I wonder if Spankling is watching intently and wondering when it will be safe to post a hilarious photoshopped picture of George W. Bush giving a nazi salute and a link to a totally real news source with a story about how the administration eats babies and uses their oil for their lamps.

Also yes, I brought up Saddam defying the UN, but it goes along with my point! What the hell did the UN do to correct his defiance in any real way? They lack legitimacy, because when it comes down to it, without the threat of force most of the time they are useless. So let them bring upon us exactly the punishments they brought upon Saddam, I am quaking with anticipation.

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Vote Jeb Bush 2008

Bing.

The sad irony of all of this is that we can all argue the ostensible mechanics and sematics of either viewpoint until we're pissing formaldehyde and our tax returns read "Lawn food" under "regular employment", but... guess what?

There aint a GHAT damn thing we can do about it because we're all just blowing smoke up each other's asses while the business of war hums along without a whit of concern as to what the respective constituancies of the countries involved think about the process or the results.

We aint allowed to do shit. We're barely allowed to board planes, balance our checkbooks, or drive on the highways at 2:00 A.M. without somebody sniffing at us to see if we've somehow gotten too big for our britches.

The people who run the world stage love nothing more than the majority of the common people, whose lives they play dice with every day, sitting about barking up their own asses about "the way it really is."

We haven't got a bloody thing to do with "the way it really is". Or isn't. So, don't hold your breath. And I caught shit for an alliterative plea to Sony Corporation?

Motherless fuck, folks. Can you name the last time that any person or group actually got CLOSE to putting a wrench into the status quo, in a manner that might actually cost the powers that be a buck or two, without getting their brains turned into a Jackson Pollock painting?

Wake up and smell the artificially flavoured, vitamin enriched sports drinks.

We don't even pretend to have elections anymore. The rest of this is just fighting over the best deck chair on the Titanic.

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I wanted my half in the middle and I wound up on the edge.

That comic is a pretty hilarious send up of my point of view, boorite. I am basing my justification for removing him that he was a probable future threat! How do you prove that somebody will probably do something? If you knew someone was going to kill you, but they left no threatening evidence, the police would do very little. And tra la la, boorite would sit and wait to be murdered, then let the law take its course.

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Vote Jeb Bush 2008

You could vote for a candidate who would stop the war right away. But at this point I think it's hard to argue that an immediate pullout is the right thing to do.

And really I don't know what police state you are living in bunner, but I don't know if I would rate the right to take a pocket knife with you on a flight as one of life's essential liberties. Unless you whittle for a living.

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Vote Jeb Bush 2008

I am sorry to report that I have killed Makk. I had strong evidence that he planned to obtain a gun and use it on me. It was "circumstantial" evidence. (He was hostile and probably had money.) But even though I haven't actually found any of this evidence, I still think Makk was a threat to my life. The police laughed at me when I asked them to kill Makk for me, so I went and did it myself. No one can arrest me anyway so what does it matter? I thumb my nose at the law. Again, I hope this doesn't bother anyone too much.

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What others say about boorite!

Also, I am sure my self-defense argument will hold up, even without evidence, because how could I possibly prove that Makk was going to attack me in the future? The whole point is, he hadn't done it yet! I wasn't just going to sit there and wait to be murdered.

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What others say about boorite!

The direction you are taking that metaphor breaks down a bit when you take into account that Saddam threw his political enemies into meat grinders, brutualized entire populations, used chemical warfare on civilians, invaded a neighboring country and refused to be open with the international community about his chemical and biological capabilities. I should have added to my metaphor that the person who was going to kill you was already a convicted and sadistic serial killer, but had been released, and the police were corrupt and powerless. Thank you for for pointing out that I needed to add that to make it more accurate.

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Vote Jeb Bush 2008

President Bush said Tuesday that foreign terrorists and supporters of Saddam Hussein are trying to create a climate of "chaos and fear" in Iraq... Well DUH! What the hell did he think was going to happen after the invasion? Did he think it was going to be like winning the world series? Everyone just rolls over and accepts that you won fair and square so the game is over?

simple minded rasum frasum...

