Moveon.org Petraeus ad ------

[Charade]

Even the Democrats he spoke to in congress treated him with dignity and respect. At least MoveOn.org can do the same

Umm... no they didn't!! I didn't hear all the testimony but the snippets I heard made my stomach turn a knot. Pompous and bloviating doesn't even begin to describe the antics of some of the Democrat leaders questioning Petraeus.

 

[Charade]

Mr. Kerry served this country in Viet Nam. Are saying it is the length of service that counts and enough years makes one "hands off" for this kind of thing?

Yes, he did but he wasn't very kind to his "brothers" when he lied about them sitting in front of Congress back in the 70's after returning from VN.

30 plus years fades away a lot of memories.

 

[DawnCt1]

Umm... no they didn't!! I didn't hear all the testimony but the snippets I heard made my stomach turn a knot. Pompous and bloviating doesn't even begin to describe the antics of some of the Democrat leaders questioning Petraeus.

You are so right. It was awful, starting with Lantos and continuing down to Wexler. What creatins! I hope that there will be plenty of video tape for the GOP commercials this year. They should hide their heads.

 

[DawnCt1]

The Swiftboat ads were dirty politics to the eighth degree. Just like Willie Horton.

Willie Horton had nothing to do with race, as mentioned in another post. It had to do with Dukakis being soft on crime and letting murderers out of jail for weekend furloughs;

Dukakis & Willie Horton

The Willie Horton case
10/88

In Massachusetts, first-degree murderers used to get out of prison for the weekend ...

Governor Michael Dukakis believed that it was "rehabilitative" for prisoners to be allowed to roam the streets unsupervised in what was known as the Prison Furlough Program.

That practice was finally outlawed by state legislators on April 28, 1988, after an enormous grassroots petition drive brought the issue before the people.

Here are the cold hard facts about Governor Dukakis' "experiment in justice," which has received little coverage on campaign news broadcasts:

* On June 6, 1986, convicted murderer Willie Horton was released from the Northeastern Correctional Center in Concord. Under state law, he had become eligible for an unguarded, 48-hour furlough. He never came back.

* Horton showed up in Oxon Hill, Maryland, on April 3, 1987. Clifford Barnes, 28, heard footsteps in his house and thought his fiancée had returned early from a wedding party. Suddenly Willie Horton stepped out of the shadows with a gun. For the next seven hours, Horton punched, pistol-whipped, and kicked Barnes - and also cut him 22 times across his midsection.

* When Barnes' fiancée Angela returned that evening, Horton gagged her and savagely raped her twice. Horton then stole Barnes' car, and was later chased by police until captured.

* On October 20, 1987, Horton was sentenced in Maryland to two consecutive life terms plus 85 years. The sentencing judge refused to return Horton to Massachusetts, saying, "I'm not prepared to take the chance that Mr. Horton might again be furloughed or otherwise released. This man should never draw a breath of free air again."

* Variations of this story were repeated on several occasions in Massachusetts. Confessed rapist John Zukoski, who had brutally beaten and murdered a 44 year-old woman in 1970, became eligible for furloughs and was eventually paroled in 1986. A few months later he was arrested and indicted yet again for beating and raping a woman.

* The Massachusetts inmate furlough program actually began under Governor Francis Sargent in 1972. But in 1976 Governor Dukakis vetoed a bill to ban furloughs for first-degree murderers. It would, he said, "Cut the heart out of inmate rehabilitation."

* The program, in essence, released killers on an "honor system" to see if they would stay out of trouble. On the average, convicts who had been sentenced to "life without parole" spent fewer than 19 years in prison. By March 1987, Dukakis had commuted the sentences of 28 first-degree murderers.

* Of over 80 Massachusetts convicts listed as escaped and still at large, only four had actually "escaped." The rest simply walked away from furloughs, prerelease centers and other minimum-security programs. These convicts included murderers, rapists, armed robbers and drug dealers.

* First-degree murderer Armand Therrien was transferred from a medium security prison to a minimum-security one, which made him eligible for a work-release program. He walked off and vanished in December 1987.

