Luck of the Draw
I don't know exactly what got to me last night but I was really haunted by the young soldier sitting across from me at the Blackjack table. Let me explain:
After nearly 20 days straight of work without a real break, I took the night off and went to play cards at an Indian casino in Albuquerque (where I'm reporting a tight congressional race and where I'll be seeing President Bush do a fundraiser on Friday).
To be more precise, I escaped to the casino after getting my fill of the congressional debate on Iraq on C-SPAN. What a revolting, absolutely nauseating spectacle. The Republicans apparently feel no shame in trying to manipulate the issue of the war, the reality of blood and gore and death, for their crass and completely transparent electoral ends.
Cut and run? I can name only two instances in recent American history of cutting and running: Nixon in Vietnam who had planned years before to pull out and was only waiting for the right moment. And, of course, Reagan in Lebanon. Or did I miss something? Oh yeah, Clinton in Somalia.
Can't tell you either that I was particularly encouaraged by what I heard from most of the Democrats in the debate. Yes, the Republicans were trying to trap them. But that's like trying to trap weasels, isn't it?
I thought that playing some cards for a few hours would get me out of the hotel, away from the infernal tube, and would help dull the psyhic pain.
Ha! Three bad beats, within 15 minutes at the no-limit poker table, however, only escalated the torture ( a pair of Aces cracked by a set of Queens, two pair A-J trumped by a set of 5's and a top pair with an Ace kicker beaten by a flush -- and each time on the river!).
On the way out of the casino, I stopped at a low limit Blackjack table and figured what the hell -- I'd play two spots at $10 each for a few minutes, figuring my luck couldn't get any worse. Sitting across from me was a young Latino kid about 20 years old with a buzz cut haircut, no more than maybe 5' 6" or so. As the fetching blue-eyed dealer, shuffled and stitched and laced the six decks, he was excitedly chatting her up. "Just came in from Baghad last night," he said. "Just finished my first tour. My Mom asked me where I wanted to go tonight and I told her I was sick and tired of playing cards in a tent. Get me to the casino, I told her," he said lighting up a smoke and stroking his modest stack of chips -- maybe forty or fifty bucks.
"That's it? You out now?" the dealer asked as she nestled the cards in the plastic shoe.
Boom. With the question, it looked like a cloud came over the young man's face. "No," he said looking down at the felt and lowering his voice. "In August I go back for a second tour -- 15 more months."
Like I said, I don't know what hit me, but my eyes just welled up and my lips started quivering. This kid was so polite, so obviously sweet and well-mannered and eager to be friendly, I just felt overwhelmed by the whole thing. I flashed on the congressional windbags I had seen earlier on TV, so cavalierly ready to have someone like this young kid become number 2501 or, for that matter, 5002.
Trying to suss out my own reaction to this, I can only figure he had touched some father-thing in me. My own daughter is 22 but I cop immediately to still suffering twinges of separation anxiety whenever one of us travel (and I have the cell phone receipts to prove it). But Jesus, what must it feel like to have a kid in Iraq? I can only shudder. In fact, I did.
After a few minutes, the soldier's mom (at least 10 years younger than I) came over to stand next to him. He enthusiastically showed her is growing stack of chips. "I'm hot, Mom," he said. She smiled and rubbed his back slowly, looking at his face as he stared down at his cards. That did it for me, again. I felt like I was going to blubber out loud; and the only recourse I had was to snap on my dark glasses which I do use for poker but never in Blackjack-- until last night.
One thing for sure, this kid was charmed. He started hitting his hands, increasing his bet each time. Man, did those cards fall sweetly for a good, long run. At one point, the dealer busted out six times in a row. We were both raking it in. I was playing two hands and betting a lot more than him, and -- presto-- I made back my earlier, rather catastrophic poker loss. And even a tad more.
After about a half hour, now with about $200 in front of him, the kid got dragged to dinner by his mother. I knew what she felt. She wanted her son to be happy, wanted him to do whatever struck his fancy. But she also wanted to squeeze out every minute she could just being with him. He tossed the dealer a generous $10 tip. "Come back and see me again before you go again," she said.
"Yes, ma'am," he answered and went off with his arm around his mother.
Feeling rather foolish, I took off my shades and tried to concentrate on the cards. My next two hands came out: 20 on one spot. 6-5 on the other. The dealer showed a 5 up. I stayed on the 20 and double-downed on the 11, drawing an 8 for a solid 19. I couldn't have better odds to win both hands. But the dealer snapped over her hole card and revealed another five. I could taste what was coming.
Bam. She drew the next card and an Ace of diamonds came out, making 21. She instantaneously swept my two bets off the table and clicked my chips into the rack.
I knew it was over and I cashed in my winnings without as much as thinking about playing another hand. Clearly, Lady Luck had pranced off with the kid. I can only hope she sticks closely by his side when he goes back to Baghad.
June 16th, 2006 at 4:13 am
sorry i didn’t answer my cell phone today.
June 16th, 2006 at 5:12 am
It’s nice that you viewed the soldier as an individual and didn’t play too far into making him a political statistic. The young man volunteered…read that again, volunteered…to become part of our armed forces and deserves all the respect and support that we can give him.
The Senate vote just gave all the ne’er-do-well’s a chance to put on record their positions, which sway from TV cameras to the floor, and to indicate if they respect and support this young man and his fellow soldiers and will let them finish the job with pride that they winning, and will win, with the right support rather than be dragged down by the cut-and-run, America is always wrong crowd.
The kid is a winner and we need more winners like him. We have them on the field. Let’s try to get more in Congress.
June 16th, 2006 at 5:32 am
If I’m reading Woody correctly, the only good citizen is one who supports whatever wars the state decides is good for the nation. Doesn’t sound like a philosophy that makes much sense in a country that is a democracy though.
Tomorrow the president could declare Chavez an ally of OBL and invade and occupy the country. Ditto Cuba. We as American citizens would be obligated then to show our ‘support for the soldiers’ [who have no say in the policy one way or the other anyhow, but 'support' is 'critical' to 'win' the wars] by supporting the wars against Cuba and Venezuela. If we take Woody’s proposal to its logical end of course.
June 16th, 2006 at 5:44 am
“Yesterday the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, opened its annual conference on international strategy with a speech from the Navy Secretary in a vast hall, followed by a panel on American power composed of three scholars, all of whom had opposed the war in Iraq. Indeed, in the biographical notes that were given out to the audience of officers?men and women wearing their dress whites?one of the scholars stated bluntly that he had written about the “folly of invading Iraq.”
For an hour the panelists gave their reasons for why they believe America will remain the most powerful country in the world well into this century, regardless of the morass in Iraq. There were about ten questions. The last one was from a Navy commander named Cladgett from Syracuse, who rose in the middle of the audience.
“My question to the panel is, What is the path to success in Iraq?”
There was a damburst of laughter in the audience, then the scholars took it on, one by one. The first, Stephen Walt of Harvard, said “This was a huge strategic blunder, there are no attractive plans forward.” The greatest danger?an international conflict in Iraq?would be there no matter when we left. The next man, Robert Art of Brandeis, said, he thought it was extremely important for America’s image in the Arab world not to have permanent bases in Iraq.
The last one to speak was the one who had used the word “folly” in the program: John J. Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago. Mearsheimer is 58. He told the audience that when he was a teenager, he had enlisted in the Army. Then he’d spent 1966-1970 at West Point. Then he said this:
I remember once in English class we read Albert Camus’s book The Plague. I didn’t know what The Plague was about or why we were reading it. But afterwards the instructor explained to us that The Plague was being read because of the Vietnam War. What Camus was saying in The Plague was that the plague came and went of its own accord. All sorts of minions ran around trying to deal with the plague, and they operated under the illusion that they could affect the plague one way or another. But the plague operated on its own schedule. That is what we were told was going on in Vietnam. Every time I look at the situation in Iraq today, I think of Vietnam, and I think of The Plague, and I just don’t think there’s very much we can do at this point. It is just out of our hands. There are forces that we don’t have control over that are at play, and will determine the outcome of this one. I understand that’s very hard for Americans to understand, because Americans believe that they can shape the world in their interests.
But I learned during the Vietnam years when I was a kid at West Point, that there are some things in the world that you just don’t control, and I think that’s where we’re at in Iraq.
The panel was over. For a moment or two there was stunned silence, and then applause?at once polite, sustained and thunderous.”
http://mondoweiss.observer.com/2006/06/at-us-naval-war-college-scholar-likens-iraq-to-plague.html
June 16th, 2006 at 6:18 am
Reminds me of the recent great reception Chomsky got at West Point. I’ve talked to people who’ve been in Iraq and are going back. Most of the military know the war is wrong.
June 16th, 2006 at 7:03 am
Here’s the clip. Imagine a missile leftist being able to respond like this to such a question? Chomsky basically gives the questioner a history lesson:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQOEhXb6jlU&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fredstateson%2Eblogspot%2Ecom%2F
June 16th, 2006 at 7:23 am
Jcummings, you talked to “some people” (not necesessarily military) and that tells you that “most of the military know the war is wrong.” Great sources and great conclusion. It staggers me to think that these people who think that the war is wrong (the military) voted overwhelmingly for Bush for a second term. Last week in the Atlanta airport I talked with soldiers coming back from Iraq and some going. All that I spoke to support our mission. Do you think that maybe their votes and my discussions are simply aberrations?
lorie, your hypotheticals are simply that. All this bull that the left supports the troops but oppose the war is simply that–bull. I’m not going to rehash the arguments. Here’s two quickly located and random links that explain some of this for anyone with an open mind.
The Left doesn’t support the troops and should admit it; Jul 12, 2005; by Dennis Prager
http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/dennisprager/2005/07/12/154883.html
The big lie: ‘Support troops, oppose war’; June 5, 2005, By Kieran Michael Lalor
http://www.thejournalnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?aid=/20050605/opinion03/506050361/1076
June 16th, 2006 at 7:32 am
No, Woody, I’m saying I don’t think it matters much way one or the other if you or I or anyone ‘supports’ the ‘troops’ [including mercenaries?], since they have little to do with, in fact nothing to do with planning for the invasion, present US occupation, or future US occupations.
So, I come back to my claim that you are arguing that in order to be a good American citizen you have to support a war no matter what the reasons given for the war or occupation, as long as it is your country that is involved in the war. An utterly irrational proposition in a democracy.
June 16th, 2006 at 7:35 am
And there, right there, is why I read this blog. Great story, Mr. Cooper.
