Politics As Usual

[Secret_Agent_Man]

Originally posted by sgtclub
You used to be moderate, but you have moved left over the last few months.

Dude, we've been talking about torture, etc. for the past few months!

Plus, the election cycle is heating up -- brings out the competitive juices.

S_A_M

[On a board with Sidd, GGG, Ty, AG, Bilmore, you, Slave and Not Me - I am decidedly somewhere in the middle.]

efs

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally posted by Secret_Agent_Man
[On a board with Sidd, GGG, Ty, AG, Bilmore, you, Slave and Not Me - I am decidedly somewhere in the middle.]

efs

Delusions help some people get through their days.

[Not Me]

Originally posted by Secret_Agent_Man
Again, your mouth outpaces your historical knowledge.

You don't need to ask Biden. The GC came after WWI -- so, no, they did not protect our POWs then.

Did I list WWI? No, so your mouth (actually fingers) outpaces your reading comprehension.

Originally posted by Secret_Agent_Man
In WWII -- the POWs captured by the Germans and Italians, at least, had access to the ICRC and were generally treated IAW the GC.

Conveniently, you neglect to mention those fighting in the pacific theater. Whatever.

Originally posted by Secret_Agent_Man
Nice or you to criticize AG, but what do you know about it?

I know that I don't jump on the "Blame America First" bandwagon every time Al Jizm issues an anti-american report. C.f. AG.

[Not Me]

Originally posted by Secret_Agent_Man
Dude, we've been talking about torture, etc. for the past few months!

No, we have been talking about things that made people uncomfortable and scared. You lefties then labeled that torture.

[Not Me]

Originally posted by Hank Chinaski
And yet you were one of the harshest posters to attack notme when she first showed.

But he didn't put panties on my head, so that wasn't torture. I never once felt uncomfortable, which is torture.

[Not Me]

Hi AG! Why are you still talking about panties on heads? Why not talk about this:

• SAVANNAH, Ga. – Boosted by his political victory at the United Nations for his Iraq policy, President Bush won unanimous approval from seven other world leaders Wednesday for his initiative aimed at bringing democratic change and economic growth to the Middle East.
  
  Several of the leaders attending a summit near here laid aside their reservations about the impasse in the Middle East peace process to hand Bush a victory for his centerpiece proposal at the annual gathering of eight major industrial democracies.

Too busy mourning Reagan's death, are you?

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally posted by Not Me
But he didn't put panties on my head, so that wasn't torture. I never once felt uncomfortable, which is torture.

he has talked about fucking in front of you, which is something. Private England did basically the same....well she fucked in front of people, but same ballpark.

[SlaveNoMore]

Sidd Finch
Two questions: Do you think wrapping someone in a sleeping bag and beating him until he dies to be in the grey areas?

How would you have responded if Jessica Lynch had been blindfolded and led naked by a leash through downtown Baghdad? Would you have said "no big deal -- it's like a fraternity prank!" Or would you have decried this as yet another example of Saddam's barbarity?

First Example:

Clearly Wrong. But the severity of punishment meted out to the perpetrators should depend on whether (1) they were trying to get info from him and went overboard or (2) they were merely a bunch of sadist punks.

Second Example:

Not Nice, but doesn't come close to my definition of torture. It also is humiliation for nothing but its own sake. Like the batman photo.

Then again, they didn't do that - instead they repeatedly raped her - this hypothetical is somewhat disingenuous.

[Not Me]

Originally posted by Secret_Agent_Man
In WWII -- the POWs captured by the Germans and Italians, at least, had access to the ICRC and were generally treated IAW the GC.

Hey, dumbass, you might want to do a bit of research on the differences between how the American Christian POWs were treated by the Germans and how the American Jewish POWs were treated. Dumbass.

[Not Me]

Hey, do the Native Americans get to do peyote to commune with their god? Huh? Do people tracing their lineage back to the Mayans get to suck on coca leaves to commune with their god? At least those are peaceful religions.

Tell this stupid fucking cunt to stick her veil up her ass.

• DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. (AP) - A state appeals court heard arguments Wednesday in the case of a Muslim woman who, citing her religious beliefs, wants to wear a veil for her driver's license photo.
  
  Sultaana Freeman lost her civil lawsuit a year ago when a circuit judge agreed with authorities that letting people conceal their faces on a driver's license is a terrorist risk.
  
  The Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles originally issued Freeman a license with her wearing a veil in 2001, but later suspended it. Freeman claims the suspension violated her First Amendment rights.

