Michael, your problem is, as I have already stated, that your perspective is so skewed as to be completely unreliable.
You are crying because of a lack of respect. You deserve no respect. In the first place, you do NOT know as much as me on many topics. But that in itself would be simply ignorance. And you are right, an ad hominem attack based on ignorance alone would be wrong. But when I say your viewpoint is skewed, i am not referring to your ignorance. I have no problem accepting that, while you may not know as much as you think you do you certainly are no dummy when it comes to facts. Indeed, it can equally be said that I do not know as much as you on several topics . And I have said on several occasions with all sincereity that you have a perfectly good intellect. You simply view the world through an enormous prejudice, and yes it is certainly bigotry. That means that your opinion of US world policy is no more reliable than David Duke's opinion of Black people's achievements in the world.
But you accuse me of coming into a debate with an attitude problem. I DO have an attitude problem. When you constantly talk about me and my brothers and sisters in arms as murderers, rapists and thieves I'm gonna have an attitude problem. Your protestations that you know "a few" good soldiers and/or Americans is no more sincere than the proverbial "Some of my best friends are niggers" attitude. When you constantly attack my country and my friends and resort to childish ranting instead of reasoned debate, I'm going to have an attitude problem. You make sweeping, arrogant, vile accusations about ALL soldiers or even MOST soldiers - and they are bullshit. I PERSONALLY came on this forum and lamented the terrible actions in Abu Ghraib as an offense to me as a soldier and an American. I have stated that I think Bush is wrong for failing to give POW status to Taliban soldiers - who I think are clearly covered (while the Al Aquaeda fighters deserve no such status). I don't have a problem with reasonable debate about US actions or about asserting your viewpoint when it at odds with mine. But when you compare US soldiers with Nazi war criminals - NOT individually (which certainly has merit) but collectively - and you compare Bush with Hitler, I am going to call you out on it and damn right I am going to have an attitude problem. Had Hitler merely been militaristic the comparison might be justified. But Bush is not mass-murdering Jews - or Muslims for that matter - in order to racially purge the world. Even if Bush's motives are purely mercantile - and I do not for a minute accept that theory - his brand of evil would be run-of-the-mill profiteering. That is wrong in itself, but it comes nowhere near the pure. demonic evil of Hitler - and very few leaders do. It's completely acceptable to compare the slavery of the US past with the racist evils of Hitler (and one of Hitlers heros, btw, was a eugenics proponent from here in Virginia named Joseph S.DeJarnette) but the US corrected its slavery issue by itself. No question it required military force - civil war, in fact - but we didn't need the world to come in and correct it for us as Hitler did.
Now when you lecture me about YOUR skewed world view and how uninformed I am, I'm gonna blow that off as a personal opinion, but I will certainly point out your nonsense as much as you choose to point out mine. All of the blind hatred, ad hominem attacks and attitude you ascribe to me are reactions to those very traits in your own posts. You accuse me of seeing the mote in your eye and ignoring the beam in my own. There is at least some merit to that, but it's hypocrisy in the purest sense. You do not have a mote in your eye - you have a petrified forest.
Since you asked, I will bring up one example of your ignorance - with a caveat. I referred to the Supreme Council of Iran and how they took away the choice of the Iranian people. Unfortunately, I used a verbal shorthand, so perhaps you were calling me on the incorrect full designation. I was referring to the Supreme Leader and the Council of Guardians. If that was your point, I concede it but I apologize for the shorthand no more than I would for calling Rhode Island and Providence Plantations just plain Rhode Island for short - like most of the known universe. But if you are still honestly unaware of the facts behind my point - and frankly, I find that surprising since you frequent this place and I thought you were at least up on currernt events, though you might well be biased in your views thereof - I will give a brief (yeah, right, Pooch is gonna be brief) explanation.
The current regime is in place after being vetted and passed off on by the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Hoseini-KHAMENEI (who has been the Iranian head of state since 1989) and his Council of Guardians - a group of six clerics appointed by the Ayatollah and and six members of the legislature. Before each election, they vet the candidates and routinely disqualify reformers. Since the legislative branch and executive branches of the government are vetted by the Supreme Leader and the Counsel, and the Judiary is directly appointed by the Supreme Leader (The Iranian secular government has a three-branch set up similar to the US model) the reality is that the Ayatollah and his henchmen are the rulers of the country. The choices of the people are therefore limited to those approved by the hard-line conservative clerics. This is about the same as Pat Robertson and the late Jerry Falwell deciding who gets to run for President in the United States for all political parties. People like Brass get upset because folks like Robertson have influence on one particular party, and even then only to a certain extent. Imagine if he got veto power over the Republican, Democratic, Libertarian, Socialist, Green, etc. candidates. Calling our government a democractically elected government under such circumstances would be technically correct, but morally a joke. Saddam, as you may recall, claimed a 98% share of the vote in his last election. Easy to do when you run unopposed. In the end, the ruling power of Iran sits atop the government like Henry Ford stating that customers can have the Model T in any color they want - as long as it's black.
