Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

This post is about club.


Eleanor Clift

Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

Speaking of 9/11 and distasteful.

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Oh, I get it -- you're back to your "Obama can order someone killed, so it was okay for Bush to torture people" theme.

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well shit, why stop there. by that logic, Obama did all that tax cutting while starting the EPA, ending slavery, and building interstate freeways connecting the entire country!

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mmmm, I don't think you do get it.

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I don't understand why you enjoy pretending to be stupid.

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you posted that obama gets "credit" for Bush tax cuts, but I pretend to be stupid? I suppose you only appreciate the real thing?

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Listen, or your tongue will keep you deaf. ~Native American proverb ---

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You can count me in agreement with Paul Krugman on almost everything he says about Guiliani and Bush in that column.

It's all true. The War in Iraq, whether it goes down as a good thing (we get cheap oil) in the long term, or a bad thing, was illegal and built on a lie. Tenet took the fall, but make no mistake: The White House led us into war against an innocent nation and people (yes, I'll go that far) based on falsifications.

Add Colin Powell to the list of criminal actors there. His act before the UN was unforgivable.

Giuliani is not a criminal. He was simply a whore who cashed in on a tragedy. His sin is, of course, forgivable because: (a) He did handle the tragedy admirably; (b) Who wouldn't cash in if put in his position?, and; (c) No harm in making something positive (in his case, a fortune) out of a tragedy.

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Speaking of the real thing, the word "credit" doesn't appear in what I posted. Other people use quotation marks to indicate that they are actually quoting something. You routinely employ them to put words in other people's mouths that they did not actually use.

Anyhoo, neither I nor Eleanor Clift nor the person whose work she was describing credited Obama for Bush tax cuts. The post "compare[d] the cost of tax cuts in just the first four years of Bush’s term (2001–04) to the first four years of Obama's (2009–12)." (See -- that is the difference between actually quoting the post and making up loosely related shit not said in the post and pretending that's what was in it.) Obama is credited for the extension of the Bush tax cuts, but not for the Bush tax cuts.

Here is how the Bush tax cuts are different from the EPA, abolition and the interstate highway system: They, unlike the latter three things, were going to cease by law absent legislative action. Obama didn't need to do anything to preserve the latter three, so no one gives him credit for their continuation.

You know all this, of course, but you enjoy playing dumb here.

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obama didn't sign a budget that funded the highways and EPA?

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I wonder where this comes out on a net basis (including, e.g., the increased taxes under HCR).

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Ty seems to be away, so let me make his point: Since so many fewer people are working hardly anyone is paying taxes and thus total taxes have been slashed due entirely to Obama's economic programs.

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I suspect your penis doesn't get hard so you attack me in a masturbatory manner when you'd like to be beating off. Have you spoken to a doctor? Or, more pointedly doctors: GP and psych?

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So you admit you had no point then. Thanks.

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I didn't think you had another gear after "you're stupid," but this response proves me wrong. Kudos - now you have two stock responses to getting pwnd on here.

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really, you didn't think he attacked me first and for no reason? I have gone out of my way not to insult sidd, then he posted that.

I have been trying to be substantive, but you all just don't want to respond.

I get that if I'm caught speeding saying "look officer the car behind me is speeding too" doesn't absolve my crime.

But when a President says "We have to do some extraordinary things that will take away rights some terrorists may have," and the next President runs on a platform of stopping all of that, then, once he understands the facts, goes beyond what the first president did, how is that not evidence that Bush had good reason, maybe you wouldn't make the same decision if you know what he knew, but it seems Obama has made the same decision.

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So if I think both of them are wrong on, say, domestic surveillance and military tribunals, that means that Bush was right? Do you see how this argument is less than compelling?

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No, he doesn't see it.

If Obama could order bin Laden killedi, then BUsh was right to torture prisoners. Don't you understand?

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I'm trying. Let me give it a shot:

"Obama's drone attacks in Afghanistan mean there really were WMDs in Iraq."

Am I doing it right?

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I thought Hank said there may have been top secret WMDs in Iraq that Bush knew about because he was President, and that he still couldn't tell us about all this time later because they were secret, and Obama's drone attacks show us this, because Bush must have known about the secret reasons not to do them, but no one is telling Obama.

This is more fun than when Shifty and I did that "Hank at judged" thing.

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first you don't have the evidence Bush/Obama have. But as I said, you might well disagree with both. I didn't ask you to agree with Bush, support everything he did, and move him into the upper ranks of President. I merely asked if Obama's similar decisions don't provide some evidence that the President might know some things that impact on whether the "rights" issues should have indicated he not take a particular course.

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And Gitmo is still open, and did you see the documentary/news story on the Osama murder? There are operations like that going on most evenings not to mention drone attacks.

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I will freely admit that I got halfway through that before I got tired of unpacking all of the backpedlaing double-negative qualifiers. But if your position is that there's some secret stuff that only Bush/Obama knows, and it makes human rights violations by the Bush/Obama administrations OK, and who are we to question without knowing all the facts, then that's pretty fucking sad.

