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legionnaire

legionnaire

Belgium
November 2003

AUG 31, 2005 08:49 PM

skankzor said:
Pics from the speech are coming in now:



OK, that's fucking hilarious.

franklychris

franklychris

United Kingdom
January 2005

AUG 31, 2005 09:00 PM



Nuff Said!

(Though I hate insulting monkeys!) biggrin

bpatrick

bpatrick

Tampa, FL
March 2004

AUG 31, 2005 09:02 PM

skankzor said:

cjensen said:
I'm curious to know what Howard Dean and
his ilk would do to win this war if they were in the
White House. Maybe John Kerry could suit up again
and command a swift boat in the Persian Gulf or
on the Tigris? The party that gave us a divided
Korea, a 50 year long stalemate in the Cold War
AND defeat in Vietnam apparently are quite the
military strategists.




Wesley Clark said back in 03 that we should have sent in twice as many troops as we actually sent to Iraq to ensure victory. And General Clark is pretty well qualified to make that sort of call.




The same Wesley Clark who voted Republican
until he changed parties a few months before
jumping into the Democratic primaries? The same
Wesley Clark who was criticized for being too
Republican by his fellow Democrats in the pri-
maries? The same Wesley Clark who consistently
flip-flopped on the war all through the primaries?
Come on..Wesley Clark served his country and
for that deserves credit..but on the current war
his credibility is a little..tarnished, wouldn't you say?

battlin_albright

battlin_albright

Dayton, OH
June 2004

AUG 31, 2005 09:20 PM

It's good to know that Bush is just as good at making analogies as he is at leading the country...

evolution

evolution

Canada
November 2003

AUG 31, 2005 11:36 PM

cjensen said:

skankzor said:

cjensen said:
I'm curious to know what Howard Dean and
his ilk would do to win this war if they were in the
White House. Maybe John Kerry could suit up again
and command a swift boat in the Persian Gulf or
on the Tigris? The party that gave us a divided
Korea, a 50 year long stalemate in the Cold War
AND defeat in Vietnam apparently are quite the
military strategists.




Wesley Clark said back in 03 that we should have sent in twice as many troops as we actually sent to Iraq to ensure victory. And General Clark is pretty well qualified to make that sort of call.




The same Wesley Clark who voted Republican
until he changed parties a few months before
jumping into the Democratic primaries? The same
Wesley Clark who was criticized for being too
Republican by his fellow Democrats in the pri-
maries? The same Wesley Clark who consistently
flip-flopped on the war all through the primaries?
Come on..Wesley Clark served his country and
for that deserves credit..but on the current war
his credibility is a little..tarnished, wouldn't you say?



The worst thing about politics is how so many issues are forced into black & white distinctions, or at least through public perception and media coverage they are.

But I would expect a former four-star general to have a better grasp of war strategy then Presidential politics anyhow.

[Edited on Sep 01, 2005 by evolution]

AceTracer

acetracer

Hollywood, FL
January 2004

AUG 31, 2005 11:40 PM

It disturbs me that we have a USS Ronald Reagan aircraft carrier.

filmnoir1

filmnoir1

Los Angeles, CA
April 2004

AUG 31, 2005 11:46 PM

Pure insanity -

freshprncebelair

freshprncebelair

Ellicott City, MD
June 2004

SEP 01, 2005 06:31 AM

evolution said:

But I would expect a former four-star general to have a better grasp of war strategy then Presidential politics anyhow.

[Edited on Sep 01, 2005 by evolution]



Additionally, he actually wrote a book about winning wars like Iraq. I would definitely liked to see him in office over Bush. He probably could have turned around the Iraq situation, as he knows what he is doing.


cjensen said:
The same Wesley Clark who voted Republican
until he changed parties a few months before
jumping into the Democratic primaries? The same
Wesley Clark who was criticized for being too
Republican by his fellow Democrats in the pri-
maries? The same Wesley Clark who consistently
flip-flopped on the war all through the primaries?
Come on..Wesley Clark served his country and
for that deserves credit..but on the current war
his credibility is a little..tarnished, wouldn't you say?



