E.g.,
Did Romney Just Doom His Campaign?
The emerging consensus: His attack over Libya was in poor taste.
September 12, 2012
This whole Libyan War thing not really working out
But, anyway, the international war with Libya that Obama agreed to start in 2011 is ancient history, of no relevance to anything happening in Libya in 2012. So, let's all talk instead about what Mitt Romney said about Libya last night, because that's what really matters!
E.g.,
E.g.,
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159 comments:
WTF is happening in Lybia? Needs more freedomz and democraciez.
No, it isn't. There have been some precious moments of showing some Libyan freedom fighters protesting themselves, sorry, I mean "killers".
A sidebar on this episode is that it has me wondering about Journolist. Reporters were caught on an open mic strategizing on concern troll questions to ask Romney about Libya. Journalist response in general has been incredibly hostile toward Romney today.
So, is Journolist back up and running?
Ann Coulter agrees
Ya think!?
LOL. Isn't having your ambassador shot in the head and dragged into the street kind of a big deal?
Historically, wouldn't a country that allowed or failed to prevent such an occurrence have to write a pretty good-sized check or do some other major grovelling to avoid at least having their border towns shelled?
Meanwhile, here's what Obama's foreign policy geniuses have concluded:
US won't rule out Islamist militant link to attack on US consulate in Libya.
You know, I'm grudgingly getting to appreciate Whiskey. This screams WEAKNESS. If we don't at least knock out a few buildings in Benghazi, nobody there is going to listen to anything we tell them. We can't do anything right.
Body of Post?
Well let me repeat a point that I made earlier today: The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs just called Terry Jones and told him to withdraw his support for the Muhammed film, so that, in one fell swoop, he violated his oath to preserve & defend both the Free Exercise of Religion and the Freedom of the Press.
Events seem to be accelerating...
Just last month the useless Wall Street Journal carried an article by the foreign policy ignoramus John McCain calling the Libyan war a great success.
"Body of Post?"
Ever notice all those Onion articles where the body text doesn't live up to the headline because the paragraphs just mechanically go through the motions of expanding upon the headline?
When I was a kid, a neighbor wife and husband were fighting in their driveway. A "do-gooder" neighbor from across the street came over and tried to mediate. She was attacked by both the husband and wife.
There is absolutely no reason for the USA to be over in the Middle East stirring up that hornet's nest. Leave those contentious people alone.
Hope and Change in Libia.
"There is absolutely no reason for the USA to be over in the Middle East stirring up that hornet's nest. Leave those contentious people alone."
Military-industrial complexes don't run on sugar and spice and everything nice; they run on O. I. L.
hilariously, war nerd just posted a new long column about what a war genius obama has been. talk about the worst timing possible.
did war nerd really write any of that column? because it didn't sound like him. anybody as smart as the old war nerd knows what a catastrophe obama's been on this stuff. deliberately turning over multiple nations to america's enemies and saying it was actually a good thing? that was smart? war nerd always rails against that stuff, wisely aware of how wrong it goes later down the line, but now he's praising it?
some of the war nerd's column was just flat out wrong as well.
obama had no intention at all of ever doing anything in libya ever, for the next 1 million years. in fact he had a friendly meeting with gadaffi just a year earlier. then, out of the blue, the french decided, they wanted gaddafi out of there. and france and UK went in there first, then asked the US for assistance. hey, they said, we'll send in special forces, all you have to do is bomb and missile a weak opponent who can't hit back.
well, why not at that point? somebody else started the fight, might as well gang up on a weak enemy who can't fight back. then, despite it taking months longer than obama said it would, rebels finally killed one of the weakest dictators in the world, who had actually been, for the last 10 years, cooperative with the west and keeping libya together. oops!
and iraq is going well? i don't know what planet this guy is living on but iraq is in a civil war. the vice president has the death sentence. GW bush did the years and years of slogging necessary to subdue the active resistance - which obama was against. how can he get credit for something he was against the entire way?
GW bush negotiated the withdrawal from iraq. obama had nothing to do with it. obama actually tried to get out of the agreed upon withdrawal negotiated by bush, and was forced by the iraqis to stick to the previously agreed upon exit. the iraqis cheered when the americans "left". although the US is still there.
afghanistan is a fiasco. money pit, body pit, liberal television credibility pit. 100 billion a year to accomplish nothing. and it's always ok when 30 americans are getting killed every month if the president is a democrat. don't send those photographers to the airport to document every incoming casket. if osama bin laden is dead, why exactly is the united states in afghanistan at this moment?
pakistan robbed the US blind for years and their penalty was...more billions in US aid.
bush also told obama to drone pakistan and to run olympic games on iran. obama didn't come up with any of this stuff on his own. well, he did come up with killing US citizens without a trial. and not declaring nidal hasan a terrorist. and not closing gitmo when he said he would. we have to give obama a little credit.
meanwhile, the obama adminstration is making the same mistake yet again in syria. the rebels are the bad guys. assad is the good guy. yet the americans are equipping and helping...the rebels.
i suspect the real war nerd didn't write that column.
I don't follow foreign affairs that much, but given what Putin has said the U.S. is doing in Russia, and a general "too professional" vibe I get from the Democratists on the ground in Libya via their mouthpieces, how fake is this whole thing?
We turned anti-Iraq war liberals into the biggest cheerleaders for democracy-at-gunpoint: it's all enough to make President George W. Bush shed a tear. Seriously, how did that happen?
Mr. Ron Unz, what say you?
Well let me repeat a point that I made earlier today: The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs just called Terry Jones and told him to withdraw his support for the Muhammed film, so that, in one fell swoop, he violated his oath to preserve & defend both the Free Exercise of Religion and the Freedom of the Press.
I was wondering if someone would bring him up. Anybody have a take on Spengler's characterization of him as an asymmetrical warrior ?
pro-doping article
"Dwain Chambers, the UK’s fastest sprinter in the 100 meters, was banned from competing in the Olympic Games after testing positive for the anabolic steroid tetrahydrogestrinone. He claimed in his autobiography that at least half of the U.S. racing team at the 2008 Summer Games used illegal substances."
taken from here:
http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/cat_biotech_athletics.html
interesting bit about the finnish skier with RBC enhancing mutation.
Ever notice all those Onion articles where the body text doesn't live up to the headline because the paragraphs just mechanically go through the motions of expanding upon the headline?
LOL'ed.
You are so NEVER going to be asked to write a 5000-word essay for the NY Times Sunday Magazine.
LOL'ed. [Yeah, twice.]
is Journolist back up and running?
What makes you think it ever went away, as opposed to further underground?
As she said.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fgcd1ghag5Y
This screams WEAKNESS. If we don't at least knock out a few buildings in Benghazi, nobody there is going to listen to anything we tell them.
Ha, ha. Maybe you slept through this, but the reason the current bunch of nuts are in power in Libya is precisely because we already bombed the crap out of the previous (and noticeably better) regime.
This does not scream WEAKNESS. It screams STUPIDITY.
hilariously, war nerd just posted a new long column about what a war genius obama has been.
I know Steve likes him, but he strikes me as the blowhard at the end of the bar who spouts off on subjects he knows nothing about.
"Dwain Chambers, the UK’s fastest sprinter in the 100 meters, was banned from competing in the Olympic Games after testing positive for the anabolic steroid tetrahydrogestrinone. He claimed in his autobiography that at least half of the U.S. racing team at the 2008 Summer Games used illegal substances."
Dopers, once caught, have a vested interest in claiming that everybody else is doping.
Has there ever been a case where some athlete has been busted for doping and he then said: "It was just me - all the other guys were clean"?
"Has there ever been a case where some athlete has been busted for doping and he then said: "It was just me - all the other guys were clean"?"
Sure.
Meanwhile, the Atlantic asks, "Will Romney's Foreign-Policy Fumble [i.e., criticizing the administration's response to the embassy attacks] Doom His Campaign"
That media tailwind must be worth at least 5 points in the polls for Obama. Unreal.
From an above post: "Military-industrial complexes don't run on sugar and spice and everything nice; they run on O. I. L."
We never have to go to war for oil, because that is the only thing the Arabs have to sell. If they don't sell it, they starve.
The only interaction we need have with those miserable people is to back the tanker up to the dock, fill it with oil, drop a pallet of Dollars on the warf and sail away.
The idea that we have to go to war with every Middle Eastern Country in order to obtain oil is a lie -- it is an obfuscation to hide the real reason.
It's working out in the sense that Libya is now a mess, and it has Muslims fighting Muslims. Zionists like that.
A little OT, but why did the film make Mohammed and his followers so white? The darkest person in the film was the christian they killed in front of his wife.
"Ann Coulter agrees"
Would she agree if a Republican president had called on the war?
"hilariously, war nerd just posted a new long column about what a war genius obama has been. talk about the worst timing possible."
Why did that guy call his column "war nerd?" It should have been "chicken hawk."
