For an interesting primer on the stab-in-the-back nonsense that will be trotted out as soon as we leave Iraq (whenever that may be), you could check the comments in this Protein Wisdom thread. A sample or two:
The only battles we are loosing are on the propaganda front, and with 5th columnists like Campos & Co., is it really any wonder? General Giap of North Vietnam has been quoted as saying that the North knew they were beaten on the battlefield, but grimly hung on counting on Hanoi Jane and Co. to snatch defeat from the Jaws of U.S. victory for them. Plus ca change.
You defeatists are ‘loosing’ this war, damnit. And then there is this:
According to soldiers I’ve heard comment on the matter, morale is down because they are winning every battle in Iraq and losing support at home. This speaks to my dogged determination to stick to the point more than anything else. Well, that, and it has been obvious to me from the beginning that such a tactic of naysaying and dissenting for the sake of dissent could very well turn prognostications of defeat into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
And this:
The enemy’s tactic for achieving stratigic victory is to not fight in the traditional sense. Rather they plan operations designed to grab headlines in the western media in the hopes we become demoralized, convince oursleves all is lost, and head for home. And that is what is so frustrating about reading your comments, those of Campos, and the current situation. Our military WILL NEVER be defeated directly by the rag-tag groups fighting us in Iraq. You know this, I know this, and most defintately they know this. But they also know they don’t have to, and that folks like Campos are their greatest allies.
And my personal favorite:
Jeff, I don’t know how much troop demoralization there is out there. From what I’ve heard, troop morale is pretty good, because they can see for themselves the progress they make and the situation as it actually stands. Sure, they’re pissed about media coverage, but they don’t believe it, unlike the folks at home, who have little or no information beyond what the MSM feeds them.
I would contend that the defeatist drumbeat is having its greatest effect here at home, and that’s where we’re going to win or lose the battle of Iraq. Even if troop morale remains sky-high for the duration, they can’t win a war if their funding is pulled, the ROE are too restrictive, the strategy is too tentative, or any of a number of factors that originate entirely within the US.
The defeatists have convinced the US public that We Can’t Win, and that is reflected in opinion polls and elections. It’s hard to argue for diminished troop morale because of the defeatists, but the causality between the news reports and how people vote is much tighter and much clearer.
We often talk about the hazards of Emboldening the Jihadis, but what about Emboldening Murtha and Pelosi? Our military can handle the jihadis, but they are helpless against a Congress who sees retreat as the only viable solution and who believes that the public supports them.
We can win the war against the jihadis only if the US public have the will to do so. The erosion of will and determination can be placed squarely at the feat of the defeatists in the media and elsewhere.
So they have all the bases covered, you see! If we win, it is because these brave stalwarts stuck it out on their blogs, and lavished unrelenting praise on the troops and the President. They stayed the course, you see, and because of them the troops could get the job done!
If we lose, it wasn’t because of anything this administration, the Pentagon, or their blind support for a leadership that didn’t deserve it. It is because of the lying ass media and those pussy Democrats.
Heads, I win; tails, you lose.
BTW- Byran at Hot Air spent four days embedded with soldiers in Iraq and has also decided the media is a bunch of traitors:
Media misconduct and malpractice leading to flagging homefront morale. This one isn’t so much a mistake as just part of the modern world. The media is incurious, generally unethical in its approach to reporting Iraq and far more skeptical of the US military than it is of the insurgents, the militias and even the Iranians. The media hardly ever reports on victories in Iraq because the kinds of things that demonstrate real success just aren’t sexy, and perhaps because at their core they don’t believe in victory. It’s sexy to talk about US troops engaging insurgents on Haifa Street and killing every last one of them, but that’s not a real victory in the terms that govern the Iraq conflict. Street fights and reports about them play into the enemy’s hands, in fact. The media poo-poos events like the re-opening of schools in Iraq because as defined on American terms, re-opening a school doesn’t mean much at all. But in Iraq, the re-opening of a school represents a community in the end state of achieving normalcy. A community that has a functioning school also has a liveable level of security, it has functioning services like power and water and has families that aren’t so worried about local violence that they won’t send their children outside their homes. It means there are probably jobs in the area, and it means that those jobs give families a level of economic security where they can think about their children’s future. Re-opening a school in Iraq means civil society itself has returned to that school’s community. It’s a big deal. But the media doesn’t understand that and doesn’t care to, preferring to focus on combat operations and sectarian killings while it farms its daily reporting duties out to very dubious agents and stringers. The MSM’s methods in Iraq feed the insurgency’s propaganda needs and damage our efforts to win.
Bombadil
I always thought Jane Fonda did more damage to the country with those exercise videos.
Are there still people around who think that we belonged in Vietnam and could really have won there?
GOP4Me et al
The sock puppets and spoofs are out in force, I see. (I hope that’s it, anyway.)
Unfortunately, reality keeps trumping spoofery- you can’t parody people who parody themselves so effectively. Still, it’s comforting to know that in 25 years, moronic reactionary troglodytes of all ages will hurl this gibberish at the rest of us.
cleek
shorter Goldstein: cock! vibrator! traitor! cock!
GOP4Me et al
If only we’d interned them in Cuba like the wise men and women over at Scrutator advocated months ago, none of this would have happened!
keatssycamore
” A community that has a functioning school also has a liveable level of security…”
Excepting, of course, the times when the front entrance to said school is blown up, killling 70 and wounding 180. At times like that the security situation is slightly less liveable. Especially if you were one of the 70 students who died.
Poo-poo, kachoo.
Big Pimpin'
Maybe it’s time for the world to form a Love Train.
Love Train.
Jimmy Mack
While it is absurd to accuse the media of deliberately aiding the insurgents, the reporting from Iraq does affect how the public views the war. It’s probably wrong to even talk about “insurgents” at this point, given that what we have is sectarian conflict, but that doesn’t mean we couldn’t hear a bit more good news. I realize that part of the problem is that the country is too dangerous for reporters to travel, but face it, we do view the conflict through the prism that the media gives us. And that lens is flawed, maybe not deliberately, but still…
norbizness
Weird, I thought it was the lack of troops and no workable security plan with the new government. Now I realize I’ve been brainwashed! Thanks, dead-enders!
Jimmy Mack
ROTFLMAO
GOP4Me et al
What good news do you want to hear? All the new school murals that have been painted? All the Iraqis that HAVEN’T been killed? Local festivals and celebrations that don’t involve bloodshed, mayhem, mass sectarianism, or the burning of American flags? Interviews with Iraqis who are unwilling to denounce America when an embedded reporter queries them in the presence of American troops? What kind of “good news” are we looking for, here?
Personally, I think they should report the news on Iraq from Camden, NJ. Then, they should turn to the urban backdrop behind them, and point out how things there are far, far worse.
demkat620
I don’t know why the MSM continues to promote the idea that Iraq is violent. Iraq is no more violent than Philly. The Iraqis have simply revived the ancient artform of spontaneous human combustion. At one point in our history this practice was seen as a display of great affection and welcome. The fact that Iraqis are now practicing this once banned artform out in the open, in groups, and with purple stained fingers to boot, is simply a further indicator of progress in Iraq.
Sherard
Wow, a NEW form of lameness at Balloon Juice. Link to a well crafted post about the media, but don’t actually analyze THAT (presumably because the local moonbats are incapable or because there is too much truth in there to fit the moonbat narrative), instead go to the comments and analyze them instead.
Brilliant.
dslak
keatssycamore may be psychically connected to me. I say this because the first thing that came to my mind when I read the bit about the importance of schools being opened was to say “except when they get blown up,” complete with a link about that story.
Anyway, of course having schools and jobs is important for normalcy, but so is having a secure environment where they’re not regular targets of violent militias and insurgent groups. No doubt the idea to keep building schools without resolving the underlying violence that results in their destruction is a result of misunderstandemerating Camus’ Sisyphus allegory.
PeterJ
Baghdad Bob II, now playing at your local right-wing nuttery.
Big Pimpin'
Sherard – There you go. The fault here lies with the link and not the brilliant “blame the messenger” ideas of the author.
It’s hardly his fault that he attracts smitten blog flies.
GOP4Me et al
Amen. In fact, most of the dead bodies found in Iraq are probably the result of gang wars in America’s inner cities. Those bodies are shipped into Iraq to deflect media and law enforcement attention. You can’t pin a Philly gangster down on a murder if the body is smuggled into a Sunni mosque a few miles away from Sadr City. OTOH, it sure does make that Sunni mosque look like a dangerous place to be, even though nothing too scary was happening around there until the Philly gangsters showed up with some corpses from Girard Avenue.
Also, has anyone considered small towns with serial killers in them? Such towns undoubtedly have murder rates far, far worse than those in Iraq, despite appearing completely quiet and normal. Meanwhile, Iraq appears to be a war zone, yet if you could just peek through the media filter you’d see it’s actually a pretty safe place to live. See if your pea brains can wrap themselves around THAT simple concept, moonbats!
cleek
hey, i hear blogger.com lets you create your own blog for, like, free.
RWB
I think these posts and commets also show a stunned disbelief (and humiliation) that the U.S. military–powerful, technologically advanced, well-supplied and well-fed–could be beaten by a bunch of guerrillas/terrorists using improvised booby-trap bombs. It just doesn’t seem credible, hence the “stab in the back” narratives.
They cannot accept that our unwillingness to accept relatively small losses for a long period of time will keep us from winning the war. This was perfectly foreseeable, and there is nothing that can be done about it really. It happened in Vietnam, it even happened in the Revolutionary War, with the British giving up.
Here’s the dynamic. Our military is vastly superior, yes, but as a nation we are realtively weakly motivated to fight this war because it doesn’t seem in any meaningful, non-paranoid way existential. If we lose it, the U.S. will still exist. We’ll lick our wounds and move on. Therefore, the American public has limited patience, and after a while asks “Well, why are we banging our head against this wall?” The media is simply a part of this dynamic.
The same thing happened in Vietnam. Obviously there was a lot of propaganda to try to make the U.S. feel Vietnam was an existential struggle (the domino theory, for example), but over time, the public stopped believing that story and the war became untenable. Escalation in particular became impossible–there is a story that Westmoreland asked Johnson for 500,000 more troups, guaranteeing victory if he had them, and Hoover told Johnson that if he tried that, Hoover wouldn’t be able to guarantee that there wouldn’t be riots in the streets. Even now, an escalation of a mere 21,000 is causing serious anxiety and resistance. If Bush tried to reimpose a draft, there would be riots. All because no one on our side seriously believes that this war is a life-and-death struggle for the U.S.
But for the insurgents, it is. If they lose, they will be wiped out. They will be hung like Saddam. Their political aspirations will be a memory. (This is not to endorse those aspirations, by the way.) So no matter how hard we hit them, they will fight ferociously until the end. The Vietnamese were the same, as were our own founding fathers. They knew that they themselves would be hung and that American liberty would be extinguished if they lost the war. If the British lost, on the other hand, they would lose one colony and a little bit of prestige. So we were willing to fight to the finish, and the British weren’t.
