It would really help your case if you could quote me properly. But you can't. I hope you realize the difference between a simple typo, as in transposing two letters, and a complete unfamiliarity with a word or name -- Mengele versus Meangle. One is an accident. The other is ignorant.
Your own "pscyhological" warfare is backfiring as you're Dean-like rage is causing typos of such easy words as "pscyhological". Mabye a trip with the less fortunate to Treasure's or a skimming of the latest male profiles on Match.com will calm you down. So, is your secretary wearing a tie today Mr. "Pscyhological" Warfare? Is she smacking Hubba Bubba or Trident?
Hey, you started the typo jabs, not me. I don't have the ego. Go YEEEAAARRRRHHHH!!!! at some of those sexy males at Match.com.
By the way, a CNN poll showed that only 45% of viewers approved of it, compared to 52% percent after Bill Clinton's SOTU right after the Monica business broke.
I think the problem people have with the Hitler comparison, is that what brought it on is so tangential to the feelings it is trying to elicit. Hitler once listed a bunch of countries that others were concerned he would try to conquer (and later did). Now, OMG Bush has a speech in which he has a list of countries. The lists are not at all related, other than being countries and being in speeches, but since we don't like Bush, and people in general dontt like Hitler, lets point out the "erie similarity". People generally don't compare Hussein to Stalin because they both have impressive moustaches, but rather because of their murderous tendencies. If Bush had been proposing the establishment of concentration camps, the comparison would have been mich more valid. As it was, the author took a somewhat obscure reference (I had never heard said speech, and it was admitted that it would likely not resonate with most Americans), and saw an opportunity to draw a parallel, however meaningless, between a person he didn't like, and a person very few people like. I am all for being able to use any person as a historical reference, but I think it should be important to have some relevence to the topic under discussion, and not be based on some superficial similarity.
Not a good start to the re-election campaign. Yeah, stick a fork in GWB; he's done. But wait. I can think of 250 million reasons (spent solely in the ~5 battleground states) which will try to make GWB into the second coming of Ghandi or some such.
The establishment of concentration camps, however, would not be the only viable comparison. I cited several earlier. They are all dismissed by one side of the argument, while at the same time they trumpet other comparisons...and when you ask how this can be, the answer is always a version of " OUR comparisons are legit, your aren't." And point out that this is a subjective position, and they will respond, no, it's fact.
The fact checkers are coming out and Will weighs in... _____________ Evasions, Half-Truths, and the State of the Union Can we trust this year's speech? By Fred Kaplan Posted Wednesday, Jan. 21, 2004, at 2:35 PM PT This time, at least, there were no blatant lies in the national-security section of the State of the Union address. The speechwriters, no doubt watched over by a hyperalert Condoleezza Rice, made sure to avoid a reprise of last year's scandal over false claims of an Iraqi hunt for yellowcake. Instead, however, the scribes piled on so many half-truths and evasions, often in disingenuous phrasings, as to erase the customary distinction between mere deceit and sheer falsehood. Let's take them one by one. "We must continue to give our homeland security and law enforcement personnel every tool they need to defend us." Yet this is precisely what President Bush has failed to do. His homeland security budget for fiscal year 2004 was smaller than the budget for FY 2003. He has yet to order a serious effort to develop or procure WMD-detecting sensors. Security of cargo on ships and commercial airliners is riddled with holes. The borders are sieves. Most local police and fire departments lack the money, gear, and training to prevent, or to deal with the aftermath of, terrorist attacks. "Nearly two-thirds of [al-Qaida's] known leaders have now been captured or killed." Good. But the remaining one-third constitutes a distressingly large number still at large—not least Osama Bin Laden, President Bush's "Wanted Dead or Alive" poster-villain of last year's chest-pounding address. More worrisome still is that phrase "known leaders." The real concerns, as Donald Rumsfeld's hand-wringing memo of last October acknowledged, are the unknowns (or, as he put it in a different context, the "unknown unknowns"—the stuff we don't even know we don't know) and the haunting question of whether, through our (for the most part quite proper) tactics in tracking down terrorists, we might be spawning new recruits in the process. "[In Afghanistan], our coalition is leading aggressive raids against the surviving members of the Taliban and al-Qaida." Now we are. The Taliban are not so much "surviving" as returning, re-entering the country through the many doors we left open—and exploiting the discontent we allowed to seethe—after proclaiming that mission complete. To its credit, the Bush administration has renewed its attention to Afghanistan, even to the point of getting NATO to help, but it took a while. "[In Iraq] men who ran away from our troops in battle are now dispersed and attack from the shadows." First, that happened because the Bush administration decided the war was over after the statue of Saddam toppled and because the occupation forces weren't nearly large enough to secure the country in any serious way. Second, as the CIA and others have observed, the insurgents attacking U.S. troops aren't just Saddam loyalists and foreign jihadists. They're also Iraqis—Sunnis and, more and more, Shiites—who simply don't like the occupation. "Our forces are on the