Thanks to the anonymous reader who emailed it to me…..
Major Trump donors who complained of immigrant ‘invasion’ used Mexican workers illegally https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/20/uline-mexican-workers-trump
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The problem is not the “echo chamber” phenomenon. It is the fact that reactionary information sources disseminate falsehoods about the…
Also I love the chicken fat on this one (and that the text of the chicken fat is big enough…
I don't think of myself as complaining about conservative echo chambers so much as I think political echo chamber like…
But in the current political moment, conservatives are complaining a lot about liberal “echo chambers,” which makes this the right…
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Wow!
Great sign.
Of course, people still died under Clinton, but not as a direct result of his mendacity.
Actually, I think Al Gore as Viable Candidate did.
I like this a lot better than the current one in vogue, which is “Bush lied, people died”. I think the message is much more positive and will work far better with the middle (that darn center)
Well, ok, I get the sign, and I think it’s pretty funny. But, if you wanna get technical — Clinton’s call to up the bombings of Iraq to take the focus off him and his lies did, in fact, kill people. Not as many, sure. But, still…
Right on, bean. I was about to post something in the same direction, but ended cancelling it by fear of possible misunderstandings.
John, are you sure there can be any positive message when the facts themselves (that people died and are still dying as a consequence of Bush’s lies) are so negative? I understand that, electorally speaking, this might “work better” with the middle, but I doubt that slight possibility is worth such a rhetorical distortion. As I see it, “center people” bother more about the inherent violence of the single word “die” than wether you openly accuse Bush or praise Clinton.
Please take it only as the opinion of an outsider who follows that from Europe (I have never lived in the USA, so feel free to correct me about any fact that could seem unfamiliar to me).
A pro-war believer might point out that lots of Iraqis were indeed being killed by their Baathist government during the Clinton impeachment.
bean, that’s a serious charge against Clinton, and not one I think you can back up. As I recall, Clinton set a deadline a couple of months ahead of time and warned Saddam Hussein that if he didn’t start cooperating with the weapons inspectors by then, then Clinton would take military action. Sometime after that announcement the Republicans set hearings on the Lewinsky affair for right after the deadline. Then when the deadline passed, and Clinton started bombing, the Republicans charged that Clinton was doing this dastardly deed to take attention away from the hearings.
It’s possible I’m conflating the details with a similar incident, but pretty much every single day for the last few years of his presidency the Republicans were trumpeting some fake (or very occasionally genuine) scandal, so how could Clinton ever do anything without someone saying it was just a wag-the-dog distraction? It seems much more reasonable to presume, absent other evidence, that Clinton acted in the sincere belief that he was doing what he thought best for the country and the world.
I’m no expert, but I’ve read several people who have postulated that Clinton’s bombings actually succeeded in decimating what remained of Saddam’s WMD programs. IF that’s true, then Clinton successfully stopped Saddam from continuing his pursuit of WMD with relatively few casualties. Personally, I think that may have been a worthy trade off.
It also is quite different from Bush. Clinton had intelligence that allowed him to target specific facilities. Bush had no such information.
Not saying I support it, just saying if it’s true, Clinton wasn’t lying and he actually achieved respectable goals (though one might argue that the cost was too high. I would really have to know more to weigh in there).
P.S. I don’t love Clinton, but I do think we should try to look at this accurately.
Our memories regarding Clinton’s bodycount are inevitably fuzzy, because media coverage was so Lewinsky-fixated and moronic anyway. From Mother Jones April 6, 1999 (filed while NATO was still bombing Serbia):
We have always been at war with Iraq; we were never at war with Iraq….
Oh, and who can forget a bombing mission named after a Nazi general? Desert Fox, indeed.
(Desert Peach is another story….)
I do have to admit, there’s something irresistably enjoyable about a scandal that produces SNL-worthy headlines like “Bush Defends Intelligence As ‘Darn Good’“.
“Nobody died because Clinton lied” is I think the sentiment, and true. Nice idea.
