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Wow, you just threw away your strenght in argument there over detainee rigths and cruel and unusual punishment.
Maybe because their fiduciary irresponsibility wrecked our economy, caused a global, synchronized recession, and we had to pawn the future prosperity of the USA to save their asses. I'm pretty sure ES had other reasons, but that one's enough for me.
Wow, you just threw away your strenght in argument there over detainee rigths and cruel and unusual punishment.
Because theyre not innocent, unlike the civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
BTW, I didnt know Japan was ready to give up. Seems I must do some reading.
I posted this video elsewhere in the forum but, it completely evicerates the "Truman was a war criminal," meme.
http://www.pjtv.com/video/Afterburner_/Jon_Stewart%2C_War_Criminals_%26_The_True_Story_of _the_Atomic_Bombs/1808/;jsessionid=abckNkTdX-KCWbaYDT_ds
I suspect the lesson could equally be applied to Dresden as well.
Oh yeah, Jon Stewart apologized.
WH23 said it better than me...big surprise.
Not really. Neither one of us called for officials to lynch bankers. We just think it's a shame they didn't have to face the justice of the mob. Or to put it another way, that the American mob lacks the probity and martial courage to see that a fitting price is paid for their reckless destruction of our wealth.
Wow, you just threw away your strenght in argument there over detainee rigths and cruel and unusual punishment.
Last edited by Winehole23; 05-06-2009 at 11:58 AM.
They didn't give up after Hiroshima. In fact, they weren't going to give up after Nagasaki -- and actually tried to stop their "god" leader from surrendering by attempting to kidnap him on the way to the radio station from where he would announce the Japanese surrender.
And our Islamic extremist enemies of today are even more fanatical than WWII Japanese.
You should have equal outrage for Barney Franks, Christopher Dodd, et. al. They bear equal (probably more) responsibility for the mess we're in that do the AIG executives who attempted a soft landing in exchange for a retention bonus.
That would more like chopping off the snake's tail IMO, but I agree that our congresscritters deserve a handsome share of the blame.
They don't have an imperial war machine sustained by a prosperous state. Big difference.
Threatmonger's handbook #5 and #9.
So? They managed to kill almost as many people on 9/11 as the Japanese on 12/7. And, are intent on doing it again.
Besides, they have you defending them.
Threatmonger's handbook #10.
Rule#10: When challenged, immediately question your critics' patriotism, credentials, or seriousness.
Without the Community Reinvestment Act amendments of '96 and the Government's heavy-handed requirements under them, banks wouldn't have made bad loans.
Without the bad loans, financial ins utions would not have needed the financial instruments -- intended to hide that debt -- in order to stay liquid.
Without the Barney and friends covering for them at every turn and frustrating Bush administration attempts to reign it in, this mess would have come to a head a lot quicker and at a lot lower cost.
Bush pushed the mortgage sector like everybody else.
You're apoplectic over KSM being waterboarded but, yet, can see Truman's view on Japan?
That's idiocy and could be construed as a defense of KSM.
I'd rather be defined as a "Threatmonger," as found in your stupid book that an idiot who fought for the rights of terrorists until they were released to wreak havoc again...which is exactly what you're doing.
If we close Guantanamo, where are the terrorists going to go?
If we hadn't waterboarded KSM and friends, what plots would have been carried out? (that's right, Obama wont releast those memos.)
Yeah, you're complicit with al Qaeda. A useful idiot, I believe.
He pushed for ways to lend to more minority home-buyers.
ACORN and Democrats pushed for lending to people who could have never paid it back...all the while, Bush was trying to reign in the madness.
There's a difference...unless, of course, you're a racist and want to say Bush's efforts amounted to unwise lending practices because minorities are dead beats. Is that what you're claiming?
Assuming arguendo that Bush really tried to rein in the banks, he failed, while his party had control of both houses of Congress.
Douglas McArthur, Dwight Eisenhower, and two of his cabinet officials didn't see eye to eye with him either.
Fiat. There are terms missing in your syllogism. You know, the part where reasoning happens?That's idiocy and could be construed as a defense of KSM.
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The numbers don't agree with you... We already debunked the CRA myth at least twice before the elections. Use the search function please. And more important, drill it on your head for once.
I bet a lot of that minority owned default swaps.
And Republican majorities in both houses of Congress were powerless to help him. Poor Bush.