June 16th, 2006 at 8:22 am
lorie, I support the Braves, so I don’t pull for the Mets to beat them. Read–no, just scan–the articles that I linked. There’s too many links as it is. There’s a big difference between debating the merits of the war and undermining our support and aiding the enemy. Also, consider that it’s always the left protesting anything military–from campus recruiting to a former President loathing them. Your “logical conclusion” is not logical or accurate.
——–
Marc Cooper, why didn’t you step away from the table when the soldier did and meet him? I sure would have under those circumstances and with the emotions that you felt. Maybe he had a greater message to share than what your across-the-table observations could read, and I highly suspect that he would have been more than glad to provide his thoughts on the war and our military to a journalist or anyone with interest. Don’t hand pick some military personnel for such a story in the future, but consider taking advantage of these random encounters. In this case, we learned what was in your soul. In the other case, we can learn what is in his.
June 16th, 2006 at 8:40 am
“lorie, I support the Braves, so I don’t pull for the Mets to beat them. ”
Again, so what. I support the Braves too, but I don’t support their manager nor their management. The analogy is irrelevant.
What is relevant is whether or not it’s normal for a person in a democratic society to say I support a war no matter what under any conditions as long as the president is committed to war. A bizarre philosophy you hold in a democratic society.
Again whether or not one ‘supports’ the ‘troops’ [does that include mercenaries btw?], the politicians make the decision to go to war and stay committed to it, whether we’re talking about Bush or Clinton or other committed defenders of empire. So why the obsession about whether one ‘supports’ the ‘troops’ or not as concerns the question should the US be at war in Iraq or Iran or Syria or wherever else it plans to be at war in the coming future?
June 16th, 2006 at 8:42 am
“Maybe he had a greater message to share than what your across-the-table observations could read, and I highly suspect that he would have been more than glad to provide his thoughts on the war and our military to a journalist or anyone with interest.”
What if his story included his disagreement with the US being in Iraq? Would that make him then a person who opposed himself? And would it matter if he opposed himself as concerns the broader policy question of should the US be at war and occupy Iraq now or in the near future?
June 16th, 2006 at 8:51 am
Woody
Your pal Dennis Prager argues that the left is disingenuous in its support for the troops; it thinks the war is immoral and therefore secretly hopes the troops fail. Except that it’s perfectly possible to wish the American army success while deploring the fact that chances for success are minimal because the war was so ill-conceived, planned and executed. In the conception, planning and execution lay the war’s immorality. The goal may have been worthwhile (at least some of the various goals advanced were) but if it was never truly achievable or if it was made unachievable by terrible planning, the resulting sacrifice of life (on both sides) could only be called immoral. (Not to speak of the collateral damage done to the U.S. economically and geo-politically.) Holding the war to be immoral in this sense, as many on the left do, is perfectly compatible with full support for the troops.
June 16th, 2006 at 9:02 am
And just because you vounteered doesn’t mean you deserve this incompetence from above or that you should have expected multiple year-plus tours of duty in a war zone.
June 16th, 2006 at 9:29 am
evets, when one volunteers for the military, there are no agreements regarding policies from above or time in an area of conflict. A lot of people in the guard and reserves learned that during the first Gulf War and some of them found that it was more than a weekend job. Today’s volunteers even go in knowing that there is a chance that a Democrat will be in office who will steer funds away from defense into feel good programs. So, when one does volunteer, he knows what that means, and it means more than you stated.
I’d stay around more, but I messed up and have too many tickets to tonight’s Braves-Red Sox game, so I have to get moving to sell them. Priorities, you know.
June 16th, 2006 at 9:46 am
“Your pal Dennis Prager argues that the left is disingenuous in its support for the troops; it thinks the war is immoral and therefore secretly hopes the troops fail.”
I don’t see what the issue is, if it’s should one support the war, what does what the troops think have to do with that? They don’t make the decision to fight or not to fight, the people do, no?
Possibly one can hate the troops and want them to stay in Iraq a few more years so another few thousand get killed or badly injured. Or they can ‘support the troops’ and see the same result. So what and who cares the motivations in that regard
. In the end it’s the policy that is at issue, whether you ‘hate’ or ‘love’ the ‘troops’ [and does supporting the troops mean supporting private mercenaries also? Please bring me up to date].
Then again, no better way to avoid debating the issue of whether the US should occupy Iraq today or tomoorow than to pretend the issue at hand is the troops [who have no say either way in any event].
June 16th, 2006 at 9:53 am
“Holding the war to be immoral in this sense, as many on the left do, is perfectly compatible with full support for the troops.”
This whole ‘support the troops’ nonsense is a product of Americans’ belief in the myth of the spat on soldiers during the American war in Vietnam.
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0430-21.htm
June 16th, 2006 at 10:37 am
A kid like this is why every single political persuasion owes absolute and throough honesty to the debate.
June 16th, 2006 at 10:43 am
Great writing by the way.
Any dishonesty betrays this kid, is another way of saying it. And of course it should go without saying that dishonesty a doesn’t excuse dishonesty b.
June 16th, 2006 at 10:57 am
Woody -
I’m a rabid Red Sox fan, but my father used to root for the Braves (Boston). Therefore I honor Warren Spahn.
That said, your point that volunteers make ‘no agreements regarding policies from above or time in an area’ is self-evident but no less ridiculous for being so. They deserve better leadership, plain and simple.
June 16th, 2006 at 11:17 am
Come on Woody, that Prager article is lame. I’ll decline to drive a truck through the holes in it, and ask another question of you instead. Since it’s Prager bleating for honesty, let’s hear it from you.
Why does sloganeering substitute for actual thinking? Let’s assume that, generally, the soldiers in our armed forces are like the rest of the population. That means that in addition to selfless, noble and courageous people there are also cheats, layabouts, and thieves. How is it that putting on some camouflage and running around an obstacle course for a couple of months and then going on firewatch in Kansas instantly confers the impramatur of nobility? Why is military service a sort of magic fairy dust for you guys?
It seems to me we should say that we support some of the troops. You know, the ones who do not torture prisoners. Just a thought. I don’t get the slavish uncritical adoration. Just to be clear, there is a lot to honor and respect, and a lot that deserves something less.
And why is, say, Jimmy Carter’s work with Habitat for Humanity any less deserving of praise than someone who has served in the military? Is that service to the country less important?
Last random musing on this Woody, regarding your airport polling, does it ever occur to you that troops have 1) a PR reason to put on a good face no matter what the circumstances and 2) are by definition inculcated to be gung ho, and perhaps are not the best source for honest assesments of the wisdom of a policy?
June 16th, 2006 at 11:33 am
“there are also cheats, layabouts, and thieves”
What about gypsies and tramps?
June 16th, 2006 at 11:38 am
The reason I think Prager’s into something is this: if I really, honestly thought this war was evil, as does much of the left, I wouldn’t be able to say I “supported the troops” beyond a wish that they survive. But how I could want them to “succeed,” in a mission whose goals I considered unworthy? And how could I “honor” their efforts, for the same reason?
I might say I “honor” their willigness to sacrifice for the nation, but frankly I wouldn’t mean it. Given the situaiton, i mean. if my naiton is prusuing evil ends, why would I honor that?
June 16th, 2006 at 11:44 am
Thanks, Mr. Cooper, for the much needed injection of perspective. Now if only we could get this swine in congress to see what you saw in that kid’s face. But then again, expecting a human reaction might be expecting too much.
By the way, I’ve ran into more than a couple of vets from the first Gulf war who seemed to enjoy telling me how many ‘kills’ they racked up (i guess they keep score). It sounded like they were talking about a fun video game.
That kid soldier across from Mark definitely sounded like a nicer fella than this one.
http://majikthise.typepad.com/majikthise_/2006/06/my_most_embaras.html
June 16th, 2006 at 11:49 am
“I’m a rabid Red Sox fan”
Me too. And of the Bruins, Patriots, and the Celtics.
Speaking of which, the Jacobs family has screwed up the Bruins (awful 05-06 season, traded Thornton and Samsonov) about as bad as….you know who has screwed up the war in Iraq.
Still, I’m a die-hard supporter of the B’s. I buy tickets, subscribe to their games, buy their merch, etc. That doesn’t stop me, though, from writing letters to the Jacobs urging them to sell the team.
June 16th, 2006 at 11:58 am
Paul -
I think there’s more often disingenuousness in declaring flat out that the war’s ends are evil. Many who do so don’t really mean it, actually believe that story is more complicated but refrain from admitting it out of anger with the administration, partisan bitterness etc. That’s why they can say they support the troops without much cognitive dissonance. I think Prager knows this and is being disingenuous himself ( which would be nothing new).
June 16th, 2006 at 12:03 pm
“I highly suspect that he would have been more than glad to provide his thoughts on the war and our military to a journalist”
Well, I would say that now with those troops with less than flattering remarks about the war and the president now being attacked for their opinions by the right, I think the message that troops like him are receiveing now is, “If you are not with our president, no amount of blood that you sacrifice will prevent us from branding you as a sub-human.”
After all, I think we all remember the late Henry Tillman, and how the right began beating up on him when his affiliation with Chomsky became known. And the bogus charges of war criminality thrown at John Kerry and Max Cleland by the punditoid right.
The result has been a chilling effect on troops: I know personally of one troop returning from Iraq who refused to discuss his opinions on the war while visiting my high school class that I taught last year.
McCarthyism is back and one only wonders now how long it will be before Dick Van Dyke reruns and Elvis hair will be back in fashion as well.
June 16th, 2006 at 12:09 pm
Needless to say, Marc did just the right thing. No one wants to be interrogated and grilled about their political views by people they don’t know. Its called having appropriate “social skills.”
June 16th, 2006 at 12:13 pm
The question to that troop, by the way, was thrown out by a student, and not the teacher (me). The soldier said that he didn’t have an opinion on the matter of the war.
June 16th, 2006 at 12:19 pm
Lovely, heartfelt post Marc, especially as we approach our annual buy-dad-a-tie weekend.
The grotesque famine of leadership and statesmanship this week on CSPAN was appalling.
In this post-patriarchy, father-knows-nothing world, it seems the left (and left of center) have rid our side of all meaningful leadership – male or female – in exchange for neutered, calculating poll readers and money raisers. And one of the great traditional roles of fatherhood – setting a moral compass for dealing with the struggles and compromises of the real world – has not evolved into shared duty, but simply been tossed aside. All we have left is hollow politicians, an angry fringe and a ubiquitous pop image of dad as powerless wage slave buffoon.
