OT: Stabbed in the back!
William Coleman
perspective the current attempts by Bush, Cheney, Rove, and other right-wing
warmongers to blame liberals and war critics for the failures of the Bush
Crime Family in Iraq. If the Iraq War winds up being a total disaster (as
if it weren't already a total disaster), we will hear a huge hue and cry
from the right that the liberals and war critics are to blame.
Of course, we have seen this all before. We lost the Viet Nam War because
Jane Fonda and John Kerry went to Hanoi. If the American military had been
allowed to do its job, we would have kicked Vietnamese ass.
Baker does a great job of tracing the origin of the modern stabbed in the
back myth to Wagner's Gotterdammerung. He shows how the Nazis embraced this
myth to explain the German defeat in World War I, and how the Republican
Party has taken a page right out of the Nazi playbook since World War II by
blaming all American foreign policy failures on treasonous betrayals by
Democrats and liberals.
This essay should be required reading for all right-wing nutcases. You guys
are all complete historical illiterates, and what history you do know is a
completely distorted narrative. Witness Paul G's recent assertion that
Augusto Pinochet was a "good man" because Chile was under attack from
communism, and Pinochet saved Chile from being transformed into a
totalitarian communist dictatorship. Never mind that Allende was
democratically elected in one of the few stable democracies in Latin
America. Never mind that, upon assuming power, Pinochet dissolved
parliament and destroyed a viable democracy. Never mind that he ruthlessly
persecuted members of all opposition parties, killing thousands of them.
Never mind that he kidnapped and tortured thousands of people. Never mind
that he disappeared thousands of others. Never mind that, like all corrupt
dictators, left or right, he embezzled millions of dollars from the Chilean
people. He was fighting communism, you see. That justifies any and all
atrocities by Pinochet, no matter how horrific. He was a good man.
Anyway, read and learn, you right-wing nutcases. Find out how everytime you
call a liberal a traitor, a terrorist sycophant, or a communist, you are
taking your strategy right out of the Nazi playbook.
http://harpers.org/StabbedInTheBack.html
Stabbed in the Back!
The past and future of a right-wing myth
Posted on Friday, July 14, 2006. Originally from June 2006. By Kevin Baker.
Sources
First drink, hero, from my horn:
I spiced the draught well for you
To waken your memory clearly
So that the past shall not slip your mind!
-Hagen to Siegfried
Die Götterdämmerung
Every state must have its enemies. Great powers must have especially
monstrous foes. Above all, these foes must arise from within, for national
pride does not admit that a great nation can be defeated by any outside
force. That is why, though its origins are elsewhere, the stab in the back
has become the sustaining myth of modern American nationalism. Since the end
of World War II it has been the device by which the American right wing has
both revitalized itself and repeatedly avoided responsibility for its own
worst blunders. Indeed, the right has distilled its tale of betrayal into a
formula: Advocate some momentarily popular but reckless policy. Deny
culpability when that policy is exposed as disastrous. Blame the disaster on
internal enemies who hate America. Repeat, always making sure to increase
the number of internal enemies.
As the United States staggers past the third anniversary of its misadventure
in Iraq, the dagger is already poised, the myth is already being
perpetuated. To understand just how this strategy is likely to unfold-and
why this time it may well fail-we must return to the birth of a legend.
* * *
The stab in the back first gained currency in Germany, as a means of
explaining the nation's stunning defeat in World War I. It was Field Marshal
Paul von Hindenburg himself, the leading German hero of the war, who told
the National Assembly, "As an English general has very truly said, the
German army was 'stabbed in the back.'"
Like everything else associated with the stab-in-the-back myth, this claim
was disingenuous. The "English general" in question was one Maj. Gen. Neill
Malcolm, head of the British Military Mission in Berlin after the war, who
put forward this suggestion merely to politely summarize how Field Marshal
Erich von Ludendorff-the force behind Hindenburg-was characterizing the
German army's alleged lack of support from its civilian government.
"Ludendorff's eyes lit up, and he leapt upon the phrase like a dog on a
bone," wrote Hindenburg biographer John Wheeler-Bennett. "'Stabbed in the
back?' he repeated. 'Yes, that's it exactly. We were stabbed in the back.'"
Ludendorff's enthusiasm was understandable, for, as he must have known, the
phrase already had great resonance in Germany. The word dolchstoss-"dagger
thrust"-had been popularized almost fifty years before in Wagner's
Götterdämmerung. After swallowing a potion that causes him to reveal a
shocking truth, the invincible Teutonic hero, Siegfried, is fatally stabbed
in the back by Hagen, son of the archvillain, Alberich.
Wagner had himself lifted his plot device from a medieval German poem, which
was inspired in turn by Old Norse folklore, and of course the same story can
be found in a slew of ancient mythologies, whether it's the fate of the
Greek heroes Achilles and Hercules or the story of Jesus and Judas. The hero
cannot be defeated by fair means or outside forces but only by someone close
to him, resorting to treachery.
The Siegfried legend in particular, though, has nuances that would mesh
perfectly with right-wing mythology in the twentieth century, both in
Germany and in the United States. At the end of Wagner's Ring Cycle, the
downfall of the gods is followed by the rise of the Germanic people. The
mythological hero has been transformed into the volk, just as heroic stature
is granted to the modern state. Siegfried is killed just after revealing an
unwelcome truth-much as the right, when pressed for evidence about its
conspiracy theories, will often claim that these are hidden truths their
enemies have a vested interest in concealing. Hagen, as a half-breed, an
outsider posing as a friend, stands in for something worse yet-the
assimilated Jew, able to betray the great warrior of the volk by posing as
his boon companion.
It was an iconography easily transferable to Germany's new, postwar
republic. Hitler himself would claim that while recuperating behind the
lines from a leg wound, he found Jewish "slackers" dominating the
war-production bureaucracy and that "the Jew robbed the whole nation and
pressed it beneath his domination." The rape imagery is revolting but vivid;
Hitler was already attuned to the zeitgeist of his adopted country. Even
before the war had been decided, a soldier in his company recalled how
Corporal Hitler would "leap up and, running about excitedly, say that in
spite of our big guns, victory would be denied us, for the invisible foes of
the German people were a greater danger than the biggest cannon of the
enemy."
It didn't matter that Field Marshal Ludendorff had in fact been the virtual
dictator of Germany from August of 1916 on, or that the empire's civilian
leaders had been stunned by his announcement, in September of 1918, that his
last, murderous offensives on the western front had failed, and that they
must immediately sue for peace. The suddenness of Germany's defeat only
supported the idea that some sort of treason must have been involved. From
this point on, all blame would redound upon "the November criminals," the
scheming politicians, reds, and above all, Jews.
Yet it was necessary, for the purging that the Nazis had in mind, to believe
that the national degeneration went even further. Jerry Lembcke, in his
brilliant work, The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory and the Legacy of Vietnam,
writes of how the Nazis fostered the dolchstosslegende in ways that eerily
foreshadowed returning veteran mythologies in the United States. Hermann
Göring, the most charismatic of the Nazi leaders after Hitler, liked to
speak of how "very young boys, degenerate deserters, and prostitutes tore
the insignia off our best front line soldiers and spat on their field gray
uniforms." As Lembcke points out, any insignia ripping had actually been
done by the mutinous soldiers and sailors who would launch a socialist
uprising shortly after the war, tearing them off their own shoulders or
those of their officers. Göring's instant revisionism both covered up this
embarrassing reality and created a whole new class of villains who were-in
his barely coded language-homosexuals, sexually threatening women, and other
"deviants." All such individuals would be dealt with in the new, Nazi order.
* * *
The dolchstosslegende first came to the United States following not a war
that had been lost but our own greatest triumph. Here, the motivating defeat
was suffered not by the nation but by a faction. In the years immediately
following World War II, the American right was facing oblivion.
Domestically, the reforms of the New Deal had been largely embraced by the
American people. The Roosevelt and Truman administrations-supported by many
liberal Republicans-had led the nation successfully through the worst war in
human history, and we had emerged as the most powerful nation on earth.
Franklin Roosevelt and his fellow liberal internationalists had sounded the
first alarms about Hitler, but conservatives had stubbornly-even
suicidally-maintained their isolationism right into the postwar era. Senator
Robert Taft, "Mr. Republican," and the right's enduring presidential hope,
had not only been a prominent member of the leading isolationist
organization, America First, and opposed the nation's first peacetime draft
in 1940, but also appeared to be as naive about the Soviet Union as he had
been about the Axis powers. Like many on the right, he was much more
concerned about Chiang Kai-shek's worm-eaten Nationalist regime in China
than U.S. allies in Europe. "The whole Atlantic Pact, certainly the arming
of Germany, is an incentive for Russia to enter the war before the army is
built up," Taft warned. He was against any U.S. military presence in Europe
even in 1951.
This sort of determined naiveté had Taft and his movement teetering on the
brink of political irrelevance. They saved themselves by grabbing at an
unlikely rope-America's very own dolchstosslegende, the myth of Yalta. No
reasonable observer would have predicted in the immediate wake of the Yalta
conference that it would become an enduring symbol of Democratic perfidy.
Yalta was, in fact, originally considered the apogee of the Roosevelt
Administration's accomplishments, ensuring that the hard-won peace at the
end of World War II would not soon dissolve
into an even worse conflict, just as the botched peace of Versailles had led
only to renewed hostilities in the years after World War I. The conference,
which took place in the Soviet Crimea in February 1945, was the last time
"the Big Three" of the war-Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin-would meet
face-to-face. The U.S. negotiating team went with specific goals and was
widely perceived at the time as having achieved them. Agreements were
reached on the occupation of the soon-to-be-defeated German Reich, the
liberation of those Eastern European countries occupied by or allied with
Germany, the Soviet entrance into the war against Japan, and, most
significantly in Roosevelt's eyes, on the structure of a workable,
international body designed to keep world peace, the United Nations.
FDR's presentation of these agreements before a joint session of Congress
that March met with almost universal acclaim. This was not surprising.
Roosevelt, who had been at Versailles as a junior member of the Wilson
Administration, was preoccupied with making sure that his vision for the
postwar world did not founder on any partisan bickering with Congress.
Before leaving for Yalta, he had briefed a group of leading senators from
across the political spectrum on what he hoped to accomplish, and solicited
their opinions and questions. The delegation he took with him to the Soviet
Union was a bipartisan team of senior diplomats, advisers, and military men,
and he continued to cultivate support from all quarters on his return to the
United States. Such prominent Republican figures as Arthur Vandenberg, the
once-isolationist senator from Michigan turned internationalist, and Thomas
Dewey, Roosevelt's fierce opponent in the 1944 presidential race, expressed
general support for the results of the Yalta conference. Taft and the right
wing of the Republican Party were more skeptical, but offered no substantial
criticisms.
Save for a few congressmen, newspaper publishers, and columnists on the
extreme fringe of the right, this early Cold War consensus would survive
until 1948. Then, Dewey's and the Republicans' stunning losses in the
elections that fall, combined with a confluence of American setbacks abroad,
served to revivify the right.
Not only did the Republicans lose a presidential election against a badly
divided, national Democratic Party; they also lost the congressional
majorities they had just managed to eke out in 1946, following fourteen
years in the political wilderness. It now seemed clear that the Republicans
would never return to power merely by supporting Democratic policies, or by
promising to implement them more effectively, and the right wing gained
traction within the party.
Meanwhile, the exposure of Alger Hiss as a Soviet agent followed, in
relatively rapid succession, by the fall of Czechoslovakia's coalition
government to a Soviet-backed coup, the Soviet attainment of an atomic bomb,
and the victory of Mao's Communists over Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang regime
in China, cast the entire policy of containment into doubt. Never mind that
the right's own feckless or muddled proposals for fighting the Cold War
would not have ameliorated any of these situations. The right swept them
into the memory hole and offered a new answer to Americans bewildered by how
suddenly their nation's global preeminence had been diminished: Yalta.
A growing chorus of right-wing voices now began to excoriate our wartime
diplomacy. Their most powerful charge, one that would firmly establish the
Yalta myth in the American political psyche, was the accusation that our
delegation had given over Eastern Europe to the Soviets. According to "How
We Won the War and Lost the Peace," an essay written for Life magazine
shortly before the 1948 election by William Bullitt-a former diplomat who
had been dismissed by Roosevelt for outing a gay rival in the State
Department-FDR and his chief adviser, Harry Hopkins, were guilty of "wishful
appeasement" of Stalin at Yalta, handing the peoples of Poland, Hungary,
Romania, Bulgaria, and the Baltic states over to the Soviet dictator.
The right wing's dolchstosslegende was a small but fateful conspiracy,
engineered through "secret diplomacy" at Yalta. Its linchpin was Hiss, a
junior State Department aide at Yalta who was now described as a major
architect of the pact. Hiss was a perfect villain for the right's purposes.
He was not only a communist and a spy; he was also an effete Eastern
intellectual right down to his name-and, by implication, possibly a
homosexual. He had been publicly exposed by that relentlessly regular guy,
Dick Nixon, as an unnatural, un-American element who had used his wiles to
sway all of his superiors in the Crimea.
Just how he had accomplished this was never detailed, but it didn't matter;
specificity is anathema to any myth. Bullitt and an equally flamboyant
opportunist of the period, Congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce, offered a more
general explanation. The Democrats, Mrs. Luce had already charged, "will
not, or dare not, tell us the commitments that were overtly or secretly made
in moments of war's extermination by a mortally ill President, and perhaps
mortally scared State Department advisers."
The idea of the "dying President" at Yalta was plausible to much of the
public, who had seen photographs of Roosevelt looking suddenly, shockingly
gaunt and exhausted throughout much of the last year of his life. To the
right wing-which had conducted a whispering campaign against Roosevelt
throughout his term in office, claiming that his real affliction was not
polio but syphilis, and that he, his wife, and various advisers, including
Hopkins, were "secret Jews" and Soviet agents-it all made perfect sense. To
the many Americans who still loved Roosevelt and whose votes the Republicans
needed, FDR himself could now become the Siegfried figure, a dying hero
betrayed by the shady, unnatural Hiss.
All of this, of course, falls apart under the most cursory examination. Hiss
was a "technician" at Yalta, relied upon mostly for his expertise regarding
the planned United Nations, and-already suspected of espionage-he had played
no policymaking role in a large, bipartisan delegation that included most of
the nation's military and diplomatic leadership. Roosevelt was in severe
physical decline and would die from a massive stroke some two months later,
but his mind was still active and engaged. Chip Bohlen-who actually was at
Yalta and who went on to become a leading Cold War statesman under both
Republican and Democratic administrations-would echo many other observers in
reporting that while Roosevelt's "physical state was certainly not up to
normal, his mental and psychological state was certainly not affected. He
was lethargic but when important moments arose, he was mentally sharp."
Far from handing over anything to anyone, Roosevelt had actually persuaded
Stalin to sign onto a "Declaration on Liberated Europe" that affirmed "the
right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will
live" and committed the Big Three "to the earliest possible establishment
through free elections of governments responsive to the will of the people."
More was not possible. The salient fact about Eastern Europe at the end of
World War II was that the Red Army enjoyed an immense numerical advantage
there. To dislodge it, the United States would have had to embark
immediately upon another epic struggle, a vast new war for which the
American people, already clamoring for demobilization, showed absolutely no
enthusiasm. It is likely that the United States would have eventually
prevailed in such a struggle, but only at a cost of American lives that
would have dwarfed the total lost in World War II itself, and the further
devastation of the very European countries we had sought to liberate.
As Bohlen told a Senate committee in 1953, "I believe that the map of Europe
would look much the same if there had never been a Yalta conference at all."
Why this should have been surprising, and how it possibly reflected a
failure of American foreign policy, is a mystery in any rational analysis of
the situation. But any such analysis could never be made by the heroic
state. Instead, Roosevelt and the nation he represented had to have been
betrayed. The previous, disastrous policies advocated by the Republican
right-ignoring the growing Axis threat, then leaving Western Europe
defenseless while plunging into war in China-could be safely forgotten.
* * *
Republicans now began an almost continuous campaign against alleged
Democratic conspiracies. Following Chiang's defeat, conservatives in
Congress demanded to know "Who lost China?" and Robert Taft, discarding his
much vaunted integrity, egged on Joe McCarthy's witch-hunt against the
Truman Administration, urging him to "keep talking and if one case doesn't
work out, he should proceed with another." Yet it would take another hot
war-and another expansion of the dolchstosslegende-to permanently enthrone
the idea of a vast, treasonous left-wing conspiracy in the American psyche.
The outbreak of hostilities in Korea in 1950 was disturbing enough, but the
defeat of General Douglas MacArthur that winter by invading Chinese forces
sent shock waves throughout the United States. More than anyone else,
MacArthur had brought about his own defeat, launching his troops up the
Korean peninsula in separate columns, divided by mountain ranges, ignoring
both orders from the White House to halt and plentiful signs that a massive
Chinese force had already infiltrated the Korean peninsula. But while his
subordinates scrambled to rally their reeling men, MacArthur moved swiftly
to salvage his military reputation and his hopes for the presidency.
What the general proposed was a massive escalation of the war. U.N. troops
would not only "blockade the coast of China" and "destroy through naval
gunfire and air bombardment China's industrial capacity to wage war" but
would also "release existing restrictions upon the Formosan garrison" of
Chiang Kai-shek, which might lead to counter-invasion against "vulnerable
areas of the Chinese mainland." Above all, MacArthur urged that no fewer
than thirty-four atomic bombs be dropped on what he characterized as
"retardation targets" in Manchuria, including critical concentrations of
troops and planes. Even this soon seemed insufficient. MacArthur later added
that had he been permitted, he not only would have launched as many as fifty
atomic bombs but also would have used "wagons, carts, trucks, and planes" to
create "a belt of radioactive cobalt" that would neatly slice the Korean
thumb from China. "For at least sixty years," he said, "there could have
been no land invasion of Korea from the north."
MacArthur insisted the "only way to prevent World War III is to end the
Korean conflict rapidly and decisively"-as if a massive, atomic attack upon
the world's most populous nation would not, in itself, constitute World War
III. When the Truman Administration rejected his proposals, the general
announced that he was not being allowed to win-"An enormous handicap without
precedent in military history." The U.N. had to "depart from its tolerant
effort to contain the war to the area of Korea" and accept his strategy to
"doom Red China," an opponent "of such exaggerated and vaunted military
power."
MacArthur conveyed similar sentiments to his conservative allies in
Congress, writing House Minority Leader Joseph Martin that he was only
trying to "follow the conventional pattern of meeting force with maximum
counter-force, as we have never failed to do in the past," and concluding:
"There is no substitute for victory." Martin gleefully aired the great man's
views in a speech in Brooklyn, thundering, "If we are not in Korea to win,
then this Administration should be indicted for the murder of thousands of
American boys." He added that "the same State Department crowd that cut off
aid" to Chiang in 1946 now opposed invading China because this would show up
their earlier mistakes. The only way to "save Europe and save Asia at the
same time" was "to clear out the State Department from top to bottom." After
Martin repeated MacArthur's views on the House floor, Truman finally removed
the general from his command. But the move seemed only to confirm that
something was very wrong.
The right seized the opportunity to renew-and expand-its charges of
dolchstoss. Republican Senator William Jenner of Indiana bellowed from the
floor of the Senate that "this country today is in the hands of a secret
inner coterie which is directed by agents of the Soviet Union. We must cut
this whole cancerous conspiracy out of our Government at once. Our own
choice is to impeach President Truman and find out who is the secret
invisible government which has so cleverly led our country down the road to
destruction." Nixon, his new colleague, agreed in barely coded language,
attacking "the whining, whimpering, groveling attitude of our diplomatic
representatives who talk of America's fear rather than of America's strength
and of America's courage." He claimed that "top administration officials
have refused time and time again to recognize the existence of this fifth
column" or "to take effective action to clear subversives out" of the
government.
