Oh I got them. But they were still marginally relevant to the conversation. You were attempting to be cute and to irritate rather than directly addressing the point I was making.
I saw your more substantial post after I had already posted the comment.
It’s somewhat frustrating to hear people say that what GWB has done makes us safer. The bottom line is that we just don’t know either way. If the CIA or FBI is unsuccessful in penetrating a terror cell, the last thing they are going to do is tell us about it. None of us on the outside has any idea how many plots have been undetected or how many people have slipped through. I feel safe in saying that only the most blindly partisan among us would seriously say that “GWB has made all the difference”.
Funny, just after you said they are working you back off and say there is no way to know if they are working or not. Somehow you came by the conclusion in your first post while you yourself admit there is no way to validly reach said conclusion.
Enjoy,
Steven
Yes, Starving Artist, I’m aware that you’ve drunk the Limbaugh Kool-Aid. Keep repeating what he said. On the basis of your apparent gross misunderstanding of the politics involved in that issue, though, and your reductive sort of “OMG!!1!! he l13d!!!11!” kind of reasoning, then yes, I’m still prepared to say you lack discernment. :rolleyes:
Last I checked, Alaska was pretty solidly red. 
As a ‘Rightie’ I just get sick of being lumped into one giant stereotype. A good way to tell which liberal posters I like and those I loathe is to see if they do that or not. Not every conservative or Republican is ‘blindly following Bush’ or only out for themselves. Don’t say “you started this illegal war” because I didn’t. Nor did I allow Enron to pull their shit. Sometimes having to defend ones self while trying to defend the arguement, two things that can be very different, just gets tiring.
Libya has been rather quiet since Reagan’s attack on them after the West Berlin bombing.
The point is that initiating a war of aggression against Iraq was wrong, no matter how bad Saddam was. It was sold to the American people with lies. I’ve heard that half of Americans or more still believe that Iraq was in league with Al Qaida. I was all for invading Afghanistan, as that’s where Al Qaida was based. Given the opportunity, I’d have gone over myself. But attacking Iraq was unjustified.
What would have happened if Iraq had not been attacked? For one thing, there would be no insurgents and a couple thousand Americans and troops from other countries and many thousands of Iraqis would still be alive. Saddam would have continued to rattle his sabre. But evidence shows that Iraq had no WMDs, and that Saddam was not persuing them. He wanted everyone to think he had a programme, because that was part of his strategy of keeping Iran at bay/nervous.
Re: Our recent disagreement. Let’s call it over with.
Under the Patriot Act, those two grenades that exploded ouside the British Consulate last month were the act of a terrorist.
Why the hell is that the bottom line? If a traitor-president like F.D.R. can take us from Pearl harbor on December 7, 1941 to VJ day on August 15, 1945, while also kicking Euro-Trash Ass, why can’t America’s Freedom-President take us from September 11th, 2001, to at least some concrete evidence that something is changing for the better in a similar time period?
I totally agree. I didn’t mean to get personal. We have more in common than you realize. I spend part of my time helping high school kids make movies.
[nitpick]Johnny’s somewhere around Seattle.[/nitpick]
You’re reaching, Lute. You know exactly what I meant.
I think we can agree that the dynamics of WWII are a bit different than those of the war on terror.
Yes, one we won, the other we spent years dicking around futily in Godforsaken deserts.
Sam:
Ah, indeed.
In other words, you decided, before inspecting the facts, that the US should invade Iraq. After making this decision, you chose to believe virtually anything that supported your decision, and to further promote those spurious beliefs tirelessly here, on the boards.
You know, Sam, it’s one thing to “uncritically” accept an assertion, tentatively, because it fits with one’s preconceived beliefs. It is quite another to continue to cling to that assertion when an overwhelming amount of counter-evidence demonstrates it to be questionable, if not downright false. And after the debates held on these boards, in which the evidence for and against the government’s claims was inspected under a microscope, there is absolutely no excuse whatsoever for your “uncritical” acceptance of the “WMD argument.” At all.
But there is a difference between what you say in this post, and what you wrote above. Above, you implied that you knew all along the real reason behind the invasion of Iraq was not its alleged possession of “WMDs.” Given this, you would have us believe that Iraq’s possession of these weapons were, in actuality, irrelevant to the debate surrounding the invasion. That’s why, you argue, Republicans are not more outraged about the absence of these weapons; you would have us believe they knew, all along, that there was a overriding, albeit unarticulated, reason for the invasion, and the WMD argument was subsidiary.
