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| 2004/3/18 [Politics/Domestic/President/Bush] UID:12739 Activity:low |
3/17 http://www.democraticunderground.com/articles/04/03/13_trifecta.html Bush *laughed* and made a *joke* out of 9/11! At fund raisers! \_ the same way the Passion reminds me of the Lord's sacrifice, the casket reminds me that we are still at war and it's not over. \_ I visit this site every once and a while for a laugh. If you search google one finds repeated posts that wish for the death of US soldiers and further terrorist attacks because we deserve it. They deify Castro, Che, Chavez, and de Silva. The site consists of the residual scum of the 1960's and counter-culture adolescents whose every third word is an expletive. Their notion of of a meaningful political message is F*CK BUSH. \_ let me guess, you are the anonymous motd freeper? \_ this is a high quality site which tells the truth about what is really going on. if you can't deal with the truth then you get what you deserve when BushCo and Ashcroft finish destroying the few rights you have left you punk. \_ ahahah. the clueless abound \_ Actually, that smells much more of troll than of clueless. \_ Do you actually believe this or are you being sarcastic again? Can you provide any evidence of any of this? \_ Yes I visit the board fairly often. Search on Google I'm not going to do it for you. That guy Will Pitt was going to appear on CNN in the months after 9/11 until the inflamatory anti-American rhetoric he was spewing was publicized. \_ you're not smart enough to understand the value the site brings to the net. you're also dodging the issue raised by the op about Bush making a big fucking fund raising joke about the 3000 deaths he caused. \_ Give me a url that backs up your claims. This was the first thing I read there: http://www.democraticunderground.com/auntie/04/129.html It is not profane and pretty anti-communist. \_ http://csua.org/u/6hd http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=110004262 \_ I'm not sure I get the point of this second link. \_ Fair enough. I thought you meant in the articles, not the discussion board. \_ Although I gotta say, the guy who wrote this webpage is freakin' nuts. Reading this I can almost feel him foaming at the mouth and slobbering all over the keyboard as he writes. \_ OMG! There are people with extreme opinions on the internet? Shut it down, man! Shut it down before someone gets hurt! \_ Sounded like a reasonable and fair criticism to me. Bush is "mean". \_ So you agree that we need more democraticunderground urls on the motd to keep the motd "fair and balanced"? |
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| www.democraticunderground.com/articles/04/03/13_trifecta.html March 13, 2004 By Jack MacMillan Lily Tomlin once observed, No matter how cynical you get, you cant keep up. Who could keep up with the stunning audacity of Bushs decision to pose with the image of a victims flag-draped casket? Didnt he know how shocking that would be for families still in mourning? This self-serving exploitation of their loss was so blatantly manipulative that it seemed almost calculated to reinforce the deep cynicism so many citizens feel about the political process. Would the White House re-election team openly break the presidents promise to the contrary and blatantly exploit this tragedy without anticipating a negative reaction? Or is it possible that this blunder was intentional, just another in a long series of Republican efforts to reinforce voter cynicism by reminding us that politicians are the lowest form of life and that politics is a business too vile to be worthy of our attention? Republicans built their resurgence on public cynicism toward government. For a generation theyve promoted the view that government is an evil institution and that everyone who serves in office does so for selfish reasons. Could their crass decision to exploit a flag-draped coffin be just another effort to promote that larger theme? Or is it our cynicism that makes such things possible, paralyzing our responses and clearing the way for the worst in public life? While unemployment rose, shattered families mourned, and bombs still fell in Afghanistan, Bush turned to his budget director, Mitch Daniels, and said, Lucky me. Instead, Bush turned it into a laugh line at a series of private fundraisers. Time and again it served as the punch line for the most tasteless joke ever told. You see, both the president and his well-heeled contributors knew that he could not sustain their massive tax cuts without shifting the cost to the remaining taxpayers - the middle class - by running massive deficits. You know, I was campaigning in Chicago and somebody asked me, is there ever any time where the budget might have to go into deficit? I said only if we were at war or had a national emergency or were in recession. Thats why the transcript shows the strange notation Laughter when he mentions war, national emergency, and recession. And why they laugh again when he happily calls them a trifecta - racetrack jargon for three lucky winners in a row! Combat deaths, civilian mayhem, and unemployment for millions were, from the perspective of Bush and his audiences, a lucky combination. The winning tickets that would pay off with cash for his contributors - and the political clout the President could use to make their winnings permanent! Bush repeated this joke a dozen times in front of select audiences that saw the joke. Laughed at the unemployed, laughed at the dead, and