Careful, Steve. This deviationist thought will get you denounced as a dishonest PRO-ROMNEY SHILL!!!! by the good folks at American Conservative (see Larison, Dan). Granted, Obama's Libyan intervention could also be said to be the result of neo-connish/Liberal Internationalist ideological assumptions which a President Romney would be no less likely to stumble into. Nonetheless, focusing on Obama's role would distract attention from the singular and unique stupidity, incompetence, and evil that is Mitt Romney's, and Mitt Romney's alone.
"Would she agree if a Republican president had called on the war?"
Did you read her post? She criticized Republicans who called for intervention in Libya too:
"Among Republicans, Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum all called for aggressive action against Gadhafi, including enforcement of a no-fly zone.
Santorum cited Reagan's 1986 bombing of Libya (after Gadhafi had killed American servicemen in Berlin), saying, "If you want to be Reaganesque, it seems the path is pretty clear."
Gingrich took all sides, first demanding: "Exercise a no-fly zone this evening. We don't need to have the United Nations. All we have to say is that we think that slaughtering your own citizens is unacceptable and that we're intervening. This is a moment to get rid of him. Do it. Get it over with."
Then, two weeks later, he said: "I would not have intervened."
Only Mitt Romney and Haley Barbour resisted calling for aggressive action against Gadhafi, with Romney merely criticizing Obama's deer-in-the-headlights response, and Barbour stating more directly, "I don't think it's our mission to make Libya look like Luxembourg." No offense, he said, "but it is not ever going to look like what we'd like."
"A little OT, but why did the film make Mohammed and his followers so white? The darkest person in the film was the christian they killed in front of his wife."
The director is a israeki-american...
"The idea that we have to go to war with every Middle Eastern Country in order to obtain oil is a lie -- it is an obfuscation to hide the real reason."
Agreed. Now what IS the real reason?
This is what bombing the crap out of a stable government for the sake of a bunch of rifle-brandishing ululating tribes gets you.
Imagine a US president providing military support for Ayatollah Khomeini and his partisans in Iran in '79, on the pretext that the Shah was an Enemy of Democracy.
Since a dead ambassador isn't a bunch of hostages, the news cycle will wash this out in less than a week... and the debates are coming up... fugeddaboutit.
Destabilizing countries weakens them, which just so happens to work to the advantage of a certain little country in the region. If the governments around it can be cracked and thrown to the wolves of the Arab Street, and Uncle Sucker can be made to continue alternating between facilitating the destabilizations and protecting the lil country from the awful wolves of the Arab Street that result from same, well, then it's Eretz Yisrael all the way. Next stop Iran and its evil nuclear power industry! Democracy forever - the revolution will be tweeted and RT'd.
@ Viva Italia
Short term: keep the USD as the currency of the oil trade
Long term: eliminate the threat of a strong arab nation-states becoming a regional power, leaving the chosen people as the de-facto leaders in the region
This may seem a dumb question, but how does Israel benefit from creating Islamic fundamentalist regimes all around it? It doesn't seem that Khadafi was very much anti-Israel, well, not as much as the rebels, and not much more than any other Muslim dictator. And Assad is definitely better for Israel than the rebels. Also, why was France so much against Khadafi? What was that all about?
P.S. The video by "Sam Becile" (Some imbecile?) is hilarious, not sure if intentionally or not:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iC6yGzpSvjU
To think that people were killed for that crap, amazing.
You'll be relieved to know that the SPLC has a "lengthy file" on the American Christian hate criminal who is really responsible for the killing of the US diplomats.
Man, your local paper is almost as bad as mine...
Just an observation:
I think part of the media hostility today, even more than normal, has to do with the fact that the specter of Jimmy Carter has been hanging over Obama this election cycle. Republicans are constantly evoking him, salivating over the idea that this may be a re-run of 1980 and, lo and behold!, we are even delivered our own middle-east embassy crisis. Even more, the administration's response was Carter-like.
The media snapped.
"The idea that we have to go to war with every Middle Eastern Country in order to obtain oil is a lie -- it is an obfuscation to hide the real reason."
This. India, China, and Japan get plenty of Iranian oil and gas by not caring about their supposed nuclear program.
France, Italy, and German enjoyed plenty of access to Arab oil and gas and ignored their dictatorships, now they do they same with Russia.
Autocratic regimes are happy to sell their oil to anyone, and as long as you don't get too cosy in propping up the autocrat (see US & the Shah of Iran) who ever overthrows the dictator will sell you oil too.
Anonymous AllanF said...
"Sure."
Then Allen F did not read his own link, where we read; "This was something that I alone did, and I take responsibility for it. My team, coaches and friends had absolutely no knowledge or participation in this."
Note that this says a big fat nothing about other competitors.
I'll never understand why we take such a personal interest in the countries we buy oil from. I don't ask my gas station attendant if he shares my politics. If things get so bad that we desperately need oil and no one is willing to sell it to us, we'll do whatever we have to - why the charade? People have this mushy idea about our government's purpose, and it is ironic that the more atheistic and liberal the administration is, the more moralistic and salvation oriented they are. How many people have come to love and know us through the Peace Corps? If you want to reach out to the world, join a religion and start proselytizing.
Of course many mainstream "conservatives" - like those at National Review - acted as if Obama's illegal war in Libya was just like FDR vs Hitler. So they can only look away in embarrassed silence as the whole thing explodes in Obama's (and their own) face.
This does not scream WEAKNESS. It screams STUPIDITY.
Believe me, I hear ya. A few more Berkley grads end up dead and dragged thru the street in foreign hellholes maybe they'll get a clue about the world.
In the meantime, can we cut off the bloody foreign aid, get the Libyans the eff out of HERE, and tell them when they have a functioning country we MIGHT return their calls? Obviously, none of this will happen.
The idea that we have to go to war with every Middle Eastern Country in order to obtain oil is a lie
No kidding. What are they going to do with it if not sell it to people that want it?
Heck, I maybe could even get behind the War for Oil trope if it were actually true and we got $1/gal gas again.
But now it just seems like war for not much and we get a police state at home because, ya know, we're at war.
"Well let me repeat a point that I made earlier today: The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs just called Terry Jones and told him to withdraw his support for the Muhammed film, so that, in one fell swoop, he violated his oath to preserve & defend both the Free Exercise of Religion and the Freedom of the Press. "
I have to admit that when I saw this, I thought the "Terry Jones" was the Terry Jones of Monty Python. My first thought was "Terry Jones is making a movie about the life of Mohammed? I'd love to see that!". My second thought was why a British film-maker and actor would care what the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff thought of his next project.
The media is going to do everything it can to turn Mitt Romney into Mark Fuhrman.
Before we stage our big "Respect" act, it might be time to dust off some of Andrew Bacevich's works.
Anonymous said... Of course many mainstream "conservatives" - like those at National Review - acted as if Obama's illegal war in Libya was just like FDR vs Hitler. So they can only look away in embarrassed silence as the whole thing explodes in Obama's (and their own) face.
I beg to differ. Mainstream conservatives are never embarrassed when proven wrong. They have an agreement among themselves to never speak of such matters again. Have you ever seen the neocons on Fox --Krauthammer, Hayes, Goldberg, and Kristol--admit they were wrong about anything?
This is our future for a long time to come. Overseas for now. But we are importing the same ancient ethnic hatreds into our own land.
'Taste' now determines who wins or loses?
Of course, it's up to the media to decide what is and isn't in good or poor taste. But then, the media acts as if the people have decided and as if it's just covering the reactions of the people.
Same thing with 'gay marriage'. The media swayed young people to be for 'gay marriage' but then it says 'gay marriage' will happen because young people want it.
Same with Buchanan at the 1992 convention. A lot of people thought it was a great speech, but then the media worked overtime to paint Buchanan into Hitler, and this was all over the media, and even conservatives were browbeaten into saying that the speech was 'extreme'.
The media decide what is right and what is wrong, forced it on the public, but then it acted as though it was just reporting the reaction of the masses.
So, who says what Romney said about Libya was in 'poor taste'? And who decides Obama always speaks and acts in 'good taste'?
"The bombings will continue until morale improves."
The overthrow of Ghadaffi and our support of the "revolutionaries" is a classic example of an idea that in any rational society would be considered dangerously crackpot, but, in ours, is, for only bad reasons, embraced by all mainstream political points of view.
As insane as was Obama's support for the rise of the revolutionaries, he was only criticized by Republicans for not doing it fast enough.
Point is, there is no one of any influence who is now in a position to condemn Obama for the obvious blunders he made, because they would have only made the same mistakes themselves but with greater gusto.
Thus are we screwed, all of us.
I've been an on and off reader of The American Conservative since 2008, and generally I find a lot to like, including the aesthetics of the new web design; but I'm baffled by Larison, Dreher, and that whole 'blogging' crew over there.