When people speak of assymetrical warfare, this is what I think of. A small, weak, under-armed group that will be exterminated if they lose fighting a large, powerful, wealthy nation with a relatively weak commitment to victory. (In other words, they want victory of course, but not at all costs.)
If we had had a quick victory over the insugents, it wouldn’t be an issue. But once we failed at that, the outcome seems almost inevitable. And yet the outcome is, to war supporters, inconceivable. They can’t believe that these ragtag backwards nobodies can defeat the mighty glorious American military. Hence the psychological need for the “stab in the back” narrative that we are hearing now.
Steve
Having read the post, I think John did a noble thing by not highlighting it further. It’s just more stab-in-the-back crap, arguing that anyone who says the war isn’t going well is emboldening the terrorists just like Joy Behar. Here’s a news flash for you: It is not the highest form of patriotism to follow the President over a cliff like so many lemmings.
Punchy
Can we make fun of Goldstein now, or is Cranky Cole still A Defender of Jeff?
I feel if I now rip Heffe for his “blog”, Mr. Cole will go all “Tippie Toe! Tippie Toe! Lemon Tree!” on this post…
demkat620
Yeah the British thought the same thing during the American Revolution and the Soviets thought the same thing in Afghanistan.
I forget, how did those stories end?
John Cole
I am not sure what Sherard’s point is. It is either:
1.) I don’t like what you are blogging about and you should have written about how brilliant Jeff’s post is.
2.) Those aren’t really stab in the back primers because you ignored how brilliant Jeff’s piece is.
3.) Sometimes when I read something written by John Cole, I get huffy and drool in my keyboard, and make comments like the one I just made.
Take your pick. I do like the previous comment about blogger.com.
Davebo
Yes, but not on his blog. That’s not fair….
demimondian
I think RWB is right. In addition, though, we will have been defeated in several wars where we had to cave, ultimately, to an “inferior” force. (Tell me again who was just elected President of Nicaragua? Oh, yeah, guy named Ortega.)
Davebo
Good god! Is there anything worse than a house husband with a Thesaurus and time on his hands?
Davebo
Good god! Is there anything worse than a house husband with a Thesaurus and time on his hands?
neil
Damn you, messenger! Damn you to [email protected]
John Cole
You have always been allowed to refute/dispute/mock anything anyone writes. Iam not gonna tolerate you making fun of Jeff personally or personal attacks. I still like Jeff and see no reason why you should need to resort to that.
SeesThroughIt
It is rather fascinating to watch all this dolchstoss play out–it’s as if the right wing is meticulously following a very old script and are determined to make you believe that their play is actually the unvarnished truth. But in addition to being fascinating, it’s also kind of sad. How is one supposed to take these wingers seriously? And what does it say about our country that so many would rather further the dolchstosslegende than be honest and forthcoming?
Andrew
Is Jeff still fisting canines?
Blue Neponset
So true, and the best way to start winning on the propaganda front is to compare those who disagree with you to “Hanoi” Jane Fonda.
FYI to all the Bush Deadenders – If you want to convince people to get on board the victory train that is the Iraq War then you don’t insult them first.
demimondian
You know, it’s kind of like playing football. Some old timey football coach, when asked why he kept running a certain play during a game, said “I used it. It worked. I was going to keep using it as long as it worked.” The right has had success pushing this particular blame-shift for half a century now. Why shouldn’t they pull the same old discredited trick out, now that everything has failed, and it is their fault?
Tim F.
You know that I love a good blogbash as much as anybody, but doesn’t harping on commenters at Goldstein’s site strike anybody as nutpicking squared? On an average day I can find any number of comments at Kos that make me want to scar somebody. Pseudonymity has a funny way of loosing the id.
Among the many cool features of measuring blog traffic is that it provides an excellent measure of the constituency behind a writer’s comments. Knocking a blogger implicitly criticizes the thousands of people who choose to associate themselves with him/her in some way. More or less by definition commenters have no constituency so knocking them doesn’t have the same significance that knocking a popular blogger has.
IMHO, of course.
ThymeZone
What I love is the patently anti-democratic attitude here (I mean, there, not here as in here, here).
“Discouraged.” “Morale.” “Propaganda.”
All bullshit, and all code for “the people cannot be trusted to see and understand well enough to make their own decisions.”
If you believe these assholes, then democracy depends on careful manipulation of information and “propaganda” and messages that aren’t “discouraging.” And of course, it would then depend on the government’s ability to control that.
The fact is that the people can judge and over time will judge what is happening and what is in their interests.
Democracy actually works, despite the best efforts of the assholes in charge of our government and their noise machine right now.
Keith
According to soldiers I’ve heard comment on the matter, morale is down because of GOP sex scandals and the fact that the Golden Globes beat the 24 premier in the ratings.
Jake
Of course, flagging support for this war has nothing to do with all those fibs about WMD, the Al-Queda connection, general disdain for the President or anything like that. I’m surprised they didn’t go after the media for failing to report on Afghanistan at all.
Oh that’s right, Afgani-where?
This is purely anecdotal but I met a man who served in WWII (Pacific) survived the Batan Death March and stayed in for Korea. One impetus for his leaving the military after Korea was interesting. During WWII, letters from home were about what people were doing to support him. Victory Gardens, scrap metal drives, etc, etc. It made him (and his buddies) feel great. People cared. They changed their lives a little to help keep the soldiers alive. There was none of that during Korea. His friends wrote him about things like that new fangled swimsuit the bikini. He said “I’m trying not to get killed and people are going on about a goddamned bathing suit?” It was, he said, depressing.
And now…well, Doonesbury had a great arc about how instant communications are a minor bane for combat troops. Folks back home expecting people to IM or e-mail at a particular time and getting pissed when, due to something blowing up, they are late checking in. E-mails in which the sender is having some difficulty and wants help from the soldier. In The Sandbox (D-bury’s blog for troops in Iraq) a number of soldiers wrote to say Yes, that is exactly what its like and it drives us nuts!
The soldiers are smart enough to distinguish public opinion of the war and the dickhead who started it from public opinion of what they are trying to do and what they have done. (I wonder why the Gung Ho Keyboardists are so happy to stick to the Poor Dumb Grunt stereotype.) But the fact is, we as a nation aren’t making any sacrifices for them, we aren’t offering support beyond “Hey, good job!” and a $2 ribbon sticker for the car. And I’d be interested to know if the GHKs think the C-i-C saying “Oops, my first few plans were all messed up, don’t worry I got it right this time!” might have some affect on morale.
Nope, that would be silly.
ThymeZone
Also, please keep in mind that MSM is far less influential than anyone on either side of the spectrum thinks it is, and the blogosphere even less so in terms of day to day topicality.
The media has a reputation that is somewhat worse than that of used car dealers and drug smugglers. The idea that their foolishnesses can sway huge blocs of votes or persuade people against a war when the war is in the peoples’ interests is just baloney.
The media hammered Ronald Reagan, and he was almost made a saint. The media hammered Bill Clinton, and he could have won a third term if it were legal. The media is not as powerful as they and some addicts like to suppose.
The media can skew a story short term (Richard Jewell? The Duke “Rape” Case?) but long term, people figure stuff out. That’s the beauty part.
demimondian
Tim has a good point — including the correct usage of the word “loosing”, which was a particularly choice bit of rhetoric. That said, I think that the analysis of the emerging propaganda war is correct, and I think that’s the point of John’s post, not the pure blogbash.
MinorRipper
I was hoping they’d let Michelle wander around the streets of Baghdad by herself a bit, you know–to get the ‘real story’ over there. Too bad.
http://www.minor-ripper.blogspot.com
Darrell
True, but it’s worse than that. John is too chickensh*t to take on Jeff’s post directly, an excellent post which is ‘guilty’ of exactly what he is so angry about… so instead John cherrypicks a few commenters from the sideslines rather than address Goldstein’s post directly.
Gee, that snippet from Goldstein’s post fits John Cole’s rantings to a tee, as Cole has repeatedly called Iraq a “disaster” (with no explanation as to why). Of course, ‘courageous truthteller’ Cole doesn’t have the stones to respond to Jeff directly.. much easier to pick through random comments to make his “point” I suppose. Pathetic really.
Steve
A little clarity, Darrell. Are you saying John Cole’s posts about the war are detrimental to the troops in Iraq?
Andrew
I’m pretty sure that this one post by Cole has doomed The Surge(tm) to failure. LtG. Petraeus might as well hang up his sidearm and go skiing in Dubai.
dreggas
Oh shit don’t even start with the “We lost on the homefront” BS. My father who served in Vietnam never bought that and actually had several points as to why we “lost” in Vietnam.
1. We fought to hold a line, you fight to hold a line the best you can hope for is stalemate. (see Korea).
2. We didn’t go up through the north with military troops and take Hanoi.
3. The South Vietnamese government was more of a dictatorship and at times more repressive than the North which made it almost inevitable that those in the south who did not support the southern government due to its own brutality would find common cause with the north.
We didn’t lose Vietnam because people at home didn’t clap loud enough and voiced dissent. We lost because the assholes in charge wouldn’t fight a damn war and instead started fighting it like a brain trust with new technology and bombing raids and other horseshit. Ask anyone who had to deal with the early versions of the M-16, hell my dad said the Marines were known to toss aside the M-16 and stick with their M-14’s.
How is Iraq like Vietnam?
1. We are involved in what is now a civil war in Iraq, Vietnam was a civil war.
2. We are fighting this war without really being at war, this is now no longer a “war” against an “army” it is a war against nearly the entire populous who when not killing one another are killing us. The country (ours) is not on a war footing and never has been…we are told to go shopping.
3. Rather than learning anything about fighting against a guerilla force that we should have learned in Vietnam we are still relying on “overwhelming force” and superior technology/firepower.
4. We did not and do not have enough troops to secure every flashpoint in baghdad let alone every flashpoint in the country at large.
scarshapedstar
Every one of these twits with “sources on the inside” who are still gung-ho about this glorious war is full of shit. Their “sources” are most likely rightwing chain emails, if they’re not just straight-up fantasizing based on Instapundit posts.
Pathetic. And deplorable. And these assholes wrap themselves in the flag.
John Cole
Umm. Jeff’s post was addressing the editorial of some guy I have never heard of and really don’t care about, and who seems to be a bit of a pretentious ass himself.
The comments in the post, though, were what caught my eye, as they are chock full of the stab in the back bullshit we are soon going to be getting a lot of- unless of course the 5k or 10k or whatever troop surge in Baghdad WINS IT ALL in the two months they are there.
So really, Darrell, go piss up a rope.
Krista
Indeed. They’re all nuts, and John is picking on them.
ThymeZone
Anybody not living in a cave without electricity or contact with the outside world …. wouldn’t need an explanation, you cretin.
