Morrissey: They are the quarry.
And it explains how Clemens finds himself at the mercy of a jury after being accused of lying to Congress about his use of drugs during a career in which he won seven Cy Young Awards.
What separates them from most human beings is that they seem to believe what they’re saying. Is there anyone left on earth who believes them in return? And if so, why? Maybe for the same reason some people believe O.J. Simpson was innocent: They don’t want to believe the truth.
I suppose both men could be playing the role Harrison Ford did in ‘‘The Fugitive’’ — that of an unjustly accused man trying to clear his name. But if you believe this, then you have to believe that sinister forces are out to get them.
...To the people who whine that the Clemens trial is a waste of federal resources that should be used on more pressing criminal and civil matters: You’re so right. We shouldn’t prosecute any cases involving battery, theft, forgery or illegal firearms until, say, the banking system is cleaned up. Or, to take it to its logical conclusion, until we get to the bottom of what killed off the dinosaurs, all other prosecutions will be put on hold.
Repoz
Posted: June 17, 2012 at 01:20 PM |
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1. adenzeno Posted: June 17, 2012 at 01:43 PM (#4159206)Who said I lied? Because I never.
Response: Noting's changed. I still love you, oh I still love you
Only slightly less than I used to, my love.
Such an odd quote, I think people are objecting that there was only a law broken because Congress 'forced' him to lie under oath. (Of course, nobody forced Clemens to say what he did, but we're only here because of some grandstanding Congressional fellows.)
Police believe alcohol was involved.
If they were all going to cost $100 million, we probably shouldn't prosecute every case of battery, theft etc.
Making a case for the dinosaurs would really prove there's no statute of limitations on murder.
If that's the logical conclusion, I'd hate to see the illogical one.
a bit facile. maybe you can provide some examples. assuming it happens all the time as you say, this won't require much effort on your part.
thanks in advance.
Why don't we start with WMD in Iraq, and we can start from there.
Or if that's too soon, there is always the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. But maybe you're too young to remember that.
"I am not a crook"
"I did not have sex with that woman"
Pfft. Probably because water is only occasionally wet
I'm glad that I'm a lifelong independent at times like these.
So you're saying that the top political leaders in both parties didn't just accept erroneous military information in the walkup to the war, and offer their support.
Both parties' leaders knew - and this is necessary for "lie" to come into play - that the intel was inaccurate, but they went ahead anyway.
Seems like a poor strategem for the Democrats, no? They knew that there were no WMDs, contrary to the intel, at least on the proffer here, yet they backed a Republican President's war anyway so that...
help me out
Why, when you are so obviously trolling. You certainly don't need help at that.
Spend a couple of minutes here, and then you can drink a nice cold can of shut the hell up.
Yeah, anyone who defends this nonsense is a cartoon character who ought not be taken seriously.
I'm not sure this behavior is limited to BTF, but, yes.
Yes.
Both parties' leaders knew - and this is necessary for "lie" to come into play - that the intel was inaccurate, but they went ahead anyway.
Yes. Although note also that "politicians lie" only requires that some senior Republicans (and/or Dems) knew the claim was bogus but lied to other politicans and the nation to convince them.
Colin Powell lied out his ####### ass to the UN. Even I knew the "intel" well enough to know it was crap.*
Seems like a poor strategem for the Democrats, no?
No. The war option was extremely popular.
Also, as you may have noticed from certain court cases, knowing something's a lie and proving it's a lie are two different things. Any politican who really wanted to prove it would have to divulge top secret info and ruin his/her own career and risk imprisonment.
But, fine, you want to call them willfully negligent instead of liars. I'm not sure how that makes anything better. I think I prefer evil competence over evil incompetence.**
* I am admittedly stunned that they in fact found NO WMD. I mean I figured they'd find a spare canister here or there. Or at least have enough sense to plant a few somewhere.
** Not that I was popular among my lib friends. "No war for oil" was a common phrase to which I generally responded "this damn war better be about oil otherwise it's the dumbest ####### war ever."
The same thing is true for Clemens.
