We're Pretty Much Fucked, Aren't We?

The BBQ Pit
41

[QUOTE=Captain Amazing]
As for the “secret prisons”, you might not like them, but the criminal justice system isn’t really set up to handle terrorism prosecutions on this scale, with this level of secrecy. Places like Gitmo are sorting themselves out, and while there probably are innocent people there who shouldn’t be, again, it’s a mistake and not intentional.
[/quote]
Prey tell, why the need for prosecutions “with this level of secrecy”? The Gulag system in Stalin’s era certainly needed this kind of secrecy–mostly because the accusations were exaggerated if not entirely fabricated–but the prosecution of criminals and prisoners of war is neither necessitates nor is facilitated by secrecy; if anything, we, the public, need to understand what is being done in our names and by whom; what threat it represents, and how much progress is being made. This is a fundamental necessity of a representative republic run along democratic principles. If we don’t know what is being done, we can’t make an informed decision as to whether or not to continue supporting it.

And far from it being a transient oversight–a “mistake” as you put it (one that destroys lives)–it is part of the continued and avowed policy of this Administration to distort, deny, conceal, and obfuscate any evidence of what goes on in these facilities, often to the point of denying they exist (prisons and interrogation facilities in Eastern Europe), and classifying prisoners in the extra-legal (and Orwellian unperson) category of “enemy combatants”, and use the label to justify recognizing the basic rights of both accused criminals and POWs. As for Gitmo, the Administration has had five years to “sort it out”, and has responded by stonewalling and moving prisoners to other unknown facilities, denying they have done so and then backtracking to the standard (and unconscionable) arguments when faced with inarguable evidence.

When you break your neighbor’s window with a misthrown ball once, it’s an accident. Do it again and it’s negligence. Continue doing it, every day, after it has been repeatedly explained to you how what you are doing is dangerous, destructive, and inappropriate is blatant malfeasance.

Stranger

42

Neocon yes. Not freemasons or reptiles. Wolfowitz, Rumsfield, Rove, Pearl ,Kristol all had Tail removal surgery. It was in Germany . Germans can keep the truth for generations.But they do profess remaking the world into what they deem is better.

43

[QUOTE=begbert2]
How does the mere fact that our leadership wants to commit horrific heinous actions against some other country make us fucked? When we bombed Hiroshima, it didn’t fuck us up, it fucked them up.

Sure, we’re going to be associated wether we like it or not with the actions horrific heinous that our ledership commits, but that’s not quite the same as being the victims thereof. Arguably, we’re the lucky ones.

We’re not fucked. We’re the fuckers.
[/QUOTE]

BEST POST EVER!!! (I wish I was that smart to articulate it in such a fashion)

I wish that major newpapers would run a front page on PNAC. It would all make sense to everyone…at least in retrospect. Anyone who defends this shit as a natural response to a credible threat is a fucker. No better way to say it.

44

[QUOTE=Captain Amazing]
See, this is why you’re being paranoid. You think the administration has some great vast plan to set up a totalitarian dictatorship, end civil liberties, and take over the world, and every action they take is in furtherance of this plan. Are people dying in Iraq? Sure, but that’s as much, if not more, the fault of the various insurgent groups, who want to, depending on their group, set up an Islamic theocracy, ensure Sunni dominance over the Shi’ites, or get revenge on the Sunni for past oppression. None of these groups are acting with the best interest of the Iraqis in mind, and, for the most part, we are. We’re trying to set up a stable democracy there. We’re doing a pretty crappy job, and sure, the administration needs to be taken to account for its failures, but its ignorance, not malice.
[/QUOTE]
Ignorance of this magnitude over matters this important is simply inexcusable. Countless experts on the Middle East were warning of the high possibility of sectarian violence and possible civil war before the invasion, and were completely ignored. When you kick a hornet’s nest on a playground, it doesn’t matter that it’s the hornets who are stinging the children and not you – it’s still your fault. The fact that you ignored all the advice of bystanders because you hoped that maybe candy would come out doesn’t change anything.

Motivations don’t trump easily foreseeable consequences. Our nation has started a shitstorm that has already claimed roughly 45,000 innocent civilian lives, and could well claim hundreds of thousands more if civil war breaks out. That’s fifteen 9/11’s we’ve inflicted on another country. Does it really make a difference if it was done out of incompetence instead of malice? Would you be able to dismiss so many deaths so easily if the shoe were on the other foot?

45

I don’t know what you people are complaining about.
Bush is living up to his campaign promise not to engage in nation building.

46

[QUOTE=jayjay]
:rolleyes:
[/QUOTE]
That’s one stupid cartoon. Are you being serious?

