Popinjay vs wideboy

[mears]

are you completely barking? I loathe GG, and eagerly look forward to WESPECK's demise - but Hitchens - like his bruv - is a laughable, washed-up old soak.
And yes, COUNTLESS people have articulated a response to saddam
10 sanctions
2) UN monitoring
3) support for democratic opposition groups
4) not arming him in the first place
-and if you missed any or all of that, you shouldn't be let near a PC

What a joke. Is that supplying opposition groups with arms, or money to buy proganda leaflets? If its the former you are encouraging civil war if its the later these groups would get their throats slit by Saddam's thugs. So which is it?
Ten sanctions?

You don't have a clue

 

[FridgeMagnet]

Bush debated well against Kerry.

transcripts: http://www.debates.org/pages/debtrans.html

Not very well in my memory, though it certainly wasn't the walkover that it was expected to be. Having said that, I'm not Bush's intended audience.

 

[nino_savatte]

What a joke. Is that supplying opposition groups with arms, or money to buy proganda leaflets? If its the former you are encouraging civil war if its the later these groups would get their throats slit by Saddam's thugs. So which is it?
Ten sanctions?

You don't have a clue

No, matey, it is you who has no clue. You come here and you troll; you have no intention of discussing or debating issues with anyone. Indeed, if you can't 'win' an argument you fall back on all the usual tricks such as "What would you do?" or "What do you believe in"? Despite your insistence that you believe in something, I would suggest that all you believe in is money. Beyond that you have neither morals nor the intellectual capacity for understanding, tolerance or anything that doesn't fit into your weird Randist framework.

 

[flimsier]

The ISR in America is sponsoring the tour. This is a publication of the ISO, which was "famously" expelled from the IST by the SWP and the other members of the IST.

Ahmed Shawki of the ISO is even speaking with him.

I wonder if the SWP are happy about that!

 

[kyser_soze]

Not very well in my memory, though it certainly wasn't the walkover that it was expected to be. Having said that, I'm not Bush's intended audience.

What is interesting, and is mentioned in 'The Bush Dyslexicon', and I noticed that he's far more comfortable talking, and far more lucid, when he doesn't have to stand in front of people/audiences. His radio broadcast sounded authoritative, well versed and it flowed in a way I hadn't thought possible for him.

 

[KeyboardJockey]

Bollocks snipped QUOTE]


Fuck me the toilets must be blocked again I can smell rancid shit from Mears direction.

 

[Gavin Bl]

Ahmed Shawki of the ISO is even speaking with him.

He can strut about too, mind (though he can be a very enjoyable speaker too) - Shawki, Galloway and Hitchens on the same platform. They'll surely collapse into a tiny superdense blob of ego, sucking the universe in behind them.

It'll be a car crash - but ya gotta watch.

 

[flimsier]

Not in the debate. On his speaking tour.

 

[Pickman's model]

[/url]

Sorry, but you did ask (nb click on the image).

doesn't galloway look increasingly like quint out of jaws?

 

[FridgeMagnet]

What is interesting, and is mentioned in 'The Bush Dyslexicon', and I noticed that he's far more comfortable talking, and far more lucid, when he doesn't have to stand in front of people/audiences. His radio broadcast sounded authoritative, well versed and it flowed in a way I hadn't thought possible for him.

Well, that's not too surprising; it's not like he writes the stuff himself. It's just when he has to answer himself rather than deliver talking points that he has problems e.g. press conferences, of which he gives almost none after his last appalling debacle.

He's also quite good in off-the-cuff chat I believe. You don't get to be president unless you are though, it's one of the required skills in schmoozing.

 

[phildwyer]

well, he changed following 9/11, iirr. One can kind of understand his desire to help 'get' Al Qaida - he knew people in the twin towers - but the extent to which he has become a complete bushbot is astounding!

And terrible, because phildwyer is utterly wrong to say he was a 'contrarian' - he was a bloody good writer, with a largely consistent set of interests. His books on (evil step) Mother Theresa & that bastard kissinger

Well, I knew people in the twin towers, and I didn't become a Bushbot. And Hitchens did write a book called Advice to A Young Contrarian. And his Mother Theresa stuff was clearly calculated to cause as much outrage as possible, as is most of his writing. Having got bored with outraging the right, he started outraging liberals instead. I am thinking of placing a bet on his conversion to fundamentalist Christianity within the decade. Galloway will wipe the floor with him, not because he's a better debater, but because he's so clearly *right.*

 

[oi2002]

What a joke. Is that supplying opposition groups with arms, or money to buy proganda leaflets? If its the former you are encouraging civil war if its the later these groups would get their throats slit by Saddam's thugs. So which is it?
Ten sanctions?

