Bush Supporters' Aftermath Thread III

I think blatham's just cranky after that all-day Photoshop session. Maybe he'll get drunk tonight and feel better tomorrow afternoon.


But he'll probably still think I can't comment on someone's lack of personal social manners because I post Ann Coulter articles on A2K and support the Iraq War.

Ticomaya wrote:

I think blatham's just cranky after that all-day Photoshop session. Maybe he'll get drunk tonight and feel better tomorrow afternoon.


But he'll probably still think I can't comment on someone's lack of personal social manners because I post Ann Coulter articles on A2K and support the Iraq War.

Tico, perhaps it's time for you to take a nap.

Do you people all live in Albuquerque?

(I know blatham's in NYC)

Is the Dys the only liberal in that part of NM?

Robert Fisk: A dictator created then destroyed by America

Published: 30 December 2006

Saddam to the gallows. It was an easy equation. Who could be more deserving of that last walk to the scaffold - that crack of the neck at the end of a rope - than the Beast of Baghdad, the Hitler of the Tigris, the man who murdered untold hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis while spraying chemical weapons over his enemies? Our masters will tell us in a few hours that it is a "great day" for Iraqis and will hope that the Muslim world will forget that his death sentence was signed - by the Iraqi "government", but on behalf of the Americans - on the very eve of the Eid al-Adha, the Feast of the Sacrifice, the moment of greatest forgiveness in the Arab world.

But history will record that the Arabs and other Muslims and, indeed, many millions in the West, will ask another question this weekend, a question that will not be posed in other Western newspapers because it is not the narrative laid down for us by our presidents and prime ministers - what about the other guilty men?

No, Tony Blair is not Saddam. We don't gas our enemies. George W Bush is not Saddam. He didn't invade Iran or Kuwait. He only invaded Iraq. But hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians are dead - and thousands of Western troops are dead - because Messrs Bush and Blair and the Spanish Prime Minister and the Italian Prime Minister and the Australian Prime Minister went to war in 2003 on a potage of lies and mendacity and, given the weapons we used, with great brutality.

In the aftermath of the international crimes against humanity of 2001 we have tortured, we have murdered, we have brutalised and killed the innocent - we have even added our shame at Abu Ghraib to Saddam's shame at Abu Ghraib - and yet we are supposed to forget these terrible crimes as we applaud the swinging corpse of the dictator we created.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article2112555.ece

Saturday, December 30, 2006
The President's praise of fair trials and the rule of law

By Glenn Greenwald - President Bush today hailed the critical importance of fair trials and the rule of law . . . . in Iraq:


"Today, Saddam Hussein was executed after receiving a fair trial -- the kind of justice he denied the victims of his brutal regime.

Fair trials were unimaginable under Saddam Hussein's tyrannical rule. It is a testament to the Iraqi people's resolve to move forward after decades of oppression that, despite his terrible crimes against his own people, Saddam Hussein received a fair trial. This would not have been possible without the Iraqi people's determination to create a society governed by the rule of law."

The President is certainly right that it is is a good thing that Saddam Hussein was given a trial, represented by lawyers, with an opportunity to contest his guilt, before being deemed to be guilty. That is how civilized countries function, by definition. In fact, allowing people fair trials before treating them as Guilty is one of the handful of defining attributes -- one could even say (as the American Founders did) a prerequisite -- for countries to avoid tyranny.

That is why it is so reprehensible and inexpressibly tragic that the Bush administration continues to claim -- and aggressively exercise -- the power to imprison and punish people without even a pretense or fraction of the due process that Saddam Hussein enjoyed. The Bush administration believes that it has the power to imprison whomever it wants, for as long as it wants, without even giving them access to the outside world, let alone "a fair trial." The power which it claims -- which it has seized -- extends not only to foreign nationals but legal residents and even its own citizens.

...

For the Bush apologists [you know who you are, tico, foxy, mcg, ad naseum] who require them, help yourselves to all the meaningless caveats you want.


Those who take comfort in comparisons like that, who think that these sorts of rationalizations constitute some kind of mitigating argument -- "hey, American behavioral standards still hover above those of Saddam's Baathist Iraq, so only deranged Bush-haters would object to America's treatment of its detainees!" -- are precisely the people who have no understanding of what kind of country America is supposed to be.

http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2006/12/presidents-praise-of-fair-trials-and.html

Thank you McTag. That is wonderful.

My favorite Burns line that I ever memorized I always thought was directed straight to me:

"O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!"

And it is quite humbling to remember that as he penned that, he was addressing a louse.

Happy New Year everybody!!!!

Foxfyre wrote:

Thank you McTag. That is wonderful.

My favorite Burns line that I ever memorized I always thought was directed straight to me:

"O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!"

And it is quite humbling to remember that as he penned that, he was addressing a louse.

Happy New Year everybody!!!!

I've not come on to disagree with anyone, of course, and Happy New Year to all, but when Burns wrote these lines he had seen a louse in the bonnet or hair of a self-important, well-dressed woman sitting in the pew in front of him in church. I believe.
This prompted the train of thought.

Burns was very popular (in translation) in the USSR, did you know that? A champion of the common man.

"An honest man's the noblest work of God"

"The rank is but the guinea stamp. The man's the gowd, for a' that"

I don't think Burns addressed that in the poem. He was addressing the louse.

In English, Burn's Scotch lines read: "Oh would some power the gift give us, to see ourselves as others see us." The poem concerns an incident in which the poet saw a woman in church sporting a new hat. Unknown to her, there was a louse visible on the plumes, subjecting her to ridicule.

Well, I didn't study English at university/college as you did, just learnt it at school.

So you are here again the better expert (besides, of course, having the advantage to be a native English speaker).

My college English professor, however, took a different point of view with it and I could see that side too.