Gawdzilla Sama
Valued Senior Member
Communism came to Cambodia DURING the Vietnam War.
We should get out of Afghanistan.
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It took over ("spread") in 1975 - two years after the US withdrew from Vietnam.
Communism also took over in Laos that year - again, probably in consequence of the US having destroyed the stabilizing institutions and economy of that country, and opposed the popular movements to replace them with better and more workable ones. The firmest enemies of the US, the forces that depended least on US support and had the least dealing with the US, thereby gained relative advantage.
One can even note that Vietnam became communist only after the Vietnam War.
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It's accurate, not a revision of history. What about it?
You post them - I can't tell and don't care if you "support" them, in some abstract sense that does not prevent your posting them.
The most obvious and ubiquitous Republican talking point(s) you post is the "bothsides" schtick - such as the false equivalences between the misdeeds of Dems and the disasters of Reps in the past fifty-odd years of US governance.
There are several others - I'll try and flag them for you as you post them, since you claim to be unaware of the origin of that fraction of your posting.
There is no such argument from evidence or reason - no telling what you mean by "good". The US did not learn to reject W, obviously - it elected and re-elected him.
There is this argument: The US majority voted for Hillary in 2016 - and Hillary was not like W. (The electoral college voted for Trump, who unlike Clinton is quite similar to W, but that is not the "US"). But it's hard to argue the US learned that from Vietnam, forty years in the past.
It assigns you blame for the election of Republican politicians - the Republican strategy was to suppress the Dem vote, in part by creating "independents" - not attract the "independent" vote. That's what the Russian dealings were all about - the Russian troll and bot operation did not focus on recruiting votes for Trump, but on discouraging voting altogether, deflecting it to protest votes for the unelectable, etc. Suppressing support for Dems, not boosting support for Reps. The Rep media feed is not digging for votes, but attempting to bury them. With you, they succeeded.
They only requirement for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing to oppose it. You are the voter Republican propaganda has been trying to create.
Republican talking points, flagrant/sucker category. You post a lot of them.
Here's another:
What coin would that be, that has full scale war and national scale economy wrecking white collar criminality on one side, and a single vaguely plausible domestic misdeed of no great significance on the other?
Republican talking point, bothsides, false equivalence, flagrant/sucker category. Drawing equivalence between Clinton's minor and normal misdeeds and W lying the US into invading Iraq is goofy.
Republican talking point - the fourth or fifth consecutive one you've posted.
It's their vote I disapprove of, not their "conservatism" (which is mostly left of the Democratic Party's proclaimed ideology. They very much like Social Security and Medicare, for example.). If they would just vote their "conservatism", rather than Hannity's swindle talk, the US Congress would be solidly "progressive" - that is, Eisenhower aligned ideologically - right now, and Trump would have lost every State he ran in.
Like I said: living in the Republican fantasy bubble as you do, you have no idea of my ideology - and very little of anyone else's.
You forgot to post that demonstration. From the several obvious and elementary errors you have made regarding what I supposedly harbor as beliefs, it appears you would have great difficulty with it - Republican bubble world does not support coherent thought of any kind.
Try this, since it's thread relevant: describe my - or anyone's - viewpoint or ideological position on US involvement in Afghanistan.
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Gawdzilla Sama
Valued Senior Member
"It took over ("spread") in 1975 - two years after the US withdrew from Vietnam."
Domino.
Domino.
There was no chain. All three of those countries went communist at about the same time - basically, as soon as they could after the US pulled its helicopter gunships out of the area.
Would anyone be surprised if Afghanistan did something similar? Not go communist, but adopt whatever has least depended on US support and has had the fewest ties with the US these past fifteen years - whatever the US has been preventing by force.
ROTFLMFAO
so, it's OK to commit felonies so long as you're a politician, on the left, and it doesn't lead to war and national scale economy wrecking white-collar criminality?
