Call George Bush "Hitler" and a "Murdering Fascist"? Cheer for Saddam? Root for Arafat? Applaud suicide bombers? Condemn America? Everybody is a racist, bigoted homophobic redneck? Promote every conceivable left-wing prejudice? No problem. Troll to your hearts' content. Show them one of the ugly faces of the "Peace" movement? Mod pulls it down in less than two minutes. Is it ugly and painful? Absolutely. But a lot more relevant than another "Bush is stoopid, hehehehehe" post from a seventh grader, or "The Supreme Court stole the Presidency from the great Al Gore" fantasy. So here is what they don't want you to see - right from the AP photo wire, a street demonstrator who is yearning for "Peace"
Some information on this photo and the controversy around it ... http://www.chronwatch.com/featured/contentDisplay.asp?aid=2135
Absolutely. Only one other person knew that it was not from the US. Amazing that nobody even questioned it. If somebody had wanted to actually contest it, instead of engaging in very typical left-wing tactics (ie: slag the messenger) I was going to say "Yes, but aren't these the same foreigners we're all upset about having hate us?" We see this person, and thousands more like her, on CBS every night and the libs all say "Oh my goodness, do you see that? All these people think we're wrong. They must be right" And American demonstrators ARE claiming solidarity with these people overseas. Well, if your gonna do that, then you have to take them all; you don't get to pick and choose, IMO. Frankly, if this person (and sorry, but she's not an isolated case) DIDN'T hate and fear us, I'd be worried. America stands against this sort of person - always have. always will. As for Knave: all very well and good, but I'm not The Times, and I'm not about to defend or apologize for their editorial choices. I did not use or reference their article in any way or form. How someone else did or did not use this picture is simply not germane here. I'd only add that a LOT of news organizations, on BOTH sides of the equation, are making some interesting choices these days. I can give you ever so many examples of blown-out-of-all-reasonable -proportions articles that are coming from the opposite side of the equation. I'll bet you can too.
Don't mind me. Just preserving my Politics posts, which are now routinely deleted due to unacceptable Pro-AMerican content. Dan: Since I know you put great stock in the Newspaper of Record (for the far Left), you need to know that even The NYT, which has pooh-poohed the war all along, disagrees with your (or is it my? God, it's so confusing...oh wait...you don't believe in...well, nevermind) "Rummy screwed up" assessment. They're very much in agreement with him, and they hate his ass. And nobody but you and Yuppie Q. Lastort think that anybody other than Geraldo said the war would be over in 20 minutes. Good God, man. Does this mean you're gargling with Chateaunuef du Pape and smoking Romeo y Julietas too? Is CSN now paying scale? The mind fairly reels. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/02/opinion/02WED1.html And after you've washed THAT one down with some French potables, and joined our freind for a quick wizz on some American war graves, then try THIS one. Same left wing source. Sorry. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/02/i...nt&position=top
Oh, THAT's the point you were going for. Actually, yes, I get that fundamentalist Muslims probably aren't going out to buy Brian McBride shirts. Yes, I get that AQ and whoever is queen of the West Bank anthill right now are still going to commit acts of terrorism against us, Israel, whomever they can catch. If I had to defend the "But it will cause us to be unpopular"/"It will cause more terrorism" case, I'd probably say two things. One, by making the United States about as popular as crab lice, it makes it really hard for moderate Muslim governments to cooperate with us. It isn't really about preventing maniacs from being maniacs, it's about making it easier for neutrals to catch those maniacs. Yes, I realize that they should help us catch the maniacs anyway. Just telling you how I think they'll see it. The other theory, of course, is that by alienating moderate Muslim governments, they will eventually reveal their true colors, and then we can go in and wipe them out. Well, it would be nice if we actually had the ass to do that, but it looks right at the moment that we don't have the girth and tumescence to take out anyone after we're done with Iraq. Syria's all but daring us to make them next...and that means Saudi Arabia will move down to at least third or fourth on the list. Where they should have been at the top. And even the UK isn't on board with invading Syria. When Robin tells Batman to call it a night, that should tell you something. Oh, yeah, not every foreigner is a silly Pakistani woman with bad taste in headgear. France and Germany really were our allies in the war against terror, back in the day. I remember distinctly.
How about Jeff Cunningham shirts then? Edson Buddle? I would make one main point in rebuttal: The term we all hear way too much is "the Arab street" as in "we know the Saudi royal family has the geopolitical sense to get what we're doing, but the Arab street only knows that the big bad bully on the block is kicking around a Muslim-Arab country and they hate us for it" Fair summary? But I think it goes deeper than that. The "Arab street" is maybe the most lied-to group of guys since "Smilin Joe" Goebbels was in the newspaper biz. Hell, Egyptian State Television is currently airing an expensive, slick 47 part production of "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion". Really. I'm not making that up. And what they're being told about this, and the primary reason they're so angry (other than they already hate us for supporting Israel) is that the USA is invading Iraq, we plan on colonizing it, making Islam illegal, destroying the Holy sites in Karbala and Hajaf and then creating something called (no, I am not making this up either "Greater Israel") Hell, if I thought that's what we were doing, I'd be out there waving a badly made sign too. And since there are people right here in America who believe this exact same thing - heck, there are people here on BigSoccer who believe it - then it's not too surprising that Arab state media outlets don't have a lot of trouble selling it in Yemen and the UAE. Let alone the West Bank. So it seems to me that when we've done what we have to do and then, low and behold, turn the keys over to Muslim Arab Iraqis and head on back to the land of MickeyD and Mickey Mouse, that a lot of the air will go out of their anger. Will they then love us? Of course not. But until we prove what we're really about in all this, we can't let our foreign policy be dictated to by somebody else's false, absurd propaganda. As for France and Germany, frankly, the former has been geopolitically irrelevant for 20 years or more. Poland is more important in the overall scheme of things. So is Czechoslovakia. Take away that UN Security Council veto FDR steered them and they are about as significant as Angola. That's not post-war hyperbole. That's just fact. The Germans are another case. They weren't going to contribute anything other than a nice "attaboy" to the effort anyway. And they have a huge, disgruntled left wing which also believes we're planning on building Disneyland on the Tigris. And again, there's only so much pandering and running scared from lies that other people believe that you can or should do. Sensitive to their concerns, regardless of how groundless? Absolutely. We're big enough to do that. But let our national interest take a back seat in order to placate European Radical Leftist propaganda? That would simply be foolish.