Your belief in Iraq’s possession of “WMDs,” and your faith in David Kay’s smile, are thus irrelevant to your previous point. So what if you believed in them? They were never your main argument in the first place, you seem to say. To which I reply: 1) at any point during our debates you could have pursued this line of reasoning, had you chosen to do so. You did not. 2) You argued repeatedly that the US must invade Iraq precisely because it possessed “WMDs.” You never once claimed that, in fact, this allegation was actually irrelevant to your position.
Certainly some proponents of the invasion floated the argument that we needed to invade Iraq as a part of our “war on terror.” There were two flavours to that argument: 1) We need to remake the middle east, so that it is less of a “terrorist hotbed.” (This is the last thin reed of justification war proponents have left to cling to.) 2) We need to overthrow Hussein as part of our war on terror, because if we don’t he will give “WMDs” to the terrorists. Obviously, this line of argument hinged on the basic idea that he possessed such weapons to start with – which he did not. Regardless, the idea that the Iraq invasion was really about fighting terrorism, rather than relieving Saddam of his “WMDs,” only gained currency after it was discovered that he possessed none.
No. A counter-example would be an environmentalist who “uncritically” accepts a flawed report on global warming, regardless of whether global warming is occurring, because in reality he hates Enron, and will do anything in his power to bring it down, regardless of the facts of the case. A counter-example would be an environmentalist who clings to a flawed report on global warming in the face of overwhelming evidence that the report is flawed, and who, when finally admitting that it was flawed, tries to rationalize his unreasonable behaviour by claiming that everyone has tendency to cling to their preconceptions.
I find the assertion that you made some sort of innocent mistake here, because of a foible shared by all of us, insulting. Go peddle it somewhere else.
You mean, like this?
Now you would have us believe that you thought the government was doing a lousy job right from the beginning, in accordance with your purported political views? Don’t make me laugh.
Try taking the high road all you like, Sam, but your double standards and hypocrisy is transparent to anyone who can read.
You said “any”. Not all terrorists come from other countries, you know.
OK, I will back off on that and apologize.
That is exactly what I am saying, without reservation. Remember back. Falwell, Dobson et al jumped on it as a “judgment by God” against gays, liberals and Democrats. They were ecstatic about it. They also orgasmed over the tsunami I bet.
Whoever gloats over disaster will not go unpunished (Proverbs 17:5b)
Bush used it as a reason to go to Afghanistan (which I supported) and then leveraged into an invasion of Iraq (which I did not support).
They don’t need the numbers, if they can whisper in the right ears and make the right “contributions”, and as long as they can reach “the faithful” through their “ministries”. They are dangerous. They are the Enemy, as in “defend the constitution … against all enemies, foreign and domestic”
Religious factions will go on imposing their will on others unless the decent people connected to them recognize that religion has no place in public policy. They must learn to make their views known without trying to make their views the only alternatives. – Barry Goldwater
…There is no such thing as … separation of state and church … in the Constitution. It’s a lie of the left. – Pat Robertson
Leave the matter of religion to the family altar, the church, and the private school, supported entirely by private contributions. Keep the church and state forever separate. – Ulysses S. Grant
I want you to just let a wave of intolerance wash over you. I want you to let a wave of hatred wash over you. Yes, hate is good … if a Christian voted for Clinton, he sinned against God. It’s that simple. Our goal is a Christian nation. We have a biblical duty, we are called by God to conquer this country… former leader of Operation Rescue – Randall Terry (he sounds a lot like Emperor Palpatine)
Democracy is the great love of the failures and cowards of life. [R.J. Rushdoony, Thy Kingdom Come,1978]
One faith, one law and one standard of justice did not mean democracy. The heresy of democracy has since then worked havoc in church and state . . . Christianity and democracy are inevitably enemies. (p 100) [R.J. Rushdoony, The Institutes of Biblical Law]
Christianity is completely and radically anti-democratic; it is committed to spiritual aristrocracy. [R.J. Rushdoony, Reconstructionist theologian, from The Religious Right: The Assault on Tolerance and Pluralism In America, published by ADL] - the priestking caste I mentioned earlier.
