Contributors

Tuesday, February 20, 2007

Bringin' Out The Sack

Two posts from me today. Kinda different, I know, but after hearing Australian Prime Minister John Howard (left) run his mouth recently, I had to put something up about it.

He was quoted as saying, "Terrorists are praying for a Democrat to win in 2008." Why? If you follow this line of logic, it is because Democrats are "weak" and the terrorists will be able to attack our country again. Once the Democrats are in power again, terrorists will be able to run rampant, killing people left and right in the Middle East and around the world.
I think Prime Minister Howard and whoever in the Bush administration is paying him off need to be reminded of a few facts.

1. The worst terrorist attack in our country's history occurred under a Republican president.

2. The last time I checked Al Qaeda has been rebuilding much of its operation in Afghanistan and terrorists are carrying out attacks on a daily basis in Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza, The West Bank, India, Pakistan, Indonesia (am I starting to bore all of you yet?....I could go on...)

3. All of the major candidates for the Democratic nomination have been on record as saying that troops need to be re-deployed to fight the people who actually attacked us on 9-11.

4. The Democrats, not the Republicans, were the ones who have been fighting tooth and nail to enact the recommendations of the 9-11 commission.

So, Johnny, congratulations. You are the recipient of this week's Shitsack!


Enjoy!

25 comments:

Anonymous said...

Goodness, where to even begin... Perhaps if you kept to a single fallacy, we could begin to discuss. Do you ever step back and just assess your own views? You’re nuttier than squirrel droppings.

(I’d like to take credit for that bit of jocularity, but I think I read the squirrel remark on an Ann Coulter blog somewhere…)

PM Howard rocks! If only all politicians spoke so plainly.

Anonymous said...

Please, you cannot be serious, joe anonymous. No prob if you are trying to just get a rise out of markadelphia but do really believe what Howard is saying?

Anonymous said...

Yes.

Anonymous said...

Look what happens when I go on a holiday weekend. People stop thinking.

Mark, why do you care what John Howard says? He's Australian...they're not even a real country.

Joe, I am a Republican and I have to say that George Bush is the worst president our party has ever fielded. He sat there like a dumb ass when he found out our country was being attacked. Reagan and Bush 41 never would've done that. He has screwed up Iraq so badly, mostly because he listened to that shit for brains Rumsfeld, and now the Democrats are going to win in 2008. Thanks alot, dickhead.

The 9-11 attacks would've happened anyway, regardles of who was president, and one of three things (out of a thousand) that I agree with Mark on is we have taken our eye off the ball in Afghanistan. I read in the paper yesterday that the Taliban has taken back much of the border regions with Pakistan and that Al Qaeda has set up camps there. This would not have happened if we had finished the job there.

So, Joe, if you are a Republican (and I hope you are) you need to stop the "Democrats are friends of terrorists" drivellings because you are just going to hand them the election in the end.

Anonymous said...

I thought there was an interesting editorial yesterday (in the Strib?) re: why it might be better for the Dems to win in 08. I'm not offering it as my belief, or even that there's much validity to the idea, but it was interesting to chew on for a bit.

The crux of it was that perhaps it's best if the Dems win so that they can learn first-hand just how difficult the war on terror really is. They've been so busy being back-seat drivers for the past 7 years (PL interjection - notice Markadelphia's continued insistance on calling attention to the fact that GWB was President on 9/11), so now maybe it's time to give them the reins and let them sink or swim. If they swim, great. If they don't, that's great too, because then they'll presumably come to understand the battle as we currently see it.

I, however, do not subscribe to that theory. We all know that if an attack occurs on 9/11/09 under President Clinton or Obama or Edwards, all of the liberals are going to be posting blog entries about how the root of the attack lay with the failures of the previous administration. (C'mon Mark...you know it's true.) Since anything negative that happens is just going to be blamed on us anyway, I'd just as soon stick with the better horse. I tried steering clear of this exact scenario by voting against GWB in 04, but alas I was not successful.

Mark Ward said...

I agree. If an attack occurrs on 9-11-09 then the Dems will blame Bush, whether he deserves it or not, just like Republicans have blamed Clinton. I have always said there is blame enough to go around on both sides. The 9-11 Commission, though deeply flawed due to the fact that it wouldn't look deeper for certain truths we all know to be valid, did cite 4 specific mistakes that Bill Clinton made in the 1990s in regards to Al Qaeda. Bush made 6 critical errors after he took office.