It might be fine to say that TAC isn't trying to be a partisan flak rag, what Auster would call "adreno-cons." Fine, it's a magazine of ideas.
But then, Pat B.'s rolled up his sleeves and made a fist a few times, no? So what's with these guys? It's like they're on freaking laudanum or something.
It's Island of the Obamacon Opium Eaters. Is their moral superiority to movement conservatism so rarefied, they'd rather hold their noses for a socialized, Balkan America than say a kind word for a Republican who might send an actual B-2 to drop a bomb instead of a Predator drone? Bush, McCain, Obama-- hasn't the mission been about the same?
The TAC daily crew are all so of a pulseless piece, I still can't remember which one writes all the entries about how Child Abuse Is Real. I'm sure they'll make for a swell Oakeshott Readers Club in the Kentucky Gulag.
So why, again, are Larison and Galupo going all Journolisty on Romney for this?
Don't ever change, Steve — You have the exactly correct blend of insight, humor, and sarcasm. Linked and commented here:
http://ex-army.blogspot.com/2012/09/winning-blame-game.html
As insane as was Obama's support for the rise of the revolutionaries, he was only criticized by Republicans for not doing it fast enough.
That was cynically opportunistic. The more he dragged his feet, the more they could paint him as weak. But the minute he committed US forces it became his project. Since we didn't really have any reason to be there in the first place, the results can only be bad for the president.
This is what happens when you have a media/academia establishment in love with the European view of human rights - that we're obligated to right every wrong in the world because we have the most guns. I have no problem with an organic revolution to get rid of a bastard like Kadaffi. But it's really not our affair and there wasn't any reason to make it our affair.
Of course, it's up to the media to decide what is and isn't in good or poor taste.
No, this cannot be right. Just ask Whiskey. He will tell you it's all the fault of white women. The media has no influence at all. Their only purpose is to give white women what they demand. Nothing to see here, move along and focus on the white women.
Today from the NYT:
"Russian State TV Claims Exiled Tycoon Behind Pussy Riot"
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/12/film-shown-on-russian-tv-ties-exiled-tycoon-to-pussy-riot/
NYT: Mr. Mamontov also cited a letter said to have been obtained from an aspiring singer whose name is not disclosed “for safety reasons.” The letter describes the young woman’s brief encounter with a recruiter advertising a mysterious Western-financed project about five years ago:
“The project was supposed to appeal to young people in order to use these people for other goals like a herd of fanatics. The clients, it turned out, were some Americans, and they were ready to pay good money. When I wondered if they were afraid of Putin at all, they replied that there’s enough money for a revolution.”
The film also claims that international celebrities are being lavishly paid to publicly support the band, using funds from Mr. Berezovsky funneled through a Britain-based public relations firm.
Anyone know anything about emigrating to Russia?
Funny, I don't remember this sort of thing happening when Gadhafi was running the railroad. Odd, really, that Obama turned on him, it sounds like Gadhafi was all about hope and change.
"The New York Times summed up the West’s objections. “Colonel Gadhafi,” the US newspaper of record said last year, “proved to be a problematic partner for international oil companies, frequently raising fees and taxes and making other demands.”
http://gowans.wordpress.com/2012/05/06/gadhafis-crime-making-libyas-economy-work-for-libyans/
This may seem a dumb question, but how does Israel benefit from creating Islamic fundamentalist regimes all around it? It doesn't seem that Khadafi was very much anti-Israel, well, not as much as the rebels, and not much more than any other Muslim dictator.
It's the neocon puppet masters of Bush and Cheney (and their allies in the media) that support Israel, which is why they dragged America into war with Iraq.
It was Obama who started war with Israel friendly Khadafi and allowed the toppling of Egypt's Israel friendly government. In my opinion Obama is secretly anti-Israel (and the first counterweight America has had to the neocons in decades) which is why I don't buy the argument that he's a puppet for the Jews. They may think they're his puppet masters but obama's smart enough to have his own secret agenda which will emerge more clearly if he gets re-elected. bush and Cheney were puppets; Obama is his own man.
A few people know what Obama is up to and call his foreign policy anti-American. It's actually anti-Israel, but neocons refuse to admit there's a distinction.
This is all classic "nobody ever learns anything" type of story. The whole Arab Spring is yet to backfire in a major way for us.
Has Whiskey's mom punished him for something by cutting off his Internet access?
Its time to get real about oil. No we don't have to go to war with "every" Muslim nation to get it, but we do need to:
1. Dominate the Persian Gulf, US policy since ... FDR.
2. Keep the Russians out, they want EXPENSIVE oil and we want CHEAP oil.
3. Keep a lid on conflicts.
In pursuit of this, we have used Israel as a proxy against Soviet-backed Egypt, Syria (the short-lived United Arab Republic), and have hit Soviet/Russian-backed Iraq numerous times. We've propped up the House of Saud despite their failings and export of Jihad because we need cheap oil.
Cheap oil means dominating the Gulf which in turn means no nukes for Iran. Iranian nukes = US Navy exit, Iran sets the Gulf production, expect oil at close to $200 a barrel. This is the real world, not some abstract Libertardian Randian fantasy.
Israel has not benefited, and has been hurt, by Jihadist/Salafist regimes. Mubarak kept the peace, but Obama's Muslim Brotherhood buddies (Hillary's Huma Abedin, whose entire family is part of the Muslim Brotherhood, and Iranian-born, Farsi speaking Valerie Jarrett come to mind as do Obama's Pakistani leftist billionaire buddies) demanded he go. Morsi and the Brotherhood know they cannot govern or even FEED the nation, so WAR with ISRAEL is a slam-dunk certainty. If nothing else they might win goes the thinking and certainly they will be able to seize control of the military Khomeni style.
Khadaffi was weak, the Salafists got out of hand (mind you because OIL PRICES WERE HIGH and Libya had low production). The "Arab Spring" was a street revolt against food price shocks. Obama should have either installed a friendly dictator, or done nothing at all. Sarkozy wanted Khadaffi gone because he hoped to install on the cheap a friendly guy and figured Khadaffi was gone and feared Khomeni on the Med, basically.
WEAKNESS begets attack. China does not treat Muslims well (it has many). It eats pork and drinks beer all the time. The Chinese routinely mock and ridicule Muslims on microblogs. The Han find Muslims awful and stupid.
No one dares attack the Chinese because no one has any doubt on the ferocity of the response. Muslims are not over-come with love for Israelis, and yet fear of Israeli response has kept general quiet in Jordan, Mubarak's Egypt, and Syria.
There are no "good guys" or "bad guys" in the ME, they're ALL bad. The dictators are brutal and often (Saddam, Khadaffi, some of the UAE guys) unstable to insane. The rebels are bin Laden in waiting. Even worse. ALL are tribal based and the only thing that unites tribes is Muslim hatred of the infidel.
The Arabs fought Arabs very nicely under Ghaddafi, Mubarak et al. That is, those dictators fought the Islamists. For decades. Now that they were (or are being) overthrown, there is a short-term increase in violence. It's strictly temporary. Once the Islamists take over they will quickly and easily put an end to all dissidents. Because they have popular support. Look at Gaza. There was some fighting in the beginning, just after Hamas took over; someone got thrown from the roof. Now, it's total harmony and consensus.
Will the new regimes be weak? Don't count on it. Yes, there will be an initial period of chaos. But the Arabs have a powerful weapon, oil. Yes, I know: they will sell it to us. And we are not supposed to care about what they'd do with all the dollars they get in exchange? That's trillions of eventual wealth in the hands of the guys like those who killed our Ambassador. You think the Saudi support for global jihadism is bad? Just wait until those fake Islamists are replaced with real Al Qaeda. You ain't seen nothing yet.
I don't even know what to say! WTF?!?! I feel like the main character from "Disgraced" when his daughter gets violently raped and beaten by a feral gang of youths, and everyone around him (including the daughter) acts as if the incident was somewhat unpleasant, but nothing to get worked up about.
Did we really apologize to the Libyans for offending them after they murdered our representative there? Really? In "Disgraced", one of the rapists comes back to burglarize the daughter's house and cuts himself in the process. She bandages his hand and asks him if he's okay, as the savage stares at her in contempt and her father in utter horror.
Why are we tip toeing around animals? Why are we validating the convoluted thought process of a savage people? They are too primitive to understand anything but brute force. The word "honor" means something entirely different to them than what it means to us. Unless all of Libya is made to hold its collective breath in fear right about now, they'll do the same thing again and soon. There are only two ways of dealing with feral animals: breaking them and keeping them on a chain or staying far away from them. Why are my leaders pretending that one can maintain a relationship with a cobra even AFTER the cobra has struck?
This is what happens when you have a media/academia establishment in love with the European view of human rights - that we're obligated to right every wrong in the world because we have the most guns.
