Obama vs. McCain? Shit, the REAL debate is on YouTube

When I began this blog, it was meant in large part to be a kind of centralized dumping site for all the online discussions and arguments in which I had become engaged. While it has strayed a bit from that ideal, I still like to include occasional commentary from online discussions I have had with Joe Righty (a moniker meant to encompass all right-wing bloggers/commentators with no official ties to mainstream or right-wing media).

As you may know, I utilize YouTube quite often as a primary source of documentary information. Occasionally I feel the urge to comment on a video or on someone else's comment. In researching my last post, Drinking the Sarah Palin Kool-Aid, I came across this gem mocking Palin's ignorance of crucial U.S. foreign policy concepts:



I found the following user comment disturbing and decided to leave a comment. Here is the comment, posted by user jimmyvan1775:

1.You can really tell a lot about a celebrity by their fans. You can also tell a lot about the fans by their choice of celebrity. This guy is a leftist idiot, a real tow the Democrat party line moron. He has the freedom to spew this kind of stupidity; others even have the right to believe it. However, lets remember that the Bush Doctrine has kept us safe to shop, work, go to movies, and yes watch retards like Maher

2. It was the Democrats, Bill Clinton, which treated terrorism as a criminal action rather than an act of war. As a result we enjoyed events such as the first bombing of the WTC, the bombing of our embassies, the bombing of the USS Cole, and the debacle that was Somalia, among other events. Now, in the waning years of the Bush administration, the left has to find a new village idiot. Sarah Palin has more backbone, brains, ands brawn, than the entire left-wing in this country.

I felt compelled to leave the following comment, hoping to set the record straight for the man:

Dude if you think attacking a country without the desire nor the means to attack the U.S. has kept us safe, then you also belong in the Category 5 Moron class. This is what is fundamentally wrong with Neo-conservatism. You believe that your right to shop and go to the movies is more important than an Iraqi citizen's right to be alive. That is an egotistical, reckless and deranged worldview. You wonder why al-Qaeda wants to attack us? Not for our freedoms, but for things like the Bush Doctrine.

Today, I was greeted by this reply from the incensed conservative:

YOU said, "Dude if you think attacking a country without the desire nor the means to attack the U.S. has kept us safe,"

Dude, I don’t think, I KNOW that sending troops into Iraq has KEPT the terrorist IN THE MIDDLE EAST fighting our solders THERE, and that has kept US safe HERE in the continental U.S.

YOU said, "then you also belong in the Category 5 Moron class."

Once again, for the real CAT. 5 Moron here, if we keep the Islamist (those are the bad guys in our story) in the Middle East, they can not set bombs in our backyards. President Bush and the military (those are the good guys) have done exactly that.

"This is what is fundamentally wrong with Neo-conservatism. You believe that your right to shop and go to the movies is more important than an Iraqi citizen's right to be alive."

First of all I am a CONSERVATIVE, none of this neo crap. As a part of my conservative beliefs, I think that when a group of people attack us and kill thousands, like say, I dunno, maybe THE TWINS TOWERS on SEPTEMBER THE ELEVENTH IN THE YEAR OF OUR LORD TWO THOUSAND AND ONE, that give us the absolute RIGHT to kick the tail of ANY HUMAN BEIBNG or ORGINIZATION that is involved with these enemies in any way. By the way, we aren’t fighting and killing Iraqis, we are fighting and killing TERRORISTS that are in Iraq.

"That is an egotistical, reckless and deranged worldview."

What is truly egotistical, reckless, and deranged, is the worldview of idiots with no ability to rationally examine a situation and come to a logical conclusion is somehow given the status of true thought. I mean people that simply absorb the comments made by retards like Maher, are allowed to believe their words are just as valid as the words of someone who truly uses his or her mind.

"You wonder why al-Qaeda wants to attack us? Not for our freedoms, but for things like the Bush Doctrine."