laughed at the families who mourned them. Laughed at the irony of three disasters that gave them the power to enforce the largest transfer of wealth in the history of the world. Laughed at the prospect of enabling the wealthiest members of American society to secede from the social union, never to pay taxes again, while the inattentive herd was left to pay the costs and shed the blood necessary to sustain their wealth. And theyre laughing now at the fact that were too cynical to care. The White house team has such faith in our indifference - and such trust in the protection afforded by our cynicism - that they keep the transcripts in plain view on the White House website, confident that very few will care enough to read or decode them. So when you next see Bush in his commercials, surrounded by those images of war, disaster, and recession, remember how he really sees them. |
| www.democraticunderground.com/auntie/04/129.html Ask Auntie Pinko March 4, 2004 Dear Auntie Pinko, I just saw the movie The Fog of War about Robert McNamara and the US involvement in Vietnam. I think from how you write you are old enough to remember the Vietnam era, so maybe you can help I apologize if youre not that old. And are there really a lot of similarities between Vietnam and Iraq? I am indeed old enough to remember Vietnam but it doesnt feel that old to me. One thing that helps to understand why America made the mistakes it did over Vietnam is to remember that in 1963 there were nuclear warheads a few hundred miles off the coast of Florida. Those warheads were owned by a power that was openly hostile to the United States, and they were attached to missiles that could have reached millions of Americans with almost no warning at all. And people closely associated that sense of menace with the countries that were called communist - the Soviet Union and China. Aunties not going to get into the difference between those autocratic tyrannies that called themselves communist to give a thin veneer of ideological validity to their criminal activities, and real communism. Its enough to say that those governments twisted the very word communist into standing for everything antithetical to freedom, and when you add the threat of nuclear annihilation to that, you have a pretty powerful fear factor. You can read Barbara Tuchmans wonderful book The March of Folly for a blow-by-blow account of just exactly how we blundered into Vietnam. Our initial mistake was letting our friendship for France convince us that the end justified the means. Ho Chi Minh who was not enthusiastically communist at the time had offered us the opportunity to help the Vietnamese people establish self-government without colonial rule. But because the colonial power the Vietnamese were trying to remove was our friend France, we turned him down, and even offered France military assistance in trying to set up and maintain a puppet government that would respond to French and, presumably, American interests. When we turned him down, Ho Chi Minh looked for allies who werent friends with France. Even though the Vietnamese people were wary of Chinese colonialism, the French were the nearer and greater evil. And its possible that the positive aspects of real communism attracted him as a way to unify the Vietnamese peoples and give them a sense of nationhood and pride. But of course, all it took was the association of communism to turn Ho Chih Minh and the North Vietnamese into devils, complete with horns, hooves, and pointy tails, in Americas eyes. People really believed in the domino theory then, because they did not yet have much experience with the economic unworkability of communism as practiced by the Soviet Union and China. A dangerous powerhouse with plenty of real, documented, verified, were-not-hiding-them nuclear weapons. And a powerhouse with an openly hostile attitude toward the United States. The Gulf of Tonkin resolution was pretty much of a pretext, and everyone knew that, even then. But if Saddam Hussein looked dangerous enough to smack down, try to imagine how a communist Vietnam looked to most American eyes then. There were plenty of Americans who were saying it wasnt such a good idea, for many reasons. But the sentiment was overwhelmingly in favor of America holding the role of anti-communist standard bearer, and stopping the Red Tide wherever it threatened to break out. Getting into Vietnam was sort of like thinking youre going to make a beautiful dive into a pool, and having it go wrong and end up being a painful belly flop. Having made the political decision to intervene, the White House then thought it needed to control the Pentagons conduct of the war, with the primary goal of keeping the war acceptable to the American people. Auntie Pinko may be a pacifist, but even I know thats no way to fight a war. As long as it was clear that the American people did not support the war strongly enough to accept its full cost, the White House was never going to be able to give control to the military. Even if they did, by 1972 the price of achieving the goal might have been too high for the Pentagon. The terrible conscription and training process had seriously degraded the Armys effectiveness, and morale was low. While many South Vietnamese did fear the communist North, many more simply wanted all the soldiers to go home and let them rebuild their houses and replant their fields - what was left of them. Are you a liberal at a loss for words when those darned dittoheads babble their talking points at you? Or a conservative, who just cant understand those pesky liberals and their silliness? |
