The gigantic wad of ego that precedes this response is a peek inside the mind of the voter who supports a candidate as vacuous and bereft as Obama.
The post above is the longest unbroken string of ultra-orthodox, uncompromisingly hackneyed talking points and clichés I’ve ever seen. The remarkable thing about it is that despite its length, it’s entirely content free.
That’s quite an accomplishment, but it mirrors the Messiah’s speeches. All that comes across is smugness, self-congratulation, and teenage snark, along with a perception of current events that’s so out of touch with reality the writer ought to be in a padded room.
Christophers Hitchens enjoys asking people what Obama said after a speech, and they can never tell him.
What gets me is the utter uniformity of expression of liberals. They really are mass-produced people. Stylistically, the endless, chortling masturbation above could have been written by any one of 40 million interchangeable people.
It’s quite depressing that an individual human would happily choose to be a complete, 100 percent-pure stereotype, as indistinguishable from his fellows as a penguin is from the millions of others in the colony.
Jun 18, 2008 - 4:05 am
Tom W, you disappoint me.
"The post above is the longest unbroken string of ultra-orthodox, uncompromisingly hackneyed talking points and clichés I’ve ever seen."
The nice thing about facts, Tom, is that they don't change. Unfortunately for people that deny facts and have set their political identities on refuting facts with right-wing spin, the constant refutation of that spin or those talking points with FACTS does get tiring.
Think of it this way. The anti-war people have been saying for six years now that we're in Iraq for the oil. The pro-war people have been changing their statements the entire time. They have WMDs! We're freeing them from Saddam! Establishing democracy! We broke it so now we have to fix it! We can't break the faith with those that have already died! They'll be a genocide if we leave! A new excuse every year. Dance and spin, dance and spin.
We're in Iraq for oil. More specifically, we're in there for Big Oil to get the right to pump something that costs maybe $10-20 to get out of the ground and sell it for market value which is currently about #140. This was the end result of Cheney's super-secret energy meeting.
At that energy meeting several problems were outlined. One, the US is critically dependent on foreign oil. Even though we, personally, use very little Middle Eastern oil, all oil, whether from Canada or Kuwait, is traded on the global market. A shortage of Middle Eastern oil raises everybody's prices. And rather than starting to move away from an oil economy as a priciple of independence and national security, as well as for environmental and health reasons, the neocons decided to secure worldwide access to that oil by militarily dominating the Middle East.
Point two: Iraq was in many ways perfect for domination. It barely has a military. The terrain was great for our tanks, troops, and aircraft: flat with few natural obstacles. Saddam was pretty well hated, so not much international sympathy or national protest.
Point three: Iraq had a LOT of oil. During the Iran-Iraq War, Iraq was not able to pump very much oil. Unlike Iran, Iraq only has one port city on a small sliver of the Persian Gulf, and that was easily within reach of Iranian fighter/bombers. So during that 8-year war, Iraq was pumping far below capacity while it's neighbors were busy pumping away for the world. Then, again after the invasion of Kuwait, UN sanctions also stopped Iraqi oil from being exported, and this continued until 2003. And since then, civil war and infrastructure decay has kept them from pumping very much.
In short, while Iraq's neighbors have been busy pumping away for the last 28 years, Iraq hasn't. At with it's national reserves worth $140 a barrel, there's trillion of dollars of wealth under that sand.
Point four: the fundamentalist Saudis in Saudi Arabia were getting restless. With high unemployment rates and, thanks to the billions of daily profit from selling oil, no reason to really work on economic development, the Saudi population was getting restless with the House of Saud and their "Muslim-in-name-only" princes. Our dear friend and ally Saudi Arabia is the home and the core of radical fundamentalist Islam, and those radicals needed a cause. Overthrowing the secular government in Iraq would draw a lot of attention away from the royalty.
Point five: The Saudies had large budget shortfalls in the early 2000's because they are in large part a welfare state. They needed the price of oil increased to fill the government's coffers and major combat in the Middle East would certainly do that.
So the invasion and occupation of Iraq was seen as a panacea for all these problems. With the added political benefit of Bush being a "war president", of course. Not going to miss a trick like that one! Shamelessly exploiting the patriotic fevor of people like AJ.
So that's why it was done, and we were promised things like $20 a barrel oil, the war will only cost $20 billion and would ultimately pay for itself, etc. And we were promised it was necessary because Saddam had sarin and nukes and antrax and was in bed with Al-Qaeda and killed puppies and left the toilet seat up and wore white after Labor Day...
Blah blah blah.
But Americans would say "Why don't we just lift sanctions so Iraq can sell their oil on the open market again?"
That would be unacceptable, of course. Saddam would profit politically and economically, and Bush and his backers wouldn't. Clearly a crazy idea.
"That’s quite an accomplishment, but it mirrors the Messiah’s speeches. All that comes across is smugness, self-congratulation, and teenage snark, along with a perception of current events that’s so out of touch with reality the writer ought to be in a padded room."
Methinks thouest need to go look in a mirror, my friend. And if you want to see smugness, go look up all the statements the right-wing pundants made in the weeks Commander Codpiece Day. Here's a taste:
"The only people who think this wasn't a victory are Upper Westside liberals, and a few people here in Washington."
(Charles Krauthammer, Inside Washington, WUSA-TV, 4/19/03)
"Why don't the damn Democrats give the president his day? He won today. He did well today."
(MSNBC's Chris Matthews, 4/9/03)
"Now that the war in Iraq is all but over, should the people in Hollywood who opposed the president admit they were wrong?"
(Fox News Channel's Alan Colmes, 4/25/03)
"I doubt that the journalists at the New York Times and NPR or at ABC or at CNN are going to ever admit just how wrong their negative pronouncements were over the past four weeks."
(MSNBC's Joe Scarborough, 4/9/03)
(cough cough)
Here's some more smugness if you can stand looking in the mirror, Tom:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x3352887"What gets me is the utter uniformity of expression of liberals. They really are mass-produced people. Stylistically, the endless, chortling masturbation above could have been written by any one of 40 million interchangeable people."
Again, want to get a mirror so you can see yourself as you masterbate to fantasies of Pax Americana? And how many times can we say "we were right", anyway?
The points that I responded to I notice you're not defending. Once again, it's attack the messenger to distract from the message. Same thing that Simple Scotty McClellen is going through. All you year is "Oh, he's disgruntled", "oh, he's an opportunist", yet despite the fact that the Bush Administration has a copy of the book a month before it hit the shelves no conservative cheerleaders seem to be actually refuting or addressing the claims made in the book.
I guess you'll have to speak up; I can't hear you over the roar of the crickets.
"It’s quite depressing that an individual human would happily choose to be a complete, 100 percent-pure stereotype, as indistinguishable from his fellows as a penguin is from the millions of others in the colony."
Yeah, isn't it a shame that AJ and his kind chose to be part of the diehard 28% instead of the "oh my god I was wrong" 50%?
The resemblence to a gambling addict at a roulette wheel is disturbing, don't you think? "Just a little more time, just a little more money, and it will all be worthwhile!" goes AJ and his kind, while from behind him the ignored liberals go "The only way to win is not to play, the only way to win is not to play".
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