Well, not to get all technical-y or anything, but it was actually a pack of Canadians who came up with this cockamamy idea (once known as the "White man's burden", it's now got the confusing name "R2P", which sounds like a robot that's wandered off a Lucas sound stage). As a matter of fact, one of 'em, a Harvard professor of all things, tried rather absurdly to become Prime Minister of the joint on the basis of the dubious distinction of cooking up this folly. (Apparently, it never occurred to the idiots pulling the strings in the Liberal Party that flying in their new candidate for PM from Cambridge MA wouldn't go over too well in Canada.)
Anyway, Canadians might like to pretend that they're hono(u)rary members of Europe, but strictly speaking they're North American by geography…
I'll never understand why we take such a personal interest in the countries we buy oil from. I don't ask my gas station attendant if he shares my politics.
We don't buy oil from Egypt...or Lebanon...or Syria...or Somalia...or Yemen...or Afghanistan...or Pakistan--or ISRAEL.
Funny, I don't remember this sort of thing happening when Gadhafi was running the railroad. Odd, really, that Obama turned on him, it sounds like Gadhafi was all about hope and change.
"The New York Times summed up the West’s objections. “Colonel Gadhafi,” the US newspaper of record said last year, “proved to be a problematic partner for international oil companies, frequently raising fees and taxes and making other demands.”
These people are idiots. Islamists who have a keen sense of their superiority over the infidel will likely be even more obstreperous. Cameron, Sarkozy and Obama. The three stooges, but with better threads and nicer hair-dos.
I knew something really bad would happen after General Dempsey snubbed Bibi... The movie was made by a israeli-american... well... what a "surprise".
I was happy he said what he did.
Notice that the media would rather examine, "Should Mitt have said what he did?" rather than asking Obama and Clinton, "Hey, you know, the Muslim Brotherhood run Egypt and no one runs Libya...so like, considering those two things and the third, that we did in Mohammar, and a fourth, it was w9/11, why didn't you guys have our embassies there protected? Why weren't you prepared?
Oh no, you can't expect PRAVA to ask the really important questions.
"Well let me repeat a point that I made earlier today: The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs just called Terry Jones and told him to withdraw his support for the Muhammed film, so that, in one fell swoop, he violated his oath to preserve & defend both the Free Exercise of Religion and the Freedom of the Press."
This is pathetic. It's a well-known Muslim tactic--instill fear--and it works.
That is, it works with wusses.
About Obama and his personality...the iSteve folks were talking earlier of introverts versus extroverts in the Oval. I think Clint Eastwood really does sum up Obama quite accurately:
"'There are two kinds of people in this world,' Eastwood told the mag a month before his 'empty chair' speech at the Republican National Convention. "'I' people and 'we' people. I've always tried to be a 'we' person. I think that our president is an 'I' person. He speaks as though he killed Osama bin Laden himself."
The cycle is again rerun. 9-11 comes around and the Moslems need an excuses to launch symbolic demonstrations and murderous celebratory attacks to commemorate Islam's Great Victory of 9-11-2001, so they seize on a year-old farce of a "movie" as their pretext to remind the Western dhimmis about who does the REAL offending and who does the knee-jerk apologizing. Cue the Western ruling-Media-Pravda-academic elite's predictable finger wagging at us not to "offend" a faux religion of mass-murdering, wife-beating, gay-hanging, apostate-stoning, Jew-hating, smug arrogant bastards; and cue simultaneously the Ikhwan-in-America's press announcements about Moslems being the usual fearful victims of the usual massive Islamophobic "backlash" that's never come. Rinse and repeat until our Western ruling elite force us all into dhimmitude.
Are Democrats really so shameless that will cheerlead for a war that has even fewer national security implications than ones they opposed?
Well yes apparently but then again Republicans are not far behind.
Newt Gingrich,Sarah Palin,Santorum and Huckabee were all supported the Libyan campaign.
My take on a loathsome Middle Eastern dictator is very simple: its the our son of a bitch principle!
Not just SOB but he agreed to be the B in SOB to GWB after 2003 Iraq.
Not quite a friend but an ally nonetheless.Isnt it customary to reward an ally and punish a belligerent?
Apparently not doing the above counts as "smart diplomacy" these days.
Obviously this is not to let Bush off the hook.He had his own version of "hope and change" ..nation building and democracy in illiterate,superstitious,psychotic,tribal and vicious Middle Eastern populations.
It worked about as well as Obama domestic version...
I knew something really bad would happen after General Dempsey snubbed Bibi... The movie was made by a israeli-american... well... what a "surprise"."
oh boy!Here we go....
The cycle is again rerun. 9-11 comes around and the Moslems need an excuses to launch symbolic demonstrations and murderous celebratory attacks to commemorate Islam's Great Victory of 9-11-2001, so they seize on a year-old farce of a "movie" as their pretext to remind the Western dhimmis about who does the REAL offending and who does the knee-jerk apologizing. Cue the Western ruling-Media-Pravda-academic elite's predictable finger wagging at us not to "offend" a faux religion of mass-murdering, wife-beating, gay-hanging, apostate-stoning, Jew-hating, smug arrogant bastards; and cue simultaneously the Ikhwan-in-America's press announcements about Moslems being the usual fearful victims of the usual massive Islamophobic "backlash" that's never come. Rinse and repeat until our Western ruling elite force us all into dhimmitude."
You had this audience until the Jew-hating bit...its best to know your market so you can customize your product accordingly!
re: War Nerd
Talk about a spectacularly mistimed comeback. Nearly as bad as the Simpson's "Islam is a religion of peace" episode right after the Mumbai attacks.
Brecher's an odd duck. On one hand he gets that tribalism, family connections, racial chauvinism and corruption are how the rest of the world(and increasingly the US) operates. On the other hand, Dolan's liberalism doesn't allow him to work out the logical conclusions of what's happening in the US.
re: Carter
At least the Ambassador wasn't taken hostage. Then we would have really had the second coming of Carter.
The biggest victims in all this are the millions of christian arabs in Iraq, Syria and Egypt. They were doing well under the arab nationalist Baath Party, which was founded by a christian arab. Now the secular Baathists are being replaced by the intolerant Islamists.
"There are no "good guys" or "bad guys" in the ME, they're ALL bad"
Whiskey speak truth, although Whiskey probably don't mean what I think he mean.
GP.
jody:
I think Obama couldn't say no to the French and British, given their ongoing participation in our misadventure in Afghanistan. Though that doesn't really explain what we or they thought was going to be gained by killing Gadafi. I wonder if there ever was a coherent reason, or if this was one of those boneheaded ideas that sometimes arises from committees and bureaucracies and takes on a life of its own.
Sam Bacile = "Uncle Sam" Imbecile or "Uncle Sam" Facile. The word, "facile" means "easy".
How we respond depends on who is responsible for the attack and how much the Libyan authorities did or could have done. If the attackers were opponents of the Libyan government, it would be ridiculous to go to war with Libya over it--that would give terrorist groups the world over the ability to make us declare war on their least favorite governments. If the attack was done with the support of the government, it's an act of war, and should be treated as such.
Terrorism and crime are like this--the visceral desire to blow someone up is often a bad impulse--it's more sensible to figure out who is responsible and figure out how to stop them doing it again. That can involve blowing people up or shooting them, but also can involve giving the local government enough information to find and get rid of the attackers for us.
Anonymous Anonymous said...
"Has Whiskey's mom punished him for something by cutting off his Internet access?
9/12/12 8:22 PM
Blogger Whiskey said...
Its time to get real about oil. No we don't have to go to war with "every" Muslim nation to get it, but we do need to:...
When the student is ready, the master will appear.
"Did we really apologize to the Libyans for offending them after they murdered our representative there? Really?"
No. Not Really.
If you need more details, pick up a newspaper.
"At least the Ambassador wasn't taken hostage. Then we would have really had the second coming of Carter."
(gallows humor)
How many days do we have left?
Checked out Drudge today and, oh my goodness, someone has found that Obama said that Mitt shoots first and asks questions later... which is exactly what Carter used to say of Reagan, LOL!!
Hey, Whiskey, 1978 called and they want their talking points back:
Its time to get real about oil. No we don't have to go to war with "every" Muslim nation to get it, but we do need to:
1. Dominate the Persian Gulf, US policy since ... FDR.
2. Keep the Russians out, they want EXPENSIVE oil and we want CHEAP oil.
3. Keep a lid on conflicts.
In pursuit of this, we have used Israel as a proxy . . .
This is 100% crap. Cheap oil is gone and never coming back because of the extra demand from China, India, and etc, both now and especially in the future. The level of demand which would exist at, say $20 or $50 per barrel, is greater than the world can supply even at maximal production in the Middle East. Thus, the price won't be that low.
At > $100 per barrel, the US and Canada are eventually going to be net exporters of oil. Shale oil and tar sands cost $50 per barrel or less to extract. Coal to oil costs less than $50 per barrel. Going forward, we don't need to care about oil from the Middle East.