Douglas MacArthur now became the martyred Siegfried, stabbed in the back by
weaklings at home who were for some reason afraid of victory. It was the
fault of these "whimpering," "soft," "cowardly," "lavender" "appeasers," so
unnatural they were willing to "murder" American boys to cover up their own
misjudgments. Communist treachery and appeasement were blended seamlessly
with an emerging, postwar sex panic.
An entire, seemingly plausible narrative of treason was now firmly
established. The conspiracy of spies, or sexual deviants, or both, had now
expanded beyond Alger Hiss to include pretty much the entire State
Department and maybe the rest of the executive branch. Taft, launching his
third run for the Republican nomination, offered to name MacArthur as his
vice president, and the general, while still harboring hopes of winning the
nomination himself, agreed on the condition that he would have a voice in
foreign policy and be put in charge of national security.
In their desire for power, Republican centrists soon joined this right-wing
chorus. John Foster Dulles, now Eisenhower's secretary-of-state designate,
denounced the very strategy of containment that he had helped to formulate
and promised to "roll back" Communism everywhere, including in Eastern
Europe. Eisenhower himself refused to disown McCarthy, even after the
senator had impugned the patriotism of his longtime friend and mentor,
George Marshall.
The Republican platform that Ike ran on in the fall of 1952 was a freefall
into fantasy, a fatal compact by party moderates with a right wing that
would eventually push them into extinction. For the first time since the
Civil War era, one major American political party charged another one with
treason. Democrats were accused of having "shielded traitors to the Nation
in high places" and creating "enemies abroad where we should have friends."
Democrats were responsible for all "110,000 American casualties" in Korea,
where they had "produced stalemates and ignominious bartering with our
enemies" that "offer no hope of victory." Republicans promised to "repudiate
all commitments contained in secret understandings such as those of Yalta
which aid Communist enslavements."
United once more, Republicans brought this compilation of hysterical charges
and bald-faced lies before the American people-who swallowed them willingly.
Once in power, Eisenhower and Dulles immediately returned to managing the
Democratic system of containment. Dulles met with MacArthur, listened
respectfully to his plan to nuke Manchuria, allowed that it "could well
succeed," then shelved it without another word. No "secret understandings"
to "aid Communist enslavements" were repudiated because, of course, they did
not exist. The idea of "rolling back" Communism from Eastern Europe was
taken seriously solely by the Hungarian people, who launched a brave
rebellion against their Soviet occupiers in 1956, only to find that Dulles
and Eisenhower were willing to offer them nothing more than sympathy.
* * *
The right's initial blindness toward first the Axis and then the Soviet
threat in Europe; the disastrous military campaign waged by one of its
icons; its feckless and even apocalyptic ideas for recouping its previous
mistakes-all had been erased in much of the public consciousness by the stab
in the back, a vote-winning tale of deviancy, subversion, and intentional
defeat radiating from Yalta all the way to Korea. The Vietnam War, however,
would call for yet another expansion of the dolchstosslegende.
Vietnam was the sort of war Republicans had been clamoring to fight for two
decades. A liberal administration had started it, with misplaced bravado,
but it had been egged on-even dared-to take the plunge into full-scale war
by prevailing right-wing dogma. When the war soured, Republicans first tried
to blame not the failed premise of the domino theory or the flawed diplomacy
of the Kennedy Administration or the near-universal American failure to
recognize Vietnam's boundless desire for self-determination-no, it was the
old fallbacks of appeasement, defeatism, and treachery in high places.
Once again, we were told that American troops were not being "allowed" to
win, if they could not mine Haiphong harbor, or flatten Hanoi, or reduce all
of North Vietnam to a parking lot. Yet Vietnam was a war with no real
defeats on the ground. U.S. troops won every battle of any significance and
inflicted exponentially greater casualties on the enemy than they suffered
themselves. Even the great debacle of the war, the 1968 Tet offensive, ended
with an overwhelming American military victory and the Viet Cong permanently
expunged as an effective fighting force. It is difficult to claim betrayal
when you do not lose a battle.
Worse yet, Republicans could not provide any meaningful alternative
strategy. Nixon was able to take office in 1969 only by offering a "secret
plan" to get the boys home from Vietnam, not by promising to hugely escalate
the fighting or risk a wider conflict. Richard Nixon became the first
Republican president since the turn of the century to take office while a
major war still hung in the balance, and now all the fantasies began to fall
away. More than 21,000 Americans were killed in Vietnam during Nixon's time
in office, and there were no Democrats to blame it on.
The only political hope for the administration was to turn its gaze
outward-to blame the people themselves, or at least a portion of them.
Nixon, as historian Rick Perlstein has observed, "had a gift for looking
beneath social surfaces to see and exploit subterranean anxieties," and he
had been on hand at the creation of this game. Initially, the divisions he
sought to exploit were much the same as those he had manipulated back in the
1940s, though they were now aimed at broad swaths of the general public-the
children of the New Deal, as it were. The leading tactics included
employment of the same sorts of code words so bluntly wielded twenty years
before, along with a good deal more street muscle.
Over and over, antiwar protesters were called Communists, perverts, or
simply "bums"-the last epithet from Nixon's own lips. The large percentage
of college students in their ranks were depicted as spoiled, obnoxious,
ungrateful children. Older, more established dissidents were ridiculed by
Nixon's vice president, Spiro Agnew, in a series of William Safire?authored
speeches, as "nattering nabobs of negativity," and, unforgettably, as "an
effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as
intellectuals." These invectives were, of course, doubly disingenuous; it
was Agnew and Safire who very much wanted such persons to be known by the
damning label of "intellectual," and what the vice president was really
calling them was fags.
All these bums and effetes might be un-American, but their disapproval still
was sufficient to demoralize our fighting men in Vietnam and thereby put
them in imminent peril. And on hand to take the torch from an increasingly
beleaguered Nixon was a new Republican master at exploiting subterranean
anxieties, Ronald Reagan. As early as 1969, Reagan was insisting that
leaders of the massive Moratorium Days protests "lent comfort and aid" to
the North Vietnamese, and that "some American will die tonight because of
the activity in our streets."
The Nixon Administration now had its new Hagens. People who voiced their
opposition to the war were traitors and even killers, responsible for the
death of American servicemen, and as such almost any action taken against
them could be justified. The Nixon White House even had its own blue-collar
shock troops. Repeatedly, on suspiciously media-heavy occasions,
construction workers appeared to break up antiwar demonstrations and beat up
peaceful demonstrators. The effete protesters had been shown up by real
working-class Americans-and their class allies in the police force eagerly
closed ranks.
* * *
Neither Nixon, nor Agnew, nor the war would survive a second term. With the
shameful, panicked helicopter evacuation of Saigon, U.S. prestige in the
world dropped precipitously-but none of the other dominoes followed. Once
again, by 1975, the American right should have found itself utterly
discredited. A war that conservatives had fervently supported had ended in
defeat, but with none of the consequences they had prophesied. Instead, the
entire operating right-wing belief in "monolithic communism" was debunked in
the wake of our evacuation from Saigon, as Vietnam attacked Cambodia, China
invaded Vietnam, and the Soviet Union and China clashed along their border.
Yet the cultural division that Richard Nixon had fomented to try to salvage
the war in Vietnam would take on a life of its own long after the war was
over and Nixon had been driven from office in disgrace. It cleverly focused
on the men who had fought the war, rather than the war itself. If Vietnam
had been an unnecessary sacrifice, if world Communism could no longer be
passed off as a credible threat to the United States, then the betrayal of
our fighting men must become the issue.
Vietnam, for the right, would come to be defined mainly through a series of
closely related, culturally explosive totems. The protesters and the
counterculture would be reduced to the single person of Jane Fonda, embalmed
forever on a clip of film, traipsing around a North Vietnamese antiaircraft
gun. The soldiers, meanwhile, were transformed into victims and martyrs. It
became general knowledge that they had been savagely scorned and mocked upon
their return to the United States; those returning through the San Francisco
airport were especially liable to be spat upon by men and women protesting
the war.
Of course, those who were able to return at all were the lucky ones. Soon
after we had bugged out of Saigon, millions of Americans became convinced
that American prisoners of war had been left behind in Vietnamese work
camps, by a government that was too cowed or callous to insist upon their
return. Numerous groups sprang up to demand their release, disseminating
flags with a stark, black-and-white tableau of a prisoner's bowed head
against the backdrop of a guard tower, a barbed-wire fence, and the legend:
YOU ARE NOT FORGOTTEN POW*MIA.
It would do no good to point out that there is no objective evidence that
veterans were ever spat upon by demonstrators or that POWs were ever left
behind or that Jane Fonda's addle-headed mission to Hanoi did anything to
undermine American forces. The stab-in-the-back myth is much more powerful
than any of these facts, and it continues to grow more so as time passes.
Just this past Christmas, one Faye Fiore wrote a feature for the Los Angeles
Times about how returning Iraqi veterans are being showered with acts of
good will by an adoring American public, "In contrast to the hostile stares
that greeted many Vietnam veterans 40 years ago." The POW/MIA flags, with
their black-and-white iconography of shame, now fly everywhere in the United
States, just under the Stars and Stripes; federal law even mandates that on
at least six days a year-Memorial Day, Flag Day, Armed Forces Day, Veterans
Day, Independence Day, and one day during POW/MIA Week (the third week of
September)-they must be flown over nearly every single U.S. government
building. There has been nothing else like them in the history of this
country, and they have no parallel anywhere else in the world-these peculiar
little banners, attached like a disclaimer to our national flag, with their
message of surrender and humiliation, perennially accusing our government of
betrayal.
* * *
If the power of the stab-in-the-back narrative from Vietnam is beyond
question, it still raises the question of why. Why should we wish to
maintain a narrative of horrendous national betrayal, one in which our own
democratically elected government, and a large portion of our fellow
citizens, are guilty of horribly betraying our fighting men?
The answer, I think, lies in Richard Nixon's ability to expand the Siegfried
myth from the halls of power out into the streets. Government conspiracies
are still culpable, of course; ironically, it was Nixon's own administration
that first "left behind" American POWs in North Vietnam. Yet this makes
little difference to the American right, which never considered Nixon
ideologically pure enough to be a member in good standing, and which has
always made hay by railing against government, even now that they are it.
What Nixon and a few of his contemporaries did for the right was to make
culture war the permanent condition of American politics.
On domestic issues as well as ones of foreign policy, from Ronald Reagan's
mythical "welfare queens" through George Wallace's "pointy-headed
intellectuals"; from Lee Atwater's characterization of Democrats as
anti-family, anti-life, anti-God, down through the open, deliberate attempts
of Newt Gingrich and Karl Rove to constantly describe opponents in words
that made them seem bizarre, deviant, and "out of the mainstream," the
entire vernacular of American politics has been altered since Vietnam.
Culture war has become the organizing principle of the right, unalterably
convinced as it is that conservatives are an embattled majority, one that
must stand ever vigilant against its unnatural enemies-from the "gay
agenda," to the advocates of Darwinism, to the "war against Christmas" last
year.
This has become such an ingrained part of the right wing's belief system
that the Bush Administration has now become the first government in our
nation's history to fight a major war without seeking any sort of national
solidarity. Far from it. The whole purpose of the war in Iraq-and the "war
on terrorism"-seems to have been to foment division and to win elections by
forcing Americans to choose between starkly different visions of what their
country should be. Again and again, Bush and his confederates have used the
cover of national security to push through an uncompromising right-wing
agenda. Ignoring the broad leeway already provided the federal government to
fight terrorists and conduct domestic surveillance, the administration has
gone out of its way to claim vast new powers to detain, spy on, and imprison
its own citizens, and to abduct and even torture foreigners-a subject we
shall return to. It has used the cover of the war to push through enormous
tax cuts, attempt to dismantle the Social Security system, and alter the
very social covenant of the nation. Incidents from the Terri Schiavo case to
the teaching of "intelligent design" are periodically exploited to start new
cultural battles.
Given this state of permanent culture war, it is not surprising that the
Bush White House trotted out the stab-in-the-back myth when its Iraq project
began to run out of steam early last summer. It was first given a spin, as
usual, by the right's media shock troops, and directed at both Democratic
and renegade Republican lawmakers who had dared to criticize either the
strategic conduct of the war or our treatment of detainees. The Wall Street
Journal's editorial page opined, "Where the terrorists are gaining ground is
in Washington, D.C." and noted that General John Abizaid, of the U.S.
Central Command, had said, "When my soldiers say to me and ask me the
question whether or not they've got support from the American people or not,
that worries me. And they're starting to do that."
Again, the link was made. Soldiers of the most powerful army in the history
of the world would be actively endangered if they even wondered whether the
folks at home were questioning their deployment. The right was looking for a
target, and it got one when Sen. Dick Durbin (D., Ill.), appalled by an FBI
report on the prisons for suspected terrorists at Guantánamo Bay, compared
them to those run by "Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime-Pol
Pot or others-that had no concern for human beings . . . "
The right's response was predictably swift and savage. The Power Line
blogger Paul Mirengoff commented that the senator "slanders his own country.
Normally that kind of slander is uttered only by revolutionaries seeking the
violent overthrow of the government." Rush Limbaugh harrumphed that "Dick
Durbin has just identified who the Democrats are in the year 2005,
particularly when it comes to American national security and when it comes
to the U.S. military. These are the same people that say they support the
troops. This is how they do it, huh? They give aid and comfort to the
enemy."
Yet for once, Rush was outdone. John Carlson, host of a Seattle talk show
and Washington State's unsuccessful Republican candidate for governor in
2000, said of Durbin, "This man is simply a piece of excrement, a piece of
waste that needs to be scraped off the sidewalk and eliminated." Bill O'Reilly
of Fox News launched a preemptive attack on his few liberal counterparts,
urging that the staff of Air America be jailed: "Dissent, fine; undermining,
you're a traitor. Got it? So, all you clowns over at the liberal radio
network, we could incarcerate them immediately. Will you have that done,
please? Send them over to the FBI and just put them in chains, because they,
you know, they're undermining everything."
Once the Republican media had secured the ground and set the terms of
debate, the party's representatives in Washington jumped into the fray. When
Democratic House Leader Nancy Pelosi called the war "a grotesque mistake"
that was "not making America safer," the as-yet-unindicted Tom DeLay
retorted that Pelosi "owes our military and their families an apology for
her reckless comments," and House Majority Whip Roy Blunt claimed that
Pelosi's words had "emboldened" the enemy.
All of the crucial elements of the stab-in-the-back charge were now in
place. Critics of the war were not simply questioning its strategy or its
necessity, or upholding the best of American traditions by raising concerns
over how enemy prisoners were being treated. Instead, they were aiding the
enemy, and actively endangering our fighting men and women. They were
traitors and "revolutionaries," individuals who were "conducting guerrilla
warfare on American troops," and "excrement" who could now be safely
incarcerated "immediately" or even "eliminated."
It remained only for the chief Republican strategist, Karl Rove, to appear
before a conservative party fundraiser in Manhattan on June 22 and tie up a
campaign that bore all of his usual earmarks.
"Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war;
liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare
indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers," Rove
began, riffing on a proven theme from the 2004 presidential election, which
sought to link Democrats not only with the terrorist attack on 9/11 but also
with a generation of Republican assertions that liberals are "soft" on
domestic crime. Rove then honed in on poor Dick Durbin's remarks: "Has there
ever been a more revealing moment this year? Let me just put this in fairly
simple terms: Al Jazeera now broadcasts the words of Senator Durbin to the
Mideast, certainly putting our troops in greater danger. No more needs to be
said about the motives of liberals."; (My italics.)
The conspiracy had expanded yet again. Not just Nancy Pelosi or Dick Durbin
but all Democrats and all liberals were now firmly established as traitors,
and it was not possible that they had made some honest gaffes; instead,
their very motives were sinister.
When Rove's thunderous media offensive had finally subsided, however, a
strange silence ensued. The popularity of his master, George W. Bush,
continued to plunge in the opinion polls. Support for the war continued to
plummet as well, and by July, Rove himself was thoroughly enmeshed in the
Valerie Plame scandal, with all of the attendant implications about its
manipulation of prewar intelligence. By November, Rove was forced to send
out Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney themselves on a new "Strategy for
Victory" campaign. Speaking on Veterans Day to an all-military audience at
an army depot in Tobyhanna, Pennsylvania, Bush attacked Democrats who were
saying they had been duped by the fraudulent intelligence the administration
had used to secure their votes for war.
"These baseless attacks send the wrong signal to our troops and to an enemy
that is questioning America's will," Bush told the soldiers assembled for
his photo op. "As our troops fight a ruthless enemy determined to destroy
our way of life, they deserve to know that their elected leaders who voted
to send them to war continue to stand behind them."
Once again, criticism of the war in Iraq had been adroitly linked to
criticism of the administration, and then to treason-something that would,
somehow, magically empower the enemy and demoralize our own troops. Once
again, unnatural enemies were striking at the heroic, Siegfried figures at
the top of the administration, who struggled to get out their great truth
that no intelligence had been manipulated and the Democrats were engaging in
"revisionism."
Yet still, somehow, Bush's numbers continued to plunge. What went wrong? How
could such an infallible Republican strategy, conducted with all of the
right wing's vast media resources at his command, have failed so utterly?
How was it that the story of the stab in the back had lost its power to hold
us spellbound?
* * *
What has really robbed the conspiracy theories of their effectiveness is how
the war in Iraq has been conducted. Bush and his advisers have sought to use
the war not only to punish their enemies but also to reward their
supporters, a bit of political juggling that led them to demand nothing from
the American public as a whole. Those of us who are not actively fighting in
Iraq, or who do not have close friends and family members who are doing so,
have not been asked to sacrifice in any way. The richest among us have even
been showered with tax cuts.
Yet in demanding so little, Bush has finally uncoupled the state from its
heroic status. It is not a coincidence that modern nationalism dates from
the advent of mass democracy-and mass citizen armies-that the American and
French revolutions ushered in at the end of the eighteenth century. Bush's
refusal to mobilize the nation for the war in Iraq has severed that
immediate identification with our army's fortunes. Nor did it begin with the
Bush Administration. The wartime tax cuts and the all-volunteer, wartime
army are simply the latest manifestations of a trend that is now decades old
and that has been promulgated through peace as well as war, by Democrats as
well as Republicans. It cannot truly be a surprise that a society that has
steadily dismantled or diminished the most basic access to health care,
relief for the poor and the aged, and decent education; a society that has
allowed the gap between its richest and poorest citizens to grow to
unprecedented size; a society that has paid obeisance to the ideology of
globalization to the point of giving away both its jobs and its debt to
foreign nations, and which has just allowed one of its poorer cities to
quietly drown, should choose to largely opt out of its own defense.
Anyone who doubts that this is exactly what we have done need only look at
how little the war really engages most of us. It rarely draws more than a
few seconds of coverage on the local television news, if that, and then only
well into the broadcast, after a story on a murder, or a fire, or the latest
weather predictions. Even the largest and angriest demonstrations against
our occupation of Iraq have not approached the mobilizations against the war
in Vietnam, but a close observer will notice that we also have yet to see
any of the massive counterdemonstrations that were held in support of that
war-or "in support of the troops." Such engagement on either side seems
almost quaint now.
Who could possibly believe in a plot to lose this war? No one cares that
much about it. We have, instead, reached a crossroads where the overwhelming
right-wing desire to dissolve much of the old social compact that held
together the modern nation-state is irreconcilably at odds with any attempt
to conduct such a grand, heroic experiment as implanting democracy in the
Middle East. Without mass participation, Iraq cannot be passed off as an
heroic endeavor, no matter how much Mr. Bush's rhetoric tries to make it
one, and without a hero there can be no great betrayer, no skulking villain.