You poor, poor, left wing propaganda casualty. They attack us because we aren’t like them. They attack us because we don’t call God Allah, and we pray whenever we feel like it, and some of us don’t pray at all. They hate us because we treat women with respect and not like dogs and slaves. What happened first? Did we preemptively, unilaterally, enter Iraq happen first? Or did the terror attacks on 9/11 happen first? How can they hate us for something that we had not even considered as a national policy at the time they did what they did? Confusing? Well, let’s make it clear. Al-Qaeda hates us for being us, and not them. As a result of this hatred they attacked us. We determined as a nation that we would find and kill or capture as many terrorist as we could. This led us into Iraq, and thus the “BUSH doctrine”.

Please do some research and thinking, maybe you can break the stranglehold the mainstream media and idiots like Maher have on your mind. Leave the dark side and come over to the light. You can do it!!!!

First, let me say that being smug ("You can do it!!!!") about something of which you are ignorant is neither endearing nor a good way to win an argument. That said, I would like to use this space to reply to the spirited post by jimmyvan1775.

"Once again, for the real CAT. 5 Moron here, if we keep the Islamist (those are the bad guys in our story) in the Middle East, they can not set bombs in our backyards. President Bush and the military (those are the good guys) have done exactly that."

This response represents what is fundamentally wrong with most proponents of aggressive military action. The "Good vs. Bad" and "Us vs. Them" scenarios are as inaccurate as they are juvenile. Foreign policy is not a fairy tale. There are not always well-defined good guys and bad guys. When you enter into a conflict believing you're on the "Good" side, then any action taken by that side is deemed infallible. Trust me, I wish global relations were that simple. I wish we were always right. But that kind of myopia is not only ignorant, it's also why many foreign countries despise the United States for our unrepentant unilateralism.

Second, the notion that "we're fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them over here" is almost as ludicrous. The Right likes to point to the fact that we have not had a major domestic terrorist attack since the Iraq War began, as if that has prevented an attack. Fair enough. Assuming correlation equals causation, as the user has assumed, here are just a few other significant post-9/11 events that have also thwarted terrorism:

• The New England Patriots win the Super Bowl three times (2002, 2004, 2005)
• The last episode of "Friends" airs (May 2004)
• Hurricane Katrina (August 2005)
• Pluto redesignated as a dwarf planet (August 2006)
• Martin Scorcese wins first Ocsar for The Departed (February 2007)
• Barack Obama becomes first African American major-party presidential candidate (June 2008)
• Michael Phelps wins 8 gold medals at Beijing Olympics (August 2008)

It is not any more preposterous to claim these events were related to 9/11 than to make that claim of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. Yet right-wingers continue to assert these false links, which have even been debunked even by their own heroes:

September 2003: President Bush admits that there is "no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with September the 11th."

June 2004: 9/11 Commission Report finds no link between Iraq and Al-Qaeda.

August 2004: Dick Cheney claims he never made Iraq-9/11 connection.

August 2006: Bush admits that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, then suggests that no one in the administration ever made that claim.

September 2006: Cheney admits there is no Iraq-9/11 connection.

Even if we could overlook the FACT that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, one would still have a difficult time making the argument that invading a sovereign Arab nation would make us safer here in the U.S. Just looking at the idea at face value, it's difficult to believe that motivated terrorists would stop planning coordinated 9/11 style attacks in favor of essentially becoming cannon fodder in Iraq. As if Osama bin Laden said, "You know...that 9/11 attack went pretty well for us, but what I think we need is to do is go to Iraq and be blown away by tank fire." Bin Laden may be a sociopath, but I give him more credit as a tactician than to believe that.

Of course, the difficulty in convincing Joe Righty using logic is that he often doesn't have the fundamental facts straight. He believes that all terrorists are irrational and only want to attack Americans because they "hate our freedoms." In believing that fallacy (which I will explain in more detail later), Joe Righty essentially feels that nothing the United States actually does will have any effect on the way these people view Americans. That being the case, the only way to prevent more terror is to kill ALL the terrorists, making America safer in the process. As you may have predicted, this is simply not the case. Expert assessments and actual U.S. intelligence have found that the U.S. presence in Iraq is inspiring terrorists and making the world and U.S. citizens less safe. Even General Petraeus, whose word conservatives value just slightly less than the word of God, could only muster an "I don't know" when asked if the Iraq strategy was making Americans safer.