No, but that was one unavoidable result of the predatory lending Bush never reined in.There's a difference...unless, of course, you're a racist and want to say Bush's efforts amounted to unwise lending practices because minorities are dead beats. Is that what you're claiming?
been there
Perhaps because the war we fought against Japan, they were the aggressors? Say what you will about the bomb, they hit us first, and they hit us harder than anyone ever has before or since. As opposed to Iraq, where we deliberately murdered people for the express purpose of making money. Not for the defense of America (however over-zealous), not to send a controversial message to the Soviets that we would not hesitate to use any force necessary, but for oil. There's a reason for the distinction, and I do not think time will be kind to GWB. Yes, what Truman did was horrific (although the firebombings of Tokyo killed more people than the atomic weapons did), but war is war, and his actions are at least understandable, if no less wrong. Bombing cities out of fear for the lives of your own people will always trump killing for oil and profit.
What's there to say? We have blood on our hands. Pretty sure that every other country in the world does too, except maybe Canada and the Swiss.Rightists regularly excoriate the crimes of Stalin, yet they are expected to remain silent when it comes to war crimes committed by the U.S., such as the "Phoenix program" during the Vietnam conflict – and they rarely disappoint.
Yes, DAMN him for wanting to keep his job! It must be nice to look back through the lens of 60 years of history and cast aspersions so readily.In any case, Stewart’s apology was embarrassing: for him, for the studio audience (which giggled nervously, and inappropriately, at awkward intervals), and for me. As he looked into the camera and babbled about how wrong he was – without giving a single reason, never mind a good one – you could almost see his strings being pulled by his corporate masters.
So let’s see if I get this straight: it is not okay to torture a member of al-Qaeda, who no doubt has information we need in order to stop terrorist attacks. Instead, we have to treat him as a prisoner of war according to the rules laid down by the Geneva Conventions. On the other hand, it is okay to murder hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians in cold blood, to incinerate entire cities and poison the land for generations to come, as long as your name is Harry Truman.
Why is this being asked? You mean, are the bombastic statements in your article actually making any decent points? No. So far it's been a waste of space, much like the above comment.Am I getting this right so far?
Or they attempt to intellectually debate the matter in order to establish a moral clarity on the issue. I guess that's not normal though, but are you writing to a normal audience with this article?I have stayed away from the torture "debate" for a number of reasons, because, after all, the issue isn’t debatable. Not in a civilized country, that is. We might as well debate the merits and demerits of infanticide or copro ia. Normal people don’t argue about these things; they simply turn away in revulsion.
Interesting. He just called a pretty large proportion of the right "weird". For it to be so easy for Obama to say, there certainly seems to be a lot of dissent, not the least of which comes from the former president.Another reason for my abstention from this ongoing brouhaha – which seems to have consumed the left wing of the blogosphere ever since Obama took office – is that there is something remarkably phony about the high moral dudgeon of the liberals when it comes to this non-question. How much moral moxie does it really take to come out, guns blazing, against torture? I mean, you don’t have to be a saint or anything to enlist in a campaign to ban pulling off the fingernails of defenseless prisoners, you just have to be halfway normal.
Sensationalism at it's finest. I see nothing of substance here at all.Furthermore, there is another reason to be su ious of the liberals-against-torture campaign that now monopolizes the capacity of certain pundits for outrage: the amount of noise being generated about this issue very effectively – and conveniently – drowns out opposition to the rest of Bush’s ugly legacy, principally the ongoing occupation of Iraq and Obama’s escalation of the "war on terrorism" in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Exhausted by their 24/7 calls to expunge the stain of torture from America’s conscience – which is to be accomplished, supposedly, by trying Bush, Cheney, and the Republican gang for war crimes – the liberals have no moral energy to take on Obama’s wars.
Oh, well since I'm uneasy about pulling fingernails off or burning people or depriving them of sleep, that makes it so much less necessary to extricate ourselves from further repe ion of the practice. "Excuse me, sir, I know you're kind of on fire right now, but we're really kind of iffy about whether we actually want to hurt you, so could you hate us a little less? Mmkay, thanks."Thus what passes for the Left in the America of 2009 is perfectly happy to make demands they know will never be met and rail against a practice that even those who advocate it in certain cir stances seem uneasy about.
What's a good synonym for histrionic but with a much lower base IQ? Can I just use tumid and a really frowny face to indicate my displeasure here?It’s so much easier than coming out against the foreign policy of a popular president whom liberals regard as the second coming of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King combined.