And yet, a convincing national narrative, though it may be the sheerest,
most vicious fiction, can have incredible staying power-can perhaps outlast
even the nation that it was meant to serve. It is ironic that, even as
support for his war was starting to unravel in May of 2005, George W. Bush
was in the Latvian capital of Riga, describing the Yalta agreement as "one
of the greatest wrongs of history." The President placed it in the "unjust
tradition" of the 1938 Munich Pact and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which
together paved the way for the start of World War II in 1939. Bush's words
echoed his statements of three previous trips to Eastern Europe, dating back
to 2001, during which he had pledged, "no more Munichs, no more Yaltas," and
called Yalta an "attempt to sacrifice freedom for the sake of stability," a
"bitter legacy," and a "constant source of injustice and fear" that had
"divided a living civilization."
The ultimate irony of Bush's perpetuating this ageless right-wing shibboleth
is that for once it wasn't intended for home consumption. The Yalta myth has
finally lost its old magic, here in historically illiterate, contemporary
America. Nor did Bush make any special attempt to let his countrymen know he
was apportioning them equal blame with Stalin and Hitler for the greatest
calamities of the twentieth century.
Bush's pandering was directed instead to the nations he was visiting, in a
region that still battens on any number of conspiracy theories. Why he
should have so denigrated his own country to a few small Eastern European
nations might seem a mystery, until one considers that this is the "new
Europe" that Bush has solicited for troops for his Iraqi adventure . . . and
where he appears to have found either destinations or conduits for victims
of "extraordinary rendition," en route to where they could be safely
tortured in secrecy.
An American president, wandering the halls of Eastern European palaces,
denounces his own nation in order to appease his hosts into torturing secret
prisoners. Our heroic age surely has come to an end.
William Coleman (ramashiva)
Max Coin
War II?
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William Coleman
"Max Coin" <4308...@recpoker.com> wrote in message
news:1152928751$830...@recpoker.com...
> And I suppose it was this liberal minded thinking that you espouse that
> won Word
> War II?
I have no idea what this incoherent sentence is supposed to mean.
Apparently you are totally ignorant of twentieth century American History.
Apparently you also did not read the article.
The right-wing in this country vigorously opposed American entry into World
War II. Believe it or not, the Republican Party was and is the party of
goose stepping Nazis. If it had been left to the Republican Party, the USA
would never have gotten involved in the war against Nazi Germany.
The liberal FDR was able to bring us into the European war only after Pearl
Harbor and the declaration of war against the USA by Germany which
immediately followed.
By the way, in the future please show some usenet courtesy. If you are
going to top post a one sentence reply to a 52 kilobyte post, please snip
the rest of the post.
William Coleman (ramashiva)
Alex
Coleman at rama...@earthlink.net wrote on 7/14/06 10:11 PM:
> The right-wing in this country vigorously opposed American entry into World
> War II. Believe it or not, the Republican Party was and is the party of
> goose stepping Nazis. If it had been left to the Republican Party, the USA
> would never have gotten involved in the war against Nazi Germany.
And if it had been left to today's Democratic Party, we wouldn't have been
willing to fight a war in Europe.
William Coleman
"Alex" <akau...@nyc.NOSPAM.rr.com> wrote in message
news:C0DDC7AB.B8CE0%akau...@nyc.NOSPAM.rr.com...
Thanks for confirming once again that you are a lying Jew.
William Coleman (ramashiva)
Rich Shipley
Bull. In fact we helped Europe out again in the nineties with Serbia and
Bosnia. Who was president then?
Rich
FL Turbo
<rama...@earthlink.net> wrote:
>
>"Max Coin" <4308...@recpoker.com> wrote in message
>news:1152928751$830...@recpoker.com...
>> And I suppose it was this liberal minded thinking that you espouse that
>> won Word
>> War II?
>
>I have no idea what this incoherent sentence is supposed to mean.
>Apparently you are totally ignorant of twentieth century American History.
>Apparently you also did not read the article.
>
>The right-wing in this country vigorously opposed American entry into World
>War II. Believe it or not, the Republican Party was and is the party of
>goose stepping Nazis. If it had been left to the Republican Party, the USA
>would never have gotten involved in the war against Nazi Germany.
>
>The liberal FDR was able to bring us into the European war only after Pearl
>Harbor and the declaration of war against the USA by Germany which
>immediately followed.
>
Yes, you disingenuous Leftist fraud.
It has been a common observation that the political Left and Right
have undergone a 180 degree turn since WWII.
Whereas the political Left in the WWII era strongly supported the Jews
against the Nazis, today's political Left has shifted to support the
IslamoNazis against Israel.
You yourself are the most obvious evidence of that in your latest rant
against Israel defending itself against the modern day IslamoNazis,
aka Hamas and Hezbollah.
Ed Koch spent the last election season in the Florida retirement
community telling the Jews there that:
"You aren't voting for FDR or JFK any more"
Slowly but surely, the Yellow Dog Democrats are finding out that their
traditional Democrat party is not their Daddy's Democrat Party any
more.
It has been hijacked by Leftists.
>By the way, in the future please show some usenet courtesy. If you are
>going to top post a one sentence reply to a 52 kilobyte post, please snip
>the rest of the post.
>
>
>William Coleman (ramashiva)
>
>
Your Secret Friend,
Paul Gee
wuzyoun...@yahoo.com
>
> Thanks for confirming once again that you are a lying Jew.
Aw, geez Willy...you're confusing me. Is he a Jew, or a goose-stepping
Nazi? I'm inclined to think the two ain't real compatible.
georgewv...@yahoo.com
> >> Believe it or not, the Republican Party was and is the party of
> >> goose stepping Nazis.>
You mean "goose stepping Nazis who post stuff like:
> Thanks for confirming once again that you are a lying Jew.
> William Coleman (ramashiva)
the men in the white coats are coming for you Willie
A Man Beaten by Jacks
>And I suppose it was this liberal minded thinking that you espouse that won Word
>War II?
You might recall our President was the biggest liberal ever to reside in the
White House, a man named Franklin Delano Roosevelt. So yes, motherfucker.
It was. Suck it.
A Man Beaten by Jacks
>> And if it had been left to today's Democratic Party, we wouldn't have been
>> willing to fight a war in Europe.
>Bull. In fact we helped Europe out again in the nineties with Serbia and
>Bosnia. Who was president then?
And for that matter, who tried to dismiss the whole thing as "Wag the Dog?"
William Coleman
<wuzyoun...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1152932101....@m79g2000cwm.googlegroups.com...
> William Coleman wrote:
>>
>> Thanks for confirming once again that you are a lying Jew.
>
> Aw, geez Willy...you're confusing me. Is he a Jew, or a goose-stepping
> Nazi?
Is there any limit to your lying and intellectual dishonesty? Please point
out where I called Alex a goose-stepping Nazi, otherwise admit that I have
caught you yet again telling a bold faced lie.
William Coleman (ramashiva)
wuzyoun...@yahoo.com
I thought you said the UN declared him a Nazi? Shit, now I'm really
confused.....
wuzyoun...@yahoo.com
You've been taking Obnoxious Asshole lessons from Carson, haven't you?
Alex
at rama...@earthlink.net wrote on 7/14/06 11:02 PM:
It's been a while but you have called me a brownshirt too.
William Coleman
And you are. A moronic brownshirt fuck, to be precise. Apparently you do
not understand that being a Jew does not mean that you can't have
hypernationalistic, hypermilitaristic, extreme right-wing views. In common
parlance, that makes you a Nazi. When I say someone is a Nazi, I am not
implying that they are a member of the Nazi Party, or are sympathetic to the
Third Reich. I am simply stating that you share many of the defining
characteristics of Nazis, which you do.
But your use of the word "too" obviously implies that I have called you a
goosestepping Nazi. I may have, years ago, I don't remember.
But DP7's comment obviously refers to something I said in this thread, not
something I said years ago of which I seriously doubt DP7 is aware.
William Coleman (ramashiva)
FL Turbo
But that was then, and this is now.
If you take a look at the realities of today, you will find the
Democrat Party now 180 degrees out of phase with the Party of FDR,
HHH, and JFK (The real JFK, and not the bogus JF'nK today).
The word "liberal" today is now a sad, sick joke.
The face of today's Democrat Party is CongressCritter Murtha jumping
up to condemn American soldiers as rapists and murderers even before
they have been charged with any crime.
He even seriously proposed that the military should "re-deploy over
the horizon, in Okinawa" so as to be ready to jump right back into
Iraq on a moment's notice.
Another sad, sick joke.
Hey, Jack.
It's FDR.
He's dead.
Beam me up, Scotty.
A Man Beaten by Jacks
Carson has nothing to teach me in that field ;-)
FL Turbo
Keep digging, Willy.
Just remember to stop digging when you hear voices speaking Cantonese.
(I'm sure you have mastered the Cantonese dialect)
You disingenuous, lying Leftist fraud.
WuzYoungOnceToo2
>
> You mean "goose stepping Nazis who post stuff like:
>
> > Thanks for confirming once again that you are a lying Jew.
Yes, but what your obvious inability to think logically proves.....
Aw, fuck it. I just can't do that schtick and keep a straight face.
WuzYoungOnceToo2
>
> Keep digging, Willy.
>
> Just remember to stop digging when you hear voices speaking Cantonese.
And when inserting a Q-Tip into your ear...STOP when you feel
resistance!
(With apologies to the former writers for "Friends")
William Coleman
"WuzYoungOnceToo2" <WuzYoung...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1152938477.8...@h48g2000cwc.googlegroups.com...
> georgewv...@yahoo.com wrote:
>>
>> You mean "goose stepping Nazis who post stuff like:
>>
>> > Thanks for confirming once again that you are a lying Jew.
Alex is a Jew. Alex is a liar. That makes Alex a lying Jew. Please
explain how accurately calling someone a lying Jew makes me a goose stepping
Nazi.
This is just more of the same bullshit we hear all the time. If you
criticize Israel in anyway, you are a Jew Hater and Nazi. If you criticize
an individual Jew in anyway, you are a Jew Hater and Nazi.
That bullshit gets old after awhile.
William Coleman (ramashiva)
William Coleman
<georgewv...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1152932358.5...@b28g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...
> William Coleman wrote:
>> >> Believe it or not, the Republican Party was and is the party of
>> >> goose stepping Nazis.>
>
> You mean "goose stepping Nazis who post stuff like:
>
>> Thanks for confirming once again that you are a lying Jew.
Alex is a Jew. Alex is a liar. That makes Alex a lying Jew. Please
Max Coin
solutions regarding aggression towards the US and it's allies have been
succesful in World War II? Let me ask another question, if Muslims are allowed
to freely express hteir ideas and practice their religion in this country then
why would they think we are trying to kill them? Osama Ben Laden could live in
this country and even be a pseudo celebrity if only he would have tried
using our free press instead of bombs to express his ideas.
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Max Coin
On Jul 14 2006 7:26 PM, William Coleman wrote:
> "Alex" wrote in message
OMG! I actually thought i could have an intelligent conversation about a
complex subject with you. I apologize, it must have been confusing.
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WuzYoungOnceToo2
Robert de Niro?
Max Coin
And how do you think FDR or JFK would handle the war on terror? Would their
reaction be more like George Bush's or Howard Dean or John Kerry or Michael
Moore? BTW it wasn't like FDR jumped feet first into World War II.
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William Coleman
> Thanks for the history lesson.Let me ask you again, would the current
> liberal
> solutions regarding aggression towards the US and it's allies have been
> succesful in World War II?
Of course, because the current Democratic Party supports a strong military
response to all legitimate threats to U.S. security. Don't fall for the
Republican lie that this is not your Daddy's Democratic Party. It most
certainly is.
> Let me ask another question, if Muslims are allowed
> to freely express hteir ideas and practice their religion in this country
> then
> why would they think we are trying to kill them?
I'm not exactly sure what you are asking, but our actions in Iraq and
Afghanistan could certainly give them that idea.
> Osama Ben Laden could live in
> this country and even be a pseudo celebrity if only he would have tried
> using our free press instead of bombs to express his ideas.
LOL. Do you even know what OBL's three major complaints against the USA
were?
The presence of infidel troops in the Land of the Two Mosques, AKA Saudi
Arabia.
Continued U.S. support for what he perceived as aggression of Israel against
Arabs, especially Palestinians.
Continued U.S. support for sanctions against Iraq, which resulted in the
unnecessary deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children, not to
mention untold suffering among the Iraqi people.
The 9/11 attacks were hardly a surprise or a sneak attack. OBL had attacked
us repeatedly at our African embassies and other locations. He made it
clear repeatedly that we had better get our infidel troops out of Saudi
Arabia, stop supporting Israel, and stop the sanctions against Iraq OR ELSE.
We chose OR ELSE.
Anyone who does not see that the USA brought 9/11 on itself by its misguided
foreign policy is an unmitigated fool.
William Coleman (ramashiva)
Max Coin
On Jul 14 2006 10:05 PM, William Coleman wrote:
> "WuzYoungOnceToo2" wrote in message
Makes perfect sense. Thanks for clearing that up. And i thought you were an
insane race baiting piece of shit. I apologize.
Alex
Coleman at rama...@earthlink.net wrote on 7/15/06 1:32 AM:
> Anyone who does not see that the USA brought 9/11 on itself by its misguided
> foreign policy is an unmitigated fool.
Yeah, we were asking for it.
What with the short dress and high-heeled backless, shoes....
William Coleman
> in article 96%tg.8343$PE1....@newsread2.news.pas.earthlink.net, William
> Coleman at rama...@earthlink.net wrote on 7/15/06 1:32 AM:
>
>> Anyone who does not see that the USA brought 9/11 on itself by its
>> misguided
>> foreign policy is an unmitigated fool.
>
> Yeah, we were asking for it.
LOL. Thanks for confirming, once again, that you are a lying Jew. Please
point out where I said we were asking for it.
> What with the short dress and high-heeled backless, shoes....
Your comparison to an innocent rape victim is ludicrous. The USA was hardly
innocent. OBL had legitimate complaints against the USA, and he repeatedly
warned us to get the fuck out of Saudi Arabia, stop supporting Israel, and
end the sanctions against Iraq.
We ignored his warnings and we paid the price. Until we start listening to
the legitimate complaints of the Muslim world against us, we will continue
to pay a heavy price. The Iraq War has now cost us over $300 billion and
over 2500 American lives. How many more American soldiers will have to die
and how many more billions will we flush down the rathole before we come to
our senses?
William Coleman (ramashiva)
A Man Beaten by Jacks
>On Jul 14 2006 8:00 PM, A Man Beaten by Jacks wrote:
>> On Sat, 15 Jul 06 1:59:11 GMT, Max Coin <4308...@recpoker.com> wrote:
>> >And I suppose it was this liberal minded thinking that you espouse that won
>> >Word
>> >War II?
>> You might recall our President was the biggest liberal ever to reside in the
>> White House, a man named Franklin Delano Roosevelt. So yes, motherfucker.
>> It was. Suck it.
>
>And how do you think FDR or JFK would handle the war on terror? Would their
>reaction be more like George Bush's or Howard Dean or John Kerry or Michael
>Moore? BTW it wasn't like FDR jumped feet first into World War II.
No, it isn't. But it is like George W. Bush dived headfirst into the Iraq war
without even looking. He was raring at the bit to get into a war, totally
ignorant of what the results would be. When people who did know what
the results would be attempted to tell this unmitigated jackass, they
were at best ignored and at worst targeted for harassment and intimidation
a la Plame and Wilson.
Face facts, Bush doesn't give a flying fuck about catching Osama and has
even openly stated he doesn't care where Osama is or what he is doing.
"I don't know where bin Laden is. I have no idea and really don't care. It's not
that important. It's not our priority." Imagine if FDR's response to Pearl
Harbor had been to say he had no fucking idea where the people who did
it were and had no intention whatsoever to do anything about it, and that
it wasn't even a priority!
Bush's response is as if FDR were a drooling spastic fuck, and his response to
the attack on Pearl Harbor had been to attack Mexico.
As far as I can tell, the spineless John Kerry's Iraq policy seemed to be that
he voted for it before he voted against it, that it was a horrible idea, and we
should pull out, but if elected, he'd do a better job fighting it. Even as
such, he couldn't have done a worse job than Bush has.
We see a lot more anti-war veterans these days than fanatical, bloodthirsty
warmongers who chickenshitted out when it was their own chance to personally
fight in a war. Really, anyone who supports Iraq now should STFU and
sign up and go over there. There's a real shortage of soldiers, mainly because
there are very few remaining people simultaneously stupid enough to
support this debacle and brave enough to put their ass on the line to
fight it.
A Man Beaten by Jacks
wrote:
>"WuzYoungOnceToo2" <WuzYoung...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
>news:1152938477.8...@h48g2000cwc.googlegroups.com...
>> georgewv...@yahoo.com wrote:
>>> You mean "goose stepping Nazis who post stuff like:
>>> > Thanks for confirming once again that you are a lying Jew.
>Alex is a Jew. Alex is a liar. That makes Alex a lying Jew. Please
>explain how accurately calling someone a lying Jew makes me a goose stepping
>Nazi.
Because if he is Jewish, it is completely fucking irrelevant to whether he
is a liar or not! Calling someone a "lying Jew" creates the perception that
you view Jews negatively, and consider it a good addition to an insult.
(Why do I bother?)
ChrisRobin
On Jul 15 2006 12:19 AM, Max Coin wrote:
> OMG! I actually thought i could have an intelligent conversation about a
> complex subject with you. I apologize, it must have been confusing.
You replied to an article several dozen paragraphs in length with a single
sentence. That's not much of a "conversation."
_______________________________________________________________
Watch Lists, Block Lists, Favorites - http://www.recpoker.com
William Coleman
"A Man Beaten by Jacks" <nob...@fool.foo> wrote in message
news:qp4hb2tqo6quj68gp...@4ax.com...
Here. I will copy and paste my response to you in another thread on this
topic, for those who missed what I said in the other thread --
Agreed. But I am not calling "people" lying Jews. I am calling a specific
person, Alex Kaufmann, a lying Jew because he is a Jew and he is a liar, as
he has repeatedly demonstrated in this and other threads. That makes him a
lying Jew. What is the problem here?
Also, you should know that I deliberately use provocative terms like "lying
Jew", "sand niggers" (referring to Arabs), "lying nigger bitch" (referring
to Condi Rice), "faggots", and "assfucking, cocksucking, HIV-infected,
limp-wristed faggots" for very good reasons.
First of all, I am a usenet ubertroll. I am here to piss people off to the
max. I know it is a cheap shot, but the use of such epithets and racial
slurs is a sure fire way to get peoples' panties twisted in a bunch.
The more important reason for my apparently bizarre and bigoted linguistic
behavior is to desensitize people to the use of the words, and to make it
clear that I reject the notion that certain words are simply unacceptable
for use in human discourse. Political correctness is total nonsense, and I
want nothing to do with it.
My use of shock terminology is also meant to help people improve their
critical thinking skills. If you automatically conclude that anyone using
the word "nigger" is a racist, or anyone using the word "faggot" is a
homophobic bigot, then you are a very shallow thinker, and your critical
thinking skills are non-existent. You need to start looking at what people
are actually saying, and you need to stop categorizing people based on their
use of shock words when, in reality, you do not understand the motivation
behind the use of such shock words.
Finally, believe it or not, my main purpose in shocking people with language
is to raise their level of consciousness. Words are words, nothing more.
If a simple word like "nigger" or "faggot" causes you severe emotional
upset, then you really are operating at a very low level of consciousness.
You need to understand that you have been programmed to react negatively to
the word "nigger". You need to understand that your reaction to the word
"nigger" is a paradigm for your entire life. Without realizing it, you have
been programmed to have emotional reactions to a whole host of words and
other stimuli. Many people, including those who wish you harm, use the
words and stimuli to manipulate and control your behavior.