Iowa, yep, we have taken our eye off the ball in Afghanistan and we are going to pay for it.

Joe, I don't quite understand what you think is nutty.

Anonymous said...

"Joe, I don't quite understand what you think is nutty."

Victims of mental illness are usually the last ones to know. j/k

Errors happen and war is full of missteps. I read a review of Flags of our Fathers. The person doing the review stated that he felt that Flags of our Fathers didn’t quite capture the struggles of WWII, especially the Battle of the Bulge. Did you know that our intelligence underestimated the number of enemy troops against us in that battle by 300,000 to 400,000 troops?

Anonymous said...

Let’s set aside the 4 fallacies and some of the other comments and focus just on PM Howard’s comment for a moment since that’s what set you off…

If I were a terrorist, why would I want the Democrats to win in ’08?
a. We’d win the battle for Iraq in the greater War on Terrorism because America would retreat.
- Even hawk Democrats are calling for an unprecedented “timeline” on the war (handcuffing their generals) but the standard Democrat is calling for out-right cut-and-run (conveniently labeled “re-deployment” for the evening news)
b. We “might” win the battle for Afghanistan because once we win Iraq; it’s only a matter of time until the body count reaches a high enough level for Democrats to get all wobbly there too. Heck they didn’t want to go there in the first place, but it sounds better to say they’re for something than nothing.
c. America might enact some of the 911 commission recommendations, but that’s a lot of window dressing. Heck, I could board a plane in Phoenix in July wearing a parka and they’re search granny before me because they don’t want to offend me.
d. We’d be able to focus our resources on Israel again because America won’t help directly and the UN has to run anything by a majority that couldn’t care less about Israel. Heck, in all these years, they haven’t even been able to come up with a definition of terrorism.
e. America would run everything thru the UN. So, if we were able to hit America again, it’d take 10 years worth of meaningless UN resolutions before America does anything on its own and then we just need to hang on until enough casualties mount up and American’s grow weary of watching and focus on the next American Idol.
f. We’d be able to turn the greater Middle East into an even greater terrorist haven and keep exporting & expanding our theology; just look at our inroads into Europe.
g. The Kurds…they’ll be strung up.
h. America is harmless as an enemy and treacherous as a friend.
- Nobody would trust America again. Every country would know that even if you had a President with enough intestinal fortitude to do something, in 4 years, things could change dramatically and you’d be left to twist in the wind. Nobody will sign on long term with a country that won’t back you up long term…you’d be better served trying to work out a deal with the bad guys or another, better set of bad guys.
i. If we’re caught, we’d be tried in a civilian court and thus lead a life of comparative luxury in an American prison…wish we had that in the Middle East…here they’ll chop off our heads if we’re caught.
j. …but I jest, how’d we ever get caught? America is far too worried about offending our sensibilities to actually be tough and plus, we have the New York times scouting for us to let us know about any new programs the gov’t has that might track us down.

…but I digress…that’s just a quick, unorganized blurb off the top of my head….I could go on, explain more, provide more examples or flush out more detail to make a more logical point, but in the end, I can only explain it to you; I can’t comprehend it for you.

Anonymous said...

Last year, John Howard and Tony Blair had a joint press conference. One reporter asked Blair if the attacks were his fault, because of his support for the invasion of Iraq. Blair's answer was adequate but John Howard also said this:

"Can I just say very directly, Paul, on the issue of the policies of my government and indeed the policies of the British and American governments on Iraq, that the first point of reference is that once a country allows its foreign policy to be determined by terrorism, it's given the game away, to use the vernacular. And no Australian government that I lead will ever have policies determined by terrorism or terrorist threats, and no self-respecting government of any political stripe in Australia would allow that to happen.

Can I remind you that the murder of 88 Australians in Bali took place before the operation in Iraq.

And I remind you that the 11th of September occurred before the operation in Iraq.

Can I also remind you that the very first occasion that bin Laden specifically referred to Australia was in the context of Australia's involvement in liberating the people of East Timor Are people by implication suggesting we shouldn't have done that?

When a group claimed responsibility on the website for the attacks on the 7th of July, they talked about British policy not just in Iraq, but in Afghanistan. Are people suggesting we shouldn't be in Afghanistan?

When Sergio de Mello was murdered in Iraq - a brave man, a distinguished international diplomat, a person immensely respected for his work in the United Nations - when al Qaeda gloated about that, they referred specifically to the role that de Mello had carried out in East Timor because he was the United Nations administrator in East Timor.