* When citizens began to protest, Dukakis and his aides defended the program relentlessly. One commissioner stated that furloughs were a "management tool" to help the prisons. Unless a convict had hope of parole, he argued, "we would have a very dangerous population in an already dangerous system." But, critics wondered, if armed guards can't control dangerous killers inside locked cells, how are unarmed citizens supposed to deal with them?

* It was through the efforts of a grassroots organization, Citizens Against Unsafe Society, that the issue was finally brought before the people. With mounting pressure from his own aides to sign a bill ending the program - for fear that it would hurt his presidential campaign - Dukakis signed the legislation in April of this year.

America ... do we want a president in office who would try the same "experiment in justice" on a national level?

The majority of this material was taken from the article "Getting Away with Murder," by Robert James Bidinotto, which appeared in Reader's Digest, July 1988.

 

[eclectics]

You are so right. It was awful, starting with Lantos and continuing down to Wexler. What creatins! I hope that there will be plenty of video tape for the GOP commercials this year. They should hide their heads.

Iraq is an important, serious issue, and he was grilled on it accordingly. I see you are omitting the hard questions your beloved Republicans asked. Isn't that convenient. Cretins indeed.

 

[eclectics]

Willie Horton had nothing to do with race, as mentioned in another post.

Then quote the other post...and "educate" them.

 

[eclectics]

Bipartisan Grilling.



http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070911/ts_nm/iraq_dc

 

[bsnyder]

Iraq is an important, serious issue, and he was grilled on it accordingly. I see you are omitting the hard questions your beloved Republicans asked. Isn't that convenient. Cretins indeed.

He was grilled on it accordingly? Assuming you watched the same hearings I did, I wanna know what you were smoking?

Barbara Boxer talked so much during the time allotted to her that Petraeus was instructed by Chairman Biden to submit his response in writing.

 

[eclectics]

He was grilled on it accordingly? Assuming you watched the same hearings I did, I wanna know what you were smoking?

Barbara Boxer talked so much during the time allotted to her that Petraeus was instructed by Chairman Biden to submit his response in writing. :rolleyes :rolleyes

Oh please, anything less than smiling adoringly and serving the good general tea would evoke outraged yells of pompous browbeating.

Obviously we watched different hearings. I heard some very, very hard questions and comments from both sides. Hard enough to have a fit? Hardly.

 

[Charade]

Oh please, anything less than smiling adoringly and serving the good general tea would evoke outraged yells of pompous browbeating.

Obviously we watched different hearings. I heard some very, very hard questions and comments from both sides. Hard enough to have a fit? Hardly.

Actually I wanted to heard hard questions. But I had a hard time hearing them with all the posturing, bloviating, arrogance and accusations of Petraeus being a liar. It should be quite apparent that hardly any Democrats came to that hearing with any sort of an open mind (they're so often supposed to have).

If the Republicans did the same (I didn't hear their questions), shame on them as well. But they must have asked hard questions because we haven't heard the left complaining about "softball" questions from the right.

 

[Geoff_M]

Funny how a thread that supposedly criticizes the actions of a Left Winger group turns into a "hammer the Right" thread.... Geez, we're back to re-fighting the 1988(!) Presidential election. But I'm not too surprised.

But Laz, how does this differ from what Swift Boat folks were doing?

While I don't buy 100% of what the Swifters were selling, there was certainly points they had that were valid. There is also another key difference between the two efforts.... John F. "Reporting For Duty!" Kerry had made his war record a central part of his campaign. When you do that, it's political "fair game". It would have been no more or less true if "W" had spent considerable time on the stump talking about his "bona fides" to be Commander In Chief because of his valiant service in the National Guard.

So six years later it's boiled down to this... The National Review's Jonah Goldberg did a great job pointing out "how we got here" and has some harsh words for both sides of the aisle:

From There to Here
The emotional half-life of 9/11.

By Jonah Goldberg

My four-year-old daughter started school — “big kid school” as we call it around here — last week. As part of the generous “welcome to the community” process at this (so far) wonderful institution, there’s a cocktail party at someone’s house for parents of new students. It’s to be held tonight, on September 11. Reason is also having a party tonight and the date doesn’t seem to have elicited much in the reservations department. And, I’m not sure it should. President Bush told America to get back to normal — even to get busy shopping — right after the real 9/11, is it really a problem if six years later they’re doing precisely that, even on the anniversary?

