No tartarin, we won't "figure it out" because it was a poor attempt at logic.
I know what was said, but I want YOUR interpretation of what was said so I can understand what you mean. I want to understand, really. I just don't know what you are talking about. Please explain.
I think I'll give you this instead (I'm past getting wound up in your little fights). This is from Cursor direct:
Hear, Hear! U.S. intelligence officials tell the San Jose Mercury News that the Iraqi National Congress "bypassed skeptics in the CIA and DIA and fed the same information about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and links to Al-Qaida to the [New York] Times and the Pentagon, so Pentagon officials would confirm what the nation's most influential newspaper was hearing and the newspaper would confirm what the Pentagon was hearing."
Now that's worth talking about!
But that has nothing to do with the logical flaw you invented about scrat and McGentrix????
Craven -- Kindly let it go. There was a piece of Limbaugh-itis a few pages back (make an assumption about what someone has written/said, derive a theory from that assumption, accuse the person of saying things they didn't say). I'm NOT, repeat NOT, going to get drawn into it. If Scrat and McGentrix didn't pick up on my logic statement, no big deal. The temperature goes up unnecessarily on occasions like this.
It is not possible to "pick up on" that which is not there.
Tartarin wrote:Craven -- Kindly let it go. There was a piece of Limbaugh-itis a few pages back (make an assumption about what someone has written/said, derive a theory from that assumption, accuse the person of saying things they didn't say). I'm NOT, repeat NOT, going to get drawn into it. If Scrat and McGentrix didn't pick up on my logic statement, no big deal. The temperature goes up unnecessarily on occasions like this.
It's always a good idea to "let it go" if not letting it go would have put you on the spot to defend a statement that both had little defense or wiggle room.
Your "logic statement" made little sense to me and I asked about it.
In your "logic statement" you implied that two members needed to go to college and take a basic course.
A few posts before that you tried to equate scrat with a "rat".
Now you can try to pretend you are avoiding it in the interests of civility but it's plainly untrue. If you wanted to avoid "temperature" you wouldn't a) call scrat a rat, and b) make up logical flaws about other members and say they need basic courses.
No, I think you want to "let it go" because otherwise you'd have to try to defend that logic.
Would you like me to do it in a PM to you? Rather than turning up the heat here, which I think would be irresponsible?
So, we're playing through then? I feel as though I should just scroll through Tartarin's posts now, but I enjoy the perspective that they come from...I just came to expect more in the short period of time I have been here.
I am glad to see the administration called on the carpet finally. I just hope it is for the right reasons and not just politically charged nonsense. I would like to see some resolution to this matter one way or the other.
The following, from today's NYTimes, explains as much as is necessary, I think, the frustration and anger felt by many liberals over the past many months. It's somewhat of a relief that Congress will now have an inquiry into the lies and distortions, though there will also likely be an effort to smooth things over rather than say, No More Lies. I agree with Krugman's conclusion -- that we may be faced with a political system which has become utterly corrupted.
Set, thanks kind of you
Although it was clearly illegal and unnecessary, I'm not blind to the fact that some good has come out of it. Saddam is gone. And I like to think that the price Blair won for British support was fair play and the twin state solution in Israel/Palestine. I might be kidding myself about Bush's sincerity but I really got the impression he meant it today with Mubarak.
Tartarin,
I would like to see it in a PM. I like logic.
McGent, Wouldn't we all! c.i.
Skip this post as you will, but at least read it.
Quote:Anyone paying attention to the political left's tirades over the past few months has had to notice that as soon as one advocate of the left gets audacious enough to shout a lie loud enough, the rest of his or her peers follow the example like lemmings -- initiating a bandwagon of bold-faced lies.
These chroniclers of "the truth" (or should we more accurately say "half truths") are no doubt hoping that what they lack in veracity, they will make up in volume.
As far as America is concerned, you can find evidence of this unseemly phenomenon in any period after the tragic events of 9/11. Whether it was some nonsense about the "impending quagmire in Afghanistan," the quality of President Bush's judicial nominees, or an attack on "Bush's tax cut for the rich," the left has spoken with one voice -- the voice of lies.
Everyone remembers such golden-oldie whoppers as the recent insistence that America was going to set off a firestorm of terrorist acts if our military went into Iraq. Of course, this oft-stated contention wasn't true; and it never happened. However, notice that no-one who professed that nonsense has fessed up to being wrong.
Then, of course, there was the Big Media Lie that American forces were bogged down outside of Baghdad, that supply lines were stretched too thin, and that America had woefully underestimated the ferocity of the Iraqi defenses. Naturally, it all turned out to be just more leftist wishful thinking and lies. But there are still no signs that anyone who pushed that malarkey is about to admit they made it all up.
In spite of the fact that the left has time and again been caught lying in the most absurd ways, they just don't quit. On the contrary, they step up their attacks.
For example, on May 30, 2003, Eric Alterman's "Altercation" column on MSNBC.com perpetuated another whopper. This time it was regarding the Bush Administration supposedly fibbing about why America went to war with Iraq. It seems Vanity Fair interviewed the Deputy Secretary of State. And instead of printing his actual words, they abbreviated a quote from him to make it appear that in coming up with a rationale for the Bush Administration's war on Iraq, "for bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one issue ' weapons of mass destruction' because it was the one reason everyone could agree on [but not necessarily because it was the prime concern]."