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wait a minute: so now you're saying Obama is bad too (assuming Bush was bad). Before (and the trolls are too) you seemed to be saying what Obama has done is not bad, you're at least making progress.

And the deeper question is why did your fellows attack me for saying that? I can fight too, but I thought we'd decided to try and stop fighting. Club and I have been ignoring the trolls so that we can keep to that goal. Now non-trolls seem to want to drag the whole thing down.

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You're ducking his point. He's merely saying Obama's continuation of Bush's programs suggests the existence of evidence unknown to the public strongly favoring their use.

That seems an inescapable conclusion, given Obama alienated a massive portion of his base following these Bush era policies. One doesn't shit where he eats without compelling reason to do so.

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Jesus Christ are you three?

1. There are some things that Obama is doing that I disagree with.
2. Some, but not all (tricky, I know) are things that Bush did too.
3. Some, but not all . . . oh fuck it I give up

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I'm not ducking anything. To the extent Obama has backed off initial efforts to change Bush administration policies he's doing it because he wants to be a centrist, which is another thing I dislike about him. He didn't change his mind about closing Gitmo because someone brought him a secret dossier about the dangerous supervillians there. He did it because idiot public opinion stoked by idiot politicians (not all Rs, btw) was that TERRORISTS WILL KILL US ALL if they ever set foot in the continental US.

Since everyone seems comfortable speculating about unknown evidence strongly favoring etc., let's hear what you think it could be. I'm really curious.

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I am with you on the existence of non-public information auguring in favor of certain domestic spying and things like Gitmo. Full knowledge of all threats made to our domestic security, and the breadth of clandestine programs abroad aimed at neutralizing terrorist threats, can never be known to us because they are necessarily classified. Your argument there makes sense.

Regarding Iraq, however, all the evidence is an open book. And unlike spying on domestic terror threats, or clandestine operations, in that case, Bush's Administration did its damnedest to exhume and present to the public any shred of evidence supporting a WMD argument. There is none. There was none. Even Bush admits the expected WMD were not present. The only question there is whether our government lied to us to take us to war against a nation of innocent civilians run by an easily contained tin pot dictator. The inescapable conclusion there, based on evidence, is Yes.

You may use the argument, "We don't know stuff Obama does, and so we should have faith he's following Bush's programs for good reason" in regard to Gitmo, warrantless wiretaps, etc. You may not credibly argue "Bush knew stuff about Iraq we didn't," or "Bush was deceived by Tenet's bad intel" in regard to Iraq. The evidence on the latter is in, and you can only reach either of those imbecilic conclusions via willful ignorance or delusion.

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You seem like the type of guy who spends a lot of time with his kids. You know, a real involved father type.

http://www.startribune.com/lifestyle...129696598.html

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When he campaigned, you know, when he was trying to vet votes, he said he was going to close Gitmo. How come he didn't care about public opinion then? Seems to me that would have been the time.

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The only thing worse than a fucko is a fucko who's too lazy to travel farther than the PB.

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I was going to include a sentence dismissing this argument out of hand. I should have done so.

Obama could have easily discontinued the domestic spying, and slowly closed Gitmo in stages. He didn't do so because he looked at the intelligence, and thought, as most would, "There's a threat. Why risk it?" The political calculation in his decisions was that he'd never see another term if he killed the programs and then we suffered another terrorist attack.

I can't speculate on what evidence is available to Obama and not to us. I wouldn't even know where to begin.

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Maybe you could figure it out if you spent a little less nurture time with the little ones.

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So after the election Obama found something out that made it impossible to, say, transfer the Gitmo detainees to a supermax in Idaho? Really? Believe it or not, I know that neither of us has access to classified information, but what I'm interested in is what you think could have justified that decision beside "political calculation," which I agree 100% was the motivation for the decision. Since we're stating the obvious, there are many, many decisions motivated by "political calculation" that are completely unjustified and wrong.

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Your fixation on the location of the detainee center is odd, and misses the crux of the dispute. The dispute between the Right and Left wasn't whether we'd have a Supermax of Islamist nuts in Cuba or Idaho. That was a secondary NIMBY issue that came later, ancillary to the main issue: Should we have Supermax/Torture center for detainees at all?

Obama did cave on the NIMBY issue, for political reasons (a bunch of disphit Republicans crying a domestic Gitmo would endanger citizens). On the issue of caging these people like animals and denying them rights, something he could have rectified quietly in stages the media would have missed, he held to Bush's line. I don't see that being a political move, except to the extent I noted above.

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and the drones murders? 1 guy we suspect has done something bad in a car full of 5 other people guilty only of being in the car? If he said no, we would never find out so it can't be political. Why do those murders? Clearly they violate the respect for rights he campaigned on.

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So you're saying that Obama could have done away with military commission trials and put the Gitmo detainees on trial in Federal Court "quietly in stages the media would have missed?" Don't take this the wrong way, but what country do you live in?

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You I don't even know what planet.