If you ever want to be truly free, you need to deprogram all the emotional
reactions to words and stimuli which have been programmed into you. Only
then can you truly call yourself autonomous and free. It is called
enlightenment.
William Coleman (ramashiva)
RioLobo1
>Thanks for confirming once again that you are a lying Jew.
>William Coleman (ramashiva)
Would you call a raise with pocket 10s? What if a face card comes on the flop?
Tom White
> We ignored his warnings and we paid the price. Until we start listening to
> the legitimate complaints of the Muslim world against us, we will continue
> to pay a heavy price. The Iraq War has now cost us over $300 billion and
> over 2500 American lives. How many more American soldiers will have to die
> and how many more billions will we flush down the rathole before we come to
> our senses?
Oh, that again. I was sure your subject referred to the
knifing Bill Clinton gave his fellow Democrats:
Clinton questioned efforts of some Democrats to impose a
fixed timetable for removing U.S. troops from Iraq --
something Lieberman opposes.
"Why send a signal to the people that are trying to keep
Iraq divided and tear it up when we're gonna go," he asked.
Does it take a Rhodes Scholar Democrat to figure out that
it would be bad for Al-Jazeera to show footage 24/7 of
Americans pushing helicopters off aircraft carriers
to make more room for the vanquished interspersed with
hagiagraphies to suicide bombers and headchoppers of the
helpless?
Rich Shipley
> Thanks for the history lesson.Let me ask you again, would the current liberal
> solutions regarding aggression towards the US and it's allies have been
> succesful in World War II?
You mean current liberal solutions like fighting the people who actually
attacked us? I think it would be pretty much the same.
> Let me ask another question, if Muslims are allowed
> to freely express hteir ideas and practice their religion in this country then
> why would they think we are trying to kill them?
Besides the fact that we are killing them? It is in the context of a
war, but civilian casualties never play well.
> Osama Ben Laden could live in
> this country and even be a pseudo celebrity if only he would have tried
> using our free press instead of bombs to express his ideas.
His interest is not in expressing ideas, but to get us out of the middle
east and topple governments that we support.
Rich
WuzYoungOnceToo2
> "Alex" <akau...@nyc.NOSPAM.rr.com> wrote in message
> news:C0DDF804.B8DAD%akau...@nyc.NOSPAM.rr.com...
> > in article 96%tg.8343$PE1....@newsread2.news.pas.earthlink.net, William
> > Coleman at rama...@earthlink.net wrote on 7/15/06 1:32 AM:
> >
> >> Anyone who does not see that the USA brought 9/11 on itself by its
> >> misguided
> >> foreign policy is an unmitigated fool.
> >
> > Yeah, we were asking for it.
>
> LOL. Thanks for confirming, once again, that you are a lying Jew. Please
> point out where I said we were asking for it.
When you said, "the USA brought 9/11 on itself by its misguided foreign
policy". See, "asking for it" is a colloquial expression meaning that
one is behaving in a manner that is inviting some sort of unfavorable
result. In other words...what you said. No need to thank me. I'm
glad to help out. I know you're still reeling from that whole "UN and
the Palestinians" debacle.
> OBL had legitimate complaints against the USA
"Legitimate"? Says you.
> and he repeatedly warned us to get the fuck out of Saudi Arabia
So...when did OBL become the recognized authority for Saudi Arabia?
> stop supporting Israel
Seems like none of his fucking business to me.
> and end the sanctions against Iraq.
You mean....the UN sanctions? (Though I realize you're a little fuzzy
on what the UN is all about.)
> We ignored his warnings and we paid the price. Until we start listening to
> the legitimate complaints of the Muslim world against us
You mean, capitulate to the demands of every self-appointed Islamic
savior who inherits some cash from dad and likes to pose for the
cameras with an AK-47.
WuzYoungOnceToo2
>
> Face facts, Bush doesn't give a flying fuck about catching Osama and has
> even openly stated he doesn't care where Osama is or what he is doing.
>
> "I don't know where bin Laden is. I have no idea and really don't care. It's not
> that important. It's not our priority."
Nor should it be, really. OBL isn't nearly as important as people seem
to think. Yeah, nailing his ass to a tree would be great for emotional
reasons...but it wouldn't do anything to decrease the threat of
terrorism against the U.S. In fact, it could well make it worse.
> Imagine if FDR's response to Pearl
> Harbor had been to say he had no fucking idea where the people who did
> it were and had no intention whatsoever to do anything about it, and that
> it wasn't even a priority!
You make it sound like declaring war on Japan was a punitive action.
Is that what you think? That we sent our boys to the Pacific to punish
Japan?
Max Coin
On Jul 15 2006 12:33 AM, ChrisRobin wrote:
>
>
> On Jul 15 2006 12:19 AM, Max Coin wrote:
>
> > OMG! I actually thought i could have an intelligent conversation about a
> > complex subject with you. I apologize, it must have been confusing.
>
> You replied to an article several dozen paragraphs in length with a single
> sentence. That's not much of a "conversation."
>
_______________________________________________________________
* New Release: RecPoker.com v2.2 - http://www.recpoker.com
Max Coin
On Jul 14 2006 10:50 PM, William Coleman wrote:
> "Alex" wrote in message
> news:C0DDF804.B8DAD%akau...@nyc.NOSPAM.rr.com...
> > in article 96%tg.8343$PE1....@newsread2.news.pas.earthlink.net, William
> > Coleman at rama...@earthlink.net wrote on 7/15/06 1:32 AM:
> >
> >> Anyone who does not see that the USA brought 9/11 on itself by its
> >> misguided
> >> foreign policy is an unmitigated fool.
> >
> > Yeah, we were asking for it.
>
> LOL. Thanks for confirming, once again, that you are a lying Jew. Please
> point out where I said we were asking for it.
>
In the sentence four inches above the one you are reading now!
> > What with the short dress and high-heeled backless, shoes....
>
> Your comparison to an innocent rape victim is ludicrous. The USA was hardly
> innocent. OBL had legitimate complaints against the USA, and he repeatedly
> warned us to get the fuck out of Saudi Arabia, stop supporting Israel, and
> end the sanctions against Iraq.
>
> We ignored his warnings and we paid the price. Until we start listening to
> the legitimate complaints of the Muslim world against us, we will continue
> to pay a heavy price. The Iraq War has now cost us over $300 billion and
> over 2500 American lives. How many more American soldiers will have to die
> and how many more billions will we flush down the rathole before we come to
> our senses?
>
>
> William Coleman (ramashiva)
_______________________________________________________________
Max Coin
On Jul 15 2006 7:45 AM, Rich Shipley wrote:
> Max Coin wrote:
> > Thanks for the history lesson.Let me ask you again, would the current
> > liberal
> > solutions regarding aggression towards the US and it's allies have been
> > succesful in World War II?
>
> You mean current liberal solutions like fighting the people who actually
> attacked us? I think it would be pretty much the same.
>
> > Let me ask another question, if Muslims are allowed
> > to freely express hteir ideas and practice their religion in this country
> > then
> > why would they think we are trying to kill them?
>
> Besides the fact that we are killing them? It is in the context of a
> war, but civilian casualties never play well.
>
LOL, answer the question. Muslims are free to practice their religion and
express their opinions in this country. Yes or no?
> > Osama Ben Laden could live in
> > this country and even be a pseudo celebrity if only he would have tried
> > using our free press instead of bombs to express his ideas.
>
> His interest is not in expressing ideas, but to get us out of the middle
> east and topple governments that we support.
>
And you are OK with this? Could you please name these governments?
> Rich
_______________________________________________________________
Posted using RecPoker.com v2.2 - http://www.recpoker.com
Max Coin
When did he say this? Where can i find the quote?
Imagine if FDR's response to Pearl
> Harbor had been to say he had no fucking idea where the people who did
> it were and had no intention whatsoever to do anything about it, and that
> it wasn't even a priority!
>
> Bush's response is as if FDR were a drooling spastic fuck, and his response to
>
> the attack on Pearl Harbor had been to attack Mexico.
>
After 9/11 I beleive we attacked Afghanistan first. Do you think that was a
mistake? Wasn't the Taliban letting Bin Laden use that country to carry out
terrorist attacks? Hardly the equivalent of attacking Mexico after Pearl
Harbor.
> As far as I can tell, the spineless John Kerry's Iraq policy seemed to be that
>
> he voted for it before he voted against it, that it was a horrible idea, and
> we
> should pull out, but if elected, he'd do a better job fighting it. Even as
> such, he couldn't have done a worse job than Bush has.
>
> We see a lot more anti-war veterans these days than fanatical, bloodthirsty
> warmongers who chickenshitted out when it was their own chance to personally
> fight in a war. Really, anyone who supports Iraq now should STFU and
> sign up and go over there. There's a real shortage of soldiers, mainly
> because
> there are very few remaining people simultaneously stupid enough to
> support this debacle and brave enough to put their ass on the line to
> fight it.
I agree with you about the war in Iraq. We had no need to invade a country that
we could wipe out with a weeks worth of bombing the moment they gave us a reson
to do so.
wuzyoun...@yahoo.com
>
> Bush's response is as if FDR were a drooling spastic fuck, and his response to
> the attack on Pearl Harbor had been to attack Mexico.
Were the Japanese using Mexico as a training ground?
ramashiva
On Jul 15 2006 7:56 AM, WuzYoungOnceToo2 wrote:
> William Coleman wrote:
> > "Alex" wrote in message
> > news:C0DDF804.B8DAD%akau...@nyc.NOSPAM.rr.com...
> > > in article 96%tg.8343$PE1....@newsread2.news.pas.earthlink.net, William
> > > Coleman at rama...@earthlink.net wrote on 7/15/06 1:32 AM:
> > >
> > >> Anyone who does not see that the USA brought 9/11 on itself by its
> > >> misguided
> > >> foreign policy is an unmitigated fool.
> > >
> > > Yeah, we were asking for it.
> >
> > LOL. Thanks for confirming, once again, that you are a lying Jew. Please
> > point out where I said we were asking for it.
>
> When you said, "the USA brought 9/11 on itself by its misguided foreign
> policy". See, "asking for it" is a colloquial expression meaning that
> one is behaving in a manner that is inviting some sort of unfavorable
> result. In other words..
Another one of you twisted bullshit arguments to try to put words in my mouth.
You still do not get that it is profoundly dishonest to paraphrase anothers'
words to create a perjorative, misleading impression of what was said. Again,
this is one of the reasons why you are so hated and despised on RGP.
>.what you said. No need to thank me. I'm
> glad to help out. I know you're still reeling from that whole "UN and
> the Palestinians" debacle.
This is too funny. There was only a "Palestinians and the UN" debacle in the
fevered imaginations of you and Alex. I made a correct statement in everyday
colloquial English. You and Alex decided to get all technical and legalistic on
me with regard to what the UN resolutions actually said. Even Alex admits that
some UN resolutions correctly characterize the West Bank as Arab lands.
I then pointed out that there had never been a nation called Palestine -- that
"Palestinians" was simply shorthand for Arabs who lived in the former British
Palestinian Mandate. Therefore, if the West Bank belongs to the Arabs, then the
West Bank clearly belongs to the Palestinians, who are the Arabs who live in the
West Bank.
This explanation is clear, concise, and irrefutable, unlike the twisted bullshit
arguments you consistently trot out. But do you accept that my explanation is
completely rational and consistent with the facts? Fuck no. Instead you start
ranting all over RGP that I have made a rookie liberal error and do not
understand anything about the UN. You are a total jackass.
> > OBL had legitimate complaints against the USA
>
> "Legitimate"? Says you.
Yes. Says me. I have the moral authority to make such judgements. You do not.
> > and he repeatedly warned us to get the fuck out of Saudi Arabia
>
> So...when did OBL become the recognized authority for Saudi Arabia?
He doesn't have to be the recognized authority in Saudi Arabia to make such
warnings. Anyone can make such warnings. The question is, does he have the
power to back up his warnings with punitive action? OBL demonstrated that he
has that power, so we would do well to heed such warnings in the future. But
the solution of you and your ilk is to hunt down and kill OBL and all his
supporters. That solution will not and cannot work. Your proposed solution has
and will continue to exacerbate an already terrible situation.
By the way, do you consider the current corrupt dictatorship in Saudi Arabia to
be the legitimate government of that country? I do not. They have absolutely
no moral or legal authority to rule that country. If a free election were held
today, Osama bin Laden would win 75% of the vote for President. That is not
just my opinion. That is the opinion of many Middle East experts. Therefore,
OBL has a greater moral right to speak for Saudi Arabia than the oil tic sand
niggers.
> > stop supporting Israel
>
> Seems like none of his fucking business to me
Do you understand that your opinion on this matter is profoundly irrelevant? Of
course it is his business. He is an Arab. Not just any Arab, but an Arab who
spearheaded the expulsion of the Russians from Afghanistan. An Arab who is
worshipped as a hero and savior by over a billion Muslims. Do you understand
that Osama bin Laden, may Allah preserve and protect him, is far and away the
most respected and admired man on Planet Earth today? Do you understand that
George Bush is far and away the most hated and feared man on Planet Earth today?
You need to get you empty head out of your Nazi ass and start looking at what is
going on in the world. Your ultra right-wing Nazi dream world has absolutely
nothing to do with the real world.
> > and end the sanctions against Iraq.
>
> You mean....the UN sanctions?
Yes, the UN sanctions, which were strongly supported by the USA, and could have
been lifted at any time if the USA decided to do so.
> (Though I realize you're a little fuzzy on what the UN is all about.)
I am not at all fuzzy on this subject. You are the one who doesn't have a clue
about the UN.
> > We ignored his warnings and we paid the price. Until we start listening to
> > the legitimate complaints of the Muslim world against us
>
> You mean, capitulate to the demands of every self-appointed Islamic
> savior who inherits some cash from dad and likes to pose for the
> cameras with an AK-47
Nope. That is not what I mean at all. This is still another example of your
extreme intellectual dishonesty. You cannot even bring yourself to make an
accurate paraphrase of what I have said. You are simply incapable of speaking
the truth about anything.
Ramashiva
ramashiva
You are truly an incorrigible liar. You know very well that he is referring to
the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, not Afghanistan.
You know this, yet, in order to score what you think is a cheap debating point,
you willfully pretend that you think he is talking about Afghanistan, not Iraq.
Contrary to your belief, you have not scored a debating point, except among the
hopelessly gullible and deluded. All you have done is provide still another
unambiguous example of your profound intellectual dishonesty.
You truly are a worthless, lying piece of dog shit.
Ramashiva
_______________________________________________________________
The Largest Online Poker Community - http://www.recpoker.com
William Coleman
Do you follow the news at all, Max? This statement by Bush was widely
publicized at the time. Do you know how to use Google? Notice that Bush's
words above are in quotes. That means, if the poster is honest, that those
are Bush's exact words, not some paraphrase. All you have to do is type
into a Google search window everything in quotes, including the quotes, and
you will get a phethora of authoritative references for the quote. In most
cases you don't even have to type everything, just a few key words. And, if
you know how to use copy and paste, it is even simpler. Just highlight the
entire quote, including the quote marks, then copy and paste it into a
Google search window.
> Imagine if FDR's response to Pearl
>> Harbor had been to say he had no fucking idea where the people who did
>> it were and had no intention whatsoever to do anything about it, and that
>> it wasn't even a priority!
>>
>> Bush's response is as if FDR were a drooling spastic fuck, and his
>> response to
>>
>> the attack on Pearl Harbor had been to attack Mexico.
>>
>
> After 9/11 I beleive we attacked Afghanistan first.
Yes. And in the view of most left-wing liberals, including myself, that was
a completely legitimate attack, because the Taliban were not only providing
OBL a refuge and training ground, they refused our completely legitimate
demands to turn him over to us.
The poster is obviously referring to the attack on Iraq, which had
absolutely nothing to do with 9/11, had absolutely no connection to Al
Qaeda, and which did not represent any security threat whatsoever to the
USA.
> Do you think that was a
> mistake? Wasn't the Taliban letting Bin Laden use that country to carry
> out
> terrorist attacks? Hardly the equivalent of attacking Mexico after Pearl
> Harbor.
Again, he was referring to Iraq, not Afghanistan.
William Coleman (ramashiva)
William Coleman
"RioLobo1" <4308...@recpoker.com> wrote in message
news:1152954071$830...@recpoker.com...
> On Jul 14 2006 7:02 PM, William Coleman wrote:
>
>>Thanks for confirming once again that you are a lying Jew.
>
> >William Coleman (ramashiva)
>
> Would you call a raise with pocket 10s?
No. I would reraise or fold, depending on several factors, including the
range of hands with which the raiser will raise in his position. This
answer assumes there are no intervening cold callers. If someone else calls
the raise cold in front of me, then I just call and reevaluate the situation
after I see the flop and the post flop action. My position is very
favorable, since I have position on both the raiser and cold caller.
> What if a face card comes on the flop?
I would continue to play my hand strongly until the action convinces me I am
beaten. If the raiser bets on the flop, I would raise to test him and to
try to get heads up. If one of the blinds bets out on the flop, or it is
bet and raised before it gets to me, I fold without hesitation.
If I raise the original raiser on the flop, and he reraises me, then I call
his reraise to see the turn. Even though I am likely beaten, it is a very
bad policy to raise then fold to a reraise. The observant players at the
table will pick up on this and start reraising you everytime you raise them.
Trust me, you don't want that. You want your raises to be respected, not
rammed down your throat.
If I don't make a set on the turn, or pick up a flush or straight draw, then
I fold on the turn if he bets, unless I know from previous experience that I
am dealing with an extremely aggressive player who would reraise me on the
flop, then bet out on the turn, with AK on a jack high flop. In that case,
I just call him down to the river to see what he has got. If another rag
comes on the turn, then I probably raise him again on the turn, because I
still likely have the best hand, and because this play will cost me the same
two big bets as calling on the turn and river. If he is still aggressive
after my turn raise -- if he reraises me on the turn or bets out on the
river, then I have to conclude that I am beaten, unless I am dealing with a
total lunatic.
There. Did that answer your question? I bet you thought I was just another
dumbass OT poster who knows nothing about poker. Trust me. No matter how
good you are or think you are, when you sit down at a limit holdem table
with me, you are at my mercy.
William Coleman (ramashiva)
marika
William Coleman wrote:
>
> I have no idea what this incoherent sentence is supposed to mean.
Ps. you misspelled miss spell.
> Apparently you are totally ignorant of twentieth century American History.
> Apparently you also did not read the article.
>
> The right-wing in this country vigorously opposed American entry into World
> War II. Believe it or not, the Republican Party was and is the party of
> goose stepping Nazis. If it had been left to the Republican Party, the USA
> would never have gotten involved in the war against Nazi Germany.
>
> The liberal FDR was able to bring us into the European war only after Pearl
> Harbor and the declaration of war against the USA by Germany which
> immediately followed.
I don't need to see any movie to convince me I want to stay out of the
ex soviet bloc.
Been there, have family there, remain uninterested.
Rich Shipley
>
>>> Let me ask another question, if Muslims are allowed
>>> to freely express hteir ideas and practice their religion in this country
>>> then
>>> why would they think we are trying to kill them?
>> Besides the fact that we are killing them? It is in the context of a
>> war, but civilian casualties never play well.
>
> LOL, answer the question.
I did answer the question.
> Muslims are free to practice their religion and
> express their opinions in this country. Yes or no?
That would be a new question. It was part of the premise of the original
question and I did not challenge it. It would be easier to discuss
things with you if you had a better grasp of English, but I assume it
must be a second language for you.
>>> Osama Ben Laden could live in
>>> this country and even be a pseudo celebrity if only he would have tried
>>> using our free press instead of bombs to express his ideas.
>> His interest is not in expressing ideas, but to get us out of the middle
>> east and topple governments that we support.
>
> And you are OK with this?
I never said I was OK with it. I just think it might be a good idea to
understand your enemies if you are going to fight them.
> Could you please name these governments?
Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan, Turkey, etc.
Rich
Alex
ri...@rtgames.com wrote on 7/15/06 10:43 AM:
> Max Coin wrote:
>> Thanks for the history lesson.Let me ask you again, would the current
>> liberal
>> solutions regarding aggression towards the US and it's allies have been
>> succesful in World War II?
>
> You mean current liberal solutions like fighting the people who actually
> attacked us? I think it would be pretty much the same.
So that would leave out Germany and Italy.
Alex
rama...@earthlink.net wrote on 7/15/06 1:37 PM:
>> .what you said. No need to thank me. I'm
>> glad to help out. I know you're still reeling from that whole "UN and
>> the Palestinians" debacle.
>
> This is too funny. There was only a "Palestinians and the UN" debacle in the
> fevered imaginations of you and Alex. I made a correct statement in everyday
> colloquial English. You and Alex decided to get all technical and legalistic
> on
> me with regard to what the UN resolutions actually said. Even Alex admits
> that
> some UN resolutions correctly characterize the West Bank as Arab lands.
>
> I then pointed out that there had never been a nation called Palestine -- that
> "Palestinians" was simply shorthand for Arabs who lived in the former British
> Palestinian Mandate. Therefore, if the West Bank belongs to the Arabs, then
> the
> West Bank clearly belongs to the Palestinians, who are the Arabs who live in
> the
> West Bank.
>
> This explanation is clear, concise, and irrefutable, unlike the twisted
> bullshit
> arguments you consistently trot out. But do you accept that my explanation is
> completely rational and consistent with the facts? Fuck no. Instead you
> start
> ranting all over RGP that I have made a rookie liberal error and do not
> understand anything about the UN. You are a total jackass.
Try actually READING the language of those UN Resolutions you support and
completely misunderstand.
Bob
If Saddam had declared war on us when we invaded Afghanistan, I would
have supported an invasion of Iraq. By the way, you can count me as
another liberal who thought invading Afghanistan was a good idea.
- Bob
Rich Shipley
Since they declared war on us and attacked our allies, I think they
count too.
> Thanks for clearing that up.
Always happy to lend a clue to the clueless.
Rich
KRJ
liberal wingnut magazing to support his liberal wingnut point of view.
Why am I not TOTALLY convinced.
Listen surrender monkey why don't you just stop paying taxes and join a
commune. Think of all the soft headed loose pussy or even looser liberal
boy ass you could score in between drinking coffee smoking dope and
complaining about how evil the world is. And, while you were righteously
enjoying yourself the rest of us would not be plagued by your off topic
posts and your idiotic political diatribes. It's a win win situation.
Of course as an alternative, you could put a gun in your mouth and pull
the trigger after leaving a really nasty letter to the editor. You would
be such a hero to the movement. Please do it.
LMAO what a moron.
William Coleman wrote:
> Here is a fantastic essay by Kevin Baker in Harpers, which puts in
> perspective the current attempts by Bush, Cheney, Rove, and other right-wing
> warmongers to blame liberals and war critics for the failures of the Bush
> Crime Family in Iraq. If the Iraq War winds up being a total disaster (as
> if it weren't already a total disaster), we will hear a huge hue and cry
> from the right that the liberals and war critics are to blame.
>
> Of course, we have seen this all before. We lost the Viet Nam War because
> Jane Fonda and John Kerry went to Hanoi. If the American military had been
> allowed to do its job, we would have kicked Vietnamese ass.
>
> Baker does a great job of tracing the origin of the modern stabbed in the
> back myth to Wagner's Gotterdammerung. He shows how the Nazis embraced this
> myth to explain the German defeat in World War I, and how the Republican
> Party has taken a page right out of the Nazi playbook since World War II by
> blaming all American foreign policy failures on treasonous betrayals by
> Democrats and liberals.
>
> This essay should be required reading for all right-wing nutcases. You guys
> are all complete historical illiterates, and what history you do know is a
> completely distorted narrative. Witness Paul G's recent assertion that
> Augusto Pinochet was a "good man" because Chile was under attack from
> communism, and Pinochet saved Chile from being transformed into a
> totalitarian communist dictatorship. Never mind that Allende was
> democratically elected in one of the few stable democracies in Latin
> America. Never mind that, upon assuming power, Pinochet dissolved
> parliament and destroyed a viable democracy. Never mind that he ruthlessly
> persecuted members of all opposition parties, killing thousands of them.
> Never mind that he kidnapped and tortured thousands of people. Never mind
> that he disappeared thousands of others. Never mind that, like all corrupt
> dictators, left or right, he embezzled millions of dollars from the Chilean
> people. He was fighting communism, you see. That justifies any and all
> atrocities by Pinochet, no matter how horrific. He was a good man.
>
> Anyway, read and learn, you right-wing nutcases. Find out how everytime you
> call a liberal a traitor, a terrorist sycophant, or a communist, you are
> taking your strategy right out of the Nazi playbook.
>
> http://harpers.org/StabbedInTheBack.html
>
> Stabbed in the Back!
> The past and future of a right-wing myth
> Posted on Friday, July 14, 2006. Originally from June 2006. By Kevin Baker.
> Sources
> First drink, hero, from my horn:
> I spiced the draught well for you
> To waken your memory clearly
> So that the past shall not slip your mind!
>
> -Hagen to Siegfried
> Die Götterdämmerung
>
> Every state must have its enemies. Great powers must have especially
> monstrous foes. Above all, these foes must arise from within, for national
> pride does not admit that a great nation can be defeated by any outside
> force. That is why, though its origins are elsewhere, the stab in the back
> has become the sustaining myth of modern American nationalism. Since the end
> of World War II it has been the device by which the American right wing has
> both revitalized itself and repeatedly avoided responsibility for its own
> worst blunders. Indeed, the right has distilled its tale of betrayal into a
> formula: Advocate some momentarily popular but reckless policy. Deny
> culpability when that policy is exposed as disastrous. Blame the disaster on
> internal enemies who hate America. Repeat, always making sure to increase
> the number of internal enemies.
>
> As the United States staggers past the third anniversary of its misadventure
> in Iraq, the dagger is already poised, the myth is already being
> perpetuated. To understand just how this strategy is likely to unfold-and
> why this time it may well fail-we must return to the birth of a legend.
>
> * * *
>
> The stab in the back first gained currency in Germany, as a means of
> explaining the nation's stunning defeat in World War I. It was Field Marshal
> Paul von Hindenburg himself, the leading German hero of the war, who told
> the National Assembly, "As an English general has very truly said, the
> German army was 'stabbed in the back.'"
>
> Like everything else associated with the stab-in-the-back myth, this claim
> was disingenuous. The "English general" in question was one Maj. Gen. Neill
> Malcolm, head of the British Military Mission in Berlin after the war, who
> put forward this suggestion merely to politely summarize how Field Marshal
> Erich von Ludendorff-the force behind Hindenburg-was characterizing the
> German army's alleged lack of support from its civilian government.
>
> "Ludendorff's eyes lit up, and he leapt upon the phrase like a dog on a
> bone," wrote Hindenburg biographer John Wheeler-Bennett. "'Stabbed in the
> back?' he repeated. 'Yes, that's it exactly. We were stabbed in the back.'"
>
> Ludendorff's enthusiasm was understandable, for, as he must have known, the
> phrase already had great resonance in Germany. The word dolchstoss-"dagger
> thrust"-had been popularized almost fifty years before in Wagner's
> Götterdämmerung. After swallowing a potion that causes him to reveal a
> shocking truth, the invincible Teutonic hero, Siegfried, is fatally stabbed
> in the back by Hagen, son of the archvillain, Alberich.
>
> Wagner had himself lifted his plot device from a medieval German poem, which
> was inspired in turn by Old Norse folklore, and of course the same story can
> be found in a slew of ancient mythologies, whether it's the fate of the
> Greek heroes Achilles and Hercules or the story of Jesus and Judas. The hero
> cannot be defeated by fair means or outside forces but only by someone close
> to him, resorting to treachery.
>
> The Siegfried legend in particular, though, has nuances that would mesh
> perfectly with right-wing mythology in the twentieth century, both in
> Germany and in the United States. At the end of Wagner's Ring Cycle, the
> downfall of the gods is followed by the rise of the Germanic people. The
> mythological hero has been transformed into the volk, just as heroic stature
> is granted to the modern state. Siegfried is killed just after revealing an
> unwelcome truth-much as the right, when pressed for evidence about its
> conspiracy theories, will often claim that these are hidden truths their
> enemies have a vested interest in concealing. Hagen, as a half-breed, an
> outsider posing as a friend, stands in for something worse yet-the
> assimilated Jew, able to betray the great warrior of the volk by posing as
> his boon companion.
>
> It was an iconography easily transferable to Germany's new, postwar
> republic. Hitler himself would claim that while recuperating behind the
> lines from a leg wound, he found Jewish "slackers" dominating the
> war-production bureaucracy and that "the Jew robbed the whole nation and
> pressed it beneath his domination." The rape imagery is revolting but vivid;
> Hitler was already attuned to the zeitgeist of his adopted country. Even
> before the war had been decided, a soldier in his company recalled how
> Corporal Hitler would "leap up and, running about excitedly, say that in
> spite of our big guns, victory would be denied us, for the invisible foes of
> the German people were a greater danger than the biggest cannon of the
> enemy."
>
> It didn't matter that Field Marshal Ludendorff had in fact been the virtual
> dictator of Germany from August of 1916 on, or that the empire's civilian
> leaders had been stunned by his announcement, in September of 1918, that his
> last, murderous offensives on the western front had failed, and that they
> must immediately sue for peace. The suddenness of Germany's defeat only
> supported the idea that some sort of treason must have been involved. From
> this point on, all blame would redound upon "the November criminals," the
> scheming politicians, reds, and above all, Jews.
>
> Yet it was necessary, for the purging that the Nazis had in mind, to believe
> that the national degeneration went even further. Jerry Lembcke, in his
> brilliant work, The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory and the Legacy of Vietnam,
> writes of how the Nazis fostered the dolchstosslegende in ways that eerily
> foreshadowed returning veteran mythologies in the United States. Hermann
> Göring, the most charismatic of the Nazi leaders after Hitler, liked to
> speak of how "very young boys, degenerate deserters, and prostitutes tore
> the insignia off our best front line soldiers and spat on their field gray
> uniforms." As Lembcke points out, any insignia ripping had actually been
> done by the mutinous soldiers and sailors who would launch a socialist
> uprising shortly after the war, tearing them off their own shoulders or
> those of their officers. Göring's instant revisionism both covered up this
> embarrassing reality and created a whole new class of villains who were-in
> his barely coded language-homosexuals, sexually threatening women, and other
> "deviants." All such individuals would be dealt with in the new, Nazi order.
>
> * * *
>
> The dolchstosslegende first came to the United States following not a war
> that had been lost but our own greatest triumph. Here, the motivating defeat
> was suffered not by the nation but by a faction. In the years immediately
> following World War II, the American right was facing oblivion.
> Domestically, the reforms of the New Deal had been largely embraced by the
> American people. The Roosevelt and Truman administrations-supported by many
> liberal Republicans-had led the nation successfully through the worst war in
> human history, and we had emerged as the most powerful nation on earth.
>
> Franklin Roosevelt and his fellow liberal internationalists had sounded the
> first alarms about Hitler, but conservatives had stubbornly-even
> suicidally-maintained their isolationism right into the postwar era. Senator
> Robert Taft, "Mr. Republican," and the right's enduring presidential hope,
> had not only been a prominent member of the leading isolationist
> organization, America First, and opposed the nation's first peacetime draft
> in 1940, but also appeared to be as naive about the Soviet Union as he had
> been about the Axis powers. Like many on the right, he was much more
> concerned about Chiang Kai-shek's worm-eaten Nationalist regime in China
> than U.S. allies in Europe. "The whole Atlantic Pact, certainly the arming
> of Germany, is an incentive for Russia to enter the war before the army is
> built up," Taft warned. He was against any U.S. military presence in Europe
> even in 1951.
>
> This sort of determined naiveté had Taft and his movement teetering on the
> brink of political irrelevance. They saved themselves by grabbing at an
> unlikely rope-America's very own dolchstosslegende, the myth of Yalta. No
> reasonable observer would have predicted in the immediate wake of the Yalta
> conference that it would become an enduring symbol of Democratic perfidy.
> Yalta was, in fact, originally considered the apogee of the Roosevelt
> Administration's accomplishments, ensuring that the hard-won peace at the
> end of World War II would not soon dissolve
>
> into an even worse conflict, just as the botched peace of Versailles had led
> only to renewed hostilities in the years after World War I. The conference,
> which took place in the Soviet Crimea in February 1945, was the last time
> "the Big Three" of the war-Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin-would meet
> face-to-face. The U.S. negotiating team went with specific goals and was
> widely perceived at the time as having achieved them. Agreements were
> reached on the occupation of the soon-to-be-defeated German Reich, the
> liberation of those Eastern European countries occupied by or allied with
> Germany, the Soviet entrance into the war against Japan, and, most
> significantly in Roosevelt's eyes, on the structure of a workable,
> international body designed to keep world peace, the United Nations.
>
> FDR's presentation of these agreements before a joint session of Congress
> that March met with almost universal acclaim. This was not surprising.
> Roosevelt, who had been at Versailles as a junior member of the Wilson
> Administration, was preoccupied with making sure that his vision for the
> postwar world did not founder on any partisan bickering with Congress.
> Before leaving for Yalta, he had briefed a group of leading senators from
> across the political spectrum on what he hoped to accomplish, and solicited
> their opinions and questions. The delegation he took with him to the Soviet
> Union was a bipartisan team of senior diplomats, advisers, and military men,
> and he continued to cultivate support from all quarters on his return to the
> United States. Such prominent Republican figures as Arthur Vandenberg, the
> once-isolationist senator from Michigan turned internationalist, and Thomas
> Dewey, Roosevelt's fierce opponent in the 1944 presidential race, expressed
> general support for the results of the Yalta conference. Taft and the right
> wing of the Republican Party were more skeptical, but offered no substantial
> criticisms.
>
> Save for a few congressmen, newspaper publishers, and columnists on the
> extreme fringe of the right, this early Cold War consensus would survive
> until 1948. Then, Dewey's and the Republicans' stunning losses in the
> elections that fall, combined with a confluence of American setbacks abroad,
> served to revivify the right.
>
> Not only did the Republicans lose a presidential election against a badly
> divided, national Democratic Party; they also lost the congressional
> majorities they had just managed to eke out in 1946, following fourteen
> years in the political wilderness. It now seemed clear that the Republicans
> would never return to power merely by supporting Democratic policies, or by
> promising to implement them more effectively, and the right wing gained
> traction within the party.
>
> Meanwhile, the exposure of Alger Hiss as a Soviet agent followed, in
> relatively rapid succession, by the fall of Czechoslovakia's coalition
> government to a Soviet-backed coup, the Soviet attainment of an atomic bomb,
> and the victory of Mao's Communists over Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang regime
> in China, cast the entire policy of containment into doubt. Never mind that
> the right's own feckless or muddled proposals for fighting the Cold War
> would not have ameliorated any of these situations. The right swept them
> into the memory hole and offered a new answer to Americans bewildered by how
> suddenly their nation's global preeminence had been diminished: Yalta.
>
> A growing chorus of right-wing voices now began to excoriate our wartime
> diplomacy. Their most powerful charge, one that would firmly establish the
> Yalta myth in the American political psyche, was the accusation that our
> delegation had given over Eastern Europe to the Soviets. According to "How
> We Won the War and Lost the Peace," an essay written for Life magazine
> shortly before the 1948 election by William Bullitt-a former diplomat who
> had been dismissed by Roosevelt for outing a gay rival in the State
> Department-FDR and his chief adviser, Harry Hopkins, were guilty of "wishful
> appeasement" of Stalin at Yalta, handing the peoples of Poland, Hungary,
> Romania, Bulgaria, and the Baltic states over to the Soviet dictator.
>
> The right wing's dolchstosslegende was a small but fateful conspiracy,
> engineered through "secret diplomacy" at Yalta. Its linchpin was Hiss, a
> junior State Department aide at Yalta who was now described as a major
> architect of the pact. Hiss was a perfect villain for the right's purposes.
> He was not only a communist and a spy; he was also an effete Eastern
> intellectual right down to his name-and, by implication, possibly a
> homosexual. He had been publicly exposed by that relentlessly regular guy,
> Dick Nixon, as an unnatural, un-American element who had used his wiles to
> sway all of his superiors in the Crimea.
>
> Just how he had accomplished this was never detailed, but it didn't matter;
> specificity is anathema to any myth. Bullitt and an equally flamboyant
> opportunist of the period, Congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce, offered a more
> general explanation. The Democrats, Mrs. Luce had already charged, "will
> not, or dare not, tell us the commitments that were overtly or secretly made
> in moments of war's extermination by a mortally ill President, and perhaps
> mortally scared State Department advisers."
>
> The idea of the "dying President" at Yalta was plausible to much of the
> public, who had seen photographs of Roosevelt looking suddenly, shockingly
> gaunt and exhausted throughout much of the last year of his life. To the
> right wing-which had conducted a whispering campaign against Roosevelt
> throughout his term in office, claiming that his real affliction was not
> polio but syphilis, and that he, his wife, and various advisers, including
> Hopkins, were "secret Jews" and Soviet agents-it all made perfect sense. To
> the many Americans who still loved Roosevelt and whose votes the Republicans
> needed, FDR himself could now become the Siegfried figure, a dying hero
> betrayed by the shady, unnatural Hiss.
>
> All of this, of course, falls apart under the most cursory examination. Hiss
> was a "technician" at Yalta, relied upon mostly for his expertise regarding
> the planned United Nations, and-already suspected of espionage-he had played
> no policymaking role in a large, bipartisan delegation that included most of
> the nation's military and diplomatic leadership. Roosevelt was in severe
> physical decline and would die from a massive stroke some two months later,
> but his mind was still active and engaged. Chip Bohlen-who actually was at
> Yalta and who went on to become a leading Cold War statesman under both
> Republican and Democratic administrations-would echo many other observers in
> reporting that while Roosevelt's "physical state was certainly not up to
> normal, his mental and psychological state was certainly not affected. He
> was lethargic but when important moments arose, he was mentally sharp."
>
> Far from handing over anything to anyone, Roosevelt had actually persuaded
> Stalin to sign onto a "Declaration on Liberated Europe" that affirmed "the
> right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will
> live" and committed the Big Three "to the earliest possible establishment
> through free elections of governments responsive to the will of the people."
> More was not possible. The salient fact about Eastern Europe at the end of
> World War II was that the Red Army enjoyed an immense numerical advantage
> there. To dislodge it, the United States would have had to embark
> immediately upon another epic struggle, a vast new war for which the
> American people, already clamoring for demobilization, showed absolutely no
> enthusiasm. It is likely that the United States would have eventually
> prevailed in such a struggle, but only at a cost of American lives that
> would have dwarfed the total lost in World War II itself, and the further
> devastation of the very European countries we had sought to liberate.
>
> As Bohlen told a Senate committee in 1953, "I believe that the map of Europe
> would look much the same if there had never been a Yalta conference at all."
> Why this should have been surprising, and how it possibly reflected a
> failure of American foreign policy, is a mystery in any rational analysis of
> the situation. But any such analysis could never be made by the heroic
> state. Instead, Roosevelt and the nation he represented had to have been
> betrayed. The previous, disastrous policies advocated by the Republican
> right-ignoring the growing Axis threat, then leaving Western Europe
> defenseless while plunging into war in China-could be safely forgotten.