Now I don't know the mind of the terrorists. By definition, you can't put yourself in the mind of a successful suicide bomber. I can only look at objective facts, and the objective facts are as I've cited.

The objective evidence is that Australia was a terrorist target long before the operation in Iraq. And indeed, all the evidence, as distinct from the suppositions, suggests to me that this is about hatred of a way of life, this is about the perverted use of principles of the great world religion that, at its root, preaches peace and cooperation. And I think we lose sight of the challenge we have if we allow ourselves to see these attacks in the context of particular circumstances rather than the abuse through a perverted ideology of people and their murder.

To the rest of you who can think rationally about this, I ask, which is better: the indignity of having your bag searched, or being blown apart by a terrorist bomb?...not a tough choice for me."

Anonymous said...

....Joe enters the room and applauds Gang Bang. Thank You!

…and that my friends, is the wonders of a straight/plain talking politician like PM Howard. No nuance. No having to explain in follow-up questions what he really meant. The world would be a better place with more men like him.

Anonymous said...

Joe,

Have you ever been to the Middle East? Africa? I have been there several times and George Bush is a terrorist's wet dream. His actions in the Middle East are a terrorist recruiter's wet dream. To quote from the Bill Maher Mark put up here..."he inflames Muslim hatred in the Middle East and then offers to protect us from it. It's like throwing shit on you and selling you relief from the flies."

To use your logic, the 9-11 attacks should never have happened because terrorists would have "thought twice" about attacking us with a Republican in office. Clearly, it doesn't matter to them.

I would think that if someone like Hillary Clinton gets elected then that would be the terrorist's worst nightmare. She would send Bill over to the Middle East where more people love him than they love George Bush.

Hatred there is so high for us right now and you say that we bear none of that responsibility? It's all their fault? Gads, man, that is what is nutty!

Mark Ward said...

Crab,

The quote you used actually works against your arguments. We are letting our government and our international actions be dicatated by terrorism. In fact, our whole policy in the Middle East is based on it.

Which is why it is so odd that we are funding both sides of it. Joe, I have no doubt in my mind that the Iranian government means to do us harm. Yet they are tacitly supporting the Shiites that we have propped up in power in Iraq. Most of the violence in Iraq is the direct result of Sunni insurgents who are being funded by our "allies" in Saudi Arabia. Just in case you forgot, 15 of the 19 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia.

The last time I checked George Bush's tounge was seen licking the ass of the Crown Prince of Saudia Arabia and our country is dependant upon them for oil. So, rather than focus your energy on the propaganda currently being fed to people like John Howard (who have an enormous financial stake in Iraq), why don't you go after the real enemy here?

Anonymous said...

Joe,

I still don't see how any of Mark's points are fallacies. How are they false?

Also, um, I hate to be the one to tell you this but we have already lost the War in Iraq. So, why aren't the terrorists rejoicing? I don't see anyone rejoicing in the Middle East. I see a lot of anger, pain, sadness, violence, and hatred. We are partially responsible for that because we live in a nation that has people like you in it who see force as the only option.

Well, we have used force. And it didn't work. We lost.

Anonymous said...

Just heard about this blog from a friend of mine who works here at the U....where to start?

Markadelphia, your posts are amusing but you are way too angry for anyone to take you seriously or listen to you. Roll back the negative passion and you might get somewhere.

Torch, I am interested in what countries you have been to in the Middle East. I go there myself for research quite often.

Joe and LILATGB, your overly simplistic take on the current situation in the Middle East makes me grateful that neither one of you is in charge of anything related to our foreign policy. There are so many details you have left out of your statements. There is not one monolithic point of view in the eyes of terrorists or in the Muslim world for that matter. There are a number of groups that each have a variety of issues in which they ply their trade of violence. For you to place them all in the same "kettle" dangerously underestimates the enemy and actually acomplishes much of their work for them.

Anonymous said...

uprof...my apologies that I'm employed...one can't really get into the finer points of an argument in just a paragraph or 2. And would anyone really listen if we went into specifics? Me thinks not.

Vheights....I stand corrected and in awe of your brilliance. 12 years of UN resolutions is abosolutely the right way to go. Keep up the good work.

Anonymous said...

Great, now we've got another one (uprof) to tell us how stupid we are. I'm terribly impressed.

Anonymous said...

