DebateGate

Do you feel that Israel is a true democratic nation...

I'm still confused with this qualifier of "true".  True in the sense that the citizens vote for who they want to represent their country?  That they don't have a shadow dictatorship actually running things?  Give me an example of a "false democratic nation", and some examples that would fit that definition, please

and a fair democratic nation?

Given that they have a plethora of parties vs our majority 2 party system, it could be argued they are exponentially more fair than even we are as a Democratic nation.  So, I guess the answer would be yes.

You see? That right there is why I don't bother with a decent reply.  Plane takes the time to at least find an article that references an academic article and makes an argument for similarity from that. The response? "It's not politically correct."

Last time I used official accepted difinitions and such, I was similarly denounced Js.  I find both reference pieces and well articulated op-eds to reinforce both the term & application of Islamofascism, but all you can do is ridicule it, & claim how that doesn't warrant a "decent reply".  Interesting double standard we have here. 

I will concede Plane is much better at remaining civil and non-condescending than I, with his posts.  He probably also has more patience in dealing with folks who just want to bury their heads in the sand, as it relates to militant Islam malignancy

Olbermann Demeans Wallace as 'Monkey,'
Bush Not 'True American'

     Keith Olbermann ended Monday's Countdown with his latest "Special Comment" rant, complete with video from a man on a rack in the movie 1984 as Olbermann described President's Bush's supposedly awful deeds. In praising how, in his interview aired on Fox News Sunday, "Bill Clinton did what almost none of us have done in five years. He has spoken the truth about 9/11, and the current presidential administration," Olbermann portrayed Chris Wallace, who conducted the interview, as an agent of the White House and delivered the lowest of insults, calling Wallace "a monkey posing as a newscaster." 

     On Bush, Olbermann accused him of "cowardice" and argued: "After five years of skirting even the most inarguable of facts -- that he was President on 9/11 and he must bear some responsibility for his, and our, unreadiness, Mr. Bush has now moved, unmistakably and without conscience or shame, towards re-writing history, and attempting to make the responsibility, entirely Mr. Clinton's. Of course he is not honest enough to do that directly. As with all the other nefariousness and slime of this, our worst presidency since James Buchanan, he is having it done for him, by proxy. Thus, the sandbag effort by Fox News Friday afternoon." Olbermann concluded his 10-minute plus diatribe: "Mr. Bush: Are yours the actions of a true American?"

     The MRC's Brad Wilmouth appended the following to my initial post:

     Olbermann opened the segment contending that Clinton had been "sandbagged by a monkey posing as a newscaster," and charged that the Bush administration's "assault" on freedoms "can do as much damage as al-Qaeda." Olbermann preemptively rationalized his "crazed" rant by arguing that "our tone should be crazed." He also compared Fox News to the "propaganda" of Tokyo Rose:
     "The headlines about it are, of course, entirely wrong. It is not essential that a past President, bullied and sandbagged by a monkey posing as a newscaster, finally lashed back. It is not important that the current President's portable public chorus has described his predecessor's tone as 'crazed.' Our tone should be crazed. The nation's freedoms are under assault by an administration whose policies can do us as much damage as al-Qaeda. The nation's marketplace of ideas is being poisoned by a propaganda company so blatant that Tokyo Rose would've quit."

     Notably, about half an hour earlier on Olbermann's show, Newsweek's Jonathan Alter, a liberal journalist who was appearing as a guest, had actually defended Wallace's decision to question Clinton about how he handled bin Laden. Alter: "I don't think there was any pre-ground rules breaking or anything like that, and I don't actually fault Chris Wallace at all. Look, when go into an interview like this, you want to ask good provocative questions. That's what we're paid to do....I don't think [Clinton] was right that somehow, you know, Fox was out to get him on this. As Wallace said, he was posing a question that a lot of Fox's admittedly very conservative viewers wanted to know."

     And just a few minutes after Olbermann's show concluded, on MSNBC's Scarborough Country, liberal political analyst Lawrence O'Donnell similarly defended Wallace's interview as "perfectly sensible." O'Donnell: "Chris Wallace, by the way, I don't think did do a right-wing hit job. I think the interview was a perfectly sensible interview."

     Returning to Olbermann's Countdown show, the MSNBC host praised Clinton's supposedly "courageous" truth-telling: "Thus in his supposed emeritus years has Mr. Clinton taken forceful and triumphant action for honesty, and for us; action as vital and as courageous as any of his presidency; action as startling and as liberating, as any, by any one, in these last five long years."