John Cole
Oh- and Iraq is a disaster because a sectarian civil war has broken out. I am not surprised you were unaware of that- after all, you don’t believe the media.
RSA
Here’s an excerpt from that “well crafted post”:
Sorry it couldn’t be shorter, but good God, Goldstein is verbose. Wait, I can shorten it myself: Violence in Iraq is a problem, but is it really as bad as the news media seem to wish it to be?
I just checked online, and found that the UN estimates that 2.3 million Iraqis have been displaced by violence, with 1.8 million of them having left the country. (The latter number is the equivalent of over 20 million people packing up and leaving the U.S.) I wonder how Jeff accounts for so many people who are actually in Iraq differing with him about the level of violence? Maybe they all just decided to go on vacation abroad at the same time.
ThymeZone
What do you call events like this, happening on a daily and weekly basis in Iraq, Darrell?
A “comma?” That’s what your dogshit president called them.
srv
What exactly was the procedure for US troops to re-open an Iraqi school? Did the administrator have to file some form in the Green Zone? Must the troops inspect the school?
Will there be a point at which Iraqis are going to be able to re-open their own schools? Or must we keep doing it for them?
The reason the media poo-poos these events is because we really don’t deserve any of the credit 99% of the time. It is ridiculous to imply the Army or CPA was needed to re-open schools. It is a lie or bigotry on the capabilities of the Iraqi people.
ThymeZone
Just can’t understand why anyone would call Iraq a “disaster.”
So puzzling.
ThymeZone
Disaster? What disaster?
/ Darrell
RandyH
Yesterday Glenn Greenwald pointed to a book “The Authoritarians” being published (free) online by Bob Altemeyer. He is a professor at University of Manitoba and specializes in Right Wing Authoritarian psychology. While researching for his recent book, John Dean found him to be especially helpful in understanding the mindset of the people we are up against here and how so many otherwise good people fall victim to it. It seems John Dean encouraged him to share his wisdom with us (liberals and libertarian-conservatives) who are currently experiencing the painful “brain freeze” in this battle of words.
He has released the intro to his book and chapter 1 so far. He will be releasing a chapter a week for seven weeks. It’s not going to be published as a “paper” book, just free PDF’s online.
Well, I went and read the intro and chapter 1 yesterday and – Oh. My. God. This is good stuff. Now I am just jonesin’ for the next chapter to come out on the 22nd. The guy is a great writer – conversational style (not overly clinical or technical) and makes sense of this totally foreign (to me anyway,) fearful, empathy-free mindset that exists in so many of our fellow travelers (authoritarian followers) and is exploited by authoritarian leaders. Some of us aren’t susceptible to it, so we have to be trained to recognize it and deal with it.
A must-read book from a great teacher. Check it out. You’ll be glad you did.
Here’s the link .
Darrell
And in the course of addressing him, Jeff touched on several points which would qualify him as “addle minded” in your book based on assertions you have made.. but you thought it would be easier to cherry pick commenters instead, and now hide beyond the “Jeff was addressing a pompous jerk so I didn’t want to engage him” excuse. Whatev..
Let me ask you a question John, is it only addle minded wingnut talk to suggest that anything other than a soon-as-possible pullout of our troops is futile? Because that would make JeffG one of the “addle minded wingnuts” you love to rail about, wouldn’t it?
dreggas
Is Clap louder?
Is Double Down?
And while they call it a surge it’s the same surge we tried before and obviously since we didn’t clap loud enough every surge failed…
Faux News
Really Darrell, rather than saying “stabbed in the back” by Liberals just use the orginal German word
“dolchstosslegende” which perfectly explained why the Germans lost WWI.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolchsto%C3%9Flegende
Have you used the Spiro Agnew quotes regarding opposition to the Vietnam War I gave you yesterday? If not here they are again:
“nattering nabobs of negativism,” (written by Safire)
“pusillanimous pussyfoots”,
“hopeless, hysterical hypochondriacs of history”,
“the liberal intellectuals…masochistic compulsion to destroy their country’s strength”,
“effete corps of impudent snobs”, and
“radiclib,” a blend of “radical liberal”.
Jake
Yes, but what the media fails to acknowledge is at least the university was open! And why can’t they report on the murals that weren’t damaged in the fighting?
PeterJ
Time to add things up.
1. All the WMD that was in Iraq has gone missing.
2. 1.8 million Iraqis has left Iraq. Where are they now? Do anyone know which Iraqis have left?
3. Almost none of the cargo containers that come to US ports are being inspected.
4. The US military is being bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Conclusion:
The US is being invaded by millions of Iraqis bringing Saddam’s WMDs with them. Fighting them over there seem to have left the backdoor open.
Or perhaps 24 is right on the money this season.
Sojourner
Two other factors. First, to win a war like Iraq or Vietnam means basically destroying the country. Which creates the obvious contradiction that to “free” the people of that country means blowing them up. Most Americans understand the absurdity of that position.
Second, there’s the enormous debt involved: half a trillion dollars for starters at the same time we’re hearing the righties talk about the need to cut benefits to balance the budget. So we’re expected to bleed out our country and screw our own citizens in order to kill a bunch of people in another country who did nothing to us. Yep, that makes sense.
Ultimately, the obvious question has to be asked. What the hell are we doing over there, other than stroking W’s ego?
Darrell
You mean the liberals who have been screaming over and over how we were “lied” into war in Iraq? To the contrary, I think those liberals are noble truth tellers, and in many ways more patriotic then Abraham Lincoln and George Washington..
dreggas
Then why do you continue to defend the war and the administration that lied us into it?
Jake
Cheeses Fucking Cripes.
Pug
Oh- and Iraq is a disaster because a sectarian civil war has broken out. I am not surprised you were unaware of that- after all, you don’t believe the media.
John, it is not a civil war. I call it a “sectarian confilict”.
G.W. Bush
John Cole
Hunh?
Darrell, it is too early to be drinking. I thought you were mad at me because Iddi not confront the sheer brilliance of Jeff’s rant against some unknown professor. Now you are asking me what, precisely?
Do I think anytrhing but a pullout is futile? No. I think if we were to send a 100k more combat troops to the region, we might be able to calm Iraq temporarily.
Do I think we will do that? Not achance.
Do I think sending 15-20k more troops into the region is futile? Absolutely.
And even if we had 100k troops to send to the region, and sent them, do I think Bush is capable of pulling it off? Nope. Maybe another administration.
And most importantly, do I think that our inability to calm the region is caused in large part by the failure of the media to sufficiently fluff Bush, Michael Ledeen, and the school painters? Of course not, and the Democrats didn;t lose this war, either. You had a Republican House, a Republican Senate, and a Republican administration, and they fucked it up pretty royally without any input from the Democrats.
So please STFU and quit being a snotty asshat to me.
dreggas
Application of small amounts of C4 around the doorway.
Seriously the U.S. troops are not trained to build schools they are trained to fight wars. The troops have done the best they can given limited resources and shitty civilian leadership.
Civil engineering organizations are the ones that should be tasked with rebuilding, however that has not been the case due to, once again, shitty civilian management in awarding reconstruction contracts to their BFF’s like Halliburton, Bechtel, etc.
Bruce Moomaw
“You have always been allowed to refute/dispute/mock anything anyone writes. Iam not gonna tolerate you making fun of Jeff personally or personal attacks. I still like Jeff and see no reason why you should need to resort to that.”
No offense, John, but this resembles Dan Ackroyd’s parody of Bob Dole during the 1988 GOP primary campaign: “The only man I can think of who would be spineless and cowardly enough to do a thing like that is my good friend George Bush.” Regarding Goldstein, what does it profit a man to retain his “likability” if he loses his mind (especially when he is pompously lecturing the country on what it should do)?
SeesThroughIt
Proof that our decadent Hollywood culture encourages terrorism! Somebody find Dinesh D’Souza (assuming, of course, he can be found after last night’s beating at the hands of Colbert)!
Andrew
What I want to know is why those who declare that the media and the left are fifth columnists who are waging war against America are too chickenshit to do anything about it beyond blogging.
Imagine! Enemies in our midst, trying to destroy our country, and the best they’re able to do is write lies on the internets.
My only conclusion is that the big, strong right wing bloggers are physically scared chickenshitless of liberals, including intimidating, scary people like Kos, Atrios, and Jane Hamsher.
Pug
I think it is a lot to ask of Americans to sacrifice their “peace of mind”.
TR
Why the scare quotes, Darrell?
Did we find those WMD stockpiles that Rumsfeld insisted were scattered around Baghdad and Tikrit? Did we find the proof of the reconstituted nuclear program Condi and Cheney told us about?
Or are you just a colossal moron?
Faux News
Look Darrell, the whole “dolchstosslegende” worked well for Herr Hitler and I think you should embrace it like your peers at World Daily Net and Red State.
I’m still VERY dissapointed you haven’t used your Agnew quotes yet to cut down the dirty hippies where ever they may blog.
ThymeZone
Uh, the majority of Americans have been saying that for quite some time now. Time to stop pretending that you don’t know this, Darrell.
dreggas
Without a doubt they are. Bullies are notoriously chickenshits when the time comes to actually put their money where their mouth is. They attack those they perceive as weak but go to the well once too often and wind up eating lots of crow.
They are the paper tigers.
srv
You know what won’t happen? In the 30+ years since Vietnam, all those geniuses who think it was “winnable” have yet to propose exactly how they were going to win it.
SeesThroughIt
And this right here speaks to a major plank in the dolchstosslegende: “We are the finest country in the world, and we have produced the finest military in the entire history of the world! Surely such a force cannot be defeated by a ragtag bunch of swarthy dudes in beat-up pickup trucks!”
Well, yes, our military is the finest for what it was built for: army vs. army conflict. When it comes to army vs. insurgency conflict…well, if I may utilize a sports simile, it’s like taking the 1992 US Olympic basketball team–the finest basketball team ever assembled–and asking it to win the gold medal in ice hockey. But the dolchstoss insists that we are unbeatable in any military capacity; this is to be taken as unassailable fact. Therefore, if we are on the losing side…well, that must be because of Democrats, homegrown terrorist-lovers that they are.
Obviously.
cleek
how can you place erosion? what is the feat of the defeatists?
Darrell
Did you just pull that number out of a hat because it “sounds” right? Or did you give any thought as to how those troops might be used and whether or not your number is wildly too high or wildly too low? And if your 100k troops-needed number can’t be attached to anything concrete.. well, not much point in addressing it further is there?
So you are absolving Dems of responsibility, including the fact that Iraqi regime change became official policy under Bill Clinton in the 1990’s? How about all the Dems who voted for the Senate authorization to invade Iraq? Dems in congress? Perhaps they were “lied” to, right John? How about all those Dems speaking on the record if you click the link on my name? They have no responsibility either?
How else to explain your intense need to absolve the Dems of all responsibility with this “not the Dems fault” sh*t? Part of John’s leftward drift involves substitution of snark and and unsubstantiated claims in lieu of factual argument.