You don't have a clue

You are entirely right that George had no problem with Saddams regime.

I'm not quite getting why you still think Saddam was the nub of the problem in the ME. We now know he was a very minor threat. He's gone and the whole Arab world and our oil supplies look far closer to whooshing down the toilet than it did when his tinpot regime was clinging onto power.

 

[Streathamite]

Ten sanctions?

was a misprint - as is painfully and pitifully evident to anyone with intellectual HP in excess of a particularly backward snail.

What a joke. Is that supplying opposition groups with arms, or money to buy proganda leaflets? If its the former you are encouraging civil war if its the later these groups would get their throats slit by Saddam's thugs. So which is it?

err....you mean like there HASN'T been a raging insurgency in Iraq for the whole of the past year?
and it is also embarrassingly evident that the answer to the question of 'what type of support is....

wait for it....

....kinda dependent on what support the opposition groupings ask for!

and here's the other solution to Iraq's problems.....

....one that would be supported by any genuine believer in self-determination...

....or anti-colonialism

....or indeed freedom....

.....none of which you believe in, as you are too convinced it is the USA's divine right to walk into any nation whose govt it disapproves of, and take over control.....

......which is global fascism, but ne'er mind.....


....here it comes....


...do nothing.
don't support evil dictators.
don't arm them.
Don't force them to invade nations with other regimes
Leave it to each nation's people to bring down or sustain each regime.
And only invade that country when it is a threat to you that cannot otherwise be dealt with.
Above all, wake up to the fact that the rest of the world is NOT thirsting for you to tell them how to run their countries.
And never has.
And can I take it by your lack of comment, that you agree with me about that drunken buffoon Hitchens?

 

[Streathamite]

One further Q to Mears; why do you believe the USA has the freedom to invade other nations on ideological grounds, when you'd not extend this 'friddum' to anyone else?

 

[FridgeMagnet]

...and you lot are attempting to debate with mears because...?

 

[Streathamite]

....in the vain, faint hope that chink of light may permeate the yawning morass between his ears

 

[sihhi]

well, he changed following 9/11, iirr. One can kind of understand his desire to help 'get' Al Qaida - he knew people in the twin towers - but the extent to which he has become a complete bushbot is astounding!

And terrible, because phildwyer is utterly wrong to say he was a 'contrarian' - he was a bloody good writer, with a largely consistent set of interests. His books on (evil step) Mother Theresa & that bastard kissinger

No- by his own admission he changed on 14 February 1989 and then decisively in 1990 over the Yugoslavian civil war:-

The realisation that American power could and should be used for the defense of pluralism and as a punishment for fascism came to me in Sarajevo a year or two later.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=11241

Re Contrarianism: His articles in the 1980s focused on among other things- support for cutting abortion funding on the grounds that it was poor babies being killed, that abortion would be impossible in socialist society (then later in the 1990s he attacked Mother Teresa for anti-abortionism), declaring at one Christophet Colombus was the first great American

Alex Cockburn sums him up:-

What a truly disgusting sack of shit Hitchens is. A guy who called Sid Blumenthal one of his best friends and then tried to have him thrown into prison for perjury; a guy who waited till his friend Edward Said was on his death bed before attacking him in the Atlantic Monthly; a guy who knows perfectly well the role Israel plays in US policy but who does not scruple to flail Cindy Sheehan as a LaRouchie and anti-Semite because she dared mention the word Israel.

 

[belboid]

No- by his own admission he changed on 14 February 1989 and then decisively in 1990 over the Yugoslavian civil war:-


http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=11241

interesting article - tho he didnt really do much about 'promoting' his 'new' views until substantially later (as the Cockburn quote implies) . Possibly a bit of post-facto self-justification going on.

 

[Streathamite]

I'm not quite getting why you still think Saddam was the nub of the problem in the ME. We now know he was a very minor threat. He's gone and the whole Arab world and our oil supplies look far closer to whooshing down the toilet than it did when his tinpot regime was clinging onto power.

