RedPhoenixxxxxx wrote:
gbaji wrote:
So believing that Bush lied to get us into a war (for some unstated reason) makes perfect sense.
"Unstated reasons"? Are you joking? Huh, I wonder why on Earth Bush would want to have a military presence in a country flowing with oil in the Middle-east...
Or why he would choose to pursue an agenda that was the neo-cons' plan of action sine the late 90s. And let's not even talk about the influences he could've been submitted to by some of his sponsors, the people who fund him, lobbies, etc...
Come on. Unless, of course, you still think he went there to free people from a dictatorship. But, once again, surely you're not that naive.
Sure. But now you're just going with a "he said, she said" type of argument. You can speculate about what sort of "evil" motives where behind it all day long. At the end of the day, you have to repudiate the stated motives if you want to get anywhere. The US has very little interest in Iraqi oil one way or the other. If anything, you can use the oil argument far more effectively as an "evil" reason for most of the UN nations not wanting to do anything about Iraq.
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But believing that liberal activist groups will deliberately leak information to the press and then hype it in order to influence an election makes no sense at all.
They might well ahve done. But, once again, thats nothing new and thats how politics work. Swift Boat Veterans anyone?
Yeah. But there's a *huge* difference between a group of people coming out, saying who they are, and stating their version of an event, and groups of people who stay in the shadows, never revealing who they are or what their agenda is, getting their "message" out by leaking information to the press.
Can you see how one is open and honest while the other is secretive and dishonest? We know who the swift boat veterans are. We know exactly what they're saying. They aren't hiding behind anything. On the other hand, we have no idea who gathered up the emails and IM's about Foley. We have no idea who put them into the hands of ABC (and a couple other media sources, ABC just happened to be the first to run with the information). What we have is a political attack, with no "face" to respond to.
And that's been a common tactic used by the Left for quite some time now. And it's also very effective. How many times on this forum have I been blasted because I have to frame my arguments with regards to these sorts of issues against "Liberals" as a broad group? You know why I have to do that? Because in an alarmingly high number of cases, there is no single known organization or political group that's behind them. They're just "stories" that appear magically in the news and no one seems to know where the information came from.
The Foley IM's is just one in a long list of similarly performed attacks. Heck. How many of the things you assume to be true derived from just such methods? Where did you learn about the SWIFT banking tracking program? Where did you learn about the NSA wiretapping? Heck! Where did you get the idea that we invaded Iraq for the oil? All of those are arguments that you hold and that you (and many others) take to heart, assume are true, and base your arguments off of. But I'm betting that you can't actually tell me who articulated the arguement in the first place.
Isn't that just a bit suspicious? Doesn't it concern you even a little bit that so much of what you believe is passed on to you by unknown sources that seem unwilling to actually stand up and openly state who they are and why they believe what they're saying? Instead, we get second hand information, passed on through media leaks and op-ed pieces, that get read by people like you and given great weight purely because they support what you want to believe, regardless of any factual value behind them.
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It makes no sense for Hastert to have "covered up" Foley's actions if he actually thought they were that serious. None at all.
It makes complete sense. I'm not saying it did happen, simply because I dont know. But covering-up issues which are potentially damaging to your party's chance's of being re-elected is nothing new in politics.
No. It doesn't make any sense. If the assumption that Republicans "hate gays", and overreact to anything that might make them look like they aren't moral and virtuous folks was true, wouldn't Hastert have immediately reacted to Foley if he'd actually thought he was doing something horribly wrong?
There's no percentage in covering that up. If Hastert actually knew about the IM's or communication's similar to those, he'd have to know that other people knew about them as well. You can't cover up something that everyone knows. Thus, it makes no sense to assume that everyone (apparently only among the Republican leadership) knew about this, but magically assumed that no one else did, and chose to cover it up.
That really makes no sense. None at all. The only thing they knew was that Foley was gay, and that he flirted with a 16 year old male page. Period. That's not enough to make a big deal out of, and Hastert would have appeared as anti-gay if he had made a big deal out of it then. And that's not even considering that he was specifically asked by the 16 year old's family not to make a big deal out of it.
My issue isn't that there couldn't have been a cover up. My issue is over the way a cover up seems to be being assumed despite a marked lack of evidence for one. It's clear election year politics. Nothing more.
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Look, you're acting like an outraged virgin. Pretending politics is all cute and cuddly, that groups dont try to influence public opinion, that politicians would never do cover-ups or hide anything...
Except that it seems as though all of the most underhanded political nastiness is coming from the Left these days. I'm not "outraged" by this at all. More pointing out that the voting public at some point is going to realize just how underhanded the Left is being, and the more they keep using these kinds of tactics, the more likely they'll kill themselves this November.
They're trying too hard, and it's becoming really obvious that their agenda isn't about protecting people's freedoms, or protecting teens from predators, but is just about pushing any story that can be made to seem "bad" in front of the people to try to get them to *not* vote Republican. The kind of tactic they're using works only so long as the people actually believe your reasons for using them are "honest". They have to actually believe you're outraged about a Congressman taking advantage of the page program. They have to believe you're actually concerned about the privacy rights of the people. If you go to far with that sort of attack, people realize that it's not about those things, but just about making the attack. And at that point, you start losing support instead of gaining it. Oh. You'll look good in the polls, because those always show the knee-jerk reaction at work. But you lose at the actual election.
I'm just pointing out that this is something that has been obvious to me for quite some time. What's interesting is that many on the left seem to be oblivious to just how obvious it's becoming to more and more voters...