The Path to 9/11: a sneak preview

[shin]

skvorisdeadsorta said:

Seriously Shin, you've done it.........if that's all you can come up with, you've proven my point time and time again that you CAN NOT and WILL NOT bring anything to a debate other than low ball graphics and name calling. You're fucking pedantic juvenellia when discussing politics is childish on a good day and quite frankly, at least debating with Chrisfan, no matter how frustrating, is well said and intelligent.

Three things.

One, there's only so many times I can bother to go through the trouble of explaining over and over again to you why I think you're a Republican enabler at best and a Useful Idiot at worst. Like Mary said the other day on another board, do I fucking HAVE to preface what I say with a full on fucking essay on why I feel how I feel when I've already done so to you a BILLION TIMES?

Two, the other week you actually admitted you'd be voting for the Democrats. So shut the god damn hell up with this "I'm the true liberal" bucket of whale ejaculata. That's what's worn thin, not my "photoshopped" picture (as if you wouldn't do that in real life), which I've posted here at most thrice. I assure you, exactly zero (0) people are impressed with your I'm-the-honest-liberal-because-I-hate-Carter-and-Clinton routine.

Three, if you think debating with Chrisfan is "well said and intelligent", then you're beyond hopeless. Getting into an unnecessary semantics argument every single time[/u][/b] is not well said OR intelligent. It's *boring*. But it seems you, like her, just want to get into intellectual wankoff fests without actually arriving at anything meaningful, repeating the same old arguments again and again and again in an attempt to convince yourself of your political credibility, which is why you, like her, insist both I and others preface my Bush hate with the 700 page footnotes that proves it so you can convince yourself that Bush is worth hating 10% as much as Klinton.

In other words, you're boring, stupid, ugly, and nobody likes you.

[Galactus]

Wow, appearently not only does Disney/ABC have no intention of removing the made up scenes they're actually advertising them as the basis of the movie and calling it the "official true story".

www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHgbeJu1WGk

[skvorisdeadsorta]

1. I have a right to my opinions just like you do even if they are not the same as yours, I know that's hard to believe to a numbskull dumb fuck but hey, maybe you'll learn some new parlor tricks some day.
2. I'm not here to impress ANYBODY. If you actually took the time to get to know someone instead of just blindly name calling you might lighten up. It's easy to be an asshole on a messageboard when you don't actually have to look at someone's face.
3. The photo offended me but it was strat's call to take it down. It could have stayed for all I care because, yes, you have posted it other times. I didn't PM anyone to have it removed either. You can post it again if you like, go ahead. I believe in the right to express and the first amendment even if you don't.
4. Chrisfan can be well said and intelligent and it's your belittling of people on this board is what's worn thin for me and it's mean spirited more than anything.
5. I don't hate Bush. What's it going to solve? What's the hate of one man solved up to now? Hasn't it caused enough bloodshed and pain around the world we need more by idiots like you jumping up and down, dumbing down arguments to the same old "us or them" only from a different side?
6. I do not proclaim myself as the authority of leftism but I do like to challenge other's ideals and if that's a problem for you, maybe you should spend some time looking at that than calling someone a Bush enabler. If anything, LIKE KEN SAID, you can point to the democratic party complaing about the things they keep unopposing when given the chance and bitching about after they've voted for it.

Ta.

[maarts]

Tell you what though- I now work in the heart of Sydney and am part of one million commuters going through Town Hall Station, the busiest place in this city during peak hour and a place identified by Al-Qaeda as a possible target...quietly hoping all will be well tomorrow morning when I get there.
That's why I'm not gonna watch the doco. I believe in remembering but after Steve Irwin's death today, the wash-up of Peter Brock's death last Friday and the Eels losing today I'm not in the mood for more melancholia.