She knows damn well that if this gets through the courts, more muslim terrorists will be able to shroud themselves to conceal their bombs.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by Sidd Finch
What I said to Ty is, what would you do? When 4000 white farmers end up with 90% of the arable land in the country (I suppose you think that's just a coincidence), and the majority of the population is starving as it was in the 90s -- long before any land reform occurred (i.e., while Zimbabwe was still barred by treaty from land reform), how do you redress that? Obviously Mugabe has been a disaster, but merely saying that and yelling "Takings Clause!" does not provide a solution.

For better or for worse, the majority of the population was not "starving" before Mugabe started seizing land in 2000, although he has denied food to certain ethnic groups in the past -- when whites do this, it is often called genocide. Zimbabwe was the breadbasket of southern Africa. The starvation that you see there now is the direct result of Mugabe taking working farms (from white farmers, mostly) and giving them to political hacks who cannot run them. I'm not saying that Zimbabwe was the platonic ideal of racial justice or anything, but Mugabe has caused this crisis as a response to his domestic political troubles.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by Secret_Agent_Man
[On a board with Sidd, GGG, Ty, AG, Bilmore, you, Slave and Not Me - I am decidedly somewhere in the middle.]

You and I don't seem to disagree much on substance, but you say it in this reasonable-man, David-Broder-after-a-couple-of-glasses-of-wine, inside-the-Beltway tone of considered moderation, whereas I give it the Full Chinaski.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

How Reagan Won The Cold War, Part XVII:

• ...although he was no liberal nor even a moderate, Reagan did repeatedly abandon conservative dogma. That he is nonetheless remembered as an unyielding conservative says less about Reagan than it does about the contemporary Republicans who lay claim to his cause. Consider, first, Reagan's contribution to the demise of the Eastern bloc. Reagan's decision to rebuild the debilitated post-Vietnam military supposedly compelled the Soviets to reform themselves by forcing them into a costly arms race that put even more pressure on their teetering economy. "In the end, Reagan won the Cold War not by defeating the Soviets militarily, but by showing them that we had economic resources they could never hope to match," wrote Bruce Bartlett last year in National Review Online. "They simply couldn't afford to keep up."
  
  Whatever you think of that explanation, it's hard to square with Reagan's 1987 agreement with the Soviets to ban medium- and short-range nuclear missiles. After all, if forcing the Soviets to deploy more weapons caused them to produce fewer consumer goods and weakened their leader's will, then letting them deploy fewer weapons, and divert the savings into the consumer economy, would have had the opposite effect. At the time, the right viewed the treaty as a betrayal. conservatives campaigning against missile treaty, read a New York Times headline; most candidates for the 1988 GOP presidential nomination opposed the treaty. Today conservatives simply gloss over that decision. This week's page-length Wall Street Journal editorial mourning Reagan made no mention at all of that highly significant treaty. Instead it praised his "willingness to walk away from Reykjavik and at other times from an arms control process that had become an article of blind faith among U.S. elites."
  
  The missile treaty was no fluke. Alongside Reagan's (justly) celebrated steely revulsion toward communism sat a wooly-headed, almost peacenik, sensibility. Washington Post reporter Lou Cannon's 1991 biography of Reagan--celebrated for its fairness by left and right alike--revealed Reagan's attachment to anti-cold war movies like The Day After and War Games, which inveighed against the horrors of nuclear war in the most syrupy way. He had a particular affinity for the 1951 science fiction film The Day the Earth Stood Still, in which an alien arrived and forced the United States and Soviet Union to make peace. Reagan invoked this trope so frequently that Colin Powell, his national security adviser, would tell his staff, "Here come the little green men again." Reagan even brought up the movie in his 1988 summit with Gorbachev--who, understandably, didn't know quite what to make of it--in the course of proposing a deal by which both sides would destroy their entire nuclear arsenals. All in all, his view toward the cold war was far different than the "moral clarity" that is currently ascribed to him.

Jonathan Chait in TNR

[Not Me]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop [I hate Reagan and am glad he is dead and all this credit he is getting for ending the Cold War just makes STEAM COME OUT OF MY EARS!!! Grrrrr.]

Get over it. You will be screaming that GWB had nothing to do with it when democracy is established in Iraq. Choke on your own bile. It will be more pleasant than what you are experiencing now contemplating Reagan's successes and what you will be going through when GWB succeeds. Yeah, they are/were both stupid, but in an idiot savant kind of way.

[SlaveNoMore]

Tyrone Slothrop
How Reagan Won The Cold War, Part XVII:

I've yet to see any of these articles discuss one of the more interesting legacies of Reagan.

Namely, "Reagan Democrats" and the gradual political transformation of the South.

Ty, run this through your "Blogoogle" and see if you can find a negative review. Maybe Rall even drew a cartoon