Cliff LyonDon’t “Take MY Word for It”
Long weary of having to defend my opinions, I have always told the staunchest Bush supporters — often the most uninformed — “Don’t take my word for it. Go seek the truth for yourself.”
To that end, one should be particularly sensitive to the integrity of the person delivering the information (and their motives). Find the smartest person you know, and ask them, I say. Don’t believe Ed Firmage? Find me someone smarter. I’ll listen.
The dearth of people admitting that they were betrayed by Bush, the media, and their own friends, neighbors, and family, is the gianganticist “elephant in the room.” I can name too many people in my life who argued for this president’s war and other actions sometimes calling me names in the process, while repeating the pitiful right-wing talking points ad naseausm attacking the messenger, and damaging our relationship in a desperate effort to validate their own foundationless convictions. My fault for caring I guess. I’m still waiting for an appology Dan L.
Don’t listen to me, listen to conservative Paul:
Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan (conservative ) administration. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal editorial page (conservative ) and Contributing Editor of National Review (conservative ), recently wrote a compelling answer to the question and the article’s subtitle:
Is the Bush Regime a Sponsor of State Terrorism? -full article
In the past three years the Bush Regime has murdered tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians and an unknown number of Afghan ones. US Marines, our finest and proudest military force, are under criminal investigation for breaking into Iraqi homes and murdering entire families. In an unprecedented event, General Michael Hagee, the Marine Corps commandant, has found it necessary to fly to Iraq to tell our best trained troops to stop murdering civilians.
To me, the more disturbing question, is why don’t we get it? Roberts writes
Americans think that they are the salt of the earth. The hubris that comes from this self-righteous belief makes Americans blind to the evil of their leaders. How can American leaders be evil when Americans are so good and so wonderful?
I’m so damn mad. I’ll soon be publishing a list of excuses “former” Bush supporters are using these days. Maybe I’ll call it, “how can you tell an ex-bloviator whose lost all their air.”
May 30th, 2006 at 9:21 am
Left me see if I got this right. With most of the original justifications for invading Iraq out the window, we are left with;
“Well, we got rid of Saddam and liberated the Iraqi people.”
But in the process, we killed more Iraqis than Saddam AND destroyed their country, AND fostered a civil war.
Hmmm.
May 30th, 2006 at 9:06 pm
Cliff
At last a new post on Oblogatory Anecdotes. I have been really busy with school so I stopped blogging for a while. I’m still very busy but I will make sure I post as much as I can. I will make sure I stop by One Utah now and again also. This site needs more conservatives commenting to counter ballance the liberalism spewed in this site. Just kidding, you know I love ya mate!
PS. I say mate because I served my mission in Australia, so don’t get any funny ideas. Hee hee! (c8
May 31st, 2006 at 9:15 am
And I’m so very sorry that I am as impotent as I am to do anything about all these awful happenings. Cancer, heart attacks quite regularly, now. And spinal surgeries.
Marines, my favorites, as a young boy, intentionally massacring people. No surprise, though. These young kids, sent in harm’s way, by four viciously ignorant fools, indictable under the Nurenberg Charter, should be tried like the war criminals they are: Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and the president of the World Bank, Paul Wolfowitz, the brainy one from Princeton, and the dummy we elected president, George the Less. All, indictable, under the supreme law of the land.
My plan: turn all four loose, with a dagger each, in any mosque in Iraq; and give Saddam Hussein and any three others of his own war criminal bunch a dagger each, too. Then let them duke it out. The winners (?) get a 30-minute head start out of town, any town, n Iraq. And bring our troops home. Justice at last.
May 31st, 2006 at 10:09 pm
Welcome back Ken! We miss you!
I see by your long over due post, that your “rightness†remains undiminished if not reinvigorated in spite of the unending series of unfortunate revelations surrounding the current administration not to mention the unprecedented and growing disapproval of it’s leader who is today popularly and affectionately referred to as the “Decider.â€
Nevertheless, I am heartened by and celebrate your continued pursuit of greater knowledge. As you know well, educational success is well served by a vigilant bias toward an open mind against the challenge of tightly held subjectivity guided by a predisposition toward one’s political and personal conviction.