[shin]

I watched two "speeches" by two amazing human beings tonight, one which was delivered a few hours ago and one that was delivered 5 years ago. In both cases, one speech spoken by a comedian and one by a former sports journalist, the expectations that anything relevant and profound could escape their mouths would have been understandably low. In both cases, however, what was uttered could have been immediately enshrined in a museum of any stature, etched in papyrus and hung with golden frames. In both cases, I saw more intelligence, more depth, more resonance, more understanding, more vision, and more humanity expressed in the words of these comparably insignificant TV personalities than in the concurrent speeches that our shameful excuse for a leader delivered, both then and now.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnqWvioDY_4

movies.crooksandliars.com/CountDown-SpecialComment-Bush-911.mov

The president delivered a speech yesterday filled with such inane cliches and insulting attempts to excuse his absolutely failed foreign policy, that I am almost convinced that he slept throughout the entire day of the attacks. That he somehow developed a very select case of amnesia, or that perhaps he never actually cared at all. That perhaps he, and only he, has truly forgotten the lessons of that horrible day.

He did, after all, admit that on the most important day of his political career, he couldn't be arsed to change his routine for just one measly day, that rather than laying awake, confused, afraid and lost in emotional though like literally 99.99999% the rest of the country, he just shared a laugh with Pickles, then went straight to beddy bye.

I, for one, spent the evening of 9/11 in that .00001%, in a sleeping bag in the woods of New Hampshire, having only briefly be told of, but not having yet seen, the events of that day.

I slept reasonably soundly the night of 9/11/2001, for it would not be until almost three weeks later that I would finally see a picture of the attacks; it was the cover of Newsweek, and I almost threw up right there in the supermarket. More so, it would not be until approximately 9/17/2001 that I would finally learn that the towers were no longer standing, so thin was my knowledge of the events of that day.

I went about my business on that camping trip (of which it was decided we would continue despite the unfolding world events), free from the emotional shell shock that the world around me was suffering from.

Just like our President on that very evening.

I am struck by the implication that a 19 year old snot nosed kid camping out in the woods of New England could not only share the emotional state of the very leader of the free world that day, but that that very kid could have farted a speech more nuanced, more profound than anything our current leader could hope to write on his own. And I, for one, would not have wanted to hear that kid's speech that day.

So what, I ask you, could compel such a man to the most hallowed position of leadership in the history of this species, to sit in the very seat which holds the button for instant global nuclear annihilation? Time and time again, I am left with only one answer: the unholy political force that is the Republican Party. Not the conservative ideology necessarily, or even the conservative movement; these exist in the realm of debate and opinion, and are themselves benign, as all ideologies ultimately are, for it is the application of (supposed) wicked beliefs that is the enemy, not the holding of them.

Nay, I speak of those of whom live under, and more importantly those who erect, the Big Tent of the GOP, under which the circus elephant, their mascot, defecates upon the very fabric of the American flag.

I speak of the delusional and obsessed party zealots, such as Chrisfan, who's emotional involvement in the political standing of their Republican masters has infiltrated their psyches, their ids, their very DNA, for they have truly accepted Big Brothers as their spiritual leaders. To them, a Republican president is not a mere mortal holding a temporary term of office, but an anointed figure of God, who holds the very benevolent and patriarchal qualities that the contemporary image of Jesus himself holds. They look into the eyes of their leader and they feel the love of their God, of their very fathers, radiating through those sapphire eyes, and for this gift of happiness they offer their services unconditionally and without hesitation.

I speak also of the emotional traumatized bed wetters, such as RocDoc, who stood proudly as a unique and principled individual on 9/10, then promptly melted into a puddle of urine and tears the very next morning. From that moment on, these now sycophantic brownnosers wove their hysteria into a sort of righteous moral indignation toward anyone who would dare challenge Dear Father the Protector, no matter the reason or validation. From that moment on, all individuality ceased to exist in their minds, for their reptilian brains abandoned all advanced primate mechanisms for the soothing endorphin rush of being held safely in the bosoms of totalitarian overlords.