     After implying that President Bush is not a "grown-up," Olbermann went on to accuse Bush of attempting, without "conscience" or "shame," to "re-write history," as he labeled Bush's administration the "worst presidency since James Buchanan."

     Olbermann: "But if his own fitness to serve is of no true concern to him, perhaps we should simply sigh and keep our fingers crossed until a grown-up takes the job three Januarys from now. Except for this: After five years of skirting even the most inarguable of facts, that he was President on 9/11 and he must bear some responsibility for his, and our, unreadiness, Mr. Bush has now moved, unmistakably and without conscience or shame, towards re-writing history, and attempting to make the responsibility entirely Mr. Clinton's. Of course he is not honest enough to do that directly. As with all the other nefariousness and slime of this, our worst presidency since James Buchanan, he is having it done for him by proxy."

     Ever the conspiracy theorist with a substantial history of accusing the Bush administration of politically timing terror alerts to distract from embarrassing news, Olbermann moved on to make a similar charge of timing, as he compared the Bush Administration to "authoritarians" being helped by "hyenas" at Fox News, and contended that Clinton was "brave" to take the Bush Administration to task for "criminal negligence." 

     Olbermann: "Consider the timing: the very same weekend the National Intelligence Estimate would be released and show the Iraq war to be the fraudulent failure it is, not a check on terror, but fertilizer for it. The kind of proof of incompetence for which the administration and its hyenas at Fox need to find a diversion in a scapegoat. It was the kind of cheap trick which would get a journalist fired but a propagandist promoted: Promise to talk of charity and generosity, but instead launch into the lies and distortions with which the authoritarians among us attack the virtuous and reward the useless. And don't even be professional enough to assume the responsibility for the slanders yourself, blame your audience for e-mailing you the question. Mr. Clinton responded as you have seen. He told the great truth untold about this administration's negligence, perhaps criminal negligence, about bin Laden. Mr. Clinton was brave."

     Olbermann, who has fallaciously complained that the Bush administration has accused critics like him of not being patriotic, concluded his "Special Comment" accusing President Bush of not being a "true American."

     Olbermann: "The free pass has been withdrawn, Mr. Bush. You did not act to prevent 9/11. We do not know what you have done to prevent another 9/11. You have failed us, then leveraged that failure, to justify a purposeless war in Iraq which will have, all too soon, claimed more American lives than did 9/11. You have failed us anew in Afghanistan. And you have now tried to hide your failures by blaming your predecessor. And now you exploit your failure to rationalize brazen torture which doesn't work anyway, which only condemns our soldiers to water-boarding, which only humiliates our country further in the world, and which no true American would ever condone, let alone advocate. And there it is, sir: Are yours the actions of a true American? I'm Keith Olbermann. Good night and good luck."

     Below is a complete transcript of Olbermann's "Special Comment" from the September 25 Countdown show:

