Last week, I brought up a really stupid “survey” one leftist whacko cooked up in his fried little brain to “test” the depths of their support. I turned it around, taking an almost-as-hyperbolic hypothetical situation and asked anti-Bush readers to answer that one.
In the comments, though, they wouldn’t take the bait. But a couple of them in particular proved my point in their refusal. jreid (mentioned earlier today and No Exit both exhibited the frothing moonbat mentality in fine fettle. In fact, No Exit so captured the lunacy, his remarks ought to be printed out and saved in the Smithsonian as an examplar of the species.
But one recurring theme was that the Bush backers (like me, presumably) are mindless automatons, unthinking, willing puppets who just voice their support regardless of whatever he does, and defend his decisions, policies, and actions without any thought for themselves.
This is a load of crap, and sheerest projection. As Synova pointed out, Bush supporters tend to be far more issue-oriented than focusing on the individual. It’s the Left that automatically denounces and gainsays Bush.
You want proof? Fine. Let’s do a little compare and contrast.
A few months ago, Bush nominated Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court. At that time, a lot of his traditional base differed with him — and quite vocally, to the point where he had to withdraw her and replace her with Samuel Alito. I was one of those voices. Also, when I endorsed Bush for re-election, I specifically cited several instances where I disagreed with his positions.
So, let’s see how things are on the other foot. I challenge liberal bloggers to go back and find a single posting where they — no matter how reluctantly — supported a single Bush policy, decision, statement, or action. If you don’t have a blog of your own, go poking through the archives of some of the bigger left-lurching blogs and find one there. Kos, Atrios, TPM, Cousin Oliver Willis — find ONE INSTANCE where they didn’t just mindlessly oppose Bush.
I’m betting you won’t.
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B Moe
LOL, yeah, I think he got most of the credits right, anyway.
You’re supporting my argument here. Instead of specifically refuting anything, you simply dismiss the entire argument. Thinking back on the Rather documents, the right blogosphere jumped all over the opportunity to disprove them. I don’t seem to remember any such thing happening with F911. The way it seems to me, some things could have been refuted, but not all, and those things that could not be disproven would have come back to hurt Bush. So instead, he ignored the whole thing and most right wingers followed obediently as they’re trained to.
OK, Sean, you want specifics on Moore? How about this list?
J.
Sean
I wasn’t setting up strawmen. One cannot talk about poverty “generally” in any meaningful way without taking into account the individuals and how they live. You seem to be looking at “location” poverty from the outside — that somehow the individuals in that location have poverty imposed upon them. I see individuals in a location marked by general poverty for a myriad of reasons, only with a minority of the people in that local “locked in” for the duration of their lives. And of the “locked in” portion, many of them are their due to their own choices.
Tell me, do you or do you not continue feeding alcohol to an alcoholic? And when an alcoholic falls off the wagon, who is responsible?
When someone pulls stickups for a living and then can’t get a high paying job after jail, who is responsible?
sean nyc/aa,
What did the Swifties say–200 of them–that was a lie?
typos — “in that local” should be “in that locale”
“many of them are their” should be “many of them are there”
sean nyc/aa:
I don’t seem to remember any such thing (in disproving the movie) happening with F911. Parens. mine.
Oh, you don’t? Here let’s go for a little trip across the Internet, shall we?
Try reading for starters. Moore is picked apart, frame by frame, in everything from ‘Roger & Me’ to ‘Bowling’ to his ultimate masterpiece in true deception and propaganda, Fahrenheit 9/11.
If reading’s not your thing, try a movie about the specific lies of F911. You can also try http://www.moorewatch.com, though I’m having trouble connecting to it today.
“Some things refuted”? You mean, like the really important “some things” that manipulated his whipped his audience into hatred for Bush? “Some things” like staged news stories, faked headlines and timelines of events, editing trickery, doctoring quotes via sound mixing, misrepresentation of facts, baseless and unproven assertions and on and on and on.
But don’t believe me, go read and see it for yourself. If you dare…
Someone murdered Vince Foster……….
Hmmm.
1. A prime example of how values and behavior affects wealth generation and retention are those who win large jackpot lotteries, and yet who end up bankrupt. The issue for these people isn’t that they don’t have money, which as lottery winners they do by definition, but that their values and behaviors simply are not oriented towards preserving that wealth.
Hope you understand.
2. As yet nobody on the left has come forward to explain that 6 year discrepency between actual discharge and awarding of the Honorable Discharge.
3. Why do I assert that values and behaviors important to the generation and retention of wealth? Because I’ve lived that life. I grew up poor in a very rural part of New Hampshire with an alcoholic father. Didn’t graduate high school, ended up as a USMC infantryman, did some oddball jobs. Then I decided that I’d go back to doing something that I loved since I was a kid, programming computers, and went and started doing that.