| csua.org/u/6hd -> www.democraticunderground.com/cgi-bin/duforum/duboard.cgi?az=show_thread&om=22307&forum=DCForumID61 Michael Kelly, the Atlantic Monthly editor-at-large and Washington Post columnist who abandoned the safety of editorial offices to cover the war in Iraq, has been killed while traveling with the Armys 3rd Infantry Division. Kelly, the first American journalist killed in the war, had also served as editor of the New Republic and National Journal. But his decision to join up with United States forces marked a return to his reporting roots, since he covered the first Persian Gulf War as a magazine freelancer and turned his observations into a book, Martyrs Day. While one Australian and two British journalists have been killed covering the war, Kellys death is the first among the 600 correspondents participating in the Pentagons embedding program. I found an archive of every one of his pieces for the last 2-3 years. I searched every editorial before and after the last election thanks a heck of a lot for making me go through that and the word Wellstone was not even mentioned. LAST EDITED ON Apr-04-03 AT 11:51 AM ET if you take the high road in politics anymore, youll find out that the bridge to the conscience of the american voter has been long washed away. The low road is the only one that has access to the proudly un -informed mindset of the american electorate these days. This warmongering chickenshit chickenhawk is more deserving of death than innocent Iraqi children. It will be good not having to see his stupid face on the editorial pages. He and others of his bent are the ones who hyped this slaughter, lets not forget that. They get drawn into these fucking up close an personal tear fests with the Right, while the Right laughs at the deaths of Leftists. Our humanitarianism for the wrong people is also why we lose every goddamn time. Shedding tears for Kelly makes about as much sense as US citizens mourning the death of Goebbels or some sychophant in WWII. I think the divisions are what it needed until these fascists bastards are gone. You dont win by crying everytime some cheerleader for fascism meets his maker. Kelly being gone is simply having one more mouth spewing this shit shut up. If you are not then maybe you should reevaluate what the hell your role is here. Just what in the hell do you namby pamby fools think is going on here? Do you not at this extremely late hour see how the Right gets your wringing your hands and dabbing at tears for them while laugh, laugh at you doing that and the deaths of those on the Left. If a Nazi propagandist seeks to convince his readership through deceit, misdirection and obfuscation that invasion of sovereign nations and wholesale murder is somehow patriotic, I will shed no tear at his demise. If an evil man, dies in commission of an evil he actively created and participated in, I will not shed a tear at his demise. What is ugly and repulsive is your comparison of Wellstone with Kelly. Especially when the sinners job is to convince young men to die and kill as mercenary soldiers, in an illegal invasion, aimed at increasing Brown and Roots bottom line. Especially when the direct result of this journalists actions serve to increase the membership of terrorist factions who aim to murder me and my family. With his death we have one less propagandist hypnotizing my country men to instigate death and destruction in the name of profit margins and imperialism under the guise of liberation. I am even more glad Kelly died in the commision of propogating the very evil which killed him. Sort of like I would be glad if an arsonist died in a fire he had set. Sort of like I would be glad if the gun of a stick up artist backfired and took his head off. Sort of like I would be glad if a Nazi gas chamber operator got locked in and gassed in his own gas chamber. Hopefully your neighbors will be as enlightened as you when the New World Order Fascists come knocking on your door some night. If I were your neighbor I would smile and wave as you were being hauled away. How surreal to be criticized for not delighting in the death of another. Its such a simple thing not to become as vicious as those who love war. And this is good: sentimentalism for sychophants, but if it is an emotion imparted to me, it is inaccurate. He was part of the cabal screaming that people who disagree with him politically are traitors and terrorist sympathizers , barely leaving it to the next lower sleaze level of the same propaganda machine to scream that those people should be killed. He hates people because they dont agree with him he must know they arent hateful, of course. Please post something where he said he wants someone who disagrees with him to die. Ive seen it here by you and your ilk, but Ive read more than one of his pieces and, bad as they are, I just never got the Fck em, they deserve to die message Ive seen here. You associate those who disagree with you politically to be filled with hatred, and therefore you feel hatred for them. But you still boil down to wanting him dead because he disagrees with you. Falsely accuse a man of not doing his chores as a young boy and you are a hatefull evil liar and want people to die. Post 165 said flat out he deserved to die because he hated Clinton and Gore. Some brilliant and supprisingly handsome Underground member said simply what a stupid thing to say and you took it upon yourself to disagree. I dont think youre clever at