     "Finally tonight, a 'Special Comment' about President Clinton's interview. The headlines about it are, of course, entirely wrong. It is not essential that a past President, bullied and sandbagged by a monkey posing as a newscaster, finally lashed back. It is not important that the current President's portable public chorus has described his predecessor's tone as 'crazed.' Our tone should be crazed. The nation's freedoms are under assault by an administration whose policies can do us as much damage as al-Qaeda. The nation's marketplace of ideas is being poisoned by a propaganda company so blatant that Tokyo Rose would've quit.
     "Nonetheless, the headline is this: Bill Clinton did what almost none of us have done in five years. He has spoken the truth about 9/11 and the current presidential administration. 'At least I tried,' he said of his own efforts to capture or kill Osama bin Laden. 'That's the difference in me and some, including all of the right-wingers who are attacking me now. They had eight months to try. They did not try. I tried.' Thus in his supposed emeritus years has Mr. Clinton taken forceful and triumphant action for honesty, and for us; action as vital and as courageous as any of his presidency; action as startling and as liberating, as any, by any one, in these last five long years.
     "The Bush administration did not try to get Osama bin Laden before 9/11. The Bush administration ignored all the evidence gathered by its predecessors. The Bush administration did not understand the daily briefing entitled 'Bin Laden Determined To Strike in U.S.' The Bush administration did not try. Moreover, for the last five years one month and two weeks, the current administration, and in particular the President, has been given the greatest pass for incompetence and malfeasance in American history.
     "President Roosevelt was rightly blamed for ignoring the warning signs, some of them 17 years old, before Pearl Harbor. President Hoover was correctly blamed for, if not the Great Depression itself, then the disastrous economic steps he took in the immediate aftermath of the Stock Market Crash. Even President Lincoln assumed some measure of responsibility for the Civil War, though talk of Southern secession had begun as early as 1832.
     "But not this President. To hear him bleat and whine and bully at nearly every opportunity, one would think someone else had been President on September 11, 2001, or the nearly eight months that preceded it. That hardly reflects the honesty nor manliness we expect of the executive. But if his own fitness to serve is of no true concern to him, perhaps we should simply sigh and keep our fingers crossed until a grown-up takes the job three Januarys from now.
     "Except for this: After five years of skirting even the most inarguable of facts, that he was President on 9/11 and he must bear some responsibility for his, and our, unreadiness, Mr. Bush has now moved, unmistakably and without conscience or shame, towards re-writing history, and attempting to make the responsibility entirely Mr. Clinton's. Of course he is not honest enough to do that directly. As with all the other nefariousness and slime of this, our worst presidency since James Buchanan, he is having it done for him by proxy. Thus, the sandbag effort by Fox News Friday afternoon.
     "Consider the timing: the very same weekend the National Intelligence Estimate would be released and show the Iraq war to be the fraudulent failure it is, not a check on terror, but fertilizer for it. The kind of proof of incompetence for which the administration and its hyenas at Fox need to find a diversion in a scapegoat. It was the kind of cheap trick which would get a journalist fired but a propagandist promoted: Promise to talk of charity and generosity, but instead launch into the lies and distortions with which the authoritarians among us attack the virtuous and reward the useless. And don't even be professional enough to assume the responsibility for the slanders yourself, blame your audience for e-mailing you the question.
     "Mr. Clinton responded as you have seen. He told the great truth untold about this administration's negligence, perhaps criminal negligence, about bin Laden. Mr. Clinton was brave. Then again, Chris Wallace might be braver still. Had I in one moment surrendered all my credibility as a journalist, and been irredeemably humiliated, as was he, I would have gone home and started a new career selling seeds by mail.
     "The smearing by proxy, of course, did not begin Friday afternoon. Disney was the first to sell out its corporate reputation, with The Path to 9/11. Of that company's crimes against truth, one needs to say little. Simply put, someone there enabled an authoritarian zealot to belch out Mr. Bush's new and improved history. The basic plot line was this: Because he was distracted by the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Bill Clinton failed to prevent 9/11.
     "The most curious and in some ways the most infuriating aspect of that slapdash theory is that the right-wingers who have advocated it, who try to sneak it into our collective consciousness through entertainment, or who sandbag Mr. Clinton with it at news interviews, have simply skipped past its most glaring flaw. Had it been true that Clinton had been distracted from the hunt for bin Laden in 1998 because of the Lewinsky nonsense, why did these same people not applaud him for having bombed bin Laden's camps in Afghanistan and Sudan on August 20 of that year? For mentioning bin Laden by name as he did so? That day, Republican Senator Grams of Minnesota invoked the movie Wag the Dog. Republican Senator Coats of Indiana questioned Mr. Clinton's judgement. Republican Senator Ashcroft of Missouri, the future Attorney General, echoed Coats. Even Republican Senator Arlen Specter questioned the timing.
     "And, of course, were it true Clinton had been distracted by the Lewinsky witch hunt, who on Earth conducted the Lewinsky witch hunt? Who turned the political discourse of this nation on its head for two years? Who corrupted the political media? Who made it impossible for us to even bring back on the air the counterterrorism analysts, like Dr. Richard Haass and James Dunegan, who had warned, at this very hour, on this very network, in early 1998, of the cells from the Middle East who sought to attack us here? Who preempted them in order to strangle us with the trivia that was 'All Monica All The Time'? Who distracted whom?
     "This is, of course, where, as is inevitable, Mr. Bush and his henchmen prove not quite as smart as they think they are. The full responsibility for 9/11 is obviously shared by three administrations, possibly four. But, Mr. Bush, if you are now trying to convince us by proxy that it's all about the distractions of 1998 and 1999, then you will have to face a startling fact that your minions may have hidden from you. The distractions of 1998 and 1999, Mr. Bush, were carefully manufactured, and lovingly executed, not by Bill Clinton, but by the same people who got you elected President.
     "Thus, instead of some commendable acknowledgment that you were even in office on 9/11 and the lost months before it, we have your sleazy and sloppy rewriting of history, designed by somebody who evidently read the Orwell playbook too quickly. Thus, instead of some explanation for the inertia of your first eight months in office, we are told that you have kept us safe ever since, a statement that might range anywhere from zero to 100 percent true. We have nothing but your word, and your word has long since ceased to mean anything. And, of course, the one time you ever have given us specifics about what you have kept us safe from, Mr. Bush, you got the name of the supposedly targeted tower in Los Angeles wrong.
     "Thus was it left for the previous President to say what so many of us have felt, what so many of us have given you a pass for in the months and even the years after the attack: You did not try. You ignored the evidence gathered by your predecessor. You ignored the evidence gathered by your own people. Then, you blamed your predecessor. That would be a textbook definition, sir, of cowardice.
     "To enforce the lies of the present, it is necessary to erase the truths of the past. That was one of the great mechanical realities Eric Blair, writing as George Orwell, gave us in the novel 1984. The great philosophical reality he gave us, Mr. Bush, may sound as familiar to you as it has lately begun to sound familiar to me.
     "'The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power.' 'Power is not a means; it is an end.' 'One does not establish a dictatorship to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. 'The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.'
     "Earlier last Friday afternoon, before the Fox ambush, speaking in the far different context of the closing session of his remarkable Global Initiative, Mr. Clinton quoted Abraham Lincoln's State of the Union address from 1862: 'We must disenthrall ourselves.' Mr. Clinton did not quote the rest of Mr. Lincoln's sentence. He might well have. 'We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.' And so has Mr. Clinton helped us to disenthrall ourselves, and perhaps enabled us, even at this late and bleak date, to save our country.
     "The free pass has been withdrawn, Mr. Bush. You did not act to prevent 9/11. We do not know what you have done to prevent another 9/11. You have failed us, then leveraged that failure, to justify a purposeless war in Iraq which will have, all too soon, claimed more American lives than did 9/11. You have failed us anew in Afghanistan. And you have now tried to hide your failures by blaming your predecessor. And now you exploit your failure to rationalize brazen torture which doesn't work anyway, which only condemns our soldiers to water-boarding, which only humiliates our country further in the world, and which no true American would ever condone, let alone advocate. And there it is, sir: Are yours the actions of a true American? I'm Keith Olbermann. Good night and good luck."