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"Jelly-belly gigglin, dancin and a-wigglin, honey that's the way I am!" Janice the Muppet

I think that I have discerned MaKK's point, despite it being hidden under a pile of fallacious reasoning and juvenile debate tactics. Here's the Cliff's Notes version: MaKK is saying that Saddam was a certifiable threat, if not to us imminently then assuredly to someone in the near future, and that the cancerous Saddam regime was absolutely justifiably wiped off the map. Thus, regardless of the pretext for the war, we did a good (and necessary?) thing. He also asserts that the idea of a cooperative international security structure is moot since, in reality, world security is largely a matter of unilateral US will and its capacity to exert that will. We try to play along with other world powers but when they stand in the way of us doing what's "right," we gotta do what we gotta do. The definition of "right" is "things that foster the security of democratic, productive nations."

Did I get it right?

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"And Wirthling isn't worth the paper he isn't printed on."

And we all know how this tacit foreign policy of "Hooray for us, fuck you" has endeared us to the world. I have no delusions that a lot of foreign nations wouldn't love to see our head on a spit even if this weren't our overall approach to dealing with global politics, but it couldn't hurt to back the fuck up off of that bully-boy crap for a while and see, would it?

America's days of doing as we Goddamn well please® because, "Hey... WWII, baby!" - are over. Over.

And the Bush administration's utterly failed attempt to fire up the Glenn Miller and Tommy Dorsey records and exhort the misguided and quasi-literate to drag us all into some bullshit, Norman Rockwell Saturday Evening Post cover and stop asking questions, goes a long way to prove that.

Frankly, I wouldn't be the least whit upset if we just closed the borders to immigration for a few years, sorted out our own house financially, (I.E: kept the Republicans from pissing away multi-trillion dollar surpluses on whatever would get that money back into the pockets of the rich the fastest), and swept our own front doorstep.

Try explaining the intracacies of foreign policy and our role as global policeman to some woman in the hood whose day consists of dragging her ass to a job she doesn't like and trying to get home in time to keep her kid from getting the shit kicked out of him by crackheads.

Try explaining to her why we have untold billions to go and "police and assist" every half-assed, middle of nowhere, sand dune republic with an oil well, but she can't get two flatfoots to her apartment inside of an hour to find out who stole her VCR and her kid's two favourite Disney VHS tapes.

Let all of these whiney little bastards -that we DO actually help out- fend for themselves for a bit while we rebuild our own infrastructure, get our own people off of the streets, and stop going about playing imperialist monopoly games under the pretext of assistance.

In other words: We can only return to being what we were by learning to look ahead. Letting a bunch of thieves run rampant and wrapping it in newspaper front pages from 1943 does not a reborn America make.

America's propensity to eat it's young with a silk napkin and gilded utensils is certainly as large a threat to the "fabric of American life" as a bunch of gun-toting, fundamentalist loonies 5400 miles away.

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I wanted my half in the middle and I wound up on the edge.

We eat what now?

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Vote Jeb Bush 2008

quote:

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President Bush said Tuesday that foreign terrorists and supporters of Saddam Hussein are trying to create a climate of "chaos and fear" in Iraq... Well DUH! What the hell did he think was going to happen after the invasion? Did he think it was going to be like winning the world series? Everyone just rolls over and accepts that you won fair and square so the game is over?

simple minded rasum frasum...

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That was a metaphor. My bad.

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I wanted my half in the middle and I wound up on the edge.

I wish these were Makk's arguments, because then there would be something to discuss. As it is, what with his "thumbing [his] nose at international justification" and believing in a terrible Iraqi threat "even without finding anything," I think he's ascended into a realm beyond the reach of such earthbound matters as fact and reason. Indeed, we seem to have entered that "strange loop" where lack of evidence constitutes a sort of proof. After all: "How do you prove that somebody will probably do something?"

Anyway. Taking the two premises (as you have articulated them) one at a time:

1. "MaKK is saying that Saddam was a certifiable threat, if not to us imminently then assuredly to someone in the near future." Doubtful. He's been sitting there like a whipped dog in his doghouse for 12 years now. Weakened and under surveillance, Saddam Hussein could not have got a softball team together, much less massed an invasion force, without setting off alarms worldwide. His neighbors knew this and were not afraid of him. They were in fact more afraid of a US invasion. So this stuff about protecting his neighbors from invasion is hogwash.

Striking at the US would have been suicide, which is probably why he never did it in all those years, and there is no evidence that he planned to. Just going around saying "surely he would have, if he could" does not constitute evidence to that effect.

Lastly, "not an imminent threat to us but assuredly (we speculate without evidence) to someone at some time in the future" is nowhere near good enough to warrant bombing and invading a country.

