When the facts don’t suit your agenda, distort them. Worked for the neoconservatives (pseudoconservatives) in their pursuit for a conflict with Iraq and now with Iran. In the same tradition, a “progressive” website made the following claims in an attempt to slander Ron Paul:
“Rep. Paul is not a liberal, protesting against the War in Iraq. He is an isolationist, who seeks to keep America’s business at home.”
Wrong. Non-interventionist. This means he advocates trading with other nations and staying out of their internal conflicts. It doesn’t mean we ignore the world.
“Rep. Paul is not socially liberal, but economically conservative, as some have claimed. He is an old-style Conservative, through and through. “
Wrong, he is mostly socially liberal AND economically conservative. Otherwise known as a classical liberal.
I suspect spreading disinformation about Ron Paul is in response to his growing numbers of liberals, conservatives, and independents who find his message of liberty appealing.
Furthermore, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and Barack Obama are betraying their own constituency by backing out of any promises to end the war. If anyone is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, it is these fake liberals who are looking more like pro-war neoconservatives everyday.
To clear up misconceptions about Ron Paul:
He may not like gay marriage, but he believes the contracts between two people should be enforced by the government. That means if a church wants to marry two gay people, Ron Paul believes the government should honor that agreement, and that heterosexual marriages should hold no special privilege.
He may detest abortion, but he believes such matters should be decided by the individual states and not the federal government. (Which means some states will allow abortion and some won’t. And perhaps it is better this way until we understand human consciousness better).
He opposes affirmative action, because he wants to treat people like individuals, not as arbitrary groups of people with special privileges, regardless of their skin color. He believes treating people like individuals and allowing them to exercise their liberties is a better way to achieve equality.
He strongly opposes the war on drugs, because prohibition causes more problems than it solves. There are only two democratic candidates who oppose the war on drugs: Gravel and questionably Kucinich. After all, should the government put you in jail for consuming Burger King food and putting yourself at risk? Why should it be any different with the personal use of drugs? Furthermore, the FDA prevents many useful medications from being sold in the market, forcing people to seek other alternatives abroad, increasing the cost of medicines, and sometimes leaving patients with no options.
He strongly opposes the Iraq war, on the grounds that we have no right to start wars of aggression. On the other hand, we have seen that Hillary and Obama are very likely to pursue an unnecessary conflict with Iran and start a new conflict in Sudan, as if we hadn’t learned from Vietnam and Iraq, already, and despite the fact that the majority of voters want out of Iraq.
Ron Paul doesn’t arbitrarily choose issues when it is convenient, like the majority of Republicans and Democrats. He goes by the principle of individual liberty, which means his stances on most issues are consistent and predictable, instead of progressively changing based on the whim of lobby groups.
I know it’s threatening to see Ron Paul earn more in donations in seven days than John Edwards earned in ten days. I know it’s threatening to see that liberals and conservatives are finding good reasons to support Ron Paul. But instead of misinforming voters, try to engage in honest discussion.
You may have read a great article by Arthur Silber pointing out that, You, Too, Can and Should Be an “Intelligence Analyst”. The basic premise is the intelligence community has little more access than you do to critical information, and that privileged information becomes irrelevant too quickly to be a major factor in foreign policy decisions.
Thus, the decision to go to war has less to do with military intelligence than it has to do with whims and irrational internal politics (read: whatever is convenient for the people in power). After all, you have an essentially unlimited number of choices from everything to what you will wear, to what you will have for breakfast, and just how you’ll get your work done today. Why is foreign policy any different? The choices aren’t only “war” and “cut and run” as this administration would have you believe. Did we have to give Saddam Hussein an ultimatum (leave the country or prepare for war) even if he had WMDs?
Generally speaking, 80 percent of the information one needs to form judgments on key intelligence targets or issues is available in open media. It helps to have been trained-as my contemporaries and I had the good fortune to be trained-by past masters of the discipline of media analysis, which began in a structured way in targeting Japanese and German media in the 1940s. But, truth be told, anyone with a high school education can do it. It is not rocket science.
You’d have to believe your government is incompetent if our only choice was to invade Iraq. Or maybe you’d believe it anyway. But our intelligence agencies aren’t incompetent. The problem is, as Arthur Silber points out, intelligence is irrelevant.
Intelligence is completely irrelevant to major policy decisions. Such decisions are matters of judgment, and knowledgeable, ordinary citizens are just as capable of making these determinations as political leaders allegedly in possession of “secret information.” Such “secret information” is almost always wrong — and major decisions, including those pertaining to war and peace, are made entirely apart from such information in any case.