47

[QUOTE=Shayna]
I know I’m probably going to catch a ration of shit for what I’m about to say, but. . .

The other night I said to my husband, “I wonder if this is how the Jews in Germany felt, in the very early rise of Hitler, just as he was growing in popularity and power – that impending sense that something sinister was very, very wrong, but not only unable to specifically identify it, let alone convince others of its evilness, but worse still, completely impotent to actually do anything to stop it.”

He agreed, and added that it was likely the same even for the average, common non-Jewish German, feeling the darkness that their government was bringing, desperately not wanting it, but also being utterly powerless to prevent the doom that was about to befall them.

**No, I’m not saying Bush = Hitler! **

But I cannot escape the terrifying feeling in the pit of my gut that the power-hungriness of this administration, the desire of some of its top members to actively pursue an agenda of “American global leadership,” their intent to “boldly and purposefully promot[e] American principles abroad,” the subterfuge and the lies created to “sell” the invasion of a sovereign nation (who next?), Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, secret prisons throughout Europe, and so on, is, at least on some level, hauntingly reminiscent of a very ugly time in the world’s not so distant past. These fucking people scare the ever-living shit out of me.

I just pray that I’m completely wrong in my fears. The consequences of being right are just too dire to contemplate.
[/QUOTE]

I’ve wondered the same…scary, isn’t it? At least one way or another, we have sanity, whether democrat or republican, converative or liberal, take office in 2008. I don’t think either side sees sanity in the approach this adminstration has taken.

I only wish there were a more centrist party (and overall view)…Washington is owned, by and large, by the politicos on the fringes, whereas the typical American is well within the center of the bell curve - we just want someone smart and honest. Who, among our founding fathers, would have though it would be so hard?

48

[QUOTE=El Cid Viscoso]
That’s one stupid cartoon. Are you being serious?
[/QUOTE]

I am. I see very little difference between the cartoon and the legions of handwavers that come out from under their rocks whenever the Bushites screw another pooch and then try to justify it by screaming “911! 911! 911!”

I’m angry. I’m a very angry American. And yesterdays orgy of public breastbeating just focused my anger to a white hot point. I’m angry that my country has been hijacked by a group of people with a well-documented pre-existing agenda. I’m angry that Al Qaeda gave them an excuse to put that agenda into play. I’m not one of the conspiracy nuts who thinks that the Bushites planned and executed the 9/11 attacks, but I’m angry as hell that this administration took a national tragedy and used it to justify behavior that, had it been performed by another nation, we as Americans would have roundly vilified. I’m angry that the American people lapped up the lukewarm pus of justification that this White House has been diligently tapping from the wound of 9/11.

Everything that this administration has done after running the Taliban out of Kabul is built on the blood and grief of its supposed constituents, and we’re complicit in our own exploitation! I find it so hard to believe that the American people can’t see the truth of this that I have to believe that the apologists know the way of it and STILL decide they’re going to suck onto the corpses of the 9/11 dead like a horde of necrophagic leeches.

So yes, I am serious. I’m as serious as a heart attack. Or as serious as two planes being flown into the WTC, if you prefer.

49

[QUOTE=Giraffe]
Our nation has started a shitstorm that has already claimed roughly 45,000 innocent civilian lives, and could well claim hundreds of thousands more if civil war breaks out. That’s fifteen 9/11’s we’ve inflicted on another country. Does it really make a difference if it was done out of incompetence instead of malice? Would you be able to dismiss so many deaths so easily if the shoe were on the other foot?
[/QUOTE]
Add to that the fact that now more Americans have died over there than on 9/11

http://news.yahoo.com/s/huffpost/20060912/cm_huffpost/029234

That is also ignoring the vast amount of people that have died due to the conditions over there but not as a direct result of the fighting.

50

[QUOTE=Giraffe]
That’s fifteen 9/11’s we’ve inflicted on another country.
[/QUOTE]
We haven’t inflicted anything, we just opened the sluice. You know, took the finger out of the dike. Violated Pandora’s Box?

We didn’t bring to them anything they’d not’ve done to themselves when Saddam finally died.

51

[QUOTE=Captain Amazing]
“all for the sake of this fucking power-hungry administration’s political gain.”

See, this is why you’re being paranoid. You think the administration has some great vast plan to set up a totalitarian dictatorship, end civil liberties, and take over the world, and every action they take is in furtherance of this plan. Are people dying in Iraq? Sure, but that’s as much, if not more, the fault of the various insurgent groups, who want to, depending on their group, set up an Islamic theocracy, ensure Sunni dominance over the Shi’ites, or get revenge on the Sunni for past oppression. None of these groups are acting with the best interest of the Iraqis in mind, and, for the most part, we are. We’re trying to set up a stable democracy there. We’re doing a pretty crappy job, and sure, the administration needs to be taken to account for its failures, but its ignorance, not malice.

