and all the bigoted , Know-Nothing, xenophobes who are destroying our country.
Bite me you orangutan birther bastard!
Fred Rich LaRiccia
thebakersays
So, I’m ready now to make my traditional Presidential Challenge to any and all takers. I bet a Lobsta Dinna that Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton will be the 45th President of the United States. Any takers ? 🙂
I’ll take that bet! If Hillary takes the White House you have 1 lobster dinner, on me, at any establishment you like. If she loses, dinner is on you. What say you Fred?
thanks to Mr. Obama, let me say: the right-minded loser of the bet was a pleasure to dine with.
thebakersays
I can’t wait.
fredrichlaricciasays
the bet is for dinner. I’ll pass on the movie.
Fred Rich LaRiccia
Mark L. Bailsays
presidential campaign is being covered extensively in the Arab world, and an apology would detract from the fact that 98% of what she said is correct. The Republicans candidates are responsible for the stochastic incitement of terrorism by Islamic extremists.
Could she have spoken more precisely? Sure. Does it warrant an apology to a guy who makes stuff up as a matter of course? IOKIYAR.
Here’s what FactCheck.org had:
Here’s what she said: “He is becoming ISIS’ best recruiter. They are going to people showing videos of Donald Trump insulting Islam and Muslims in order to recruit more radical jihadists. So I want to explain why this is not in America’s interest to react with this kind of fear and respond to this sort of bigotry.”
The Clinton campaign cited an NBC News article to support her claim. That article quoted two experts: David Phillips, director of the Program on Peace-Building and Rights at Columbia University’s Institute for the Study of Human Rights, said Trump’s anti-Muslim rhetoric “will surely be used by ISIS social media to demonize the United States and attract recruits to fight in Iraq and Syria.”
Rita Katz, director of the SITE Intelligence Group, which NBC said “monitors the social media activities of Islamic terrorist groups,” told NBC: “When he says, ‘No Muslims should be allowed in America,’ they tell people, ‘We told you America hates Muslims and here is proof.’
Christophersays
…campaign statements from Donald Trump took 1st, 2nd, AND 3rd places in the poll to determine Politifact’s “Lie of the Year”.
bob-gardnersays
. . . “aid and comfort.”
SomervilleTomsays
If Ms. Clinton had said “Donald Trump is a steaming pile of horse manure”, would the various network fact-checkers do a detailed chemical analysis and answer that the statement was “false”?
I took her statement as metaphor, and I think that’s how she intended it.
The statement she made is true (just as the hypothetical I offer above is also true).
Mark L. Bailsays
herself, but she was accurate enough.
Fact checkers often suck because they are stupidly binary. Politifact, for example. And that guy for WaPo. This one was pretty good because it didn’t get into true or false very much, just traced the roots of what she said. No pants on fire or Pinocchios. Unlike Trump, the source wasn’t Glenn Beck or Alex Jones.
fredrichlaricciasays
“Carry the battle to them. Don’t let them bring it to you. Put them on the defensive. And don’t ever apologize for anything”. PRESIDENT HARRY TRUMAN
Fred Rich LaRiccia
jconwaysays
A folly authorized and consistently supported by Hillary Clinton until the last five years. It’s beachhead in Libya is also the result of the American led intervention that toppled Qadaffi leaving a power vacuum in it’s wake, which she remains a major cheerleader for.
As others have pointed out, no one in the entire field in either party can match her on policy experience and fluency on these issues. I praised her ISIL plan on these pages as being more forceful than Obama’s status quo, without being dangerously irresponsible like anything the Republicans are proposing. I think no one can question her experience, but I do think her judgment on some of these questions is a vulnerability that can’t be papered over by quick soundbites. As someone who wants a Democrat to win next fall, I strongly hope she focuses on learning from her own mistakes as well as making the comparatively easier call of denouncing a bigot like Trump.
thebakersays
I think no one can question her experience, but I do think her judgment on some of these questions is a vulnerability that can’t be papered over by quick soundbites.
No one could question Hillary’s vast “experience” of making bad judgment calls.