By Pooch standards, that WAS brief.
Further, when I call you for hostile, offensive and sometimes literally blithering rants, instead of recognizing that you have stepped over a line, you insist I am only attacking you because I have "run out of substantive argument." THAT, sir, is a cop out. I respond to idiocy by pointing it out as idiocy. There is no need to answer comparisons to Hitler, broadbrush accusations against honorable soldiers or gratutitous profanity and superfluous ridicule with reasoned debate. It is you, sir, who have a lot of nerve expecting me to respond rationally and respectfully to such childishness. I won't, and you have no right to expect me to.
My lack of respect for you is not based on your ignorance or lack of intellect. I think you ARE ignorant in some areas, but generally you are well informed and perfectly capable of becoming informed in areas where you might lack. It is CERTAINLY not based on lack of intellect, because I have no doubt of your intellectual capacity - and just to be clear, I mean that I think you have an excellent intellect. And it does not come from your mutual lack of respect for me, because my ego is way too big to take disdain personally. Indeed, I have no problem accepting certain criticisms as having merit, and I can easily ignore those I think are nonsense. The sole reason for which I lack respect for you is your absolute bigotry against the United States in general and its soldiers AS A GROUP in particular. It makes it very hard to respond to your reasonable points (though heaven knows I try) when I am reading them through a ton of bigotted garbage. But if I did not respect your ABILITIES and knowledge I wouldn't even try that. I stopped responding to Knute - except to make fun of him - long ago because I gave him no credibility at all. I TRULY have no respect for him. You I do respect - and believe me I wouldn't waste my time or the forum's disk space to post this if I didn't - but that respect goes south in a hurry when your posts dropo to the level of knute-like rants.
Finally, my last post was DELIBERATELY skewed. I was trying to demonstrate YOUR method of argument. That's why I directly chose to use "Malvinas" instead of "Falklands" among other characterizations. You will note that when I discussed it in terms of acknowledged British rights I referred to them as the Falklands. The whole point of the post was that there are two ways of looking at anything. The one response in your rebuttal I think it actually worth debating (and by that I am not disparaging your points, but simply stating that both sides of most of the other points are already done to death) is your comparison of how GB adminstered her empire and how the US administers ours. You talk about Great Britain "taking care" of her empire by adminstering the government of her possessions while the US sets up puppet governments and then leaves them. You may be just responding in kind to my "two ways of looking at it" argument. But if you are serious then I would respond that British policy has historically been to colonize, subjugate and then govern other lands. US policy - at least since it became a world power - has been to try to leave the countries it takes over with its own government - preferrably, though not always a democratically elected one. That is part of that social evolution of world powers I referred to.
Now you need not respond - because I concede in advance - that the governments the US leaves in control are often dictatorships propped up by US power. And you can certainly rationally make the argument that this constitutes neglect of the needs of the people of those countries in favor of US interests. But we also do things like we did in Japan, putting in a system of government we approve and allowing the country to evolve along those lines. Objectively, there is an argument that this demonstrates a certain degree of arrogance but in this case I think it is a fairly benign one. While individual examples of both attitudes may be compared one way or the other, the core debate is whether it is better to conquer and retain another country or to conquer and then release it. In that respect I think the general US policy is better than the general British policy - but I hasten to say that unlike the US, Great Britain has not been involved in the business of empire building in decades, and has certainly evolved in its colonial policies in the last century. Where US policy may be more enlightened than other nations, it is simply because the US has benefit of the examples of other nations in earlier, less enlightened times. Those other nations have learned the same lessons, they have just not had to apply them. To put it another way, the US opposition to apartheid was not hypocritical because of our previous policies of slavery, Jim Crow, and general racial inequality. We had just grown up.
My hostility towards you is simply based on your hostility towards me - and make no mistake I take it personally when you call soldiers rapists, thieves and murderers. I certainly take offense when you choose ridicule instead of reasoned responses to my posts, and then call me out for responding to that ridicule with ridicule. You can certainly continue to express that opinion, but I'm going to call it bigotry and I think the characterization is more than fair. Beyond that, I think you are unable to reach objective conclusions because of your bias. That makes you no different from most people, myself included, but I honestly think I make far more effort to recognize and overcome my prejudices than you do. I concede that you have certainly made some efforts in that regard, and I further concede that I am working from my own set of prejudices in this situation. But if you are upset about my lack of respect for you, recognize that the only area in which I lack respect for you is in your prejudice against the US and the US military in particular. While you dishonor people who are actually dying and coming home damaged for life, I'm going to call you on it - and it won't be respectfully.