Of course, even if one could claim that we're "fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them here," there are still a few obvious moral impediments. One, it's not really fair to Iraqi citizens for their country to be destabilized to the point of civil war so that the United States can outsource its terrorism problem. Imagine, if you could, that China is at war with some radical anti-Chinese element residing in Mexico. Imagine that the Chinese leader says (in his best Bill Lumbergh voice), "Hey, America. Yeah...see we've got this war-type thing going on with some guys down in Mexico, so if you could just...let us occupy your country for the next several years while we fight them. I hope you don't mind. Of course, many of them will cross over here to try and kill our soldiers, and in the process, many American civilians will die in the crossfire. But hey, we need to fight them here so we don't have to fight them at home. 'Mkay?"

The second obvious moral issue is the idea that a U.S. soldiers' death is worth less than the "potential" death of a U.S. civilian. Look, I understand that certain sacrifices are expected to be made when one dons the uniform. What makes the notion of preemptive war so ridiculous is the fact that in sending troops into the line of fire, some will certainly be killed. By comparison, there is no guarantee any Americans will die if troops are not sent into a preemptive battle. Given how shoddy the pre-war intelligence was (lies, exaggerations, forgeries, cherrypicking), what are the odds that a military death has actually saved a civilian life? Five percent? Ten? So much for "an eye for an eye." 3,000 Americans are killed in the 9/11 attacks, and what do we do? We send 4,000 more to die, create violent unrest in Iraq while Osama bin Laden remains a free man. And somehow people who question that strategy are called un-American.

First of all I am a CONSERVATIVE, none of this neo crap.

Not surprisingly, neoconservatives don't much care for that label, probably because of the negative connotation these philosophies have garnered in recent years. But make no mistake about it. "Nation-building" and aggressive foreign policy (i.e. the Bush Doctrine) are hallmarks of neoconservatism. Still not convinced? Here's what some prominent neocons have said about the Bush Doctrine:

William Kristol: "The world's a mess....The danger is not that we're going to do too much. The danger is that we're going to do too little."

Richard Perle: "So the message to Syria, to Iran, to North Korea, to Libya [four countries that have not attacked nor threatened the United States] should be clear. If we have no alternative, we are prepared to do what is necessary to defend Americans and others.

David Horowitz: "Today 'neo-conservatism' identifies those who believe in an aggressive policy against radical Islam and the global terrorists.

Paul Wolfowitz: "if we say our only problem was to respond to 9/11, and we wait until somebody hits us with nuclear weapons before we take that kind of threat seriously, we will have made a very big mistake."

Just because you don't like the label, it doesn't mean it isn't aptly applied.

As a part of my conservative beliefs, I think that when a group of people attack us and kill thousands, like say, I dunno, maybe THE TWINS TOWERS on SEPTEMBER THE ELEVENTH IN THE YEAR OF OUR LORD TWO THOUSAND AND ONE, that give us the absolute RIGHT to kick the tail of ANY HUMAN BEIBNG or ORGINIZATION that is involved with these enemies in any way. By the way, we aren’t fighting and killing Iraqis, we are fighting and killing TERRORISTS that are in Iraq.

Again, Iraq was not at all involved with the September 11th attacks. The attacks were perpetrated almost entirely by Saudis, who received training in Afghanistan. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was a Kuwaiti living in Afghanistan and Osama bin Laden was from Saudi Arabia. And you can't be so naive as to believe we are only fighting "terrorists" in Iraq. Exactly who we are fighting in Iraq is an extremely complex issue, as CNN's embedded reporter Michael Ware explains here. It is fairly common knowledge that the Iraqi insurgency began with the vacuum created by the removal of Saddam Hussein. Initially, the insurgency was born from a combination of Saddam loyalists, Iraqi nationalists (who resented U.S. occupation), disgruntled Iraqi military (whose unit's were disbanded under the Coalition Provisional Authority) and some Islamic radicals. We know that there now exists an al-Qaeda presence, but experts believe it represents a small percentage of the overall fighting, and did not come to be affiliated with al-Qaeda until 2004, after U.S. troops arrived.