I also speak of brainless and parroting genetic incompletes, such as Stratman (his contributions to these boards have not been forgotten), of whom waving the flag is not so much an extension of one's personal feelings and beliefs toward one's country, an educated appreciation of the history and development of the Enlightenment derived concept of a democratic and federal republic, but rather a statement that "Hey, I would just as gladly wave the Ecuadorian flag, had I been born there instead." For these people, politics is just another distraction of communal convenience, no more different than rooting for the local professional sports franchise; something to think about instead of the harsh and complicated realities of both their immediate and intimate existence, as well as the strange and confusing "outside world" of which is so frighteningly depicted in the history books that are burned in piles on the local church parking lot.

I also speak of Napoleonic racists and quasi-molester/pederasts, such as Numbers, who views the political domain as nothing more than a forum to vent every seething projection of inner hatred onto the Other. It is this psychiatrist's wet dream that is drawn to the side of the debate that eschews reason moral decency, the side that instead launches fecal projectiles of subconscious torment, such as erecting a 2000 miles fence along the Mexican border, or nuking Mecca.

And last but not least I also speak of the Useful Idiot, such as Skvor, who lumps all those who don't wish to abolish the stock market and begin rationing chocolate provisions to the citizens immediately upon election as "right wing racists"; the sort of self-serving sandal-wearing Liberal Orthodox who considers Lyndon LaRouche as bathroom reading, who thinks Cornel West is "a bit too conservative for my liking", who equates buying an iPod with clubbing a baby seal. These people have no interest in pragmatism, and as such serve as useful foils by which the GOP build both their strawmen and their bogeymen. These are the people who suggest that not only do we get the troops out of Iraq right now, but we blast the whole babymurdering lot into space forever, and the ridiculous Support the Troops movement only gains momentum and fuel because of it.

These are the people who would have it so that people like Stewart and Olbermann find themselves entertainers on television instead of statesmen in the halls of power, and that people like George Bush sit upon the throne of America, instead of scrubbing toilets at the local Sizzler.

Five years after 9/11, it is clear to me that Islamic terrorists aren't the only people threatening the health of this country.

I thank you for your time. Now if you'll excuse me, it's 4 in the morning, and there's internet pornography to be watched.

[Thorngrub]

kenholzman said:

Presidents get the credit and blame for what happens on their watch. 9/11 was Dubya's disaster. He was the one with the last, best, and proximal chance to do something to avoid this strike. He was the one who presided over the ignoring of what intelligence was out there, and he's the one who has tried to say "no one imagined this could happen!" after it did, despite the fact that there was documented intelligence predicting exactly this sort of strike.

And when Clinton tried to focus the US' attention on the dangers posed by Arab terrorists, he was accused of trying to draw attention away from the dangers of a President recieving blowjobs in the oval office.

There's plenty of blame to go 'round for the 9/11 attacks, but the vast majority of it goes to the current administration. And more importantly, IMHO, they get 100% of the blame for squandering the immense goodwill which 9/11 engendered throughout the world for the US, and for the quagmire we are now entrenched in throughout the Middle East.

Yes, there is plenty of blame to go 'round . . . and not enough of it lands squarely in our own laps (if you ask me).

If you'll excuse the inescapable conclusion w/out the logistics that lead up to it:

We The People are squarely to blame.


And until We The People look in the mirror and see ourselves as the ultimate source of how this country should have been and could be run, we are never, ever going to SOLVE this problem.

So go ahead: keep on pointing the finger to each & every possible political party, affiliate, current administration, foreign subsidy, squalid group of piss poor 3rd worlders, you name it; we blame it.

It won't change the fact we are to blame. We are the end-all, be-all in this country. We the People run this place (regardless of what cynical liberals may think). Because even if a contingency of our People wrested that power from the rest of us - - well, who's to blame there -? Again, we are: those from whom this potential power was wrested. For we did nothing but sit on our asses and ALLOWED them to.

So now we cry about it? Pathetic. We sat by while this meal was ordered. We did nothing to stop that it was not to our taste. We sat by while they delivered it. Now it's here, on our doorstep and steaming. If you ask me, we should tip the delivery driver, shut our pie holes, and choke it down like good little children.

Because until the day comes we grow up and take control of ordering our own food - that is, get involved in how this country is run - then we shouldn't be pointing the finger at no one (but oursleves).