http://www.mrc.org/cyberalerts/2006/cyb20060926.asp#1

. . . .and when he didn't do it.

BY RICHARD MINITER
Wednesday, September 27, 2006

Bill Clinton's outburst on Fox News was something of a public service, launching a debate about the antiterror policies of his administration. This is important because every George W. Bush policy that arouses the ire of Democrats--the Patriot Act, extraordinary rendition, detention without trial, pre-emptive war--is a departure from his predecessor. Where policies overlap--air attacks on infrastructure, secret presidential orders to kill terrorists, intelligence sharing with allies, freezing bank accounts, using police to arrest terror suspects--there is little friction. The question, then, is whether America should return to Mr. Clinton's policies or soldier on with Mr. Bush's.

It is vital that this debate be honest, but so far this has not been the case. Both Mr. Clinton's outrage at Chris Wallace's questioning and the ABC docudrama "The Path to 9/11" are attempts to polarize the nation's memory. While this divisiveness may be good for Mr. Clinton's reputation, it is ultimately unhealthy for the country. What we need, instead, is a cold-eyed look at what works against terrorists and what does not. The policies of the Clinton and Bush administrations ought to be put to the same iron test.

With that in mind, let us examine Mr. Clinton's war on terror.

Some 38 days after he was sworn in, al Qaeda attacked the World Trade Center. He did not visit the twin towers that year, even though four days after the attack he was just across the Hudson River in New Jersey, talking about job training. He made no attempt to rally the public against terrorism. His only public speech on the bombing was a few paragraphs inserted into a radio address mostly devoted an economic stimulus package. Those stray paragraphs were limited to reassuring the public and thanking the rescuers, the kinds of things governors say after hurricanes. He did not even vow to bring the bombers to justice. Instead, he turned the first terrorist attack on American soil over to the FBI.

In his Fox interview, Mr. Clinton said "no one knew that al Qaeda existed" in October 1993, during the tragic events in Somalia. But his national security adviser, Tony Lake, told me that he first learned of bin Laden "sometime in 1993," when he was thought of as a terror financier. U.S. Army Capt. James Francis Yacone, a black hawk squadron commander in Somalia, later testified that radio intercepts of enemy mortar crews firing at Americans were in Arabic, not Somali, suggesting the work of bin Laden's agents (who spoke Arabic), not warlord Farah Aideed's men (who did not). CIA and DIA reports also placed al Qaeda operatives in Somalia at the time.

