Friday, February 19, 2010

Random Questions: The Weekend Edition

I'm going to shake up my edition of Jonathan's Random Questions. Instead of me ranting and raving, I want the Count and RalphyFan to join the fun. Just ask your question on page and explain why this question either pisses you off or has you generally stumped. I'll be updating more over the weekend, and I hope the Count and RalphyFan join in as well.

- Will the conservatives please make up their fucking minds about what they hate President Obama for?! At the Conservative Political Action Conference today, former Bush lawyer for the Department of Justice Viet Dinh actually criticized the president for killing too many enemy combatants. I'm not making that up.

"Why have executions increased?" asked Viet Dinh, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center and one of the authors of the USA Patriot Act. Dinh complained that "the president and vice president expound this fact as a fact that they are actually successful in war."

"That doesn't mean I think they are not illegitimate," he added. "No, we have every right to kill the other side's warriors. But at what cost? When we do not have an effective detention policy the only option we have is to kill them before we can detain them. And if we don't detain them, we don't know what they know and what they are up to."

Are you fucking serious?! For the last eight years, the Bush policy to handling terror suspect was to shoot and/or torture first, ask questions later. If international law, and the Congress disagreed with said policy? Fuck em, i'm gonna do it my way. Now that a Democrat is running the show, you're concerned about our world image and how we fight radical Islam? Bull!


- What does it say about our media when most of the networks actually covered Tiger Woods's apology for being a bigger man-whore than Bill Clinton and John Edwards combined? Tiger's 13-minute apology to his friends and his fans was, of course, covered on ESPN and ESPN2, because that makes perfect sense. He's an icon of the world of sports. Then, I flipped to MSNBC, and guess who was on the tube? Tiger. Same story with CNN. And CBS. And ABC. Exactly, what was the appeal of Tiger on CNN? Was he also going to admit that he and Mark Sanford were both taking trips to Argentina simultaneously? Surly there had to have been other stories for ABC and MSNBC to cover besides this.

Weekend Dawn Patrol Edit from RalphyFan:

OK, Jonathan, I'm up for it! Returning in somewhat saner mode to a topic that got my goat (and that I deleted) earlier this week...WTF is up with former Georgia Congresscritter Bob Barr? Yes, I get that he's a self-described conservative (who got booed, coincidentally, just yesterday at this year's CPAC confab: go figure). Yes, I get that he's written on the Clinton years as a "wasted legacy" - we should all have such a profitable "wasted legacy," methinks, compared to today's economic wasteland.

So now he's on such shaky ideological ground, he has to take on the comparatively safe bugbear of Paganism in order to regain credibility.

Barr...come on, pal. It was under the BUSH administration - a move I never honestly saw coming, to be frank - that Paganism/Wicca was recognized as a legitimate religion and authorized for memorialization on servicepeople's tombstones.

But Barr's on the warpath, railing against the establishment of a stone circle at the Air Force Academy in CO as excessive tolerance, just because he finds distasteful the notion of following someone "who dances around a circle of stones in the woods carrying a lighted candle...into battle."

I wonder if he ever thought about how some servicepeople would find the notion of following those who fall to the floor in church, shrieking incoherently in "tongues," into battle. Or following those who ritually consumed the flesh and blood of their deity on a weekly basis, into battle.

The fact of the matter is, military service to one's country is not confined to any one faith, any handful of faiths, or any lack of faith thereof...the opinions of the Boykins of this world to the contrary.

Accommodating multiple religious beliefs amongst those who feel called to serve their country in a military role is a matter completely separate from the fitness of those individuals to serve, or to lead, or to be followed wholeheartedly into conflict.

Barr demonstrates a complete inability to differentiate his personal religious convictions from his patriotism; and, further, an inability to acknowledge that someone who shares the latter might not share the former.

And that is shameful.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

The answer to question A is they hate him for everything no matter what. They have ODS.

Answer #2 it's our culture. In many ways it's our fault. If we didn't care this wouldn't be a story.

Anonymous said...

Just when I think Uber has written the dumbest thing I have ever read...he posts again.

Flying a plane into a building he knows will be occupied will definately cause deaths and misery to the families of the dead but none of those family members are afraid today.

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