the flip flop canidateFollow

You're kidding right?



No. If he'd said: "I have the support", or "they support me", he wouldn't have been implying anything. He's have been coming right out and saying it. You do know the definition of "imply", right?

I think it's very clear that when you have a two party system like in the US, and the candidate of one party says that "personX" has told him that he'd like the other party to lose, he's claiming the support of "personX". Sure. It's implied, but it's the one and only implication to get from that statement. In what other way can Kerry's statement be interpreted?

I can't believe you're even arguing this point.


I'll tell you what. If we're going to only go on the literal words someone says, then are you willing to drop the whole "Bush said Iraq has WMD, so he was lying" thing?

After all, he never said we'd *find* any WMD, did he? You're just infering that if there are WMD, we should be able to find them...


At some point, you have to accept a reasonable level of inferrence in what people say. As to the Bush administration implying that Iraq was connected to 9/11, that's a bit farther along the line then Kerry's statement. Sure, they lumped them both in one basket of "enemies". Sure, they didn't go out of their way to correct the public perception that they were connected. But the Bush administration never officially stated or even implied that there was a connection beyond "Iraq has ties with some terrorist groups". Just because some idiots in the US after 9/11 assumed "terrorists == Al-queda" is not the fault of the administration. A reasonable person would not automatically assume that the terrorists that Iraq was known to deal with were in fact Al-queda. Anyone who was even moderately informed would have known better.

Kerry, on the other hand, made a statement that can *only* be interpreted as claiming foreign support. This wasn't something an aide said, that got misinterpreted into something else and Kerry didn't correct it. This wasn't something that some random group dug up and posted somewhere that many people mistakenly believed. Heck. I'd respect that. This is something Kerry himself said. There's a world of difference between those two.

Lol... Ok. I'm using a strawman? That's funny...


Look. You have desperately worked to steer the debate away from the point. The point was and still is that Kerry has claimed to have had private converstations with foreign leaders that he didn't have.

It doesn't make a damn bit of difference exactly what was said Smash. I happen to think that Kerry's aledged conversations amount to a claim of support. You disagree. Whatever. I'm done arguing an irrelevant point with someone who obviously can't make a very easy logical connection.

What you cannnot possibly deny is that Kerry is claiming to have had private conversations with foreign leaders. At the very least, he's claiming that these foreign leaders want Bush out of office (please tell me you wont try to deny that!). I don't think it's unreasonable at all for the Bush administration to demand that the source for those claims be revealed.

Edited, Thu Apr 1 18:36:15 2004 by gbaji

And again he ignores the point.

Kerry has claimed to have had private conversations with foreign leaders, specifically ones in which those foreign leaders have told him they would like a change in the US administration.

He's made these claims with no evidence that he's actually had these conversations and shown a complete unwillingness to say which foreign leaders these are. That's the issue Smash. You can keep trying to change it into a semantics debate, but that's not the point.

If you come on this board and start talking about how the aliens abducted you and told you that the end of the world was coming, the key issue would be whether you actually had a conversation with aliens, or just made it up. That's the issue here. Did Kerry actually have conversations with foreign leaders? Or did he make it up?

It's not that hard Smash. Just say it: "Yes. Kerry needs to provide some evidence to support what he claimed". You can do it...

That's exactly the point though. It was an offhand comment that he shouldn't have made. The problem is that Kerry has been apparently making a lot of "offhand comments". That's what's got so many people in an uproar.

Despite Smash's insistence to the contrary, people do read into what political candidates say. When you are campaigning, you can't make offhand remarks like that. And if you do make one, and you're comment implies something negative towards your opponent, you'd damn well better be able to back it up.

It's just completely *********** for a candidate to sit there and make "offhand comments" that imply bad things about the opposition, but then insist that he doesn't have to back them up because "they're just things I heard", or "that was recieved in confidence". If you don't have something to say that you can support, then you don't say it. End of story. Kerry is not running for a high school officer position. He's running for President of the United States. I would hope he'd have more sense then to use such childish tactics.

When you are a candidate for a political office, you have to expect that every single thing you say is going to be questioned. If Kerry can't help but make stuff up when he's running, what's he going to do if he's president? You don't get to use innuendo and "offhand comments" once your in the top spot. You have to make clear decisions and have good reasons for making them. Is he going to "imply" instructions to the Joint Chiefs during a crisis and then when something goes wrong say that he was misunderstood or was simply making an offhand comment? He needs to show that he can be clear about his goals. He needs to show that he has a set of policies that are based on something more then vague statements about what other people are doing wrong. He's not going to have that luxury if he gets into the White House. And he's certainly not going to be able to make speaches to the public and then refuse to support his statements because he didn't want to break a confidence. If something is told to him in confidence, then he shouldn't be repeating it. Most of us learned that sometime during gradeshool. Apparently, Kerry hasn't...