But the rest of the 1978 talking points are also crap. We do not use Israel as a proxy to keep a lid on anything. Israel has been more or less constantly at war with its neighbors since 1948. You can have a reasonable debate about whether Israel or the US is the biggest cause of instability in the Middle East, but there's no doubt that our policies have been instability-generating.
Poor Mitt. He must feel completely betrayed by all those neo-con and neo-lib pundits. I mean, he did what he was supposed to do. He supported the batshit-crazy policy of overthrowing the regimes in Libya and Egypt. Then, when things inevitably went sour, he criticized Obama for not being batshit-crazy enough.
He's gotta be thinking to himself: isn't this what they want me to do? Oh! Please! Just tell me what I am supposed to do! Would it help if I said this was all caused by not moving the US embassy to Jerusalem?
This may seem a dumb question, but how does Israel benefit from creating Islamic fundamentalist regimes all around it? It doesn't seem that Khadafi was very much anti-Israel, well, not as much as the rebels, and not much more than any other Muslim dictator.
(a) They benefit from the short-term turmoil. These countries are weakened by the transition. Their economic advancement is slowed and their cultural leanings are alienating, both of which mean that their capacity to procure advanced weapons and train their forces in their use is diminished.
(b) In the long-term, people hate islamic fundies, so it makes what would have been Israel's particular little problem everyone's problem.
Cheap oil means dominating the Gulf which in turn means no nukes for Iran. Iranian nukes = US Navy exit, Iran sets the Gulf production, expect oil at close to $200 a barrel. This is the real world, not some abstract Libertardian Randian fantasy.
And we followed your advice to dominate the Gulf and look what it has wrought.
The interventionists want to butt into conflicts, mess things up beyond repair, and then suggest that we need to solve these new problems by even greater intervention.
All these neocons were pushing to oust Saddam, who was a natural opponent of Iran. We stupidly followed their counsel. Now they complain because Iran now seems to have a better strategic position in that their arch enemy is gone and their coreligionists are in power in Iraq.
They couldn't leave well enough alone in Egypt, Libya and Syria either. To make their project more palatable to the center and left, they dressed it up in drag and called it 'spreading democracy'. They even came up with catchy slogans such as, "no two democracies have ever gone to war".
Of course spreading democracy had nothing to do with it. It was just a way to market their strategy. After all, whoever is against spreading democracy must be an unpatriotic conservative.
Of course the real patriots, that is Pat Buchanan to you whiskey, predicted all along what was going to happen. They were right on Iraq and they were right on Egypt, Libya, Syria. To paraphrase Buchanan, how many times do these guys have to be wrong before people stop listening to them?
If the neocons truly believe in their democracy cult, maybe that is why they have no problem with mass immigration. To them people are apparently unimportant so long as they have the glorius institution of democracy. So importing millions of third worlders year after year will have no forseeable problems since we already have a 200-plus-year-old established democracy to mold them. What could go wrong?
"It's not that there's no right or wrong here. There's no right"
Hillary Clinton should resign as her incompetence has become very glaring at this point. She always was in over her head but covered herself with glitzy sounding r2p rhetoric along with human rights pretensions. She can take her girlfriend with her, the foreign mole Huma.
Obama met Gaddafi in person and shook his hand, then later signed off on having him killed. What does that tell you about his morality?It's like that of a mafia don.
The riots seem to be getting fanned from behind in an organized way so there seems to be some goal that they have in mind. All this brings to mind our current involvement in organizing and supplying the atrocious rebels of Syria. Another great foreign policy brainstorm?
81 comments about US foreign policy in the Arab world and only two comments even mention the Saudis (and one was Whiskey's, so no one read it).
"'I' people and 'we' people. I've always tried to be a 'we' person."
--------------
Funny words coming from a libertarian who supports 'gay marriage'.
"Anyone know anything about emigrating to Russia?"
Russia be a hellhole overrun with crime and corruption. Trust me, I done have lots of people over there sending me news all the time.
When Obama attacked Bush's foreign policy: brilliant and forceful.
When Romney attacks Obama's foreign policy: poor taste.
So says the 'consensus' in the media... that is 95% liberal.
Back in the old days, we'd just bombard the coast more or less randomly.
The idea was that the local authorities not being in control of the rabble wasn't an excuse.
Want this not to happen again? Let a few cruise missiles fly from the USS Plenty More Where That Came From to homes/palaces/offices of people claiming to be nominally in charge or influential in Libya.
Even if it doesn't prevent another incident, it will make us feel a lot better about ourselves...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlz3-OzcExI
Hahahahahaha. So funny.
"Now the secular Baathists are being replaced by the intolerant Islamists."
BY THE RIGHTFUL MAJORITY. WE NEED TO RISE UP TO AND OVERTHROW THE HOSTILE MINORITY ELITES THAT ARE RULING OVER US.
Are Democrats really so shameless that will cheerlead for a war that has even fewer national security implications than ones they opposed?
I guess you need to be reminded of this.
In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better.
It's not a matter of being shameless, it's all about having the power to make you say that you see five lights when there are only four. It's about the sincere belief that reality is whatever the party apparatus says it is.
The left is a mass psychosis.
Why do we even have embassies in many of these countries? An embassy is nothing but a conduit through which meddlesome advice and busybodying flows out, and immigrants flow in, and we certainly don't want these people to immigrate. Nor should we be meddling in their affairs.
Slash the State Department's budget, close half of the embassies and reduce the staff at the ones that remain.
WEAKNESS begets attack. China does not treat Muslims well (it has many). It eats pork and drinks beer all the time. The Chinese routinely mock and ridicule Muslims on microblogs. The Han find Muslims awful and stupid.
No they don't. The Hui Muslims have a long history in China and in service to the government.
You should stick to bloviating about the Mideast. You don't need to add yet another topic to the things you know nothing about.
"Military-industrial complexes don't run on sugar and spice and everything nice; they run on O. I. L."
As do the stomaches of Middle Easterners (indirectly, of course). They don't make shit over there. I think I own some underwears made in the Mid East. Not much else. The only thing they have to pay the bills with is their oil. If they don't sell that, what the hell else are they gunna sell?
"That media tailwind must be worth at least 5 points in the polls for Obama. Unreal."
Seriously. Had I the time, I'd be keeping score of all the Obama-related headlines from any given outlet vs. all the Romney ones. Even the pretense of objectivity is gone.
Imagine a US president providing military support for Ayatollah Khomeini and his partisans in Iran in '79, on the pretext that the Shah was an Enemy of Democracy.
"Fuck the Shah" didn't help.
"My first thought was 'Terry Jones is making a movie about the life of Mohammed? I'd love to see that!'."
That Terry Jones was actually involved in a BBC documentary on the Crusades that was (supposedly) very one sided, in a Christians bad/Muslims good kinda way.
"[Jews] may think they're his puppet masters but obama's smart enough to have his own secret agenda"
Even dumb people can have secret agendas. It ain't that hard.
"The movie was made by a israeli-american... well... what a "surprise"."
Don't worry. The BBC have tracked down the perpetrator of this crime against "the Prophet Mohammad" (as they ALWAYS refer to him) - and he's a naturalised Egyptian Copt. They've named him and the small CA town he lives in.
Nice work, BBC!
OT, but Ben Bernanke just proved once and for all, in case anyone had any doubt, that he's clueless.
"Did we really apologize to the Libyans for offending them after they murdered our representative there? Really? In "Disgraced", one of the rapists comes back to burglarize the daughter's house and cuts himself in the process. She bandages his hand and asks him if he's okay, as the savage stares at her in contempt and her father in utter horror."
Yes, we essentially apologized for our First Amendment.
Hey, Romney ought to blast Obama and Clinton for not speaking out against the Broadway smash "The Book of Mormon."
After all, it ridicules a faith.
Maybe I missed it, but I've not heard them speak out about "entertainment" that's in such bad taste, have you?
Has the media pointed out the bad taste of the musical?
I didn't think so.
Man. Take away those drones from Obama, and you realize he has no policy, just "words."
Are we in a "War of Terror"? The answer from history is no - not quite yet.
When did WWII start? Let's ignore for now the Japanese. The conventional answer is with Hitler's invasion of Poland. That of course was not when Hitler had begun his provocations. He had been bullying and invading his neighbors long before. Poland was when the West finally responded.
We have yet to respond to the Islamic terrorist provocations - but we will. It is all so obvious. The agressors set the agenda. Hitler began invading his neighbors. For a long time the West tried to ignore it. Chamberlain is the leader most associated in history with this policy, but most of the West didn't want to face up to the Hitler problem either.
Hitler initiated the invasions but eventually the West reluctantly, in order to survive, had to respond exactly in kind. We invaded Europe. In the East. Hitler had invaded Russia and then Russia invaded Germany. We will respond to terror with terror too. No choice.
