Posts Made By: Terry Friedrichsen

Collin Smith said:
Besides sending thousands of patriots to die (and tens of thousands more to a crippled existence) in a pointless war he lied to start and by treason suppress the truth about, let's see ...

You must have missed the part of my post where I asked for "calm, sane, and rational" without "name-calling" ... not to mention the part where I suggested avoiding the Iraq war as a means of keeping the discussion calm.

And people wonder why I don't bother arguing with liberals of your ilk.

By the way, the "lie" you refer to in your first paragraph was a "lie" that was actually the *truth* as perceived by every western intelligence service, and was self-admittedly instigated by Saddam's explicit disinformation campaign. That's a really odd definition of "lie".

And Iraq most definitely *did* have WMD capabilities at one time -- ask some tens of thousands of Kurds who died from nerve gas. So it was by no means unreasonable to believe that they still did.

The war was by no means pointless -- Saddam Hussein is now precisely where he belongs because of this war.

(Yeah, I know -- I broke my own rule about not arguing with liberals who can't be calm and rational ... I'm leaving now.)

Terry (astrotrf)

Joe Bergeron said:
I suspect the habitual Republican budget-busting has something to do with their desire to "strangle the Federal government until it's small enough to drown in a bath tub."

And I suspect the habitual Democrat tax-raising has something to do with their desire to take every last dollar from us and spend it as *they* deem fit.

I also suspect that both of us are wrong ...

Terry (astrotrf)

Les Chambers said:
Keep in mind that one of her first acts as Gov. was to sheppard legislation to approve a 1750 mile long natural gas pipeline. Does McCain thinkg we are blind AND stupid?
Les

I'm afraid I haven't kept up with ultra-liberalism as well as I should. So pipelines are automatically bad now, or is there actual rational *reasoning* involved?

At least give a passing thought to the fact that we *need* the natural gas. How else do you propose getting it here?

Terry

Joe Bergeron said:
I however have learned not to bet on the discernment of the American electorate.

I suspect that your definition of "discernment" would not match mine! Further, I'm reasonably sure I'm glad the American electorate doesn't meet your definition; I'm prepared to be surprised, though.

Terry

Les Chambers said:
No one said pipelines are per se bad.

OK -- glad to hear it.

The point was--and I think you know this--is that the pipeline had been stalled for years because of enviromental, economic and other concerns. Yet, Palin who is tied to the oil industry makes it her first priority as governor. Forces it through the legislature while ignoring every concern raised against it.

I view this from a different perspective. At some point, logjams like this have to be resolved. It doesn't sound to me as though concerns were ignored -- they'd been argued over for years. It sounds to me as though she weighed these concerns against the need for the pipeline and decided to push the project ahead.

It illustrates that her priorities may not be the same as the public as a whole.

And maybe they *are* -- lots of folks heat their homes with natural gas, and natural gas prices have gone up quite a bit in recent years. I know I'd certainly rather build a pipeline than freeze all winter, and I'll bet I can find a few other folks who agree with me.

This is a far right ideologue who wants to sunset the Endangered Species Act so polar bears wont get in the way of the oil industry. Nothing worse than an idealogue and she is a poster-child for putting an agenda before the facts.

Oh, please. The left is shot through with ideologues of their own. And "putting an agenda before the facts" just means that someone else weighs the facts differently than you do.

I think what she did was right -- that doesn't mean *I'm* an ideologue and doesn't mean that I have malicious intent or sinister ties to the oil industry.

Terry

Thanks, Les. I was struggling with the definition of "ideologue" until I read your post. The dictionary definition is fairly benign, but now that I see it in actual practice ...

Joe Bergeron said:
... rather than disputing the issues Les raises?

The primary reason I didn't do that is just that it's all been said before, and has never done any good in the past. The liberals continue to believe what they want to believe, even when faced with the most blatantly obvious contradictory facts.

But since you asked:

The difference is that when idealogues of the left win out, we all win.

Ideologues of the left only want to vacuum money out of *my* pockets to pay for their latest favorite big-spending boondoggle. That doesn't count as a "win" in my book. I tell you what: give 'em ALL of *your* money and let me keep mine.

Internationally, the US govt cooperates with other nations to foster diplomatic solutions to problems ...

