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mises
Joined: 05 Nov 2007
Location: retired
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 Posted: Sat Oct 25, 2008 1:33 pm Post subject: |
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| McCain palls around with George Bush and Obama will William A. I'll leave it to each of your individual bias to determine who has had a worse aggregate impact on human life and which relationship is more troubling. |
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On the other hand
Joined: 19 Apr 2003
Location: I walk along the avenue
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| Posted: Sat Oct 25, 2008 1:56 pm Post subject: |
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| mises wrote: |
| McCain palls around with George Bush and Obama will William A. I'll leave it to each of your individual bias to determine who has had a worse aggregate impact on human life and which relationship is more troubling. |
I take your point. But this argument can't really be presented by Democrats to the American electorate, since it amounts to saying that the president is equivalent to or worse than a known terrorist. Plus, a lot of Democrats supported and continue to support Bush's wars, so they'd also be indicting themselves as terrorists. |
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mises
Joined: 05 Nov 2007
Location: retired
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| Posted: Sat Oct 25, 2008 1:59 pm Post subject: |
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| No kiddin. |
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Gopher
Joined: 04 Jun 2005
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| Posted: Sat Oct 25, 2008 2:13 pm Post subject: |
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| On the other hand wrote: |
| ...it amounts to saying that... |
A more honest way of looking at this is that it forces people to self-consciously appraise how they construct and view the United States and especially the American govt -- especially in such polarized conditions as we now see prevailing in the discourse.
As a democratic society worth holding onto? As a positive force in world affairs?
As the imperialist aggressor? As the villain in world affairs?
If you tend to see America one way, then B. Obama's relationships with the Rev. J. Wright and W. Ayers likely concern you. If you tend to see America the other way, then J. McCain's relationship with W. Bush (as well as B. Obama's relationships with Z. Brzezinski and others in the foreign-affairs elite, but let us set that inconsistency aside for a moment) likely concern you.
Which one concerns you indicates where you stand on larger questions, then. |
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mises
Joined: 05 Nov 2007
Location: retired
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| Posted: Sat Oct 25, 2008 3:26 pm Post subject: |
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Or, we have the repubs demonizing Obama for working with a former terrorist who caused minimal damage and the reality being that McCain works with a guy who is responsible for the invasion of two nations, tens of thousands of civilians deaths and torture, including torture to death.
Choose your poison. But it has nothing to do with how the "US" is constructed. Sometimes one is worse than the other. I do not for a minute think that Obama agrees with B.A.'s violent actions, but I know for god damned sure that McCain agrees with the violent actions of Bush. |
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Kuros
Joined: 27 Apr 2004
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| Posted: Sat Oct 25, 2008 3:32 pm Post subject: |
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| mises wrote: |
Or, we have the repubs demonizing Obama for working with a former terrorist who caused minimal damage and the reality being that McCain works with a guy who is responsible for the invasion of two nations, tens of thousands of civilians deaths and torture, including torture to death.
Choose your poison. But it has nothing to do with how the "US" is constructed. Sometimes one is worse than the other. I do not for a minute think that Obama agrees with B.A.'s violent actions, but I know for god damned sure that McCain agrees with the violent actions of Bush. |
I think its time to take away your Andrew Sullivan privileges for awhile. You're adopting his penchant for self-important moral uber-righteousness. You've become the second person besides Sullivan who could get me to vote for McCain at this point. |
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Gopher
Joined: 04 Jun 2005
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| Posted: Sat Oct 25, 2008 3:37 pm Post subject: |
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| mises wrote: |
| Or, we have the repubs demonizing Obama... |
The Republican campaign has despereately overexploited the opportunities Wright and Ayers have presented for months now. They treated B. Obama unfairly and then when it started to get out of hand, they pulled back (and some moved away from J. McCain -- C. Powell and others). In retrospect, I hope moderate Republicans like me can better persuade the right-wing that this represents one of the major mistakes that this campaign committed in this election.
