What Is "Compassionate conservatism?"
"Conservatives are very upset at the idea of single-mom families. But they do their best to create a lot of them by sending American men off to war to be killed."
Harry Browne
4/25/2007
"Conservatives are very upset at the idea of single-mom families. But they do their best to create a lot of them by sending American men off to war to be killed."
Harry Browne
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16 comments:
If only we used nukes, then none of our boys would die and this statement would be exposed for what it is: a bunch of blllshit.
Cato:
Why is it that we don't use nukes? Do you suppose it's because our leaders want to be perceived as "compassionate." I would think the oil fields would still pump oil and the workers could wear haz-mat suits to counter act the radiation.
Cato:
I thought we went to Iraq to liberate the Iraqis? Who actually is our enemy there? I thought we were taking out the Hilter character? I don't think there would be many hearts or minds left with you approach.
This is another ugly reason why democracies are messy. The moajority of the people actually have an emotional heart and soul -- although they are often herded in directions they don't take the time to understand why.
Uh, the Germans were the people we were against. It's not like if we took out Hitler they would magically stop doing what they were doing. Yes, because of Hitler they acted the way they did. But they all believed him, whole heartedly. They needed to be destroyed, and they were. You don't need to kill all of them, most of them heard about what we NEEDED to do to to places like Dresden and Tokyo and Hiroshima. There was guerrilla warfare at the end of WWII. It quickly subsided as we took a realistic approach to war and killed our enemies, who included the wives and children of our enemies, what the media likes to call these days "collateral damage". They are not. They are our enemies and our enemies need to be destroyed when we goto war or we will not win.
I've never said I agreed with the Iraqi war, but in general wars can't be half-assed. I said I didn't agree with the Iraq war. Yeah, you're right, it's boiled down to so-called humanitarian reasons as to the justification of the war. Which makes it far worse. Iraqis should be irrelevant to the US government. They do not pay taxes. They do not vote. They do not matter.
There you go Cato, it's the half-assed part that is causing a problem. We had less than half-assed reasons for going into Iraq and now were are morally stuck. We can't just turn around and leave. We will be the jihad targets of choice in the Middle East for the next 30 years, thanks to Bush and his half-assed, limp-dicked group of chickenhawks.
CATO:
The problem with your appraoch to this war is not that it's inhuman (thought it is), it's more that it wouldn't work. You forget one tiny little detail about WWII, ( I knew that you'd bring it up) WE WERE THE ONLY ONES WITH THE BOMB!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The real problem with your approach is that it is unrealistic. It would never work. It's like the Neo Con plan on paper. Great theory, terrible reality.
In your typical Black or White fashion, you can't tolerate anything in between. Reality never complies with the simplistic.
You make the arguement that we destroyed our enemies in WW2. We didn't, not all of them. We destroyed the will of those fighting against us. The arguement has been made that dropping the A bombs probably saved 1 million lives. I agree with that. It was a different time an different circumstances. We don't know who our enemy is, How the hell can you Nuke them all? We took over Iraq in a week. Our idiots in charge couldn't figure out that the enemy went into hidding? Mission Accomplished.
Another small detail you forgot about WWII, we spent the next 10 years rebuilding our "enemy's countrys". Think out the real consequences of what you propose.
Our enemy already fears us. That's why their fighting an insurgency and not a war. Wiping out half the earth's population is not the solution and would not bring about a good end for anybody.
So long as Islam is around, there will be jihadists. The trick then is to scare them so much that they won't come after us, although we'll have to kill a lot of them along with "collateral damage" of the people who associate with them and give them food and talk to them but don't kill them (also known as "our enemy").
They don't care about their own lives. But I think they do care about their children having a future.
We could nuke Afghanistan back into... Afghanistan.
One day soon we will get our resolve back, although I fear the loss of life will be staggering. I hope whomever our President is uses that instant 99% approval for whatever he does and destroys the enemy within a week unlike this President who screwed it all up by being so prissy about it all.
You cannot meet a group of people who wishes that we all die on some sort of truce. We give them no quarter. There should be no prisoners. We must destroy that which fuels them. This President lost his opportunity to be great.
Half the world's population is not our enemies, and our enemies in this war do not have the bomb. We do.
Why would it never work? Because people would get mad about it? You don't need to nuke em all, you just need to make a few displays of your firepower so all will submit. Honestly I had thought that was a reason for this Iraq adventure. To show how easily we could destroy a government (we did, very easily) to show off to others like China. Sure we got problems rebuilding a country but honestly I thought the boys should have come home after Bush said "mission accomplished" because after we disposed of the threat it is no longer our business.
The alternative is to let our enemies destroy our civilization.
CATO:
you said:
"They don't care about their own lives. But I think they do care about their children having a future."
Actually, they don't. The Jihadists are training their 5 year olds to grow up to be Jihadist suicide bombers.
Also:
"We could nuke Afghanistan back into... Afghanistan."
It's statements like these that reveal your true ethnocentric nature. When you look at the real people in Afghanistan, most of them want want we all want. A job families, a house. You can dehumanized them, that's how you can say the things you say. You turn them into things that don't matter, they are all "The Enemy". If you met face to face with most of the people you characterize this way, I don't think you'd Nuke them.