As an example, you once questioned the majority scientific community’s premise on global warming. Was that thoroughly refuted position based not on an erroneous and flawed interpretation of fact but rather political bias?
Your true potential will be realized when you can say with honesty that you have surrendered all bias in favor of enlightened curiosity and practiced objectivity.
As Eli Weisel remarked during his recent visit to Snow College, “after all these years as a professor, I understand that it is about the questions, not the answers.”
As you well know, the Senate’s role as the more deliberative body holds true when you acknowledge that the Senate immigration bill represents popular opinion and that the punitive House bill is motivated by politics and a disturbing expression of hypocrisy, intolerance of diversity, and fear born of ignorance. Should we not demand honest representation over a convoluted policy of meanness?
My own father entered the 10th grade speaking not a word of English. I am but an embarrassingly small part of the tremendous contribution he continues to provide to the country and world.
You can’t really believe that we should arrest, punish, or send home 12m honest, hardworking, taxpaying people who have been encouraged to come here and allowed to stay and raise beautiful loving and innocent American children?
Imagine having worked your butt off, paid rent, taxes (from which you will never benefit), and raised several children, and then be told you must leave, or pay a huge fine.
If we have been hypocrites in both policy and practice, we can hardly ask our Latino brothers to pay for our own failures.
Support for the house bill is perfectly correlated to one’s exposure to the many and diverse Latino communities. In other words those with the least experience of the culturally rich, hardworking Latino community are more likely to feel threatened by them than those of us who have the great fortune of being able to practice the teachings of Jesus with our strong and devout Christian brothers and sisters from the Americas.
Be about love Ken, and tolerance. Only then will you find firm footing on the road of certainty.
June 1st, 2006 at 7:21 pm
Cliff
You are right about one thing that preconceived biases should not cloud your ability to acquire new knowledge. It is my love for science and knowledge that compels me to question global warming. Questioning the conventional wisdom is the essence of science. When science becomes dogmatic and set in it’s ways then it ceases to become science, it becomes a quasi-religion were it’s practitioners become fanatics. I am more than willing to change my mind on human caused global warming when I see irrefutable proof that can be verified and replicated, instead of evidence I only get fear mongering and demands for remedies that are more political than practical.
Next, I love our Mexican brothers. They are great people and when they are here legally, they are a great asset to our country, the same as so many other immigrants that come here to better their lives. The people who come here with hopes to partake of the American Dream are not the problem. The problem comes from the illegal immigrants that have come here and drive down wages artificially. They have become the new slaves in this country.
Slavery was abolished for blacks over a hundred years ago, but in a way we still have slavery. When you force an underclass of people to work well below minimum wage you are creating a slave class.
We all like to buy cheap products but do we ever stop and think about why it is so cheap in the first place? It is because some unscrupulous businessman is hiring slaves under the table, whether they are illegal immigrants or children in developing countries.
Obviously we can’t deport 12 million people. What we can do is make it less palatable for business to hire illegal aliens. Any business that is found hiring illegal workers should face severe fines and even jail time. We also need to put the squeeze on Vicente Fox to stop encouraging his people to leave his country. If Mexico was prosperous then we would not be having these problems. Next we need to make it more difficult for illegals to enter the United States. 10% of all Mexican nationals are now living in the United States. When you have such a mass migration from one country into another how can you call it anything else but an invasion?
June 2nd, 2006 at 7:15 am
Its a matter of enforcing the laws. We have immigration and employment laws on the books right now. Nobody will enforce them properly, they don’t want to be polictically incorrect. We shouldn’t create new laws until we fix the ones we currently have on the books.
We have laws that prevent sweat shops here in the US, yet they exist in cities like San Franscio, Chicago, New York, and other places around the country. Instead of making people feel like the bottom of the pile, or turn 12 million people into felons over night, we should be realistic and deal with the core problems first.