>
> * * *
>
> Republicans now began an almost continuous campaign against alleged
> Democratic conspiracies. Following Chiang's defeat, conservatives in
> Congress demanded to know "Who lost China?" and Robert Taft, discarding his
> much vaunted integrity, egged on Joe McCarthy's witch-hunt against the
> Truman Administration, urging him to "keep talking and if one case doesn't
> work out, he should proceed with another." Yet it would take another hot
> war-and another expansion of the dolchstosslegende-to permanently enthrone
> the idea of a vast, treasonous left-wing conspiracy in the American psyche.
>
> The outbreak of hostilities in Korea in 1950 was disturbing enough, but the
> defeat of General Douglas MacArthur that winter by invading Chinese forces
> sent shock waves throughout the United States. More than anyone else,
> MacArthur had brought about his own defeat, launching his troops up the
> Korean peninsula in separate columns, divided by mountain ranges, ignoring
> both orders from the White House to halt and plentiful signs that a massive
> Chinese force had already infiltrated the Korean peninsula. But while his
> subordinates scrambled to rally their reeling men, MacArthur moved swiftly
> to salvage his military reputation and his hopes for the presidency.
>
> What the general proposed was a massive escalation of the war. U.N. troops
> would not only "blockade the coast of China" and "destroy through naval
> gunfire and air bombardment China's industrial capacity to wage war" but
> would also "release existing restrictions upon the Formosan garrison" of
> Chiang Kai-shek, which might lead to counter-invasion against "vulnerable
> areas of the Chinese mainland." Above all, MacArthur urged that no fewer
> than thirty-four atomic bombs be dropped on what he characterized as
> "retardation targets" in Manchuria, including critical concentrations of
> troops and planes. Even this soon seemed insufficient. MacArthur later added
> that had he been permitted, he not only would have launched as many as fifty
> atomic bombs but also would have used "wagons, carts, trucks, and planes" to
> create "a belt of radioactive cobalt" that would neatly slice the Korean
> thumb from China. "For at least sixty years," he said, "there could have
> been no land invasion of Korea from the north."
>
> MacArthur insisted the "only way to prevent World War III is to end the
> Korean conflict rapidly and decisively"-as if a massive, atomic attack upon
> the world's most populous nation would not, in itself, constitute World War
> III. When the Truman Administration rejected his proposals, the general
> announced that he was not being allowed to win-"An enormous handicap without
> precedent in military history." The U.N. had to "depart from its tolerant
> effort to contain the war to the area of Korea" and accept his strategy to
> "doom Red China," an opponent "of such exaggerated and vaunted military
> power."
>
> MacArthur conveyed similar sentiments to his conservative allies in
> Congress, writing House Minority Leader Joseph Martin that he was only
> trying to "follow the conventional pattern of meeting force with maximum
> counter-force, as we have never failed to do in the past," and concluding:
> "There is no substitute for victory." Martin gleefully aired the great man's
> views in a speech in Brooklyn, thundering, "If we are not in Korea to win,
> then this Administration should be indicted for the murder of thousands of
> American boys." He added that "the same State Department crowd that cut off
> aid" to Chiang in 1946 now opposed invading China because this would show up
> their earlier mistakes. The only way to "save Europe and save Asia at the
> same time" was "to clear out the State Department from top to bottom." After
> Martin repeated MacArthur's views on the House floor, Truman finally removed
> the general from his command. But the move seemed only to confirm that
> something was very wrong.
>
> The right seized the opportunity to renew-and expand-its charges of
> dolchstoss. Republican Senator William Jenner of Indiana bellowed from the
> floor of the Senate that "this country today is in the hands of a secret
> inner coterie which is directed by agents of the Soviet Union. We must cut
> this whole cancerous conspiracy out of our Government at once. Our own
> choice is to impeach President Truman and find out who is the secret
> invisible government which has so cleverly led our country down the road to
> destruction." Nixon, his new colleague, agreed in barely coded language,
> attacking "the whining, whimpering, groveling attitude of our diplomatic
> representatives who talk of America's fear rather than of America's strength
> and of America's courage." He claimed that "top administration officials
> have refused time and time again to recognize the existence of this fifth
> column" or "to take effective action to clear subversives out" of the
> government.
>
> Douglas MacArthur now became the martyred Siegfried, stabbed in the back by
> weaklings at home who were for some reason afraid of victory. It was the
> fault of these "whimpering," "soft," "cowardly," "lavender" "appeasers," so
> unnatural they were willing to "murder" American boys to cover up their own
> misjudgments. Communist treachery and appeasement were blended seamlessly
> with an emerging, postwar sex panic.
>
> An entire, seemingly plausible narrative of treason was now firmly
> established. The conspiracy of spies, or sexual deviants, or both, had now
> expanded beyond Alger Hiss to include pretty much the entire State
> Department and maybe the rest of the executive branch. Taft, launching his
> third run for the Republican nomination, offered to name MacArthur as his
> vice president, and the general, while still harboring hopes of winning the
> nomination himself, agreed on the condition that he would have a voice in
> foreign policy and be put in charge of national security.
>
> In their desire for power, Republican centrists soon joined this right-wing
> chorus. John Foster Dulles, now Eisenhower's secretary-of-state designate,
> denounced the very strategy of containment that he had helped to formulate
> and promised to "roll back" Communism everywhere, including in Eastern
> Europe. Eisenhower himself refused to disown McCarthy, even after the
> senator had impugned the patriotism of his longtime friend and mentor,
> George Marshall.
>
> The Republican platform that Ike ran on in the fall of 1952 was a freefall
> into fantasy, a fatal compact by party moderates with a right wing that
> would eventually push them into extinction. For the first time since the
> Civil War era, one major American political party charged another one with
> treason. Democrats were accused of having "shielded traitors to the Nation
> in high places" and creating "enemies abroad where we should have friends."
> Democrats were responsible for all "110,000 American casualties" in Korea,
> where they had "produced stalemates and ignominious bartering with our
> enemies" that "offer no hope of victory." Republicans promised to "repudiate
> all commitments contained in secret understandings such as those of Yalta
> which aid Communist enslavements."
>
> United once more, Republicans brought this compilation of hysterical charges
> and bald-faced lies before the American people-who swallowed them willingly.
> Once in power, Eisenhower and Dulles immediately returned to managing the
> Democratic system of containment. Dulles met with MacArthur, listened
> respectfully to his plan to nuke Manchuria, allowed that it "could well
> succeed," then shelved it without another word. No "secret understandings"
> to "aid Communist enslavements" were repudiated because, of course, they did
> not exist. The idea of "rolling back" Communism from Eastern Europe was
> taken seriously solely by the Hungarian people, who launched a brave
> rebellion against their Soviet occupiers in 1956, only to find that Dulles
> and Eisenhower were willing to offer them nothing more than sympathy.
>
> * * *
>
> The right's initial blindness toward first the Axis and then the Soviet
> threat in Europe; the disastrous military campaign waged by one of its
> icons; its feckless and even apocalyptic ideas for recouping its previous
> mistakes-all had been erased in much of the public consciousness by the stab
> in the back, a vote-winning tale of deviancy, subversion, and intentional
> defeat radiating from Yalta all the way to Korea. The Vietnam War, however,
> would call for yet another expansion of the dolchstosslegende.
>
> Vietnam was the sort of war Republicans had been clamoring to fight for two
> decades. A liberal administration had started it, with misplaced bravado,
> but it had been egged on-even dared-to take the plunge into full-scale war
> by prevailing right-wing dogma. When the war soured, Republicans first tried
> to blame not the failed premise of the domino theory or the flawed diplomacy
> of the Kennedy Administration or the near-universal American failure to
> recognize Vietnam's boundless desire for self-determination-no, it was the
> old fallbacks of appeasement, defeatism, and treachery in high places.
>
> Once again, we were told that American troops were not being "allowed" to
> win, if they could not mine Haiphong harbor, or flatten Hanoi, or reduce all
> of North Vietnam to a parking lot. Yet Vietnam was a war with no real
> defeats on the ground. U.S. troops won every battle of any significance and
> inflicted exponentially greater casualties on the enemy than they suffered
> themselves. Even the great debacle of the war, the 1968 Tet offensive, ended
> with an overwhelming American military victory and the Viet Cong permanently
> expunged as an effective fighting force. It is difficult to claim betrayal
> when you do not lose a battle.
>
> Worse yet, Republicans could not provide any meaningful alternative
> strategy. Nixon was able to take office in 1969 only by offering a "secret
> plan" to get the boys home from Vietnam, not by promising to hugely escalate
> the fighting or risk a wider conflict. Richard Nixon became the first
> Republican president since the turn of the century to take office while a
> major war still hung in the balance, and now all the fantasies began to fall
> away. More than 21,000 Americans were killed in Vietnam during Nixon's time
> in office, and there were no Democrats to blame it on.
>
> The only political hope for the administration was to turn its gaze
> outward-to blame the people themselves, or at least a portion of them.
> Nixon, as historian Rick Perlstein has observed, "had a gift for looking
> beneath social surfaces to see and exploit subterranean anxieties," and he
> had been on hand at the creation of this game. Initially, the divisions he
> sought to exploit were much the same as those he had manipulated back in the
> 1940s, though they were now aimed at broad swaths of the general public-the
> children of the New Deal, as it were. The leading tactics included
> employment of the same sorts of code words so bluntly wielded twenty years
> before, along with a good deal more street muscle.
>
> Over and over, antiwar protesters were called Communists, perverts, or
> simply "bums"-the last epithet from Nixon's own lips. The large percentage
> of college students in their ranks were depicted as spoiled, obnoxious,
> ungrateful children. Older, more established dissidents were ridiculed by
> Nixon's vice president, Spiro Agnew, in a series of William Safire?authored
> speeches, as "nattering nabobs of negativity," and, unforgettably, as "an
> effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as
> intellectuals." These invectives were, of course, doubly disingenuous; it
> was Agnew and Safire who very much wanted such persons to be known by the
> damning label of "intellectual," and what the vice president was really
> calling them was fags.
>
> All these bums and effetes might be un-American, but their disapproval still
> was sufficient to demoralize our fighting men in Vietnam and thereby put
> them in imminent peril. And on hand to take the torch from an increasingly
> beleaguered Nixon was a new Republican master at exploiting subterranean
> anxieties, Ronald Reagan. As early as 1969, Reagan was insisting that
> leaders of the massive Moratorium Days protests "lent comfort and aid" to
> the North Vietnamese, and that "some American will die tonight because of
> the activity in our streets."
>
> The Nixon Administration now had its new Hagens. People who voiced their
> opposition to the war were traitors and even killers, responsible for the
> death of American servicemen, and as such almost any action taken against
> them could be justified. The Nixon White House even had its own blue-collar
> shock troops. Repeatedly, on suspiciously media-heavy occasions,
> construction workers appeared to break up antiwar demonstrations and beat up
> peaceful demonstrators. The effete protesters had been shown up by real
> working-class Americans-and their class allies in the police force eagerly
> closed ranks.
>
> * * *
>
> Neither Nixon, nor Agnew, nor the war would survive a second term. With the
> shameful, panicked helicopter evacuation of Saigon, U.S. prestige in the
> world dropped precipitously-but none of the other dominoes followed. Once
> again, by 1975, the American right should have found itself utterly
> discredited. A war that conservatives had fervently supported had ended in
> defeat, but with none of the consequences they had prophesied. Instead, the
> entire operating right-wing belief in "monolithic communism" was debunked in
> the wake of our evacuation from Saigon, as Vietnam attacked Cambodia, China
> invaded Vietnam, and the Soviet Union and China clashed along their border.
>
> Yet the cultural division that Richard Nixon had fomented to try to salvage
> the war in Vietnam would take on a life of its own long after the war was
> over and Nixon had been driven from office in disgrace. It cleverly focused
> on the men who had fought the war, rather than the war itself. If Vietnam
> had been an unnecessary sacrifice, if world Communism could no longer be
> passed off as a credible threat to the United States, then the betrayal of
> our fighting men must become the issue.
>
> Vietnam, for the right, would come to be defined mainly through a series of
> closely related, culturally explosive totems. The protesters and the
> counterculture would be reduced to the single person of Jane Fonda, embalmed
> forever on a clip of film, traipsing around a North Vietnamese antiaircraft
> gun. The soldiers, meanwhile, were transformed into victims and martyrs. It
> became general knowledge that they had been savagely scorned and mocked upon
> their return to the United States; those returning through the San Francisco
> airport were especially liable to be spat upon by men and women protesting
> the war.
>
> Of course, those who were able to return at all were the lucky ones. Soon
> after we had bugged out of Saigon, millions of Americans became convinced
> that American prisoners of war had been left behind in Vietnamese work
> camps, by a government that was too cowed or callous to insist upon their
> return. Numerous groups sprang up to demand their release, disseminating
> flags with a stark, black-and-white tableau of a prisoner's bowed head
> against the backdrop of a guard tower, a barbed-wire fence, and the legend:
> YOU ARE NOT FORGOTTEN POW*MIA.
>
> It would do no good to point out that there is no objective evidence that
> veterans were ever spat upon by demonstrators or that POWs were ever left
> behind or that Jane Fonda's addle-headed mission to Hanoi did anything to
> undermine American forces. The stab-in-the-back myth is much more powerful
> than any of these facts, and it continues to grow more so as time passes.
> Just this past Christmas, one Faye Fiore wrote a feature for the Los Angeles
> Times about how returning Iraqi veterans are being showered with acts of
> good will by an adoring American public, "In contrast to the hostile stares
> that greeted many Vietnam veterans 40 years ago." The POW/MIA flags, with
> their black-and-white iconography of shame, now fly everywhere in the United
> States, just under the Stars and Stripes; federal law even mandates that on
> at least six days a year-Memorial Day, Flag Day, Armed Forces Day, Veterans
> Day, Independence Day, and one day during POW/MIA Week (the third week of
> September)-they must be flown over nearly every single U.S. government
> building. There has been nothing else like them in the history of this
> country, and they have no parallel anywhere else in the world-these peculiar
> little banners, attached like a disclaimer to our national flag, with their
> message of surrender and humiliation, perennially accusing our government of
> betrayal.
>
> * * *
>
> If the power of the stab-in-the-back narrative from Vietnam is beyond
> question, it still raises the question of why. Why should we wish to
> maintain a narrative of horrendous national betrayal, one in which our own
> democratically elected government, and a large portion of our fellow
> citizens, are guilty of horribly betraying our fighting men?
>
> The answer, I think, lies in Richard Nixon's ability to expand the Siegfried
> myth from the halls of power out into the streets. Government conspiracies
> are still culpable, of course; ironically, it was Nixon's own administration
> that first "left behind" American POWs in North Vietnam. Yet this makes
> little difference to the American right, which never considered Nixon
> ideologically pure enough to be a member in good standing, and which has
> always made hay by railing against government, even now that they are it.
> What Nixon and a few of his contemporaries did for the right was to make
> culture war the permanent condition of American politics.
>
> On domestic issues as well as ones of foreign policy, from Ronald Reagan's
> mythical "welfare queens" through George Wallace's "pointy-headed
> intellectuals"; from Lee Atwater's characterization of Democrats as
> anti-family, anti-life, anti-God, down through the open, deliberate attempts
> of Newt Gingrich and Karl Rove to constantly describe opponents in words
> that made them seem bizarre, deviant, and "out of the mainstream," the
> entire vernacular of American politics has been altered since Vietnam.
> Culture war has become the organizing principle of the right, unalterably
> convinced as it is that conservatives are an embattled majority, one that
> must stand ever vigilant against its unnatural enemies-from the "gay
> agenda," to the advocates of Darwinism, to the "war against Christmas" last
> year.
>
> This has become such an ingrained part of the right wing's belief system
> that the Bush Administration has now become the first government in our
> nation's history to fight a major war without seeking any sort of national
> solidarity. Far from it. The whole purpose of the war in Iraq-and the "war
> on terrorism"-seems to have been to foment division and to win elections by
> forcing Americans to choose between starkly different visions of what their
> country should be. Again and again, Bush and his confederates have used the
> cover of national security to push through an uncompromising right-wing
> agenda. Ignoring the broad leeway already provided the federal government to
> fight terrorists and conduct domestic surveillance, the administration has
> gone out of its way to claim vast new powers to detain, spy on, and imprison
> its own citizens, and to abduct and even torture foreigners-a subject we
> shall return to. It has used the cover of the war to push through enormous
> tax cuts, attempt to dismantle the Social Security system, and alter the
> very social covenant of the nation. Incidents from the Terri Schiavo case to
> the teaching of "intelligent design" are periodically exploited to start new
> cultural battles.
>
> Given this state of permanent culture war, it is not surprising that the
> Bush White House trotted out the stab-in-the-back myth when its Iraq project
> began to run out of steam early last summer. It was first given a spin, as
> usual, by the right's media shock troops, and directed at both Democratic
> and renegade Republican lawmakers who had dared to criticize either the
> strategic conduct of the war or our treatment of detainees. The Wall Street
> Journal's editorial page opined, "Where the terrorists are gaining ground is
> in Washington, D.C." and noted that General John Abizaid, of the U.S.
> Central Command, had said, "When my soldiers say to me and ask me the
> question whether or not they've got support from the American people or not,
> that worries me. And they're starting to do that."
>
> Again, the link was made. Soldiers of the most powerful army in the history
> of the world would be actively endangered if they even wondered whether the
> folks at home were questioning their deployment. The right was looking for a
> target, and it got one when Sen. Dick Durbin (D., Ill.), appalled by an FBI
> report on the prisons for suspected terrorists at Guantánamo Bay, compared
> them to those run by "Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime-Pol
> Pot or others-that had no concern for human beings . . . "
>
> The right's response was predictably swift and savage. The Power Line
> blogger Paul Mirengoff commented that the senator "slanders his own country.
> Normally that kind of slander is uttered only by revolutionaries seeking the
> violent overthrow of the government." Rush Limbaugh harrumphed that "Dick
> Durbin has just identified who the Democrats are in the year 2005,
> particularly when it comes to American national security and when it comes
> to the U.S. military. These are the same people that say they support the
> troops. This is how they do it, huh? They give aid and comfort to the
> enemy."
>
> Yet for once, Rush was outdone. John Carlson, host of a Seattle talk show
> and Washington State's unsuccessful Republican candidate for governor in
> 2000, said of Durbin, "This man is simply a piece of excrement, a piece of
> waste that needs to be scraped off the sidewalk and eliminated." Bill O'Reilly
> of Fox News launched a preemptive attack on his few liberal counterparts,
> urging that the staff of Air America be jailed: "Dissent, fine; undermining,
> you're a traitor. Got it? So, all you clowns over at the liberal radio
> network, we could incarcerate them immediately. Will you have that done,
> please? Send them over to the FBI and just put them in chains, because they,
> you know, they're undermining everything."
>
> Once the Republican media had secured the ground and set the terms of
> debate, the party's representatives in Washington jumped into the fray. When
> Democratic House Leader Nancy Pelosi called the war "a grotesque mistake"
> that was "not making America safer," the as-yet-unindicted Tom DeLay
> retorted that Pelosi "owes our military and their families an apology for
> her reckless comments," and House Majority Whip Roy Blunt claimed that
> Pelosi's words had "emboldened" the enemy.
>
> All of the crucial elements of the stab-in-the-back charge were now in
> place. Critics of the war were not simply questioning its strategy or its
> necessity, or upholding the best of American traditions by raising concerns
> over how enemy prisoners were being treated. Instead, they were aiding the
> enemy, and actively endangering our fighting men and women. They were
> traitors and "revolutionaries," individuals who were "conducting guerrilla
> warfare on American troops," and "excrement" who could now be safely
> incarcerated "immediately" or even "eliminated."
>
> It remained only for the chief Republican strategist, Karl Rove, to appear
> before a conservative party fundraiser in Manhattan on June 22 and tie up a
> campaign that bore all of his usual earmarks.