[Thorngrub]

shin said:

skvorisdeadsorta said:

Seriously Shin, you've done it.........if that's all you can come up with, you've proven my point time and time again that you CAN NOT and WILL NOT bring anything to a debate other than low ball graphics and name calling. You're fucking pedantic juvenellia when discussing politics is childish on a good day and quite frankly, at least debating with Chrisfan, no matter how frustrating, is well said and intelligent.

Three things.

One, there's only so many times I can bother to go through the trouble of explaining over and over again to you why I think you're a Republican enabler at best and a Useful Idiot at worst. Like Mary said the other day on another board, do I fucking HAVE to preface what I say with a full on fucking essay on why I feel how I feel when I've already done so to you a BILLION TIMES?

Two, the other week you actually admitted you'd be voting for the Democrats. So shut the god damn hell up with this "I'm the true liberal" bucket of whale ejaculata. That's what's worn thin, not my "photoshopped" picture (as if you wouldn't do that in real life), which I've posted here at most thrice. I assure you, exactly zero (0) people are impressed with your I'm-the-honest-liberal-because-I-hate-Carter-and-Clinton routine.

Three, if you think debating with Chrisfan is "well said and intelligent", then you're beyond hopeless. Getting into an unnecessary semantics argument every single time

[/u][/b] is not well said OR intelligent. It's *boring*. But it seems you, like her, just want to get into intellectual wankoff fests without actually arriving at anything meaningful, repeating the same old arguments again and again and again in an attempt to convince yourself of your political credibility, which is why you, like her, insist both I and others preface my Bush hate with the 700 page footnotes that proves it so you can convince yourself that Bush is worth hating 10% as much as Klinton.

In other words, you're boring, stupid, ugly, and nobody likes you.[/quote]


Er. . . I like skvor


p.s.
I also liked your long ass rant, shin. If I may pipe in a bit with: perhaps we should grow slightly thicker hides, and allow someone like shin's points (which reference peeps around here in order to make them clear) to roll off our backs so to speak, and get on with the business behind these alleghations, you know, like adults?

Let's try & keep w/the "spirit of the problem" which underlies these debates: maybe we'll stand a chance to dig in deeper, get somethin' out of it.

[Thorngrub]

I just read my post above, and I must say, skvor's responses have been very adult.

And by the way - I hope y'all will excuse my childish commentary: It is meant to be nothing but a fresh perspective on a tired-out, well-flogged horse. At least I can admit I am still a child; but with eyes looking directly @ becoming an adult.

(i.e, I hope my childish input is helpful.)

[skvorisdeadsorta]

"And last but not least I also speak of the Useful Idiot, such as Skvor, who lumps all those who don't wish to abolish the stock market and begin rationing chocolate provisions to the citizens immediately upon election as "right wing racists"; the sort of self-serving sandal-wearing Liberal Orthodox who considers Lyndon LaRouche as bathroom reading, who thinks Cornel West is "a bit too conservative for my liking", who equates buying an iPod with clubbing a baby seal. These people have no interest in pragmatism, and as such serve as useful foils by which the GOP build both their strawmen and their bogeymen. These are the people who suggest that not only do we get the troops out of Iraq right now, but we blast the whole babymurdering lot into space forever, and the ridiculous Support the Troops movement only gains momentum and fuel because of it."

Mythbusters time, fuckface and you are an ignorant bastard who slides into personal attacks and refuses to get to know anyone outside of your safe little bubble because your argument is SHIT, especially when it comes to me. It's impossible to do anything else because you're filled with nothing but hate and consumed by it's slow decline. You have no respect for people with opposing viewpoints whatsoever and it's always an absolute with you. Always.

1. I don't want the Stock Market abolished and I have never made such a ridiculous statement. Do I want more fiscal responsibility and social responsibility when it comes to the current Corporate atmosphere? Yes. Do I see similarities with that of the Robber Barrons during the turn of the 19th to the 20th Century? You bet. I have ever once said abolish the stock market? NO.