June 3rd, 2006 at 11:18 am
Cliff How does putting up “Anatomy of a Republican” help Utah Democrats? All it does is help Republicans know that Democrats are assholes. One Utah as long as it your Utah? There are better ways to bring about change. One is understanding that you are not going to suddenly have more Democrats than Repeblicans. Maybe you and Rocky are really Republicans who want Democrats to look bad. Think about it!
June 3rd, 2006 at 12:35 pm
Hey God’s little brother Ted. Your name provides the acronym GLBT. Therefor, you must be a gay or lesbian, whether you realize it yet or not! Will you be showing your pride on Sunday? I’ll bet your’s is a tight one.
Pass me another tall-boy. I’m thirsty.
June 3rd, 2006 at 3:25 pm
What do you mean by help “Help Utah Democrats”, God’s Little Brother?
As for putting up “Anatomy of a Republican”, you’ll notice my own title “Anatomy of a Certain Republican I Know”. But the idea that what I do on One Utah could be construed as an indictment of all democrats, is just pandering to the very strategy that Republicans have used so effectively to put us all in a box. That kind of party loyalty has never helped dems and is killing republicans today.
You may be afraid to lash out at republicans, but frankly, I don’t give a damn. Bill Frist and Orin Hatch regularly vilify democrats, as do many many others. Are you suggesting democrats should be more civil toward THEM or those that put them there? What is a republican anyway? Is Bush a republican? Based on polls, I would say at least half of them don’t support him anymore, and think he has strayed from their core values.
Wasn’t Ohio stolen by people calling themselves republicans? Should we respond to the criminal violation of the Voting Rights Act and The Constitution with politeness?
Some would suggest that such a spineless position is the very reason dems have ZERO power in Washington.
By the way, the Rocky comment was a little strange. I do believe he has been re-elected once already on a platform more progressive than most mayors. It would be hard to argue that he is bad for Utah democrats. Is anyone left of McCain a democrat, or everyone left of Hillary. The two-party system was not designed to cover all ideologies. It is an experiment conceived as a compromise to overcome some of the liabilities of the parliamentary system.
The term “democrats†is a big one. Some democrats also openly criticize Bush, condemn the war, and openly support GLTB rights. Some are don’t. Some are afraid. Some democrats think we need to support the war to get elected, some would like to impeach the president. Some republicans are pro-choice, some dems are pro-life.
The very idea anyone knows how to “help Utah Democrats†is well, insane. It hasn’t happened frankly, and I don’t see anyone trying as hard as I am except the fine people at the State Party, a few leaders like Ralph Becker, Roz McGee, and a handful of party specific activists and candidates.
What I don’t see, is a body of democratic incumbents going out of their way to help candidates. I’d love to know what Jim Matheson plans on doing for Steve Olsen, Christian or Ashdown. What IS the standard for “helping Utah Democrats?â€
June 6th, 2006 at 6:03 pm
Cliff, You capitalize Republican and use small case for Democrat. I never said you didn’t work hard, just that what you do is hardly working. Blah, blah, blah.
Vermont alcoholic. I never realized that the acronym for my name was so cool. You however should be ashamed of yourself. You assumed that calling me gay would be an insult, but all it showed is that you still have far to go. Your disrespect for the GLBT community is sad, but what do you expect from a person from Vermont that drinks Utah beer, DUMBASS!
I’m glad I said my piece and I can’t wait to see your 10.000 word response.
By the way, what has Rocko done for Christian Burridge, Pete Ashdown, or Steve Olsen, besides ask them to clean up his parrot’s ass?
June 7th, 2006 at 8:37 am
Now, now, hold your horses there GLBT. A closer look at the post indicates no disrespect for anyone, just off-the-cuff commentary which, unfortunately, was open to interpretation. Nevertheless, you appear overly sensitive about the issue which I suspect, is the reason you felt pure ad hominen was the proper response.
Maybe now we can return to and join the important business of shutting down the Decider-in-Chief, who is the bigger insult to both our intellect and sensitivities.
June 27th, 2008 at 6:14 pm
the role of horses in the civil war…
I am thinking of doing a blog, how many times a week do you think I should post?…