Not really knowable. If the US were better in the future if the rest of the world were to invade us next year, killing hundreds of thousands, well that would be OK because we would be better in the future? Really?
I'm skeptical of the pure utilitarian calculus of pain to this side of the ledger, happiness to this side of the ledger as a method for justifying war. It's not a calculation that we can do with any kind of confidence, absent omniscience and perfect foresight. (If you're skeptical of WAR for baseball, you should be very skeptical of using the same method to justify actual war.)
I much prefer the classic calculus of just war theory, and the Iraq War fails on basically every count for jus ad bellum.
http://www.factcheck.org/iraq/anti-war_ad_says_bush_cheney_rumsfeld.html
Summary
"An anti-war coalition of mostly liberal groups ran a newspaper ad quoting six alleged lies about Iraq by President Bush and others.
But, like movie blurbs, the quotes sometimes look different when read in full context.
And while much of what the ad calls lies was indeed wrong, there's evidence that the President and his advisers believed the falsehoods at the time...... And a bipartisan commission concluded earlier this year [2005] that what the Bush administration told the world about Iraqi weapons – while tragically mistaken – was based on faulty intelligence."
.........
even if you want to say that the commission is in on the scam (which is your right), surely you can't say that it's a stone-cold, ironclad example of "lying."
I do know a diner where they serve a nice cold can of crow juice, if you don't like your bird fried.
Hoist by your own petard, as it were.
Meanwhile, snopes.com analyzed a list of comments supposedly by leading Democrats about WMDs and found that the list was "true" in the sense that the quotes are accurate (and helpfully, they provide fuller context as needed).
http://www.snopes.com/politics/war/wmdquotes.asp
That leaves giving the power to the middle-sized group to be the only possible option. Yes, you'll get a strongman dictator; remember, his support base is only about 30%. But he's too small to try ethnic cleansing on the shiites and the Kurds aren't worth his time, although Saddam did exercise his need to bully someone on the Kurds at least once. By removing Saddam, we very much DEstabilized Iraq, and in a way that democracy cannot fix.
And it's worse than that. The thin film of plausibility about the WMDs is that Ronald Reagan, when president, gave Saddam a bunch of TACTICAL nuclear and biological weapons, which Saddam used on the Kurds, mostly. But he also did what Ronnie wanted him to do. He got aggressive with Iran's ayatollahs. They had a war. Iraq ended up being our buffer state between Iran and the western world. When Saddam went down, so did that control. Read a recent newspaper. You'll find some reference to the new nuclear sabre-rattling coming out of - Iran. Why? Saddam's gone.
I also don't think that bad intel is nearly as strong a cause as some of you do. My take on the thing, which is pretty much composed of hard-to-argue facts, goes like this: A group called al-Qaida, headed by Osama bin Laden, attacked the U. S. in 911. This was like the Japanese attacking Pearl Harbor. And, as with FDR and PH, for a short while, the whole country rallied behind its president, as indeed it should, went bipartisan and said, "Go get 'em!". So FDR attacked the Japanese, who had done the deed. W attacked ... Iraq? At the time, al-Qaida had virtually no presence in Iraq. Saddam and Osama had had one meeting and had agreed that the only thing they could do was disagree. Osama is a shiite. For W to attack Saddam is a direct betrayal of the thing the American public rallied behind him to get him to do. It would be as though FDR, responding to Pearl Harbor, had attacked Australia or China or somewhere that was NOT Japan or a Japanese ally, but a Japanese opponent. In other words, it comes uncomfortably close to being treason. Think about what your opinion of FDR would be if he had done this.
The result was to plunge the country into massive deficit spending, because Osama was still out there, stirring up Afganistan and Pakistan with his 6-year head start, in addition to the Iraq War. And destabilizing Iraq. And emboldening Iran. But the real icing on the cake is when I found the web site for the "Project for the New American Century" (the url is not "PNAC", that gets you a pentacostal group). The PNAC is a think-tank of W's think-alikes, including brother Jeb. You can find a button leading to a letter written to President Bill Clinton demanding that he invade Iraq. On Jan. 7, 1998! Therefore to make the bad intel claim, you must also make the claim that the people I call the NeoCult thought there were WMDs in Iraq no later than late 1997, and still, by the time of 911, had not been able to find out that it wasn't true. That's all but impossible. They had to know there was nothing there.