For most folks, the apparent fear of moral spine has become the defining quality of the Democrats. And the Republicans coldly exploit it – hence their love of “meaningless†symbolic non-binding votes where they can frame things in moral terms like “cut and run.â€
“They’re wrong, pull out†may be better than “cut and run†but not by much. Leading America out of the morass in Iraq is a different task from just getting the hell out; real leadership would require an articulated vision of something principled and strategic.
Sadly, when I make my own neutered calculations – to get our kids out of this deadly folly ASAP – either crappy phrase beats the Republican alternative. But it’s hard to feel too good about that, especially around Father’s Day.
“Honey!!?? Have you seen my moral compass for dealing with the struggles and compromises of the real world?â€
“Look in the closet. Maybe behind the ties.â€
June 16th, 2006 at 12:21 pm
“No one wants to be interrogated and grilled about their political views by people they don’t know.”
Good point, Dave. And who wants to talk about their job while enjoying a night out on the town?!?! I think that my job as a secretary is stressful enough, and I sure as day don’t wanna be talking about my stressful job if I’m at a casino with my mom! Who would barge up and start talking about that?
June 16th, 2006 at 12:37 pm
It is a good post, I agree. And it reminded me of some tributes I read recently. Some of it is a bit over the top, but some of it left me pretty choked up.
Go to Thursdays post and read some of the comments if interested. http://www.crossfit.com/
June 16th, 2006 at 12:48 pm
evets-
prager’s disingenuous for not realizing or admitting that anti-war left is disingenuous when they denounce the war so thoroughly? He’s just suppsoed to let them get away with rhetoric that is overheated because hey, he should realize they dont mean it?
I meanbeyond that, though, I think you have a point about the anti-war left actually realizing at some level that the situation is “more complicated” than outright evil.
But it’s not Prager’s (or my) fault for pointing out that you can’t logically make one kind of statement (the war is evil) and then insist you mean another kind of statement (I support the troops) that doesn’t fit with the first.
June 16th, 2006 at 12:51 pm
What the hell is wrong with Dick Van Dyke, reruns or otherwise?
June 16th, 2006 at 12:58 pm
Kennedy, Kucinich, Gore. These were major Dem names who were against the war from the start and said so. Not that I would suggest Murtha deserves to called a weasel either.
These anti-war stances, from the start, were much more animent than what appeared at the time in Marc Cooper’s writing (“Forget about it, just don’t let him go to Iran.” No problem there, Marc.). Not to mention the horse hockey Hitchens was allowed to talk, unchalleged, on Cooper’s radio show. Was that the kind of fawning interviews that went on a Daily Kos?
Are the military right wing or left? I would assume they have some serious mixed feelings, neither side is very convicing when using this ploy to argue for the virtue or lack thereof of the war effort. I do shudder every time I hear our dunderhead Pres. insist it is the military who calls the shots in Iraq. Talk about dariliction of duty….
Prager, of course, is a dunce sited by fools. We have already “won” the war to the extent that we are going to win it, and staying there longer just means more death and injury for our people. That my NOT in fact be a fully plausable reason to leave. But the wellfare of the troops is not served by his imbicilic concept of victory.
I would love to see a radical journalist in a major publication meditate, for once, on the true innocents in this war, becuase the kid who’s going back over may end up killing people who never wanted him to come to thier country in the first place. These are the needless deaths, tens of thousands of them, that are truely on the hands of the American voters who sent George Bush to Washington for a second time. Save a little of your pity for the people whom Hitchens decided were not up to choosing there own leaders, or running there own country, who looks at this Neocon disaster and says, “ah, they would have done it anyway. “
June 16th, 2006 at 1:16 pm
Paul -
Their rhetoric isn’t overheated. It’s appropriately heated, just misworded. “The war is immoral for complicated reasons. It’s not black and white but on balance etc etc ” isn’t an easy sound bite to throw around, though plenty do make this sort of argument, more than Prager (or apparently you) would be willing to admit. He’s making a niggling debating point, technically accurate in some cases, that doesn’t capture reality. It’s pretty damn clear that almost all of those who oppose the war on the left don’t think that all it’s purported ends are evil, no matter what they say say in the heat of the moment. They do believe that it has, in the end, produced more evil than good and will in all likelihood continue to do so. I think Prager knows this, though maybe I overestimate him.
June 16th, 2006 at 1:22 pm
On his show, Prager treats people with good opposing arguments honestly presented with respect. That’s a rare characteristic.
June 16th, 2006 at 1:30 pm
I’ve always thought that if you can’t handle Prager, you’re hopeless. He’s Mr. Rational on most questions.
Heat and content are not unrelated. Heat appropriate to over the top evil applied to an ambiguous situation is a form of tremendous dishonesty.
Anyway, as you know, we differ on the wording commonly used. I see inappropriate heat coupled with dishonest argumentation. There’s a a lot of ground, I’m afraid, you wound’t see as dishonest that I would.
June 16th, 2006 at 1:30 pm
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0611-24.htm
Published on Sunday, June 11, 2006 by the Los Angeles Times
Iraq’s Pentagon Papers
This unjustified war is waiting for its whistle-blower, says the leaker of Vietnam’s secret history.
by Daniel Ellsberg
A joint resolution referred to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week by Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) calls for the withdrawal of all American military forces from Iraq by Dec. 31. Boxer’s “redeployment” bill cites in its preamble a January poll finding that 64% of Iraqis believe that crime and violent attacks will decrease if the U.S. leaves Iraq within six months, 67% believe that their day-to-day security will increase if the U.S. withdraws and 73% believe that factions in parliament will cooperate more if the U.S. withdraws.
If that’s true, then what are we doing there? If Iraqis don’t believe that we’re making things better or safer, what does that say about the legitimacy of prolonged occupation, much less permanent American bases in Iraq (foreseen by 80% of Iraqis polled)? What does it mean for continued American armored patrols such as the one last November in Haditha, which, we now learn, led to the deaths of a Marine and 24 unarmed civilians?
It was questions very much like these that were nagging at my conscience many years ago at the height of the Vietnam War, and that led, eventually, to the publication of the first of the Pentagon Papers on June 13, 1971, 35 years ago this week. That process had begun nearly two years earlier, in the fall of 1969, when my friend and former colleague at the Rand Corp., Tony Russo, and I first started copying the 7,000 pages of top-secret documents from my office safe at Rand to give to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
That period had several similarities to this one. For one thing, Republican Sen. Charles Goodell of New York had just introduced a resolution calling for the unilateral withdrawal of all U.S. armed forces from Indochina by the end of 1970. Unlike the current Boxer resolution, his had budgetary “teeth,” calling for all congressional funding of U.S. combat operations to cease by his deadline.
Two other similarities between then and now: First, though it was known to only a handful of Americans, President Nixon was making secret plans that September to expand, rather than exit from, the ongoing war in Southeast Asia — including a major air offensive against North Vietnam, possibly using nuclear weapons. Today, the Bush administration’s threats to wage war against Iran are explicit, with officials reiterating regularly that the nuclear “option” is “on the table.”
Second, also in September, charges had been brought quietly against Lt. William Calley for the murder 18 months earlier of “109 Oriental human beings” in the South Vietnamese hamlet of My Lai 4. This went almost unnoticed until mid-November of that year, when Seymour Hersh’s investigative story burst on the public, followed shortly by the first sight for Americans of color photographs of the massacre. The pictures were not that different from those in the cover stories of Time and Newsweek from Haditha: women, children, old men and babies, all shot at short range.
What was it that prompted me in the fall of 1969 to begin copying 7,000 pages of highly classified documents — an act that I fully expected would send me to prison for life? (My later charges, indeed, totaled a potential 115 years in prison.) The precipitating event was not Calley’s murder trial but a different one. On Sept. 30, I read in the Los Angeles Times that charges brought by Creighton Abrams, the commanding general of U.S. forces in Vietnam, against several Special Forces officers accused of murdering a suspected double agent in their custody had been dismissed by the secretary of the Army.
The article, by Washington reporters Ted Sell and Robert Donovan, made clear that the reasons alleged by Secretary Stanley Resor for this dismissal were false (and that the order to dismiss the charges had most likely come directly from the White House). As I read on, it became increasingly clear that the whole chain of command, civilian and military, was participating in a coverup.
As I finished the article, it hit me: This is the system I have been part of, giving my unquestioning loyalty to for 15 years, as a Marine, a Pentagon official and a State Department officer in Vietnam. It’s a system that lies reflexively, at every level from sergeant to commander in chief, about murder. And I had, sitting in my safe at Rand, 7,000 pages of documentary evidence to prove it.
The papers in my safe, which came to be known as the Pentagon Papers, constituted a complete set of a 47-volume, top-secret Defense Department history of American involvement in Vietnam titled, “U.S. Decision-making in Vietnam, 1945-68.”
I had exclusive access to the papers for research purposes and had been reading them all summer; they made it very clear that I, like the rest of the American public, had been misled about the origins and purposes of the war I had participated in — just as are the 85% of the troops in Iraq today who still believe that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11 and that he was allied with Al Qaeda.
The papers documented in stunning detail a pattern of lies and deceptions by four presidents and their administrations over 23 years to conceal their war plans — along with internal estimates of the high costs and risks of these plans (and their low probabilities of success), never meant to reach the public and provoke debate. They showed very clearly how we had become engaged in a reckless war of choice in someone else’s country — a country that had not attacked us — for our own domestic and external purposes.
It seemed to me that to be doing that against the intense wishes of most of the inhabitants of that country was not just bad policy but morally wrong. Moreover, it became clear to me that the justifications that had been given for our involvement were false. Vietnam was not a just war, and never had been. And if the war itself was unjust, then all the victims of our firepower were being killed without justification. That’s murder.
As I read the story in The Times that morning about the coverup of the Special Forces murder and compared it with what I’d been reading in the secret history, I came to see it as a microcosm of what had been happening since the war began. And I thought to myself: I don’t want to be part of this lying machine anymore. I am not going to conceal the truth any longer.
I called Russo, who had been fired from Rand a year earlier, in part for inconvenient field reporting about torture of prisoners by our Vietnamese allies. I asked him if he had access to a copying machine.
He did.
We began on Oct. 1. Night after night, I brought out batches of papers from my safe, and we copied them. I gave them first to members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, hoping that they would make the documents public. But they did not. Eventually, I gave them to the New York Times, which began publishing them Sunday, June 13, 1971.