>
> "Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war;
> liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare
> indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers," Rove
> began, riffing on a proven theme from the 2004 presidential election, which
> sought to link Democrats not only with the terrorist attack on 9/11 but also
> with a generation of Republican assertions that liberals are "soft" on
> domestic crime. Rove then honed in on poor Dick Durbin's remarks: "Has there
> ever been a more revealing moment this year? Let me just put this in fairly
> simple terms: Al Jazeera now broadcasts the words of Senator Durbin to the
> Mideast, certainly putting our troops in greater danger. No more needs to be
> said about the motives of liberals."; (My italics.)
>
> The conspiracy had expanded yet again. Not just Nancy Pelosi or Dick Durbin
> but all Democrats and all liberals were now firmly established as traitors,
> and it was not possible that they had made some honest gaffes; instead,
> their very motives were sinister.
>
> When Rove's thunderous media offensive had finally subsided, however, a
> strange silence ensued. The popularity of his master, George W. Bush,
> continued to plunge in the opinion polls. Support for the war continued to
> plummet as well, and by July, Rove himself was thoroughly enmeshed in the
> Valerie Plame scandal, with all of the attendant implications about its
> manipulation of prewar intelligence. By November, Rove was forced to send
> out Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney themselves on a new "Strategy for
> Victory" campaign. Speaking on Veterans Day to an all-military audience at
> an army depot in Tobyhanna, Pennsylvania, Bush attacked Democrats who were
> saying they had been duped by the fraudulent intelligence the administration
> had used to secure their votes for war.
>
> "These baseless attacks send the wrong signal to our troops and to an enemy
> that is questioning America's will," Bush told the soldiers assembled for
> his photo op. "As our troops fight a ruthless enemy determined to destroy
> our way of life, they deserve to know that their elected leaders who voted
> to send them to war continue to stand behind them."
>
> Once again, criticism of the war in Iraq had been adroitly linked to
> criticism of the administration, and then to treason-something that would,
> somehow, magically empower the enemy and demoralize our own troops. Once
> again, unnatural enemies were striking at the heroic, Siegfried figures at
> the top of the administration, who struggled to get out their great truth
> that no intelligence had been manipulated and the Democrats were engaging in
> "revisionism."
>
> Yet still, somehow, Bush's numbers continued to plunge. What went wrong? How
> could such an infallible Republican strategy, conducted with all of the
> right wing's vast media resources at his command, have failed so utterly?
> How was it that the story of the stab in the back had lost its power to hold
> us spellbound?
>
> * * *
>
> What has really robbed the conspiracy theories of their effectiveness is how
> the war in Iraq has been conducted. Bush and his advisers have sought to use
> the war not only to punish their enemies but also to reward their
> supporters, a bit of political juggling that led them to demand nothing from
> the American public as a whole. Those of us who are not actively fighting in
> Iraq, or who do not have close friends and family members who are doing so,
> have not been asked to sacrifice in any way. The richest among us have even
> been showered with tax cuts.
>
> Yet in demanding so little, Bush has finally uncoupled the state from its
> heroic status. It is not a coincidence that modern nationalism dates from
> the advent of mass democracy-and mass citizen armies-that the American and
> French revolutions ushered in at the end of the eighteenth century. Bush's
> refusal to mobilize the nation for the war in Iraq has severed that
> immediate identification with our army's fortunes. Nor did it begin with the
> Bush Administration. The wartime tax cuts and the all-volunteer, wartime
> army are simply the latest manifestations of a trend that is now decades old
> and that has been promulgated through peace as well as war, by Democrats as
> well as Republicans. It cannot truly be a surprise that a society that has
> steadily dismantled or diminished the most basic access to health care,
> relief for the poor and the aged, and decent education; a society that has
> allowed the gap between its richest and poorest citizens to grow to
> unprecedented size; a society that has paid obeisance to the ideology of
> globalization to the point of giving away both its jobs and its debt to
> foreign nations, and which has just allowed one of its poorer cities to
> quietly drown, should choose to largely opt out of its own defense.
>
> Anyone who doubts that this is exactly what we have done need only look at
> how little the war really engages most of us. It rarely draws more than a
> few seconds of coverage on the local television news, if that, and then only
> well into the broadcast, after a story on a murder, or a fire, or the latest
> weather predictions. Even the largest and angriest demonstrations against
> our occupation of Iraq have not approached the mobilizations against the war
> in Vietnam, but a close observer will notice that we also have yet to see
> any of the massive counterdemonstrations that were held in support of that
> war-or "in support of the troops." Such engagement on either side seems
> almost quaint now.
>
> Who could possibly believe in a plot to lose this war? No one cares that
> much about it. We have, instead, reached a crossroads where the overwhelming
> right-wing desire to dissolve much of the old social compact that held
> together the modern nation-state is irreconcilably at odds with any attempt
> to conduct such a grand, heroic experiment as implanting democracy in the
> Middle East. Without mass participation, Iraq cannot be passed off as an
> heroic endeavor, no matter how much Mr. Bush's rhetoric tries to make it
> one, and without a hero there can be no great betrayer, no skulking villain.
>
> And yet, a convincing national narrative, though it may be the sheerest,
> most vicious fiction, can have incredible staying power-can perhaps outlast
> even the nation that it was meant to serve. It is ironic that, even as
> support for his war was starting to unravel in May of 2005, George W. Bush
> was in the Latvian capital of Riga, describing the Yalta agreement as "one
> of the greatest wrongs of history." The President placed it in the "unjust
> tradition" of the 1938 Munich Pact and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which
> together paved the way for the start of World War II in 1939. Bush's words
> echoed his statements of three previous trips to Eastern Europe, dating back
> to 2001, during which he had pledged, "no more Munichs, no more Yaltas," and
> called Yalta an "attempt to sacrifice freedom for the sake of stability," a
> "bitter legacy," and a "constant source of injustice and fear" that had
> "divided a living civilization."
>
> The ultimate irony of Bush's perpetuating this ageless right-wing shibboleth
> is that for once it wasn't intended for home consumption. The Yalta myth has
> finally lost its old magic, here in historically illiterate, contemporary
> America. Nor did Bush make any special attempt to let his countrymen know he
> was apportioning them equal blame with Stalin and Hitler for the greatest
> calamities of the twentieth century.
>
> Bush's pandering was directed instead to the nations he was visiting, in a
> region that still battens on any number of conspiracy theories. Why he
> should have so denigrated his own country to a few small Eastern European
> nations might seem a mystery, until one considers that this is the "new
> Europe" that Bush has solicited for troops for his Iraqi adventure . . . and
> where he appears to have found either destinations or conduits for victims
> of "extraordinary rendition," en route to where they could be safely
> tortured in secrecy.
>
> An American president, wandering the halls of Eastern European palaces,
> denounces his own nation in order to appease his hosts into torturing secret
> prisoners. Our heroic age surely has come to an end.
>
>
>
> William Coleman (ramashiva)
>
>
>
>
William Coleman
You fucking moron. Could you possibly be more clueless???
Germany declared war on the USA immediately after Pearl Harbor. Our
response was to declare war on them. Please read some history and stop
making idiotic statements on matters about which you know absolutely
nothing.
William Coleman (ramashiva)
Rich Shipley
> Laughing so hard. A liberal wingnut quoting a liberal wingnut in a
> liberal wingnut magazing to support his liberal wingnut point of view.
> Why am I not TOTALLY convinced.
>
> Listen surrender monkey why don't you just stop paying taxes and join a
> commune. Think of all the soft headed loose pussy or even looser liberal
> boy ass you could score in between drinking coffee smoking dope and
> complaining about how evil the world is. And, while you were righteously
> enjoying yourself the rest of us would not be plagued by your off topic
> posts and your idiotic political diatribes. It's a win win situation.
>
> Of course as an alternative, you could put a gun in your mouth and pull
> the trigger after leaving a really nasty letter to the editor. You would
> be such a hero to the movement. Please do it.
>
> LMAO what a moron.
I like how you refuted an article on the dishonest use of language by
the right by doing it yourself. Nice irony.
Rich
Alex
b...@synapse-cs.com wrote on 7/15/06 4:32 PM:
Except Germany and Italy declared war on us BEFORE we retaliated against
Japan.
Alex
ri...@rtgames.com wrote on 7/15/06 4:37 PM:
> Alex wrote:
>> in article 68idnaZCc6I_YiXZ...@comcast.com, Rich Shipley at
>> ri...@rtgames.com wrote on 7/15/06 10:43 AM:
>>
>>> Max Coin wrote:
>>>> Thanks for the history lesson.Let me ask you again, would the current
>>>> liberal
>>>> solutions regarding aggression towards the US and it's allies have been
>>>> succesful in World War II?
>>> You mean current liberal solutions like fighting the people who actually
>>> attacked us? I think it would be pretty much the same.
>>
>> So that would leave out Germany and Italy.
>
> Since they declared war on us and attacked our allies, I think they
> count too.
Attacking our allies didn't seem to matter before December 7, 1941.
And declaring war is hardly the same as attacking us.
Plenty of terrorist organizations had "declared war" on the US prior to
9/11.
>
>> Thanks for clearing that up.
>
> Always happy to lend a clue to the clueless.
>
Might want to hang on to some of those clues since you seem to be running
short.
Alex
Coleman at rama...@earthlink.net wrote on 7/15/06 4:44 PM:
Since the original statement was "fighting people who actually attacked us,"
I was pointing out that Germany and Italy had done neither.
Now the standard gets changed to "those who declared war on us," a standard
which actually encompasses terror groups today.
Thanks for now approving of the War on Terror, even though I know you didn't
mean to.
Rich Shipley
> in article rd-dndK87IQ-zyTZ...@comcast.com, Rich Shipley at
> ri...@rtgames.com wrote on 7/15/06 4:37 PM:
>
>> Alex wrote:
>>> in article 68idnaZCc6I_YiXZ...@comcast.com, Rich Shipley at
>>> ri...@rtgames.com wrote on 7/15/06 10:43 AM:
>>>
>>>> Max Coin wrote:
>>>>> Thanks for the history lesson.Let me ask you again, would the current
>>>>> liberal
>>>>> solutions regarding aggression towards the US and it's allies have been
>>>>> succesful in World War II?
>>>> You mean current liberal solutions like fighting the people who actually
>>>> attacked us? I think it would be pretty much the same.
>>> So that would leave out Germany and Italy.
>> Since they declared war on us and attacked our allies, I think they
>> count too.
>
> Attacking our allies didn't seem to matter before December 7, 1941.
>
> And declaring war is hardly the same as attacking us.
A country that is allied with a country that attacks us, and is
currently attacking our allies, and declares war on us is the same as
attacking us.
> Plenty of terrorist organizations had "declared war" on the US prior to
> 9/11.
Do you have a point? Or are you just another pointless debater?
Rich
William Coleman
"KRJ" <krj...@bellsouth.net> wrote in message
news:Wqcug.3605$Bx....@bignews5.bellsouth.net...
> Laughing so hard. A liberal wingnut
LOL. Wingnuts are right-wing nutcases like you. The appropriate term of
approbrium for liberals is "moonbats".
> quoting a liberal wingnut in a liberal wingnut magazing to support his
> liberal wingnut point of view.
Please provide documentation that Kevin Baker is a liberal wingnut, or even
a liberal. If you think Harpers is a liberal wingnut magazine, then you are
totally misinformed. Harpers is one of the most respected periodical
publications in the world.
> Why am I not TOTALLY convinced.
Because you are too fucking stupid and brainwashed to recognize the truth
when you hear it.
> Listen surrender monkey
LOL. Please point out where I have advocated surrender as the foreign
policy of the USA. I have advocated an immediate withdrawal from Iraq
because guerrilla insurgencies cannot be defeated when supported by a
significant percentage of the population, and because the continued presence
of American troops in Iraq is fueling the insurgency and exacerbating an
already disasterous situation. That is not surrender. That is realism.
> why don't you just stop paying taxes and join a commune.
Why don't you mind your own fucking business, and I will do what I damned
well please?
> Think of all the soft headed loose pussy
I don't like loose pussy. I like nice, tight, young pussy. The kind of
pussy into which it is difficult to insert your little finger.
> or even looser liberal boy ass
I am not interested in fucking other men in the ass. How about you? Are
you one of those assfucking, cocksucking, HIV-infected, limp-wristed
faggots? Probably.
> you could score in between drinking coffee smoking dope
I manage to drink all the coffee and smoke all the high quality green fluff
I want. Thank you very much.
> and complaining about how evil the world is.
I never complain about how evil the world is. God created the world, and it
is good. What is evil is the Prince of Darkness and his minions, of which
you are obviously one.
> And, while you were righteously enjoying yourself the rest of us would not
> be plagued by your off topic posts and your idiotic political diatribes.
>Here's an idea. If you don't like my posts, DON'T READ THEM. Better yet,
>killfile me. You think I give a rat's ass?
> It's a win win situation.
With respect to you and your ilk, the only win for me will be the final
destruction of Satan and all his demons, including you.
> Of course as an alternative, you could put a gun in your mouth and pull
> the trigger
Yes, and so could you. What kind of demented asshole are you to suggest
that someone commit suicide simply because you disagree with their politics?
> after leaving a really nasty letter to the editor. You would be such a
> hero to the movement.
I am not interested in being anyone's hero. I have been found worthy to be
the High Priest of the Virgin Mary on Planet Earth. That is enough of an
accolade for me.
> Please do it.
Please sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up.
>
> LMAO what a moron.
You certainly are. You managed to avoid addressing all of the many
substantive points in the article, while spewing the vilest hatred
imaginable. Too bad. The article describes you perfectly. You are simply
demonizing liberals and war critics and blaming them for the many failures
of the Bush Crime Family, of which you are an obvious typical rabid
supporter. That is what the article is all about. How Republicans, since
World War II, have blamed all the failures of their own policies on liberals
and Democrats.
As Bill Clinton would say --
That dog won't hunt anymore.
William Coleman (ramashiva)
William Coleman
It all happened on the same day, December 8, 1941. Everyone declared war on
each other on the same day.
Again, sit the fuck down, shut the fuck up, and read some history.
William Coleman (ramashiva)
Alex
ri...@rtgames.com wrote on 7/15/06 5:05 PM:
> Alex wrote:
>> in article rd-dndK87IQ-zyTZ...@comcast.com, Rich Shipley at
>> ri...@rtgames.com wrote on 7/15/06 4:37 PM:
>>
>>> Alex wrote:
>>>> in article 68idnaZCc6I_YiXZ...@comcast.com, Rich Shipley at
>>>> ri...@rtgames.com wrote on 7/15/06 10:43 AM:
>>>>
>>>>> Max Coin wrote:
>>>>>> Thanks for the history lesson.Let me ask you again, would the current
>>>>>> liberal
>>>>>> solutions regarding aggression towards the US and it's allies have been
>>>>>> succesful in World War II?
>>>>> You mean current liberal solutions like fighting the people who actually
>>>>> attacked us? I think it would be pretty much the same.
>>>> So that would leave out Germany and Italy.
>>> Since they declared war on us and attacked our allies, I think they
>>> count too.
>>
>> Attacking our allies didn't seem to matter before December 7, 1941.
>>
>> And declaring war is hardly the same as attacking us.
>
> A country that is allied with a country that attacks us, and is
> currently attacking our allies, and declares war on us is the same as
> attacking us.
Look at the mental gymnastics you have to go through because you think one
war was right and the other wrong.
>
>> Plenty of terrorist organizations had "declared war" on the US prior to
>> 9/11.
>
> Do you have a point? Or are you just another pointless debater?
>
My point is that if the standard has gone from "they attacked us" to "they
declared war on us without actually attacking us," then you've now approved
of the War on Terror.
But I'm sure you didn't mean to.
William Coleman
> in article rscug.7941$ye3....@newsread1.news.pas.earthlink.net, William
> Coleman at rama...@earthlink.net wrote on 7/15/06 4:44 PM:
>
>>
>> "Alex" <akau...@nyc.NOSPAM.rr.com> wrote in message
>> news:C0DEC805.B8F02%akau...@nyc.NOSPAM.rr.com...
>>> in article 68idnaZCc6I_YiXZ...@comcast.com, Rich Shipley at
>>> ri...@rtgames.com wrote on 7/15/06 10:43 AM:
>>>
>>>> Max Coin wrote:
>>>>> Thanks for the history lesson.Let me ask you again, would the current
>>>>> liberal
>>>>> solutions regarding aggression towards the US and it's allies have
>>>>> been
>>>>> succesful in World War II?
>>>>
>>>> You mean current liberal solutions like fighting the people who
>>>> actually
>>>> attacked us? I think it would be pretty much the same.
>>>
>>> So that would leave out Germany and Italy.
>>
>> You fucking moron. Could you possibly be more clueless???
>>
>> Germany declared war on the USA immediately after Pearl Harbor. Our
>> response was to declare war on them. Please read some history and stop
>> making idiotic statements on matters about which you know absolutely
>> nothing.
>>
>
> Since the original statement was "fighting people who actually attacked
> us,"
> I was pointing out that Germany and Italy had done neither.
So fucking what??? You want to pick nits? Fine. Nothing was said about
ONLY attacking those who have actually attacked us. And you need to read
some history if you think Germany had not attacked us before Pearl Harbor.
> Now the standard gets changed to "those who declared war on us,"
No standard was changed, you fucking moron. Do you have to have it spelled
out to you that we should not only go to war with those countries which
attack us, but also those countries which declare war on us?
> a standard which actually encompasses terror groups today.
No it doesn't, you total ignoramus. Only nation states can declare war.
Individuals and groups have no standing in international law to declare war
on anyone.
> Thanks for now approving of the War on Terror,
There is no "War on Terror", numbnuts. That is simply a slogan used by the
Bush Crime Family to justify using the Constitution as toilet paper.
William Coleman (ramashiva)
Alex
Coleman at rama...@earthlink.net wrote on 7/15/06 5:14 PM:
Actually it didn't.
We declared war on December 8, Germany on December 11.
Might help to have your facts straight if you're going to tell me to read
some history.
Bob
Alex wrote:
>
> My point is that if the standard has gone from "they attacked us" to "they
> declared war on us without actually attacking us," then you've now approved
> of the War on Terror.
Since we have been talking about the War in Iraq, you are implying that
we invaded Iraq because Saddam declared war on the USA.
If I thought that invading Iraq was actually making the world safer or
reducing terrorism, I would be in favor of it. Unfortunately, the War
on Iraq was a terrible idea that has made the world less safe and
increased terrorism.
- Bob
Alex
Coleman at rama...@earthlink.net wrote on 7/15/06 5:21 PM:
Original statement as quoted above: "You mean current liberal solutions like
fighting the people who actually attacked us?"
But I guess I'm just picking nits and being all technical about insisting
words mean what they mean.
>
>> Now the standard gets changed to "those who declared war on us,"
>
> No standard was changed, you fucking moron. Do you have to have it spelled
> out to you that we should not only go to war with those countries which
> attack us, but also those countries which declare war on us?
Original statement as quoted above: "You mean current liberal solutions like
fighting the people who actually attacked us?"
But I guess I'm just picking nits and being all technical about insisting
words mean what they mean.
>
>> a standard which actually encompasses terror groups today.
>
> No it doesn't, you total ignoramus. Only nation states can declare war.
> Individuals and groups have no standing in international law to declare war
> on anyone.
Because Ramashiva says so?
Take your meds, you're not funny anymore.
>
>> Thanks for now approving of the War on Terror,
>
> There is no "War on Terror", numbnuts. That is simply a slogan used by the
> Bush Crime Family to justify using the Constitution as toilet paper.
>
There is no justification for what the Bush Administration has done to the
Constitution.
But that does not mean we are NOT at war.
Alex
b...@synapse-cs.com wrote on 7/15/06 5:29 PM:
Depends on where.
Iraqi support for Palestinian terror dried up ($25,000 a family is a big
incentive) and, until recently, Israel had undergone a period of relative
quiet.
