Beneath the dignity of the Office of the President

[chemisttree]

Maybe you should read my post and the link I provided before responding and so save us both a lot of wasted time. Bush never mentioned Ayman Nour.

Art, we know what you posted. The story you posted clearly identifies Nour as the reference Bush intended. YOU are re-interpreting his meaning to mean the Muslim Brotherhood as the main opposition party in Bush's statement. This is factually incorrect since the MB cannot legitimately hold office in Egypt since it is an outlawed organization. It cannot be an opposition party by definition (in Egypt).

You are correct in saying that the MB 'secret' members might run as Independents but what is your source of information for that statement? Can such as statement be proven?

 

[mheslep]

So if we hate a person enough, it's OK to subvert our Constitution and lock them up -- with no due process?

Strawman, and a silly one.

 

[lisab]

Strawman, and a silly one.

I wish. In fact, it's exactly what we've done.

 

[Art]

Art, we know what you posted. The story you posted clearly identifies Nour as the reference Bush intended. YOU are re-interpreting his meaning to mean the Muslim Brotherhood as the main opposition party in Bush's statement. This is factually incorrect since the MB cannot legitimately hold office in Egypt since it is an outlawed organization. It cannot be an opposition party by definition (in Egypt).

You are correct in saying that the MB 'secret' members might run as Independents but what is your source of information for that statement? Can such as statement be proven?

The author covering the story interpreted it as a swipe at Egypt about Nour however as I pointed out Bush didn't specify what he was talking about (and probably didn't know himself as it seems unlikely his speech writers would bother trying to explain it to his limited intellect) but regardless the point remains you can't only support the non-oppression of opposition parties when they happen to agree with your world view. At least not if you want to be considered sane and reasonable. Democracy is about choice but democracy based on a choice of agree with me or else isn't exactly what it's supposed to be all about.

As for your contention the MB cannot hold seats in Egypt, well they actually do so you are factually wrong. They cannot run under the MB flag but they make no secret of their affiliation. You can even read about them on their English language website http://www.ikhwanweb.com/SectionsPage.asp?SectionID=67

 

[mheslep]

I wish. In fact, it's exactly what we've done.

Regardless of what you think has been done, equivocating my statement w/ some distortion of it so that it appears false is still a strawman:

wiki

1. Person A has position X.
2. Person B ignores X and instead presents position Y. Y is a distorted version of X and can be set up in several ways, including:
3. Person B attacks position Y.
4. Person B draws a conclusion that X is false/incorrect/flawed.

 

[mheslep]

...It's probably also worth noting these suspected 'combatants' held in Guantanamo were largely picked up in their native country fighting against an invading army on behalf of their legitimate (at that time) government.

Art, simply, no they are largely not natives. Theywere the invaders. Of the ~500 detainees, they're largely Saudi, Yemeni, Pakistani, Morrocan, Algerian, Jordanian, etc, etc. There are also ~50 some Afghans, most of whom have now been released, but I don't hold that the Taliban was a legitimate anything.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/nationalsecurity/gitmoarchive.html

 

[turbo]

The Taliban were made up of groups that were actively recruited by the US, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to fight the Soviets in a proxy war. It wasn't until the Taliban began to persecute Afghanis (especially women) with a very restrictive form of sharia that the US broke with them. Short-term political convenience breeds some very nasty, messy, alliances.

Many of the people in Gitmo were turned in for bounties, and have been held for years with no charges and no access to legal defense. Many of those people may be Muslim fundamentalists and some of them may in fact be guilty of crimes, but the fact that the US government has not been able to make cogent legal cases against them argues against that.

 

[quadraphonics]

Many of those people may be Muslim fundamentalists and some of them may in fact be guilty of crimes, but the fact that the US government has not been able to make cogent legal cases against them argues against that.

Not that I have any urge to defend Guantanamo, but the difficulty in making cases has more to do with the inadmissability of the evidence against these guys than it does with their actual guilt. I can't see why the government would continue to hold people it didn't truly believe were guilty, considering that they've already released over half of all of the detainees that were ever sent there without any charges.

 

[lisab]

Regardless of what you think has been done, equivocating my statement w/ some distortion of it so that it appears false is still a strawman:

wiki

That line of reasoning doesn't work because your original comment (what I was referring to) was sarcasm:

Yes, yes they're untold thousands of democratic activists, newspaper owners, and civil society members locked away in Guantanamo.