Two days later, the New York Times was ordered by a federal judge, at the request of the White House, to stop publishing — the first injunctive prior restraint of the press in U.S. history. I then gave copies to the Washington Post and, when it also was enjoined, to 17 other newspapers, while I was being sought by the FBI. On June 28, I turned myself in and was arrested and charged with violations of the Espionage Act and theft.
Today, there must be, at the very least, hundreds of civilian and military officials in the Pentagon, CIA, State Department, National Security Agency and White House who have in their safes and computers comparable documentation of intense internal debates — so far carefully concealed from Congress and the public — about prospective or actual war crimes, reckless policies and domestic crimes: the Pentagon Papers of Iraq, Iran or the ongoing war on U.S. liberties. Some of those officials, I hope, will choose to accept the personal risks of revealing the truth — earlier than I did — before more lives are lost or a new war is launched.
Haditha holds a mirror up not just to American troops in the field, but to our whole society. Not just to the liars in government but to those who believe them too easily. And to all of us in the public, in the administration, in Congress and the media who dissent so far ineffectively or who stand by as murder is being done and do nothing to stop it or expose it.
It is past time for Americans to summon the civil courage to face what is being done in their name and to refuse to be accomplices. We must force Congress and this president, or their successors if necessary, to act upon the moral proposition that the U.S. must stop killing men, women and children in Iraq, and must not begin to do so in Iran.
Neither the lives we have lost, nor the lives we have taken, give the U.S. any right to determine by fire and airpower who shall govern or who shall die in countries we have wrongly attacked.
Daniel Ellsberg was put on trial in 1973 for leaking the Pentagon Papers, but the case was dismissed after four months because of government misconduct.
June 16th, 2006 at 1:32 pm
press box
Drooling on the Vietnam Vets
Jack Shafer
Posted Tuesday, May 2, 2000, at 7:49 AM ET
Last week, both the New York Times and U.S. News & World Report reprised the horrific accounts of Vietnam War protesters spitting on returning servicemen. In a piece about West Point’s post-Vietnam mood (April 28), timed to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, Times reporter John Kifner writes:
Much has changed since Lt. Col. Conrad C. Crane (’74) watched on television here as the war wound down, a time he remembers as “almost a siege mentality” at West Point, when cadets could not wear their uniforms off campus for fear of being spat on.
Amanda Spake of U.S. News quotes (May 1) Terry Baker of the Vietnam Veterans Association about the disgraceful behavior:
“When the WWII guys came back,” Baker adds, “they were able to talk about the war. With Vietnam, vets had to change their clothes in the bus station because people would spit on them.”
Although Nexis overflows with references to protesters gobbing on Vietnam vets, and Bob Greene’s 1989 book Homecoming: When the Soldiers Returned From Vietnam counts 63 examples of protester spitting, Jerry Lembcke argues that the story is bunk in his 1998 book The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam (click here to buy it). Lembcke, a professor of sociology at Holy Cross and a Vietnam vet, investigated hundreds of news accounts of antiwar activists spitting on vets. But every time he pushed for more evidence or corroboration from a witness, the story collapsed–the actual person who was spat on turned out to be a friend of a friend. Or somebody’s uncle. He writes that he never met anybody who convinced him that any such clash took place.
While Lembcke doesn’t prove that nobody ever expectorated on a serviceman–you can’t prove a negative, after all–he reduces the claim to an urban myth. In most urban myths, the details morph slightly from telling to telling, but at least one element survives unchanged. In the tale of the spitting protester, the signature element is the location: The protester almost always ambushes the serviceman at the airport–not in a park, or at a bar, or on Main Street. Also, it’s not uncommon for the insulted serviceman to have flown directly in from Vietnam. In the most dramatic telling of the spitting story, First Blood (1982), the first installment of the series about a vengeful Vietnam vet, the airport is the scene of the outrage. John Rambo, played by Sylvester Stallone, gives a speech about getting spat upon. Rambo says:
It wasn’t my war. You asked me, I didn’t ask you. And I did what I had to do to win. But somebody wouldn’t let us win. Then I come back to the world and I see all those maggots at the airport. Protesting me. Spitting. Calling me baby killer. … Who are they to protest me? Huh?
Of course, the myth of the spitting protester predates the Rambo movies, but how many vets–many of whom didn’t get the respect they thought they deserved after serving their country–retrofitted this memory after seeing the movie? Soldiers returning from lost wars have long healed their psychic wounds by accusing their governments and their countrymen of betrayal, Lembcke writes. Also, the spitting story resonates with biblical martyrdom. As the soldiers put the crown of thorns on Jesus and led him to his crucifixtion, they beat him with a staff and spat on him.
Lembcke uncovered a whole lot of spitting from the war years, but the published accounts always put the antiwar protester on the receiving side of a blast from a pro-Vietnam counterprotester. Surely, he contends, the news pages would have given equal treatment to a story about serviceman getting the treatment. Then why no stories in the newspaper morgues, he asks?
Lastly, there are the parts of the spitting story up that don’t add up. Why does it always end with the protester spitting and the serviceman walking off in shame? Most servicemen would have given the spitters a mouthful of bloody Chiclets instead of turning the other cheek like Christ. At the very least, wouldn’t the altercations have resulted in assault and battery charges and produced a paper trail retrievable across the decades?
The myth persists because: 1) Those who didn’t go to Vietnam–that being most of us–don’t dare contradict the “experience” of those who did; 2) the story helps maintain the perfect sense of shame many of us feel about the way we ignored our Vietvets; 3) the press keeps the story in play by uncritically repeating it, as the Times and U.S. News did; and 4) because any fool with 33 cents and the gumption to repeat the myth in his letter to the editor can keep it in circulation. Most recent mentions of the spitting protester in Nexis are of this variety.
As press crimes go, the myth of the spitting protester ain’t even a misdemeanor. Reporters can’t be expected to fact-check every quotation. But it does teach us a journalistic lesson: Never lend somebody a sympathetic ear just because he’s sympathetic.
Jack Shafer is Slate’s editor at large.
June 16th, 2006 at 1:42 pm
Paul -
I can’t handle Prager (listening to him is like swallowing mayonnaise straight from the jar). I’m not btw conceding that most on the left argue according to his oversimplistic characterization; a minority do some of the time. He’s using them to set up a a sort of straw man. He may be rational, but his premises aren’t all that honest.
June 16th, 2006 at 2:57 pm
“What the hell is wrong with Dick Van Dyke, reruns or otherwise”
Um, nothing I guess. Although I spose that guy who wrote that “Manliness” book might not know what to make of he and his wife sleeping in separate beds every night…
June 16th, 2006 at 2:59 pm
We shoud lsiten to him together sometime.
I think the tone of his voice may put people off.
June 16th, 2006 at 3:09 pm
“Prager, of course, is a dunce sited by fools.”
Quite right. As a matter of fact, it occurs to me that the batty right wingers who post here have very little to offer except for bloviating radio personalities – a tribute to the intellectual bankruptcy of the positions that they represent. From now on, I will ignore anyone who relies so heavily on such piss poor sources of information as this.
June 16th, 2006 at 3:18 pm
What’s sad about the “spitting” thing, is that it’s a lie that runs interferance for bigger lies. Vietnam vets got a raw deal. It wasn’t their fault what they were asked to do was doomed to faliure, and wrong on the face of it. And while right wingers tell us how great the vast majority of them did in later life, many were broken people who got little sympathy from anybody for way too long.
I’m glad Dennis Prager is SO polite. I’m sure he apoligized to Joe Conason, for browbeating him over a matter on which he turned out to be dead wrong. His very premise, in this case,
however, is fundementaly insulting and simply more
conservative garbage ball. We can’t just disagree on the war;
you can’t possibly wish the best for our soldiers unless you
accept my terms for “victory.”
Well, that throws things back into the realm of
numbers, I’m afraid. We both understand, I think, Prager and
the rights concept of victory here. Is it worth another
2,500 American lives (I won’t talk about Iraqi carnage, I know
you don’t go there) to achive? I say no. If you say yes, can
you still be side that claims to care for our soldiers?
June 16th, 2006 at 3:25 pm
God, some of you people are weird.
June 16th, 2006 at 3:40 pm
Woody says,
The Senate vote just gave all the ne’er-do-well’s a chance to put on record their positions, which sway from TV cameras to the floor, and to indicate if they respect and support this young man and his fellow soldiers and will let them finish the job with pride that they winning, and will win, with the right support rather than be dragged down by the cut-and-run, America is always wrong crowd.
He starts with an adhominen attack on calling Democratic crticis of the war “ne’er do wells”–an ad hominen atttack. Then he says that we should support soldiers”in the job in Iraq they are winning…” The U.S. isn’t “winning” but holed up in its bases and the Green Zone as the country has descended into Civil War. Woody, come back to earth. The position of U.S. is so bad that reporters really can’t safely leave the Green Zone.
Sorry but it’s better to stay with reality. U.S. will never “win” anything in Iraq. The U.S. couldn’t even get the sewage or the electricity system to work. Iraqis want us out because they’re aware that as long as the U.S. is there, the sewage and electricity system will never work. They want clean streets and elecrtricity.
What Bush has successful in giving terrorists a terrific training ground. When the U.S. leaves, a lot of the reasons for the insurgency will be gone.
Bush regime is particularly incompetent in combating terrorists–that’s their prime #1 incompetence. To think that the House Republicans just linked winning in Iraq to some kind of victory in the war on terror is laughable. Sad too.
The U.S. will squander more money and more lives, both U.S. soldiers, Iraqi civilians. Woody ends up his statement with another ad hominen attack on the “cut-and-run crowd …”
June 16th, 2006 at 3:41 pm
“The young man volunteered…read that again, volunteered…to become part of our armed forces and deserves all the respect and support that we can give him.”
As in he chose to risk his hide so we shouldn’t feel an especially generous amount of sympathy for him should he be blown to pieces?
Does respect and support include not allowing soldiers or their families to purchase proper body armor? Does respect and support include not providing properly armored humvees to all patrol groups?
Do I think certain liberal Democrats would like nothing more to see this war fail, but would turn out around and support almost any war started by their own party? Probably.
But I am also quite convinced the Republicans don’t especially give a damn about the lives of our enlisted young men and women, let alone the lives of Iraqis, nor do they give a damn about the cost of this conflict in dollars and domestic freedoms. As much as anything else, this war was a partisan cudgel with which Rove and his supplicants in the press and out in the country could flog their allegedly treasonous Democratic counterparts.