offensive, leading over 1,600 patrols a day and conducting an average of 180 raids a week." It's a puzzle why Bush's staff wrote this sentence or, having done so, kept it in the speech. It inexorably brings to mind related, but less assuring, statistics—the weekly rate of Iraqi attacks and U.S. casualties. "We're working with Iraqis and the United Nations to prepare for a transition to full Iraqi sovereignty by the end of June." Again, now we are, sort of. Until very recently, when the realities on the ground finally pressed too hard to ignore, the Bush administration did everything it could to keep the United Nations out of such preparations, to deny that any outside powers were necessary. "Because of American leadership and resolve, the world is changing for the better. Last month, the leader of Libya voluntarily pledged to disclose and dismantle all of his regime's weapons of mass destructions programs. … Nine months of intense negotiations involving the United States and Great Britain succeeded with Libya." Almost certainly the war in Iraq, especially the collapse of Saddam's reign, had a sobering effect on Col. Qaddafi. Still, it is worth noting that his weapons of mass destruction program amounted to little more than a handful of centrifuges and a smattering of uranium; he wasn't close to mounting a real project, much less to building a bomb. Also, the reference to "nine months" raises questions. That indicates the "intense negotiations" got under way last March—before the war began. Bush didn't say much about, at best, uneven attempts to dash the nuclear ambitions of Iran or North Korea—a failing that, in North Korea's case, can be placed squarely on Bush's refusal to negotiate. "Some in this chamber, and in our country, did not support the liberation of Iraq." This is a low blow. In last year's address, the war was sold only peripherally as a campaign of liberation; its main pitch was to chop off the world's most dangerous possessor of biological, chemical, and—any day now—nuclear weapons. "The Kay Report identified dozens of weapons of mass destruction-related program activities…" Here is where the speechwriters most fastidiously avoid last year's dread "16 words" syndrome. Note that the sentence mentions not "weapons of mass destruction" but "weapons of mass destruction-related," and not even "programs" but "program activities." This careful phrasing is in keeping with David Kay's report, which is replete with phrases that, skimmed swiftly, suggest much danger but, read closely, indicate next to nothing. (For a detailed analysis of the report, click here.) "Some critics have said our duties in Iraq must be internationalized. This … is hard to explain to our partners in Britain, Australia, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Thailand, Italy, Spain, Poland, Denmark, Hungary, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Romania, the Netherlands, Norway, El Salvador, and the 17 other countries that have committed troops to Iraq." Let's go to the numbers (courtesy of globalsecurity.org). Some of these countries do have fairly substantial numbers of troops in Iraq. Britain has about 11,000. A few of them have something like the equivalent of a battalion: Italy, 3,000; Ukraine, 2,000; Spain, 1,300; the Netherlands, 1,100; Australia, 1,000; Poland, 630. The others can only be called token: Bulgaria, 470; Thailand, 443; Denmark, 367; El Salvador, 360; Hungary, 150; Japan, 41. (Norway has only naval forces in the area; the Philippines' numbers are unrecorded but doubtless minuscule.) Few of these troops are detailed, or even trained, for combat. None (except Britain's and Italy's) comes close to the levels committed by the genuine coalition of forces that President Bush's father amassed for the Gulf War of 1991. In that earlier war, several Arab and European countries deployed whole divisions on the ground and wings of jet fighters in the air. More to the point, Bush's critics on this point are concerned not just with spreading the costs and the burdens but also with legitimizing the transition to Iraqi sovereignty. The issue isn't so much which countries send troops as who's making the decisions. "There is a difference, however, between leading a coalition of many nations and submitting to the objections of a few. America will never seek a permission slip to defend the security of our people." This is a textbook definition of a red herring. Even the U.N. Charter explicitly allows the right to unilateral self-defense. The question, of course, is whether Saddam Hussein constituted a threat to the security of the United States. Last year's address spent much time contending that he did, citing the tons of anthrax, warehouse loads of bioweapons, and secret laboratories full of nuclear gear that Saddam had at his disposal—and the links between Iraq and al-Qaida that could bring these dangers to our shores. This year, the speechwriters might have contemplated reminding the American people of the case. But, to their credit and their caution, they decided not to give it a single word's credence. Fred Kaplan writes the "War Stories" column for Slate. _____________ State of the Campaign Bush, Kerry, and Clark debate the State of the Union. By William Saletan Updated Wednesday, Jan. 21, 2004, at 5:35 AM PT Monday night, John Kerry won the Iowa caucuses and departed for New Hampshire to face Wes Clark. Tuesday night, President Bush delivered his State of the Union address, followed by rebuttals from Kerry and Clark. Here's a review of how the incumbent and his challengers performed. 1. Forward/backward. Bush's speech opened with a series of juxtapositions between going "forward" on the issue at hand (i.e., Bush's way) or going "backward" (i.e., any other way). This is the basic Bush/Rove strategy: to ruthlessly suppress alternatives so that anyone who opposes Bush's prescription drug bill appears to be against prescription drug coverage, and anyone who opposes Bush's homeland security bill appears to be against homeland security. 