Is It Just Me…
by Brian Pierce • Mar 25th, 2008 at 1:46 pm •
…or is Moqtada al Sadr smarter than George W. Bush?
(Disclaimer: I’m talking about strategic intelligence here, not moral equivalence.)
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…or is Moqtada al Sadr smarter than George W. Bush?
(Disclaimer: I’m talking about strategic intelligence here, not moral equivalence.)
Comment by erik on 26 March 2008 at 7:10 am:
al Sadr also enjoys popular support. funny thing.
Why are you afraid to touch the issue of Bush vs Sadr on Morality?
Shit. I mean, who is the most widely-accepted (in the US), living evil person in the world? Bin Laden?
Even if you can do the logical acrobatics to place all blame for 911 on him, that is only 3,000 deaths. Bush initiated a war accross two countries so far with, time has shown, little interest in anything remotely connected to security or anti-terror efforts and furthermore a negligence towards actually increasing anti-terror policing that would have been vastly more effective. The terror threat is worse and getting worser, he knows it, and even if you don’t count Arabs and Persians more US citizens have died in these counter-productive trade wars than anything you can blame Bin Laden for. Let alone Sadr.
Bush, a conservative, pro-life Christian actually mocked electrocuted Texan Carla Faye Tucker–to the disgust of National Review reporter Tucker Carlson–on the 2000 GOP primary trail.
And pretend Bin Laden is openly requesting lots of A-Bombs to destroy America with. As far as I know, he hasn’t done anything of the sort, but I could be wrong or he might just be covert about it. Bush sits on top of the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world. This is nothing new, I know, but we do know that he has openly threatened to use them, both for revenge AND in first strike situations. Then we feign indignance when vastly weaker and routinely threatened states make motions towards acquiring even a single defensive nuke.
In conclusion I think its time for even Right-wing Democrats like you, Brian, to drop the taboo around talking about morality and waxing on about the horse race (which is really losing its legs anyways) and start admitting that being the Boss of America doesn’t exclude you from having your own evilness held up to the light. Even in the interest of political expediency it is high time that the Democrats and more specifically the Left (Democrats merely being the least right) stopped ceding the idea of morality to immoral Right-wingers. It works because people want to have something to believe in–ideally to talk about and seek on their own, too, but that isn’t what government is about. So Condemn Already!!!
Comment by thetodd on 26 March 2008 at 10:19 pm:
I have nothing to say about Bush vs. Bin Laden vs. Sadr on morality.
I just wanted to point out that 9-11 has had significant negative consequences for the world far beyond the 3000 immediate deaths and injuries.
Comment by erik on 27 March 2008 at 7:34 am:
i don’t know if you are agreeing with me or disagreeing with me, but by that logic our training/arming (need i finish this) etc of bin laden had negative consequences far beyond killing tons of afghanis and russians. and cow’s milk is a gateway drug to marijuana.
well, actually the first is much, much, much more tenable.
Comment by thetodd on 27 March 2008 at 1:03 pm:
I didn’t mean to agree or disagree. I don’t know enough about the main subject of the discussion to have a useful opinion. I only meant to reply to one sentence from your comment: “Even if you can do the logical acrobatics to place all blame for 911 on him, that is only 3,000 deaths.”
Even if you don’t go down the cow’s milk->marijuana path, and you don’t accept any indirect, non-immediate consequences at all (like loss of freedoms), 9/11 still had significant immediate and direct consequences that 3000 fatal car accidents don’t have. One of the most productive areas in the world was temporarily shut down. Financial markets were closed for almost a week.
Unless you think the markets are highly inefficient, then the fact that they plunged so sharply in the weeks following 9/11 (and that they don’t plunge sharply whenever there’s an earthquake somewhere) should also hint at the magnitude of the socioeconomic costs of 9/11 relative to other disasters with a similar death count.