As for the “secret prisons”, you might not like them, but the criminal justice system isn’t really set up to handle terrorism prosecutions on this scale, with this level of secrecy. Places like Gitmo are sorting themselves out, and while there probably are innocent people there who shouldn’t be, again, it’s a mistake and not intentional.

As for “inciting the terrorists”, they don’t really need the help. The terrorists are going to act against us no matter what the Administration says or does. Your “machine running roughshod over our civil liberties that will grow powerful enough to maintain control forever” thing, I don’t even know how to respond to, but I’ll bet you any sum you want to wager that by the end of January, 2009, this current administration is out of the White House and a new one is in, and that the whole “continue to maintain control” thing will stop in 2009.

As for an “American ruled world”, we already have one, and have had one since the fall of the Soviet Union. We’re the only superpower, and the only nation with the resources and will to project power anywhere around the world.

And btw, the non-Jewish Germans weren’t “feeling the darkness that their government was bringing, desperately not wanting it, but also being utterly powerless to prevent the doom that was about to befall them.” The fuckers loved Hitler, and loved the Nazis, especially while thing were going well, and all the stuff the Nazis did, the average German approved of.
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I TAKE IT BACK!!!
We are fucked, especially by people like you…who seem to think its our right to lead (OWN, as that what it comes down to, isn’t it) the world, that Guantanifuckimo is a moral pillar, and we can’t possibly do anything wrong.

FUCKED FUCKED FUCKED

(actually, not me…you…are FUCKED in the head)

52

Is it inappropriate for me to ask for some of you to just calm the fuck down?

53

[QUOTE=Giraffe]
When you kick a hornet’s nest on a playground, it doesn’t matter that it’s the hornets who are stinging the children and not you – it’s still your fault. The fact that you ignored all the advice of bystanders because you hoped that maybe candy would come out doesn’t change anything.
[/QUOTE]

You’d think the Leader of the Free World, with all his country-ass anecdotes, could understand simple shit like this.

But no, he’d just tell you that you can’t get honey without a few children getting stung.

54

[QUOTE=El Cid Viscoso]
…We didn’t bring to them anything they’d not’ve done to themselves when Saddam finally died.
[/QUOTE]

Stunning.

55

I find it encouraging that the apologists have nothing but transparent distracting maneuvers left. I’m not seeing any real defending going on, just a lot of gyrations and hyperventilating.
Still, I live in Brooklyn so I have no idea what is on the minds of those who voted for Bush the second time around. It seemed obvious to everybody here where this administration was heading. Being smackdab in the middle of blue, it is hard to judge what makes others so red.

56

[QUOTE=El Cid Viscoso]
We didn’t bring to them anything they’d not’ve done to themselves when Saddam finally died.
[/QUOTE]
Yes, but we brought it to them. It’s got our name on it. We chose to take an action which had fairly predictable consequences. That bad things might have happened in the future doesn’t absolve us of what we did.

I’m often a bit stunned by how dismissive Iraq war defenders are about the civilian casualties. Did you see the CBS 9/11 documentary? Remember the part where people’s bodies are hitting the ground outside? There’s nothing that brings home the horror of that day to me more than that image, because people who should have just been working a boring office job were suddenly in the position of burning to death or jumping. I don’t want to be even a tiny bit responsible for people dying like that. And we are.

57

[QUOTE=Roonwit]
You’d think the Leader of the Free World, with all his country-ass anecdotes, could understand simple shit like this.
[/QUOTE]
No, the Pres is quite educated. Giraffe’s anecdote is therefore beyond him.

58

[QUOTE=Giraffe]
Did you see the CBS 9/11 documentary? Remember the part where people’s bodies are hitting the ground outside?
[/QUOTE]
What’s worse is seeing the Chaplain, mere moments from being squashed by a jumper. Remember the radio call “get under the portico”?

59

[QUOTE=El Cid Viscoso]
No, the Pres is quite educated. Giraffe’s anecdote is therefore beyond him.
[/QUOTE]

As is simple critical thinking, apparently.

He did not make any post war plans. The guy who works for him threatened to fire anyone who did. What kind of education leads a man to make that much of a stupid of decision?

60

[QUOTE=El Cid Viscoso]
Is it inappropriate for me to ask for some of you to just calm the fuck down?
[/QUOTE]

Yes - go stick your head back in the sand, and make pretend this is all a pleasant dream. We’ll deal with reality.