And no, I don't think that is what you meant. I just think that it's hilarious that you would excuse a felonious act as "a single vaguely plausible domestic misdeed of no great significance". minor and normal misdeeds. LMFAO
the rule of law requires equality under the law.
ROTFLMFAO
PS - I'm not an Independent. I'm a Liberal Anarchist.
Gawdzilla Sama
Valued Senior Member
s
Still a domino.
I'm a mite curious about this one and I think it deserves an honest answer: how is it a ubiquitous Republican talking point of false equivalence that I've pointed out both sides violate the rule of law and neither side is honest?
That is important to explain, imho.
Seattle
Valued Senior Member
Because both sides don't do it equality. Trump says both sides have some good people when he is looking at liberal protesters on the one side and skin heads on the other (for example).
There, if you want to be a simpleton about it, a Republican talking point would be to deflect any criticism by saying "both sides" do it.
It's not Ok. It's just not equivalent to stuff that does lead to full scale war and national scale economy wrecking white-collar criminality (two different kinds - a record) and the deaths of thousands in New Orleans
It's just that Hillary Clinton did nothing remotely equivalent to any of the three or four worst disasters of W's eight year administration. Not in scale, not in effect, not in kind, not in moral turpitude, not in ethical abandonment of declared principle, not in any way. W did stuff orders of magnitude worse than anything either Clinton even attempted. To find bad shit equivalent to even one of W's worst done by a US politician one might have to go back to Jefferson Davis, unless some major Vietnam War horror can be pinned wholly on Kennedy or Johnson or Nixon.
Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton was not on the left even by claim until - maybe - the last couple months of 2015, depending on if one believed her changes of stance.
And although you wisely avoid specifying what it is you think Hillary Clinton did that was equivalent to launching the invasion and occupation of Iraq, odds are you aren't talking about anything she did as a politician.
So the whole schtick there is what the analyzers of fascist propaganda have labeled the "Big Lie" tactic.
By being a false equivalence, being for years now publicized and promoted as a flexible talking point by the standard Republican media operatives in charge of composing and promoting talking points for Republican candidates and media support institutions, and being in fact continually used by all of them in exactly that way thousands of times for years now.
ubiquitous. Republican. talking point. false equivalence. Check, check, check, check.
Meanwhile: Trying to claim something Hillary did is similar enough to one of W's major horrors to match up on a coin is bizarre and fanciful enough to raise psychological questions. It's almost as if the Republican media feed victims have never noticed that Hillary's entire career as a politician was a decent but compromised and uninspiring term in the Senate and a single inept campaign for a Presidency that she managed to get cheated out of by a pack of rookies running an illiterate and increasingly senile slob from New York City in their first campaign for anything anywhere.
That is their criminal mastermind of ruthless tyranny and iron fisted doom?
Which is essentially what happens, over and over, on every major media news outlet and analytical format in the US, week in week out, preemptively as well as in reaction.
Because it works.
For instance: It's one reason we can't get out of Afghanistan by pressing the Reps who took us there for follow-through to avoid blame.
Seattle
Valued Senior Member
We haven't been able to get out because it's always hard to get out and it's very easy to get in.
You could have not been for getting into some (any) conflict and still have a hard to responsibly getting out since those who want to stay will "win the day" at the polls when you get out and all hell breaks lose.
In other words, it's not a simple problem for any party/government/side. Look at Syria. No one wants to be there and yet no one wants to just pick up and leave the way Trump wants to.
Exxon wants to be there, as does Russian oil. There are pipelines involved, as well as fossil fuel from Syria proper.
Trump does not want to leave either, and isn't leaving. He just wants Erdogan to be happy with him and keep paying him royalties for the use of his name on those buildings in Istanbul.
Yazata
Valued Senior Member
It's because they want to believe that they are Good and that their chosen opponents are Evil.
Any suggestion of equivalence denies that assumed moral superiority and threatens to collapse good into evil.