2. "The cancerous Saddam regime was absolutely justifiably wiped off the map." Saddam Hussein was a despot. That fact does not justify bombing and invading the country. Also, despotism clearly does not factor into Washington's decisions on whom to bomb and whom to arm. If the Kurds are the issue, then we should have bombed Turkey also.

Yes, another loop, a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. I'm surprised more people don't see the irony. The US defies the UN, notes that the UN cannot stop it, and uses the UN's ineffectiveness as retroactive justification for defying the UN. It all comes down to a "you and what army" sort of argument.

I'm reminded of a headline a few years back in the Washington Post, when East Timor finally won its independence. The headline noted the White House's proclamation that the UN had not done enough to stop Indonesia from decades of slaughter in East Timor. That was technically true, but what was omitted was that it was Washington who blocked and stifled every UN resolution on the matter in question. Also the US who was supplying the arms required for the slaughter. So it's kind of funny that Washington would criticize the UN for ineffectiveness here.

And so it goes.

Whether the wars currently under way foster anyone's security is a subject worthy of intense scrutiny.

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What others say about boorite!

In case you're not reading the papers, boy are you missing some funny stuff. President Bush is framing the stepped-up guerrilla attacks on our troops as a sign of progress. Why? Because it shows how desperate the insurgents are becoming! I guess once we really have them on the run, they'll blow up Washington, and the President can declare total victory.

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What others say about boorite!

So now I have to agrue against boorite's interpretation of wirthling's interpretation of my arguments? Well..ok..

I keep telling you there was CIRCUMSTANTIAL evidence.
Not NO evidence.

quote:

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Striking at the US would have been suicide, which is probably why he never did it in all those years, and there is no evidence that he planned to. Just going around saying "surely he would have, if he could" does not constitute evidence to that effect.

Lastly, "not an imminent threat to us but assuredly (we speculate without evidence) to someone at some time in the future" is nowhere near good enough to warrant bombing and invading a country.

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Here's an editorial cartoon for you

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ken.kaufman@gmail.com

I got this: X

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I wanted my half in the middle and I wound up on the edge.

Wait... never mind.

HAHAHAHAHAHAH!

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I wanted my half in the middle and I wound up on the edge.

quote:

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I keep telling you there was CIRCUMSTANTIAL evidence.
Not NO evidence.

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Judging by your attitude, you have no idea what a real threat looks like.

Why are we even bothering what? Looking for WMD? I think I have said several times I don't know why Bush made that his main case for going to war (unless he really thought he was sure he could find something). I didn't know we were talking about looking for WMD. Or are you brining in yet another unrelated topic to give the illusion that you have a stronger argument.

quote:

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We suffered a suicide attack from al Qaeda, and so we may assume that Saddam Hussein will also launch one, and then bomb Iraq in self-defense? That doesn't even pretend to make sense.

The truth is, suicide attacks have never been Saddam's modus operandi, nor the MO of heads of state generally. (We are, however, suffering losses from suicide attacks now that we have invaded. If you squint really hard, maybe you'll see the irony.)

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quote:

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Why are we even bothering what?

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BTW, the no-fly zones were imposed unilaterally by the US. They are not part of any UN sanctions or resolutions. Also, those sanctions were mostly lifted as of nearly a year before the latest US invasion; States were authorized to sell Iraq goods not appearing on the Goods Review List of military-related goods or commodities. And looking at this Goods Review List, I don't see anything resembling a prohibition on Playstation 2 technology. Sounds like bullshit to me. Wonder what radio station you heard that one on.

Makk, are you sure the Iraq-US thing is a topic that interests you in a serious way?

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What others say about boorite!

Jesus. I found the source for the Playstation 2 thing. WorldNet Daily (founded 1997!) said the FBI and Customs were worried about it back in 2000. A quote:

This is truly frightening, because I could injure myself laughing. I'm sure a bunch of PS-2's tied together is right up to battlefield specs wrt operating temperature, vibration, radiation shielding... hahahaha. What the fuck "intelligence source" said this?

Not surprisingly, anyone with a brain wrote the story off as balls, and nothing more was made of it, that I can tell. Probably a PR grab for Sony.

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What others say about boorite!

quote:

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Looking for WMD? I think I have said several times I don't know why Bush made that his main case for going to war (unless he really thought he was sure he could find something).
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To scare Congress and the American people into going along with this dumb war, silly.

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