I take pride in not being a party-line blogger, but this blatant display of partisanship calls for a balancing post, and since his is a contest, so is mine. Ted wants to find the best example of the looney left in the nation. I'll settle for the most ridiculous GOP moment in Iowa in 2006.
The nominees:
1) Ted Sporer implies historical evidence likening the current war in Iraq to WWII. After I said this:
This isn't World War II. There's no clear-cut need to be in Iraq right now. And anyone who compares the two needs to be beaten with the history books they obviously haven't read.
Sporer responded with this:
I won't have time until Sunday to pursue this debate-but brother we are going to talk history books on this one, and you aren't going to like it.
2) Steve King compares citizens of a neighboring nation to cattle. From a speech on the House floor on "the fence:"
"We could also electrify this wire with the kind of current that would not kill somebody, but it would be a discouragement. ... We do that with livestock all the time"
3) Steve King says Washington, DC is more dangerous than Iraq. June 12:
Well I by now have a feel for the rhythm of this place called Washington, D.C., and my wife lives here with me, and I can tell you, Mr. Speaker, she’s at far greater risk being a civilian in Washington, D.C. than an average civilian in Iraq.
It turns out the actual statistics show 2.5 times more murders annually in Iraq. And I'm betting not every Iraqi death gets reported.
4) Jeff Lamberti the Congressional candidate vows to cut federal spending, but Jeff Lamberti the State Senator gives hundreds of thousands of state dollars to Rock in Prevention and Excel.
5) Jeff Lamberti blames Leonard Boswell for expanding federal deficits while Jim Nussle, Chair of the House Finance Committee, is running for governor of his state. An unconfirmed phone conversation from the next day: I'm sorry, Congressman Nussle, were those your toes I stomped on?
6) Secretary of State: A podiatrist beats a former federal prosecutor in the primary, then decides not to run anyway, forcing the Republicans to scramble for a month, then bring back a former Iowan from Washington DC to fill the spot on the ballot.
7) Republicans in the Iowa Legislature halt efforts to raise the minimum wage, cap interest rates on car title loans and raise the cigarette tax. At the same time, huge donation checks just keep pouring in. Purely coincidental, I'm sure.
8) The Republican Party state convention. More specifically, the ratification of the party platform. Check it out if you missed it. Where else can you find the promotion of xenophobia, homophobia, hog confinements, standardized test-based education, the elimination of no-fault divorce, increasing prison capacity, and end to separation of church and state, "the fence," and ending the protection of porcupines all in one place?
Here's the poll:
I'm sure I missed some. Feel free to write-in vote in the comments.
KL
6 comments:
Ted Sporer didn't say he was going to compare the Iraq occupation to WWII--just that he was going to "talk history books".
Maybe he'll write about WWII, but he could discuss other historical examples too.
I assume he won't blame Pearl Harbor or the Holocaust on Clinton.
An honorable mention should be Sporer ending a post from Aug. 30th with these words, "Rumsfeld is the biggest stud in America!
EMPOWER YOURSELF
VOTE REPUBLICAN"
If you vote Republican aren't you doing the opposite of empowering yourself?
Madman-I'm already winning. The Global War on Terror is WW3, I don't know why we don't call it for what it is.
I'm up in Jefferson protecting the right of self empowerment in Court right now and Saturday the Hawks feast on Cyclone meat (which tastes a lot like turtle)and my true love will be expressed in a preppy black polo shirt and my most lucky Old School Herky.
But Sunday-we're talking history and, although you won't admit publicly, I will persuade you to get on board and help unite the people behind the real need to prosecute this vile war a lot harder so we get over with faster and get back to worrying about school and housing choice, literacy, hope, growth and opportunity-the essential ingredients of self empowerment (although a real good lawyer can help push that job along as well).
Sunday, I'll be your huckleberry.
Like Cindy Sheehan, I too want to go back in history to when I was 21 and then go 14 more years further back and intereact with a future president, and have the 21 year old Ted party in New Haven with the 21 year old Bill.
Party on Hawkeye Dudes!
Iraq isn't WW3, it is just a battlefront, like the "Russian Front" in WW2 in a much larger war.
Like the Russian Front, the Iraq part of the war is going to take a fairly long time. The Axis Allied casualites on the Eastern Front totalled something like 30 million. But the winner on the Eastern Front was probably going to win the larger war. Had the Nazis won, they would have had a far more powerful military industrial complex and they could have imposed their totalitarian vision on the rest of the world, certainly a much larger part of it. So as much as those 30 million casualties were horrific they certainly were preferrable to the Nazi occupation of a large part of the Soviet Union and all that came with it-which would have meant organized extermination on literally unimagineable scales.
Bush has pretty much identified what we would happen if we lose in Iraq-and he is right on point-so I won't repeat it, but the principle is the same. No one made the Islamofascist world pour into Iraq because we toppled Saddam, they chose this battlefield. Better for us because the situation favors us. What we need is a unity so that the various savages that we are fighting in Iraq understand that they cannot win by wearing us down.
My complaint is that we are not using maximum force to the enemy so as to win the war as quickly as possible. We should have marshalled a much larger ground force, actually occupied Iraq like we did in Germany and Japan, and create the new society that the world requires in the Middle East and already have moved on to Iran.
This isn't war mongering, it is war waging. The war has been going on since at least '79 and we are just now starting to fight back.
History teaches that wars only end when one side submits and stops fighting. The Franco Prussian War of 1870, WW1 and WW2 were really just one long war interrupted by two periods of rest and false peace while the losers got ready for the next round. That all ended with WW2 'cause we literally kick the living shit out of our enemies-killed 'em by the millions, destroyed their cities and politically converted their societies into relatively peaceful, almost too peaceful, societies. That is what we have now, until Islamfascism and, especially its Jihadist medievel element.
How am I wrong?
Sporer,
I'll try to be brief.
The connection between the War on Terror and the Iraq War is like the connection between the fight to get rid of stray dogs and a puppy mill. If your goal is to catch as many stray dogs as possible, go ahead and start a puppy mill - and then release all the dogs. You'll be catching a lot of dogs. Sadly, you are not doing anything to solve the original problem.
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