By the end of Mr. Clinton's first year, al Qaeda had apparently attacked twice. The attacks would continue for every one of the Clinton years.

• In 1994, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (who would later plan the 9/11 attacks) launched "Operation Bojinka" to down 11 U.S. planes simultaneously over the Pacific. A sharp-eyed Filipina police officer foiled the plot. The sole American response: increased law-enforcement cooperation with the Philippines.

• In 1995, al Qaeda detonated a 220-pound car bomb outside the Office of Program Manager in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, killing five Americans and wounding 60 more. The FBI was sent in.

• In 1996, al Qaeda bombed the barracks of American pilots patrolling the "no-fly zones" over Iraq, killing 19. Again, the FBI responded.

• In 1997, al Qaeda consolidated its position in Afghanistan and bin Laden repeatedly declared war on the U.S. In February, bin Laden told an Arab TV network: "If someone can kill an American soldier, it is better than wasting time on other matters." No response from the Clinton administration.

• In 1998, al Qaeda simultaneously bombed U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing 224, including 12 U.S. diplomats. Mr. Clinton ordered cruise-missile strikes on Afghanistan and Sudan in response. Here Mr. Clinton's critics are wrong: The president was right to retaliate when America was attacked, irrespective of the Monica Lewinsky case.

Still, "Operation Infinite Reach" was weakened by Clintonian compromise. The State Department feared that Pakistan might spot the American missiles in its air space and misinterpret it as an Indian attack. So Mr. Clinton told Gen. Joe Ralston, vice chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff, to notify Pakistan's army minutes before the Tomahawks passed over Pakistan. Given Pakistan's links to jihadis at the time, it is not surprising that bin Laden was tipped off, fleeing some 45 minutes before the missiles arrived.

• In 1999, the Clinton administration disrupted al Qaeda's Millennium plots, a series of bombings stretching from Amman to Los Angeles. This shining success was mostly the work of Richard Clarke, a NSC senior director who forced agencies to work together. But the Millennium approach was shortlived. Over Mr. Clarke's objections, policy reverted to the status quo.

• In January 2000, al Qaeda tried and failed to attack the U.S.S. The Sullivans off Yemen. (Their boat sank before they could reach their target.) But in October 2000, an al Qaeda bomb ripped a hole in the hull of the U.S.S. Cole, killing 17 sailors and wounding another 39.

When Mr. Clarke presented a plan to launch a massive cruise missile strike on al Qaeda and Taliban facilities in Afghanistan, the Clinton cabinet voted against it. After the meeting, a State Department counterterrorism official, Michael Sheehan, sought out Mr. Clarke. Both told me that they were stunned. Mr. Sheehan asked Mr. Clarke: "What's it going to take to get them to hit al Qaeda in Afghanistan? Does al Qaeda have to attack the Pentagon?"

There is much more to Mr. Clinton's record--how Predator drones, which spotted bin Laden three times in 1999 and 2000, were grounded by bureaucratic infighting; how a petty dispute with an Arizona senator stopped the CIA from hiring more Arabic translators. While it is easy to look back in hindsight and blame Bill Clinton, the full scale and nature of the terrorist threat was not widely appreciated until 9/11. Still: Bill Clinton did not fully grasp that he was at war. Nor did he intuit that war requires overcoming bureaucratic objections and a democracy's natural reluctance to use force. That is a hard lesson. But it is better to learn it from studying the Clinton years than reliving them.


http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110009001

There you go again. What accusation? You haven't shown one yet. Where did I accuse you or Ami of anything?

H, you are NOT this dense         The implied accusation was claiming that either Ami or I, or both were laying claim that the selected NIE info that was leaked couldn't be trusted because it dared to show something negative about the current war.  I don't think I need to paste your quote a 3rd time, do I??   I guess I do....following only single responses from Ami & myself came "Ooooh, so they're only right when the administration can cherry pick them for tidbits that support their claims to convince the US to go to war, but when their conclusions point to something unfavorable to the administration, well, they can't be trusted"

So, if not Ami or I, then WHO is claiming the current leaked NIE info can't be trusted

I speculated on what the new rules were for accepting the conclusions of NIEs and made a generalization.

What new rules?  When were they applied?  Was there a meeting we missed?  How come we weren't provided any memos?

If you don't like it when anyone besides yourself makes generalizations, tough

I have no problem with generalizations.  We do that all the time.  But if you're not going to practice what you preach, don't be pulling out the victim card if someone starts misrepresenting your position.  We'll just have to chalk that outrage up as an apparent persecution complex, as established by yourself of all people