First thing first – those weren’t my statements. They were the statements of Austrailian PM John Howard as I said at the beginning of the post. I guess I looked at his statements from the context of what was going on in and around his country at the time he made them. In addition to what he said there about the bombings, earlier that year Australians also had to deal with Lebanese Sheik Faiz Mohammed, who gave a lecture in Sydney where he informed his audience that rape victims had no one to blame but themselves. Women, he said, who wore skimpy clothing, invited men to rape them. After that, when Australian journalist Paul Sheehan reported honestly on the series of Sydney gang rapes, he was called a racist and accused of stirring up anti-Muslim hatred. And when he reported in his Sydney Morning Herald column that there was a high incidence of crime amongst Sydney’s Lebanese community, fellow journalist David Marr sent him an e-mail stating, “That is a disgraceful column that reflects poorly on us all at the Herald”. Guess it would have been more noble to sweep it all under the rug. Political correctness is simply the denial of a reality that is uncomfortable.

Second - I make no claim to be some policy genius who has all the answers. If I were in charge of anything that important it would probably take up too much of my time and would cause me to miss out on the stuff that truly makes life worth living - the softball season, volleyball matches, the fishing season, my weightlifting routine and my European vacations. I don’t want to be in charge of anything that grand because I don’t look to a job to seek fulfillment. Besides, they would probably air all my dirt (boo-ya).

Here’s the quote from E.J. Pratt that I have posted to Mark several times on here – "The mark of an educated man is not in his boast that he has built his mountain of facts and has stood on top of it, but in his admission that there may be other peaks in the same range with men on top of them, and that, though their views of the landscape may be different from his, they are none the less legitimate".

Some quotes from Mark from this blog recently - "I don't see, based on all the evidence, how anyone could have another viewpoint about Bush Co.", "There is no looking at "the other side", and finally "I don't see how the alternatives that I am proposing keep people less safe". Regarding that last one - simply because one cannot be proven wrong, does not make them right. Most of the tricks of logic and debate refute questions and attacks, but fail to establish any true justification for a given idea. For example, just because you can’t prove that I’m not the king of France reincarnated doesn’t make it so. So when Mark says "My plan A is the best because no one has explained how it will fail" know that I see a logical gap in this argument. Simply because no one has described how it will fail, doesn’t necessarily make it the best plan. It’s possible than plans B, C, D, or something I post on here all have the same quality.

Speaking of doing Al Queda’s propaganda work for them, who exactly are people helping when they say "we have already lost the War in Iraq"? Is that considered "supporting the troops"? My brother-in-law who lives in St. Loius is a veteran of Gulf War I and he has marine buddies who are returning from Iraq. Some observations they made to him. 1) The violence is largely limited to a restricted area - mostly the four provinces within the Sunni triangle. He says once you get outside of that it's almost like a different country. 2) Outside of the Sunni triangle, he says most Iraqis are glad Saddam is gone and appreciative of the efforts of coalition countries. The Kurds are especially friendly and happy to see us there.

I think that if the only goal the terrorists have is to force the US to leave then they would do better to just stop all violence, make everybody think that it is all secure and just wait till the US leaves.

To me, in addition to all their other gripes, it’s obvious also that one of the main goals of the terrorists is to prevent the establishment of a Democracy in Iraq. Why? Because they know that a free Democracy would be a threat to all of the dictatorships in the region. Since the dictatorships support these terrorists groups...that would greatly damage the infrastructure of the terrorist’s regimes.

Last January the terrorists released a statement that any Iraqi that tried to vote would be targeted. If the terrorists are just Iraqi citizens that are tired of the US occupation...why would they intentionally target Iraq citizens? Especially for doing something like voting? Then they released a statement saying that any official that signs the Iraq constitution would be targeted as well as their families. Again...why are they so hell bent on stopping the formation of an independent Iraqi Democracy if all they want is the US to leave?

Mark Ward said...

Crab, none of your arguments address the issue of Saudi involvement in Iraq, the Shiite lead government that has ties to militia groups that are also committing violence, or the complete failure of Iraqi securit forces.

I, too, know at least six people tha have served in Iraq and all of them have said the same things: The "war" is unwinnable and we lost it. There are some things that just can't be won militarily. I don't see why that is a bad thing.

Both you and joe have arguments that break down in hyperbole. You have said repeatedly on this blog that Muslims hate freedom and democracy. So, then why are we there trying to put it in place if they don't want it?

Joe's argument makes the least sense to me. He accuses most Islamist regimes of handling their affairs through violence and hatred. He says they are evil. So, his answer is....for us to be the same way? We have to be violent, we have to hate our enemy..shoot first and ask questions later.