My guess is probably not. People have cocktail parties on the anniversary of, say, Pearl Harbor without batting an eye or even realizing that December 7 is a date we were told would live on in infamy (though of course the war that day started is long over). But still, there’s an odd irony here. The most controversial event scheduled for September 11, 2007, is General David Petraeus’s report to the Senate about progress in the war in Iraq. Of course, Congress picked the timing of the testimony. But you can be sure if the White House had, there would have been a firestorm of protest. Rudy Giuliani, meanwhile, was under considerable pressure not to speak at this year’s memorial service in New York because he’s running for president. The controversy has its merits, but one complaint seems to be that “using” 9/11 for anything other than expressions of remorse and sadness is beyond the pale.

“Remember 9/11!” once looked like it was going to be a battle cry for the ages up there with “Remember the Alamo!” Now, the only aspect of 9/11 that is acceptable on a bipartisan basis is sadness. Obviously, with that much carnage and suffering there’s a place for the sadness. But why only sadness?

If I had said in late 2001, with bodies still being pulled from the wreckage, anthrax flying through the mail, pandemonium reigning at the airports, and bombs falling on Kabul, that by ‘07 leading Democrats would be ridiculing the idea of the war on terror as a bumper sticker, I’d have been thought mad. If I’d predicted that a third of Democrats would be telling pollsters that Bush knew in advance about 9/11, and that the eleventh of September would become an innocuous date for parental get-togethers to talk about potty-training strategies and phonics for preschoolers, people would have thought I was crazy. Then again, lots of people think I’m crazy already, so maybe that’s not the best example.

But, I’m hardly alone. The times themselves seem more than a little wacky. Imagine if a more reliably sober-minded sort — say Zbigniew Brzezinski, David Broder — prophesied six years ago that in 2007, Bin Laden would still be at-large and giving televised addresses in which he offered generous blurbs for Noam Chomsky, touted global warming, expressed disappointment with the Democratic majority in Congress and championed a flat tax so low it would make Steve Forbes blush like John Ashcroft at a Pussycat Dolls audition. Most of us would have suggested that Messrs. Brzezinski or Broder should open the window when they cook their meth. And just imagine if some similar Nostradamus of 2001 had foreseen that all of this would pale in controversy compared to the news that the rock-ribbed-conservative senior Senator from Idaho had been busted for signaling “Get out of my dreams and into my stall” in gay semaphore in a Minneapolis airport bathroom (apologies to Billy Ocean, among others).

There are a lot of reasons why the emotional half-life of 9/11 has been so short, many of them good, or at least understandable. We haven’t been (successfully) attacked at home since 9/11, for example.

But it’s important to remember that from the outset, the media took it as their sworn duty to keep Americans from getting too riled up about 9/11. I wrote a column about it back in March of 2002. Back then the news networks especially saw it as imperative that we not let our outrage get out of hand. I can understand the sentiment, but it’s worth noting that such sentiments vanished entirely during hurricane Katrina. After 9/11, the press withheld objectively accurate and factual images from the public, lest the rubes get too riled up. After Katrina, the press endlessly recycled inaccurate and exaggerated information in order to keep everyone upset. The difference speaks volumes.

The column I wrote in 2002 was subtitled “I want to be disturbed.” It seems that when it comes to 9/11 it would have been more fashionable if I’d written some pabulum subtitled “I wanna be sedated.” (Apologies to the Ramones).

But the chief reason 9/11 has lost its punch is politics. To talk about 9/11 as a justification for any foreign policy position — activist, isolationist or realist — is to start an argument. To suggest, for example, that 9/11 proved the necessity or the folly of the Iraq war, is to risk letting the soup get cold as diners hurl bread rolls, in much the same way as siding with Whittaker Chambers or Alger Hiss wrecked many a fine meal half a century ago. “Remember the Alamo!” was a call to action. “Remember Peal Harbor” needed no explanation. “Remember 9/11” demands the response, “What do you mean by that?”

There are plenty of arguments one can have about the Iraq war and the uses and abuses of 9/11, but I think what a lot of people fail to realize is that the disagreements over the Iraq war are expressions of divisions that long predate it. The culture war, red vs. blue America, Bush hatred, Clinton hatred, and radical anti-Americanism poisoning much of the campus Left: All of these things were tangible landmarks on the political landscape long before the invasion of Iraq.