I don't differentiate for two basic reasons
1- opportunity is part of criminal acts more often than not
2- when a person commits a criminal act, especially a felonious act, you can logically state that the person is capable, willing and likely to commit other criminal acts. This is best demonstrated by the recidivism rate in our nation
sorry, but I disagree.
the felony violated the rule of law, it didn't in any way protect the Constitution, and potentially released classified information, plus, she can't claim ignorance of the law (no excuse anyway) because all civil servants, appointed or hired, are required by law to not only be briefed (regularly), they're required to sign affidavits acknowledging training and or briefing.
And that is just one known, proven, demonstrable felony that was never prosecuted for whatever reason directly violating the rule of law - there was no equality under the law with this situation
this speaks volumes about the character of not only the individual but the state of affairs within the government at the time.
any government organisation that is willing to suspend equality and or the rule of law for an individual or individuals doesn't meet the requirements for the rule of law and undermines the process in ways that reverberate through history by establishing a precedent and creating a special class or subgroup immune from prosecution.
I would state that undermining the rule of law and equality is equally horrendous in the long term, if not potentially worse, than what w did
I don't "think", I know. She violated 18 USC § 1924
and again, I would state that undermining the rule of law and equality is equally horrendous in the long term, if not potentially worse, than what w did
apparently, in modern society, it's ok to believe something is legal because someone else got away with an explicitly stated crime. Worse still, once a precedent is established it is either binding on or persuasive for a court or other tribunal when deciding subsequent cases with similar issues or facts, and pretty damn difficult to get rid of
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Opinion:
Half hearted war fighting never works out.... either be at war or not, never half way...If the USA isn't prepared to win the war then don't be there fighting it..
Half hearted war fighting never works out.... either be at war or not, never half way...If the USA isn't prepared to win the war then don't be there fighting it..
Seattle
Valued Senior Member
There is no war to fight. There should have been a feel good bombing of a very terrorist camps right after 9/11 and that's it.
It was trivial, compared with W's major disasters - as a crime, and in every single one of its consequences.
It was also matched, and exceeded, specifically, by comparable minor misdeeds of W and Trump and several other Republicans (including Colin Powell, in the same job).
You can only use it to coin match one of these minor crimes by one of those folks - you need another ten felonies, hundreds of thousands of dead people, millions of refugees, the most corrupt military contracting America ever saw (at least since the Civil War), wholesale violation of the Constitution (torture, secrecy, surveillance, etc.) to get anywhere near W or Cheney's side of the coin.
Depends on the felony, and the person - in particular, who created the opportunities.
Like I said: The Republican propaganda accusations of what would have happened if the fantasy bubble of "bothsides" were the reality of the world carry the same weight, for you, as the actual crimes and disasters of real people in real life. You repeat Re talking points about Dems, what some Republican media operative claims Democrats would have done, as if they were equivalent to the actual misdeeds of Republicans.
One could instead match potential with crime by reality checking: Clinton, Kerry, Gore, Obama, almost any other Democrat, would almost certainly not have invaded Iraq at all, much less lied to do it. It wasn't on their agenda. They would not have trashed FEMA, the IRS, the bank regulators, or any other valuable government agency - that was a specifically Republican agenda item. They would not have had the Homeland Security Act mostly written and ready to be shoved through Congress within a few weeks under the excuse of 9/11 - that too was a Republican Party initiative, made ready in advance by the Republican think tanks but not the Democratic or independent ones. They would not have pushed large tax cuts for the rich in the face of an exploding budget deficit, and allowed corporate lobbyists to write major provisions of US tax law and Federal regulation, and obstructed State regulation of real estate lending and other increasingly corrupt areas of State level banking and finance - those were Republican Party goals, as pursued for a generation. They would not have set up the string of torture prisons and torture protocols W did, or turned as much to mercenaries and the CIA and hired foreign paramilitaries to fight American wars.
And so forth.
The state of affairs within the government, especially the Executive and eventually the Judicial branches, is exactly what would have been most different under Gore, Kerry, or Clinton. We can see that by comparing B Clinton's tenure, Obama's tenure, Carter's tenure, etc, with the dysfunctional and criminal messes created by Reagan, Bush, W, and Trump.
