DebateGate
General Category => 3DHS => Topic started by: RoboPoster on August 06, 2010, 03:00:03 PM
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America Is at Risk of Boiling Over
Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal
It is, obviously, self-referential to quote yourself, but I do it to make a point. I wrote the following on New Year's day, 1994. America 16 years ago was a relatively content nation, though full of political sparks: 10 months later the Republicans would take the House for the first time in 40 years. But beneath all the action was, I thought, a coming unease. Something inside was telling us we were living through "not the placid dawn of a peaceful age but the illusory calm before stern storms." The temperature in the world was very high. "At home certain...
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/2010/08/06/america_is_at_risk_of_boiling_over_239104.html
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<<Because we're not going to send the estimated 10 million to 15 million illegals already here back. We're not going to put sobbing children on a million buses. That would not be in our nature. (Do our leaders even know what's in our nature?) >>
ROTFLMFAO. Ya gotta love this ignorant nitwit. Who else could be so fucking and unashamedly dumb?
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<<Because we're not going to send the estimated 10 million to 15 million illegals already here back. We're not going to put sobbing children on a million buses. That would not be in our nature. (Do our leaders even know what's in our nature?) >>
ROTFLMFAO. Ya gotta love this ignorant nitwit. Who else could be so fucking and unashamedly dumb?
What was dumb about her statement?
UP has been yammering about comprehensive reform for years and CU4 agreed recently that those here already likely would not be deported.
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<<What was dumb about her statement?>>
That it's not in Americans' nature to put millions of sobbing children on buses. But it's in their nature to napalm them and blow them to smithereens and starve them to death in politically motivated embargoes.
The general assumption of the "goodness" of the American people, the flip side of which is the "badness" of everyone else. American exceptionalism, in other words.
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I agree that the mass deportation of millions is very unlikely. If there were scenes of sobbing children on the news every night, this would be quite disturbing in any country, not just the US, but the main reason not to deport more than a quarter at most of the illegals is that they are needed here as cheap labor, and Mexico could explode into a serious problem if remittances ceased.
The idea of "American Exceptionalism" is a stupid rightwing fiction, for the most part.
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That it's not in Americans' nature to put millions of sobbing children on buses. But it's in their nature to napalm them and blow them to smithereens and starve them to death in politically motivated embargoes.
So the rise of the anti war movement of the 60's had nothing to do with images of horror telecast nightly into American homes? It was all based on fear of being drafted?
You really do post the silliest things.
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<<So the rise of the anti war movement of the 60's had nothing to do with images of horror telecast nightly into American homes? It was all based on fear of being drafted?>>
No, the images of the war were not of children sobbing on buses, they were of women, children and old men mowed down in a ditch. They were of a police chief shooting a prisoner in the head. They were of napalmed children running down the road with the clothes burned off their bodies and screaming in pain.
Kids sobbing on buses? Sorry, I don't recall any such images from Nam. They would have been treated as comic relief
<<You really do post the silliest things. >>
Gee, sorry about that, boss. Next time, I'll try to post really insightful and informed commentary, like equating kids sobbing on buses to kids burned alive in napalm. You set a high standard, boss, but I'll try. I'll really try.
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I'll really try.
Good, since it was you who introduced napalm to the equation.
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If a child falls down a well the rescue effort will trump all other news of every sort , wars and famines and economic rollercoasters and scientific discovery is forgotten as the child struggleing for life occupied all of the wavelength the human attention can muster.
I think that what prople find interesting depends a lot on anchient instinct , there isn't so much anchient instinct for keeping up with the stock market as there is to answer the distress cry of a child.
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But do our political leaders have any sense of what people are feeling deep down? They don't act as if they do. I think their detachment from how normal people think is more dangerous and disturbing than it has been in the past.
That seems like a central concern, isn't the meme of American government the consent of the governed ,that the government will be the servant of hte people , drawn from the people , operated by the people as an instrument of their rights?
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<< . . . since it was you who introduced napalm to the equation. >>
I did? Oh, yeah, I did. That was my foolish take on "images of horror broadcast nightly into American homes." Stupid of me to take that as a possible reference to napalm. I should have realized you were really talking about images of little kids sobbing on buses. My bad, BT. I'll try to be more careful in the future.
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I remember photos of Napalm attack being highly upsetting .
Including that very famous one of the injured little girl running injured away from the scene naked from the blast of bombs tearing her clothing off.
She got luckyer later and escaped the communists to find shelter in the U.S.
The truely unfortunate Vietnameese were neither the dead nor the injured , the most unfortunate are still trapped in the Communism.
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I did? Oh, yeah, I did. That was my foolish take on "images of horror broadcast nightly into American homes." Stupid of me to take that as a possible reference to napalm.
How prescient. You introduced napalm at 8:49AM my nightly news reference came in almost 4 hours later.
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Sorry, BT, my mistake.
However, the entire debate about who introduced napalm first into the discussion is irrelevant, if it was a relevant topic to introduce at all in the light of Noonan's idiotic statement of what images American "nature" would or would not tolerate. Since it was clearly within the American "nature" to shrug off images of napalmed children, the anti-war movement being the sole exception, I felt it was an appropriate reference in the context of Noonan's column, but instead of saying so, I responded to the tone of your "silliest things" comment and, forgetting about my first reference to napalm, focused on my most recent mention of it (in response to your "nightly news" post) in order to make you look like an idiot. That's what can happen when emotion, rather than reason, is introduced into a discussion. You baited me, I rose to the bait. Nothing much lost, but nothing much gained either.
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<<I remember photos of Napalm attack being highly upsetting .
<<Including that very famous one of the injured little girl running injured away from the scene naked from the blast of bombs tearing her clothing off.>>
The photos that you remember (including "that very famous one") are very mild in comparison to photos that appeared in Ramparts magazine, which the MSM of the time took pains to ensure that most Americans would never see. The MSM made sure, under the guise of repressive tolerance, that SOME photos of napalm victims would appear to the U.S. public, just enough to ensure that they could maintain the ludicrous fiction of a "free press."
The photos in Ramparts were extremely upsetting, sickening in fact, and they showed child and elderly victims of U.S. napalm bombing in full colour and detail. I remember at the time that my own kids were about the same age as some of the child victims portrayed, and wondering what I would do to any American pilot that I ever got my hands on who had done something like that to them. It's amazing that you saw the "lite" edition only and think that you saw the "horrors" of war. Believe me, you ain't seen nuthin yet. And you won't, as long as the corporate-controlled MSM operates the floodgates of the information flow.
Whenever I hear that bitch John McCain whining and bitching about how he was "tortured" by the Vietnamese, I always think to myself, "Brother, you don't know what torture is. It's too bad that you were never turned over to the parents of your napalmed victims for a couple of days."
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Whenever I hear that bitch John McCain whining and bitching about how he was "tortured" by the Vietnamese, I always think to myself, "Brother, you don't know what torture is. It's too bad that you were never turned over to the parents of your napalmed victims for a couple of days."
He was .
and
He was.
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I am against torture, but McCain parleyed his captivity into Fat City (married a billionaire beer heiress, owns seven houses, has a cushy job in the Senate, and has now degenerated into a total whore. So as of right now, I have ceased to feel sorry for him. So far as I am concerned, he is Kyl's twin, and both of hem can eat my shorts.
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I'm against torture also, but I would sure as hell love to see McCain get what's coming to him. Only in fantasy, of course.
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McCain should retire now. He has outlived any degree of usefulness that he ever had. Retire and enjoy the money and the beer.