Christophersays
…that ISIS is a result of our abandoning Iraq too quickly, and I am starting to wonder if they have a point. I still see Libya as more or less how things were supposed to work at least philosophically, even the competence isn’t quite there yet.
jconwaysays
I actually think it’s an interesting point, the problem is, for the Republicans the Iraq War seemed to have started on Jan 20, 2009 when it really started on March 20, 2003 when President Bush made the fateful decision to go to war. How long should we have stayed? Forever? The real question is, would ISIl still exist if we had left Iraq alone instead of invading it in a flawed war of choice? I think the answer is clearly no, and I still question how much Clinton has learned from that clear and utter failure.
Christophersays
We’ve been around this before and I doubt either of our minds have changed, but while it was the wrong war at the wrong time when we should have put all our eggs in the Afghan baskets we DID replace a tyrant with elected government, so +1 in that regard.
jconwaysays
I question the premise that the new government is elected, representative of the Iraqi people or even willing to defend itself. As for fighting tyranny, why do we allow several other tyrants to continue in power without US interference and in some cases with US support? Saddam was a terrible person, but his regime was contained to the central portions of Iraq, and was no longer a threat to the US or even its allies in the region.
The Kurds were arguably safer then than they are now battling ISIL and Turkey. He “gassed his own people” prior to no fly zones. Since they were imposed, he didn’t do it and wouldn’t do it. It obviously was a fairly weak military and I am confident he would’ve been toppled or threatened by Arab Spring like events down the road. He had no WMDs and was no longer a state sponsor of terror. It’s likely time, sanctions and regional changes would’ve eventually led to his undoing.
Christophersays
I checked that out last time we went through this, and there have been a couple elections since the famous purple fingerprint election the first time around. It’s not a great government, but that’s for the people to rectify. Like I say, I’m not defending the timing, but I would have preferred knocking him out in 1991. We shouldn’t go looking to overthrow just ’cause, but since we did that’s a good thing. As for why we outright support some tyrannical regimes – beats me. I have consistently argued against such policies.
TheBestDefensesays
I have to disagree that the Kurds were safer under Saddam than they are now. I worked in Kurdistan (Erbil) just after the Sunni uprising. Under Saddam they had been rebels on the defensive to hold on to their core territory. After the US invaded, they became the first part of Iraq to liberate themselves and create a semi-autonomous state, post- Saddam, a huge victory based on decades of fighting. Now they are the tip of the spear against a different oppressor, Daesh/ISIL, but this time they are fighting for more than themselves.
They are bringing the battle where others fear to go. Be clear: the feeling in the soul when leading a fight is better than when on the defensive. It ceases to be about safety and instead becomes self-determination.
Saddam committed genocide against the Kurds during the Iran-Iraq war, including dropping poison gas on Halabja in March 1988. The Kurds fought him to a weak draw, and when the US invaded more than a decade later, it only took the Kurds a few days to claim almost total control of Kurdistan. They became victors, not the victims Saddam tried to make them. I never met a prouder people and prouder warriors.
Today, the Kurds are not defending themselves from a rich opponent. They are defending themselves AND people of OTHER faiths and ethnicities from Daesh. They are volunteering to protect OTHERS from a nasty force of hatred. If you gave me a choice of ten Kurdish peshmerga putting themselves in danger to protect relative peace and safety, or twenty Iraqi regular army in a battle because they are a pseudo-professional army, I would take the Kurds.
The long active peshmerga remind me of the people of the brief Sunni uprising. Both were people on the defensive, albeit at different times and different durations. They both became warriors against Al-Queda. The Kurds are now warriors against Daesh. I hope the people of the Sunni uprising join them. They are the essential ground forces that the West and the Sunni Arab world will not provide to fight Daesh.
Most Kurds who are in danger are the Iraqi warriors who chose to fight totalitarianism. Turkish Kurds in the war are likewise volunteers experienced in battle against Istanbul. The Syrian Kurds are the real victims, people who had virtually zero war experience but who are now attacked by Syria, Russian airstrikes and Turkey. The Syrian Kurds faced no special problems until long after the US invasion. They are the minority part of the Kurds who are worse off today than under Saddam, but only because they had limited involvement with each other when he was in power, and only secondarily because of the US invasion.
jconwaysays
I stand corrected, and agree with you that the Kurds are great fighters. I am especially impressed by the female fighters who are kicking ass against Daesh.
Mark L. Bailsays
We replaced a tyrant with a government that doesn’t have control of the land within its boundaries, replaced a Sunni regime with a Shia regime, upsetting the balance of power in the Middle East, and so freaked out the Sunni population that many reluctantly support ISIS.