 

[turbo]

Not that I have any urge to defend Guantanamo, but the difficulty in making cases has more to do with the inadmissability of the evidence against these guys than it does with their actual guilt. I can't see why the government would continue to hold people it didn't truly believe were guilty, considering that they've already released over half of all of the detainees that were ever sent there without any charges.

Does the inadmissibility of evidence have anything to do with sleep-deprivation, prolonged restraint in stress-positions, water-boarding, exposure to extremes of heat and cold, etc? Gosh, we are the white knights of the world, aren't we?

 

[drankin]

Does the inadmissibility of evidence have anything to do with sleep-deprivation, prolonged restraint in stress-positions, water-boarding, exposure to extremes of heat and cold, etc? Gosh, we are the white knights of the world, aren't we?

Should we just let them all go then?

 

[turbo]

Should we just let them all go then?

Do we keep them all in endless detention with no charges filed and no access to legal defense. The ball's in your court.

 

[drankin]

Do we keep them all in endless detention with no charges filed and no access to legal defense. The ball's in your court.

It's a tough situation. They have access to legal defense, but the question is on what foundation of law are they tried and defended? It can't be American law because they aren't in America and they aren't Americans. We can't try them as we are accustomed and we can't just let them all go lest they come back and try to kill us. If we did try them the way we are accustomed, it would be a farce, the legal foundations would be made up on both sides. Hopefully the next administration helps bring a rational approach and solution on how to deal with this in a way that doesn't let murders loose and doesn't keep innocents locked up.

Nowadays it's better than a typical American prison over there. But, it's still a prison.

 

[Art]

Art, simply, no they are largely not natives. Theywere the invaders. Of the ~500 detainees, they're largely Saudi, Yemeni, Pakistani, Morrocan, Algerian, Jordanian, etc, etc. There are also ~50 some Afghans, most of whom have now been released, but I don't hold that the Taliban was a legitimate anything.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/nationalsecurity/gitmoarchive.html

The foreign fighters were not invaders they were allies of the then official Afghan gov't forces. There are 50 Afghanis left in detention but hundreds were held there at the beginning tortured and then released.

For example dangerous Afghan terrorists such as these

PESHAWAR, Pakistan - Badr Zaman Badr and his brother Abdurrahim Muslim Dost relish writing a good joke that jabs a corrupt politician or distills the sufferings of fellow Afghans. Badr admires the political satires in "The Canterbury Tales" and "Gulliver's Travels," and Dost wrote some wicked lampoons in the 1990s, accusing Afghan mullahs of growing rich while preaching and organizing jihad. So in 2002, when the U.S. military shackled the writers and flew them to Guantanamo among prisoners whom Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld declared "the worst of the worst" violent terrorists, the brothers found life imitating farce.

For months, grim interrogators grilled them over a satirical article Dost had written in 1998, when the Clinton administration offered a $5-million reward for Osama bin Laden. Dost responded that Afghans put up 5 million Afghanis -- equivalent to $113 -- for the arrest of President Bill Clinton.

"It was a lampoon ... of the poor Afghan economy" under the Taliban, Badr recalled. The article carefully instructed Afghans how to identify Clinton if they stumbled upon him. "It said he was clean-shaven, had light-colored eyes and he had been seen involved in a scandal with Monica Lewinsky," Badr said.

The interrogators, some flown down from Washington, didn't get the joke, he said. "Again and again, they were asking questions about this article. We had to explain that this was a satire." He paused. "It was really pathetic."

It took the brothers three years to convince the Americans that they posed no threat to Clinton or the United States,

http://www.newsday.com/news/nationw...1,0,1261397.story?coll=ny-worldnews-headlines

 

[mheslep]

...they were allies ... There are 50 Afghanis left in detention but hundreds were held there at the beginning tortured and then released.

Allies? Can you provide a source that says 'hundreds' of Afghanis were tortured at Gmo?

Nevermind. Your proposition has grown thin, and your holding it up with sophistries.

 

[Poop-Loops]

I guess if the speech is good and you don't like the president then it's bad despite how good it is.

I guess if the speech is bad and you are infatuated with the president then it's good despite how bad it is.

 

[drankin]

I guess if the speech is bad and you are infatuated with the president then it's good despite how bad it is.