Andrew
Darrell is a featist.
cleek
including the fact that Iraqi regime change became official policy under Bill Clinton in the 1990’s?
you pathetic worm, that resolution expressly excluded the use of force as a means of achieving that regime change, and you know it.
They have no responsibility either?
you won’t take any, why should anyone else ?
dreggas
Perhaps I should have further qualified what I meant by “doing the best they can given the limited resources”.
Let me clarify:
1. Shitty civilian leadership with a chip on its shoulder to go fight a war that was completely unnecessary and was a waste of the lives of those serving.
2. being trained in guerilla warfare and civil war and the best ways to combat that (they aren’t trained in this because they are trained to fight identifiable armies.
3. Shitty leadership (this applies in #2 since nothing was learned from vietnam from a military perspective otherwise they would have received such training).
I am not trying to re-inforce any meme, I am simply pointing out that this war should never have been fought as it was unnecessary. Those put in charge of it were a complete disgrace and finally that the military if anyone should have learned that superior firepower is meaningless when fighting an indegenous force that does not wear a uniform.
jg
It all comes down to perspective. You either see the wisdom of what we’re doing there or you don’t. If you do you love america and the troops and are an obediant servant of George. If you don’t you’re screwed because there is no way to be reasoned into believing this adventure has any merit or that it is in our best interests as a country. Any rationale given for what we’re doing in Iraq only sounds reasonable of you are already of the mindset that what we do is right, which you would only believe if you were so nationaistic that you don’t ever see a misstep by the US(unless the president is a dem). If you aren’t of that mindset the rationale is absurd, transparently so. To approach this issue objectively is the highest crime in the eyes of the right wing. To be objective is treasonous since it doesn’t assume correctness on the part of the US. There is no way to win in this argument when the act of arguing is an act of treason.
ThymeZone
Hi, have you met Darrell? He’s the guy who can’t understand why anyone would call Iraq a “disaster.”
Jake
Well you know…liberals. I mean…what if some liberal guys tried to kiss them, or make ’em eat tofu or somethin’?
ThymeZone
What does it mean to add 21k troops to a “disaster?”
Hmm. If only there were a way to find out what people are thinking and saying about this …..
Then we could explain it to Darrell.
TenguPhule
Jimmy Mack’s Irony of the Day.
Tim F.
Does wailing with your fingers in your ears help shut out the pain of being wrong about everything?
Funny how a question answers itself when you phrase it the right way. Brought to you by the American Museum of Bullshit Debating Tactics.
John Cole
I used the 80k figure that seemed to be widely agreed upon as the necessary troop strength needed to resolve the issue, and recognizing that the number one problem in this war so far has been underestimating the troop strength required, and added 20k troops.
Not sure why adding 20k troops to esure success (as much as things can be ensured) is an unforgivable sin, yet George Bush sending 60k less troops than is required is somehow perceived by you to be profound leadership in a time of crisis.
But then again, I think you are an idiot.
Actually, I blame insufficient Democrat anger over the Lewinsky affair and lack of Democratic curiosity about the death of Vince Foster. That seems to work for you.
On a serious note, I blame the Republicans because until recently, they, umm, ran everything. I know that makes sense and everything and is historically accurate, so you probably won;t buy it and instead will make some snide coment about me being a truth-teller or having a leftward slant on everything.
dreggas
I am beginning to see Darell as the male equivalent of The Vancome Lady
Darrell
Apologies in advance for such an off-topic post, but since BJ did a special post on how those religious ‘nuts’ had succeeded in blocking the Park Dept. from saying how old the Grand Canyon was, complete with all the BJ leftist idiots whining over it… this turns out to be another lie. And as usual, don’t hold your breath waiting for liberals to own up and acknowledge this for the lie that it was. They didn’t own up to it over White Phosphorous, or “Plamegate” either because, well, because they are all so noble and honorable
“We believed it because we are stupid gullible liberals. We wanted so badly for the Grand Canyon story to be true, that we accepted the rumors, and went out of our way to trumpet them, without any reasonable confirmation as to whether or not they were true” /Honest liberal
TenguPhule
Democrats who voted for the Authorization admitted they were wrong and that if they’d known the Bush Admin’s case was pure bullshit, they’d never have voted for it.
The thing Darrell seems to miss is that even those who initially supported this obscenity of a war have finally realized what the dirty fucking hippies already knew, Iraq is a bad idea made worse by the stupidity and hubris of those who pushed for war, bullied others into backing them, and who *still* refuse to admit that things have gone to hell in a handbasket over there.
And so all Darrell can do is lie, lie and pretend his lies have not been repeatedly disproven because his gorging on the Bushshit is his only true purpose in life. It gives him meaning.
Redleg
The pro-Iraq war folks just don’t want to realize that their failure to enlist in the Army or Marines is the real reason we are not doing better in Iraq. What really galls me is that these sad sacks then have the friggin’ audacity to call us war critics traitors, cowards, un-American, pro-terrorist, etc.
John Cole
I don’t recall ever writing about the Grand Canyon. However, I must say that when I hear Darrell talking about the Grand Canyon, I think he is discussing the gulf between his beliefs and reality.
Andrew
John Cole, I think you need to take the seriously the possibility that because the Democrats are now in power, they have funded and developed a time machine. A time machine used by Nancy Pelosi and Howard Dean, who traveled back in time to 2000 to secretly make Gore lose the election, allowing the Republicans to take power, so that the DemocRATS and their formerly Republican West Virginia professor type apologists can BLAME everything that has gone wrong on the innocent Republicans.
Further, future Howard Dean told past Howard Dean that screaming at a campaign rally would cause him to win the election, but of course it caused him to lose the election, ENSURING that all of the Iraq war dead from January 2005 would be solely blamed on President Bush.
There is no depth to which the DemocRATS will not sink, nor a time to which they will not travel, in order to ensure that virtuous Republicans are blamed for things that Democrats might have also caused if history had worked out differently.
The only solution is to capture the enemy TIME MACHINE and encase Sean Hannity is some sort of human skin covering, so that we can send him back in time to terminate future Howard Dean and Nancy Pelosi. And SAVE the WORLD.
ThymeZone
It was Christian News that advanced the story.
Vladi G
Winning every battle, eh? Ya know, I’ve never lost a battle against the ants in my backyard. Every time a new anthill pops up, I spray it with insecticide, and it kill the ants. But it’s the darndest thing, they just keep coming back. But I know someday I’ll win the war and ants will never come into my yard again, as long as I keep winning those battles.
Redleg
Darrell,
What is false about “Plamegate?” Seems to me that Scooter “Cheney’s Balls Polisher” Libby is being tried for playing games with a legal and justified investigation of the Plame affair. In fact, there is no question that Plame was outed and that she was a CIA official.
You Bush sycophants ought to the ones stung by the many falsehoods and deceptions coming out of the Whitehouse. You are the ones who should question your own judgment in supporting Bush.
RSA
I don’t know about John’s calculations, but here’s one possibility. Population of Baghdad: 6 million. Army Field Manual recommendation: 20 to 25 soldiers per 1,000 inhabitants. That gives us 120,000 to 150,000 needed for Baghdad alone; expand Baghdad to some reasonable “region” and you get our current troop levels plus 100,000. Of course, that leaves the rest of Iraq untouched, but John seemed to be talking about calming a region of Iraq temporarily.
cleek
It was Christian News that advanced the story.
also, eSkeptic, repeating the same unfounded claims of PEER.
but, the truth came out and the parties directly responsible are setting the record straight. elapsed time, less than 2 months? compare and contrast to the truth about WMDs.
Tim F.
I did write about the Grand Canyon, and this is the first that I’ve heard about the story being wrong.
Thanks for pointing it out, Darrell, and as always for being your usual gracious self.
TenguPhule
This from the moron who insists we have 60,000 free troops in Germany.
JWeidner
Darrell Sez:
Jesus, my irony meter just blew up.
pharniel
ok, new rule.
if you don’t belive the GC is more than 14k years old, and you think that geologists are secular lying scum you have to give back all other amenities and advancements generated by the same methods.
that includes tivo and nascar.
TenguPhule
Not to be picky, but does this mean you’ve turned in your Red card for good, John?
chopper
where are the WMDs?
HyperIon
i am assuming that JeffG wrote this. (i no longer visit his site because i think he is a very poor writer and general sleeze bag.)
but even if he didn’t write it, it’s still a great example of how FUBAR our position is: the Iraqi government should BY DEFINITION have full autonomy. in what bizarro world does the US get to parcel out autonomy to a DEMOCRATICALLY ELECTED government?
i don’t see how any worthwhile discussion can flow from the question block-quoted. BTW here’s a link (published over the weekend) to someone who presents arguments about what can be hoped for in Iraq. She analyzes things in terms of the Spanish Civil War and discusses various scenarios. None good, of course. But she does get beyond saying “The world will end if the US is defeated in Iraq”.
Tony J
You know, I try to make it a rule that I’ll just ignore the Pony Whisperer’s bilge until John finally kicks him to the kerb, but slap me till my cheeks glow, I just have to frame this one for my Museum of Black Comedy.
At a secure location, somewhere in the United States, the current drone on shift at Project S.P.O.O.F. 2.0 dropped a load and hit the Reset button.
“If you can’t beat ’em, change the subject.”
Faux News
“If you can’t beat ‘em, change the subject.”
Every thread with Darrell in it automatically becomes an open thread.
Tsulagi
Our military has not been beaten nor have they lost this war. Their prime job is nation destruction, not nation building. They effectively neutralized Iraq’s military and removed its leadership. That’s what they’re trained to do and they do it well.
But the military was given the job of nation building; they will do what they are ordered to do. Their greatest enemy in achieving that mission has been the Coalition of the Retarded: the president, his administration, and a Republican controlled Congress that could not get their collective asses high enough in the air in subservience to a brain-dead leadership. KISS, Keep It Super Stupid, was the order of the day. They couldn’t have set the stage better for a potential partioning of Iraq and civil war.
Former commanders Abazaid and Casey both several years ago said a political solution was needed, that military power alone was not going to make Iraq a success story. Think maybe that was a clue for the administration and Republican Congress? Nah, way too subtle for them to pick up on during their hectic two-day workweeks of clapping louder for an idiot.
So now what we have is our military tasked with being policemen keeping one Muslim sect from shooting, drilling, decapitating, whatever to another Muslim sect. We get to be the third side being shot at in the middle of a civil war for power. In the hope of propping up a weak Maliki government even our brilliant administration dissed just before meeting to cooperatively work out a solution. A Maliki government that owes its existence and continued support to Iranian backed militia leaders like Sadr (Mahdi Army) and Hakim (Badr Brigades).
And now our new and improved plan is counting on the militia riddled Iraqi Army to deal with those militias. Yep, sounds like another great plan. An masterpiece just dying to be unveiled. Given the proven Republican brilliance in stratergerizing, the only thing that can keep this continuing success story from being appreciated is that hate America MSM.