I'll tell you why....cos bushbot command central told them all to think that way.
yee-hah!

 

[TeeJay]

Not very well in my memory, though it certainly wasn't the walkover that it was expected to be. Having said that, I'm not Bush's intended audience.

He did less well in the first debate but overall he was less wooden, more engaging and more likeable than Kerry. He also engaged well with what Kerry said and seemed to understand all the issues that were raised. The supposedly 'intellectual' Kerry certainly didn't wipe the floor with him in terms of ideas and talking about policy - in fact at times Kerry seemed flakey and confused in comparison.

I don't support Bush or the Republicans, but focussing on his apparent near 'dyslexica' (in terms of grammar etc) is a poor substitute for pointing out policy failures. In fact his 'down to earth'/blokeish persona makes him *more* attractive to a lot of average Americans rather than less so - probably in the same way as many people probably like John Prescott despite his similar inability to form long, coherent sentences, and trust him more than the silver-tongued Mandelson's of this world.

 

[TeeJay]

....kinda dependent on what support the opposition groupings ask for!

What kind of support were they asking for? For example what were the Kurds asking for? Or the Shias or the marsh arabs? As this is your proposed policy I assume that you have some idea.

 

[TeeJay]

do nothing.
don't support evil dictators.
don't arm them.
Don't force them to invade nations with other regimes
Leave it to each nation's people to bring down or sustain each regime.
And only invade that country when it is a threat to you that cannot otherwise be dealt with.

Isolationism?
Peace in our time?
Stand by and watch people be slaughtered and oppressed?

What kind of moral basis does this rest on? Some kind of fetish for the divine right of national borders? The idea that nationalism and national sovereignty is some kind of absolute that trumps all other considerations of human rights and human welfare?

Even in pragmatic and self-interested terms the idea that you should let dictators run amok right up to the point they arrive on your own borders is a bad idea in any case (and would require leaving NATO and a host of other defence pacts - btw are you in favour of leaving NATO?).

 

[flimsier]

What kind of support were they asking for? For example what were the Kurds asking for? Or the Shias or the marsh arabs? As this is your proposed policy I assume that you have some idea.

Why would that mean he has some idea?

I favour democracy. Doesn't mean I know who or what is going to be voted for.

 

[sihhi]

interesting article - tho he didnt really do much about 'promoting' his 'new' views until substantially later (as the Cockburn quote implies) . Possibly a bit of post-facto self-justification going on.

Yes it is important to note that fr instance he called Clinton's air raids on Sudan 1998 a "war crime".
In the Clinton period he attacked Clinton for his actions Re MonicaLewinsky, attacked the raids on Sudan (and Afghanistan iirc) which he saw as an attempt by Clinton to divert media attention from the Lewinsky affair but then supported Clinton and NATO's bombardment of Serbia.

Well Cockburn and him were very close friends and they fell out totally over the NATO campaign. Cockburn probably feels an element of personal betrayal in Hitchen's writings where Hitchens savages former comrades. As a result Cockburn began to return the favour to Hitchens especially after 2003 and Said's death.

Hitchens typically likes to parade himself as a "victim" of the American left's ad hominem attitudes when in fact he cleverly goaded the American left to attacking him personally by attacking former friends personally first.

 

[rebel warrior]

It'd almost be worth the air fare to see GG rip a slice out of Hitchens. Does anyone know whether it will be streamed over the internet?

Ive found this but I don't know what time...

http://kpftx.org/

 

[TeeJay]

He is saying that it would have been a better policy to take towards Saddam - a concrete foreign policy issue from the past about which he has information. If he is arguing that this would have been better then surely he has some kind of basis on which to make this claim? I'll let RJ answer for himself however rather than asking you to give his version of what he means, seeing as I am interested in what he think about this, rather than what you think he thinks (IYSWIM).

 

[gurrier]

Ive found this but I don't know what time...

http://kpftx.org/

http://www.indymedia.ie/newswire.php?story_id=71961

 

[X-77]

will be able to listen and watch this on Democracy Now:

http://www.democracynow.org/

Can't wait!!!!

 

[rebel warrior]

About to start in a bit...

 

[flimsier]

I shoujld have had broadband!