.
So are you for torture, or against torture? If you’re against torture, it doesn’t matter whether Nancy Pelosi knew about torture, you’re still against torture.
If all you care about is protecting Bush administration officials, then whether Nancy Pelosi knew about the torture or not becomes a very big issue. If you care about torture, it isn’t.
So which is it, Bricker? Which is it, Shodan? Forget what the weak-minded liberal sheep, say, what do you say? If you prefer to reserve a discreet silence…well, there you go.
You are joking, right? There are at least 15 threads on torture running right now. Way more if you include this and **Mr. Moto’s **thread and others like them.
Raiding into Pakistan with the permission of the Pakistani government is just a little bit different than invading Iraq without anyone’s permission.
If you were fully awake, you might have learned that the Taliban has essentially occupied portions of Waziristan, such as the Swat Valley, and the Pakistani central government has no access to or control of the region.
The lovely yet vapid Ms. Prejean didn’t just say she couldn’t condone same sex marriage- she took it upon herself to become the spokesman for just about every “family values” (:rolleyes:) organization in America. Now, for the record, I don’t think her personal beliefs should have disqualified her from being Miss America (and according to the other judges, they didn’t) - but she’s hardly a meek flower who has been swept up in the controversy. She’s owned it.
Obama was running for President. I have no problem with him refusing to come out and say that he’s pro-SSM, because if had done so it would have lost him the election*. He did also make a point of endorsing civil unions.
*Yes, that means I’d be okay with him lying about his feelings, just as I’d be okay with a Republican candidate telling people he’s into Jesus just to win a primary. I’m an realist.
Note that internal inconsistencies can be germane and worthy of discussion. However, rampant IOKIAXDI isn’t helpful at all, and the stream of Gotcha-Ya threads and posts (from both sides) is indeed pitworthy.
I think you’re also missing my point. My point is not “I admit that I support Obama in all things and am a massive hypocrite, now let’s debate issues, won’t that be fun?”. My point is “everyone is human, including me, so if your entire objective in debating is to set up gotchas and try to find cases where I reacted to things differently based on who was involved (not necessarily total reversals of policy and position but things like being more willing to extend the benefit of the doubt, etc), then sure, you win, I’m not 100% perfectly objective. BUT, instead of that kind of gotchas, why don’t we all admit that people aren’t quite totally objective and do our best to debate the interesting issues anyhow?”.
People also have a frustrating tendency (as I ranted about at exhaustive length here) to look for examples of hypocrisy when they’re not really there. “The left” is not a monolithic entity. Sure, SOME people on the left were probably saying very very extreme things like “torture is so terribly horribly wrong that anyone who does anything other than oppose it instantly and completely and totally is a bad person”, and SOME people on the left are now being pragmatic about release of photos, and sure, arguably, those two positions are in direct contradiction to each other. But unless you can point to a single individual who had made both those arguments, you got nothing. And, (and this is the key point), even if you somehow DO manage to make that claim, and lay out utter and complete chapter and verse showing with absolutely inarguably irrefutable certitude that MaxTheVool held two utterly contradictory positions, well, what have you really accomplished?
That’s a strawman argument. I don’t know of anyone who supports torture. The argument is about whether or not interrogation method X is torture or an allowable means of harsh interrogation.
And the fact that Pelosi was apparantly told about interrogation method X a few years back and said nary a word about it, seems to imply that she really didn’t think that the method was all that bad until it became politically expedient to think so.
This is nice and all, but what does it have to do with Shodan supporting his assertion about how liberals reacted to december’s sleight of hand?
HAH! Get out more. Talk to some blue-collar men age 40 and up. It won’t take you long to meet a whole gaggle of new friends who support torture.
REally? Nobody agreed with you? Nobody at all? I find that hard to believe. Would you mind linking to the relevant post so we can see?
Seriously? You want to link me to something you said last summer? Search goes back 750 posts and I’m pretty sure I’ve made more than that since then.
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I think most everyone in the country did give Bush the benefit of the doubt after 9/11 and in the runup to the Iraq war in particular. I know for myself, while I thought an Iraqi invasion was likely to compromise US security interests, I didn’t particularly object to the invasion because I assumed that Bush and Cheney must know what they were doing. Then there were a whole litany of revelations, one after the other, too long to list here, and I have no problem with the fact that I stopped giving Bush the benefit of the doubt after the Duelfer report came out.
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Obama is being attacked from the netroots and progressive parts of the Democratic party over his positions on torture, state secrets, warrantless wiretapping, military commissions, the latest confrontation with Britain over sharing intelligence, the Senate defeat of mortgage cramdowns, TARP, don’t ask don’t tell, gay marriage, and the dithering over the inclusion of a public plan in health care reform, just to name a few. Here’s the thing, however. Whenever the netroots or progressives criticize Obama, that’s just held up as evidence of how “looney” they are. It’s a damned if you do, damned if you don’t scenario. If you don’t criticize Obama, you are a hypocrite, and if you do criticize him, you are a looney-tunes who shows how the Democrats are really Defeatocrats and communists.
Ok, the search on this board is practically broken. I don’t know why I pay for a search that makes me wait 5 minutes and throws a fucking database error half the time, but here’s what I found: Obama made my skin crawl when he said he believes a marriage is between one man and one woman, and it’s a religious union under god. (post 22)
No one responded to it. It’s not exactly the post I was thinking of, because another time I said something similar, a few people posted, basically, “he has to pretend to be against SSM to win the election.” But there’s no one agreeing with me right there for you.
You put it in GD, where I don’t really go. If it was in the Pit or IMHO or MPSIMS I’d be all over it.
That’s kind of an odd example to pick, since everyone in that thread was identifying something they didn’t like about the Dems and the Reps. Seems like a thread that was created to challenge political hypocrisy itself.
I didn’t “pick” it, I found it while looking for the other instance, but it’s still me saying it and no one responding-- exactly what you asked for. And plenty of people were responding to what other people were posting; one person even said she didn’t like the Republicans’ stance on gay marriage.