I think Jesus is tired of weeping. Now he gets a good laugh when any retard says to vote Republican for national security.
Pooh
WELCOME TO DIAL A FLAMEWAR.
For “Clinton did it too”, Press 1.
For “Steve, you dishonest hack”, Press 2.
For “Leftist Wackjobs”, Press 3.
For “Why isn’t John Cole telling us about the people who haven’t been murdered in Iraq?”, Press 4.
For a link to todays talking points from NewsMax, press 5.
To Unleash a jackalope, press *. Repeat as necessary.
To ignore anything said by anyone else, unscrew your headset.
RSA
There was sloppiness involved, but after George (Big Bang “theory”) Deutsch, the public-affairs minders at NOAA, lead industry representatives on the CDC panel on lead poisoning, etc., you have to admit that the Grand Canyon story fit the general pattern. And if you can point to someone who wanted the story to be true (someone who wasn’t responsible for inventing it in the first place), that would be a sign of intellectual honesty. I put that statement in the same category as “People who think we’re failing in Iraq want us to fail in Iraq.”
Tony J
Only as long as people keep on giving him/her/they the time of day. I’m half convinced that John let Darrell continue posting here purely to give his mostly Lefty audience a convenient whipping-boy they could vent their spleen on, leaving him to represent the voice of moderate Republican reason.
But as the Reign of El Residente has gone on digging a grave for America’s hyperpower status, the gulf between Darrell’s poorly crafted button-pushing and John’s brand of conservatism has grown so comically wide that it’s just not that funny anymore. It’s simply annoying.
And since El Res is looking nuttier by the day, and attacking Iran looks like the summer blockbuster he most wants to go and see, I wish people would just put down the whip and ignore the git until he/she/they/it goes away.
Pooh
Since we’re already off topic…wiretapping governed by FISA again?
carpeicthus
They just blew up one of those re-opened schools yesterday. Awesome security.
Andrei
And yet there’s Tim proving you wrong on the front page. Honestly Darrell, no one cares about your personal ideological paranoia. Give it a rest already.
James F. Elliott
I heard the Iraq Ambassador to the U.N. on NPR a few days ago. He said, roughly, that a sign that things have improved in Baghdad will consist of the following three things, none of which are happening:
1) Shops will be open and people will be shopping in them.
2) Children will be in school.
3) Cars will drive after dusk.
According to him, an Iraqi government official, none of these things are happening.
But clearly, he was on NPR, so he must be a liberal shill.
Steve
Hilarious. Try and pretend that this has nothing to do with Pat Leahy and the subpoena power. Nope, seriously folks, we were working on submitting this stuff to the FISA court all along!
And all the people who said it was logistically impossible to submit these wiretapping requests to the FISA court… I have a feeling their own admissions of error won’t be on the front page.
demimondian
Yep, and now that the “program won’t be reauthorized” (!= “is not continuing until the current authorization runs out”), wanna bet that the subpoena’s are “old news”?
Jake
tBone
Typical of you Leftist whackjobs to be celebrating yet another terrorist victory. Shout it from the rooftops, let everyone see just how extreme you really are.
Redleg
tBone,
The real terrorist victory is that conservative chickenhawks like you don’t enlist and go fight in the war.
Darrell
Who the hell says they were in “error”? And on what basis do you make that claim?
Is there still doubt among you lefties that the volume of intercepts would not exceed FISA’s capacity many times over? Is that type of nonsense still taken seriously on the left?
And make no mistake, anyone who thinks that with the volume of electronic intercepts from email, phone, satellite, and spy sweeps, that amount of data would not wildly exceed FISA’s capacity for judicial review of each intercept in which one side or the other was originated or received in the US.. anyone who thinks the FISA courts could handle that kind of volume most definitely, well, belongs as a proud member of the “reality based” community in good standing.
That article didn’t have squat for detail, so we don’t much. But hey, knock yourself out pretending that you understand something that you don’t.
tBone
Yet another tired Leftist taunt. For your information, I’m contributing to the war effort in my own way, by posting on blogs and liking pie.
Darrell
If teh gays can’t marry, the terrorists have won.
SeesThroughIt
The subpoenas are already old news. Why do you insist on dwelling in the past, demi? Why can’t you join us in looking toward the future, where ‘Slammyfashizm is replaced by regular showerings of gumdrops and lollipops?
Redleg
Darrell,
What are your credentials? And I don’t mean those you use to impress your wingnut chickenhawk buddies with.
Redleg
tBone,
Me too!
tBone
Alberto Gonzales is a lefty now?
Darrell
Not yet
But hey, no need to reconcile this statement today with the FISA link, because you lefties have everything all figured out.
Redleg
Darrell,
Have you been right about anything you’ve posted here?
Darrell
Name one thing I’ve been wrong about
Jake
And the volume of intercepted data doesn’t exceed NSA’s capacity to analyze it, neither. So there!
And that defeatocrat talk about there not being enough translators? Hogwash!
Redleg
Darrell,
My list would be a lot longer than yours.
dreggas
And Bush is? Excuse me while I laugh my ass off while pointing.
ThymeZone
This question?
This has been today’s edition of Simple Answers to Disingenuous Questions.
Otto Man
FISA worked when we were in a standoff with the Soviet Union. I don’t have the exact numbers in front of me, but I’m pretty sure there were more phone lines coming out of the Kremlin than coming out of Bin Laden’s cave.
So, yes, I’d say that kind of nonsense is still taken seriously by the left, the center, and the moderately-sane right. You and Blogs for Bush are on your own.
Darrell
Ouch!
Otto Man
That part where you posted Sen. Cornyn’s words but used your own name.
Richard 23
Redleg throws Double D a softball:
“Softball,” because it’s a simple yes/no answer. So Darrell’s “honest” response is…
Better “yet,” just change “the” subject!
Darrell
This kind of leftist idiocy is beyond any parody that GOP4Me or the DougJ has ever had on conservatives.
tBone
Of course, in the story you link Gonzales doesn’t say anything about FISA’s capacity, or lack thereof. But hey, he said nasty things about activist judges! Case closed.
That’s pre-911 thinking, moonbat.
tBone
In Darrell’s defense, I do think he’s right when he says he likes pie.
BadTux
Bullseye!
If the country is too dangerous for even reporters travelling with armed bodyguards to move about, who cares about how many schools got whitewashed last year? The news story is that the country is a bloody hell-hole with hundreds of dead bodies showing up every day. If you’re dead or too scared to leave your house, all the whitewashed schools in existence are no good to you.
When jet planes crashed into the towers, the news media covered that tragic event all day long with continuous coverage, even though there was also lots of good news going on. People went to school, people went to work, children were born, people got promoted, etc. Do I think this news coverage of a horrible event was unwarranted? No. Do I think that news coverage of a similar horrible event (which happens EVERY MONTH in Iraq now) is unwarranted? Well, since I’m not a bigotted hypocrit and value all human lives equally, unlike bigots, who only value human lives if the humans involved look like them… I’d have to say that the MSM is UNDER-covering the tragedy that is daily life in Iraq. To properly cover it, every month they’d have to devote as much time to covering the bloodshed in Iraq as they did covering the bloodshed in New York City — i.e., all day long for several days. Ain’t happened. Won’t happen.
Redleg
tBone,
Who among us doesn’t like pie?
Otto Man
Really? What part, Darrell?
The idea that FISA was designed to stand up to the Soviet Union and worked well in the Cold War? Well, let’s see what that notorious left-wing scholar John Yoo had to say about FISA in the Cold War. Here’s a piece by him published by that idiotic leftist organization, the American Enterprise Institute:
Or are you really suggesting that Bin Laden and his small group are putting out more telecommunications traffic than the entire Soviet bloc?
TR
Once again, Darrell dodges the question.
What’s the current clock on that yes/no question about D’Souza?
dreggas
Ted Haggard Not being in the whitehouse for meetings with Bush.
D’Souza not being taken seriously by mainstream “conservatives”
Support for this administration and the policies that are trashing this country.
I would be willing to bet you are also wrong about that whole Rapture thing but am not much of a betting man on future events.
Otto Man
I’m guessing that Darrell’s next effort to change the subject or move the goalposts will be to claim that Al Qaeda is a much trickier type of enemy, and therefore FISA doesn’t work.
I’ll let Glenn Greenwald do the heavy lifting.
All yours, Senator Shortbus.
Darrell
There weren’t emails back then for one thing.. or faxes throughout most of the Cold war. Or cellphones, or the proliferation of satellite communication and other technologies. Our electronic data mining tools have advanced significantly since then as well. So in summary, as a result of technological advances there is far more communication going on now than before, and our abilitiy to collect it has vastly improved resulting in mountains of data, as compared to the amount of intercepts during the cold war.
Did that really have to be spelled out for you?
BadTux
Exactly. Our military won this war on May 1, 2003, when major combat operations were declared over. By the end of that year the final mop-up had been concluded — Saddam’s evil sons were dead, and Saddam was in custody. At that point, the war was *OVER*. The military had done their job, which is to kill people and terminate threats to America with extreme prejudice.
The war is over. We won. Bring the troops home. They’re serving no purpose over there now except to be targets in the middle of a bloody civil war.
Pooh
And the funny thing is, there’s an easy answer…Tim may have even posted about something recently. But the knee jerks, like it does, and…oooooh shiny!
Otto Man
Faxes came into wide use after the IBM model was rolled out in 1966. And email was in existence when President Bush signed the FISA extensions in October 2001, so he didn’t seem too worried about that.
Yeah, good thing the Soviets never got any satellites up there. They might have called them goofy names like “Sputnik” or something. And mobile phones, in one form or another, have been in existence since the dawn of the Cold War.
So we’re able to pore over communications intercepts with greater ease and greater speed, and that means FISA would hold us back … how exactly?
No, but I wanted the laugh anyway. My brother-in-law’s a state trooper and he says sometimes he makes the obvious drunks walk the line and say the alphabet backwards just for fun. He could just whip out the breathalyzer, but it’s so much more entertaining.
So thanks! You never fail to disappoint.
Darrell
That’s probably true, if the scop of FISA is interpreted as it should be, to be limited to communication in which both parties are in the US.
If a terrorist in Yemen gets a phone call from Miami, Bush and Clinton justice depts have said that monitoring such calls would not fall under the scope of FISA.
Any other questions Otto?
dreggas
This ASS-U-ME’s that the technology to collect this data is not sufficiently advanced enough to filter out “noise” (ie most communications) to locate potential threats that FISA would have to authorize a warrant to continue monitoring.
Of course what the Admin appears to have been doing and has all but admitted to doing is listening in on any and all communications into and out of the united states (and most likely within the united states) without ever pursuing a warrant as FISA would have laughed them out of the court room.
If the amount of communications itself is so vast as to overwhelm the filters as well as overwhelm FISA then it obviously would overwhelm the people monitoring it since it is a needle in a haystack.