On the day before 9/11, a University of Massachusetts professor proclaimed the American flag “a symbol of terrorism and death and fear and destruction and oppression.” After 9/11 the hits kept coming. Barbara Foley of Rutgers University explained of the attacks “whatever its proximate cause, its ultimate cause is the fascism of U.S. foreign policy over the past many decades.” Moveon.org whimpered that the Afghan war would perpetuate the “cycle of violence” making America “like the terrorists.” The New York Times called Afghanistan a quagmire almost from the get-go. In 2001, Michael Moore expressed exasperation that al Qaeda would be as stupid as to kill non-Bush voters. In 2004, after his political porn movie Fahrenheit 9/11, he became arguably the most popular leftwing figure in America and he sat in Jimmy Carter’s booth at the Democratic Convention.

Dissent has become institutionalized on the left. Dissent is healthy when it’s not schtick. But from Michael Moore’s apologias to Fidel Castro and Saddam Hussein, to Noam Chomsky’s anti-American Manichaeism, to that knock-off cigar store Indian Ward Churchill, to the bowel-stewing stupidity that once prompted even The New Republic to run an “idiocy watch,” primarily aimed at the mainstream left (and the nutter-right), it now seems difficult to fathom a more legitimate hard left in this country, one that could ever quit the habit of making a living off of casting America as the locus of evil in the modern world.

I have plenty of criticisms of how liberals — as opposed to the leftists above — have handled their responsibilities in recent years but I don’t have much room for all that here. Suffice it to say, I think liberals are paying penance for the fact they mostly sided with conservatives on the Iraq war, or at least didn’t do much to stop it. Now they feel like they must prove their progressive bona fides, and in other ways atone for the errors of their ways, particularly now that the left has the upper-hand politically. So they bow and scrape to the netroots, they’re terrified of seeming like a “wanker” and they don’t worry that irrational Bush hatred will ever count against them professionally.

But rather than expand on all that let me close by saying I also blame George W. Bush. Yes, yes: Democrats have been hyper-partisan all the while claiming Bush is too partisan. Absolutely, the double standards applied to Bush-hatred and Clinton-hatred, are infuriatingly stacked. Without a doubt, the notion that politics should end at the water’s edge has become for many liberals the political equivalent of the Edsel: an outdated relic of a bygone era worthy of nostalgia, bemusement and even mockery.

But you know what? That doesn’t let Bush off the hook. Presidents have faced stubborn opponents before, and they have succeeded in co-opting and cajoling them into the bandwagon. Bush has defined leadership as doing what he has to do. There’s much to recommend this sort of thing in an amorphous war like the one in which we find ourselves.

But if this is really “World War IV,” if it’s comparable to the Cold War, then you can’t just write off the Loyal Opposition until it becomes joined at the hip with the Permanent Opposition. If we are in a generations-long battle against an existential foe, then you can’t define domestic success as merely steamrolling this or that amendment to the FISA law through Congress. You need to define success as making such reforms uncontroversial. Better to have things be a little more difficult for the CIA, have a bit more oversight at the FBI, if in exchange Democrats see this as their war too. It should be more difficult to launch a pre-emptive war than a straightforward war of self-defense. Yes: The Democrats who voted for the war should be ashamed of themselves — not for their votes, per se, but for the transparent cynicism they employed while casting them, and for the dishonorable way in which they turned their backs on those votes the second the political slot machine failed to pay out in the way that they hoped. But, George Bush lacked the political imagination to keep the Democrats within the tent.

This might sound unfair, but if George Bush had been a better president, John Edwards would never have dreamed of calling the war on terror nothing but a bumper sticker. As it stands right now, if any Democratic candidate other than Joe Biden or maybe Hillary Clinton (!) gets elected we will bug out of Iraq so precipitously it will be indistinguishable from abject defeat in the eyes of the world. And under any of them, the war on terror will become a glorified Elliot Spitzer style legal campaign. That is not a sign that President Bush has adequately led the country or prepared it for the struggles ahead.

It quickly became a cliché that 9/11 changed everything, but when it comes to the basic divisions of the last 20 years, 9/11 didn’t change nearly enough so much as accentuate everything we knew before. And that all but guarantees we’ll have another 9/11 of which to ponder the meaning. Link

 

[LakeAriel]

I apologize if my response upsets somebody, but I have to respond...