Christophersays
This is a philosophical absolute for me. Electing a government is ALWAYS in principle preferable to otherwise, even if the latter does a better job “making the trains run on time” or doing anything else. There is zero room for debate on that point in my mind. Even here at home, democracy was hardly universal at first and it could be argued there are still issues, but even our initial attempts were an improvement over the British colonial regime that gave us no elected representation in Parliament.
The paragraphs in the Wikipedia article you linked make it pretty clear they weren’t real elections until 1987.
Christophersays
…I just fell into the trap of following your tangent about Iraq, but this comment doesn’t have much to do with whether she should apologize over her accusation against Trump. I added a couple more replies downthread, but don’t really have anything more to add that I haven’t said elsewhere.
centralmassdadsays
Is that ISIS/ISIL is a direct result of (1) the 2003-2009 folly in Iraq + (2) significant and serious bumbling mistakes by the present administration, which took an existing bad situation and made it quite a bit worse.
At some point, certainly by the 7th year of the administration, you can’t blame Bush for Obama’s persistent effort to put out Bush’s fire with gasoline. At some point, the resulting conflagration is as much Obama’s fire as it is Bush’s. We are well past that point.
Donald Greensays
wrapping my mind around all this. Mr. Crudeness makes remarks that do not put the US in a good light. Then enters another candidate to hurl back a remark with practiced inaccuracy. We know HRC prepares heavily for these debates. Nothing comes out unless it has been thoroughly rehearsed for impact. Now agreed Mr. Trump is a crass individual, but why give him leverage by putting yourself in a position of saying something unreliable.
SomervilleTomsays
I don’t see that any leverage has been offered to Mr. Trump.
I’ve never seen a “warm bucket of spit“, have you? I’ve never had a problem distinguishing a candidate from the hindquarters of an actual horse.
I think Ms. Clinton correctly called out Mr. Trump for who and what he is, and correctly called out his supporters for what they are actually doing. I think the media is profoundly uncomfortable about that, as is (not surprisingly) Mr. Trump himself.
I think this is going pretty much as anticipated, and I hope Ms. Clinton continues making these devastatingly accurate and correct statements.
Mark L. Bailsays
A metaphor has a tenor and a vehicle in which x is compared to y.
Clinton said,
“He is becoming ISIS’s best recruiter. They are going to people, showing videos of Donald Trump insulting Islam and Muslims in order to recruit more radical jihadists.”
Her first sentence is hyperbole. Okay as far as that goes. That’s a claim. Trump has to refute it. However, there’s no comparison, implied or otherwise, in the second sentence. It’s a statement of fact. It’s literal.
Her statement could have been more precise, but there’s no reason to apologize. It’s not worth correcting. Fck ’em.
Donald Greensays
there are video(s) being distributed by ISSIS. Her source of information were conjectures, not prima facie evidence. This is careless speech leaving the door open for Mr. Trump to make some hay at her expense. I agree the thought was in the right direction, but were stretched for effect. To garner votes from independents or shaky Republicans it does not help.
and all the bigoted , Know-Nothing, xenophobes who are destroying our country.
Bite me you orangutan birther bastard!
Fred Rich LaRiccia
I’ll take that bet! If Hillary takes the White House you have 1 lobster dinner, on me, at any establishment you like. If she loses, dinner is on you. What say you Fred?
would want to eat with you?
and take that bet !
Fred Rich LaRiccia
thanks to Mr. Obama, let me say: the right-minded loser of the bet was a pleasure to dine with.
I can’t wait.
the bet is for dinner. I’ll pass on the movie.
Fred Rich LaRiccia
presidential campaign is being covered extensively in the Arab world, and an apology would detract from the fact that 98% of what she said is correct. The Republicans candidates are responsible for the stochastic incitement of terrorism by Islamic extremists.
Could she have spoken more precisely? Sure. Does it warrant an apology to a guy who makes stuff up as a matter of course? IOKIYAR.
Here’s what FactCheck.org had:
…campaign statements from Donald Trump took 1st, 2nd, AND 3rd places in the poll to determine Politifact’s “Lie of the Year”.
. . . “aid and comfort.”
If Ms. Clinton had said “Donald Trump is a steaming pile of horse manure”, would the various network fact-checkers do a detailed chemical analysis and answer that the statement was “false”?
I took her statement as metaphor, and I think that’s how she intended it.
