DebateGate

What if a bunch of conservative billionaires started to worry about the growing power of China and India, and the future demand for and supplies of oil?  And what if they figured out there might not be enough to go around?  And what if they figured out that they had better grab some while they still could, before China and India got strong enough to stop them?  Because otherwise they all might lose shitloads of money and the American economy might go down the tubes and the people might want to look for new ways of governing themselves and distributing the wealth, kind of like in the 1930s.  And this wouldn't be good.  For anybody.

So for the good of everybody (everybody in America, anyway) they might want to occupy Iraq and then Iran.  And of course they couldn't tell the people of the U.S.A. "Hey let's go to war and secure us a  long-term supply of oil," so of course they would have thought of other reasons to put to the American people as to why they were going to Iraq and Iran.  For the sake of argument, say they came up with "WMD" and then later with "democracy."

Well, I'd say that in that case, Phase I of the plan was a success.  A big success.  They're in Iraq and they've got the oil fields.   The cost in human life is (in their frame of reference) negligible - - 40,000 Iraqis (who are only technically human) and a couple thousand Americans, the lowest of the low, the unemployables, the drop-outs, the un-connected, 30% of them not even citizens, just desperate Hispanics from some Latin American shit-hole or other, risking their poor pathetic lives in the hope of surviving and being rewarded with citizenship and finally, escape from the shit-hole.  (No, it isn't Cuba the Communist hell-hole that we're talking about, but the free-enterprise paradises of El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico, etc. that these folks are literally "dying" to escape from.)
2600 American soldiers are NOTHING to these billionaires.  They blew off twenty times that number in Nam before finally pulling the plug on that one.  But maybe you think the price in dollars (half a trillion) is too high?  NOTHING could be further from the truth.  You see the half-trillion comes out of the public purse.  It's EVERYBODY'S money so in a sense it's nobody's money.  The PROFITS that will come out of this little escapade - - that is definitely NOT "everybody's money."  What's Halliburton's is Halliburton's and what's KBR's is KBR's, and so on - - less a small cut (and I MEAN a small cut) for Uncle Sam and another slice to grease a few choice Republocrat palms.  Big Oil (I just LOVE using that phrase!!!) is not one to share gladly.  But - - but what if the "terrorists" prevent them from getting as much oil out of the ground there as they used to?  Oy.  You just don't get it, do you?  Who gives a shit if THEY can't get it out of the ground?  At least their Chinese and Indian competitors won't be getting any more of that stuff than they will, and if or when it finally DOES start to flow, just exactly where do you think it'll be flowing to?

The hell of it is, the Republicans can't TELL anyone that Iraq is a success.  Not in terms that don't excite ridicule and disbelief.  The Republicans, unfortunately, are now the prisoners of their own bullshit.  Since they lied to the American people TWICE - - once, that they were going in for WMD, then that they were there to establish democracy and justice - - they can only evaluate the project in terms of its stated goals - - yet to do so only invites ridicule and disbelief for obvious reasons.

What's a self-respecting crypto-fascist to do?  Fortunately, they don't give a shit.  They don't have to.  They don't need to WIN elections any more.  Stealing them is good enough, and they have THAT down to a science.

I will start this off with a disclaimer:  I did not watch the Clinton-Wallace TV segment - for some reason my speakers aren't functioning and I don't have the time to fix them or even find out why.

However:  my first knowledge of it came from Huffington Post.  It was almost universally welcomed on Hufpo as a sign that Democrats are finally getting some backbone and hitting back hard.  I understood that when Clinton asked Chris Wallace how come he (Chris Wallace) asked only Clinton why he hadn't gone after Osama, how come he never asked any Republicans, Wallace stammered, simpered, sank back, claimed he HAD asked the tough questions of his Republican guests, but when Clinton told him not to bullshit him and the audience, he had NOT asked the tough questions of the Republicans, Wallace had nothing to say, just a shamefaced silly grin and a weak giggle.

Clinton further made the point that at least he had tried - - tried and failed - - but that in EIGHT MONTHS of office, Bush had not even tried.  And again, Wallace had no answer to this.

This was looked upon as a HUGE PR victory by a Democrat and a humiliating defeat for Murdoch and Fox "News" in every way.

So imagine my surprise to read R.R.'s spin and the mutual chortle-fest between him and sirs as to how BADLY Clinton had come across.  Once again, I had to wonder:  do conservatives really live in some other universe where people say hello when they mean goodbye and put their clothes on to jump into the swimming pool but shed them to come out?  Now if I could only fix those %#*&!! speakers, I'd know for sure what now I only suspect.

<<That such usage also causes extreme embarrassment to both the Islamists themselves and their leftist “anti-fascist” appeasers in the West is just too bad. >>

LMFAO.  The term is an embarrassment only to its inventors and users.  But dream on, Zionists and Zionist apologists.