all, you just want to molest children . I dont need to be psychic to see you want to molest children, youve said it. I dont need to guess that you want to molest children, because you leap to the defense of those who molest children. Kelly never did any of us more harm than setting us in a bad mood after reading one of his absurd pieces of tripe. Now and then, someone like Kelly says something that actually sets me thinking that maybe hes got a point that needs to be addressed or even, on very rare occasions, that hes right and Im wrong. He was wrong - at least according to us - but he came by his views honestly. Whoever degrades another degrades me, And whatever is done or said returns at last to me. Sure, death is always sad but that is really an issue for those who either knew the man or admired him. But, I cant work up any grief myself-I didnt love him, and didnt like his work. That he published his diatribes against those like me who opposed this adventure that got him killed, contributed to the daily anxiety I deal with if my very conservative colleagues find out Im not pro-war. Because they repeat the mantra that anti-war pro-terrorist And, this is one of the men that spread that libel. You mourn him if you like, the fact that I am indifferent doesnt make me anymore of a monster than pro-peace made me pro-terrorist in Mr. The war is wrong because NOBODY should have been killed over this. Not a Bush ass-kisser like Kelly or the most gung-ho marine or even members of Husseins Republican Guard much less the poor innocents whove suffered. If we applaud the deaths of people like Kelly it makes us no better than Bush or Hussein. Kelly and maybe I would disliked him as much as I disliked his writings. Or maybe I would have liked him and simply agreed to disagree with him on politics. We cant decide that some people deserve to die because of who they are or what their politics are. He promoted this war, had the luxury of chosing to go for career or personal reasons and was old enough and experienced enough-he knew the risks. It is unfortunate, but of all the people there at the moment that I can focus sympathy on, I think innocent civilians and young enlisted men and women are in front of the line. You say these things gleefully about a journalist whose views you disagree with, but you refrain from condemning a mass murderer like Saddam Hussein who, might, just might have a bit more responsibility for having caused the deaths of innocent civilians in all of this? I said that grief for this man was a concern for his family and friends and that I was not joinging in-I neither knew him nor cared for his work which, by the way, very much effects me when he calls anyone with my opinion on an issue pro-terrorist Gleeful? If anything, it was detached indifference and generali... |
| www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=110004262 Note: Links were good at the time we posted this column, but they often go bad after a while. BY JAMES TARANTO Wednesday, November 5, 2003 11:00 am EST Vote for the Crook. Louisiana has an odd system of elections, in which all candidates of all parties run in an open primary. If no one gets 50 of the vote, the top two finishers-sometimes of different parties, sometimes not-face each other in a runoff. In 1991 this produced a horrific outcome: a runoff for governor pitting Democrat Edwin Edwards, a notoriously corrupt former governor, against nominal Republican David Duke, a neo-Nazi whose main political experience was in the Ku Klux Klan. This match-up gave rise to the legendary political slogan Vote for the crook, its important. In retrospect, this might have been confusing, since Duke also turned out to be a crook; Voting for the crook has not always worked out well for the Democrats. In Louisiana, David Duke faded into obscurity, and in 1995 the state elected a Republican governor, Mike Foster, who won a second term in 1999. This year Bobby Jindal, a GOP candidate whos about as different from Duke as can be imagined-hes the son of immigrants from India-looks to have a good chance to win. Letting Clinton off the hook likewise proved costly for Democrats. Had the Senate convicted Clinton, or had fellow Democrats induced him to resign la Nixon, Al Gore would have become president. In 2000, President Gore would have had the advantage of incumbency, and the taint of Clintons wrongdoing would have been far less. Given how close that election was, its a near certainty that had Bill Clinton been ousted in 1999, Al Gore would be president today. If the Democrats do as badly a year from now as some think they will, Vote for the crook, its important may have relegated the party to long-term minority status. As to what will happen in Philadelphia, we dont dare hazard a guess. Meanwhile, as the New York Sun reports, New York City voters wisely rejected a measure pushed by Mayor Mike Bloomberg that would have established a Louisiana-style system of nonpartisan voting, with a free-for-all primary followed by a runoff between the two top finishers. This makes it a lot less likely that Al Sharpton, the Big Apples version of David Duke, will ever end up in a general election for mayor. Lincolns Party Surges in South Last month, when California tossed out Gov. Gray Davis, a Democrat, and elected Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger to take his place, Terry McAuliffe, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, hilariously tried to spin his partys crushing loss as an example of anti-incumbent sentiment that somehow