This is happening *now*, despite left-wing attempts at sabotage. Progress with North Korea is intermittent, but moves forward over the long term. Even Iran has gone from kicking out all nuclear inspectors to allowing some inspections to resume. Libya was persuaded to give up its nuclear ambitions.

And the U. S. was highly involved in diplomatic efforts to cool the situation between Russia and Georgia.

If you think diplomacy is the exclusive province of the left, you're more than simply wrong.

... and to protect everyone's environment.

I don't know what you're referring to specifically here. The U. S. government has been actively involved for many years in encouraging other countries to clean up their environmental emissions and has programs in place to encourage U. S. technology companies to export environmental technologies to other nations. This is hardly the exclusive province of the left.

Domestically, there is a safety net that includes guaranteed health care ...

It's going to take a lot more than left-wing hand-waving economics to demonstrate that we can afford such a thing.

... and education for everyone rather than just the privileged few.

I don't know what it's like where *you* live, but in small-town central Wisconsin, where I grew up, *everybody* my age was in school. In fact, there are laws *requiring* parents to school their children. I've no idea what you're talking about here.

when the ideologues of the right prevail, we get international isolation ...

You're living in a different world than I am. The U. S. is involved all over the world: Europe, the Koreas, Georgia, the Middle East, the Far East, South America, Australia and New Zealand, etc., etc. With the exception of those who are actively our enemies, everyone else *wants* U. S. involvement. That doesn't sound like isolation to me.

wars that costs 100,000 lives and counting,

Wars are not the exclusive province of the right. Don't forget that it was a pair of Democratic presidents that got us into Vietnam, a war that cost a lot more lives than that. If you'd like, we can compare and contrast the left's idea of using U. S. troops with the way the right employs them, but I'll skip that for now.

detention camps

That happens in wartime, left or right. FDR was a Democrat, and there were detention camps during World War II. In fact, the folks placed in *them* weren't even enemy combatants. You'd have been better off not mentioning this one.

torture,

If Khalid Sheik Mohammad (spellings differ) had been in *my* hands before 9/11, and I knew he was planning something huge, you'd best have just stayed away then. Cold, embarrassing nudity, mean barking dogs, uncomfortable positions, and loud, lousy rock music wouldn't have begun to cover it. The rock music would have masked the screams, though, so there's that.

continued subjugation to the oil barons

I know the left hates people who make money, unless they're left-wingers themselves -- especially if they can't tax it at a huge rate. But the oil companies take huge risks in order to assure future supplies of oil; the rewards for the risks that pay off are likewise huge. If you had a billion dollars to invest, where would you put it? In a venture that might double your money, but might result in a 100% loss? Or in a bond fund earning a nice, safe 5% return? What would the probabilities have to be to get you to fund the venture? The oil companies have to take the first choice.

The oil companies bring oil from halfway around the world, refine it, and sell heating oil to keep folks warm in the winter. You'd gladly pay a lot more for it if you were faced with the possibility of not having any. They also sell gasoline to run our cars -- which you'd also pay a lot more when the alternative is walking to work and back every day.

So don't tell me about "subjugation" when the product is affordable for most folks.

We're sending massive amounts of money overseas to buy oil from other countries, and the liberal left can't even spot the fact that a bunch of that money could STAY HOME if we drilled our *own* oil; they keep making specious excuses for NOT doing so. THAT form of "subjugation" somehow doesn't seem so bad to them.

... and record levels of national debt.

Now *there* you've got me. However, I must say that I fully appreciate the irony that it was the liberal left that railed against and refused to pass (or even consider) a balanced-budget amendment to the constitution, but now wields the national debt as though it were their own personal attack weapon.

I think the conservative right is wrong on a few things, as well. Chief among these are stem cell research and abortion rights. Les, is there anything you think the left is wrong about?

Both sides are pretty weak on funding scientific research; they both seem to understand that technology is the key to the future, but they don't want to spend much money on it.

In short, the left means to help, ...

I'm sure they do; I don't think the left has evil intentions. They just go about things the wrong way most of the time, and sometimes wildly so.

... the right hopes only to rule and to line its own pockets.

I don't think the right has evil intentions, either. They just have a different point of view than the left does.