Before the war everyone was afraid of what was considered the ultimate atrocity - bombing civilian cities from the air. In the Battle of Brittain the Germans initiated bombing London, if only by accident. Soon the Nazis bombed London for real. The civilized and pacifistic Western democracies soon found themselves responding with Dresden and Hiroshima.
We are being pushed into a War of Terror. We have yet to respond appropriately with our own terror - but we will. The good news is that we will surely win. The 9/11 attacks were indiscriminate murder from the air. America is well equipt for that kind of war. We have the planes, the drones, and the bombs.
We know the that war has yet to begin because we are still cogitating over attacks. That is not warlike behavior. In a war, when you are bombed you bomb back reflexively.
Most of the 9/11 attackers were from Saudi Arabia. A true warlike response would have been to nuke Riyadh. At the time such a response was unthinkable, but as events pile up such a response begins to emerge as a consideration.
There are a billion and a half Muslims in the world. One day soon the reaction of Americans to that number will be - "Good! A target rich environment". Just as the delicate sensibilities of Westerners in the thirties could never have imagined the fire bombing of Dresden, they changed their attitudes and we will change ours too. We don't want to of course. We are really nice people, but we are being driven to such extremes. The Muslims are escalating their provocations. At some point we will not analyze and debate the death of our ambassador we will just drop a tactical nuke.
I'm not the only one who has figured out that Anthrax would be an effective weapon in Afganistan. But we are still in the period when such ideas are unthinkable. Just wait.
In regards to our use of nuclear bombs and biological agents, I don't advocate - I predict.
Albertosaurus
---> Dr Van Nostrand:
My comment had nothing to do with this "market" or with what you claim to be a prejudice of its constituents: it merely contained the truth, which is found in plain words in the koran and in Moslems' own behavior, that Moslems are "Jew-hating." No matter how inconvenient one may apprehend them to be, facts be facts. It is ignorance - most often the deliberate ignorance - of screamingly obvious facts which has brought the United States to its present sorry condition in which evasion of facts and apologetics contrived to evade facts have become what Orwell, with uncommon accuracy, characterized thusly: "“At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question.”
To omit "Jew-hating" from the content of Islamic dogma and from direct observation of Moslems'self-avowed behavior amounts to a self-deception of the sort which I strive rigorously to abjure, lest I should fall prey to the prevailing suicidal orthodoxy of our Western ruling class-Media-Pravda-academic elite - or, indeed, to baldfaced anti-semitism based on whichever pretext one might care to name.
Jesus, Secretary of State Clinton is still carrying out the Carter-Obama Doctrine of Groveling.
She should say, "We have a 1st Amendment in the US. It protects US citizens, non-citizens, everyone...and there are those that attack Christianity incessantly, those that attack everything...but we don't kill because of their free speech. And that's the last time we'll speak of this because it's not an issue. Period."
The emerging consensus
Ten out of ten Democrat's in the media agree that Romney is a big poo-poo head. That's consensus for you!
Is Albertosaurus a Whiskey sock-puppet? The similarities between the two are quite striking.
Dahlia:
After Carter's example, no president will ever sit around hoping to negotiate hostages back from a hostile power for more than a couple days. I wouldn't be surprised to see such a thing lead us into a war that didn't make much sense otherwise (not like that's rare for us), simply because no president *ever* wants to have that "Hostage Crisis: Day 183" hanging over his head again. IIRC, in the first Gulf war, Saddam had US hostages, and Bush Sr sensibly just warned Iraq that killing them would prove expensive, and then went ahead with what he was going to do anyway. That's the best possible strategy for the' well-being of potential hostages, since it means there's not much payoff for taking them, but it probably decreases the current hostages' life expectancy.
A big problem with responding to terrorist attacks is that it's often politically really hard not to respond in some visible and spectacular way. And yet, doing so means that anyone who can get a couple dozen goons together to attack the US can force us to do stuff, like bombing a regime they don't like or invading somewhere we don't want to invade or whatever.
The Hui Muslims have a long history in China and in service to the government.
Most americans have no idea that China has 20-30 million muslims. Thats far more than the Anglosphere and the European Union combined.
They also are not aware that Russia has 15-20 million muslims. Also more than the entire West.
India has over 150 million muslims, its largest minority.
Subsaharan Africa has ~200 million muslims.
Southeast Asia has 240 million....
The American Continent, North and South, has the fewest muslims by proportion of any major zone on Earth.
Anon. 9/13/12 2:48 PM said:
>Is Albertosaurus a Whiskey sock-puppet? The similarities between the two are quite striking.<
Both are entertaining fabulists. Fact-check them sometime.
pat:
What color is the sky in your world? In ours, the US invaded and bombed the shit out of Iraq and Afghanistan, and has been blowing people up, raiding homes, holding down territory, training local auxillaries, and generally playing high tech imperial power since 9/11. We've been running these odd sorta-covert wars in Yemen and Pakistan for several years now. We only pulled out of Iraq (which had nothing at all to do with the 9/11 attack, since Al Qaida was not remotely able to operate in places where Saddam's secret police were keeping an eye on things) a couple years ago. We've been in Afghanistan for over a decade.
It is possible that high-tech terrorism by bomber and missile would be more effective than what we've done, but I doubt it. First, because the Soviets in Afghanistan were bloody and brutal as hell, and this didn't work out all that well for them. Second, because Arab and Muslim nations often don't much like each other, and so (for example) the Iranians would find us bombing Riyahd a welcome development. Third, because so far, our bloodier and more brutal actions have probably mainly served to help Al Qaida's recruiing and fundraising. Fourth, because sufficient crazy brutality from the US would quickly scare the shit out of the other industrial powers. My guess is that nuking someone to make an example after a 9/11 scale terrorist attack means that about five years later, there are a couple dozen new members of the nuclear club and a big arms buildup all over the world. (Do you imagine Germany, Japan, South Korea, or Australia would have the slightest problem developing nukes of their own? North Korea managed it, and they can barely keep the damn lights on.)
Sam Bacile = Some Imbecile.
Anon 3:01:
Yep. In domestic politics, US foreign policy debates take place in a world of cartoon physics and unknowing ignorance. The presidential candidates and other top-tier politicians are surely better informed than this, and they have genuine experts as advisors, but they still have to play to the cartoon-physics worldview of the voters. And this is true all across the board of issues.
Partly, that's our broken media, who even when they seem to be informing people are providing crappy information and lots of crappy entertainment disguised as information. Partly, it's just honest inability and lack of interest on the part of the average voter, who in truth neither knows nor cares where Libya, Iran, Afghanistan, or any number of other countries is, or what might be going on there.
"Before the war everyone was afraid of what was considered the ultimate atrocity - bombing civilian cities from the air. In the Battle of Brittain the Germans initiated bombing London, if only by accident. Soon the Nazis bombed London for real. The civilized and pacifistic Western democracies soon found themselves responding with Dresden and Hiroshima."
hehe albertosaurus, you so funny.
"Though that doesn't really explain what we or they thought was going to be gained by killing Gadafi. I wonder if there ever was a coherent reason, or if this was one of those boneheaded ideas that sometimes arises from committees and bureaucracies and takes on a life of its own."
I was never able to verify this, but I've read that some of the French elites (including Sarkozy)were largely indebted to the Gaddafi clan via various enterprises and investments. Sounds like a long shot, but, hey, at least this would make the last year's war a little less random.
anonymous: Careful, Steve. This deviationist thought will get you denounced as a dishonest PRO-ROMNEY SHILL!!!! by the good folks at American Conservative (see Larison, Dan)
9/12/12 5:04 PM
Lucius: I've been an on and off reader of The American Conservative since 2008, and generally I find a lot to like, including the aesthetics of the new web design; but I'm baffled by Larison, Dreher, and that whole 'blogging' crew over there.
... It's Island of the Obamacon Opium Eaters. Is their moral superiority to movement conservatism so rarefied, they'd rather hold their noses for a socialized, Balkan America than say a kind word for a Republican who might send an actual B-2 to drop a bomb instead of a Predator drone? Bush, McCain, Obama-- hasn't the mission been about the same?
... So why, again, are Larison and Galupo going all Journolisty on Romney for this?
9/12/12 6:55 PM
I'm glad others have noticed the weirdness at TAC. These days I find myself going there not to learn but to see what contortions they get into defending Obama and to witness how anally retentive they can be in their criticism of Republicans and conservatives. How many 10000 word critical analyses can Larison write about throw away remarks by irrelevant Republican functionaries? What explains these people: Aspergers? Madness due to daily analysis trying to make sense of neoconservatism? Bitterness due to their irrelevance within conservatism? A desire to be liked by liberals and maybe invited onto MSNBC? Or maybe just instructions from a certain proprietor of TAC who pays them?
The American Continent, North and South, has the fewest muslims by proportion of any major zone on Earth.