That doesn't apply to me because I'm not a big fan of Bush. But it was a good speech.

 

[Poop-Loops]

That doesn't apply to me because I'm not a big fan of Bush.

Uh huh.

 

[Gokul43201]

That doesn't apply to me because I'm not a big fan of Bush. But it was a good speech.

I've asked this more than once now, and have gotten no answers, so I'll ask again...especially since you like the speech so much.

Which of the following people are appeasers?

Bob Gates, Colin Powell, Condi Rice - for wanting the US to engage in negotiations with Iran,

McCain - for wanting to engage in diplomacy with Hamas after their election victory in Palestine,

Bush - for talking to Kim Jong Il just after the announcement that they had violated the Agreed Framework,

Reagan, Bush Sr., Rumsfeld, et al. - for their support of Pinochet, Marcos, the fascist junta of Argentina, the drug trafficking contra in Nicaragua, Saddam Hussein, the apartheid government of South Africa, military regimes in Nicaragua and Guatemala that carried out civilian massacres, etc.

Nixon & Kissinger - for meeting with Mao

 

[chemisttree]

The greatest thing that Bush said in the speech was,

Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: "Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided." We have an obligation to call this what it is -- the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.

 

[Poop-Loops]

The wrench in the works, of course, is how you define a terrorist.

 

[lisab]

The greatest thing that Bush said in the speech was,

Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals

Sounds like his speech writer was straight from Faux News. I hear that a lot on that channel; a "journalist" sets up a "some say" construct and then shoots it down with some right-wing rant.

 

[seycyrus]

Sounds like his speech writer was straight from Faux News. I hear that a lot on that channel; a "journalist" sets up a "some say" construct and then shoots it down with some right-wing rant.

As opposed to the straight from the hip news on CNN or MSNBC?

HAHAHAHAHAHAH!

What time and what channel are you going to be watching tonight? Let's compare notes.

 

[BobG]

Matthews could have asked, "What do you think Bush meant by 'the false comfort of appeasement' when he called the American Senator's statement, "If I had only talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided" the "false comfort of appeasement?" But that probably would have been a little too 'fair and balanced', eh?

Damn! That would have been a tougher question than the one Matthews actually asked!

Of all the people to quote, William Borah has to be one of the strangest. If anyone using that quote could describe what Borah meant, I'd be pretty impressed. Borah had the nickname, "The Great Opposer", and seemed to get more pleasure from opposing whatever the prevailing sentiment was than to actually stand for something.

He was a Republican, a Communist sympathizer, a supporter of FDR's New Deal, an opponent of the League of Nations, and a supporter of revising many of the terms of the Treaty of Versailles (which might have been what he meant in the quote, but, if so, he must have meant if he could have talked to Hitler about 10 years prior to the invasion of Poland).

Aside from annoying his fellow Republicans, Borah's main legacy was allegedly fathering Teddy Roosevelt's grand daughter, Paulina Longworth (actually, that was probably pretty annoying to Alice Longworth's husband).

Years from now, I guess people will be quoting Ron Paul in the same vein that Bush uses Borah quotes.

 

[BobG]

Maybe Obama could respond with his own Borah quote from the post World War I era:

"Everybody is in favor of the Constitution when it favors them, but too many are willing to trample upon it when it gets in their way. The war disclosed that the great principles and guarantees of the Constitution are vital to a free people and at the same time are easily disregarded in an hour of passion or crisis."

With the next salvo in the war of Borah quotes being:

"No more fatuous chimera has ever infested the brain than that you can control opinions by law or direct belief by statute, and no more pernicious sentiment ever tormented the heart than the barbarous desire to do so. The field of inquiry should remain open, and the right of debate must be regarded as a sacred right."

Hmm, that quote might fit better into John Kerry's style of speaking.

 

[Poop-Loops]

John Kerry would completely butcher the quote and you'd end up with a story of a man running out of ice cream.

 

[mheslep]

Sounds like his speech writer was straight from Faux News. I hear that a lot on that channel; a "journalist" sets up a "some say" construct and then shoots it down with some right-wing rant.

Like you just did here for instance w/ the nondescrip 'a journalist sets up' construct.

 

[Poop-Loops]

Like you just did here for instance w/ the nondescrip 'a journalist sets up' construct.

Yes, except she doesn't get paid to provide non-biased news coverage of events happening around the world.

But we can ignore that. Yes, she is just as horrible.