The second you start arguing about intelligence, you’ve given the game away once again. This is a game the government and the proponents of war will always win. By now, we all surely know that if they want the intelligence to show that Country X is a “grave” and “growing” threat, they will find it or manufacture it. So once you’re debating what the intelligence shows or fails to show, the debate is over. The war will inevitably begin.
Gabriel Kolko explains:
It is all too rare that states overcome illusions, and the United States is no more an exception than Germany, Italy, England, or France before it. The function of intelligence anywhere is far less to encourage rational behavior–although sometimes that occurs–than to justify a nation’s illusions, and it is the false expectations that conventional wisdom encourages that make wars more likely, a pattern that has only increased since the early twentieth century. By and large, US, Soviet, and British strategic intelligence since 1945 has been inaccurate and often misleading, and although it accumulated pieces of information that were useful, the leaders of these nations failed to grasp the inherent dangers of their overall policies. When accurate, such intelligence has been ignored most of the time if there were overriding preconceptions or bureaucratic reasons for doing so.
Because when intelligence doesn’t support your goals, you can just dismiss it and revise history:
What’s next? On to Iran
Since we are labeling Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization for “supplying the weapons that are killing a growing number of American soldiers in Iraq” and since we are already over there, why not? It appears that the main reason for going to Iraq in the first place was to maintain a foothold in the Middle East and secure the region for our perpetually-muddled “ally” Israel. If the door starts to close because our military is spreading thin (as shown in the video above) the only way to keep it open (and transfer some of the responsibility for the war to the next lucky administration) is to engage Iran militarily (but it’s not really Iran, it’s the terroristic Revolutionary Guard! Oh, the wonders of the vague war on terrorism!) Of course, this is irrational, because we don’t belong in Iraq in the first place, and second, if Iran had invaded Canada or Mexico, you can be sure our government would be supplying Iran’s enemies with weapons, to maintain some control over our neighboring terroritory and protect ourselves passively by proxy.
They usually mean the terrorists hate us for our freedoms. But it holds true to neoconservatives, because they too are terrorists.
They hate us for our freedoms
First, they want us to stop criticizing the war. They want to wiretap our phones. They want to control the flow of information on the internet. They want you to get a REAL ID, so they can track your movements “in case you are a terrorist”.
They hate our troops
They want to send our troops to die in a meaningless war.
Meaningless? That’s right - The war in Iraq is meaningless because there is no winning or losing. The point of the war is to taunt Iran and launch the United States into a global conflict that extends the global reach of a few power-hungry politicians. This brings me to the last point:
They hate the United States
By compromising our freedoms, the lives of our troops, and our national security, the neoconservatives are destroying the United States and what it stands for: liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Am I exaggerating? No. If you are a neoconservative who is serious about bringing democracy to the world, you could do it the right way: without force. The world will then stop hating us. If you want to stop terrorism, then look at why the world hates us: our foreign policy.
If you want to incite more hatred and make the world less safe, continue nation-building. If you want to take away our freedoms continue sending our soldiers to meaningless wars. Continue violating our privacy and our right to keep to ourselves. Continue instigating fear with meaningless terror alerts and empty rhetoric. Continue dividing the United States by pretending dissent is un-American.
Why does anyone want to vote for these idiots? You’ve got Giuliani pretending to be tough on terror (even though Chris Matthews considers him a terrorist); Fred trying desperately to win by laying on a couch all day and riding around in a golf cart, possibly still hoping his YouTube video will go viral and magically incite a Ron Paul effect; and finally Mitt Romney, who took a page from Rudy’s kindergarten playbook and started whining “what about 9/11″ in a poor attempt to draw attention to himself at the Iowa debate.
The remaining choice is obvious. But in keeping with the tradition of the old media, I won’t even mention the name.
So Rudolph Giuliani has finally come out and revealed what kind of amazingly stupid dick he can be. When he was criticized for not really caring too much about the health problems the 9/11 rescue workers were suffering from he said something to the effect of he had spent as much time if not more than the majority of the people trying to dig bodies out of the rubble of 9/11. Well, he had to backtrack because it sounded like he was saying he was more heroic than the firemen and all the other ACTUAL heroes of September 11th. But that’s not why he’s less intelligent than most high schoolers. Most high schoolers understand that statements like that can be verified quantitatively, which is what the New York Times did. And what did the New York Times find out? That Mayor Giuliani spent about 29 hours total in the area where the World Trade Center fell. Which means the vast majority of rescue workers spent more time by September 14th at Ground Zero than he did. Rudolph Giuliani has apologized again, but not before having someone write a rambling article under his name in Foreign Affairs.