Further proof that you are a LIAR that is making assumptions based on NOTHING.

2.Ration Chocolate? Are you crazy? I love the stuff. Where are getting this crap, the tinfoil hat you have on while you sit infront of your screen and piss stained underwear pulled up over your belly?

3. I do think that several Democrats are racists, but I'd hardly call them extreme right. You can be racist without being a Reaganite, it's going to happen. Look at Europe: Anti-Semetic, Racist, Nationalist, and with social programs like Free Health Care.

4. I hate Sandals with a passion and wouldn't be caught dead wearing them. I don't want people to see my dirty feet, why would I want to see yours.

5. I'm don't Read LaRouche, Cornel West, and I do believe that people should buy iPods because I am such a huge fan of Apple. I work in the tech industry and have for several years along with my recording side buisness so honestly dude, you're barking up the wrong tree here.

6. I'm not the one that swears allegience to a party that claims that Bush is stupid, but was duped into voting into both wars by the guy. You aks me, that's diabolical genius and proves that he's EVIL as can be, but hardly stupid. There was only one opposing vote to the War in Afghanistan and god bless her too, being the crazy San Franciscan that she is. If there was more of that going on, I wouldn't be near as critical and wouldn't say much of the Democrats at all if that was the case.

7. You are right in that I do have no interest in being pragmatic. I don't feel like "comprimising" and I do feel like holding on to my Utopian ideals to some degree. I think if more people did that, we wouldn't be in the mess that we are in now.

8. Whatever, Mortal.

[skvorisdeadsorta]

Also, your generalizations on RocDoc and Chrisfan have little tact and respect, but hey, to each their own. I'm sure that will give me two more enabling points because I dared to speak up for people with viewpoints opposite of my own.

Also, never put me in the group with people who shout things at our troops like "baby killer". I do not share that view nor will I ever share that view or have that point of view. Bitch.

[shin]

Oh Skvor, you make me laugh. If Matrix were here, he'd laugh too.

Anyway. In the spirit of my polemic, I bring you this opinion piece:

Let’s quit while we’re behind


By Christopher Buckley


“The trouble with our times,” Paul Valéry said, “is that the future is not what it used to be.”

This glum aperçu has been much with me as we move into the home stretch of the 2006 mid-term elections and shimmy into the starting gates of the 2008 presidential campaign. With heavy heart, as a once-proud—indeed, staunch— Republican, I here admit, behind enemy lines, to the guilty hope that my party loses; on both occasions.

I voted for George W. Bush in 2000. In 2004, I could not bring myself to pull the same lever again. Neither could I bring myself to vote for John Kerry, who, for all his strengths, credentials, and talent, seems very much less than the sum of his parts. So, I wrote in a vote for George Herbert Walker Bush, for whom I worked as a speechwriter from 1981 to ’83. I wish he’d won.

Bob Woodward asked Bush 43 if he had consulted his father before invading Iraq. The son replied that he had consulted “a higher father.” That frisson you feel going up your spine is the realization that he meant it. And apparently the higher father said, “Go for it!” There are those of us who wish he had consulted his terrestrial one; or, if he couldn’t get him on the line, Brent Scowcroft. Or Jim Baker. Or Henry Kissinger. Or, for that matter, anyone who has read a book about the British experience in Iraq. (18,000 dead.)

Anyone who has even a passing personal acquaintance of Bush 41 knows him to be, roughly speaking, the most decent, considerate, humble, and cautious man on the planet. Also, the most loving parent on earth. What a wrench it must be for him to pick up his paper every morning and read the now-daily debate about whether his son is officially the worst president in U.S. history. (That chuckling you hear is the ghost of James Buchanan.) To paraphrase another president, I feel 41’s pain. Does 43 feel 41’s? Does he, I wonder, feel ours?

There were some of us who scratched our heads in 2000 when we first heard the phrase “compassionate conservative.” It had a cobbled-together, tautological, dare I say, Rovian aroma to it. But OK, we thought, let’s give it a chance. It sounded more fun than Gore’s “Prosperity for America’s Families.” (Bo-ring.)