 

[wildman]

The greatest thing that Bush said in the speech was,

Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: "Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided." We have an obligation to call this what it is -- the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.

By Poland it was too late. Talk doesn't always work. However, if the French and Germans had talked 25 years earlier (before WW I), we might had avoided the whole mess.

 

[seycyrus]

Yes, except she doesn't get paid to provide non-biased news coverage of events happening around the world.

But we can ignore that. Yes, she is just as horrible.

If her off-handed remark was directed at Oreiley, then I must point out that Oreiley is of course NOT paid to provide non-bias. He is there to give an opinion.

If you are talking about the other news people, I must yet again ask you when you will be watching so we can compare notes.

 

[seycyrus]

By Poland it was too late. Talk doesn't always work. However, if the French and Germans had talked 25 years earlier (before WW I), we might had avoided the whole mess.

Is that mean to be funny?

They talked PLENTY.

That is the problem with this *talk* argument. If the outcome is different than you wanted, then you didn't talk *enough*.

That argument could be made forever and thus it loses its credibility.

 

[Art]

I don't think anyone could accuse Winston Churchill of being an appeaser who famously said

To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war.

International relations are managed through diplomacy. Talking is the cornerstone of diplomacy and war is the final diplomatic solution to be used only when all other avenues of diplomacy are exhausted. To jump from A straight to Z because everything in the middle might not work is hardly an intelligent way (or civilised way for that matter) to resolve a dispute. Unless of course you doubt your negotiating skills to such an extent you feel failure is inevitable. In which case train better negotiators

 

[seycyrus]

Talking is the cornerstone of diplomacy and war is the final diplomatic solution to be used only when all other avenues of diplomacy are exhausted. To jump from A straight to Z because everything in the middle might not work is hardly an intelligent way (or civilised way for that matter) to resolve a dispute.

It is a good thing that we do not jump straight from A to Z! Why the creation of the obvious straman?

 

[Art]

It is a good thing that we do not jump straight from A to Z! Why the creation of the obvious straman?

So presumably you do support talking to one's enemies and so agree with Obama's strategy. That's good!

 

[chemisttree]

Obama's statement:

QUESTION: Would you be willing to meet separately, without precondition, during the first year of your administration, in Washington or anywhere else, with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea, in order to bridge the gap that divides our countries?"...
OBAMA: "I would. And the reason is this, that the notion that somehow not talking to countries is punishment to them -- which has been the guiding diplomatic principle of this administration - is ridiculous."

Hillary's response is actually quite good.

Obama's latest explanation of this statement:

Obama is the only major candidate who supports tough, direct presidential diplomacy with Iran without preconditions. Now is the time to pressure Iran directly to change their troubling behavior. Obama would offer the Iranian regime a choice. If Iran abandons its nuclear program and support for terrorism, we will offer incentives like membership in the World Trade Organization, economic investments, and a move toward normal diplomatic relations. If Iran continues its troubling behavior, we will step up our economic pressure and political isolation. Seeking this kind of comprehensive settlement with Iran is our best way to make progress.

and

There has been no confusion. I have been absolutely clear on this. I will meet not just with our friends but with our enemies. I will meet without preconditions. That does not mean I will meet without preparation. It is very important before any meeting to make sure that there is a list of agenda items that we are going to be talking about. But the difference is with me, for example, meeting with Iran, I would not expect that they would give in on critical issues like nuclear weapons before the meeting. The objective of the meeting would be to ensure that they stand down and that we've offered them carrots and sticks."

http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/story/05-19-2008/0004816986&EDATE=

Without preparation? Without precondition? This is a typical politician/lawer doubletalk... and we've seen it all before. This isn't change. It is the Bush policy.

Engel's immediate follow-up question was, "Repeatedly you've talked about Iran and that you don't want to see Iran develop a nuclear weapon. How far away do you think Iran is from developing a nuclear capability?"

The President replied, "You know, Richard, I don't want to speculate – and there's a lot of speculation. But one thing is for certain – we need to prevent them from learning how to enrich uranium. And I have made it clear to the Iranians that there is a seat at the table for them if they would verifiably suspend their enrichment. And if not, we'll continue to rally the world to isolate them."

Not talking to Iran until they give up the uranium enrichment is the diplomatic tool (yes, diplomatic) the Bush Administration is currently using to pressure Iran.