Responses

Go Pistons!

I’ll start with Wazoo, who doesn’t seem too far off the deep end, and maybe get to some of James.

"For each person we torture, 10 recruits sign up for al Qaeda" needs a citation.

Just common sense. I know the conservatives hate the expression – “this is why they hate us” but it’s true. There’s nothing unpatriotic about exploring our foreign policy to determine what we might be doing to piss people off. Propping up brutal dictatorships like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and yes – IRAQ with money and weapons is what started it all. The realpolitik of the necessity of oil (and I’m not such a bleeding heart that I don’t appreciate that our economy rests on getting access to oil, I’m not suggesting an alternative per se), had us ignoring the plight of the people in the region. Now we’re paying the price. I would proffer that it’s unpatriotic to not look at the situation critically. And don’t come at me with “blame America first” politics. Bill Maher has a bit about how liberals love America, but like a wife – sometimes you can have disagreements, but you always love her. Conservatives love America like Mommy – she can do no wrong. Newsflash – sometimes we do bad things. Bad policy decisions doesn’t undermine the absolute brilliance of our Founding Fathers and our Constitution.

Anyhow, the 10 recruits was a made up number. And it’s probably unprovable since we actually have no idea the level of the insurgency. But there is this quote:

Lt. Col. Frederick P. Wellman, who works with the task force overseeing the training of Iraqi security troops, said the insurgency doesn't seem to be running out of new recruits, a dynamic fueled by tribal members seeking revenge for relatives killed in fighting.

"We can't kill them all," Wellman said. "When I kill one I create three."

Moving on:

"Maybe you’ve read the Bill of Rights? How about the part about cruel and unusual punishment?" The Bill of Rights refers to American citizens, which at once rules out most of the guys at Gitmo.

Of course. I just meant that we are a country of ideals. One of our ideals was human rights, and suddenly when our back is against the wall in a scary, dangerous war, we sell out our founding principles? That’s not the sort of country that Jefferson etc. had been imagining.

"And killing faggots! Don’t forget the dirty, dirty faggots!" What?

Hyperbole. Bush uses gay marriage as a wedge issue to get good people to vote against their own interests. The poor exploited WalMart worker who could use some government protection from the evil overlord votes for Bush because of the “dirty dirty faggots.”

"There happened to be one document that they were unable to accurately source, but it was also never proven false (on Rathergate)." It's (nearly) logically impossible to prove something like this false

So don’t refer to it as a forgery then. My point is that there was nothing untrue in the story, the media just attached itself to a mismanagement of the niggling details rather than focus on the overall truth of the story. Take another example, the Newsweek bullshit. Newsweek screwed up, for sure. But in what way? The “wrong” part of that story was that the Koran desecration was going to appear in a government report. It wasn’t going in a report. But, the Koran desecration had still happened. But Bush would have you believe that it hadn’t happened at all because of a nuanced “Inside Baseball” media mistake.

Moore has been a documented deceiver since way before F9/11,

Show me.

How the media could be right-leaning when "80%+" voted for Kerry (need a citation too, James).

This would be an example of “how to lie using statistics.” How reporters vote is irrelevant. I can vote for democrats and still be an executive at WalMart. What’s important in media bias is the stories they print and more importantly the stories the editors authorize. Bush has been a bully with the media. If you write a story that’s critical of Bush, he denies you close access and leaks. Reporters live and die on access to the higher-ups. It’s more important to them that they make a name for themselves in their careers than who actually wins elections. Furthermore, the right-wing media machine has been screaming “liberal bias” for three decades. Starting some time in the 90s, when the machine really started picking up steam, the news agencies started self-editing to avoid the screaming echo chambers. You can’t write a story without pointing out the other side, no matter how absurd that side might be. Anyway, go to Media Matters for America for examples every single day, with backup evidence. Don’t let O’Reilly just tell you that they’re lying without reading what they have to say. Oh, and here’s a short list of stories that haven’t made it to the big time because they’re too afraid of Bush:

missing $8 Billion from the Coalition Provisional Authority (that’s a lot of body armor, innit)

Tom DeLay’s massive ethical violations

voting irregularities in Florida in 2000. In Ohio in 2004. Both states where the Secretaries of State were regional Bush/Cheney chairpeople.

The military lied about the “heroic” battle scenes of Pvt. Lynch and Pat Tillman.

Yes, the Downing Street Memo, which is a smoking gun, no matter what you think. It wasn’t what “some guy” thought they were saying. It was a transcript of a meeting between Blair, one of his top ministers and the HEAD of British intelligence. And it isn’t just about the intelligence being “fixed,” it was that Bush lied to us when he said he was trying to solve it peacefully. And that no one in the UK had the impression that we had done any post-war planning, which by the way, you might have noticed isn’t going so well. "A post-war occupation of Iraq could lead to a protracted and costly nation-building exercise." The authors add, "As already made clear, the U.S. military plans are virtually silent on this point. Washington could look to us to share a disproportionate share of the burden."

Who outed Valerie Plame?

Bush fired the guy who wanted to tell the truth about how much that Medicare giveaway to the pharmaceutical companies was going to cost.

How was it that Jeff Gannon was in the White House day after day on a day pass, sometimes when there weren’t even press conferences, when a real journalist like Maureen Dowd was denied access?

Whatever, the list goes on and on. Actually my coeditor mentioned a number of things in his comment where Bush has removed items from scientific reports that didn’t support his political worldview. Any investigative reporter worth his/her salt would be all up on those stories. But not at the expense of losing access to the White House.

I don’t have the time to go into James right now. But I guess I’d ask him how he knows that Kerry joined the Navy to dodge going to war? (or for that matter, how that’s worse than Bush joining the National Guard and then going AWOL?). Second, as far as Kerry being a pussy or whatever, did you see that Kerry released his military records? Did you see what it said?

The records, which the Navy Personnel Command provided to the Globe, are mostly a duplication of what Kerry released during his 2004 campaign for president, including numerous commendations from commanding officers who later criticized Kerry's Vietnam service.
...

Indeed, one of the first actions of the group that came to be known as Swift Boat Veterans for Truth was to call on Kerry to sign a privacy waiver and release all of his military and medical records.
But Kerry refused, even though it turned out that the records included commendations from some of the same veterans who were criticizing him.

Funny. I wonder why they would change their stories? Could it be that they were lying during the campaign?