But when it comes to "hopes only to rule", the liberal left has put itself in the position of *hoping the U. S. would lose a war* and *continuing to oppose a proven winning strategy* in order to further its ambitions of rule. That's completely disgusting.

If I can paint what I see using VERY broad brush strokes, I think the attitude of the left is that good intentions are all you need to pave the way to success, both foreign and domestic, while the right believes that you need good intentions and a BIG STICK (both militarily and economically).

The left fervently wishes to do away with the big stick, while the right sees that as a recipe for instant disaster and opposes it with equal fervor.

Terry (astrotrf)

Les:

With taxes, like everything else, you get what you pay for.

Not really, IMHO. When it comes to taxes, you get considerably *less* than what you pay for.

But the fundamental difference between us in this area is that what you want to pay for is not what I am willing to pay for. Resolving such differences is what elections are for.

Les:

Safety net/Universal health care. Why can't we afford it? We "afford" $10B a month in Iraq. Its not a question of "affording" but of priorities.

But in the next breath you rightfully complain about the national debt ... it's not going to go down unless we *stop* huge amounts of spending. Shifting it around isn't going to do the job.

And as to priorities: universal health care isn't going to do the country much good if we allow countries that openly wish for our destruction to gain nuclear weapons or threaten us in more subtle but just as deadly ways.

Joe:

As for the war, I'm sure we'd all be a lot less ambivalent about it if it actually had something to do with the defense of the USA.

And there, of course, is one of the fundamental left-right differences. I say getting rid of a dangerous military dictator who had used nerve gas on his own people, overrun a tiny neighbor and threatened others in the region, IS an action in defense of the USA. Unopposed, who's to say he wouldn't have decided to start gassing his neighbors or even taken his attacks to the West? A well-funded gang like al Qaeda has international reach in this day and age; how much the more so a man with an entire nation and huge oil reserves?

I think that invading Iraq to depose Saddam Hussein was exactly the correct thing to do.

I would also argue that the unintended consequence of having al Qaeda move heavily into Iraq to oppose us was, in the long run, a fortuitous circumstance. Initially, it created difficulties for our military, to the point where the left was ready to give up; but in the end, we've prevailed and dealt a HUGE blow to al Qaeda, a sworn enemy of the U. S.

Joe:

If I see my best friend walk up to some weakling and start pounding on him while shouting slogans about how evil he is, I'd have a hard time deciding how to feel about that, too.

What you're missing in this analogy is that the "weakling" was a mass murderer who killed tens of thousands of people, and was UNDENIABLY evil. And that everybody *knew* that before your friend started pounding on him.

Les:

... if you get your news from anywhere but FOX you may have heard that Putin claims that it was the US that instigated the Georgians to help McCain's election chances. BS you say? The EU believed enough of it to abandon sanctions against Russia.

The left sure likes to believe that Fox isn't a real news organization, just because they don't spout the liberal line (vice CBS, NBC, MSNBC, various newspapers). As a matter of fact, I did hear this story ... ON FOX. And yeah, I think it's BS; I'm quite certain that the truth is that we told Georgia NOT to provoke Russia. The EU may have had reasons for declining to saction Russia, but I doubt that taking Putin's babbling seriously was one of them.

Les:

Blood baths like Nicaragua, Phillipines,Korea, and Viet Nam were all brought to you by the GOP and its big business masters,

You'll have to be more specific here; I don't know what "blood bath" you're referring to in Nicaragua or the Philippines (outside of World War II). Korea? Truman was a Democrat. Viet Nam? Kennedy and Johnson were Democrats; Nixon inherited a bad situation and took far too long to decide to just get out.

"big business masters" can be safely ignored as standard left-wing ideologue claptrap.

Joe:

Detention camps: Vile then, vile now.

But the alternative in Iraq and Afghanistan was what? Let 'em go so they can shoot at us some more? Or just shoot 'em rather than take them prisoner at all? The only way to avoid detention camps is to not bother detaining anybody, one way or the other.

Joe:

t's highly debatable how many of our "combatant" prisoners are really combatants. I sure don't expect their jailers to tell us.

