view from the outside

[bryan.fury]

here (http://www.guardian.co.uk/uselections2004/story/0,13918,1344144,00.html)

in light of all the hatred in PO

[FormerLurker]

The charge that Bush and his second war had actually made America less, not more safe, and had created, not flushed out, nests of terror, simply failed to register with the majority of those who put that issue at the top of their concerns.

Why? Because, the president had "acted", meaning he had killed at least some Middle Eastern bad dudes in response to 9/11. That they might be the wrong ones, in the wrong place - as Kerry said over and over - was simply too complicated a truth to master. Forget the quiz in political geography, the electorate was saying (for the popular commitment to altruistic democratic reconstruction on the Tigris is, whatever the White House orthodoxy, less than Wolfowitzian), it's all sand and towelheads anyway, right? Just smash "them" (as one ardent Bush supporter put it on talk radio the other morning) "like a ripe cantaloupe". Who them? Who gives a shit? Just make the testosterone tingle all the way to the polls. Thus it was that the war veteran found himself demonised as vacillating compromiser, the Osama Candidate, while a pair of draft-dodgers who had sacrificed more than eleven hundred young men and women to a quixotic levantine makeover, and one which I prophesy will be ignominiously wound up by next summer (the isolationists in the administration having routed the neocons), got off scot free, lionised as the Fathers of Our Troops.

[Scott]

Wow. It's funny how Europe can be so smug and have it all wrong. Their "view from the outside" is always off target.

It is time we called those two Americas something other than Republican and Democrat, for their mutual alienation and unforgiving contempt is closer to Sunni and Shia, or (in Indian terms) Muslim and Hindu. How about, then, Godly America and Worldly America?

Complete unintelligent nonsense.

[Hassan i Sabbah]

Originally posted by Scott
Wow. It's funny how Europe can be so smug and have it all wrong. Their "view from the outside" is always off target.

Simon Shama is an American citizen.

And when you say it's 'nonsense', what you clearly mean is that you don't understand it.

It isn't enough for you to disagree with it, even though the writing's clearly fantastic. No, it has to be 'nonsense'.

Instead of engaging in a debate, you declare something 'nonsense'. Perhaps the best-respected essayist writing in the English language writes semething you disagree with, even though it's clearly beyond you to read the thing and attempt to understand it, and you declare it 'nonsense'.

[BuonRotto]

Might as well play point/counterpoint:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2004/11/03/do0302.xml&sSheet=/opinion/2004/11/02/ixopinion.html

[bryan.fury]

Originally posted by Scott
Wow. It's funny how Europe can be so smug and have it all wrong. Their "view from the outside" is always off target.
Complete unintelligent nonsense.

that's an interesting way to argument: debunk the generalisations of your counterpart by making a generalisation about your counterpart.

The tenacity with which Godly America insists the theory of evolution is just that - a theory - with no more validity than Creationism

this has always baffled me. i simply find it hard to believe that the majority of educated republicans buy into this kind of thinking.

Originally posted by BuonRotto
Might as well play point/counterpoint:

some true points there, although i disagree with her assessment of european reaction to 911:
a chorus of "America got what it deserved"
everyone was shocked about what happened then. it's just, that after shock wore off many people (including my american self) came to the conclusion that in the end the real surprise was that it hadn't happened earlier. so to rephrase that quote, the reaction was more like: "America got what was the result of 40 years of flawed foreign policy"