Like to keep it that way, myself.
"The media is going to do everything it can to turn Mitt Romney into Mark Fuhrman."
Yep, they already have, but if you're one of the millions of people who watch NBC, you'll never know better.
I think R&R should be up front in each of the three debates. In opening remarks, Romney and Ryan should greet "my worthy opponents, Mr. Obama and the working press."
Every answer that points out a negative about Barry should point out the same about the press.
And.....R&R need to name names. ONly naming names will do any good.
The most interesting things about this whole Libya affair to me are:
1) - The US MSM's lack of interest in the actual details of the Benghazi attack
2) - The same media's lack of interest in re-examining the US/NATO attack on Libya and its possible relevance to this week's events
3) The gap between what US liberals say to offended Muslims and offended Russian Christians (think Pussy Riot). Muslims: we are as offended as you are. Russian Orthodox: it was a harmless protest so get over it! Free Pussy Riot!
"'I' people and 'we' people. I've always tried to be a 'we' person."
--------------
Funny words coming from a libertarian who supports 'gay marriage'.
_________________________
Not so funny. As an actor and a director, Eastwood is respected for his collaborative abilities. He sees what a lot of us saw from the beginning as a character trait in Obama--there is no such desire to work collaboratively.
There are people who actually enjoy team sports more than individual sports because of the feeling of comraderie and joint success. That is not to say that those who engage in individual sports and do well are somehow less worthy of praise for their achievements. However, one who wishes that comraderie will not find it in singles tennis and those who prefer working alone will not enjoy football or baseball, esp. if he's called on to sacrifice insteand of swinging away.
The Presidency isn't a monarchy. It seems reasonable that the person who is most likely to be suited for it is one who enjoys working with others... or at least one who doesn't hate the process of doing so.
How many 10000 word critical analyses can Larison write about throw away remarks by irrelevant Republican functionaries? What explains these people: Aspergers? Madness due to daily analysis trying to make sense of neoconservatism? Bitterness due to their irrelevance within conservatism? A desire to be liked by liberals and maybe invited onto MSNBC?
A desire to remain employed by Ron Unz.
"The only thing they have to pay the bills with is their oil. If they don't sell that, what the hell else are they gunna sell?"
The problem with this view:
If they sell less oil, the price goes up! They make just as much money and we get screwed.
vid. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_oil_crisis
And even if they make slightly less money in the short run, well, a few Saudi princes don't get a few extra ivory backscratchers, but what happens to our economy when gas is $5+ a gallon?
The gap between what US liberals say to offended Muslims and offended Russian Christians (think Pussy Riot). Muslims: we are as offended as you are. Russian Orthodox: it was a harmless protest so get over it! Free Pussy Riot!
As Glenn Reynolds keeps saying, you get more of what you reward. I won't be the slightest bit surprised if we start seeing Christian extremist groups bombing places and rioting just like the Muslims.
If they sell less oil, the price goes up! They make just as much money and we get screwed.
The problem with that view:
If we're going to go to war with Arab countries for oil, then let's go to war with Arab countries for oil. Let's invade, occupy, and keep the oil for ourselves.
But that's not what we're doing. We're having the wars with the Arab countries, just as you want us to, but those wars have jack to do with oil.
So why are we having those wars again?
"As Glenn Reynolds keeps saying, you get more of what you reward. I won't be the slightest bit surprised if we start seeing Christian extremist groups bombing places and rioting just like the Muslims."
Yeah, I'd build a bomb shelter if I were you. Maybe you still have one since the threat of the pogroms that were supposed to follow the release of The Passion of The Christ.
To omit "Jew-hating" from the content of Islamic dogma and from direct observation of Moslems'self-avowed behavior amounts to a self-deception of the sort which I strive rigorously to abjure, lest I should fall prey to the prevailing suicidal orthodoxy of our Western ruling class-Media-Pravda-academic elite - or, indeed, to baldfaced anti-semitism based on whichever pretext one might care to name.
I have no doubt there is some Jew-hating along with Christian-hating and hating of anyone not a muslim. But, the Jew-hating we see has more to do with the fact that modern Israel exists.
muslims had no problem getting along with jews when they were using them to administer and run captured Christian lands such as Spain and the Balkans. In fact, God forbid, if the muslims were ever able to take control of the USA, I am sure they'd take full advantage of our jews to help ensure things were kept running.
But modern Israel is different. To muslims this is as if the Christians are using Jews to occupy a muslim land. Israel is an outpost of the West in the heart of the Ummah. And that is something they cannot stand and accounts for much of the Jew-hating we see. If Israel did not exist as a Jewish state, I doubt Jews would be the objects of much muslim hate.
The big, ongoing struggle has always been between Christians, or their successors in the West, and muslims. Jews have just been middlemen that have played for both sides. When they allied with the muslims, the Christians hated them and expelled them from Spain. Now that they ally with the West in creating modern Israel, the muslims hate them and want to expel them from the Mideast.
The best response to current events in Libya and Egypt is to stop all Muslim immigration to North America.
Mohammedans already here should be encouraged to self-deport themselves.
The best response to current events in Libya and Egypt is to stop all Muslim immigration to North America.
Mohammedans already here should be encouraged to self-deport themselves.
The whole neocon/liberal establishment needs to crumble for this to happen.
"David Davenport said...
The best response to current events in Libya and Egypt is to stop all Muslim immigration to North America.
Mohammedans already here should be encouraged to self-deport themselves."
Here, here. They already have their own nations. We should be left to ours. And I care not a whit which despot ends up ruling them.
The big, ongoing struggle has always been between Christians, or their successors in the West, and muslims. Jews have just been middlemen that have played for both sides. When they allied with the muslims, the Christians hated them and expelled them from Spain.Now that they ally with the West in creating modern Israel, the muslims hate them and want to expel them from the Mideast.
1. Islam was completely wiped out in Spain, Portugal, Sicily etc, while Christians continued to be tolerated in the Ummah. That was a big difference.
2. Christian Arabs were anti-Israel as well. And they were thrown under the bus by western christians.
Christians predated muslims in muslim lands, while muslims were invasive in Christian lands. So it is not exactly the same thing.
True. But greco=roman, celtic, nordic paganism predated christianity in Europe and was wiped out as well.
And while christendom turned its back on pagan greek philosophy, the muslims embraced it....
The big difference is that while the West eventually had its Enlightenment, which kicked the Bible and Church off its pedestal and replaced it with Reason and Science, the Ummah is still stuck with the Koran and Sharia.
I don't quite get the responses to my post this morning. David accuses me of making up fables and advises that I be fact checked. Please, be my guest. Everything I wrote about WWII is I believe a mainstream account. I was worried that I would be too repetitive by writing again about events that are so well known. Maybe some out there really didn't know that between the wars, public officials were horrified at the prospect on the bombing of cities.
Another person seems to think that we have been wholeheartedly engaged to date in our fight against Muslim terrorism. That's a judgement and my judgement may be faulty, but it seems to me that our responses thus far to Muslim terror have been very circumspect. Else why do inconvenience our airplane passengers while we have yet to put all Muslims in internment camps? That's another bit of WWII history that seems to have been forgotten. Almost every Allied offensive against the Nazis was vastly more intense than any of our actions recently against the Muslims.
The parallels to the run up to WWII seem glaring to me. Disagree if you like but please don't call me "whiskey".
Albertosaurus
I think the pro-Israel thing is only part of the picture. The other half is the warfare state. The Israel lobby and the defense industry were made for each other. The Israel lobby terrorizes the libtards and the media, and the defense industry keeps the world safe for Isr- er, democracy.
Are Democrats really so shameless that
The answer to this is "yes." It doesn't matter how you end the sentence, the answer is always "yes."
pat said...
I don't quite get the responses to my post this morning.
That's pretty hard to believe because you don't seem stupid. The account you gave could have come out of a middle school social studies book or the mouth of John Podhoretz, not that there is a difference.
First, you compare Hitler's Germany, the most powerful country in Europe at the time, to a bunch of silly, disorganized, incompetent, geographically remote, cave-dwelling, goat-fuckers. Islam is overwhelmingly, pathetically weak. They are not a threat, at all. All we need to do is stop importing them, and we will be perfectly safe.
Second, your account of strategic bombing in WWII is both false and morally repugnant. Intentional bombing of civilians was begun by the British. Furthermore, they were so insanely bloodthirsty about it that even the Americans thought they were a bit off.
The attempt to blame grotesque war crimes like Dresden and Hiroshima on their prostrate victims is revolting.
And this:
We have yet to respond to the Islamic terrorist provocations
Simply bizarre. We have fought or are fighting wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, likely Syria, Yemen, Pakistan, and other places. The sheer scale of this incompetent overreaction is mind-boggling.
You sound, in that comment, like a complete lunatic, like Whiskey.
It seems most of the rioting is happening in Arab Spring nations whereas. Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, etc. I wonder if Gadfly would have kept a lid on things if he was still in power.