That article deserves its own paragraph it’s so god damn stupid. It’s like Giuliani had Norman Podhoretz drink five bottles of Wild Irish Rose and then sit at a laptop and just type, because it’s really the most delusional piece of writing this side of Little Green Footballs’ insane fascination with Islam in southeastern Asia.
America and its allies have made progress since that terrible day. We have responded forcefully to the Terrorists’ War on Us, abandoning a decadelong — and counterproductive — strategy of defensive reaction in favor of a vigorous offense. And we have set in motion changes to the international system that promise a safer and better world for generations to come.
In what universe? Firstly let’s be real, we have hardly responded forcefully to the terrorists’ “War on Us.” A forceful response would have been to carpet bomb Afghanistan into absolute nothing, which I’m not advocating, but I suspect al Qaeda would not be as resurgent in Waziristan right now had we used Barry Goldwater’s approach to Vietnam. Secondly, a forceful response to al Qaeda and those who support them would have meant dealing seriously with countries like Saudi Arabia. Fifteen of the nineteen hijackers came from the Kingdom, and the head of al Qaeda is a Saudi. Telling the Saudi royals to fuck off, which Rudy rightfully did when they promised 15 million dollars with the stipulation that Israel be criticized, is not necessarily a forceful response. And finally, in that paragraph, we have set in motion changes to the international system. We have allowed democracy to flourish in Egypt, Lebanon, and Palestine. What has that brought us? The Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah, and Hamas. You know, it may not be politically correct to say this, but giving the Arabs the right to make their own decisions usually leads to bad decisions being made. Even my friends from Morocco think that.
Next up, Fred Thompson. He is still trying to fight the image that he’s a lazy asshole. He did so by going to the Iowa State Fair and riding around in a golf cart, unlike any of the other candidates. The man is a genuine idiot. What has he done for his campaign so far? Seen a ton of butter shaped like a cow, and made an incredibly stupid video response to Michael Moore challenging him to a debate. The YouTube video has him claiming his schedule is full. Well yeah, he’s got sleeping to do. Who does Michael Moore think he is trying to interrupt the sleep time of the GOP’s Garfield with things like debates and issues? He’s also using idiot terms like Islamofascism and talking about fighting the terrorists, while hiring people for his campaign staff who are admittedly more sympathetic towards groups like Hezbollah. Nutjob Debbie Schlussel won’t support him now because he hired someone with somewhat sympathetic ties towards other people in the Middle East besides the Likud Party’s members.
He also refuses to abide by his campaign financing rules. He was an outspoken supporter of the hideous McCain-Feingold campaign financing laws, but is right now avoiding all of that by not announcing that he’s running. So right now he could conceivably collect much more than $2000 a donor because he’s not running for anything except tallest douchebag to see 2000 lbs of butter shaped into a bovine.
And finally, Mitt Romney. It’s like the man has no brain in his head. I just relistened to the Iowa debate from two weeks ago, and it’s absolutely amazing how stupid he is and how stupid he thinks the voters are. When they replayed Sam Brownback’s critical message of Mitt Romney’s position on a woman’s right to choose, he said none of the message is true. When pressed which part in particular was untrue, he said “well I’m pro-life.” Well that’s not the point of Sam Brownback’s advertisement. Brownback’s advertisement is filled with direct quotes of Governor Romney saying he’s an advocate for a woman’s right to choose, which Romney refused to refute.
This was all within a month of him claiming that his sons trying to get him elected Chief Executive is equivalent to serving in the Armed Forces, holding up a sign which implied Barack Obama is worse than Osama bin Laden, praising Hezbollah (which Crooks and Liars agreed with, but Crooks and Liars also blamed Robert Mugabe’s odious actions on the United States), and then laughing while telling a story about his dog essentially being tortured while on a family road trip. I mean seriously, the man might be genuinely dense.
Patriot Trash is defined as people who claim to be patriots, but whose actions and ideology are actually bad for this country. That includes most neocons and supporters of this [Iraq] war.
Rudy wants to be your nanny and tell you what to do. He hates your freedoms.
He’ll slam the cookie jar on your hand.
He’ll put your ferret to sleep and cook it for dinner.
He’ll spank you* when you don’t finish your ferret.
He’ll force you to sleep at 9:11 every night.
He’ll scare you with WTC stories so you won’t leave your room.
(And there’s a terrorist in your closet).
He makes your friends take off their shoes at home to check for shoe-bombs.
He beats you* and tortures when your RFID chip is not functional**
He dresses and speaks like Mrs. Doubtfire when he invites Trump over.