2. Split personality. Bush's tone was discordant. On terrorism, he cautioned against the "illusion" that the worst was over. "That hope is understandable, comforting—and false," he said. But on the economy, he promised, based on thin evidence, that the worst was over. Evidently we're supposed to be optimistic in some areas and pessimistic in others, depending on which outlook justifies Bush's policies. 3. Stat games. In situations where the data didn't bear out Bush's claims of success, he resorted to less relevant but more agreeable measurements. In Iraq, for example, he talked not about U.S. troop casualties (which have continued unabated since Saddam Hussein's capture) but about patrols and raids: "Our forces are on the offensive, leading over 1,600 patrols a day and conducting an average of 180 raids a week." In a rebuttal on NBC, Kerry complained that Bush had touted a net increase in education funding under the No Child Left Behind Act in order to duck the administration's failure to fund the bill at the level it had promised. 4. Sliding standards. Bush's pre-emptive war doctrine gets more and more slippery. In this speech, he said the U.S. would confront regimes that "could" supply terrorists with weapons of mass destruction. "We refuse to live in the shadow of this ultimate danger," he declared. How big or close would that shadow have to be to trigger war? Bush didn't say. Meanwhile, he continued to stretch the definition of WMD possession to justify the Iraq war. "Already, the Kay report identified dozens of weapons of mass destruction-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations," said Bush. Not WMD, mind you, but "related program activities," whatever that means. 5. Credibility. Bush suggested that Libya had submitted to weapons inspections because the U.S. had invaded Iraq for refusing to do the same. I think Bush is right. But on the larger principle he cited, he has been a disaster. "For diplomacy to be effective, words must be credible," said Bush. "And no one can now doubt the word of America." Are you kidding? Even Republican foreign policy experts concede that the still-unsubstantiated Iraqi WMD claims the administration tried to foist on the world have undermined our credibility. A day before Bush's speech, the Washington Post observed, "Already, in the crisis over North Korea's nuclear ambitions, China has rejected U.S. intelligence that North Korea has a secret program to enrich uranium for use in weapons." Bush followed that whopper with another: "Some critics have said our duties in Iraq must be internationalized. This particular criticism is hard to explain to our partners in Britain, Australia, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Thailand, Italy, Spain ..." Really? Is it hard to explain to the Japanese, South Koreans, and Spaniards why it might be a good idea for somebody else's troops to step in and start taking the bombs and bullets? Only if the person doing the explaining is Bush. 6. Values. Bush delivered, as advertised, his virtual endorsement of a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. But he softened that statement by surrounding it with less divisive moral issues: drugs, abstinence, faith-based charities, and steroids in pro sports. Part of the Bush/Rove genius is the substitution of such unconventional, broadly appealing moral issues for conventional, controversial moral issues. Bush even couched the gay marriage issue in procedural terms, so that moderates uncomfortable with an assault on gays could interpret Bush's position merely as an assault on "activist judges." 7. The official Democratic response. The words, delivered by House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle, were right: lots of talk about an "opportunity society" (without apologies to Newt Gingrich) and the Democrats' commitment to fight terrorism and protect the country. The presentation, however, was horrendous. With her bugged-out eyes and her embalmed grimace of a smile, Pelosi came across as a Stepford Wife, a Saturday Night Live caricature of herself. She needs to study old tapes of Fred Thompson delivering the Republican response to President Clinton. 8. The unofficial Democratic response. ABC and NBC interviewed Kerry, effectively anointing him the party's true spokesman. His debut was unpromising. With a face devoid of energy and passion, he pledged to campaign "with all the energy and all the passion that I have." He reeled off platitudes from his stump speech. When pressed to clarify his positions on the Iraq war, the Partriot Act, and gay marriage, he descended into endless nuance, going on for so long (and ending up somehow talking about race and judicial nominations) that Peter Jennings blinked with fatigue. The best line Kerry came up with was, "There are just two Americas: the America of the special interests and the lobbyists the president defends, and the America [in which] other people ... are living." It's such a good line, in fact, that John Edwards has been using it for more than a month. 9. The unofficial Democratic response to the unofficial Democratic response. Clark ran ads on at least two networks after the speech. He also did an interview on NBC, illustrating the difference between his virtues and Kerry's. Clark's appearance was perfectly staged: Behind him stood a flag and an audience of New Hampshire voters. Kerry, meanwhile, sat alone in a kitchen belonging to a family that for some reason wasn't there. But when it came time to talk, Kerry was the one who stuck to his lines, and Clark was the one who blew his cool, raising his voice in anger and interrupting Tom Brokaw. That's the difficult choice Clark and Kerry are offering Democrats in New Hampshire: If you want a nominee with military credentials, you can have the animation or the discipline, but not both. William Saletan is Slate's chief political correspondent.