These are small times, full of small people.
June 16th, 2006 at 4:02 pm
Marc…. Wonderful post.
Made me cry. Hard.
Even from this distance.
http://www.sonymusic.com/clips/selection/fu/BruceSpringsteen/Home_01_01_full_smil.mov
June 16th, 2006 at 4:11 pm
If the link above doesn’t work for everyone, go here and you’ll find one that does:
http://www.brucespringsteen.net/news/index.html
…written by Pete Seeger in 1965, tweaked and re-recorded by Bruce Springsteen in June 2006.
June 16th, 2006 at 4:22 pm
Thank you rosedog. Besides Marc’s, best post of the day.
June 16th, 2006 at 7:12 pm
“The U.S. isn’t “winning†but holed up in its bases and the Green Zone as the country has descended into Civil War. Woody, come back to earth. The position of U.S. is so bad that reporters really can’t safely leave the Green Zone.”
Julia, will you stop bothering Woody with facts? Remember, we’re talking about a sovereign country, into which the President of the US can fly into without any prior knowledge of the “president” of Iraq!!
June 16th, 2006 at 8:26 pm
“What the hell is wrong with Dick Van Dyke, reruns or otherwise?”
Nothing. He’s a classy, selfless man, unassuming and a professional. I learned a lot working with him.
June 16th, 2006 at 8:31 pm
“that’s like trying to trap weasels, isn’t it?” Many of those congressmen, again, took tougher anti war stances at invasion time than Marc Cooper, and they should not be made to suffer Cooper’s insults. I see Dick Cheney trouting out his old “they saw the same intelegence as we did” lie on Fox. That, of course, was the White House’s trap time, forcing the Dems to vote for stengthing Bush’s hand in going to the U.N., for approval he didn’t care about getting one way or another.
It might be nice, if, once in awhile we remembered a central truth: If any war was ever the highly understandable call of one man, it was Iraq. I say highly understandable, because it was a major dumb call in the midst of a major dumb poilicy realinement by a guy who never for an instant from the time he crawled out the womb deminstrated the smarts that should be required of The President of The United States. Hate them as you might, that simply is not true of Bill Clinton, Al Gore, or John Kerry.
Ironicly, in a real sense, in WAS about 9-11. 9-11 gave W the power to do fantastic, bold, and wonderful things for this planet. Instead, the Iraqi invasion, a bad idea pimped by aging nerds from the Jerry Ford era. To place the buck in any place else is like blaming Queen Victoria for the sexual repression that produced Bill Clinton’s Mt. Everest of sexual tomfoolery.
John Murtha, Kerry, and many others have had the character to admit they were wrong, and come clean. Cooper, who at the time spent most of his ink jeering at the Peace Protests, ought to drop the “plague on both their houses” schtick and come clean. Or as Ani Difranco put it so well…..
“Just give, and admit you’re an asshole,
you would be, in some good company…….”
June 17th, 2006 at 1:47 am
What will it take to prevent the U.S. from launching yet another Iraq war?
That seems to be the most relevant question here, not whether one theoretically, hypothetically or vicariously “supports” the troops.
June 17th, 2006 at 4:17 am
I suppose some people only support the troops when they are putting their lives on the lines providing care and protection only to those people Progressives consider worthly of protection (for example….Clinton sending troops into Bosina/Kosovo or George Clooney and Company’s call to save those in Darfur from slaughter even though the US is only one of very few who recognize the genocide unacknowledged by the United Nations).
Whatever became of Classical Liberialism and its call to ‘bare any burden, pay any price’ ?When did it come with the condition that Progressives pick and choose what is worth fighting for while condemning anyone who does not agree as warmonger.
As one who believes in Classical Liberalism it is sickening to hear the Progressive voice encourage failure in Iraq.
Why should anyone in free America support the Progressive diatribe of identity politics found in women’s rights, gay rights, minority rights at home when clearly the Progressive voices in America are telling us that these things are worthless beliefs to fight for around the world?
June 17th, 2006 at 6:39 am
“I suppose some people only support the troops when they are putting their lives on the lines providing care and protection only to those people Progressives consider worthly of protection (for example….Clinton sending troops into Bosina/Kosovo or George Clooney and Company’s call to save those in Darfur from slaughter even though the US is only one of very few who recognize the genocide unacknowledged by the United Nations).”
Try being serious and not repeating some tripe you’ve heard on FOX. Plenty of people on the left opposed Clinton’s Kosovo adventure and are plenty critical of proposals to solve the Darfur crisis through sending in US troops to ‘solve’ the crisis there. Go read a left journal like Monthly Review or The Nation sometime…then talk about what the ‘left’ says.
The left doesn’t have to encourage failure in Iraq anyhow. The US military and the politicians who pushed the war and continue to push it have failed without any of our help.
June 17th, 2006 at 6:42 am
“Why should anyone in free America support the Progressive diatribe of identity politics found in women’s rights, gay rights, minority rights at home when clearly the Progressive voices in America are telling us that these things are worthless beliefs to fight for around the world?”
Well, I would be interested in knowing of a “progressive voice” who is “telling us” that “women’s rights, gay rights, and minority rights are worthless beliefs to fight for around the world.”
Whose “voice” is it that you are referring to???
June 17th, 2006 at 7:03 am
“Whatever became of Classical Liberialism and its call to ‘bare any burden, pay any price’…As one who believes in Classical Liberalism it is sickening to hear the Progressive voice encourage failure in Iraq.”
It is apparent that you have no education, or even a minimally basic understanding of classical liberalism.
What you call “classical liberalism” more closely describes “social liberalism,” (or “modern liberalism”), the former arising out out of the Enlightenment and John Stuart Mill.
For classical liberals, rights are of a negative nature –rights that require that other individuals (and governments) refrain from interfering with individual liberty, whereas social liberalism (also called modern liberalism) holds that individuals have a right to be provided with certain benefits or services by others.
I could go into it in more detail, but I have to go.
June 17th, 2006 at 7:05 am
Suffice is to say, I would love to know of any “Classical Liberal” with a “call to ‘bare any burden, pay any price.’”
June 17th, 2006 at 7:27 am
Marc: “The Republicans apparently feel no shame in trying to manipulate the issue of the war, the reality of blood and gore and death, for their crass and completely transparent electoral ends.”
Oh please Marc. The left, progressives and Democrats (not necessarily all three the same thing) have been manipulating the issue from day one. At least acknowledge that and that the Republicans, conservatives and right (again, not all three necessarily the same thing) are responding in kind and in the same venue.
June 17th, 2006 at 9:19 am
rosedog, I appreciate the emotion and sentiments from “Bring ‘em Home,” but a musician isn’t anyone whom I consider a good resource for determining foreign policy and how to fight terrorism. People who are talented in the arts have, in my opinion, absolutely the worst thinking processes for dealing with real world problems and arriving at practical solutions. I prefer logic over emotion.
Here’s the deal. Left-brained people will let the right-brained people be in charge of the arts if the right-brained people will let the left-brained people handle business.
Also, consider that work left undone by someone today will have to be finished under worse conditions by someone else later. Our military needs more support than the left gives it, and if our enemies keep getting encouragement from the left that they just need to hold on until a withdrawal timetable is set, then more harm and deaths can occur. The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.
June 17th, 2006 at 9:26 am
Backing up….Julia, accurate adjectives aren’t necessarily ad hominem attacks. They merely describe the people and their attitudes to which reference is being made. Trying to deflect the discussion from facts and circumstances to criticism of labels is often done to avoid the real issues and improperly discredit your opponents. If you don’t like certain labels, then tell us why they don’t apply.
June 17th, 2006 at 9:47 am
“The left, progressives and Democrats (not necessarily all three the same thing) have been manipulating the issue from day one.”
It’s hard to manipulate the Bush administration into making the kind of disastrous decisions they have made. It’s likewise hard to manipulate Dems like Hillary into supporting the invasion and occupation of Iraq by the US, today and tomorrow.
” Trying to deflect the discussion from facts ”
Woody, you distract from the issue of whether the US should remain as occupiers in Iraq by pretending the issue is not *that* but the soldiers who are there. You are the one who does not want to debate the real question, “Should the US occupy Iraq?”
June 17th, 2006 at 9:58 am
“when one volunteers for the military, there are no agreements regarding policies from above or time in an area of conflict. A lot of people in the guard and reserves learned that during the first Gulf War and some of them found that it was more than a weekend job.”
Let us conservatives be fair Woody. Young people ‘volunteer’ for service not mainly for patriotism but for a job, education and travel for those who otherwise would not have the opportunity due to their economic situation.
The positive side is military service turns out matured, disciplined and responsible citizens from many young people who aren’t and may never be, many with no father figure in their lives.
The negative side is the risk they may be killed or wounded for life, and understand that risk later, as you noted, since ‘disclosure’ of risk is required my recruiters.
Those on the lower economic rung have always fought our wars on the ‘front’ lines and always will. Even the draft found ways to exempt those with money or power. I understand in the Civil War, one could actually pay some one else to serve for them.
My point Woody: Please don’t press the point you were making in earlier posts these youngsters ‘volunteered” and ‘Knew” the risks. They mostly don’t…..think about it anyway.
I know from experience.
June 17th, 2006 at 10:02 am
That should be ‘disclosure of risk in NOT required by recruiters”.
June 17th, 2006 at 10:05 am
“responsible citizens from many young people who aren’t and may never be” should have been “who aren’t and may never have been”
Damn it.
June 17th, 2006 at 11:09 am
Great story, Marc. Just great.
June 17th, 2006 at 12:01 pm
Jim Russell, you’re probably right. I look at the military volunteer situation from the standpoint of an adult who says, “Don’t tell me that you didn’t read the contract before you signed it!” That, of course, addresses a technical issue but ignores the fact that a lot of young people simply do that–sign the “standard contract” without careful consideration, whether it’s for a car loan or for risking their lives.
There’s a saying that goes something like, “Wisdom helps me avoid bad decisions, and bad decisions gave me wisdom.” If someone signed up for something that he didn’t understand but he does now, then he needs to bring it to someone’s attention and get things corrected, or else suffer the consequences and learn from his mistake.
There are right ways to do things, and having a bunch of leftists screaming for total withdrawal to help these, what they consider, unfortunates is not the right way. But, people on the left never have understood individual choices and individual responsibilities and that there are consequences (and rewards) for decisions.