As I said, I think that this constitutes treason, the only treason that I've ever heard of in an American president of any party. That the NeoCult lied to Colin Powell, resulting in a speech to the UN that he promptly found out was full of error, was just part of the plan. What to do? How about confiscating all the wealth of W, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Karl Rove, Grover Nordquist, and all the right-wing talk show hosts, to pay off some of the deficit? And then we can sentence W to go to the families of dead soldiers and explain himself, house to house. It's what he deserves to do with the rest of his life.
As Walt said, and I thoroughly agree (although, in general, Walt seems to be well to the right of me), if this was NOT about oil, then it was the most f'd up war in American history. I think it was about ideology, not oil. And I think it was treason. - Brock Hanke (expecting Jim to move this comment to a "politics" thread, and am happy for him to do so.
OTOH, it was worth sitting through that crap to hear Bob Ryan's rant about attending something like 1500 baseball games and never getting to see a no hitter. That was gold.
"Traitor" is the most dangerous accusation possible, yet it was used with thoughtless ease and frequency for much of the 2000s. As someone who'd been called that — and by people I'm close to, friends for more than 20 years — I caution that anyone use it in political discussions (or any discussions). It's not just another invective we can toss around lightly.
EDIT: I mean the one in TFA re: Prosecution. In case someone applies to some Iraq war stuff.
Some groups in Iraq- the Kurds for instance- are definitely better off, some groups (even leaving the dead aside) are worse off.
Is the middle east as a whole better off? Yes, I think so, why? Because several million Arabs got to watch their brethren cast votes in contested elections. I think that in some small part contributed to the Arab spring... I don't think you are ever going to have a decent level of appreciation for human rights without democracy and democracy takes time, and the Arab world insofar as representative democracy is about where much of Europe was in the 19th century- elected parliaments used to provide legitimacy to autocrats. The Arab world is essentially backward socially and culturally, and parts have seemingly shown a regression to the middle ages, but the events of the past decade do show some sign of progress.
Plus Sadaam and his family were essentially a mafia family running a country instead of the rackets. Sure it's fun to watch Johnny Sack run "New York" on the Sopranos, but would you want to live in a country where teh entire government friom ground up to the top is run that way?
A large number of the members of the Bush administration were veterans of Iran-Contra... so yeah, pretty much.
We will have to let him know he owes you a coke.
In case there is any doubt, TJ Quinn is NOT reporting this, via Twitter or any other method.
He's too good for hanging, we claim.
His neck is too thick,
and heights make him sick,
to string up this boy would be a shame.
Either that, or a conspiracy of some sort. Someone must be blamed for the facts not lining up right.
Stay classy, Guapo. After all, you got the scoop.
So you are saying that Bush N' Co are responsible for all the deaths in Syria, too?
This is different from the US because criminals running it aren't actually related (aside from Bushes, Kennedys, etc.)
i was kind of with you until this, brock. osama was a sunni. the wahhabis, the fundamentalist root of al qaeda, are sunnis. the reason it doesn't make sense to see hussein -- also a sunni -- as a coconspirator in 911 is that al qaeda is not a secularist movement, as saddam hussein's baath party-type dictatorship was.
al qaeda's beef is with the heretical nature of the entire non-islam -- read wahhabi -- world. they were behind the revolt in saudi arabia some years back that the royal saudi family had to put down, mostly because they see the royal family as decadent for allowing american soldiers on saudi soil.
iran is leery of al qaeda because it is sunni. and they should be, if the behavior of sunnis to shiites in iraq is any indication. but as long as al qaeda's larger goal is still taking out the west, they don't mind how unruly it gets.
i think some of your overall points are valid though.
Uhh, I thought Gary Larson had already answered that.
Wouldn't the Icy Hot burn their mouths?
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