Finally, to illustrate just how improbable is the idea that only "terrorists" have been killed in the Iraq War, one need only look at any of the estimates of Iraqi civilian deaths. Estimates run as high as 650,000 civilian casualties. Even if you take the Bush Administration's word for it and assume that only 30,000 Iraqis have died since 2003, that is still 30,000 civilians!!!! Not terrorists, but civilians, and by Bush's own admission. Of course, given the Bush administration's extensive war propaganda machine (here and here), the chance that their estimate is correct is highly unlikely. No one suggesting that the U.S. military gunned down 650,000 Iraqi civilians, only that these people would theoretically still be alive were it not for the American military presence in Iraq. I wonder if jimmyvan1775 remembers the sacrifices these people made when he goes shopping. Probably not.

What is truly egotistical, reckless, and deranged, is the worldview of idiots with no ability to rationally examine a situation and come to a logical conclusion is somehow given the status of true thought. I mean people that simply absorb the comments made by retards like Maher, are allowed to believe their words are just as valid as the words of someone who truly uses his or her mind.

I generally try to avoid making statements that, taken out of context would mean virtually nothing without a few key partisan words. For the sake of illustration, I'll break with tradition, and offer this critique of jimmyvan1775:

What is truly egotistical, reckless, and deranged, is the worldview of idiots with no ability to rationally examine a situation and come to a logical conclusion is somehow given the status of true thought. I mean people that simply absorb the comments made by retards like Maher Hannity, are allowed to believe their words are just as valid as the words of someone who truly uses his or her mind.

See what I mean? A virtually universal statement. Although I would submit that my argument has relied on a breadth of information from a variety of actual documented sources, while my conservative counterpart has (I can only assume) relied almost exclusively on Fox News talking points (hand delivered by the White House) to defend...well, the White House. What you find, when you actually fact check and diversify your information stream, is that the conclusions you are able to draw are invariably more valid.

They attack us because we aren’t like them. They attack us because we don’t call God Allah, and we pray whenever we feel like it, and some of us don’t pray at all. They hate us because we treat women with respect and not like dogs and slaves.

I also dealt with this topic several months back. The University of Maryland conducted a public policy survey entitled the 2008 Annual Arab Public Opinion Poll, a vast survey of the current attitudes of Arab citizens. The polling found that 80% of those surveyed based their opinions about the United States on "American Policy" compared to 12% who responded that "American Values" were most influential. For all we have heard about Muslims "hating freedom," these data really blow that idea out of the water. Certainly there exist some radical elements in the Arab world, and certainly, taken literally, the Koran can be seen as promoting violence against the "infidel". But again, these people represent a very small percentage. Besides, there are many non-Muslim nations throughout the world, often with more liberal societies than that of the United States. Yet it is the United States that, in the same survey, was viewed "Very Unfavorably" by 64% of the Arab world. Does anyone really believe that all this anti-U.S. animosity is created entirely from a disdain for American values? If that is the case, why don't we see similar anti-Chinese, anti-Italian or anti-Brazilian sentiment? They are just as non-Muslim as the United States. Is Brazil any less liberal a society than the United States? Is Italy any less free? The freedom-hating Muslim theory is one that has been debunked so many times, yet it somehow remains a belief espoused by many Americans.

What happened first? Did we preemptively, unilaterally, enter Iraq happen first? Or did the terror attacks on 9/11 happen first? How can they hate us for something that we had not even considered as a national policy at the time they did what they did?

Those are all great rhetorical questions. However, since we have already seen that 9/11 had nothing to do with the Iraq War, these questions are reduced to mere historical trivia rather than the cause and effect relationship the author had hoped to establish. Here are a few more rhetoricals, but this time, with that relationship.

What happened first, September 11th or the Reagan-era bombings of Lybia?

What happened first, the 1993 World Trade Center bombing or U.S. support of Israel?

What happened first, the U.S.-led coup in Iran and subsequent installation of a puppet government or the Iran hostage crisis of the early 1980's?