He warns you there will be another 9/11 if you are not good.
He won’t shut up about 9/11 even for the 9 minutes and 11 seconds you are allowed to watch TV***
He’ll punish you* for writing in Arabic numerals.
He once locked your friend Gibran in your ferret cage and threatened to waterboard him until he admitted he hated your freedoms.
*With a mangled 9/11 beam.
**Because you might not be you.
***You are only allowed to watch FOX news; and commercials count.
I get the feeling you readers out there don’t all like my ideology. Of course that is to be expected since I am a neoconservative, the true and only principle based ideology (not to be confused with neonazi.)
Anyway, to make the Spin Factor as Fair and Balanced as possible I offer the following: Don’t like my ideology? I’ll adopt yours! Are you an Al-Qaeda leader lacking good writing skills? I’ll help you out (but don’t tell Bush, I don’t want to be put on a no-fly list). Are you a liberal like Clinton in need for some love? I’ll write a personal ad for you and find you a cute intern.
Of course, you may not agree with me, but I certainly agree with you.
Ahmadinejad, I’ve almost finished your article on Why we need to adopt nuclear energy and stop worrying.
And Saddam, I almost finished writing Why I shouldn’t be hanged today - but I had some trouble with adjectival phrases that day, plus Bush needed a one-liner on what he would do that day (”I decided to go to sleep early and didn’t watch the execution”) and it was really hard to write. Then again, I’m still working on it. I know you are dead already, but maybe Bush will regret hanging you when he reads it: Here is an excerpt:
And that, fellow world citizens, is why my life should be spared. Nevertheless, I have some confessions to make in case I die:
To George Bush Senior: Love, I’m sorry I couldn’t quit you. I’m sorry you cheated on Barbara because of me. Maybe this hanging is what I deserve for letting you commit such a beautiful sin. The thing with Donald Rumsfeld was just a fling - I never loved him. I hope you can forgive me someday.
To George Bush Junior: I’m sorry you could never love me as a step-father. I tried. I really did. I never told you this, but when I was dating your father I always fantasized about you and I. And sometimes Bill O’Reilly, too. There’s just something manly and Irish about him.
To all Iraqi citizens: [This is where I left off… sorry Saddam].
As you can see, you need to submit your requests on time. I get calls from Castro everyday and he takes up a lot of my time. He is always babbling on about how his own doctors can’t keep him alive and how he wants me to take over Cuba in his place. But I declined. Here is my letter to Fidel:
It would have been a great honor to serve this nation again. But after thoughtful discussions with people both in and outside of this administration, I concluded that the current Havana decision-making process lacks a linkage to a broader view of the region and how the parts fit together strategically.
So if there’s an article you heroes want me to write, I want to write it. 5/4 dictators recommend my services (Bush is the fifth, but he declined to be included).
I recommend you schule kinder (schoolchildren) tell on your teachers if they ever criticize the president:
A top Constitutional scholar from Princeton who gave a speech that slammed Bush’s executive overreach has been added to the TSA’s terrorist watch list. “I was denied a boarding pass because I was on the Terrorist Watch list,” he said. When he asked why, the clerk asked if he had been at any peace marches. We ban a lot of those people.
Yeah, that’ll teach University Professors not to teach if they want to fly American! HAHAHA! Neocons 1 - University Professors 0!
It worked for Nazi Germany, so why wouldn’t it work for Bush? Department of Vaterland Security über alles!
We must win the war on FIRE. Fire burned us when we cooked our first meal, when we spilled our first McDonald’s coffee on our lap, and innocent civilians are taken down by fire.
Fire doesn’t care if you are a good Christian, or whether your last Christmas tree was nicely decorated (it will burn your tree down without remorse). Fire will kill you even when it is “friendly” fire. We cannot allow fire to consume our country. Or our planet.
Fire is responsible for wiping out our wildlife and wild brush in California. It will take not only your job, but the company you work in. Fire is responsible for burning the Library of Alexandria in 50 B.C. (For context, imagine losing the entire internet today!) Fire destroyed Chicago in 1871 and was sponsored by a COW! Fire and this pyromaniac cow killed hundreds and destroyed about four square miles.
We must not give an inch of flammable material to those cows that would harbor fire and which hold no respect for life of us who want nothing but their freedom. Let this message be heard loud and clear: We will not tolerate sponsors of fire and those who would harbor fire.
“We’re in a new world. We’re in a world in which the possibility of fire, married up with technology, could make us very, very sorry that we didn’t act.
-Condoleeza Rice
“In a world of inhumanity, war and fire, American citizenship is a very precious possession.”
