The babyjesuschristsuperstar on Board: filling the moral void of Clinton’s legacy

[bilmore]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
OTOH, it's clear that the presence of our troops is aggravating some problems, and the Iraqis may not get as serious about solving their security problems as long as we are there to keep shooting at the insurgents. (The same people who love to talk about the disincentives created by welfare seem to have a very hard time understanding this.)

When you brother was on the roof, did you think that pulling down the ladder would make him taller?

[bilmore]

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by bilmore
When you brother was on the roof, did you think that pulling down the ladder would make him taller?

By this metaphor, getting the Iraqis to take over the counter-insurgency has always been a pipe dream.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by bilmore
First, I dispute your main point - that we have a "mess" now. We have free elections in Iraq, we have plastic shredders shredding plastic, and we have the beginnings of a move towards democracy and, hopefully (and in my mind, likely) more stability in the entire region.

We can talk about elections, but we indisputably have less stability in Iraq and in the region. Iraq's borders and existence are in question now.

If everyone had known this was how things would look, there would have been very little support for an invasion.

Maybe it will still come to a decent outcome, but I doubt it. I guess I'm being conservative instead of hopeful.

Second, what you just described is what everyone does to get their way in our system. Look at the numbers put out by the R's and the D's to support anything - take SS privitization, for example. Both sides put out numbers that were, at best, fanciful. Both sides chose to present those facts that best supported their desires, and ignore the ones that militated against them. Did Bush do just such a selling job in service to what he wanted to do in Iraq? Yep. Didn't the anti-warites do their own version of the anti-sell at that same time? Yep. Remember the vote after the dust settled? We're in Iraq. Want real lies? Look at "the new hawk" Murtha, and the coordinated response by the D's calling him just that. That's not even spin - that's outright lying. Geez, for an honorless cohort to call another cohort honorless is just so much fun to watch.

Bush put out fanciful "facts" when he did his selling job of the war. But it's OK because everyone does it. Got it. I'm appalled, but I've got it. Me, I prefer my democracy somewhat more Madisonian, but I guess I'm just old-skool that way.

If I ever change my mind, you can tell me where to get my "Bush Lied -- So What?" bumpersticker.

[taxwonk]

Originally posted by sgtclub
I think it's clear that they wanted to go in pre-9/11, but for the same reasons they proferred post. I believe they honestly believed Saddam was a real threat and needed to be deposed. 9/11 gave them all the momentum they needed to carry it out. But I really can't blame Bush. Per the Woodward book, he was being told by his minions that it was a "slam dunk." Hearing that type of evidence, it would have been gross mismanagement not to do something.



I agree about the incentives, but that has to be weighed against actual readiness. Pulling out completely would be a catostrophic mistake. Drawing down may give the incentives needed.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds a lot like you just agreed with a lot of what I posted,

[Spanky]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
If you think it was OK for Bush to lie to the country to lead it into war, why not just say so instead of continuing to talk about Clinton? I'm not defending Clinton.

Roosevelt saying he would do whatever he could to keep us out of war. Nixon saying he had a secret plan to end the war in Vietnam. All this stuff I don't care about. I don't care about a president lying to get us into a war, I just care whether the war is a good idea.

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop No, it shows that we live in a democracy. Those of you who think that those principles are something to be dragged out every two years on Election Day and otherwise ignored are, thankfully, a minority in this country. Most of us expect our leaders to tell the truth, especially when they are asking young men and women to sacrifice their lives for the rest of us.

I am sorry but I think that is really naive. When it comes to national security President have to play games and tell lies. If they do not then they aren't good statesment. Luckily, I can't think of a single president since 1932 that has been honest with the American public about national security.

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
What do you think congressional Democrats should be saying and doing re the war and Iraq? (Answer as an American citizen, not a Democrat or Republican.)

If you are going to fight a war, then fight to win. We need to send more troops.

Once we have made a decision to go in we have to take responsibility for it. We need to spend more money fixing the countrys infrastructure.

The future well being of Iraq is not worth a single american life.

We should pull out now even though that will hurt the Iraqi people. Strategically we have no interest in Iraq. Foreign policy can not be based on altruism.

[Spanky]

Ann Coulter claims that:

"As noted here previously, George Clooney's movie "Good Night, and Good Luck," about pious parson Edward R. Murrow and Sen. Joseph McCarthy, failed to produce one person unjustly accused by McCarthy. Since I described McCarthy as a great American patriot defamed by liberals in my 2003 book, "Treason," liberals have had two more years to produce a person — just one person — falsely accused by McCarthy. They still can't do it."

