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Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
You have accused me of two different things.
First, you said that I "spliced" a quote. That is flatly wrong, and I'm waiting for you to admit it. I quoted one sentence from the Economist, verbatim. I didn't splice anything. Show some class and admit you were wrong.
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Now you are playing with semantics. You put in a statement that with out the surrounding language was misleading. I stand by the statement. I call that splicing. If you dont' like the term fine. What ever you want to call it, it is misleading. That is the substance of my argument so why don't you cop to that.
Quote:
Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
Second, you are suggesting that the Economist is not blaming Bush, and that it gives him credit for being a free trader. To this, I'll say three things:
(a) You are flatly misreading the article and misunderstanding reality if you think that Bush was "trying to make the Doha round cut more [agricultural] subsidies." That Economist article says the opposite. The U.S. wanted to cut agricultural tariffs but was unwilling to cut agricultural subsidies. If you are not understanding this, read it again. Or, to take just one example from many on the web, this:
- This round collapsed, as many before it did, in a deadlock between farm import tariff users and farm subsidy users. Washington continued to argue for steep cuts in farm import tariffs, which are used by the European Union, India, and Japan, while refusing further cuts in its agricultural subsidies. Four of the six negotiating parties blamed U.S. intransigence as the downfall of this last round of talks. Brazil, usually aligned with the United States on farm tariffs, began earlier this year to shift its position away from that of the United States and toward the European Union, after Brussels was held to blame for the lack of progress at the December ministerial meeting in Hong Kong. Only Australia neglected to single out the United States for the failure.
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Quoting from another periodicle to say what the Economist said is bunk. Stick to what we are talking about. The quote speaks for itself.
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Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
(b) Notwithstanding (a), you are correct that the Economist gives Bush credit for being a free trader. It points to the "irony" that people blame the U.S. for the recent collapse, since the U.S. pushed to get the talks back on track after the Cancun failure.
This does not contradict the point I made with the Economist article, which is that the U.S. was not somehow blameless for the Doha collapse, as you suggested. My failure to agree with every point in the Economist article does not mean that I misrepresented it when I accurately quoted it in part.
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You are splitting hairs. You were also using the quote to show that Bush was not a committed free trader. The fact that the article directly contradicted what you were trying to argue, and therefore, you used just one sentence of the article to back up your point was misleading.
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Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop (c) Moreover, I would suggest that (a) and (b) are absolutely consistent with my criticism of Bush on free trade, which is that he pays it lip service but has not invested political capital in it. Bush paid no political price whatsoever for pushing foreign countries to return to the table after Cancun, which is what the Economist praised him for. But he was not prepared to make the case domestically to limit agricultural subsidies -- for which he would have paid a price politically -- and so the Doha talks failed. When it cost him nothing to be for free trade, he was for it. When he would have had to invest something, he wouldn't ante up.
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He pushed very hard to get CAFTA through. To defeat CAFTA the Unions and the Democrats put up their biggest fight ever to defeat a free trade agreement. During the negotiations he Democrats tried to get him to insert all sorts of riders that would kill the deal, and then presented a solid front against him to defeat it on the up or down vote. He got unanimous Republican support. It is almost impossible to get unanimous Republican support on anything.
You just don't like to give him credit for what he did because you didn't want him to succeed. And since he beat your side, you don't want to think your side played its best game. Well they put up one hell of a fight.