The significance of Jesus Christ as the “faithful and true witness” is that He not only witnesses against those who are at war against God, but He also executes them. - R.J. Rushdoony, The Institutes of Biblical Law (Nutley, NJ: Craig Press, 1973), p. 574.
So let us be blunt about it: we must use the doctrine of religious liberty to gain independence for Christian schools until we train up a generation of people who know that there is no religious neutrality, no neutral law, no neutral education, and no neutral civil government. Then they will get busy in constructing a Bible-based social, political and religious order which finally denies the religious liberty of the enemies of God. - Gary North, “The Intellectual Schizophrenia of the New Christian Right” in Christianity and Civilization: The Failure of the American Baptist Culture, No. 1 (Spring, 1982), p. 25.
We believe that institutionally Christianity should be the official religion of the country, that its laws should be specifically Christian. - Rev. David Chilton, Church of the Redeemer, Placerville, CA.
The long-term goal of Christians in politics should be to gain exclusive control over the franchise. Those who refuse to submit publicly to the eternal sanctions of God by submitting to His Church’s public marks of the covenant–baptism and holy communion–must be denied citizenship, just as they were in ancient Israel. - Gary North, Political Polytheism: The Myth of Pluralism (Tyler, TX: Institute for Christian Economics, 1989), p. 87.
Christians have an obligation, a mandate, a commission, a holy responsibility to reclaim the land for Jesus Christ - to have dominion in the civil structures, just as in every other aspect of life and godliness.
But it is dominion that we are after. Not just a voice.
It is dominion we are after. Not just influence.
It is dominion we are after. Not just equal time.
It is dominion we are after.
World conquest. That’s what Christ has commissioned us to accomplish. We must win the world with the power of the Gospel. And we must never settle for anything less.
If Jesus Christ is indeed Lord, as the Bible says, and if our commission is to bring the land into subjection to His Lordship, as the Bible says, then all our activities, all our witnessing, all our preaching, all our craftsmanship, all our stewardship, and all our political action will aim at nothing short of that sacred purpose.
Thus, Christian politics has as its primary intent the conquest of the land - of men, families, institutions, bureaucracies, courts, and governments for the Kingdom of Christ. It is to reinstitute the authority of God’s Word as supreme over all judgments, over all legislation, over all declarations, constitutions, and confederations. True Christian political action seeks to rein the passions of men and curb the pattern of digression under God’s rule. - George Grant, The Changing of the Guard (Ft. Worth, TX: Dominion Press, 1987), pp. 50-51.
Finally, my personal favorite…
"Every good Christian ought to kick Falwell’s ass." – Barry Goldwater
Let me amend this. Not all terroist acts result in stewn body parts.
Under the Patriot Act, Broomstick’s vandilzed airport is a terrorist act.
This has got to be the stupidest, most ignorant thing I’ve heard this year. Do you really believe that the Bush Administration was hoping that someone would orchestrate an attack on American soil that would kill thousands of innocents? Be honest.
Lord Ashtar:
This suspicion can be traced back to a discussion found in a PNAC report entitled “Rebuilding America’s Defenses.” This paper is openly dedicated to the proposition that the US is the dominant world power, and that it should pursue policies to ensure that it remains so:
I’ve bolded the formulations that I find worrisome. With regard to you question, however, if we continue reading, we find the following passage, in the Chapter entitled “Creating Tomorrow’s Dominant Force”:
This may have simply been unfortunate phrasing on the author’s part, but has anyway led many war opponents to suspect that there are at least some hardliners within our government who welcomed a “Pearl Harbor-like” catastrophe as a catalyst for furthering their plans. After all, the article is a product of PNAC (Project for the New American Century), a sort of neo-con clearing house, and the paper’s “co-chairmen” are prominent neo-con thinkers. (You can find the entire paper linked as a .pdf file at the bottom of this page.)
This impression is not helped by the fact that we know Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld began to press for action against Iraq immediately after 9/11, despite the absence of evidence link Iraq to the attack. Neo-cons had been advocating an invasion for years before the towers fell.
“Stewn” body parts is what may have happened to the prisoners that the US has “rendered” (no pun intended) to other countries:
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/050214fa_fact6
'be careful what you ask for - you might get it!"
they did, so now they grouse