There has to be someone. Isn't there?

[Spanky]

This is how you critisize the Republican party............


Grand Old Spenders

The storm-tossed and rudderless Republican Party should particularly ponder the vote last week in Dover, Pa., where all eight members of the school board seeking reelection were defeated. This expressed the community's wholesome exasperation with the board's campaign to insinuate religion, in the guise of "intelligent design" theory, into high school biology classes, beginning with a required proclamation that evolution "is not a fact."


But it is. And President Bush's straddle on that subject — "both sides" should be taught — although intended to be anodyne, probably was inflammatory, emboldening social conservatives. Dover's insurrection occurred as Kansas's Board of Education, which is controlled by the kind of conservatives who make conservatism repulsive to temperate people, voted 6 to 4 to redefine science. The board, opening the way for teaching the supernatural, deleted from the definition of science these words: "a search for natural explanations of observable phenomena."


"It does me no injury," said Thomas Jefferson, "for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg." But it is injurious, and unneighborly, when zealots try to compel public education to infuse theism into scientific education. The conservative coalition, which is coming unglued for many reasons, will rapidly disintegrate if limited-government conservatives become convinced that social conservatives are unwilling to concentrate their character-building and soul-saving energies on the private institutions that mediate between individuals and government, and instead try to conscript government into sectarian crusades.


But, then, the limited-government impulse is a spent force in a Republican Party that cannot muster congressional majorities to cut the growth of Medicaid from 7.3 to 7 percent next year. That "cut" was too draconian for some Republican "moderates." But, then, most Republicans are moderates as that term is used by persons for whom it is an encomium: Moderates are people amiably untroubled by Washington's single-minded devotion to rent-seeking — to bending government for the advantage of private factions.


Conservatives have won seven of 10 presidential elections, yet government waxes, with per-household federal spending more than $22,000 per year, the highest in inflation-adjusted terms since World War II. Federal spending — including a 100 percent increase in education spending since 2001 — has grown twice as fast under President Bush as under President Bill Clinton, 65 percent of it unrelated to national security.


In 1991, the 546 pork projects in the 13 appropriation bills cost $3.1 billion. In 2005, the 13,997 pork projects cost $27.3 billion, for things such as improving the National Packard Museum in Warren, Ohio (Packard, an automobile brand, died in 1958).


Washington subsidizes the cost of water to encourage farmers to produce surpluses that trigger a gusher of government spending to support prices. It is almost comforting that $2 billion is spent each year paying farmers not to produce. Farm subsidies, most of which go to agribusinesses and affluent farmers, are just part of the $60 billion in corporate welfare that dwarfs the $29 billion budget of the Department of Homeland Security.


Brian Riedl of the Heritage Foundation reports that Congress responded to the Korean War by setting priorities, cutting one-fourth of all non-war spending in one year . Recently the House failed to approve an unusually ambitious effort to cut government growth . This is today's ambitiousness: attempting — probably unsuccessfully — to cut government growth by $54 billion over five years.


That is $10.8 billion a year from five budgets projected to total $12.5 trillion, of which $54 billion is four-tenths of 1 percent. War is hell, but on the home front it is indistinguishable from peace, except that the government is more undisciplined than ever.


Gerard Alexander of the University of Virginia wonders whether conservatives' cohesion is perishing because it was a product of the period when conservatives were insurgents against dominant liberals. About limited-government conservatism, he says:


"Perhaps conservatives were naive to expect any party, ever, to resist rent-seeking temptations when in power. Just as there always was something fatally unserious about socialism — its flawed understanding of human nature — is it possible that there has also been something profoundly unserious about the limited-government agenda? Should we now be prepared for the national electoral wing of the conservative movement — the House and Senate caucuses and executive branch officials — to identify with legislation like the pork-laden energy and transportation bills, in the same way that liberals came to ground their identities in programs like Social Security?"


Perhaps. But if so, limited-government conservatives will dissociate from a Republican Party more congenial to overreaching social conservatives. Then those Republican congressional caucuses will be smaller, and Republican control of the executive branch will be rarer.

[Not Bob]

Originally posted by Spanky
This is what I said:

If a Republican had lied under oath, especially in the way Clinton did the Republicans would have forced him to resign.

Iran-Contra suggests otherwise.