By this logic alone the program is untennable because it is overwhelming.
Of course you will deny this because the Administration has super powers that allow it to find these needles with such precision we can trust them not to just listen to everyone and everything, therefore they don’t need a warrant.
It’s things like this which make me shake my head and laugh that it was the wingers who used the whole “Big Brother” canard to constantly instill fear in the sheeple.
TenguPhule
Only if the sweeps rely on the minimum level Bullshit that Darrells love to trudge out as ‘guilty by conviction’. You have up to three days *AFTER* a tap to get the warrant. And the FISA courts tend to defer to the government….yet for some reason FISA courts had to actually *throw* *back* some of the Bush applications, something almost unheard of.
Which means one or more of four things:
1. Bush’s people had jack shit for evidence when applying for the tap.
2. Bush’s people tried to make the taps too broad even for FISA to swallow.
3. Bush’s taps involved people not involved in terrorism he shouldn’t be spying on.
4. Liberals employed Martian Brain Control Techniques to stop Bush from swinging his manly codpiece and catchig Osama in midconversation with Sheehan and then wrestling him to the ground like a croc until he personally choked him to death like the conquering hero that he is.
Darrell obviously subscribes to 4.
jg
If I already thought Bush was always right this sort of ‘foundation free’ answer would be more than satisfying.
Otto Man
One. How do you access the internet from the isolation wing of the asylum?
Seriously, Darrell, it’s always a pleasure seeing you here. Your patented combination of ignorance and arrogance is hysterical, and your belief that your Bizarro World View of the world is not just common-sense but commonly-held by everyone else but the dirty liberals on this site, well, it’s just adorable.
Keep on stamping your feet, you crazy bastard. It’s a hilarious show.
dreggas
FISA would have a say, FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act…Some name huh?) would come into play because of the fact that the communication start point was located in Miami.
Another thing you are wrong about…
TenguPhule
Bzzzt.
Godwin=Clinton’s Law violated.Any call in the US with US citizens involved falls under FISA, dimwit. You can *not* legally tap communications without a warrant, and trying to claim ‘it’s too hard to get a warrant’ is bullshit. If you can’t filter it down to the point where you can justify a warrant, you shouldn’t be listening to our phone calls. Because that ‘volume’ you’re implying is thousands upon thousands of citizens having their personal privacy violated by Big Brother.
TR
Uh, proof please.
Marc
What I want to know from Darrell is this — if FISA doesn’t apply here and the warrantless wiretapping was entirely fine and dandy, then why exactly did the Justice Department just reverse course and put all of its wiretaps back under FISA oversight?
Simply put, Darrell — who’s wrong, you or your president?
TR
Darrell doesn’t subscribe to #4. The Liberals use their Martian Brain Control Techniques to beam those thoughts directly into his brain.
Darrell
You’re like a retard… maybe just socially retarded. So you acknowledge that technology has generated far more communication and many more types of communication, as well as our ability to intercept and analyze more of these communications.
More communication X better ability to intercept communications = “mountains” of communications which far exceed what had to be dealt with during the cold war. Of course none of us knows exactly how much data is being intercepted, but commons says there is no way can FISA logistically sort through the amount of data and voice intercepts which NSA almost certainly “sweeps” up, even if it had 10,000 judges on staff.
Tsulagi
Hard to decide what’s funnier. The random bullshit that tumbles out of someone like Darrell, or their fervent belief someone out there still gives the loony, retarded far right any credibility on national security.
Otto Man
Darrell, you really need to rush that crack analysis down to the White House. President Bush apparently disagrees with you, because he’s put all those mountains of material back under FISA supervision.
As noted upthread, either you’re wrong here or the president is. Which one is it?
TenguPhule
Shorter Darrell: I’m a fucking retard.
FISA is not carte blanche to tap into *EVERYONE’S* communications, Darrell. It specifically restricts taps to actual *suspects* against which an actual case could be made that they are a threat. Unless Darrell is proposing there are hundreds of thousands of Al Queda sleepers in America?
Shabbazz
Driving stakes of lunacy through the heart of the Reagan Revolution one semantic circle-jerk at a time! I think he needs his own show! MORE people need to hear his “voice of reason” on a daily basis! Preach it Far and Wide, Brother Darrell! You’re doing fine work!
TR
Commons says that? What an idiot.
The day we need to rely on Darell to get a gauge on what constitutes common sense will be the day he’s the last manchild on earth.
Marc
It’d be like Bill O’Reilly dumbed even further down. He could call it “The Telerepubbies.”
RSA
Actually, common sense suggests that if there are so many suspicious phone calls, emails, and other types of communication going in and out of the U.S. (they’d have to be suspicious, right, otherwise there’d be no basis for a warrant) that the FISA court can’t handle the deluge, then we’re already totally fucked.
Darrell
We don’t know that they did, The news release mentioned “new” FISA rules which were not explained. I’m guessing that concessions were made limiting FISA’s scope… especially in light of Gonzalez’s statement released today.
You’re making arrogant assumptions that are virtually guaranteed to come bite you in the ass because you’re too stupid to know better.
Steve
What’s amazing about the wingnut mind is that they’ve always worked out such a simple explanation for everything – “we didn’t have email in the Cold War, moonbats!” – and yet, inexplicably, it never occurs to people like Alberto Gonzales to actually offer those simple explanations that would satisfy everyone. And yet people like Darrell march around acting like they’ve received the secret briefing on why the administration has to do an end run around FISA, and everyone else should STFU.
These are the same people who believe beyond a shadow of a doubt that we actually did find the WMDs in Iraq. Yet the Bush Administration, for some reason, feels compelled to say silly things like “yeah, we were wrong about the WMDs” instead of pointing to the clear, obvious evidence that all the wingnuts can see. It must confuse them greatly, watching their leaders unable to make a simple point.
Marc
Always seems to work well for you.
TenguPhule
Darrell’s Irony of the Day(tm).
He never fails to disappoint.
dreggas
Addressing two parts here, first the part in bold.
This is exactly why this is an illegal program that violates FISA. To even go to get a warrant from FISA requires specific enough information to secure the warrant. By this part right here Darrell you shoot yourself in the foot and while it would be easy to lower myself to say it is you who is retarded I won’t, rather I will explain in slow steady sentences using small words.
If the FISA can’t handle the amount of data then those collecting it can’t either by your logic alone they’d need 10,000 people manning the monitors.
Again you point to a nebulous (that’s large) amount of Data being collected by the NSA. Just who authorized them to collect this data on an ongoing basis?
Common Sense says that unless we have software and technology to filter out chatter then those monitoring the chatter cannot filter through it either. Let alone enough actionable intelligence to even get a warrant let alone take action.
I won’t get into the technical side because I am sure it would bore most people but suffice to say if they can monitor that amount of communications then they can filter it. BUT they should not be monitoring communications with an umbrella program in hopes of catching someone doing something somewhere. I am not willing to sacrifice my right to privacy just so you can sleep well at night, if you are then you are a fool..
Darrell
Oh my, Steve is embarrased over his moronic statements earlier about what a huge “error” it was to suggest that FISA courts might not be able to handle infinite amounts of voice and data intercepts. He mocked the idea, and now he feels stupid.
Darrell
No one disputes the that the President has authority to monitor suspected foreign enemies overseas. So if a suspected terrorist in Algiers gets an email from Brooklyn, you’re saying it’s “illegal” then to intercept the email or phone call without first stopping to get a warrant from FISA?
Do you realize what a halfwit you are now? Has it dawned on you yet?
The Other Steve
Absolutely agreed.
Our mission was to take out Saddam and eliminate the Weapons of Mass Destruction.
Saddam’s dead, and there were no WMDs.
I think it’s high time for a parade for our returning soldiers.
The Other Steve
Darrell,
Seriously given your track record for being wrong… i don’t think you are in a position to credibly call anyone stupid.
RSA
What I like is the flexibility. When the Bush administration makes a complete about-face, there’s an immediate acceptance of the new course of action as being just as correct as the old one was. FISA warrants are just the most recent example. Not even a “Huh?”
Darrell
What the fuck? That is EXACTLY what the President needs to be doing to our enemies overseas. He needs to be monitoring their communications with every tool available searching for intel which makes us safer.
What kind of moonbat nonsense is it to say he SHOULD NOT be doing exactly that?
Darrell
Care to elaborate? Because you sound like a moron.
Pooh
1. Somebody forgot to tell the other guys.
2. Wait, we won? I thought it was just another success which hadn’t occurred yet.
TenguPhule
Shorter Darrell: Pay no attention to what I said before!
So we went from ““mountains” of communications” to one suspect. And then ignoring the ‘three days after’ provision for warrants to play the old ‘we can’t wait’ canard.
Darrell, stupid but sure.
Marc
And if anyone can tell what a moron sounds like, it would be Darrell. So much experience listening to himself.
dreggas
The Rule Of Law, The Foreign Intelligence Service Act, Domestic Law….but I guess congress is a bunch of moonbats.
Notice the bold text in your own response. No one says we can’t monitor communications between a terrorist in say England and Algiers but FISA does say that monitoring of communications originating in or between parties within the united states requires a warrant. Again I guess that FISA is moonbat logic.
*holds up a mirror*
Darrell, I can keep going and the more you spit, sputter, try to insult (rather lamely I might add) just proves who is the halfwit. I am almost tempted to ask your age but then again I probably don’t want to know.
TenguPhule
Jackalope sighted! We have now moved into official Darrell is a Dingbat territory. Random American citizens have now been rebranded as Enemies by the all knowing Darrell.
Darrell’s Idea of Government.
Step 1. Tap their phones.
Step 2. Kill them.
Step 3. Determine if they were in fact terrorists.
Step 4. Return to Step 1.
Darrell
dreggas, given the amount of voice and data likely collected through NSA “sweeps”, do you think it likely that even 10,000 FISA judges could sort through it all, even if you gave them 5 years?
Not to mention the idiocy of asking our agents to stop in the middle of monitoring a foreign terrorist sitting in Yemen, and then scramble to get a FISA warrant just because the terrorist in Yemen gets a call from Atlanta.
But such insane restrictions make perfect sense to you ‘reality based’ types, right?
Tsulagi
I know I shouldn’t poke challenged people, but sometimes you just go for cheap laughs.
Hey, here’s a thought, how about we ask someone who has a pretty good idea how much data is being collected. Someone like a NSA director. Why damn, someone did…
I guess Hayden just doesn’t have the common sense every wingnut has to know FISA couldn’t handle the load. Actually, seems to me he was saying he wanted to do data collection that a FISA court might not approve. But not to worry, we can always trust the ‘honor and integrity’ administration. They’re God’s soldiers.
TenguPhule
FISA isn’t supposed to be sorting through that, the NSA is. FISA is for approving warrants for taps on actual suspects.
‘Sweeps’ without cause are *ILLEGAL*, Darrell.