Well, if we want people to rise up, they sure are rising up. And who's to say they must only rise up against the likes of Mubarack and Gadfly? Why shouldn't they rise up against the US too?
Btw, is Hillary gonna condemn Sarah Silverman and Larry David for their disgusting and insulting expression?
Or what about Israel TV that airs stuff like this?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ma4zgSXpFgE
If someone made a movie mocking the Holocaust or Anne Frank, there would be plenty of liberals who will call for the person to be prosecuted, fined, and imprisoned.
And if someone made a movie making fun of Michael King, aka Martin L. King, he would be drummed out of Hollywood--more so that communist writers in the 1950s--, blacks might even riot, and there would be hell to pay.
We are not so different from Muslims. We just have different gods. Jesus is no longer all that sacred in the West. But gays, MLK, and Holocaustianity are.
I have a great idea. Get the Muslim rioters together with Pussy Riot.
"It is worth noting that centuries before Islam came to Egypt, from what is now Saudi Arabia, the religious fanatics in Roman Egypt were christians. They persecuted the greco-roman pagans, burned down their center of learning, the Library of Alexandria, brutally killed their leading light, one of the greatest women in history, Hypatia, and set the example for centuries of religious intolerance and fanaticism in the West...."
Yes, Christians take great pride in these alleged acts, they are unwavering in their support of them, unlike modern israeli politians' disavowal of Jonathan Pollard for his spying.
If Pussy Riot had performed similar acts in a synagog in one of a few Western European countries, they could be subject to hate crimes prosecution. I don't know how severe the punishment would be, except for lifetime unemployment.
"the religious fanatics in Roman Egypt were christians. They persecuted the greco-roman pagans, burned down their center of learning, the Library of Alexandria, brutally killed their leading light, one of the greatest women in history, Hypatia, and set the example for centuries of religious intolerance and fanaticism in the West...."
some people need to google hypatia myth. While at it, also read about the 'dark' ages.
http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2010/06/the-perniciously-persistent-myths-of-hypatia-and-the-great-library
http://armariummagnus.blogspot.com/2009/05/agora-and-hypatia-hollywood-strikes.html
"
She was, all the evidence suggests, a brilliant lecturer in Platonic thought, a trained scientist, and the author of a few mathematical commentaries. Despite the extravagant claims often made on her behalf, however, there is no reason to believe she made any particularly significant contributions to any of her fields of expertise.
She was not, for instance—as she has often been said to have been—the inventor of either the astrolabe or the hydrometer. It is true that the first extant mention of a hydrometer appears in a letter written to Hypatia by her devoted friend, Synesius of Cyrene, the Christian Platonist and bishop of Ptolemais; but that is because Synesius, in that letter, is explaining to her how the device is made, so that she can arrange to have one assembled for him."
So an ancient Ada Lovelace.
"If you had asked me at the age of 15 that's certainly what I would have told you, since I had heard of Hypatia largely thanks to astronomer Carl Sagan's TV series and book Cosmos...
After describing the glories of the Great Library of Alexandria, he introduces Hypatia as its "last scientist". He then notes that the Roman Empire was in crisis in her time and that "slavery had sapped ancient civilisation of its vitality"; which is an odd comment since the ancient world had always been based on slavery, making it hard to see why this institution would suddenly begin to "sap" it of "vitality" in the Fifth Century. "
like an atheistic santa claus.
oh yeah the library part too:
"The tale of a Christian destruction of the Great Library—so often told, so perniciously persistent—is a tale about something that never happened. By this, I do not mean that there is some divergence of learned opinion on the issue, or that the original sources leave us in some doubt as to the nature of the event. I mean that nothing of the sort ever occurred."
Who Really Killed the Pax Romana?
The idea that Islam was the primary cause for the end of classical civilization has been out of favor for the last eighty years or so, ever since the Belgian historian Henri Pirenne first proposed it in his ground-breaking book Mohammed and Charlemagne.
In Pirenne’s time it was commonly understood — and still is — that the end of civilization began in the fifth century with the fall of Rome and the barbarian invasions, a full two hundred years before the legions of Mohammed raged across the eastern and southern littorals of the Mediterranean. According to the scholarly consensus, Roman civilization was already moribund by the time the Arabs arrived on the scene, and the Islamic incursion simply tipped the last vestiges of it into oblivion.
Using recent archaeological data, Pirenne concluded that classical civilization did not end in the fifth century, but rather in the seventh, when the fragments of the later Roman Empire were overrun by the Arab invaders. The Islamic predators terminated civilization wherever they encountered it, in whatever form it happened to take.
Can i not say the words "Jewish lobby"? My comments never get posted when i say that?
@Bill:
Good post. Well said.
"which is an odd comment since the ancient world had always been based on slavery"
Rome was initially a republic of citizen farmers. The elite imported slaves to work on their estates, put the citizen farmers out of business, bought up their farms and turned the combined land into giant slave plantations. The dispossessed citizens drifted to Rome where they were kept quiet through the original bread and circuses.
The more things change the more they stay the same.
.
"the religious fanatics in Roman Egypt were christians"
You seem to have missed a step.
For a very long time Christians were subject to extremely savage persecution - including being killed in very nasty ways in the arena - partly as a result of certain people who had a strong dislike of Christianity spreading blood libels that communion involved actual cannibalism.
The more things change the more they stay the same.
It is worth noting that centuries before Islam came to Egypt, from what is now Saudi Arabia, the religious fanatics in Roman Egypt were christians. They persecuted the greco-roman pagans, burned down their center of learning, the Library of Alexandria, brutally killed their leading light, one of the greatest women in history, Hypatia, and set the example for centuries of religious intolerance and fanaticism in the West....
It's worth noting that religious fanaticism really made its bones with Judaism. Historical examples abound.
zealot (n.)
c.1300, "member of a militant 1st century Jewish sect which fiercely resisted the Romans in Palestine," from L.L. Zelotes, from Gk. zelotes "one who is a zealous follower," from zeloun "to be zealous," from zelos "zeal" (see zeal). Extended sense of "a fanatical enthusiast" first recorded 1630s.
Not sure if these are the folks who burned themselves (mostly women and children at that point) alive in their fortress rather than convert (I do know they're still idolized by their descendants).
The whole "chosen people of G-d" thing is a big clue. I mean, they executed Jesus for practicing his false religion, didn't they?
There's also the HBD angle; a preponderance of the world's biggest nuts seem to be of western Asian origin.
The idea that Islam was the primary cause for the end of classical civilization has been out of favor for the last eighty years or so, ever since the Belgian historian Henri Pirenne first proposed it in his ground-breaking book Mohammed and Charlemagne.
In Pirenne’s time it was commonly understood — and still is — that the end of civilization began in the fifth century with the fall of Rome and the barbarian invasions, a full two hundred years before the legions of Mohammed raged across the eastern and southern littorals of the Mediterranean. According to the scholarly consensus, Roman civilization was already moribund by the time the Arabs arrived on the scene, and the Islamic incursion simply tipped the last vestiges of it into oblivion.
Using recent archaeological data, Pirenne concluded that classical civilization did not end in the fifth century, but rather in the seventh, when the fragments of the later Roman Empire were overrun by the Arab invaders. The Islamic predators terminated civilization wherever they encountered it, in whatever form it happened to take.
Wait, so, western academia pretends the eastern empire didn't exist so they won't have to admit that Muslims put it in its grave?
"It is worth noting that centuries before Islam came to Egypt, from what is now Saudi Arabia, the religious fanatics in Roman Egypt were christians. They persecuted the greco-roman pagans, burned down their center of learning, the Library of Alexandria, brutally killed their leading light, one of the greatest women in history, Hypatia, and set the example for centuries of religious intolerance and fanaticism in the West...."
Yes, Christians take great pride in these alleged acts, they are unwavering in their support of them, unlike modern israeli politians' disavowal of Jonathan Pollard for his spying.
There's the problem with Christians; they say "we ain't proud of it" when they should be saying "they were WOGs for God's sake!"
Also, your diction is telling; "Christians" and "Greco-Roman" should be capitalized, while "west" need not be. Neokahnservative?
There's the problem with Christians; they say "we ain't proud of it" when they should be saying "they were WOGs for God's sake!"
FYI, Christianity is a WOG religion that took shape in what is now the middle-east: in Israel, Egypt, Syria, Algeria, Turkey...
The Italians who started controlling it after Constantine made it the state religion of the Roman Empire were themselves wogs. It must burn you up no end to think that the christian wogs persecuted your human sacrificing ancestors and ended their barbaric celtic, nordic religions for good. Right?
The more things change the more they stay the same.
I can imagine a Roman equivalent of Archie Bunker or Joe Curran whining about weak decadent youth abandoning the temples of their forefathers for some crazy communist beatnik guru from the Evil East.
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