So your alternative thesis is that we just rounded up a few thousand people at random and hauled them to Guantanamo? Why, when actual enemy combatants were thick on the ground? The idea that these prisoners are poor innocent victims is just plain fantasy.

Les:

Thats BS but that horse has already been beaten to glue. Wreck the environment to extract the last drop of oil and it might last US 10 years. What then?

No, it's *not* BS. A trillion dollars worth of oil in ANWR is a trillion dollars in *our* pockets rather than some foreign government's. Ten years of oil is ten years we don't have to ship money overseas to buy the stuff; the money stays here in our own economy.

Nobody's talking about "wrecking the environment". A few oil wells aren't going to "wreck" ANWR. If the oil's pumped out after 10 years, the wells disappear. Soon you'd never know they were there.

The pipeline to the north slope of Alaska was supposed to be a monstrous environmental disaster, too -- didn't happen, despite all of the left-wing hysteria. And they were so *sure*, too ...

What then? Well, that buys us ten years to get a lot better at alternative fuels, which is an absolute necessity, but can't be done overnight.

Oh, and as for "Goodbye from the world's biggest polluter!". It's easy to spin that, if you want. But were I the President, listening to folks loudly proclaiming that the U. S. is the world's biggest polluter day after day, it's exactly the departing line I might deliver myself, intending it purely as humor. Your "puerile grin" is my sarcastic-humor smirk. It all depends on just how humor-challenged you are.

Joe:

... as might anyone whose heroes aren't Beevis and Butthead.

This is another reason why I generally just refuse to get involved in debating the liberal left. They seem to have this fundamental inability to accept the fact that other people might simply disagree with their opinions. If you disagree with a left-winger, or don't take the action that a left-winger deems correct, it's most often taken as evidence that you are ignorant or idiotic, and responds with denigration and name-calling rather than serious debate.

By the way, this "Grossman" guy that Les is citing is hardly a dispassionate observer. His "briefing" is loaded with distortion, innuendo, and negative spin. As a historian, he's not worth listening to.

Wow; I hardly know where to begin. This is a world view through a kaleidoscope rather than a telescope.

1) We shouldn't have deposed Saddam Hussein because we aren't prepared to depose *all* dictators; it should be all or nothing

2) It's OK for Saddam to use nerve gas because we gave it to him

3) "no opinion in the border disagreement" is clearance to attack

4) al Qaeda finds a way to kill 3,000 people in New York, but there's no way Saddam could think of any way to do so

5) we used to support Saddam, so we're not allowed to change our minds

6) etc. in the same vein

Let me say this just one more time; you've read the words before, but they just don't seem to sink in:

Every major western intelligence service *believed* Saddam Hussein had WMDs. Saddam was actively engaged in a campaign to foster and encourage this belief; he said so himself. There's no possible way to fairly and honestly construe the WMD issue as a "lie".

> I don't trust the government enough to necessarily believe every claim of his demonic evil

How many more claims than the ones you *do* believe do you need to have?

> Alaskan oil: any money coming from there goes into the pockets of the oil companies and their investors

This astounding statement completely ignores the fact that the money goes to pay the salaries of the oil company employees, gets reinvested in finding new sources of oil and developing technology to recover more oil from existing fields (among lots of other things), and is invested by the oil companies in stocks and bonds, which helps other sections of the economy grow.

You seem to believe that the oil companies just stuff their cash into coffee cans underneath the back parking lot.

> When did it become okay to attack countries because some of us think they might do something to us someday?

That's the wrong question; this isn't the reason we deposed Saddam Hussein. He claimed to have WMDs, thwarted the efforts of weapons inspectors, ignored a grand total of 17 U. N. resolutions ordering his compliance, had a proven track record of *using* WMDs, attacked a helpless neighbor, and threatened other neighbors with attack. And all of that is to say nothing of the horrific things he was doing internally to his own people.

As much as the liberals try to spin this into something bad, getting rid of Saddam was a Good Thing. But you ignore that simple fact and spend all of your time hand-wringing instead.

Terry (astrotrf)

I was too busy last night to do the fact-checking, but here's where the nerve gas *really* came from:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article400177.ece

A Dutch businessman supplied the raw materials; Iraq manufactured the nerve gas themselves.

Terry (astrotrf)