portends defeat for President Bush next year. George Bush and Karl Rove have got to wish this thing never happened, McAuliffe told The Wall Street Journal at the time. Ronnie Musgrove of Mississippi lost to Haley Barbour, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee. We searched the Web in vain for comments by McAuliffe attributing Musgroves defeat to anti-incumbent anger, but McAuliffe has been uncharactistically silent. We did, however, find this Robert Novak column from last week: No prominent national Democrat dares set foot in the state to help re-elect Gov. He would meet Bill Clinton or Al Gore at the state line to keep them out. But that does not mean this election is unimportant for the Democrats. National Chairman Terry McAuliffe has spread the word that defeating so prominent a Republican in the Deep South would pave the way for defeating President Bush nationwide next year. Republicans picked up another governorship, in Kentucky, where Rep. Ernie Fletcher beat Attorney General Ben Chandler for an open seat that had been in Democratic hands since 1971. This means so far this year the GOP has picked up three governorships for a nationwide edge of 28-21, with the Louisiana race still pending. The GOPs victories in Kentucky and Mississippi bode well for the partys hopes of expanding its Senate majority next year, since a quartet of currently Democratic open seats in the South is the linchpin of that effort. Democrats, on the other hand, will take comfort in John Streets Philadelphia victory and the results in the New Jersey legislative races, which gave the Dems control of both houses the state Senate had been evenly divided. But its hard to discern any nationwide trend from an election that involved so few states. Exit Polls Show Some Voting Party Straight-Ticket-headline, Jackson Miss. Pat Roberts, the Kansas Republican who serves as the committees chairman, describes the memo as a road map for how the Democrats intend to politicize what should be a bipartisan, objective review of prewar intelligence. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, disclaims the memo: The draft memo was not approved nor was it shared with any member of the Senate Intelligence Committee or anyone else. It was likely taken from a waste basket or through unauthorized computer access. Dems Gone Wild-III Reader William Hoyt makes a good point about the Charlie Brown analogy we employed yesterday in regard to Democratic futility: Charlie Brown was a really nice kid, while the Democrats are nasty bigots. The second and more crucial difference is that Lucy really did have a football. The Democrats may think they see scandal and conspiracy everywhere, but really there is nothing there. The Democrats remind me of a chronic drunk going through delirium tremens. The drunk may see monsters and pink elephants everywhere, but its just in his head, and purely the result of his own misbehavior. On the Angry Left Web site Democratic Underground , someone calling herself Starpass explains why I hope the bloodshed continues in Iraq quoted verbatim: I wont be hypocritcal. It is politically correct, particularly in any Dem discussion to hope and pray and feel for our troops and scream bring them back now. Im a 58 year old broad and I can tell you that what is going on in our country isnt the usual ebb and flow of politics where one party is in power and then another; It occured to me that all the bump that Bush got late last week from the economic figure went up in flames yesterday with that helicopter. That would be the Chinook that was shot down in Baghdad Sunday, killing 15 soldiers. For the Angry Left, it seems, every dark cloud is a silver lining. The Underpants Debate For once we have to agree with Teresa Kerry. The Boston Herald quotes the outspoken ketchup heiress and philanthropist, whose haughty, French-looking husband by the way served in Vietnam, as saying that nine-way Democratic presidential debates are silly, unproductive slugfests that waste voter and candidate time. Theyre not as silly, though, as last nights eight -way Rock the Vote debate that aired on CNN . Dick Gephardt showed a degree of statesmanship just by not showing up for this embarrassing spectacle. Rather than the usual panel of journalists, the eight remaining candidates took questions directly from an audience made up of under-30 Democrats and independents. Unlike at the Rock the Vote event in 1992, where Bill Clinton famously was asked-and answered-what kind of underpants he wore, there were no questions about undergarments. Actually the big news of the night was that Dennis Kucinich said no, which means he really has no excuse. Kerry, Howard Dean and John Edwards all said they have smoked pot, while Wesley Clark, Joe Lieberman and Al Sharpton said no. Carol Moseley Braun, showing a modicum of dignity, refused to answer. Then there was this question, which came from a young woman who identified herself as a fiscal policy analyst for the Massachusetts Senate: You guys seem to get to know each other fairly well. Id be curious to find out, if you could pick one of your fellow candidates to party with, which you would choose. But keeping in mind, partying isnt just, you know, who do you think can shake their groove thing. John Edwards, meanwhile, vowed to put a stop to these sweetheart deals for Halliburton. Could someone please explain what this pack of protectionists is doing demonizing an American company? Another weird moment came when someone asked Wesley Clark to describe his personal comf... |