But they are right to express concern about the kinds of ideas Ayers expresses beginning at 1:29 into the video Five Eagles posted here. And this has everything to do with how people, especially people on the left, have constructed "the United States." "Poison," Mises, is a nice appropriate word here. How much of it has B. Obama taken in? This is not an unreasonable question.
Last edited by Gopher on Sat Oct 25, 2008 3:40 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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mises
Joined: 05 Nov 2007
Location: retired
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| Posted: Sat Oct 25, 2008 3:40 pm Post subject: |
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"Adopting"? Dude, that's been my thing since long before eslcafe and has nothing to do with Andrew Sullivan. Haven't you ever seen me righteously mouthing off about islam? Really?
All this William Ayers talk is, frankly speaking, stupid bullshit. George W. Bush is responsible for far more death, suffering and destruction than B.A. is. This is a mere fact. I don't like to mouth off to Americans, cause you all get it enough. But seriously. Time for the American "base" to grow the *beep* up. |
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Kuros
Joined: 27 Apr 2004
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| Posted: Sat Oct 25, 2008 3:52 pm Post subject: |
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| mises wrote: |
| "Adopting"? Dude, that's been my thing since long before eslcafe and has nothing to do with Andrew Sullivan. Haven't you ever seen me righteously mouthing off about islam? Really? |
Ha ha ha. Touche.
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| All this William Ayers talk is, frankly speaking, stupid bullshit. |
Yes. I agree. Stop right there . . .
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| George W. Bush is responsible for far more death, suffering and destruction than B.A. is. |
Oh, no. There you go.
First of all, your case against Bush for Afghanistan, if its the same as I've seen before, is full-stop retarded. Seriously.
Second of all, as dangerous and reckless as Bush has been, he's not fully responsible for all the death in Iraq. Gotta put a lot of that death at the feet of various Iraqi militant groups themselves.
| Quote: |
| This is a mere fact. I don't like to mouth off to Americans, cause you all get it enough. But seriously. Time for the American "base" to grow the *beep* up. |
Oh, gee. Yes, we're dainty little souls, we Americans. So sensitive. |
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mises
Joined: 05 Nov 2007
Location: retired
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| Posted: Sat Oct 25, 2008 4:01 pm Post subject: |
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The Afgan disagreement doesn't matter. Like so many others, time will tell. Like I've been saying from day one, and key Brit, NATO and other leaders are saying now, the nation can't be tamed. Anyways, no, Bush is not directly responsible for all death. But camon. Who didn't know that the country would explode into sectarian war? Bush didn't, for one. I did. He may not have pulled the trigger, or ordered every shot, but he's really the spark. Let's be honest.
But back to issue #1. The problem isn't how "leftists" or non-Americans construct America. The problem is how right-wing and centrist Americans construct America. My mother drunk or sober etc. This is the problem. |
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Kuros
Joined: 27 Apr 2004
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| Posted: Sat Oct 25, 2008 4:11 pm Post subject: |
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| mises wrote: |
| The problem is how . . . centrist Americans construct America. My mother drunk or sober etc. This is the problem. |
Centrist Americans? When was the last time you were here, dude? I know a lot of Centrist Americans and they do not buy into the mother drunk or sober line. |
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mises
Joined: 05 Nov 2007
Location: retired
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| Posted: Sat Oct 25, 2008 4:13 pm Post subject: |
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Yeah, maybe. Could be isolated to the right.
Anyways. The Ayers thing is stupid. |
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Kikomom
Joined: 24 Jun 2008
Location: them thar hills--Penna, USA--Zippy is my kid, the teacher in ROK. You can call me Kiko
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| Posted: Sat Oct 25, 2008 6:34 pm Post subject: |
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Raising the Specter of the '60s
by Gary Leupp | October 25, 2008 - 1:39pm
Like over 3000 other academics, I've signed the "Support Bill Ayers" statement defending Ayers from the desperate, opportunistic attacks of the McCain campaign. I think it important to combat the depiction of a distinguished scholar as a "terrorist" by the likes of Sarah Palin, whose ignorance and extremism terrify many. But I also think that the campaign might be doing us all a favor by drawing our attention to the 500 pound guerrilla in the room: the '60s.