Still, with all the gore and doom about Iraq that the left and the liberal media cram down our throats, how can someone NOT know of the risks that they may face? They know. So, why do they still sign?
Honestly, I think that the truth is that even with full and complete disclosure, young people shrug it off that it is the “other guy” who will “get it”–not them. I have a very good friend who was a Marine fighter pilot many years ago and trained in Pensacola. He told me that, in their early training, the instructor told them to look at the the person sitting next to each of them, because one of them would not live past the training and combat. Whether or not that was true was besides the point, because everyone of them, to the man, was sure that it was the other guy the instructor was talking about. But, a successful fighter pilot should be optimistic and confident.
Bottom line–people do smart things and people do stupid things, but government isn’t responsible to saving them from all the stupid things that they do. But, the left doesn’t believe that. Someone else is always responsible for their plight, and society and government better fix it–at least, until they bankrupt our system.
June 17th, 2006 at 12:38 pm
“But, people on the left never have understood individual choices and individual responsibilities and that there are consequences (and rewards) for decisions.”
I draw those lessons from Noelle Bush, Neil Bush, Arnold Schwartzeneger, the President, the Vice President, Jimmy Swaggart, Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, that fake journalist/GOP operative who was a male prostitute, Jenna and other Babe Bush, Newt Gingrich and others who know the value of taking responsibility for their actions and being responsible in general, not to mention the value of HARD WORK!!
“Still, with all the gore and doom about Iraq that the left and the liberal media cram down our throats,”
You never show appreciation for the help the media gave you guys in selling the war before the official invasion began, for supporting privatization of Iraq’s economy, and for referring to torture as ‘abuse’. Many of those journalists in Iraq don’t even reveal that they are reporting from the safety of their hotel because it’s too dangerous to go outside into the real Iraq! But they just can’t do enough to please Woody.
“Bottom line–people do smart things and people do stupid things, but government isn’t responsible to saving them from all the stupid things that they do.”
Unless they’re speculators like Neil Bush….then…well saving people is ok.
June 17th, 2006 at 12:42 pm
Woody. It’s not meant to be a foreign policy statement. It’s art. (And the occasional wise person has opined that art— poetry, painting, fiction, film, music—often gets to a deeper truth than facts and logic can manage. But that’s another discussion altogether.)
As to the Boss’s thought processes, I’d take his mentation any ol’ day over that of most Senators on either side of the aisle. (Don’t forget, you’re talking to the woman who wrote an LA Times Op Ed specifically suggesting that Congress members would do well to load certain Bruce Springsteen songs on to their respective iPods while formulating immigration policy.)
One more thing, about those young people who “know the risks†when they volunteer: a great number of those 19, 20, and 21 year olds—children really— who sign up for military service in order to go to college, or to get fire fighter training, or just a decent paying job, are told point-blank by recruiters that they won’t be going to Iraq, no how, no way. And those kids—who could be my kids, or your kids—believe the lies purveyed by the representatives of their government. I used to think this was an urban myth or a rare occurrence. First hand research has recently thought me that it isn’t. (Weirdly I don’t blame the recruiters. They’re merely ordinary men and women trying to do one more impossible job that an ill-conceived, mendaciously-sold war has forced on our country’s armed forces. Lies breed lies. Follow that same slippery slope a bit further and welcome to Haditha.)
All that said, I have to admit I’m no longer willing to argue the Iraq war with anyone. I simply don’t see the point anymore—since, in my humble opinion, what passes for “logic†in defending this failed and tragic Iraq policy demands a willful ignorance, not merely of facts on the ground, but of history, cultural patterns, and the basics of human psychology.
Better to offer up music. At least we can agree on the grace and talent, if not on the meaning.
June 17th, 2006 at 12:44 pm
Uh….make that “taught me” not “thought me…”
June 17th, 2006 at 2:35 pm
Some thoughts on supporting the troops:
The other day CSPAN’s “Washington Journal” had Cher on, yeah that Cher (she’s a CSPAN junkie – who knew?) Cher was with a Doctor who founded a group called “Operation Helmet” that provides kits to upgrade the kevlar helmets the troops use to prevent brain damage form IED detonations. It costs $79 bucks a helmet and the organization raises the funds to send the kits. The way I see it we are talking maybe 100 -200 million dollars tops to do this. But somehow, in a 500 BILLION Defense Appropriations bill there is no money for this. So Cher has to hustle on CSPAN for the dough like one of her informertials!
Support the troops my Ass!
The Democrats should not have given that phony GOP Resolutuion any respect but to a person should have vote “Present” to show what a farce it was.
Did anyone else see pudgy little Karl Rove, free from the threat of prison call real men like John Muurtha and John Kerry people who would cut and run? And not be there for the last bullet? Fine words from a guy who couldn’t be there for the first, last, or any bullet. But he supports the troops! Good Grief!
June 17th, 2006 at 2:36 pm
Anyone who would really like to support the troops by putting their money where their mouth is can go to “Operation Helmet.Org”
June 17th, 2006 at 2:37 pm
What Richard L. C. said—in triplicate.
June 17th, 2006 at 2:44 pm
“But, people on the left never have understood individual choices and individual responsibilities and that there are consequences (and rewards) for decisions.â€
“pro·jec·tion P Pronunciation Key (pr-jkshn)
n.
Psychology.
The attribution of one’s own attitudes, feelings, or suppositions to others: “Even trained anthropologists have been guilty of unconscious projectionof clothing the subjects of their research in theories brought with them into the field†(Alex Shoumatoff).
The attribution of one’s own attitudes, feelings, or desires to someone or something as a naive or unconscious defense against anxiety or guilt.”
June 17th, 2006 at 2:50 pm
“Support the troops my Ass!”
I think Woody might respond that it is high time those soldiers end their addiction to government dependence and take the portion of wages they spend on alcohol, drugs, and prostitution on helmets! If they were more like Neil Bush, they would appreciate independence and self-initiative and stop whining!!!
June 17th, 2006 at 3:48 pm
rosedog, missed your article on iPods for Senators. Sounds like another give-away program. I enjoy music until it crosses that line and tries to make stupid judgements or conclusions on political issues. Remember this?
Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace
You may say that I’m a dreamer…
Or, say that he’s on dope. Let’s just go tell the Islamic terrorists to give up their religion and live in peace.
I don’t want anything more controversial in music than Ray Stevens or Roger Miller.
=====
Now. Linus, we’ve been down that “projection road” before with others, and it simply doesn’t apply. Nice try. If I accuse someone of being a liberal or not bathing (often one and the same), then in no way does that apply to me or make me French, either. Sorry.
=====
I saw the segment on C-span with Cher and was surprised and impressed. The show went on to discuss reasons why the military hasn’t handled this. The problems with the military giving the best to our troops seem to be the same inherent problems with most government bureaucracies–the inability to act quickly and to make fast adjustements. That’s true whether it’s the DoD, FEMA, or your favorite liberal agency.
Do you know what kind of coat that Rep. Sonny Bono was wearing when he died? A fir.
June 17th, 2006 at 4:16 pm
[...] And maybe he has. Cooper’s clear-eyed impression of last week’s YearlyKos convention is skeptical, but more hopeful than I expected. But then Cooper did something really unexpected, moving me nearly to tears with his latest blog entry which starts out as a tale of casino woe (a kind of woe I can relate to), and becomes a confession about a blackjack table encounter a young soldier at the blackjack tables. It’d make Al Swearingen weep, I tell you. [...]
June 17th, 2006 at 4:19 pm
…..add Jimmy Buffet to that list Woody.
Happy politics and controversy free Fathers Day tomorrow everyone.
June 17th, 2006 at 4:22 pm
“Let us conservatives be fair Woody.”
Good advise, Jim, which is why you should term what you and Woody are as “neo-conservatives” rather than as “conservative.”
June 17th, 2006 at 4:51 pm
Speaking of hilarious bloviating on the war in Iraq, did anyone catch The National Review’s Diane West in her latest column, calling for a “redefining [of] the mission” in Iraq? (at this point, I have personally lost count of the total number of “redefinitions” thus far). She wants us to “aim” for “an Iraq that is not a terrorist threat, not an Iraq that is a democratic paradigm.” (which put us, of course, back at the same place we were in 2002….2500 US soldiers and 400 billion dollars ago).
Apparently, she believes that democracy has not been achieved in Iraq: she calls it “false democracy.” She bases this on al-Maliki’s recent comments lashing out at alleged American atrocities committed against Iraqi citizens.
Actually – and I HOPE THAT YOU NEO-CONS AND “CONSERVATIVES” ARE PAYING ATTENTION – I don’t think that West gives Bush nearly enough credit here (Yes, I am defending Bush here – so take note).
After all, if the goal here was to export American style Democracy to Iraq, who can possibly say that it hasn’t in part been achieved? After all, at about the same time al-Maliki made his comments, he also met with President Bush and lavished the Crawford, TX man and the American forces with much praise. What better way to try and appease all the various warring factions in Iraq (the Sunnis, the Shiites, the Kurds, etc.) by talking out of all sides of his mouth?
Hmmm….talking out of both sides of your mouth…sound familiar?
Which brings us to the ultimate irony that escapes not only West, but nearly all of you on the right wing: If you are wishing, truly, for “American-style Democracy” in countries like Iraq around the world, be careful what you wish for, because you may get it.
It is highly likely that within five years, people on the right like West, to the detriment of the Kurds they once pretended to care for, will be pulling for US support of a Baathist tin horn friendly to the U.S., a 1988 version of Saddam Hussein. I hope not, but given the recent (and predictable) series of events in that country, and the a revealing of the right’s true colors regarding their philosophy of “Democracy,” it is not inconceivable.
June 17th, 2006 at 5:15 pm
West is from the Moon’s Washington Times…not the National Review. Big difference there.
June 17th, 2006 at 5:31 pm
For Woody only:
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/suncommentary/la-op-springsteen1may01,1,298195.story?coll=la-headlines-suncomment
Okay, now I’m off to watch Al Gore on the big screen. I’ll save you some popcorn.
June 17th, 2006 at 7:24 pm
“The problems with the military giving the best to our troops seem to be the same inherent problems with most government bureaucracies–the inability to act quickly and to make fast adjustements. That’s true whether it’s the DoD, FEMA, or your favorite liberal agency.”
That’s why I say it’s time for those soldiers to stop spending $$ on beer, sex, and drugs and time to start spending more of their own $$ on helmets! Get off the dole!
