Long fascinating article about right wing myths and US foreign policy

[skins]

Very relevant to what is going on in our country right now.

[AtomicCEO]

Shoo, quitter.

[skins]

Shoo, quitter.

 

 

Thanks for the bump, liar.

[cre8tiff]

That is one heck of an article. That writer did a lot of research and makes a persuasive argument. Would be nice to hear a right-wing response to it that included research and well-thought out responses. But what we are likely to get is far more base than that.

 

Once again, we were told that American troops were not being “allowed” to win, if they could not mine Haiphong harbor, or flatten Hanoi, or reduce all of North Vietnam to a parking lot. Yet Vietnam was a war with no real defeats on the ground. U.S. troops won every battle of any significance and inflicted exponentially greater casualties on the enemy than they suffered themselves. Even the great debacle of the war, the 1968 Tet offensive, ended with an overwhelming American military victory and the Viet Cong permanently expunged as an effective fighting force. It is difficult to claim betrayal when you do not lose a battle.

 

Sounds familiar...

[chiefjay]

Things are finally getting back to normal around here.

[TimC]

myth ( P ) Pronunciation Key (mth)

n.

A fiction or half-truth, especially one that forms part of an ideology.

 

Let's use it in a sentence. It is not a myth that Skins runs tuna can first into a door over and over while Daniel Snyder watches in a red dress and traditional Injun headgear while Joe Gibbs stands in the corner shaking his head wondering why he took this job.

[skins]

myth ( P ) Pronunciation Key (mth)

n.

A fiction or half-truth, especially one that forms part of an ideology.

 

Let's use it in a sentence. It is not a myth that Skins runs tuna can first into a door over and over while Daniel Snyder watches in a red dress and traditional Injun headgear while Joe Gibbs stands in the corner shaking his head wondering why he took this job.

 

 

I like this:

 

It is not a myth that TimC's likes to rub hairy mansak and spoo into his greasy festering pus filled hairplugs.

[driveby]

Shoo, quitter.

 

ditto

 

 

oh, and

 

 

[Ursa Majoris]

That is one heck of an article. That writer did a lot of research and makes a persuasive argument. Would be nice to hear a right-wing response to it that included research and well-thought out responses. But what we are likely to get is far more base than that.

 

 

Indeed. No rightie has sufficient intellect or attention span to make it halfway through, never mind engage in any kind of meaningful debate.

[Meat Face]

ditto

oh, and

 

 

ditto. why is that ffacking loser here? I thought he died.

[Caveman_Nick]

Indeed. No rightie has sufficient intellect or attention span to make it halfway through, never mind engage in any kind of meaningful debate.

 

 

 

 

I know you aren't questioning my intellect.....

 

So I'll go look at boobies!

[TimC]

Indeed. No rightie has sufficient intellect or attention span to make it halfway through, never mind engage in any kind of meaningful debate.

 

 

Yo mama.

[Big John]

Yo mama.

 

yo mama is not a rightie.

[Perchoutofwater]

Not only did the Republicans lose a presidential election against a badly divided, national Democratic Party; they also lost the congressional majorities they had just managed to eke out in 1946, following fourteen years in the political wilderness. It now seemed clear that the Republicans would never return to power merely by supporting Democratic policies, or by promising to implement them more effectively, and the right wing gained traction within the party.

 

Change Republic to Democrat, and change 1946 to 1994, and the same thing can be said.

 

The idea of the “dying President” at Yalta was plausible to much of the public, who had seen photographs of Roosevelt looking suddenly, shockingly gaunt and exhausted throughout much of the last year of his life....Roosevelt was in severe physical decline and would die from a massive stroke some two months later, but his mind was still active and engaged. Chip Bohlen—who actually was at Yalta and who went on to become a leading Cold War statesman under both Republican and Democratic administrations—would echo many other observers in reporting that while Roosevelt’s “physical state was certainly not up to normal, his mental and psychological state was certainly not affected. He was lethargic but when important moments arose, he was mentally sharp

 

Sounds like the way the Dems portraied Reagan.