Clinton’s Iraq is another matter, and in fact it was Amp who brought home to me the sanctions death toll. My own biggest objection to Clinton had been the doubling of the US prison population to 2 million. War on drugs.
No…no one died in Iraq when Clinton was in office. Those mass graves of over 1,000,000+ dead Iraqi’s don’t really exist. The people of Iraq would be MUCH better off with Saddam and his sons in power.
Good way to confuse issues, Bubba. But Clinton did not create those mass graves—at least not directly (and if you want to argue that US foreign policy had indirectly supported the Hussein regime’s brutality, you would be more truthful by including the Reagan & Bush I administrations in your accounting). He did, however, support a sanctions regime that contributed to the deaths of thousands of Iraqi civilians. And he did occasionally use our military to attack Iraq, killing more civilians. But he did not, like the current President, use false, fabricated and forged evidence to justify a war that has claimed 6,058—7,711 civilian deaths, not to mention a hundred or so deaths among coalition forces (who continue to die, by the way.)
The evil committed by the Hussein regime does not justify the evil committed by either the Clinton or Bush regimes. And if you really think it is acceptible for the political leadership of a country to scare its people into war with lies, I can think of any number of totalitarian countries where you might feel more comfortable. But if you plan to stay put, then you could serve your country well by demanding the political leadership be held accountable—for the mendacity of the White House and the spinelessness of the Congress.
(Gee, ja think I’m a little outraged heah?)
Bubba will be better off sticking to the sanctions, which we’ve already discussed. If he wants to invoke the mass graves, which I think is an excellent idea, he should check the dates on them. They aren’t Clinton dates, but they are from when we were supporting Saddam Hussein. The 1980s.
Who’d a thunk it?
I believe you’ll find that in the 1980s, our President was Republican.
He might find another set of mass graves (in fact, I know he will), from 1991, when we called on the Kurds and Shiites to rise up and then sat back and watched them be slaughtered.
Who was President in 1991?
Bubba, either your cheeks are crimson when you read this or you’re a lying sack of s**t.
I think Bubba obscures his real point by focusing on Clinton, although the original photo invites it. As you all point out, both parties tolerated Iraqi brutality in past years. I suspect what Bubba means to assert is that whatever happened in previous years, “Bush’s Lies” have saved Iraqi lives.
I happen to agree with that point, but certainly it’s open to argument, and we may just have to await history’s judgment.
Tom T., how about this for a SNL-worthy headline: Attacks ‘a bunch of bull’
I suspect what Bubba means to assert is that whatever happened in previous years, “Bush’s Lies” have saved Iraqi lives.
If true, it is some twisted logic. It presumes that the several thousand lives killed during the war are sacrificed to prevent the possibility of an even greater number of lives killed if there had been no war—a possibility made less and less likely by the greater and greater unreliability of so-called intelligence. (Nevermind the lack of an “imminent threat.”) It also presumes that the ends justify the means, that in a democracy we can forgive our leader’s lying to us to commit our families and friends to the bloody, destructive business of war, so long as the outcome is somewhat agreeable.
The brutality of the Hussein regime has been a convenient reality for the Bushies to use as cover for its more naked agenda of exploiting resources and of rewarding corporate buddies. No reasonable human being sheds a tear for Saddam Hussein, and I am glad to see him gone. But means are important. And the ends are not contained to merely the toppling of a despot. Effects linger, history is not static, not a replaying of the statue falling over and over on television. The Iraqi people continue to suffer, only this time as a result of direct war and a bungled, thoughtless occupation. The American people suffer, too, through the loss of loved ones—and through a greatly reduced national security as a result of lost credibility around the world. Does anyone honestly think that these revelations of forgeries and fraud will not come to haunt us?
And furthermore, are we now going to invade every country with a violent dictatorship? Where is the line drawn?
And how come we’re spending billions of dollars on Iraq when we so desperately need that money here?