June 17th, 2006 at 10:18 pm
Marc Cooper says:
“The Republicans apparently feel no shame in trying to manipulate the issue of the war, the reality of blood and gore and death, for their crass and completely transparent electoral ends.”
I agree. The Republicans are running on the war: on the advisibility of the war; on the justice of the war; on the benefits of the war that may accrue to the US, to the Middle East, to the world, in the event of its success. I also agree that the reality of war is “blood and gore and death,” and that the Republican objectives are “crass and completely transparent electoral ends.”
In a word, Republicans support this war, as do millions of defectors from the Democratic party, like me, who now vote a straight Republican ticket not out of love for Republicans, but in support of this war.
Democrats hate the fact that they have been called on the carpet. They can either support the war or oppose it, which, indeed, involves “crass and completely transparent electoral ends.”
But why resent the fact that Democrats have been asked to either support the war or oppose it?
There is no shame in principled opposition to this war, and there is no shame in the honest belief that this war has been a mistake from the start and is unwinnable. The shame lies in resenting the fact that each and every one of us must be counted; the shame lies in refusing to accept that these votes in the House and the Senate, like the coming votes in the 2006 general election will be a referendum on the war. The shame lies in claiming that this war is unwinnable — (how can anyone possibly know the future?) while resenting the fact that you are being held to account for your beliefs and prognostications.
Oppose the war? Go ahead and oppose it, but in the name of God, quit resenting the fact that you are being held to account for your opposition to the war. Have courage; have principles; make sense. Quit whining about the fact that you are being asked to say yeah or nay. You either support this war or oppose it. If you oppose it, why whine about the fact that your political opposition is trying to get you on record for your opposition?
June 18th, 2006 at 4:40 am
rosedog, very good article. May I take it a step further? I don’t have any numbers, but you mentioned 300 Mexicans who die each year illegally crossing the border. I wonder how many Americans die each year from gangs and crimes, smuggled drugs, accidents, over-burdened emergency rooms, etc. because of the illegal immigrants. These people should be Mexico’s problem–not ours.
Another good song for the “conscience of our country” would be not a song with your article’s title and a play off of Springsteen’s song, “Born in countries other than the USA,” but this (be sure to click the “play arrorw >” in the upper right): http://www.brownielocks.com/godblesstheusaWAVE.html . It’s not political, in my opinion, it just expresses a love for our nation–which all sides can do.
Here’s an editorial from yesterday from that particular employer of yours:
“A hurricane of fraud?
FEMA did mismanage Katrina relief, but it’s wrong to blame victims for spending irresponsibly.”
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-fema17jun17,0,4807430.story?coll=la-news-comment-editorials
Just whose fault is it that Katrina “victims?” used the emergency funds for sex, vacations, diamonds, etc.? What kind of drugs do they put in the ventilation system down at the paper?
=====
lorie, how much have you sacrificed to help provide armor and protection for the soliders?
No, I don’t think that the soldiers should have to pay for their own armor, and the Pentagon has put in place a procedure to reimburse those soldiers who have done that and who do so. That is a good policy, because it takes less time to reimburse the individuals than it does for the bureaucracy to authorize and equip all of them with new gear. Keep in mind that this is part of the bureaucracy that you want providing us with emergency health care. I’d die in the waiting room while they checked forms.
=========
Samuel Stott’s comment above was very good. He can say things much nicer than I can. Read him rather than me.
June 18th, 2006 at 4:59 am
Hey, rosedog, you might like this page better from that site that I linked to you earlier with Lee Greenwoods’s song. The lyrics and tunes are catchy (and can be quite touching), even if often misguided. But, they didn’t have Edwin Starr’s “War (what is it good for?).” which I think came out in the 1970′s.
War (Protest) Songs of the 1960′s
http://www.brownielocks.com/sixtieswarsongs.html
June 18th, 2006 at 7:38 am
“Quit whining about the fact that you are being asked to say yeah or nay. You either support this war or oppose it. If you oppose it, why whine about the fact that your political opposition is trying to get you on record for your opposition?”
I’ve got to agree with this really. Disgusting to hear Democrats talk about being “trapped” into voting against the war, how about turning the tables on the Bushies–or would that be too embarrassing to Hillary?
June 18th, 2006 at 10:16 am
“lorie, how much have you sacrificed to help provide armor and protection for the soliders? No, I don’t think that the soldiers should have to pay for their own armor, and the Pentagon has put in place a procedure to reimburse those soldiers who have done that and who do so.”
—You don’t? Gosh, you’re such a government loving liberal!!!
Problem with too many forms? Universal single payer health care and voila, ya don’t have to sign 10,000 forms for all the different private health care to get emergency care.
The reimbursement plan is more expensive actuallly. Waste of manhours on forms, checking against fraud, etc.
Then again Cher’s whole project is really typical of the ‘liberal’ Hollywood crowd in any event, much closer to Woody than the left actually. For Cher, no different from Woody, the primary key issue of the war is the US troops. A million Iraqis could die in the war every year and it wouldn’t make a dent in their understanding of the war. So much for “Hollywood” left…
June 18th, 2006 at 10:36 am
Gore’s right no matter how hard self-interested partisans try to ridicule him. Any argument used trying to discredit him and his film has been found to be fallacious by the top experts in the world on climate. Their sources are a far fringe group, and even fringes of that group, and a small minority. The chances of their version being true are infinitessimal.
June 18th, 2006 at 12:36 pm
I saw Al Gore on Letterman the other night repeating over and over that the science about global warming is no longer in question. It was like a talking point that he had to drive home to avoid “an inconvenient truth” about misleading information he presented.
Well, there are many qualified and reasonable scientists who still dispute most of the global warming alarmists. If anyone is on the fringe, it’s those who deny that a debate still exists.
Here’s a very fair and reasonable take on Al Gore’s powerpoint presentatiion aka his movie.
An Inconvenient Truth
Gore as climate exaggerator
Ronald Bailey, June 16, 2006
http://www.reason.com/rb/rb061606.shtml
On balance Gore gets it more right than wrong on the science (we’ll leave the policy stuff to another time), but he undercuts his message by becoming the opposite of a global warming denier. He’s a global warming exaggerator. I give An Inconvenient Truth a tepid 2 stars.
June 18th, 2006 at 12:41 pm
So, the same media that is ‘left’ and ‘liberal’ just ignored the Harpers article after reading it? Wow! Another proof that there are miracles and angels and fairies and goblins…
June 18th, 2006 at 5:19 pm
“global warming is no longer in question”
No Woody there isn’t. The fringe naysayers are paid for by industry and have no peer reviewed papers. You “believe” there is a debate because you refuse to face reality. That isn’t the fringe, it’s the refuse bin of denial.
June 18th, 2006 at 5:23 pm
And by the way, Bailey is one of those paid for deniers. It’s a small group well-paid for their propaganda work. He has no scientific qualifications either, not that your side neeeds any. Belief never requires any study.
June 18th, 2006 at 5:36 pm
Publius, not to get personal, but you’re nuts. (I hope I skirted by that “personal” issue with that mild response.)
To pull a “reg,” here’s the “dope” (literally) on Gore >>> http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a38dcfe0d392e.htm . Also, here’s an article by one of the people not paid off by industry >>>> http://www.canadafreepress.com/2006/harris061206.htm . What about your guys using phony alarmist issues to seek office?
Just a few minutes before I read your comment, I had checked those links out on this site >>>>> http://bornavol.blogspot.com/ , so I give him credit for those two entries. Also, he seems like a nice guy (except for being a Tennessee fan) and a good father–which is appropriate for Father’s Day.
I’m sorry that a post about a soldier back from Iraq has morphed into an exchange on global warming. Maybe the only connection is that the young man got “hot” in Las Vegas, which must be the focal point of global warming. On that issue, let’s hope that cooler heads prevail.
June 18th, 2006 at 7:27 pm
Actually it morphed into an irrelevant discussion about ‘support’ for the ‘soldiers’ as an attempt to avoid real issues like, “Should the US be in Iraq now or in the future as the occupier of Iraq?”.
June 18th, 2006 at 9:09 pm
Geez, smear tactics from the hard right? I’m shocked. I don’t care if Gore flunked science in school, he made up for it later. He’s correct, and you’re? Well, deranged comes to mind but factually incorrect is what I’m going with here.
June 18th, 2006 at 9:19 pm
The blogger is a joke. You could fill a thimble with what any of your “links” knows about science. In that case an appeal to nobody. I mean really.
June 18th, 2006 at 10:19 pm
“Now. Linus, we’ve been down that “projection road†before with others, and it simply doesn’t apply. Nice try. If I accuse someone of being a liberal or not bathing (often one and the same), then in no way does that apply to me or make me French, either. Sorry.”
Bien sur!
June 19th, 2006 at 3:09 am
The Canada Free Press article Woody cites contains the following mind-bogglingly shallow passage:
—-
Appearing before the Commons Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development last year, Carleton University paleoclimatologist Professor Tim Patterson testified, “There is no meaningful correlation between CO2 levels and Earth’s temperature over this [geologic] time frame. In fact, when CO2 levels were over ten times higher than they are now, about 450 million years ago, the planet was in the depths of the absolute coldest period in the last half billion years.” Patterson asked the committee, “On the basis of this evidence, how could anyone still believe that the recent relatively small increase in CO2 levels would be the major cause of the past century’s modest warming?”
—-
First, Patterson is not a paleoclimatologist. He was educated in geology and biology, and is best described now as a paleo-oceanographer. He has dozens of publications, but only one I’ve found that could be called “paleoclimatology”. And that reflects an effort to get into the game pretty late, too.
Second, his reasoning here is silly. In under two minutes, I came up with a hypothesis for why a severe ice age would cause dramatically higher CO2 levels, without any significant warming for a while. And I’m not even a paleoclimatologist.
There is a secondary biological carbon cycle involving deposits of calcium carbonate from dead shellfish being subducted deep into the Earth, resulting an eventual release of CO2 under the intense pressures there. An ever-deepening ice pack could squeeze out lots more trapped carbon, possible by also increasing volcanic activity at the same time (volcanic activity being, on balance, a source of cooling in the atmosphere.) Ice is quite IR-reflective, and if the ice is increasing steadily in overall area, as it will during an ice age, that general increase in the Earth’s albedo could easily offset any warming effect from the CO2 that the ice itself was squeezing out of deep strata. (Albedo matters — a lot! It’s been said that planting more trees would actually result in more global warming for a while, because a forest would tend to be more IR-absorbing than the previously-arid land under it. That new forest would also allow more water vapor release from the land, because trees have a lot more surface area than the dirt underneath them, and a lot more water content. Water vapor is also a GHG, the biggest one, in fact.)