General Petraeus has served this country since he entered the Military Academy in 1970. How dare anyone do something like this.

Hate Bush? fine. Hate the war? It is your right. But to do this to someone who has served his country so faithfully is a disgrace. Are we returning to the days of Vietnam? Should we throw food and feces on him? One can protest the war without insulting those who faithfully uphold the vow they took to defend this country.

Even the Democrats he spoke to in congress treated him with dignity and respect. At least MoveOn.org can do the same

Too bad John Kerry wasn't treated with respect when his service to this country was mocked by the Bush supporters.

 

[Charade]

Too bad John Kerry wasn't treated with respect when his service to this country was mocked by the Bush supporters.

Kerry betrayed his fellow soldiers with his Congressional testimony back in the 70's.

Bush's service was mocked and even lied about (remember "Rathergate") by many people.

 

[eclectics]

Actually I wanted to heard hard questions. But I had a hard time hearing them with all the posturing, bloviating, arrogance and accusations of Petraeus being a liar. It should be quite apparent that hardly any Democrats came to that hearing with any sort of an open mind (they're so often supposed to have).

If the Republicans did the same (I didn't hear their questions), shame on them as well. But they must have asked hard questions because we haven't heard the left complaining about "softball" questions from the right.

If that's your opinion John, you are certainly entitled to it. I disagree. Like I said before, I guess we saw different hearings. I hope what I hear about Bush making it official that the surge troops WILL come home next summer is true. Patraeus said maybe, and I did not smoke anything and dream that up. I heard him.

 

[bsnyder]

Funny how a thread that supposedly criticizes the actions of a Left Winger group turns into a "hammer the Right" thread.... Geez, we're back to re-fighting the 1988(!) Presidential election. But I'm not too surprised.

While I don't buy 100% of what the Swifters were selling, there was certainly points they had that were valid. There is also another key difference between the two efforts.... John F. "Reporting For Duty!" Kerry had made his war record a central part of his campaign. When you do that, it's political "fair game". It would have been no more or less true if "W" had spent considerable time on the stump talking about his "bona fides" to be Commander In Chief because of his valiant service in the National Guard.

So six years later it's boiled down to this... The National Review's Jonah Goldberg did a great job pointing out "how we got here" and has some harsh words for both sides of the aisle:

I've long agreed with that assessment as the central failing of the Bush Administration. I think they decided from the very early post-9/11 days that trying to bring the opposition into the tent in any meaningful way would be a fruitless effort. And so they decided not to waste any energy doing so. IMO, a big mistake, as back then I think the effort might have paid at least some dividends.

 

[diznygirl]

Does anyone here realize they are arguing about a bunch of people that aren't running for election? And a whole bunch of nonsense from the past? Can't you guys find something about the actual candidates to argue about????


Sorry - lost my head there a minute.... carry on.....

 

[Charade]

Does anyone here realize they are arguing about a bunch of people that aren't running for election? And a whole bunch of nonsense from the past? Can't you guys find something about the actual candidates to argue about????


Sorry - lost my head there a minute.... carry on.....

Actually, we're arguing about a bunch of people (MoveOn.org) who say (it's right there on their website) they are committed to influencing elections.

 

[LakeAriel]

Kerry betrayed his fellow soldiers with his Congressional testimony back in the 70's.

Bush's service was mocked and even lied about (remember "Rathergate") by many people.

They nerve of him testifying about the atrocities committed by us in Vietnam! The nerve...and yet it continues. One of the most heroic things a good soldier will do is weed out the bad.

 

[diznygirl]

Actually, we're arguing about a bunch of people (MoveOn.org) who say (it's right there on their website) they are committed to influencing elections.

Does it help any that the smart people know not to pay any attention to these radical fringe groups? Both sides have them - fringe groups and smart people.

 

[Charade]

They nerve of him testifying about the atrocities committed by us in Vietnam! The nerve...and yet it continues. One of the most heroic things a good soldier will do is weed out the bad.

That would be *if* the allegations were true. Most of them weren't. But let's assume they were, that would make Kerry a self admitted war criminal.