Or more properly, the '60s and early '70s: that era shaped by an unpopular imperialist war and massive social movements demanding racial and gender equality. The antiwar and civil rights movements mobilized millions and influenced everybody. Without the gains of those years, arguably, a black man would not be leading in a presidential race today. The public would not reject the Iraq War as a wrong war based on lies but rather rally around the flag, trusting the leaders.
John McCain has built a political career on one episode in his life: his plane was shot down in October 1967 as he was bombing a power plant in a heavily populated area of Hanoi. (In 1995 the Vietnamese government estimated that two million North Vietnamese civilians died during the war, mainly due to such bombing.) His downed plane landed in Truc Bach Lake, and his life was saved by a Vietnamese civilian. The Vietnamese, realizing the McCain came from a distinguished military family, granted him special medical treatment although he had suffered no mortal injuries. He was held as a POW to 1973. During that time he publicly praised his captors for providing him "very good medical treatment." While he has claimed to be the victim of torture, and claimed his statements acknowledging war crimes were forced, he has also opposed the release of his government debriefing that might shed light on these subjects. He was reportedly bound by ropes, and subjected to beatings during his confinement. But no one has suggested he was terrorized by attack dogs, sexually humiliated, water boarded or subjected to the refined torture tactics used in Gitmo or Abu Ghraib. It is doubtful that his treatment would fit the Bush administration's current (very narrow) definition of torture.
Somehow McCain's been able to parlay this history into a reputation as a "war hero" whose faith in God and country kept him strong against his evil "gook" captors. This is the account the mainstream media accepts, as it accepts and promotes the idea that somehow McCain is "strong on national security." Up until recently polls showed the public generally buying this line, however logically inconsistent it may be with the general assessment of the Vietnam War as a "mistake" if not a crime. How can you be a "war hero" in a war that was so unheroic and so wrong?
Bill Ayers represents an era of widespread outrage at American imperialism, including in the U.S. itself�an era of deep division unparalleled since the Civil War. An era McCain and his right-wing fringe running-mate would like to forget or undo. They see nothing wrong in the Vietnam War except for a lack of will to win. The '60s "protesters" for them were a genus of traitors, whose very right to protest was somehow being defended by those bombing Hanoi. If the communists weren't stopped in Vietnam, they argued, they'd be invading the west Coast. Rational people see this argument as highly stupid now.
Three years after McCain was shot down over Hanoi while on that bombing mission, Ayers by his own admission participated in a bombing of a New York City police station, and went on to bomb the Capitol and Pentagon in the next two years. Each action came in response to a specific escalation of the Vietnam War. There were no casualties, and Ayers was never convicted of a crime. He denies that the bombings were acts of terrorism and points out instead that the war in Vietnam was a war of terror. (During this time, by the way, the 11 to 13 year old Obama was living in Indonesia and Hawai'i.)
Bill Ayers like many of his generation was a follower of Martin Luther King before joining the SDS then some of its spin-offs which (like many in the New Left) parted company with the doctrinaire non-violence they perceived as ineffectual. But consider his background. While studying at the University of Michigan in 1965, he joined a picket line protesting an Ann Arbor pizzeria's policy of refusing service to African-Americans. (18 years later, when I studied at UM, such racist exclusion was unimaginable. How the world had changed because of people like Ayers!) He participated in a draft board sit-in, punished by 10 days in jail. He worked in progressive childhood education. These are the kind of rebellious activities that enraged the white supremacists (then far more respectable and mainstream than now), the knee-jerk anticommunists, the reactionaries terrified by rock 'n roll and the youth counterculture. But what's there to damn here, for those who aren't misled by a washed-up generation of racist uptight bigots?