If a man who voted republican all his life decided to run against the republican president at the time, I feel that definitely reflects on his opinion of how Bush handled things.

NickFaust

NickFaust

USA
April 2004

SEP 01, 2005 07:20 AM

George W. Bush is an incompentent, and inveterate putz.

The best thing that he can do for air quality in the US is to stop breathing it.

RustyShackelford

RustyShackelford

I'm lost
April 2005

SEP 01, 2005 08:35 AM

Yes, I hope we lose so that George Bush will be taugh a lesson. Stupid evil Republicans. blah blah blah

stockula

stockula

Anchorage, AK
May 2003

SEP 01, 2005 12:18 PM

legionnaire said:

While I may lack the insight into military history that the president commands, it's hard for me to understand how the German/Japanese combination of fascist and imperialist militaristic expansion in the second world war can possibly be compared with the ragtag bunch of insurgents blowing up cars and taking potshots at soldiers for a murky combination of ideologies in modern day Iraq.



What Bush means is is that al-qaeda is motivated by an encompassing totalitarian ideology not unlike the Nazis and the communists were. The war in Iraq is a facet, a battle in that war.

I held back on responding responding to your glib and snarky news item, because the tone of your article is so unserious about a very serious issue. I didn't want to go through the effort of explaining what Bush meant, the nature of the terrorist enemy today and how he's a lot like the Nazis and communists of the past to someone who probably wasn't interested in actually understanding these sorts of issues or the nature of the enemy and what motivates him. But I found a post on a blog that pretty much makes my point, and provides new insight as to why the Left doesn't take the terrorist threat seriously today. The French Left in the 1930's didn't take Hitler seriously as a threat either. In fact, they thought he had a lot of legitimate grievances.

True Believers

Reader DL sends an excerpt from Paul Berman's recent Terror and Liberalism who "puts his liberal credentials on the line ... by critiquing the left while presenting a liberal rationale for the war on terror". Berman believes the Left should have arrived at a logical opposition to radical Islamism independently because:

... Islamism (is) a totalitarian reaction against Western liberalism in a class with Nazism and communism ... Berman delineates how all three movements descended from utopian visions (in the case of Islamism, the restoration of a pure seventh-century Islam) into irrational cults of death.

In a word the Left would logically be expected to oppose Osama Bin Laden because it represents everything Berman thinks the Left has fought against since it's inception. The question Berman tries to answer is why the precise opposite has happened. To get a handle on the problem he dissects the failure of the 1930s French Left to resolutely oppose Hitler. On pages 124-128 Berman says:

Blum and his supporters regarded Hitler and the Nazis with horror ... But mostly they remembered the First World War ... They grew thoughtful, therefore. They did not wish to reduce Germany in all its Teutonic complexity to black-and-white terms of good and evil. ... And, having analyzed the German scene in that manner, the anti-war Socialists concluded that Hitler and the Nazis, in railing against the great powers and the Treaty of Versailles, did make some legitimate arguments ... Why not look for ways to conciliate the outraged German people and, in that way, to conciliate the Nazis? ...

The anti-war Socialists of France did not think they were being cowardly or unprincipled in making those arguments. On the contrary, they ... regarded themselves as exceptionally brave and honest. They felt that courage and radicalism allowed them to peer beneath the surface of events and identify the deeper factors at work in international relations-the truest danger facing France. This danger, in their judgment, did not come from Hitler and the Nazis, not principally. The truest danger came from the warmongers and arms manufacturers of France itself ... who stood to benefit in material ways from a new war. ... But the political arguments rested on something deeper, too -- a philosophical belief; profound, large, and attractive ... that, in the modern world, even the enemies of reason cannot be the enemies of reason. Even the unreasonable must be, in some fashion, reasonable.

The belief underlying those anti-war arguments was, in short, an unyielding faith in universal rationality. ... And, stirred by that antique idea, the anti-war Socialists gazed across the Rhine and simply refused to believe ... in a political movement whose animating principles were paranoid conspiracy theories, blood-curdling hatreds, medieval superstitions, and the lure of murder. At Auschwitz the SS said, "Here there is no why."