Ahh, armchair journalism. Because shooting an enemy in a firefight is suddenly the moral equivalent of pinning him down while helpless to inflict pain?It doesn’t seem to matter that those policies are murderous, just as Bush’s were, and potentially even more disastrous for the U.S. in terms of "blowback." If we are signing on to an occupation of Afghanistan and the tribal areas of Pakistan that will make our activities in Iraq seem like the briefest of episodes, then liberals of the Kossack/Huffington Post/Jon Stewart sort don’t want to hear about it. That’s because they’re okay with it – as long as we don’t torture people individually, you see, by making them think they’re drowning or throwing them against a wall. Obama’s in the White House, and all’s right with the world!
Once Dear LeaderI wonder what this guy pays for his 20-20 history vision.has determined that it’s imperative we actually kill people en masse, for reasons that have little or nothing to do with the defense of the United States, as we are doing in Afghanistan and Pakistan – well, then, it’s nothing to get too excited about. Indeed, it’s actually praiseworthy, positively Truman-esque – and we all know what a heroic figure the gnome-like machine politician Truman was!
You don't say. I'm about out of patience to respond at this point.That’s why liberals are rendered practically speechless by ritualized neocon invocations of "Hitler" and "Munich" every time a supposedly deadly threat to the U.S. arises somewhere in the world.
What? Mass murder on a never before seen scale? How about the Holocaust? Stalin? , the firebombing of Tokyo killed more people than the atomic bombings. But since it's less sensational, this guy clearly wants nothing to do with actual research and fact-checking. If Japan was ready to surrender, it should have surrendered well before that, as it was clear for many weeks that they had no hope of winning the Pacific in any possible form.For a moment, however, Stewart saw through the veil of myth and prejudice (yes, racial prejudice) that obscures the truth about what we did to Japan, which was ready to make peace on reasonable terms. Roosevelt’s insistence on unconditional surrender, upheld by Truman, rationalized mass murder on a scale never before seen, and at the time the liberals fell right into line, with nary a pip or a squeak from any of them.
The only success they had against the Americans were their kamikaze pilots, and even the vaunted Zeroes were being wiped out by the newer fighters. Japan held on stubbornly in a war it provoked, and guess what? War is . Amazing how history turns such a blind eye to the fact that they allied themselves to people responsible for the deaths of 6,000,000 Jews. It's not prejudice to hate them (at the time) for that.
lol firebombsIt was inside the military and the U.S. government that dissent raised its head. Truman’s decision went against the advice of Generals Douglas MacArthur and Dwight David Eisenhower, not to mention his own secretaries of state and the Navy. In 1963, Eisenhower told Newsweek: "The Japanese were ready to surrender, and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing."
Nor was it necessary for Japan to ally themselves with Hitler or attack Pearl Harbor, either. They endorsed mass murder and attacked without provocation.
REALLY not a concern with this article.Oh, but please don’t confuse us with the introduction of needless facts.
What are you, one of those obstructionist Republican extremists? In the wake of Stewart’s faux pas and subsequent Soviet-style self-criticism, one thing is clear: measures must be taken. It is necessary – in this, the Age of Obama – to establish a firm doctrine from which no one, no matter how popular, how "provocative," or how "edgy" they might be, is allowed to dissent, and it is this: no Democratic president can ever be guilty of a war crime. No, not even Lyndon "Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?" Johnson. Which means Obama has a license to obliterate Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran (as his secretary of state said she would like to do), and we can get on with the important business of conducting political show trials of our favorite Republican villains.
And all’s right with the world…
To conclude: yes, Stewart is a wimp, a wuss, and a moral coward – but he’s very far from alone.
Wow. I can't believe I wasted so much time responding to this.
Last edited by Cry Havoc; 05-06-2009 at 01:27 PM.
In a broad way I think Raimondo wanted to draw attention to the tunnel vision of progressives who pitch a fit over torture, but pardon Truman/Kennedy/LBJ reflexively for things that are plausibly even worse.
He's a polemicist and trades in hyperbole. You're quite correct that very many of his points don't stand up too well, but go too far IMO by suggesting that Raimondo has mounted some kind of defense of Japan.
What's valuable in the OP IMO is the moral focus on atrocities against civilians and the hypocrisy/spinelessness of progressive liberals like Jon Stewart.
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