If your viewpoint is that only the US matters, then you can't have it both
ways-- an ally under attack and we respond-- wasn't that the rationale
others have been giving for WW2?
William Coleman
Are you claiming that the USA declared war on Germany on December 8???
Thanks for confirming again that you are a total historical illiterate. The
USA declared war on Germany on December 11, the same day Germany declared
war on us.
My above statement that everyone declared war on each other on December 8 is
another one of those statements which, while not technically correct, states
the reality of the situation.
We did declare war on Japan on December 8. Because of the Axis treaty
obligations of Germany and Japan, a declaration of War against Japan
immediately put us in a state of war with Germany, declared or not. Germany
was obligated to declare war on anyone declaring war on Japan. Thus we knew
for a certainty that Germany would declare war against us. A declaration of
war against Japan was effectively a declaration of war against Germany.
> Might help to have your facts straight
I do have my facts straight. I have two degrees in Oriental Studies with a
specialization in Modern Japanese History. You think I don't know what I am
talking about with regard to the events of December, 1941???
> if you're going to tell me to read some history.
You really should. You are making a total fool of yourself, as usual.
William Coleman (ramashiva)
Alex
Coleman at rama...@earthlink.net wrote on 7/15/06 5:40 PM:
>>>> Except Germany and Italy declared war on us BEFORE we retaliated against
>>>> Japan.
>>>
>>> It all happened on the same day, December 8, 1941. Everyone declared war
>>> on
>>> each other on the same day.
>>>
>>> Again, sit the fuck down, shut the fuck up, and read some history.
>>>
>>>
>>
>> Actually it didn't.
>>
>> We declared war on December 8, Germany on December 11.
>
> Are you claiming that the USA declared war on Germany on December 8???
> Thanks for confirming again that you are a total historical illiterate. The
> USA declared war on Germany on December 11, the same day Germany declared
> war on us.
Nope. December 11.
Reading for comprehension not your strong suit?
>
> My above statement that everyone declared war on each other on December 8 is
> another one of those statements which, while not technically correct, states
> the reality of the situation.
I see what the problem here is.
I'm insisting words have recognized meanings and you think you can
communicate by using them as you see fit.
My bad.
But I guess that's what I get when I argue with a crazy person.
William Coleman
He didn't have to go through any mental gymnastics. He just explained the
obvious to an idiot.
>>> Plenty of terrorist organizations had "declared war" on the US prior to
>>> 9/11.
>>
>> Do you have a point? Or are you just another pointless debater?
>>
>
> My point is that if the standard has gone from "they attacked us" to "they
> declared war on us without actually attacking us,"
Why do you keep lying about this??? No standard changed. No one said we
should ONLY attack countries which attack us. Among intelligent
individuals, which excludes you, it goes without saying that we should
declare war on any country that declares war against us.
> then you've now approved of the War on Terror.
As I have already told you, there is no "War on Terror". That is just a
slogan used by the Bush Crime Family to justify using the Constitution as
toilet paper.
William Coleman (ramashiva)
Alex
Coleman at rama...@earthlink.net wrote on 7/15/06 5:46 PM:
And yet, quoted right above you, is this gem:
" You mean current liberal solutions like fighting the people who actually
attacked us?"
If you're going to be involved, at least TRY to keep up with the discussion.
Or does " You mean current liberal solutions like fighting the people who
actually attacked us?" in Ranashiva-speak mean something other than what
they mean in reality?
A Man Beaten by Jacks
>> "I don't know where bin Laden is. I have no idea and really don't care. It's
>> not
>> that important. It's not our priority."
>When did he say this? Where can i find the quote?
Well, I found the speech cited as March 13, 2002. I checked for speeches on
that date, the only one I found does NOT include the quote in question in this
form.
http://web.archive.org/web/20021102185138/http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/03/20020313-8.html
http://tinyurl.com/epaum
The quote is at best out of context and I withdraw it, at least
unless I can find it in the form I found it in originally.
A Man Beaten by Jacks
wrote:
>> Imagine if FDR's response to Pearl
>> Harbor had been to say he had no fucking idea where the people who did
>> it were and had no intention whatsoever to do anything about it, and that
>> it wasn't even a priority!
>You make it sound like declaring war on Japan was a punitive action.
>Is that what you think? That we sent our boys to the Pacific to punish
>Japan?
"Punishing" Japan serves not only the purpose of retaliation, but as an
object lesson to any other regime that would attack us. Similarly,
allowing someone like Osama bin Laden to basically thumb his nose
at us, distributing jihad videos to the world, sends a very weak
lesson. So does fighting a losing war in Iraq.
A Man Beaten by Jacks
>Since the original statement was "fighting people who actually attacked us,"
>I was pointing out that Germany and Italy had done neither.
You were being completely wrong, then, since they had, up to and including
sinking our ships.
William Coleman
> in article Jhdug.8639$PE1....@newsread2.news.pas.earthlink.net, William
> Coleman at rama...@earthlink.net wrote on 7/15/06 5:40 PM:
>
>>>>> Except Germany and Italy declared war on us BEFORE we retaliated
>>>>> against
>>>>> Japan.
>>>>
>>>> It all happened on the same day, December 8, 1941. Everyone declared
>>>> war
>>>> on
>>>> each other on the same day.
>>>>
>>>> Again, sit the fuck down, shut the fuck up, and read some history.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>> Actually it didn't.
>>>
>>> We declared war on December 8, Germany on December 11.
>>
>> Are you claiming that the USA declared war on Germany on December 8???
>> Thanks for confirming again that you are a total historical illiterate.
>> The
>> USA declared war on Germany on December 11, the same day Germany declared
>> war on us.
>
> Nope. December 11.
Hey, Alex. Are you sitting at your computer waiting for my next post? You
posted this five minutes after I posted.
> Reading for comprehension not your strong suit?
Not at all. But writing is certainly not your strong suit. Don't you see
how --
"We declared war on December 8, Germany on December 11"
could reasonably be interpreted as saying that the USA declared war on
Germany on December 8?
>> My above statement that everyone declared war on each other on December 8
>> is
>> another one of those statements which, while not technically correct,
>> states
>> the reality of the situation.
>
> I see what the problem here is.
No you don't. The problem here is your total stupidity and ignorance,
combined with a DP7-like fetish for nitpicking.
> I'm insisting words have recognized meanings
So do I.
> and you think you can communicate by using them as you see fit.
I do not use words as I see fit. I am very precise about the use of words.
You could learn a lot from me. In ordinary discourse, I believe in making
simple, easily understood statements which accurately describe the reality
of the situation, regardless of whether nitpickers like you and DP7 can
point out something which is not technically correct.
> My bad.
Indeed.
> But I guess that's what I get when I argue with a crazy person.
Too funny. I am far and away the sanest person with whom you have ever had
contact. Believe it or don't.
William Coleman (ramashiva)
ChrisRobin
On Jul 15 2006 11:14 AM, Max Coin wrote:
> It wasn't much of an article.
Heh. I bet you didn't even make it past the second paragraph.
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William Coleman
I am keeping up much better than you, Alex. Please point out where in the
above quote the word "only" occurs.
> Or does " You mean current liberal solutions like fighting the people who
> actually attacked us?" in Ranashiva-speak mean something other than what
> they mean in reality?
Why are you attributing this quote to me??? Those are not my words.
> Among intelligent
>> individuals, which excludes you, it goes without saying that we should
>> declare war on any country that declares war against us.
>>
>>
>>> then you've now approved of the War on Terror.
>>
>> As I have already told you, there is no "War on Terror". That is just a
>> slogan used by the Bush Crime Family to justify using the Constitution as
>> toilet paper.
I see you didn't care to comment on this statement. Figures.
William Coleman (ramashiva)
William Coleman
> in article 1152998970....@b28g2000cwb.googlegroups.com, Bob at
> b...@synapse-cs.com wrote on 7/15/06 5:29 PM:
>
>>
>> Alex wrote:
>>>
>>> My point is that if the standard has gone from "they attacked us" to
>>> "they
>>> declared war on us without actually attacking us," then you've now
>>> approved
>>> of the War on Terror.
>>
>> Since we have been talking about the War in Iraq, you are implying that
>> we invaded Iraq because Saddam declared war on the USA.
>>
>> If I thought that invading Iraq was actually making the world safer or
>> reducing terrorism, I would be in favor of it. Unfortunately, the War
>> on Iraq was a terrible idea that has made the world less safe and
>> increased terrorism.
>>
>
> Depends on where.
No it doesn't.
> Iraqi support for Palestinian terror dried up ($25,000 a family is a big
> incentive) and, until recently, Israel had undergone a period of relative
> quiet.
Under Saddam there was NO terrorism. None. Got that? There were no
suicide bombers. There were no car bombers. Those things were not
permitted. Please do not come up with some bullshit that Saddam was a
terrorist. Please do not come up with some bullshit that Zarqawi was in
Iraq under Saddam. He was in the no fly zone in the North, where Saddam had
absolutely no control or influence.
Now in Iraq, there are literally hundreds of terrorist attacks EVERY DAY.
I saw a story recently about an Iraqi who was told that the USA was in Iraq
to fight terrorism. His response? Can't George Bush find somewhere else to
fight terrorism?
From 2003 to 2004 (or maybe from 2004 to 2005. I am too lazy to look it
up), the number of significant terrorist attacks worldwide more than
tripled. Those are official State Department statistics, Alex.
So fucking what if Israel had a brief period of relative tranquillity after
Saddam was ousted? That period of tranquillity is long gone, and Israel has
had such periods of tranquillity (Arabic "hudna") before. You cannot
attribute the relative tranquillity of the last three years to the ouster of
Saddam.
Tell me something. Do you care only about Israel? Does the loss of a
Jewish life to terrorism in Israel mean more to you than the loss of an
Iraqi life to terrorism in Iraq? If so, you are beneath contempt.
> If your viewpoint is that only the US matters,
Who thinks that? Anyone who thinks only the USA matters is a jingoistic
jackoff.
> then you can't have it both
> ways-- an ally under attack and we respond-- wasn't that the rationale
> others have been giving for WW2?
Not at all. Either you cannot read, or you are willfully lying. France and
Great Britain had been under attack for years, and we did not attack Germany
or go to war with them. We only declared war against Germany when they
declared war against us.
William Coleman (ramashiva)
Rich Shipley
>> A country that is allied with a country that attacks us, and is
>> currently attacking our allies, and declares war on us is the same as
>> attacking us.
>
> Look at the mental gymnastics you have to go through because you think one
> war was right and the other wrong.
Not gymnastics at all. Just a sentence with more than a few words. Sorry
that confuses you.
>>> Plenty of terrorist organizations had "declared war" on the US prior to
>>> 9/11.
>> Do you have a point? Or are you just another pointless debater?
>
> My point is that if the standard has gone from "they attacked us" to "they
> declared war on us without actually attacking us," then you've now approved
> of the War on Terror.
There is no "War on Terror." It is just a catch phrase to manipulate
public opinion.
Rich
William Coleman
You are not picking nits and you are not being technical. You are reading
the statement as follows --
"You mean current liberal solutions like ONLY fighting the people who
actually attacked us?"
There is no "only" in the original quote, Alex. Look again. It's still not
there.
>>> Now the standard gets changed to "those who declared war on us,"
>>
>> No standard was changed, you fucking moron. Do you have to have it
>> spelled
>> out to you that we should not only go to war with those countries which
>> attack us, but also those countries which declare war on us?
>
> Original statement as quoted above: "You mean current liberal solutions
> like
> fighting the people who actually attacked us?"
>
> But I guess I'm just picking nits and being all technical about insisting
> words mean what they mean.
You are not picking nits and you are not being technical. You are reading
the statement as follows --
"You mean current liberal solutions like ONLY fighting the people who
actually attacked us?"
There is no "only" in the original quote, Alex. Look again. It's still not
there.
>>> a standard which actually encompasses terror groups today.
>>
>> No it doesn't, you total ignoramus. Only nation states can declare war.
>> Individuals and groups have no standing in international law to declare
>> war
>> on anyone.
>
> Because Ramashiva says so?
Well, I am sufficient authority here, but I suggest you call any university
and ask to talk with a professor in the history or political science
department. Better yet, the international law department, if they have one.
Jesus H. Christ, Alex, could you possibly be more ignorant??? Are you
claiming I have legal standing in international law to declare war against
another country???
Ramashiva versus Egypt? Are you fucking nuts??? Of course, Egypt would
have no chance, since I would merely call down fire and brimstone from
heaven and incinerate them.
> Take your meds, you're not funny anymore.
Trust me. I am not trying to be funny when I respond to a lying Jew and
foaming at the mouth warmongering Nazi like you.
>>> Thanks for now approving of the War on Terror,
>>
>> There is no "War on Terror", numbnuts. That is simply a slogan used by
>> the
>> Bush Crime Family to justify using the Constitution as toilet paper.
>>
>
> There is no justification for what the Bush Administration has done to the
> Constitution.
OMFG! You actually said something which is correct. How many words have
you written the last two days? This is the first statement, other than
trivial matters of fact, which you have made which is correct.
> But that does not mean we are NOT at war.
Yes it does. We are not at war. A state of war can only exist between
nation states. We are not currently at war with any nation state.
Terrorism is a tactic. You cannot be at war with a tactic.
William Coleman (ramashiva)
Alex
Coleman at rama...@earthlink.net wrote on 7/15/06 6:39 PM:
>>>
>>> As I have already told you, there is no "War on Terror". That is just a
>>> slogan used by the Bush Crime Family to justify using the Constitution as
>>> toilet paper.
>
> I see you didn't care to comment on this statement. Figures.
I've already commented on it.
Apparently you think I have to repeat myself every time you do.
mbar...@hotmail.com
Studying the history of the past century certainly doesn't fit well
with the name calling, the vague generalizations, and the clumsy black
and white, bad and good, liberal and conservative categorical
thinking.... which is where most of your critics here are at.....
thanks William hope you are well. The energy you devote to dealing
with these cretins is to be applauded. Maybe some good will come of it
all.
wuzyoun...@yahoo.com
nihilbono
Very Interesting Read,
I got to this point and thought the writer lost it:
>Neither Nixon, nor Agnew, nor the war would survive a second term. With the
>shameful, panicked helicopter evacuation of Saigon, U.S. prestige in the
>world dropped precipitously-but none of the other "dominoes followed".
Pol Pot, now there's a domino, in Cambodia doesn't come to the writer's
mind?
Didn't the Congress cut off funding for South Vietnam which might have
led to "...the shameful, panicked helicopter evacuation of Saigon,,".
Church Ammendment?
Do I have the funding thing wrong?
Joe
wuzyoun...@yahoo.com
>
> Look at the mental gymnastics you have to go through because you think one
> war was right and the other wrong.
Makes you wonder if Shipley and Coleman are roommates...if you know
what I mean.
wuzyoun...@yahoo.com
>
> Not gymnastics at all. Just a sentence with more than a few words. Sorry
> that confuses you.
Does your mommy know you're using her PC?
wuzyoun...@yahoo.com
>
> You fucking moron. Could you possibly be more clueless???
Well...he could be you.
wuzyoun...@yahoo.com
>
> My above statement that everyone declared war on each other on December 8 is
> another one of those statements which, while not technically correct, states
> the reality of the situation.
LOL! Someone smack Willy...he's caught in a loop. "while not
technically correct". LOL!
Translation: "Fucking wrong."
But I'm still wondering about your statement last night, Willy. Tell
us again how the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land (whatever that
is) is "illegal" per the UN? You say there's no resolution to that
effect. So...what the fuck is it?
wuzyoun...@yahoo.com
>
> So fucking what??? You want to pick nits?
My unabridged Coleman-To-Sane-Person Dictionary defines "pick nits" as:
To insist that one...
1) Say what they fucking mean.
2) Mean what they fucking say.
wuzyoun...@yahoo.com
> On Jul 15 2006 10:14 AM, wuzyoun...@yahoo.com wrote:
>
> > A Man Beaten by Jacks wrote:
> > >
> > > Bush's response is as if FDR were a drooling spastic fuck, and his response
> > > to
> > > the attack on Pearl Harbor had been to attack Mexico.
> >
> > Were the Japanese using Mexico as a training ground?
>
> You are truly an incorrigible liar. You know very well that he is referring to
> the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, not Afghanistan.
Then maybe he, like you, should learn to say what the fuck he means.
He said "his response to 9/11". The immediate response to 9/11 was the
invasion of Afghanistan. Iraq came some time later.
You're "Uhm er...you liar! What I/he *clearly* meant was..." bullshit
is so boring and repetative that I'm having to drink an extra coffee
just keep awake while reading it.
wuzyoun...@yahoo.com
>
> I like how you refuted an article on the dishonest use of language by
> the right by doing it yourself. Nice irony.
The irony is your dishonest accusation that he was being dishonest.
There was nothing dishonest. He as simply hurling subjective insults
at Coleman and suggesting that he kill himself. Honesty/dishonesty
doesn't apply.
William Coleman
"A Man Beaten by Jacks" <nob...@fool.foo> wrote in message
news:e5qib2pdagqug1upt...@4ax.com...
LOL. I had already mentioned this to Alex, but he ignored me.
William Coleman (ramashiva)
wuzyoun...@yahoo.com
Susan
<wuzyoun...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1153005196....@75g2000cwc.googlegroups.com...
wuzyoun...@yahoo.com
> On 15 Jul 2006 08:32:07 -0700, "WuzYoungOnceToo2" <WuzYoung...@yahoo.com>
> wrote:
>
> >You make it sound like declaring war on Japan was a punitive action.
> >Is that what you think? That we sent our boys to the Pacific to punish
> >Japan?
>
> "Punishing" Japan serves not only the purpose of retaliation, but as an
> object lesson to any other regime that would attack us.
I didn't ask you what value you thought it had (though you seem to
think it was all about revenge and deterrence). I asked you why we
actually did it.
> Similarly,
> allowing someone like Osama bin Laden to basically thumb his nose
> at us, distributing jihad videos to the world, sends a very weak
> lesson. So does fighting a losing war in Iraq.
Still not getting it? It's not about revenge or setting an example
(though there is some value in the latter.) It's about dealing with
the actual threat. That's why we went to war with Japan and sent young
men to die. To crush their war machine so that it was no longer a real
threat to us, either directly or indirectly. The fact is that OBL is
simply no longer a critical part of the terrorist threat. Yeah, he
makes speeches...but he's not directing things. The groups that are
taking actions are pretty much independant. They're what you need to
deal with...not some figure head in the Pakistani wilderness.
wuzyoun...@yahoo.com
LOL! Heather?
Max Coin
On Jul 15 2006 1:13 PM, Rich Shipley wrote:
> Max Coin wrote:
> >
> >>> Let me ask another question, if Muslims are allowed
> >>> to freely express hteir ideas and practice their religion in this country
> >>> then
> >>> why would they think we are trying to kill them?
> >> Besides the fact that we are killing them? It is in the context of a
> >> war, but civilian casualties never play well.
> >
> > LOL, answer the question.
>
> I did answer the question.
>
> > Muslims are free to practice their religion and
> > express their opinions in this country. Yes or no?
>
> That would be a new question. It was part of the premise of the original
> question and I did not challenge it. It would be easier to discuss
> things with you if you had a better grasp of English, but I assume it
> must be a second language for you.
>
If we are attacking and killing Muslims as you say then why are they allowed to
live in this country. Is it because we are at war with terrorists and
not Muslims?
> >>> Osama Ben Laden could live in
> >>> this country and even be a pseudo celebrity if only he would have tried
> >>> using our free press instead of bombs to express his ideas.
> >> His interest is not in expressing ideas, but to get us out of the middle
> >> east and topple governments that we support.
> >
> > And you are OK with this?
>
> I never said I was OK with it. I just think it might be a good idea to
> understand your enemies if you are going to fight them.
>
> > Could you please name these governments?
>
> Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan, Turkey, etc.
>
> Rich
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