In short, I’m sure this Patterson guy is very smart, a credit to his field even if that field is not paleoclimatology, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s NOT on the Big Oil / Big Coal payroll. He just seems like your basic straight-up scientist. But I surmise that he’s out of his depth on climate change issues. What was the biggest clue, the one that made me take a closer look at his argument? It’s simple. He’s relying on ONE VARIABLE: CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. Real climate models used by real climatologists typically use dozens of variables, including quite a few that I can’t even pretend to understand.
It’s been said that every reputable scientist can have one wacko theory tolerated (with irritation) by peers, so long as it involves only a little meddling outside his or her true area of expertise. That may well be the case here, with paleo-OCEANOGRAPHER (not paleo-CLIMATOLOGIST) Tim Patterson.
Shame on CFP for not fact-checking. I’d say “shame on Woody”, too, but I already know he’s impervious to that.
June 19th, 2006 at 3:29 am
Oh, and by the way: good piece, Marc.
Not so long ago, I roomed one night at a hostel in Seattle with a reservist due to be sent off to The Sandbox in a few months. In transient places like that, you take it for granted that you might not ever see a roommate again. It’s quite another thing, however, to add “casualty of a war we should never have gotten into” as one of the possible reasons.
How do you “support the troops” in situations like these? Maybe you do what I did: be as warm, funny, personable and kind as you can. Don’t get into the politics of the war. Be even-handed and understanding if the subject comes up on *their* initiative. You could do more, and I wish I had: get an e-mail address off them, write them often, offer help whenever reasonable, keep politics out of it.
There is honor (until proven otherwise) in merely being a soldier. But there is no glory in war, a nasty geopolitical business that’s occasionally necessary. I don’t think it was necessary to go into Iraq. I *think* (but can’t claim to *know*) that it’s now necessary to stay. But even if I knew for sure, somehow, that we should be getting out, blaming soldiers for our still being there is wrong.
June 19th, 2006 at 4:47 am
Let’s see. According to Michael Turner, who presents himself as a credible judge of scientific and global warming analysis but with little to back up that position, says that a scientist in opposition to global warming scares is “out of his depth on climate change issues” because his field is not climatology–but, we’re supposed to give complete credence to a former Vice President with poor academic credentials and no experience in science and who has admitted to exaggerating GW consequences and who wants to run for the highest political office using this issue.
Or, maybe we’re supposed to give credence to the global warming supporting Union of Concerned Scientists, that supports every left-wing issue, was founded in Massachusetts by professors and students, and whose voting group includes non-scientists, political activists, and “scientists” in many non-related fields including that of mental health–who probably belong because of the rich resource for patients that the organization offers.
I’d say “shame on not fact checking,” but the left knows that it’s not being honest on this issue and wants to use it as a wedge between the American people and our administration and as a tool to cripple our economic system to replace it with theirs that has failed repeatedly but will work this time.
For once, just once, I wish that the left would wisen up and be honorable enough to put truth above politics.
That’s all that I’m going to say on this issue–totally unrelated to the subject of Marc’s post.
June 19th, 2006 at 7:03 am
It was Michael Bater, not Turner.
June 19th, 2006 at 8:05 am
That article has been debunked ever since it came out. The problem with newspapers is they fall victim to shills, but usually only if the editorial board is of the conservative bent. The other guy in NZ is a geologist and not a climatologist, and the line from him is the same: it’s natural no worries mate. It isn’t.
Woody and his friends trot out the talking points to the letter every time, and it’s always the same false premises. If they repeat it it just may work, which is what black propaganda is for. Too stupid to learn is how I would desribe them, and dangerous whack jobs is what they are, save for the fact that no credible expert agrees, and the few that do are on someone’s payroll affected by any emmissions change in any treaty one could come up with.
June 19th, 2006 at 8:19 am
Woody, next time you “pull a reg” try to use a news source (unlike Canada Free Press) for your “science” that doesn’t also publish horseshit by creationists. That is, if you ever aspire to being taken seriously.
(I’ve so been enjoying my now self-imposed respite from reacting to this moron, but since he invoked my “name” I couldn’t resist. FYI, I was blocked from posting on any computer for a stretch of several days a while back, and I take Marc’s word that it wasn’t a “ban” although I still couldn’t post after Marc corrected that assumption. When I discovered, testing on an old thread, about a week ago that the problem was fixed, I realized what a ridiculous waste of time it had been to engage with a fool who never admits error and will stoop to anything in order to glibly perpetuate his moral, intellecutal and rhetorical deficiencies. I followed the thread where Woody defended Coulter and was truly amazed at his capacity to simply make shit up. My suggestion is to ignore someone who has so little respect for those he debates, the truth or, for that matter, himself. At least once it’s no longer fun to poke holes in his facade.)
If you want to “pull” the only kind of “reg” you’re actually capable of, Woody, you are welcome to tell me to go fuck myself – in the same spirit that I offer that suggestion to you.
Stalin’s stepchild, signing off.
June 19th, 2006 at 9:12 am
Also, everyone should be sure to check the old Coulter thread today for Michael Turner’s response to Woody’s blatant fabrications. I don’t think there’s anyone else – save one – who posts here regularly and simply lies – or, if in their eagerness to bash others or push a failing line of argument let’s loose a statement obviously based on a false assumption, who doesn’t admit it, apologize and move on. Oh…and who then wouldn’t try to be more careful in the kind of crap they use as “evidence” in further efforts to promote a hackneyed, strait-jacketed agenda of “true beliefs”.
June 19th, 2006 at 12:31 pm
Hang tough reg. It is quite a waste of time responding to resident trolls. The lies never end.
June 19th, 2006 at 12:39 pm
Welcome back, reg! Did you bring any Cuban cigars back with you?
June 19th, 2006 at 1:15 pm
As a citizen of a free country, Reg is not allowed to travel to Cuba to buy cigars.
June 19th, 2006 at 1:44 pm
Jimmy Carter went there and even got to hug a dictator.
June 19th, 2006 at 5:31 pm
So did Hemingway. What of it? He also kept a loaded shotgun by his bed until he escaped.
June 19th, 2006 at 7:32 pm
I thought Hemmingway used it on himself, or was that Hunter Thompson? It’s hard to keep up with crazy authors. I hear there’s another one writing fish stories in L.A. who has mulitple identities.
What happened to the soldier that Marc Cooper saw–both in real life and in this comment section?
June 20th, 2006 at 11:50 am
Yeah, Carter went there, average US citizens go there and risk being fined. I guess that’s necessary to maintain our freedom and stop terrorism…
The soldier in real life was a topic, but then you went off on this attempt to use him to distract people from the question of whether or not the US occupation of Iraq is good policy now or in the future. I guess you thought the soldier had some role in making that decision, more so than, say, the president or bomb making CEOs or others infinitely more powerful than that soldier…
June 20th, 2006 at 12:57 pm
I hear there is an anonymous troll named after Pinocchio. “A chip off the old block,” or “the shavings don’t fall far from the stump.”
Hemingway has one m, but I realize three writers is a lot to keep track of. Atill these two were good company while they were here. That’s more than we can say for trolls like this with wooden heads.
June 20th, 2006 at 10:19 pm
here here
June 21st, 2006 at 7:23 am
Woody writes: “Let’s see. According to Michael Turner, who presents himself as a credible judge of scientific and global warming analysis …”
Actually, I didn’t say I was a credible judge of global warming analysis. Quite the contrary. To be a good credible one, I’d have to be a climatologist. And I pointed out that I wasn’t one.
I am, however, able to use Google to find out whether someone who is credited in a news article with being a climatologist really is one or not. You, Woody, could do the same — but for your childish credulity when it comes to sources you like, and your your knee-jerk dismissals of sources you don’t like. “Homework? Wazzat?”
As for being a judge of “scientific analysis”, I am able to spot a patently silly argument most of the time, and in this case, that was enough. Saying “more CO2, Earth was colder then, THEREFORE, increasing CO2, from whatever source, has nothing to do with global warming” is a patently silly argument, if you know anything significant about the subject. It so happens that I do know something about the subject, even though I’m not a climatologist.
“… but with little to back up that position,…”
A position I never took, so why would I bother to “back it up” unless I was a pathological liar? It’s just that I generally know “stupidly wrong” when I see it, and even when I can’t, I can often smell it well enough to go look for why a news report might be *subtly* wrong. I don’t claim to know exactly what’s right on this issue of anthropogenic global warming, and I don’t think anybody does.
“… says that a scientist in opposition to global warming scares is “out of his depth on climate change issues†because his field is not climatology–…”
But also because the guy’s reasoning was so obviously simplistic, please note ….
“…. but, we’re supposed to give complete credence to a former Vice President ….”
I never said Gore was right. If anything, I find him a total embarrassment on the subject, and I wish he would shut the fuck up about it. Because he sounds as stupid and shrill as the majority of climate-change *deniers*.
There are rabid and silly extremes at both ends of the spectrum of debate on this issue. I sometimes find myself defending Bjorn Lomberg (author of The Skeptical Environmentalist) because, even though he is a statistician and not a climatologist, many of his criticisms of the statistical support for anthropogenic global warming were persuasive, and some of his detractors sound like idiots at times. I don’t think he’s gotten a fair hearing. He can be wrong. (Where it’s pointed out, he gracefully admits it, unlike you, Woody.) But at least he doesn’t represent himself as a climatologist.
June 21st, 2006 at 9:31 am
Lomborg is wrong on everything. Crichton is not only wrong he lied in his novel. Sure it’s fiction, but with real people as characters being defamed with blatant propaganda. All of these naysayer kooks are wrong. Experts say so. Gore got it right.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/05/al-gores-movie
June 21st, 2006 at 10:27 am
[...] I’ve gotten a record amount of private email response to my post last week about the soldier I met at a casino in New Mexico. The overwhelming response was a positive one, with many correspondents pointing to the surreal atmosphere we’re currently living in. [...]
July 12th, 2006 at 10:45 pm
I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor Ringtone…
Download the ringtone of the popular song: I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor …
August 9th, 2006 at 12:31 am
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April 11th, 2007 at 4:50 am
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April 14th, 2007 at 11:01 pm
Interesting comments..
March 23rd, 2010 at 2:49 pm
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April 6th, 2010 at 1:31 pm
good post. thanks.
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