There are Jihadists who cannot be reasoned with ( unless you covert to Islam which neither of us will I'm sure ). But this is a war of ideas more than weapons. How many Iraqi's do you think support innocent civialian Iraqi's being blown up in the street? A minority.
If you want to kill Jihadists, I say have at it, but you have to find them first. You can't take out entire countrys like you propose.
It's the lack of forsight of the repercussions of our actions that's gotten us in the mess we're in. Mission Accomplished MY ASS.
After Nuking everyone you'd be in the same position as Bush was in when he made this assinine statement.
No, I don't it's a minority in Islam. Sure, a minority do the actions, just like a minority of our people are the military. But it seems to me that most of the Islamic world supports them or is sympathetic to them. All who do are our enemy, the enemy of our civilization. We can't afford to take prisoners in a war of civilization.
Even if there are innocents killed, as in people who do not wish us harm or are sympathetic at all to the terrorists, these people do not matter to our GOVERNMENT if our government is to be just. It's our government, not theirs, and it's simple numbers. Killing them, along with the jihadists, will lead to less Americans dead, so it is, in the end, a good thing, from a Governmental standpoint (I hope you read that sentence correctly). From another standpoint, although I don't agree with it, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one. So killing a small amount of innocents there (relatively speaking) will lead to less killing overall.
Nukes worked the last time there were a bunch of people going on suicide missions for their god in order to kill us(who was also known as the emperor). They will work again.
"Nukes worked the last time there were a bunch of people going on suicide missions for their god in order to kill us(who was also known as the emperor). They will work again."
I doubt it! The world today has little or no resemblence to the 1940's. Globalization has changed all that. If you want our enemies to fear us, that's already accomplished, but it's brought resentment along with it not blind submission.
This administration has squandered almost universal good will toward America after the 9-11 attacks. How, by lying to create an excuse to invade Iraq to appease the many Neo Cons in this administration rather than fighting a real war on terror. Where the hell's Bin Laden.
Bush was going to "smoke him out".
A year later Bush called him irrelevant. They had the Taliban defeated, now they are making a comeback, why, because we've stretched ourselve too thin with Iraq.
Where are you going to drop this Nuke, Teheran, Maybe Mecca for starters. That will make us all safer right? Our borders are a leaking sieve, it's a miracle we haven't suffered another attack.
Where are the terror alerts, don't they provide the disired political result Rove desires anymore?
All that aside. You should watch some of a recent PBS series on the war, no matter what your position on the war, it gives real insight into how Our soldiers have to fight it. For me it instilled a greater respect for our troops and their discipline.
http://tinyurl.com/38edx6
Yet they are on Mission
Imposible and The Shrub can't seem to figure that out.
After "Shock and Awe" Nukes wouldn't creat much more fear. That didn't work and neither would Nukes. It's simplistic wishful thinking surprisingly coming from a complex commenter.
That sentence above you worried about being read properly. I have no idea what you mean?
Some people can't distinguish between governmental obligations and personal obligations. Typically such people are left wingers and indeed is part of the reason they are. They think people should help out other people (nothing wrong with that) and in turn think the government should do what people do (wrong!). And so while you and I may have some shred of empathy for my fellow man the government should not. The government should put Americans above all else, for it is our government not the government of Iraqis.
Rove... that guy is funny. He's managed to make people believe he's some sort of evil genius.
Conservatives are always portrayed in one of two ways. Idiots who couldn't figure out how to tie their shoes or with Lucifer's evil and cunning, spinning webs of lies in order to win favor. It's one or the other, although many politicians have been portrayed as both. The Vast Right Wing Conspiracy and all of that...
Threatening to nuke Mecca unless all terrorist activities stop... that might work. Maybe we should.
Cato:
Double checking to make sure where you are coming from...
If I am walking do the street and the old lady walking in front of me falls down and can't get up, I have no obligation to stop and help her. Correct?
From the libertarian perspective, I have a choice to help or not help. There is no such thing as a "moral obligation," from your perspective. Correct? It's all a matter of individual choice.
A bleeding heart liberal would not only help the fallen granny, he who advocated for softer sidewalks, legislation that required grannies to wear helmets and knee pads while walking and possibily advocate for walking assistants to hold the arms of walking grannies to prevent this in the future. Correct?
Pretty much.
I was talking about something different though; our government should value one drop of American blood and one penny of our treasure over all the lives of everyone else in the entire world.
Cato:
Should I value the old lady who tripped in front of me on the side walk? How can a government value anything? A government is on non-thinking, feeling thing populated by people -- perhaps the old lady once worked for the government.
So are you saying the people who run the government should nuke the Middle East, if anyone in our country is in danger of losing a penny or getting a bloody nose because of the actions of someone from the Middle East? And these are the same people who have no moral obligation to help the old lady who tripped and did a face plant on the sidewalk?
Me thinks you have so splaining to do...
No, I really don't think the government should care much about anything. However, it is our government -- not their government -- and their lives are meaningless to our government. Only Americans matter. This means if we are to goto war, then we goto war, and we don't play games.
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