That grimly hilarious punchline was not exclusive to Auschwitz. Piers Brendon recalls in Dark Valley, his history of the 1930s, that the most common scrawl left by doomed Old Bolsheviks at Lubyanka prison were the words "What For?" But more poignant yet was the refusal of some Party members, exiled to Magadan, the worst camp of the Gulag, to smuggle news to their comrades of their fate. One said, 'at least now they still have hope in Communism. If I let them know the truth then they will have nothing'. Even in Magadan the Left's deepest need was to believe. Having abolished the God of their forefathers and finding themselves prostrate before the false god they fashioned for themselves, as between extinction and despair they chose extinction. But back to Berman.

... among the anti-war Socialists, a number of people, having voted with Petain, took the logical next step and, on patriotic an idealistic grounds, accepted positions in his new government, at Vichy. Some of those Socialists went a little further, too, and began to see a virtue in Petain's program for a new France and a new Europe-a program for strength and virility, a Europe ruled by a single-party state instead of by the corrupt cliques of bourgeois democracy, a Europe cleansed of the impurities of Judaism and of the Jews themselves, a Europe of the anti-liberal imagination. And, in that very remarkable fashion, a number of the anti-war Socialists of France came full circle. They had begun as defenders of liberal values and human rights, and they evolved into defenders of bigotry, tyranny, superstition, and mass murder. They were democratic leftists who, through the miraculous workings of the slippery slope and a naïve faith in the rationalism of all things, ended as fascists. Long ago, you say? Not so long ago.

[Edited on Sep 01, 2005 12:23PM]

sixbysix

sixbysix

United Kingdom
December 2004

SEP 01, 2005 12:31 PM

Which side exactly are we analagous to in this WWII comparison?

Will the people of England string up Tony & Cherie by their ankles in Leicester Square?

norritt

norritt

Mesa, AZ
December 2002

SEP 01, 2005 01:48 PM

skankzor said:


cjensen said:
The same Wesley Clark who voted Republican
until he changed parties a few months before
jumping into the Democratic primaries? The same
Wesley Clark who was criticized for being too
Republican by his fellow Democrats in the pri-
maries? The same Wesley Clark who consistently
flip-flopped on the war all through the primaries?
Come on..Wesley Clark served his country and
for that deserves credit..but on the current war
his credibility is a little..tarnished, wouldn't you say?



If a man who voted republican all his life decided to run against the republican president at the time, I feel that definitely reflects on his opinion of how Bush handled things.



good point

Cash

Cash

USA
OLD SKOOL

SEP 01, 2005 01:54 PM

FreakPirate said:
And Bush is no Roosevelt.



He's the opposite of Roosevelt. FDR was dead from the waist down.....

Kosomot

kosomot

Pompano Beach, FL
November 2003

SEP 01, 2005 01:56 PM

Ah ha, You said "Bush thinks" tongue tongue tongue tongue tongue

Schismatic_God

Schismatic_God

Houston, TX
March 2005

SEP 06, 2005 02:42 AM

I would just like to ask this question, how many of you all think that this country is headed for a cival war?

Arrus

Arrus

Olathe, KS
March 2005

SEP 06, 2005 03:27 AM

Hmmmmm.......

Deux

Deux

Oak Grove, KY
January 2003

SEP 06, 2005 04:28 AM

I wonder if he thinks of the New Orleans situation as "Waterworld."

Let's face it, the man has no fucking idea what he's doing, or what the will of the people is. I hope against hope that his bullshit response to the Katrina disaster marks the death knell of his political career. Bush's only interests in being president are (in order) vacationing while storms hit and the casualties mount in Iraq, placiting his House of Saud interests, increasing the debt of the federal budget, and making empty promises in his public appearances. I think nearly everyone here would agree with me that America hasn't had a president this corrupt since Nixon, and this useless since Coolidge. I truly cannot fathom how anyone can still support the man's politics.

And, you know, things are pretty bad when even Trent Lott is starting to point fingers...

Whatever happened to "of the people, for the people and by the people?"

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