Apparently the line is drawn at Uzbekistan, where Donald Rumsfeld recently shook hands with the tyranical despot who boils his political dissenters alive. (someone else find the photo, I’m lazy and have a slow connection)
We also have to assume that Saddam would kill more Iraqis than the war and the occupation, and whatever comes next due to our bumbling with diplomacy. Iraqis are already preparing for a civil war, one that wouldn’t take place if Saddam were in charge, and one that could possibly leave a regime worse than Saddam’s. In the midst of chaos, we can’t trust that good will prevail, or we have learned nothing from history.
Oh, and who can forget a bombing mission named after a Nazi general?
Minor historical comment — Rommel was not a Nazi. He was killed for his participation in the assassination plot against Hitler. (Or he was sent his own sword, which amounts to the same thing.)
I do wonder if Rumsfeld enjoys shaking hands with these chaps. He does like a strong hand, and he looks happy in the Saddam photo. When confronted with it on TV, his response was: “Where did you get that?” Scary.
Kevin made most of my points. I guess I’d say it is NEVER OK to lie to take your country into war. Yup, never sounds about right. Not even WW II. Beyond that, we can get into further discussion, beginning with the fact I rather vehemently pointed out that Saddam’s mass murders are pre-Clinton. They are GOP mass murders if they’re anyone’s.
Which brings me to this: “As you all point out, both parties tolerated Iraqi brutality in past years.” No, Tom T., that is certainly not what I point out. I point out, with some data, that the GOP tolerated extreme Iraqi brutality for a dozen years, from Reagan to Bush I. Clinton ended that. That’s good. He replaced it with UN sanctions (with unanimous UNSC support, IIRC), which killed perhaps 500,000 people, causing Madeleine Albright to say the remark for which I cannot forgive her, that she felt 500,000 deaths were worth it. Sadly. That is the difference between Clinton and the GOP there: Clinton’s 500,000 did not die through Iraqi brutality, but through starvation and disease. Make of it what you will, but do not claim that I’m saying both parties equally tolerated Iraqi brutality. They did not.
There is clear evidence, OTOH, that the sanctions were either badly mismanaged or deliberately rigged. Eggs were banned as a potential deadly weapo, and items useful to Saddam allowed through, or so I’ve read.
My claim: Iraqis were not being mass murdered just before we went in, whatever the TV tells you. Some were being gruesomely tortured, and tens of thousands were dying of starvation and disease, from the UN sanctions. Make that point instead, folks.
I cannot believe that sign! Every sperm is sacred! He and that Monica Lewinsky (she looked good last night) must have killed millions between them. Millions!
As well as improving cigar sales.
Nobody died?
Yeah, um, Vince Foster, er, shot himself, and then, uh, dragged himself up a hill.
Oh, please.
From snopes.com:
On 10 October 1997, special prosecutor Kenneth Starr released his report on the investigation into Foster’s death, the third such investigation (after ones conducted by the coroner and Starr’s predecessor, Robert B. Fiske) of the matter. The 114-page summary of a three-year investigation concluded that Foster shot himself with the pistol discovered in his right hand. There was no sign of a struggle, nor any evidence he’d been drugged or intoxicated or that his body had been moved.
If Foster had been murdered or if unanswered questions about his death remained, Starr would have been the last person to want to conclude the investigation prematurely. Or are we to believe Starr is part of the cover up, too?
Okay, let’s assume that the wacky conspiracy theory about Vince Foster is correct (which means you need to believe that Starr was in on the cover-up – hahaha). Which of Clinton’s lies lead to his death ‘a’?
Talk about a non-sequitur (sp?).
Hey, can we have a thread dedicated to a bizarre, non-linear discussion/flame war w/ conspiracy theorists & Constitution Party members? Oh, the things you will read.
Call me crazy, but I think that a’s post was tongue-in-cheek. Of course I could be wrong.
a’s post was pretty poorly written if it was toungue-in-cheek, but we already had discussions on stuff like this. If his intentions went astray, I’ll forgive him (her?) for it. Otherwise, fuck a. Fuck him right in the ear.
Anyway, I’m not sure of this No one died when Clinton lied stuff. I for one nearly died of shock when I found out that he was being less than honest about his affair with Monica. I mean, who saw that one coming?
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