People over 50 remember that period very well, and many much younger people view it with envy and fascination. After all, today's youth listen to the Beatles, Stones, Doors, Jefferson Airplane and Grateful Dead, considering them their own. (We in the '60s rarely listened to the music of the '20s, '30s and '40s.) College students flock to courses on the '60s, viewing that decade as one of turmoil, excitement, and progressive change. The verdict's in: the war was wrong, segregation and all racism was wrong, sexism and homophobia were wrong�and the limited social progress as we've seen since the '60s is largely rooted in the tireless efforts of the activists of that decade. The '60s were good!
But McCain doesn't see it that way. Nor does Sarah Palin. She of course is 44 years old, but obviously atypical of her generation. There's no reason you can't be the popular governor of a state of 676,987 while expressing contempt for such '60s fixtures as "community organizers," sexual liberation and the questioning of wars of aggression. Palin, the lipstick-painted pit-bull, has chosen to attack Ayers as a "terrorist" decades after the demise of the Weather Underground, after he's become a Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and received a Citizen of the Year award (1997) from the city of Chicago for his work on education reform. Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley (son of the infamous Mayor Daley who ordered the police attack on antiwar protesters at the Democratic Convention in 1968), who regularly consults Ayers on school issues, says: "He's done a lot of good in this city and nationally." But for Palin, he's a terrorist, present-tense.
Now, no honest person can actually suggest that Obama's association with Ayers, dating from 1995 when Ayers hosted a fund-raising event for Obama in his living room and including service on the board of the philanthropic Woods Fund of Chicago (along with several Republican business executives from 2001) constitutes "palling around with terrorists." Journalists from a variety of publications have concluded that Obama had at most a friendly casual acquaintance with a man he knew as a liberal activist. Even "palling around with former terrorists" would be a dubious charge, but that qualifier would weaken the McCain-Palin smear-job effort so Ayer and his wife Bernadine Dohrn become, for campaign purposes, lifetime terrorists
McCain and Palin say "we need to know the full extent" of the Obama-Ayers "relationship"�so we can know if Obama "is telling the truth to the American people or not." The fact is, of course, that the politically careful Obama has steered clear of Ayers since January 2005 when he took his Senate seat. So what do they want to know? How many times the two men met on the street in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood, where both live? How many times Obama visited Ayers' house? Do we need to know the content of their conversations?
Obviously with her "palling around with terrorists" remark Palin wants to set voters' imaginations working. What does she want them to imagine? Obama patting Ayers on the back, saying "Good job on that Pentagon bombing, Bill"? Maybe. Recall the famous July 21, 2008 New Yorker cover, showing Obama in Muslim dress, fist-bumping Michelle sporting an Afro and AK-47, American flag burning in the fireplace, Osama bin Laden picture on the wall. It was "satire" supposedly, but in a country where 11% believe Obama is a Muslim (Newsweek poll, May 2008), and one-third believe U.S. Muslims are sympathetic to al-Qaeda (USA/Gallop August 2006) that sort of image, and Palin's kind of language, can be poisonous.
"This is not a man who sees America as you see it and how I see America," Palin declared earlier this month to a select crowd of people who in her words "see America as the greatest force for good in this world� [a] beacon of light and hope for others who seek freedom and democracy�" (Has she read the international polls about how this country is really perceived nowadays?)
Maybe, in fact, Obama doesn't see America precisely as she does; he seems, after all, more aware of the real world in general. Unfortunately, with his plans to escalate the hopeless counterinsurgency war in Afghanistan, provoke further confrontation along the border with Pakistan, and support the strike on Iran favored by his top Middle East advisor and the Israel Lobby, he sees America all too much as do McCain and Palin: through the eyes of an imperialist.