I’ve done well for myself ever since, well aside from a pretty awful chronic illness. Yet with that background I should probably be a basketcase. Yet I’m not. Why not? Because I choose to not be a basketcase. I made that choice and every day I continue to make that choice.
It’s about values you know.
4.
Are you actually trying to assert that congress would never do anything independent of the President? That Democrats would never do anything independent of the President?
Go ahead. Pull the other one.
5.
Sorry but that’s incorrect. Kerry has *never* fully addressed the issues brought forth by the Swift Boat Veterans nd he continues to duck those issues to this day. For one thing, and I’m dying to know more about this, Kerry hasn’t ever come clean about his gun-running trips to the Khmer Rouge 4 years prior to their creation whilst violating Cambodia border security during Christmas in 1969 and ferrying secret CIA missions involving a guy with a “magic” bonnie hat.
You really believe that nonsense? You go right ahead. But Kerry is on record talking about all of that bullcrap.
6.
Thank you. I know this is heartfelt.
7.
*shrug* what statement?
That was the entirety of your “statement” concerning Ken Lay. Frankly I ignored it as both inconsequential and rather more of a rhetorical ploy than anything else. If you’ve actually got something to write about Ken Lay then do so. But if you think I’m going to respond to every oddball half-sentence you care to toss out, then you’re sadly delusional.
And while we’re on this subject. I’ve written quite a few things that you haven’t addressed. And none of those were half-sentences either. In fact I specifically requested that you respond in detail.
Yet another pathetic dodge there “gloria”.
Jaytea, it is on the old version of my blog that is no longer online (I was using either blogger or movabletype at the time), right when NCLB passed (when Bush actually worked with the loathed Ted Kennedy on it). But I supported it and still do – I just don’t like the systematic underfunding of it, and its about the only Bush policy I do support.
You guys aren’t being fair. SOME of F911 was DEFINITELY factual, as I am sure some kid somewhere flew a kite in Iraq before we showed Saddam why he shouldn’t be shooting at our pilots.
Also, the President does enjoy a good game of golf now and then….
I think that about sums up the accuracies in the movie.
I went through and read the whole list JT linked to, quite comprehensive. There were 59 “deceits”, so I won’t address all of them, but here’s a few.
Most of them are deceits of what Michael Moore specifically says, which are undoubtedly deceits. But I could probably go through a large number of Bush quotes (or Cheney) and find evidence disputing those statements as well. That is to be expected from any partisan figure, and Moore is known to be partisan.
Secondly, some of the proof used to refute Moore is quotes from other partisan figures. Ex: Hitchens (whom he cites several times) rhetorically asks,
why did Moore’s evil Saudis not join “the Coalition of the Willing”? Why instead did they force the United States to switch its regional military headquarters to Qatar? If the Bush family and the al-Saud dynasty live in each other’s pockets…then how come the most reactionary regime in the region has been powerless to stop Bush from demolishing its clone in Kabul and its buffer regime in Baghdad? The Saudis hate, as they did in 1991, the idea that Iraq’s recuperated oil industry might challenge their[s]….They fear the liberation of the Shiite Muslims they so despise. To make these elementary points is to collapse the whole pathetic edifice of the film’s “theory.”
I have several reasons which dispute Hitchens quote. Why should the Saudis care about Kabul? I highly doubt they were getting any kind of aid from or that there was any economic incentive for that gov’t to stay in power. They had no significant power in the region to assist against Iran. Moving the military ops is quite an easy answer. No Muslim country wants the US to launch an attack on another Muslim country from its soil. Moving out of SA benefits the Saudi govt by keeping its population slightly happier. And as far as oil competition, look at oil prices. Did the war help or hurt the Saudi bank account?
All I’m trying to say is that Moore certainly is no saint, but that doesn’t mean everything he says is untrue. Much of it may be, but the Bush/Bath/bin Laden triangle (despite the site’s reference) is still very suspicious. And the image of the Cong. Black Caucus being denied a voice when the electoral votes where being counted is very disturbing. And the approval of the Patriot Act (which even the site says is accurate) w/o question is troubling. And the influence of Saudi Arabia on American policy/economy. And then there is the WMD and al qaeda connection which we can argue about all day. All of these are worthy of discussion which Moore was trying to bring into the spotlight.
Maybe the swift boaters were trying to do the same thing, but their claims are about one man, unlike Moore’s which mostly address US policy on a whole.
‘if you are not with us you are against us’
this is debate in the 21st century