TenguPhule
Fixed to make it easy to understand even for Darrell.
dreggas
Darrel
dreggas, given the amount of voice and data likely collected through unwarranted, illegal NSA “sweeps”, do you think it likely that even 10,000FISA judgesFederal Agents could sort through it all, even if you gave them 5 years?Surely it was idiocy to ask the same thing of those monitoring people in Russia. Then again it is idiocy and more dangerously illegal to monitor a call originating within the united states or it’s territories without a warrant.
According to the Law it’s not insane, according to bush after the amendments to FISA, FISA was fine, of course it was fine because he intended to ignore it anyway.
Oh and your little talking point about “A judge not being in position to know what is best for national security” is a nice direct quote from your BFF Abu Gonzales who I am listening to give a presentation to *gasp* the American Enterprise Institute as I write this. Guess you can’t have an original thought can ya? Or for that matter look at anything without kool-aid stained glasses.
TenguPhule
Shorter Darrell: I have proved I am so completely full of shit that when I open my mouth, Global Warming doubles.
Darrell Logic: Three days after the tap, they can still get the warrant = Liberals prevent them from listening in on suspects at the time.
Darrell
I love it when you guys reveal what simpletons you truly are. Only for “actual” suspects, huh? What the hell is an actual suspect.
I guess suspected foreign terrorists being monitored in Cairo aren’t “actual” suspects then, unless they get an email or phone call from Phoenix, right? Then stop everything to get a warrant. yeah, you all are real ‘deep thinkers’
Marc
Listening to Darrell here saves me from spending time at a bar to get the latest common-sense, inside-scoop political insights of the shit-faced drunk at the end of the bar.
Darrell
I take you are too stupid to know that if those sweeps are directed foreign terrorists who are in foreign countries, it’s not “illegal”. In fact, the President has an OBLIGATION to run those sweeps, and more, on those suspected terrorists overseas.
dreggas
The, what’s the word, humane side of me says I should not continue but since I have not been told to stop and, well, am a sadist I guess I will just continue helping this train wreck along.
TR
Uh…. A specific individual targeted for a wiretap? As opposed to the broad, subjectless sweeps done by the NSA.
Jeez. Am I the only one here who is SANE enough to SEE THROUGH the lies of the REALITY-BASED LIBERALS?
TenguPhule
Shorter Darrell: I consistantly prove I know jack shit about FISA.
When you tap domestic/international communications where at least one end is in America, you need a warrant. That warrant can be applied for up to three days *after* the taps. This doesn’t apply to purely foreign calls. To get these warrants approved, you better have some evidence that the person you’re tapping is a possible threat.
Data mining American communications is *strictly* forbidden to the NSA.
Darrell
Now we’re making progress in exposing the idiocy for all to see. So you whackjobs are saying that all NSA sweeps are “illegal” unless specific individuals are targeted with warrants, right?
dreggas
Darrell FISA The Foreign…Intelligence…Surveillance…Act does not prevent the NSA or CIA from listening to communications with origination points outside the USA. It DOES limit their ability to monitor the communications of people that originate in the United States.
What part of that do you not understand?
TenguPhule
But not on domestic American communications. Nor on communications between Americans and foreign countries where there are no suspects on either side involved.
Because it’s I-L-L-E-G-A-L.
After this thread, Darrell will never be able to post anything ever again without being mocked without mercy for being a boneheaded moron.
RSA
Right, I wasn’t thinking of you with respect to FISA, but others in the blogosphere. By the way, your style of argumentation leaves a lot to be desired, intellectual content aside.
Darrell
Last time I’ll explain for the little minds. If the President has undisputed authority (and obligation) to monitor foreign enemies overseas, then how f*cking stupid to suggest that constitutional authority suddenly ends just because Osama bin Laden gets a phone call or email from Portland. What? No FISA warrants?
I can’t spell it out any more clearly than that.
TenguPhule
When you tap domestic/international communications where at least one end is in America, you need a warrant. That warrant can be applied for up to three days after the taps. This doesn’t apply to purely foreign calls. To get these warrants approved, you better have some evidence that the person you’re tapping is a possible threat.
Still waiting for Darrell to apologize for being stupid and wrong here.
Marc
After?
dreggas
Umbrella operations monitoring all communication originating in the United states to foreign countries is illegal. Monitoring a specific person suspected of being a foreign agent is not so long as a warrant is applied for (with enough evidence to justify the warrant) within 72 hours.
Obviously this requires that there be enough information on hand to initiate the wiretap PRIOR to going in for a warrant to continue surveillance.
Here let me just let FISA spell it out.
What this means, and again I will say it slowly, is that Domestic surveillance whether it be targetted or, in this case, gathered through dragnet sweeps is illegal under FISA.
What part aren’t you getting Darrell?
TenguPhule
You have up to three days after the tap to get a warrant.
How Darrell talks with crow and both feet in his mouth is a mystery.
TenguPhule
Every time he tries to bring up the Grand Canyon, we can slap him back down with this.
Darrell
When NSA sweeps are made targeting foreign terrorists overseas, there is so much data to and from so many people that it doesn’t matter if they have 3 days or 3 months.. It’s insane to suggest NSA could begin to handle it.
dreggas
And last time I will the president does not have this authority under the constitution. We are a nation of laws, not of men, as such the president does not have the authority to summarily ignore laws passed by and signed into law by congress and previous administrations.
There is no such thing as the unitary executive, it is not in the constitution, nor in the law which the president is charged to uphold.
The constitution, 2 centuries of constitutional law and precedent cannot make it any clearer.
Darrell
The complete unwillingness for any of the leftists here to concede any validity to my arguments, just reinforces what dishonest extremists most of you truly are.
I’ve given clear examples of the problems and complications involved, yet you pretend as if it’s cut and dried. Leftists by and large tend to have their beliefs dictated by dogma rather than logic. This thread is more evidence of that tendency.
dreggas
but wait a sec I thought it was only insane to suggest FISA could handle it? If the NSA can’t handle it why are they doing it? Oh that’s right because the decider decided so!
Here’s more pie…
Jonathan
Darrell:
You never got back to me about Rumsfeld threatening to fire anyone who even mentioned planning for the occupation phase of the Iraq invasion.
Despite asking this question many times over at Right Wing Nuthouse, I have never gotten any answer at all from any conservative and I have now been banned despite following all the rules scrupulously.
Do you think General Scheid lied when he made the statement above?
I’m not holding my breath. I think you will ignore this, just as every other conservative I have asked has.
Prove me wrong, Darrell, answer me.
dreggas
Translation: My tongue is twisted in so many knots from spinning and my head is so far up my ass I will simply dismiss you all as extremists and project my own dishonesty onto you…thus spaketh the Darrell.
Translation: I have spun my head around so many times I am now nauseous and will be making an offering to the porcelain god as soon as I hit submit. Further my refusal to acknowledge logic in the real world somehow proves my point.
Here’s more pie…
Otto Man
Dammit, this has to be a Doug J-style spoof. Even Darrell isn’t that stupid.
Darrell
I mistyped. Should have read
NSA can clearly sweep for data. FISA can’t begin to review and make judicial assessment on that volume of data
Pooh
Well Darrell, your arguments are invalid for two main reasons, bear with me here.
First, they are not logically sound. Tim has explained logical fallacies to you from time to time, I’m sure you recall.
Second, even if they were, you continually skip the step of demonstrating the factual accuracy of your premises. If you say “If A, then B”, to use this to prove the existence of B, you must first prove A. You don’t assume A. You don’t tell us that none of us know whether A is true or not. You have the burden of proof. Or, as Steve or myself might say in our professional capacities “Objection: assuming facts not in evidence.”
So really, our ‘failure’ to concede that your arguments have any validity has more to say about your arguments than it does us. But, projection being what it is, that’s our fault too. Because logic has a well known liberal bias.
dreggas
No they can’t thus speaketh the Law.
Here’s your sign…
Pooh
You really shouldn’t wait.
Dreggas, TP, I should warn you, we’ve been down this road on FISA several times, and the same stupid zombie crap keeps resurfacing (who knew that zombies crapped? I didn’t either before meeting Senator D…)
You’ll simply never get anywhere. He will keep begging the question and assuming his conclusion (TERRORISTS! Who says? I DO. How do you know? JUST SHUT UP, MOONBAT!) He’ll keep bringing up “unitary executive powers of the CIC”, while ignoring the expressed foreign affairs powers given to Congress in the Constitution. If you’re really lucky, he might even reanimate a really hoary chestnut and blockquote a rather…selectively truncated passage of the Youngstown concurrence.
Otto Man
Sssh, Pooh. Don’t ruin the end of this movie for the people who haven’t seen it yet.
dreggas
I’m done, he moved from getting pie to getting a sign. You get a sign I tend to move on. It has been fun though and as has been stated Darrell has forthwith relinquished any credibility after this thread (or that’s the general consensus). I am still wondering just how old Darrell, for pure curiosity purposes, I think I would probably die laughing if I found out he was older than me.
Pooh
Dude, Bruce Willis is dead man…
Jonathan
Darrell:
You’ve now had thirty minutes and I see no reply from you to my question.
You disappoint me, Darrell. I thought you were made of sterner stuff.
Silence is the tacit nod of acquiescence.
Dave
Hmm..225 responses. Darrell must be posting in this thread.
TenguPhule
And when foreign targets are swept, it’s not a FISA warrant.
But you can’t do sweeps on Americans. You especially can’t sweep on domestic communications.
And if you want to listen in on *SPECIFIC* people talking in America to their fellow Americans or overseas (none of the Darrelling ‘millions of calls bullshit’) you need a warrant. You can get one after the tap, but you still need a warrant.
But you can’t ‘sweep’ and data mine thousands/millions of calls being made in America. Period. It’s illegal. No ifs, ands or buts about it.
tBone
I thought the same thing. Darrell is like a meta-spoof. He is the fount from which all spoof springs. Kneel, worms – kneel before your Spoof Lord!
Jonathan
Darrell:
It’s now been an hour and no reply.
What’s the matter, don’t you want to talk to me?
You were posting about every ten minutes or so until I asked my question.
Silence is the tacit nod of acquiescence.
Zombie Santa Claus
Thank goodness for signing statements!
That’s what I’ve been saying all along. GOP4Me was just a parroting of Darrellspeak. That’s why Darrell hated him so much when he found out his mirror image was really a dishonest leftist whackjob. Like you. It’s who you are. I OWN you kooks.
Jonathan
Darrell has left the building.
Pooh
I’m in ur Intranets, spoofing ur argum3nz
srv
Don’t hold yer breath. The rest of us have been waiting over a year:
Domestic Surveillance
Jonathan
I think I already said that. About holding my breath I mean.
People like Darrell are easy to shut up, just hit them with something that they cannot either deny or bullshit their way out of.
Darrell:
It’s been an hour and a half now, where are you?
Please talk to me, I promise I won’t make fun of you or call you names.
Silence is the tacit nod of acquiescence.
tBone
Don’t sell yourself short. GOP4Me was more like a giant mutated megaparrot version of Darrell.