Phyllis Schlafly
“This was not an act of arson, but it was an act of war.”
George W. Bush
“The war we are fighting today against fire is a multifaceted fight. We have to use every tool in our toolkit to wage this war - water, water hydrants, long water hoses, special foam, water-boarding, and of course, water - and we are developing new tools as we go along.”
Richard Armitage
“Fire can shake the foundations of our biggest buildings, but it cannot touch the foundation of America.
Fire melts steel, but it cannot melt the steel of American resolve.”
–George W. Bush Address to the US after fire burned the US World Trade Centers and Pentagon, September 11, 2001
“There is no meeting of minds, no point of understanding with such fire. Just a choice: put it out or be burned by it. And put it out we must.”
Tony Blair
“Fire made me cruel.”
Emily Brontë
“Did you know Hell is filled with FIRE?”
Më
Those who worship fire will stop at nothing to destroy us.
Did you know hell is filled with FIRE and brimstone? 5 out of 4 reverends recommend avoiding Hell.
We must fight the war on fire to make the world safer. Did you know Hindus harbor cows? And whosoever harbors cows is our enemy. Cows started the 1871 fire.
Cows also spread propaganda like wildfire. Did you ever hear the phrase “Eat Mor Chikin®” Those are the words of cows. Cows that will stop at nothing to see our atmosphere burn up. Do not be fooled by their propaganda.
And let me say this: If you are not willing to fight the war on fire, you do not deserve to NOT be enveloped in flames.
We must slaughter every cow and make no excuses when we eat it raw (remember, there is a war on fire), in front of Hindus. We must not appease to the cows and the Hindus that harbor them.
If you are not against friendly fire, you are with enemy fire. That makes you a traitor. Why don’t you fight with the Hindus?
You know what else about fire? It’s so easy a caveman can do it. Do you want cavemen teaching your children to start fires in your home? I didn’t think so. And gecko poo isn’t clean either.
Once Iran has fire, it will be an irreversible change that will mark a defining moment in the history of the United States and of Western civilization, which will forever alter life at the mercy of hate-filled suicidal fanatics and sadists.
We must therefore taunt Iran in the WATER.
(Yay, Blair!)
And when the war on fire has been won. And when all fire has been extinguished, no one will complain of global warming, for the new trend will be global cooling.
We will then need to turn on our ELECTRIC stoves on all the way to save the planet.
We must burn ALL books on fire, so that fire can never be created again. It will be a big fire. But nobody said the war on fire would be short or easy. We sometimes must make sacrifices. If that means starting a fire to put it out, well, we must fight fire with fire. (No, that doesn’t make us arsonists because two wrong fires, make a right.)
Now, some people don’t think fire is a threat. Well, those are the people we must BURN, on a STAKE! Holding their feet to the fire WILL show them just how dangerous fire is. And that’s how we’ll win them over.
We must distribute flammable ads (soaked in oil) with pictures of people burning and flammable U.S. flags. If people are not afraid of fire, how can we possibly win the war on fire?
We must remind the people that fire is a threat by burning a house down every now and then. We must have a fire alert flash on every major news network to warn us of the local humidity and chance of fire.
We must outlaw all spicy food. Any Mexican who eats spicy food is also the enemy. We must burn all Mexican restaurants in the United States and close the borders to prevent the spread of hot food. We must send refrigerators abroad to spread frigidism and wetness.
People in third world countries didn’t ask for our help, but frigidism and wetness is what’s good for them. (They are so stupid!) Only by establishing frigidism and wetness in the Middle East can we protect the American people of fire.
If you do not oppose fire you are the enemy and we will set you on fire.
Crooks and Liars has this priceless rebuke from Vietnam vet and former Senator Max Cleland to VP Cheney who took 5 deferments from the Vietnam draft. Most of the guys in my college dorm couldn’t get 1.
Well, guess what, idolator.net. This is just proof that VP Cheney is smarter than all your college dorm buddies. This means he is smart enough to perpetuate a war in Iraq forever. This means we will never have to fight at home (unless Cheney dies from a heart attack before then) at the cost of only 10-11 soldiers a day.
I’ll be keeping an eye on your blog very closely. Anybody who attacks Cheney is attacking our country and emboldening the terrorists. Every time you attack Cheney a blood vessel near his heart pops. If you continue to help terrorists, I will add you to my enemy blog roll along with Al-Qaeda, possibly until the war is over. You liberals sicken me.
**Update**
I have declared war on your site. I will send your domain name to Al-Qaeda. Don’t expect a response; even if I made a mistake.