Six years later, the White House uses the phrase about as much as it does “Mission Accomplished.” Six years of record deficits and profligate expansion of entitlement programs. Incompetent expansion, at that: The actual cost of the President’s Medicare drug benefit turned out, within months of being enacted, to be roughly one-third more than the stated price. Weren’t Republicans supposed to be the ones who were good at accounting? All those years on Wall Street calculating CEO compensation....

Who knew, in 2000, that “compassionate conservatism” meant bigger government, unrestricted government spending, government intrusion in personal matters, government ineptitude, and cronyism in disaster relief? Who knew, in 2000, that the only bill the president would veto, six years later, would be one on funding stem-cell research?

A more accurate term for Mr. Bush’s political philosophy might be incontinent conservatism.

On Capitol Hill, a Republican Senate and House are now distinguished by—or perhaps even synonymous with—earmarks, the K Street Project, Randy Cunningham (bandit, 12 o’clock high!), Sen. Ted Stevens’s $250-million Bridge to Nowhere, Jack Abramoff (Who? Never heard of him), and a Senate Majority Leader who declared, after conducting his own medical evaluation via videotape, that he knew every bit as much about the medical condition of Terry Schiavo as her own doctors and husband. Who knew that conservatism means barging into someone’s hospital room like Dr. Frankenstein with defibrillator paddles? In what chapter of Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom or Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind is that principle enunciated?

The Republican Party I grew up into—Dwight D. Eisenhower, William F. Buckley Jr., Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon (sigh), Ronald Reagan—stood for certain things. It did not always live up to its ideals. Au contraire, as we Republicans said in the pre-Dominique de Villepin era—often, it fell flat on its face. A self-proclaimed “conservative,” Nixon kept the Great Society entitlement beast fat and happy and brought in wage and price controls. Reagan funked Social Security reform in 1983 and raised (lesser) taxes three times. He vowed to balance the budget, and drove the deficit to historic highs by failing to rein in government spending. Someone called it “Voodoo economics.” You could Google it.
There were foreign misadventures, terrible ones: Vietnam (the ’69-’75 chapters), Beirut, Iran-Contra, the Saddam Hussein tilt. But there were compensating triumphs: Eisenhower’s refusal to bail out France in Indochina in 1954, Nixon’s China opening, the Cold War victory.

Despite the failures, one had the sense that the party at least knew in its heart of hearts that these were failures, either of principle or execution. Today one has no sense, aside from a slight lowering of the swagger-mometer, that the president or the Republican Congress is in the least bit chastened by their debacles.

George Tenet’s WMD “slam-dunk,” Vice President Cheney’s “we will be greeted as liberators,” Don Rumsfeld’s avidity to promulgate a minimalist military doctrine, together with the tidy theories of a group who call themselves “neo-conservative” (not one of whom, to my knowledge, has ever worn a military uniform), have thus far: de-stabilized the Middle East; alienated the world community from the United States; empowered North Korea, Iran, and Syria; unleashed sectarian carnage in Iraq among tribes who have been cutting each others’ throats for over a thousand years; cost the lives of 2,600 Americans, and the limbs, eyes, organs, spinal cords of another 15,000—with no end in sight. But not to worry: Democracy is on the march in the Middle East. Just ask Hamas. And the neocons—bright people, all—are now clamoring, “On to Tehran!”

What have they done to my party? Where does one go to get it back?
One place comes to mind: the back benches. It’s time for a time-out. Time to hand over this sorry enchilada to Hillary and Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden and Charlie Rangel and Harry Reid, who has the gift of being able to induce sleep in 30 seconds. Or, with any luck, to Mark Warner or, what the heck, Al Gore. I’m not much into polar bears, but this heat wave has me thinking the man might be on to something.

My fellow Republicans, it is time, as Madison said in Federalist 76, to “Hand over the tiller of governance, that others may fuck things up for a change.”

(Or was it Federalist 78?)



Christopher Buckley’s new novel Boomsday will be published in April 2007 by Warner Twelve.

www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2006/0610.buckley.html