Jonathan
Darrell:
It’s two hours now and I have not heard from you.
Where are you Darrell?
Please talk to me.
Silence is the tacit nod of acquiescence.
RobR
And your unwillingness to concede any validity to my argument that your willingness to slander President Ford means that you fuck the dead (Beyond threatening to “Knock [my] buck teeth in” – a clear slander against my orthodontist, you goatfucker) just reinforces what a dishonest necrophiliac you truly are.
And the least you can do is tell my grandfather I love him,
Steve
From what I can tell through the pie filter, I’m pretty sure I covered all this crap with Darrell over a year ago. Not that it’s gotten less fun in the interim, mind you.
Dreggas
Then it is like a rite of passage around here? All “Shark Bait Ooo Ha Ha!” right?
How’d I do?
Jonathan
Darrell:
Silence is the tacit nod of acquiescence.
demimondian
Not bad, all things considered. Now you know why it is that most of the regulars run the pie filter.
Dreggas
demi,
Well I kinda like at least making stupid painful verbally. I guess some people are just to dense to really feel it.
Pooh
Dreggas, I’d say not bad. Between Steve (more) and me (less) we pretty much covered the same ground as to the legalities. There was a time (more or less one year ago) when I could have this whole conversation (complete with citation to relevant authority) in my sleep. I would have been wise to simply generate an FPD (Frequentely Posted Darrrelisms) by which I could simply cut and paste…
Really the sticking point boils down to us asking “how do you know they are terrorists?” with the reply “how do you know they aren’t?” and after discussing the impossibility of asking us to prove negatives as well as the complete inversion of the usual burdens of proof, we throw our hands up in the air, and start surfing Cornyn’s website to find out what nonsense he would be spouting in the next thread.
Steve
Greenwald spotted a couple right-wing reactions:
These guys understand that the administration has now gone back on any number of its most critical claims concerning this program. Even Mark Levin – one of the dumbest men on the planet – understands that point. Yet Darrell is defending the administration’s position to the death, even now that they have abandoned it. Classic!
Chuck Butcher
Darrell and his ilk don’t care what the Law is. Post 9/11 and the assumption of George II’s mantel of imperium those archaic laws don’t count. The Constitution is useful for Article II, CiC and the BOR for the 1st regarding his religion (gays) & keeping a gun. Now I perosnally happen to like the rule of law, and if I choose to disregard it, I do so at my own risk (I might chose to) and I keep guns because of people like Darrell.
Some of you may remember an aspect of the Cold War that I have fond memories of, duck & cover, after that particular innoculation I find it a little difficult to get real damn scared about desert assrats.
dslak
Mmm, mmm, mmm. Another lengthy, delicious thread about the tastiness of pie.
Zombie Santa Claus
A 400 ton aquatic rodent, as it were.
jake
Don’t bother. He’ll just say you’re “stalking” or “obsessing” about him. He’s a big tease that way.
Darrell
Steve, how could those guys, including Mark Levin, “understand the point” as you say, when so few details have been given out:
Seriously, you pretend as if you have it figured out. And since you cited Captain Ed, a quick visit to his site shows this:
Which leads Captain Ed to object only on the grounds that the Bush admin should not have talked to FISA at all (enabling many who objected to Bush’s program to save face), but instead make a big public constitutional fight over it. From everything I’ve read, especially Gonzalez’ statement yesterday, I’ll bet nothing has changed on how the wiretapping/monitoring will be being carried out… except now we have leftists screaming “I told you so” out of ignorance.
Darrell
The phrase ‘drama queen’ comes to mind.
The Other Steve
What part of FISA oversight do you not understand?
The battle wasn’t over eavesdropping, it was over the Rule of Law you fucking imbecile.
Darrell
No surprise that the stupidest of the stupid tend to be leftists. TOSser is impenentrable to facts and evidence which conflict with his narrative.
demimondian
Darrell does a superb bit of rhetorical sliminess here.
You see, the quotation from Captain Ed? It’s only partly from Captain Ed. The second paragraph is from the other blogger he cites. Ed then goes on to refute the claims of this “not being a climb-down”.
You know, D-boy, I used to feel kind of bad beating on you. I couldn’t tell if you were stupid, crazy, or evil. I won’t, ever again. To stab your own ideological allies in the back by deliberately misquoting them is loathsome.
Steve
Captain Ed (my favorite conservative blogger) is worth quoting at greater length:
Tulkinghorn
These two groups, more specifically, would be Jews and homosexuals. This is directly out of the Goebbels playbook.
At times I wonder if the whole Iraq clusterf*ck was pursued just to put us in an unwinnable situation where these groups could be blamed and, eventually, legally persecuted by expanded powers of state. Or maybe Bush & Cheney just stumbled into fascism.
Punchy
My computer just exploded.
lifetime_fiscal_conservative
Personally, I think they should report the news on Iraq from Camden, NJ.
There’s several big differences. Camden’s situation is improving, they have 24 hours electricity, and they have drinkable water.
Rich Jones
It was never the media reporting of negative news that turned the public against the war. It was the unrelenting lies of the administration, the assault on civil liberties, and the astonishing arrogance displayed by the administration here at home. I’ve never lost faith in the ability of our military or in their committment to duty. I have lost faith in Bush, Cheney, Rumsfield and Rice. They are incompetent and have done everything possible to cover their own incompetence. As long as these people are in charge, there is no believable way for us to win this war. At some point, you people need to start holding the architects of this war responsible for results, or is that no longer viable in Republican circles?
easterpig
Now that Bush has declared the situation in Iraq “a slow failure” and “unacceptable” I guess we have to include him in our Moonbat Pussy Club. But I don’t want to. If you guys include him, I quit. That’s right. I just quit.
Jim
Here’s a tip for pro-Iraq War supporters and critics of the media: if you want to jab at those who are anti-war, try using another term other than ‘Hanoi-Jane’. Why? Most people under a particular age, say those younger than 32, do not have a clue who the hell you’re talking about. Jane who? Maybe you guys could work up a name insult attaching somebody like Jay-Z, Angelina Jolie, Anne Hathaway or Brad Pitt.
TenguPhule
Fixed.
And brave Sir Darrell ran away, ran away.
Zombie Santa Claus
The water in Camden is chock-full of lead and benzene. New Jersey’s known about it for over 30 years, has promised repeatedly to fix it, and has done nothing. If you want to see pissed-off people, you should go to a town meeting in Camden where this is discussed. I went to one once, and it basically consisted of two hours of screaming at the guy from the McGreevey administration there to discuss it.
Steve
The problem with drawing analogies between Camden and Iraq – at least if you’re a war supporter – is that the case for withdrawing from Camden is equally clear-cut.
The Other Steve
I noticed Darrell did not object to my calling him a fucking imbecile.
section9
There is general agreement on the conservative side that Bush and Rumsfeld’s conduct of the war from April 2003 onward has been execrable. Our criticism generally revolves around Rummy’s decision not to increase Army end strength and Bush’s indecisiveness at Fallujah in April of 2004.
Where we fault the Left at this point in time is its sometimes blithe ignorance of the consequences of a hasty withdrawl. Defeat will have vast consequences, up to and including the probable use by Al Qaeda of al Anbar province as an international training base. Eventually, we will have to send raiding parties into al Anbar all the time, whether under a President Giuliani or a President Obama or Clinton.
Your disgust for Bush is understandable. However, it seems no one on the Left has thought about what happens when defeat comes. More war, of course. You people are foolish enough to believe that Al Qaeda and their allies will leave us alone. You are in for quite a rude awakening.
TenguPhule
I call bullshit. Al Queda in Iraq will be lucky to get out in one piece once the local Sunni and Shia stop shooting at our boys and girls and start going after them. Nobody in Iraq likes Al Queda, the only reason they’re tolerated at the moment is because our troops are higher priority on their kill list. The Shia hate them for bombing their mosques and the Sunni hate them for getting the Shia after them in the death squads in retaliation for all the trouble and killings Al Queda was causing on the Shia side.
Bullshit. Iraq is going to go down the same path it is currently on, only without US casualties once we pull out. If we’re lucky, the ethnic restructuring will be quick and we end up with three mini-states in all but name, two of which will be on friendly terms with Iran. At worse, total anarchy as every power in the Middle East sticks their fingers into it by supplying their own factions with guns and ammo to try and wrestle control of the prime oil fields and ports.
But what doesn’t matter in all of it will be the USA. We’re non-entities in the Iraq power struggles now. Our credibilty is blown and our military can’t solve even the basic need of security.
Does this sound bad? Sure, but that’s what cutting your losses is. It’s not about the possibility of salvaging anything anymore, this is about getting out before things get worse and make getting out later even more costly.
TenguPhule
Anyone who still confuses Iraq with Al Queda and other regional guerillas operating in other countries is full of shit and deserves all the scorn and mockery they get.
GOP4Me et al
I think that already happened, about 30 years ago.
You’re section 8 if you think Iran’s going to let this happen.
Darrell
Yeah, “probable cause” being the Bush admin says someone overseas is a terrorist, and FISA gives them near carte blanche to monitor all communication coming to and from those terrorists, including communication to and from the US, WITHOUT having to get warrants each time.
In other words, when monitoring terrorists overseas, they won’t have to come running to FISA for warrants each time they intercept emails, phone calls, and other communication coming from the US, but have “blanket authority” for massive intelligence sweeps without having to stop and get individual warrants.. which was the central point Steve and virtually everyone else on his side has been howling over.
Looks almost certain that FISA has de facto conceded that authority to the Bush administration, but I admit that details are too sketchy to say so with 100% confidence.
TenguPhule
Shorter Darrell: Yes, I am a fucking idiot. I don’t know what I’m talking about and I don’t care. If I want to suck Bush’s salty chocolate balls, that’s exactly what I’m gonna do!
Jeff G
How dare Bryan Preston spend four days over in Iraq and then presume to comment! Why, he could have just stayed home on his recumbent bike and become a hero to the left by denying that the steady drumbeat of media defeatism has any appreciable effect at all on anything!
JOHN COLE, MAVERICK BLOGGER! You should move to Arizona. You might even get elected to Congress.
Jeff G
And while you’re at it, try to ignore all the criticisms in that comment thread of military strategy. Or any previous posts I’ve done commenting on same.
From your recumbent bike. WHICH HAS BECOME UNTO A THRONE!
Of course, I’m probably not allowed to question your intellectual honesty. After all, you’ve served, man!
person of choler
“Stab in the back”. Nice smooth insertion of the Nazi Leitmotiv without getting Godwinian about it.
TenguPhule
Shorter Jeff G: How dare you question our plan to brand the liberal media as the fifth column! Why must you comfort terrorists you filthy mutant liberal traitor! I am outraged! Outraged, I say! If I could leave this hiding space under my bed where I quiver in fear of terrorists coming to kill me, I’d think about saying some strong words to you!