 

The previous, disastrous policies advocated by the Republican right—ignoring the growing Axis threat, then leaving Western Europe defenseless while plunging into war in China—could be safely forgotten.

 

Again change Republican right to Democrat left, and change and you have what we do today with middle east.

 

Republicans now began an almost continuous campaign against alleged Democratic conspiracies. Following Chiang’s defeat, conservatives in Congress demanded to know “Who lost China?” and Robert Taft, discarding his much vaunted integrity, egged on Joe McCarthy’s witch-hunt against the Truman Administration, urging him to “keep talking and if one case doesn’t work out, he should proceed with another.”

 

Plame, Enron, Haliburton, etc.... It appears the shoe is on the other foot now.

 

The outbreak of hostilities in Korea in 1950 was disturbing enough, but the defeat of General Douglas MacArthur that winter by invading Chinese forces sent shock waves throughout the United States. More than anyone else, MacArthur had brought about his own defeat, launching his troops up the Korean peninsula in separate columns, divided by mountain ranges, ignoring both orders from the White House to halt and plentiful signs that a massive Chinese force had already infiltrated the Korean peninsula.

 

So in 1950 we were to question military personnel and trust the whitehouse, but today we are to question the whitehouse, and believe any ex-military guy that get a pen in hand or microphone in face?

 

William Jenner of Indiana bellowed from the floor of the Senate that “this country today is in the hands of a secret inner coterie which is directed by agents of the Soviet Union. We must cut this whole cancerous conspiracy out of our Government at once. Our own choice is to impeach President Truman and find out who is the secret invisible government which has so cleverly led our country down the road to destruction.”

 

Sounds like the lunatic left talking about Bush and the House of Saud, or Coporate America.

 

For the first time since the Civil War era, one major American political party charged another one with treason. Democrats were accused of having “shielded traitors to the Nation in high places” and creating “enemies abroad where we should have friends.” Democrats were responsible for all “110,000 American casualties” in Korea

 

Boy, this sure sounds familiar, only the left started when we had 1% of the casualties.

 

United once more, Republicans brought this compilation of hysterical charges and bald-faced lies before the American people—who swallowed them willingly.

 

A lot of people are drinking the liberal kool-aid these days.

 

Worse yet, Republicans could not provide any meaningful alternative strategy. Nixon was able to take office in 1969 only by offering a “secret plan” to get the boys home from Vietnam

 

Sounds a lot like what Kerry tried to do.

 

Again and again, Bush and his confederates have used the cover of national security to push through an uncompromising right-wing agenda. Ignoring the broad leeway already provided the federal government to fight terrorists and conduct domestic surveillance, the administration has gone out of its way to claim vast new powers to detain, spy on, and imprison its own citizens, and to abduct and even torture foreigners

 

Sounds like FDR to me. How many Americans are in concentration camps today? How many were in concentration camps under FDR?

 

Again, the link was made. Soldiers of the most powerful army in the history of the world would be actively endangered if they even wondered whether the folks at home were questioning their deployment. The right was looking for a target, and it got one when Sen. Dick Durbin (D., Ill.), appalled by an FBI report on the prisons for suspected terrorists at Guantánamo Bay, compared them to those run by “Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime—Pol Pot or others—that had no concern for human beings . . . ”

 

So, this guy is blaming the right for Durbin being an idiot?

 

All of the crucial elements of the stab-in-the-back charge were now in place. Critics of the war were not simply questioning its strategy or its necessity, or upholding the best of American traditions by raising concerns over how enemy prisoners were being treated. Instead, they were aiding the enemy, and actively endangering our fighting men and women. They were traitors and “revolutionaries,” individuals who were “conducting guerrilla warfare on American troops,” and “excrement” who could now be safely incarcerated “immediately” or even “eliminated.”

 

Wasn't this guy complaining when the right was doing this to FDR just a few paragraphs ago?