W did exactly that, on a larger scale than any Dem (or any previous President, actually). He is not remembered for it - perhaps because he also did even worse things. Lots of them.
So you are what, blaming Colin Powell for Clinton's email handling?
IIRC the last few of the dozen + investigations all absolved her of doing that - they couldn't show that any of the documents involved were classified. Meanwhile, the Republican mishandling of one hundred times as many such documents, including apparently provable classified ones, culminating in actually losing them in direct violation of the law (much more serious than Clinton's crime), was not investigated nearly as thoroughly.
If you want to call those two bad misdeeds, one a settled crime a hundred times larger and apparently much more damaging than the hypothetical other, "equivalent", ok - but you have used up your coin side on that. You still have the contracting, the torture, the various Homeland Security violations of the Constitution, the political trashing of FEMA amd the IRS and various banking regulators, electoral fraud and obstruction (including irregularities of the Supreme Court, Cheney's residency violations, voting machine and registration mishandlings, etc)
and the gorilla of all crimes - lying the country into a corrupt and Partisan (Republican) war of occupation.
Bothsides is bullshit.
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Too bad Obama isn't "we" - he even gets blamed for the budget deficits of his tenure.
I've been saying the same thing for a long time, the US has only struggled to win a war when it wasn't willing to commit the necessary resources, which were theoretically available if they'd been willing to use them. So if Americans don't feel the war in Afghanistan is serving their interests then they should certainly leave. It would be more productive to focus on Pakistani state sponsorship of terrorism anyhow- many of the roots of 9/11 can be traced to their soil and they have no business receiving any American aid or access to international markets until they cease such behaviour.
attitudinal statements that are irrelevant. you don't get to set the bar for everyone else, especially when blatant violations of the rule of law are involved. regardless of who violated those laws as well.
w was an idiot and I'm not dismissing his crimes, but you don't get to say that his "wholesale violation of the Constitution" is better or worse than hillary's "wholesale violation of the Constitution" because they're both nefarious and have long term consequences.
no, it doesn't. a felony is a felony, and "wholesale violation of the Constitution" is "wholesale violation of the Constitution".
if things would have been so different under dem rule, especially the noted above, why wasn't hillary prosecuted for the crime?
the felony was literally proven under POTUS Obama. That makes your entire point of "The state of affairs within the government...is exactly what would have been most different" and "Republican propaganda accusations" false as well as confirmation bias - wishful thinking combined with Belief perseverance (also known as conceptual conservatism), so I guess you're a conservative after all, eh?
your comment is literally a dismissal of a corruption of the democratic party foundational principle of equality - that dismissal is every bit equivalent to the idiot w because, as you claim about the idiot w, it is a "wholesale violation of the Constitution" and undermines the rule of law.
you remember wrong.
changing the subject in the hopes that it absolves hillary and the democratic party?
sorry, bud, but that won't work.
A criminal act is a criminal act, and justifying one because someone else got away with a crime is exactly my point about undermining the constitution and the rule of law.
Thank you for demonstrating the long term effects of criminality in politics and how it affects cultures making them dismissive of illegal activities because someone else got away with it.
moving the bar and distracting from the point will not justify your argument
irrelevant and distraction. where the hell did that come from?
no, I haven't.
why do I have to justify or explain any of that?
as I stated: w was an idiot and I'm not dismissing his crimes, but you don't get to say that his "wholesale violation of the Constitution" is better or worse than hillary's "wholesale violation of the Constitution".
you refuse to see the evidence - for whatever reason.
attempting to justify your parties "wholesale violation of the Constitution" makes you every bit as complicit in the crime as hillary and w, imho, and your continued perpetuation of dem talking points makes you the dem propaganda machine.
I didn't "fall" for any of it from either side. I simply followed the evidence, and that leads me to believe that both parties are equally sh*t.
so perpetuate away, because I know you will continue to push your beliefs