"I said he (GWB) was lying when he cited inteligence he knew was false." --Smasharoo

Well, now you are doing exactly what you said you wouldn't-- inferring something from what you cannot possibly know. You don't any way ofknowing what Bush knew or didn't know. That's a straight-out assumption on your part.

Damned by your own words there, buddy. Once again, your threshold for proof goes up and down as often as Slick Willie's zipper did for every ***** who caught his eye.

Totem

Ok. Let's do that...



And I didn't even make the assumption that Kerry was a liar when he spoke words in his march 14th speach which are catagorically, undeniably false. I simply stated that if he's claiming to have conversations with foreign leaders, that maybe he should provide proof.





He knew that he was making up those foreign leader conversations, and intentionally lied to make a better case for his presidential bid



He's so mentally incompetant that he can't tell the difference between reality and make-believe. In my mind this would make him incompetant to be President. But that is, of course, my opinion.



See. Here's where the two scenarios differ though (in exactly the way I explained to Joph earlier in this thread). When Bush gave his speach in the State of the Union address, he was commenting on second (or third!) hand information. He did not personally witness the gathering of the intel that was in the speach. He did not personally gather that information together and confirm its validity. He has staff that does that.

Kerry's comments were made about first hand information. He wasn't saying that his advisors gathered some intel about some foriegn leaders and based his statements on that. He specifically said he had "private conversations" with "foreign leaders".

The huge difference is that if something in Bush's speach was wrong, there are a number of points between the information gathering and the vocalization of the speach where the incorrect information could have been inserted. In Kerry's speach, there is only one place where that false information could have come from, and that's Kerry himself. I can't understand why you can't see the distinction there.


Also. Not to be overly obvious or anything, but intent is what makes something a lie. If you can't determine intent, then you can't assume something is a lie. You'll note that I never said Kerry was lying. You did say (many times) that Bush was.

But hey. I'm the one who makes assumptions about things, right?

Edited, Fri Apr 2 18:28:41 2004 by gbaji

And again with the strawman. He did claim to have "private conversations" with "foreign leaders", in which those leaders expressed sentiments (which he passed on) against the Bush administration.

When will you get the point Smash? Forget about whether these comments were "support for Kerry". Ignore that. All I'm curious about was whether Kerry actually had these private conversations at all.

If he didn't, then what was said in them is kinda unimportant, wouldn't you think? It's the validity of these conversations at all that is the issue Smash.


Are you really this dense?

Edited, Sun Apr 4 20:00:13 2004 by gbaji

The fact that no one can find any record of him having even been in the same room with more then one foreign dignitary at any level for at least the last 3 years.

That, and his refusal to state who he was talking to.

If you make a claim like that, you have to support your claim.


I'll toss an analogy out there (an apparently relevant one at that).

When Bush made his claims about WMD in Iraq, he was required to present "proof". He did that. Sure, it turned out that a couple of the several dozen pieces of evidence he based his statement on were false, but there's no evidence that he knew that when he made the claim.

Kerry is making a claim about foreign leaders. He's been asked to provide "proof" ofhis converstations. He has provided none. We haven't even gotten to the point of verifying that the converstations contained the statements of which he's claiming. He can't even provide evidence that he even had converstations.

That would be like Bush claiming WMD in Iraq and then just sitting there and saying that he doesn't have to support the claim at all. You have the luxury of questioning Bush's sources of intel because he actually provided them. Kerry hasn't. We can't even go to those leaders and find out if they actually said what he's claiming they did because he's unwilling to even provide that much support for his claim.


I hope you can see the difference there.

Hey Smash, I'll give you a cookie if you kay off the bold key for a few posts.

Oooohhh smash called me a wannabe. I'm hurt. No, really...


At least he didn't use any bold.

Look, I don't want to shock you here, but the national media moved on from the foriegn leaders thing about three weeks ago. The only people who think it's a lie or a problem are die hard Republicans. Swing voters don't care and, to be honest, probably aren't even paying attention to the election yet.

I think he was carefull about wording and didn't want to expose people he had spoken to. I don't think he created it wholesale. Kerry's a powerfull well known man internationally. He has no reason to lie about it, it's not something that gains him him anything in that it's obvious that people like Chirac would prefer a President Kerry.

If he said he had met with leaders of the Christian Right and that they supported him I think you'd have something here.

No, if you had the balls and sense to say "You're right" we'd have been done with it.

When I say Bush lied at the state of the union because he knew the facts were wrong and someone says "There's no proof he knew they were wrong" I say:

Yes, you're right.

You, on the other hand spend all this time trying to avoid being wrong, and failing by the way, over the semantics of a single word.

Sad, really.