In each case, of course, U.S. foreign policy preceeded the terrorist act. Why is there a causal relationship between these events? Because the terrorists that carried out these acts actually said what their motivations were. In fact, in the last several hundred years, I'm not sure there has ever been a terrorist attack on the United States that was the result of hatred of our values. This idea is an invention of the mainstream media and the U.S. government, as a means of deflecting guilt away from our own past military escapades. That is certainly not to say that these terrorist attacks were justified by any means. It says that ignoring the terrorists' motivations and writing off attacks as acts of lunacy does nothing to help thwart future attacks.

We determined as a nation that we would find and kill or capture as many terrorist as we could. This led us into Iraq, and thus the “BUSH doctrine”.

I might have to re-read my history book, but I always thought we went to fight in Afghanistan because we were trying to fight and kill terrorists. By the Bush administration's own admission, the Iraq war has at various times been about liberating the Iraqi people, deposing a brutal dictator, finding the WMD's, and was a mission from God.

And the notion that "we determined as a nation" to go to war with Iraq is highly suspect. Look at how the nation feels today. As the public came to understand the costs and learned that the justifications for war were flimsy if not outright lies, people withdrew support for the war. Currently 65% oppose the war and only 39% feel we were right to invade Iraq. Certainly the war had more support in the beginning, even in congress. Yet in October 2002 (a month before a congressional election), despite the fact the president and intelligence experts were telling congress that Iraq had nukes and that and Saddam was involved in the 9/11 attacks, 23 Senators and 133 Members of the House boldly voted not to authorize U.S. military involvement in Iraq. So we certainly did not go to war "as a nation" but rather as a nation divided. Once the holes emerged in the pre-war intelligence, support for the war dwindled dramatically and was the primary reason for the 2006 shift of power in congress.

Please do some research and thinking, maybe you can break the stranglehold the mainstream media and idiots like Maher have on your mind. Leave the dark side and come over to the light. You can do it!!!!

Well, I decided to take him up on this little challenge. How'd I do? I certainly outdid him on the research aspect, but let's examine the question of "thinking" for a bit. Which would you say requires more thinking?

- Constructive criticism or name-calling ("idiots", "retard")

- Relativism and objectivity or "Good Guys" versus "Bad Guys"

- Careful, documented analysis or regurgitation of GOP talking points

Naturally, the options in blue exhibit more sound reasoning than the chest-pounding, knee-jerk type of responses seen in red.

Perhaps most disappointing about jimmyvan1775's post is the fact that he never quite addresses the main point of my comment, the critique of his claim that Americans should have the right to shop and go to the movies even if it means the deaths of many innocent people. I suppose my opponent would counter by claiming that no innocent Iraqi was killed, as all Iraqis are terrorists. Really? Even the women and children? They were all terrorists too, huh?

Finally, a few words now for jimmyvan1775:

Whether or not you choose to believe it, yours is an insulated worldview, shared by an ever-dwindling number of like-minded individuals. In fact, we are both in the minority with respect to our views on the Iraq War. I opposed the war from the beginning. You still support it now. In between, 35% of Americans withdrew their initial support for the war, with about 60% currently opposed, according to Gallup polling. Only about 40% support the war. Who are these people? Basically, they are the ill-informed, or should I say, misinformed. Despite the notion being debunked by the 9/11 commission and the Bush administration, 30% of Americans still believe Saddam was "personally involved" in the 9/11 attacks. In an internet world where information is so readily available, how are so many Americans so wrong about major current events? Is it stubbornness? Intellectual laziness? Fox News? Whatever the cause, Americans need to start allying themselves with the facts rather than blindly following the leader. The United States was founded on dissent. The founding fathers saw it necessary to include freedom of speech, freedom of the press and checks and balances to dissuade groupthink from stifling dissent. Because of these allowances, the truth about the Iraq War has come out and many Americans have changed their minds. Certainly you too are allowed dissent from the mainstream and continue to tow the GOP party line, but why would you? Why cling to beliefs that are just not true? Do you still believe the Earth is flat? Do you still think slavery was moral? Do you still think witches ought to be burned? Assuming the answer to each is no, why do you still cling to the idea that the Iraq War has anything to do with September 11th or making Americans safer? In this age of information, you have every opportunity to acquaint yourself with the truth. I humbly implore you to do so.

You can do it!!!!