[Not Bob]

Originally posted by Spanky
Ann Coulter claims that:

"As noted here previously, George Clooney's movie "Good Night, and Good Luck," about pious parson Edward R. Murrow and Sen. Joseph McCarthy, failed to produce one person unjustly accused by McCarthy. Since I described McCarthy as a great American patriot defamed by liberals in my 2003 book, "Treason," liberals have had two more years to produce a person — just one person — falsely accused by McCarthy. They still can't do it."

There has to be someone. Isn't there?

How about Fred Fisher, the Hale & Dorr lawyer who was accused by McCarthy of being a communist because he volunteered for the National Lawyers Guild? (This accusation is what led Joseph Welch to say "have you no sense of shame?" to McCarthy during the Army hearings.)

Spanky, I suggest that you read a book by famed trial lawyer Louis Nizer called "The Jury Returns." He represented a radio entertainer named John Henry Faulk whose career was destroyed when an anti-communist pressure group succeeded in getting his sponsors to drop him and CBS to fire him. http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/.../FF/ffa36.html

[sgtclub]

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satelli...cle%2FShowFull

[Spanky]

Originally posted by Not Bob
How about Fred Fisher, the Hale & Dorr lawyer who was accused by McCarthy of being a communist because he volunteered for the National Lawyers Guild? (This accusation is what led Joseph Welch to say "have you no sense of shame?" to McCarthy during the Army hearings.)

Was Fred Fisher a communist?

Originally posted by Not Bob
Spanky, I suggest that you read a book by famed trial lawyer Louis Nizer called "The Jury Returns." He represented a radio entertainer named John Henry Faulk whose career was destroyed when an anti-communist pressure group succeeded in getting his sponsors to drop him and CBS to fire him. http://www.tsha.utexas.edu/handbook/.../FF/ffa36.html

Was John Henry Faulk a communist?

I have no problem with communists lives being destroyed. If they want the violent overthrow of the U.S. government I have no problem with people boycotting them or refusing to hire them.

[taxwonk]

Originally posted by Spanky
Ann Coulter claims that:

"As noted here previously, George Clooney's movie "Good Night, and Good Luck," about pious parson Edward R. Murrow and Sen. Joseph McCarthy, failed to produce one person unjustly accused by McCarthy. Since I described McCarthy as a great American patriot defamed by liberals in my 2003 book, "Treason," liberals have had two more years to produce a person — just one person — falsely accused by McCarthy. They still can't do it."

There has to be someone. Isn't there?

Whether there is or not, who cares? Many of the people wose lives were destroyed by McCarthy were members of organizations that professed admiration for some of the ideals of communism in the 20s and 30s.

What made McCarthy so inherently evil, and what makes Coulter just as evil, is the fact that what people may have thought or flirted with in their youth does not make them enemies of America. Demonizing people for exercising their First Amendment rights does make McCarthy and Coulter enemies of America.

[Spanky]

After a little digging it turns out that Herbert Brownell, Jr., While the Attorney General, referred to the Lawyers Guild, "the legal bulwark of the Communist Party".

Later KGB documents revealed that the guild had received money from the Soviets. Fred Fischer was a member of that organization.

McCarthy pointed out that Fischer was a member of an organiztion that had communist sympathies. What is worng with that? What people have been upset if McCarthy had revealed that Fischer was part of an organization that had Nazi sympathies. I doubt it.

Ann Coulter is usually over the top, but is she right about this. Did he not falsley accuse anyone of being a communist?

[Spanky]

Originally posted by taxwonk
Whether there is or not, who cares? Many of the people wose lives were destroyed by McCarthy were members of organizations that professed admiration for some of the ideals of communism in the 20s and 30s.

What made McCarthy so inherently evil, and what makes Coulter just as evil, is the fact that what people may have thought or flirted with in their youth does not make them enemies of America. Demonizing people for exercising their First Amendment rights does make McCarthy and Coulter enemies of America.

Correct me if I am wrong here, but if they had just said that they had been members of these organizations but now see the errors in their ways, and disavow the communist party it would have been no problem.

The problem was these people would not admit to being members or disavoe the communist party. They were never jailed or had their rights infringed. They just were not given jobs by studios who did not want to hire communists or communists sympathizers.

And remember, these were people that were part of an organization that was receiving money from a foreign power and was promoting the violent overthrow the U.S. Government and insituting a dictatorship.

Again, if this had happened to Nazis or Nazi sympathysers I don't think there would have ever been a problem.