His campaign ads make clear, lest anyone might doubt, that Bill Ayers will have no role in his administration. Colin Powell, on the other hand, might. This is the Colin Powell who, as an Army Major in 1968, six months after the My Lai Massacre charged with investigating charges of U.S. atrocities in Vietnam, dismissed them blithely declaring "relations between American soldiers and the Vietnamese people are excellent." That was his '60s, as McCain's '60s were his glory days bombing those Vietnamese people.
For many of us, the antiwar movement of that time remains a cherished memory. So too the Freedom Rides, the marches on Washington. The counterculture. The Stonewall Riots of June 1969. That groundswell of necessary rebellion in this country that dovetailed with the near-revolutionary upsurge in Europe in 1968 and even the Cultural Revolution in China. Those '60s�emblematic of all the subsequent challenges to mandatory "patriotism," butt-headed religiosity, attacks upon science, criminalization of inner-city youth under the guise of the "War on Drugs," resurgent assaults on women's rights�is the real focus of the attack on Ayers, and through him on Obama.
What sort of political operative sits behind a desk, weighing options, decides, "Ok, let's go with this Ayers thing?" The sort of operative who imagines that the base can best be energized by a frontal attack on the '60s. The sort of Rovian manipulator who calculates that the ideal simple-minded voter seeing Atta in Ayers will see Osama in Obama. If one can exploit Islamophobia to conflate al-Qaeda with Iraq with Yassir Arafat with Hizbollah, one can exploit the lingering Republican bitterness at the '60s and revolutionary possibilities that era represents to confer an aura of radicalism around the Democratic presidential candidate.
He surely doesn't deserve it. But neither does he necessarily suffer from it. For many of us, the '60s were and remain a time of youthful exuberance and idealism, sincere questioning of received wisdom, righteous resistance to obvious lies, institutional racism and vicious immoral war. By all means, Ms. Palin, raise that specter, and see what good it does you!
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/18207
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Tiger Beer
Joined: 07 Feb 2003
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| Posted: Sat Oct 25, 2008 8:38 pm Post subject: |
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Actually, the more I read about BILL AYERS, the more I like him.
He's about EDUCATION and EDUCATION REFORM. A professor and expert in the field, with a career spanning 30+ years of it.
WE NEED PEOPLE LIKE THAT IN AMERICA.
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If you are FOR Education and Education Reform...then you shouldn't be calling the national leaders of Education as terrorists (in the present tense).
Anyways, we all know this 'associate game'. Label one person a word that sounds like he has muslim garb and a long beard...then try to associate Obama with someone with that image in your head...and voters who aren't too bright, and don't research anything, hear that 'associative' word, and...well, y'know. |
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The Hammer
Joined: 18 Jan 2003
Location: Ullungdo 37.5 N, 130.9 E, altitude : 223 m
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| Posted: Sat Oct 25, 2008 9:13 pm Post subject: |
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| Gopher wrote: |
| On the other hand wrote: |
| ...it amounts to saying that... |
A more honest way of looking at this (Haha! ) is that it forces people to self-consciously appraise how they construct and view the United States and especially the American govt -- especially in such polarized conditions as we now see prevailing in the discourse.
As a democratic society worth holding onto? As a positive force in world affairs?
As the imperialist aggressor? As the villain in world affairs?
If you tend to see America one way, then B. Obama's relationships with the Rev. J. Wright and W. Ayers likely concern you. If you tend to see America the other way, then J. McCain's relationship with W. Bush (as well as B. Obama's relationships with Z. Brzezinski and others in the foreign-affairs elite, but let us set that inconsistency aside for a moment) likely concern you.
Which one concerns you indicates where you stand on larger questions, then. |
The informal fallacy of false dilemma (also called false dichotomy, the either-or fallacy, or bifurcation) involves a situation in which only two alternatives are considered, when in fact there are other options. Closely related are failing to consider a range of options and the tendency to think in extremes, called black-and-white thinking. Strictly speaking, the prefix "di" in "dilemma" means "two". When a list of more than two choices are offered, but there are other choices not mentioned, then the fallacy is called the fallacy of false choice. |
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