This article is just too long and too stupid to waste any time on.  Essentially it begins with a hand-crafted definition of fascism different from any other definition of fascism that ever existed until the Zionist bullshit machine came up with "Islamofascism" as a term of art, which is specially edited to apply to . . . you guessed it!  to the current anti-Zionist, anti-American Islamic fundamentalist guerrilla movements originally sponsored by Americans and Saudis to fight the Russians in Afghanistan.

Once you accept this new definition of "fascism," it is a foregone conclusion that it will apply to al Qaeda and similar movements.  Thus, Al Qaeda is an Islamofascist.  Q.E.D.

 <<It's bad enough dealing with Tee's misguided hyperbolic rants of how out of control our military is, or Lanya's op-ed parade of how Bush is a war criminal, so why not actually try applying terms appropriately.>>

1.  Your military is in fact out of control.  It is committing criminal acts never seen in all of WWII on the part of Americans.  It is not obeying the laws of warfare, it is torturing and murdering prisoners and it is covering up the torture and murder of prisoners.  It is massacring civilians and covering up the massacre of civilians.  And not just the military but its civilian "overseers" who have basically given it a blank cheque.  Now whether these truths are stated in business-school numbered-point prose or in "hyperbolic rants" should not carry one one-hundredths the significance of the fact that these things are being done.  It's bad enough that Lanya, and I, and other sane and normal people in this group have to deal with the continual lies and distortions of the rabid right on these topics (to say nothing of the nit-picking that goes along with them as if matters of great significance depended on it) but now we have to be faced with the asinine distraction of defining "torture" as if . . . as long as someone here can point to a worse form of torture not yet committed . . . or not yet KNOWN to have been committed . . . by Americans, then everything short of the most extreme form of torture must be OK.

I have challenged you - - sirs - - REPEATEDLY - - to simply state whether or not the forms of treatment reserved by the "President" as his prerogative to inflict on persons in American captivity - - WHETHER OR NOT YOU CALL IT TORTURE, it makes no difference - - is acceptable if inflicted on Americans captured by the other side.  In your typical gutless fashion, you have so far refused to answer that simple question.  You have dodged, you have evaded, you have come up with snarky little pretexts - - but you have not answered.  And will not answer either because you lack the balls or the intellectual honesty or both.

Instead of answering one simple question, you now have the balls to come up with a new distraction, to define torture.  Dictionaries are full of definitions of torture.  Pick one and go with it.  I see from further back in the thread that definitions of torture were in fact offered to you.  Definitions you didn't accept as presented, you had to tweak and hammer at them until they were refashioned into new, hand-crafted (by you) definitions that, curiously enough, applied to things the (so far, according to you) the Americans have not been proven to commit.  You are of course stacking the deck once again for anyone stupid enough to fall for your childish and pea-brained game.  Don't waste my time or anyone else's with this kind of bullshit, you are merely insulting the intelligence of anyone who pays you the courtesy of reading that drivel. 

We know now you won't answer the simple question that I have repeatedly put to you, and most of us understand why.  Basically it's because even you know at some level of your hate-filled little brain that what Bush wants to do to his prisoners is just plain WRONG.

<<The guys that might actually be guilty of that particular crime are going to be put on trial.
The guys that captured some Americans almost certainly abused prisoners that were innocent .

<<If any American will do for revenge , whjy not any Arab?>>

Any Arab WILL do for revenge.  What do you think the massacre of Falluja was all about anyway?  800 civilians massacred to avenge 4 US mercenaries.

<<Well then lets see if the Al Queda can treat a prisoner according to the golden rule , supposeing that they ever have the ability to capture someone that is not unarmed.>>

I think you have forgotten that after a 14-year-old girl was raped and, together with her family, murdered, by U.S. troops, the local Resistance fighters captured and executed two members of the unit that had committed the crimes.

You are very much mistaken if you think that the Resistance forces are unable to capture Americans.  Right now that's not in their plans, so it is not happening very much.  But they are not incapable of doing so just because it is not their priority.  I would think that capturing prisoners is not as difficult as holding them.  They'd need a large expanse of safe territory for that.

<<I kind of expect that what they have been doing to the unarmed ones indicates a general attitude.>>

A general attitude to Jewish-American journalists or Jewish-American businessmen might not reflect their leaders' attitudes to American troops.  The fact is you are just speculating.

So why don't you answer my simple little question?  Are you afraid of exposing a little moral hypocrisy?  If it's OK for US interrogators to use the "President's" interpretation of the Geneva Conventions to determine how the al Qaeda prisoners will be treated, will it be OK to treat Americans in captivity the same way?

Simple question, plane.  Curious minds await.