Comments on: US Has No Right to Condemn NK Human Rights Abuses: NY Philharmonic Music Director

By: Maddlew

Maddlew — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 22:54:16 +0000

I thought it was Jack Nicholson in a “Few Good Men”.

By: Robert

Robert — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 20:01:21 +0000

#72
More like shades of George Orwell, but given the quality of the comments on this thread, I am not surprised someone is that wrong.

By: Robert

Robert — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 19:59:32 +0000

Yes dogbert is correct, because as we all known, waterboarding three people and imprisoning men caught in Afghanistan, fighting against US soldiers is the moral equivalent of imprisoning and starving a nation of millions. Did you hear the story about the people in Philadelphia who were executed for using a cell phone? Oh, wait… And evidently the president of the United States played no role at all in keeping terrorists from attacking the US again after 9-11. It seems the shrill, unbalanced critics of the Bush administration actually deserve all the credit.
I don’t know what is worse, the fact that someone can compare Bush to Kim Jong Il or the fact that someone thinks it still makes them look cool and edgy to criticize Bush.

By: drewjube

drewjube — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 08:24:27 +0000

@mcnut: I’d say you’re aptly named.

How much does a lifetime subscription to “Soldier of Fortune” go for, anyway?

By: hoju_saram

hoju_saram — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 06:56:37 +0000

We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.”

Shades of Walt Whitman.

By: Mizar5

Mizar5 — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 14:33:24 +0000

It’s called a classic “straw man” argument. Gandi lacked the moral authority to speak out against slaughter because he once tried chicken.

By: mcnut

mcnut — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 14:01:56 +0000

HOLY F’ing crap the mere fact that you would blame a guy who was in office 8 months and assign no blame to an entire administration that was in for 8 years before shows your ignorance or left wing lunacy which are one in the same

oh but wait bush let it happen and the CIA blew up the world trade center so that they could go to war and get all the OIL!!!

clinton politicized the process of getting intelligence and purely wanted to treat everything as an legal issue to treat these attacks as crimes. he stripped field agents of capabilities to detain and interrogate known terrorists, get informants, or put people inside these organizations back when it would have been feasible to do so

clinton also was the major obstable into the USS Cole investigation

bush treats this as an act of war an attack on the country and rightfully so has given power back to agencies to handle these people when and where they rear their wacky heads

“We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.”

you are all products of this quote from orwell above simply because you are afforded the freedom and right to come to south korea and make a living because someone made that decision 58 years ago to go into a war that was unpopular and unsupported and wow look how that turned out

that quote is alive and well to this day because of people all over the world currently doing jobs that most of you wieners cant imagine and not just military folks either

By: Richardson

Richardson — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 13:33:03 +0000

It’s very simple. If none of you here commenting has never served time in a prison and/or been subjected yourself to any sort of like torture . . . you have very little business making moral distinctions between the badness of Camp 22 and the goodness of Gitmo.

That’s a flimsy argument that would take debate about most historical events off the table for most people, and is a refuge of the ignorant. Probably the better standard would be to use facts, reason, and what experience we do have.

In this case, I personally know many folks who have debriefed and/or spoken with detainees in several different capacities and have discussed the issue with them. Aside from studying North Korea for the last decade, I’ve been present at the debriefings of North Korean defectors. But even if I did not have that knowledge, there is plenty of other data out there to make an informed and logical judgment.

While people here like WJK, Richardson, Joshua, and others continue to express their amazement at how others can see things from a different vantage point than theirs. . .

Being amazed at someone’s ignorance and inability to tell right from wrong, and disgusted at the moral equivalence they propose, is significantly different from how you describe it. I reject moral equivalence for the coward’s argument that it is.

I might be wrong. Maybe those at Gitmo are more luxuriously accommodated than I’ve ever been at any five-star hotel I’ve ever had the fortune to stay in.

A strawman and not even a remotely humorous one.

By: Richardson

Richardson — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 13:10:16 +0000

Dogbert,
That position doesn’t hold much water. The attack was planned during Clinton’s reign, and those that missed it – CIA, FBI, etc. – had just come through eight years of Clinton. I’m not saying it’s Clinton’s fault, but that it’s something that (in this case) blame to a president (either one) cannot be assigned either way.

By: dogbert

dogbert — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 12:49:52 +0000

I do think it is interesting how dogbert called wjk an idiot when wjk for the first time seemed to actually make sense.

Considering that “dubya” was the sitting president when 9/11 occurred, I hardly consider him effective at preventing terrorism in the U.S. That was the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history and it occurred on his watch.