 

 

Who could possibly believe in a plot to lose this war? No one cares that much about it. We have, instead, reached a crossroads where the overwhelming right-wing desire to dissolve much of the old social compact that held together the modern nation-state is irreconcilably at odds with any attempt to conduct such a grand, heroic experiment as implanting democracy in the Middle East. Without mass participation, Iraq cannot be passed off as an heroic endeavor, no matter how much Mr. Bush’s rhetoric tries to make it one, and without a hero there can be no great betrayer, no skulking villain.

 

So if we are fighting war and the nation is not suffering greatly then that is a bad thing? confuse me more!?

 

 

It is amazing how the tables have turned, and will no doubt turn again in the future. Everything the author tries to slam the right for, the left has been guilty of in the past. Does that make it right? No, but so much of this is just rhetoric anyway, and of very little substance.

[Azazello1313]

Indeed. No rightie has sufficient interest in clicking on another stupid skins link.

 

 

fixed.

[dread]

Indeed. No rightie has sufficient intellect or attention span to make it halfway through, never mind engage in any kind of meaningful debate.

 

 

Is your "insufficient intellect" insult meant to be an attempt at meaningful debate?

[Ursa Majoris]

Is your "insufficient intellect" insult meant to be an attempt at meaningful debate?

 

It's meant to provoke a meaningful debate. To his credit, Perch has done it.

[skins]

It's meant to provoke a meaningful debate. To his credit, Perch has done it.

 

 

To his credit, perch is about the only goofball Republican who even tries.

 

Though it is fair to ask, why would anyone bother defending the utterly incompetent GOP when Bush is right there on TV spraying food in world leaders' faces and speaking at a second grade level about slicing the pig as the world burns?

[Beaumont]

... slicing the pig as the world burns?

 

 

... mmmmm .... pig .....

 

:drooling:

[TimC]

... mmmmm .... pig .....

 

:drooling:

 

 

Pig on a stick. :mmmmm:

[skins]

ditto. why is that ffacking loser here? I thought he died.

 

 

Dont get kicked out of any more ff leagues for being an annoying loser, kay?

[dread]

To his credit, perch is about the only goofball Republican who even tries.

 

Though it is fair to ask, why would anyone bother defending the utterly incompetent GOP when Bush is right there on TV spraying food in world leaders' faces and speaking at a second grade level about slicing the pig as the world burns?

 

 

Again...why would you think hurling insults would encourage a person to engage in a meaningful debate? Issuing insults as a conversation invitation probably will only receive replies in kind.

[Ursa Majoris]

Again...why would you think hurling insults would encourage a person to engage in a meaningful debate? Issuing insults as a conversation invitation probably will only receive replies in kind.

 

You been here long? Insults are to the Tailgate as the dollar is to the Fed.

[DemonKnight]

Nice article, I think this paragraph about sums it up...

 

On domestic issues as well as ones of foreign policy, from Ronald Reagan’s mythical “welfare queens” through George Wallace’s “pointy-headed intellectuals”; from Lee Atwater’s characterization of Democrats as anti-family, anti-life, anti-God, down through the open, deliberate attempts of Newt Gingrich and Karl Rove to constantly describe opponents in words that made them seem bizarre, deviant, and “out of the mainstream,” the entire vernacular of American politics has been altered since Vietnam. Culture war has become the organizing principle of the right, unalterably convinced as it is that conservatives are an embattled majority, one that must stand ever vigilant against its unnatural enemies—from the “gay agenda,” to the advocates of Darwinism, to the “war against Christmas” last year.

 

I love how conservative politicians demonize liberals for standing for totally undefendable and totally fictitous arguments. Whats next, will the right be defending "every americans right to breathe"?

[cre8tiff]

Nice article, I think this paragraph about sums it up...

I love how conservative politicians demonize liberals for standing for totally undefendable and totally fictitous arguments. Whats next, will the right be defending "every americans right to breathe"?

 

 

Deserves a bump for that.