International relations and the politics of war is anything but black and white. It is so grey that what little hairs I have left on my head pale in comparison. No one is accusing anyone of being stupid here....just incredibly short sighted.

Anonymous said...

No, I've said that terrorists hate freedom and democracy because it threatens their way of life. I've never said that peaceful muslims in general hate freedom and democracy. Unfortunately, I don't see the peaceful ones taking back their religion. It would be nice but when you're faced with a choice of "shut up or die", I'm guessing they'll choose the "shut up" option.

I didn't know we were talking about the Saudi government. I thought we were talking about John Howard.

What would recommend we do about the Saudis?

Anonymous said...

No one is accusing anyone of being stupid here

That's not true. Truthgirl called HMHC stupid. You (Mark) have called basically half of the entire US stupid. And I am calling everybody here who passes judgment along the lines of "if you don't believe [insert factoid here] then you are wrong" stupid.

Mark Ward said...

I think we need to become energy independant of the Saudis and then tell them to fuck off. This will not happen as long as the leaders in our government and the corporations that back them are in business with the Saudis.

What is truly sad is that exploring alternative energy sources would create a new economic boom in this country and employ a heckuva lot of people. One of the things America does best is magnify innovation. We might not always be the first to think of something but we can expand it to a the size of an 800 pound gorilla.

I think half of the entire US must be stupid if all three news channels think the two biggest stories are: Anna Nicole's Smith body and Brittany Spears in rehab. People must be watching this crap other wise they wouldn't be getting such high ratings. This has nothing to do with poltics.

Anonymous said...

Joe, you really have to start thinking differently. I don't want to see Hillary Clinton or anyone else on the Democratic side as President. PL, I am ripping you off here but I can't help it. If part of our base continues with the belief that terrorists want the Democrats to win and continues to put that out there as a talking point, we are going to lose. It's that simple.

I run a small business down here in Iowa and people are sick of this war, they are sick of the lying, and they want a decent, honest man in the White House. It's not going to come from the Democratic side. We have some great guys lined up for 2008 and I want them to win by being the heroes I know they are not by lying about a bunch of nonsense.

Anonymous said...

Hey, I didn't mean to offend anyone nor do I think I called anyone stupid. But some of the claims put out on here by everyone, markadelphia included, are terribly uninformed.

The Middle East is an area of the world filled with much diversity and variety of peoples. Any one view is different from the next. On my trips there, I have mostly found a great deal of interest in the United States and generally good feelings. The groups that we call "terrorists" are no different than our own groups of violent offenders, whether civic or political.

American media tend to homogenize Muslims and only show images of them with guns and bombs. One claim on this blog is vaild: the media never shows the good news. It also doesn't show the good people because the machinations of power have decided that they are the bad guys du jour. What we see on television is but a small slice of life in Lebanon, for example, which is looked upon by the rest of the Middle East as we look on Las Vegas.

Anonymous said...

Iowa,
I'm not sure what you mean when you say you are ripping me off, so I'll simply add this...I think it's funny (in a sad way) that even with the multitude of problems in the Republican party, the Democrats still keep finding ways to lose. Markadelphia and others have talked about how the last election was a mandate against the corruption of the Republicans. Sure, they took back the majority, but I actually think the election results illustrate just how bad the Democratic party is right now. Public opinion of the Republican party has to be at historic lows right now, yet they managed to avoid being completely wiped out, which is what they probably deserved. Only somewhat tongue-in-cheek I would say that the best strategy for the Republicans is to just sit back and let the Dems implode.

Uprof,
It sounds as if many opinions about the Middle East would be considered uninformed when stacked against your experience, which is great. Unfortunately, too many of us are too uninformed about too many topics. But I think it's interesting that the person on this blog who spends the most time saying "wait a minute, there's an alternate perception" is the person who gets torched the most by those who claim to be informed. So I'm not sure that information is the key as much as reasoned application. Just one man's opinion.

Anonymous said...

Pretty interesting article in Time re: the relations between Sunni and Shi'ite. On the topic of uninformed, I readily admit that I haven't taken the time to learn much about the history of that relationship. As always, I'm sure there's much more to it than what this article relates, but it seems a fairly level-headed overview of some factors involved. At the very least, the author refrains from the inflammatory rhetoric that is so prevalent on this blog. I'd recommend giving it a read.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1592849-1,00.html