What was left out of the Deputy Defense Secretary's "quote" was the following: "There have always been three fundamental concerns. One is weapons of mass destruction, the second is support for terrorism, the third is the criminal treatment of the Iraqi people." To which he added, "The third one by itself, as I think I said earlier, is a reason to help the Iraqis but it's not a reason to put American kids' lives at risk, certainly not on the scale we did it. That second issue about links to terrorism is the one about which there's the most disagreement within the bureaucracy, even though I think everyone agrees that we killed 100 or so of an al Qaeda group in northern Iraq in this recent go-around, that we've arrested that al Qaeda guy in Baghdad who was connected to this guy Zarqawi whom Powell spoke about in his UN presentation."
Just as "journalist" Maureen Dowd had done a week earlier for the New York Times, when she abbreviated a quote from President Bush to make it sound like he claimed al-Qaeda had been defeated and was no longer a problem, so did Vanity Fair do the same with the Deputy Secretary of Defense. Only this time, it was about the Bush Administration putting one over on the American public by deliberately advancing the "fabricated" notion -- that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction -- as a pretext for war.
Even worse, just as the political left in America did with the Dowd lie, they picked up on and disseminated the Vanity Fair lie. This time, however, the Bush Administration was actually able to release a full transcript of a Pentagon audio tape of the Vanity Fair interview that convincingly refuted the abbreviated Vanity Fair quote. The Bush Administration was able to demonstrate how Vanity Fair had taken the Deputy Secretary's words out of context and abbreviated the quotation to say something quite different than was actually said.
However, as it always is in the case with the liberal left of late, left-leaning journalists chose to gnore the truth and just keep perpetuating the lie. For example, Paul Krugman, in an article for the New York Times wrote that "the deputy defense secretary, recently told Vanity Fair that the decision to emphasize W.M.D.'s had been taken for 'bureaucratic reasons . . . because it was the one reason everyone could agree on.'" Mr. Krugman also explained that the toppling of the Saddam statutes and the rescuing of Private Jessica Lynch, "seem to have been improved by editing."
Krugman then went on to explain that the real reason for America going to war with Iraq was for personal reasons. President Bush felt slighted by Saddam Hussein. So he sent in the Marines, Air Force, Navy and Infantry to quell his sense of anger at being "mocked" by Saddam. Mr. Krugman quotes the Financial Times for that revelation. No-one in the know is quoted accurately; just unnamed sources in unknown positions within and out of government.
From all indications, media leftists will not stop perpetuating their lies and vile innuendos. And that because there's no longer any fear on the part of leftist journalists that they will be held accountable for anything they say or do -- because even if there is some criticism or questioning, they simply move on to the next story, and the next pack of lies.
While it may be true that the New York Times recently removed one blatant abuser of the 1st amendment from its staff, and lost another because of his misrepresentation of who wrote what, the other blatant purveyors of fabricated reality continue to thrive and go on.
Let's all just hope that the pendulum finally starts to swing back towards integrity and truthfulness in reporting -- and that Americans finally are able to get what they expect from the news media: these two important virtues back.
Bravo Steve!
I too would like the result of the war if the renewed focus on the mideast reulted in a settlement.
But whether or not Bush is sincere (I hope so) I worry that Abu does not have the political based needed to make a settlement take and that excluding Arafat from a symbolic role will mean that any settlement is temporary.
Tartarin - the New York Times today carried pretty much the same story. One of the things to note is that John Warner has begun to doubt, and wants an inquiry, and he has been one of the most loyal defenders of the truth of the evidence presented.
Although there have always been doubters of the need to go to war, to defend, there has almost always been an implicit trust in our top leadership and intelligence agencies. This trust began to be questioned soon after 9/11, and it is curious to look at in retrospect. After all, the normal reaction was that we had been attacked, this was a heinous crime, something had to be done. But information started to come out quite soon about how much intelligence pre-attack was actually there, and what was done about it. At the time, we knew that most of the attackers were Saudis, and that the mastermind was from Saudi. The logical conclusion would seem to be an investigation into the genesis and geography of the attack.
Instead of that, our attention was being drawn to another country, another leader, with an extremely nebulous connection to what had actually happened. And, as it turned out, the plan was not to go after the source of the murders which had actually occurred, but to use the logic of possible future attacks against a country on which we had obvious designs.
Most people are slow and reluctant to relinguish their faith in their leaders, figuring that there must be superior intelligence and knowledge to warrant their decisions and actions. It is not easy to lose faith. But once it happens, it's more difficult to mend.
Logic demands an investigation into cause and effect, into whether or not truth was told, or propaganda fed. Logical thinking most often takes us from one step to another, leading to conclusions.
What is not logical is to keep questioning whether or not something is logical. Then it becomes a game, a game of one-upmanship in which nobody wins or loses.
We have a very serious problem in this country now, a very big one. And it has to do with trust. And a lot of what happens will depend on how we face it.
He better mean it Steve, given the likelihood of a growing nightmare scenario in Iraq, it's 50 years past time that an American President should put the screws to Israel, if that's what it's going to take, to assure that they do their part to live in peace with their neighbors--there's no way any one will have leverage to get to a peaceful solution as long as the Israelis can be painted as the aggressors and territorial imperialists. If what you hope for Blair is based upon deals he made, and it comes to pass, then i will wish the best to him, although i've had no brief to defend him in the past.
I suppose it all depends if Arafat is big enough as Father (or should that be Fatah) of the Nation not in fact to be recognised as Father (or Fatah - this is getting complicated) of the Nation.
i.e. is he wise enough to realise his role is done and let go. Probably not.
Mamaj -- Haven't opened the Times yet, but I'm relieved (aren't you!) that Congress is beginning to, uh, catch on? There's been a lot of pooh-poohing going on about Bush lying, but once a crack is opened by this investigation into lying the country into war, a timely investigation into the why's and wherefore's of 9/11 (who knew what when) will become more likely. Above all, those who have had doubts all along will no longer feel they are crying in the wilderness.