The statement she made is true (just as the hypothetical I offer above is also true).
herself, but she was accurate enough.
Fact checkers often suck because they are stupidly binary. Politifact, for example. And that guy for WaPo. This one was pretty good because it didn’t get into true or false very much, just traced the roots of what she said. No pants on fire or Pinocchios. Unlike Trump, the source wasn’t Glenn Beck or Alex Jones.
“Carry the battle to them. Don’t let them bring it to you. Put them on the defensive. And don’t ever apologize for anything”. PRESIDENT HARRY TRUMAN
Fred Rich LaRiccia
A folly authorized and consistently supported by Hillary Clinton until the last five years. It’s beachhead in Libya is also the result of the American led intervention that toppled Qadaffi leaving a power vacuum in it’s wake, which she remains a major cheerleader for.
As others have pointed out, no one in the entire field in either party can match her on policy experience and fluency on these issues. I praised her ISIL plan on these pages as being more forceful than Obama’s status quo, without being dangerously irresponsible like anything the Republicans are proposing. I think no one can question her experience, but I do think her judgment on some of these questions is a vulnerability that can’t be papered over by quick soundbites. As someone who wants a Democrat to win next fall, I strongly hope she focuses on learning from her own mistakes as well as making the comparatively easier call of denouncing a bigot like Trump.
No one could question Hillary’s vast “experience” of making bad judgment calls.
…that ISIS is a result of our abandoning Iraq too quickly, and I am starting to wonder if they have a point. I still see Libya as more or less how things were supposed to work at least philosophically, even the competence isn’t quite there yet.
I actually think it’s an interesting point, the problem is, for the Republicans the Iraq War seemed to have started on Jan 20, 2009 when it really started on March 20, 2003 when President Bush made the fateful decision to go to war. How long should we have stayed? Forever? The real question is, would ISIl still exist if we had left Iraq alone instead of invading it in a flawed war of choice? I think the answer is clearly no, and I still question how much Clinton has learned from that clear and utter failure.
We’ve been around this before and I doubt either of our minds have changed, but while it was the wrong war at the wrong time when we should have put all our eggs in the Afghan baskets we DID replace a tyrant with elected government, so +1 in that regard.
I question the premise that the new government is elected, representative of the Iraqi people or even willing to defend itself. As for fighting tyranny, why do we allow several other tyrants to continue in power without US interference and in some cases with US support? Saddam was a terrible person, but his regime was contained to the central portions of Iraq, and was no longer a threat to the US or even its allies in the region.
The Kurds were arguably safer then than they are now battling ISIL and Turkey. He “gassed his own people” prior to no fly zones. Since they were imposed, he didn’t do it and wouldn’t do it. It obviously was a fairly weak military and I am confident he would’ve been toppled or threatened by Arab Spring like events down the road. He had no WMDs and was no longer a state sponsor of terror. It’s likely time, sanctions and regional changes would’ve eventually led to his undoing.
I checked that out last time we went through this, and there have been a couple elections since the famous purple fingerprint election the first time around. It’s not a great government, but that’s for the people to rectify. Like I say, I’m not defending the timing, but I would have preferred knocking him out in 1991. We shouldn’t go looking to overthrow just ’cause, but since we did that’s a good thing. As for why we outright support some tyrannical regimes – beats me. I have consistently argued against such policies.
I have to disagree that the Kurds were safer under Saddam than they are now. I worked in Kurdistan (Erbil) just after the Sunni uprising. Under Saddam they had been rebels on the defensive to hold on to their core territory. After the US invaded, they became the first part of Iraq to liberate themselves and create a semi-autonomous state, post- Saddam, a huge victory based on decades of fighting. Now they are the tip of the spear against a different oppressor, Daesh/ISIL, but this time they are fighting for more than themselves.
They are bringing the battle where others fear to go. Be clear: the feeling in the soul when leading a fight is better than when on the defensive. It ceases to be about safety and instead becomes self-determination.
Saddam committed genocide against the Kurds during the Iran-Iraq war, including dropping poison gas on Halabja in March 1988. The Kurds fought him to a weak draw, and when the US invaded more than a decade later, it only took the Kurds a few days to claim almost total control of Kurdistan. They became victors, not the victims Saddam tried to make them. I never met a prouder people and prouder warriors.
Today, the Kurds are not defending themselves from a rich opponent. They are defending themselves AND people of OTHER faiths and ethnicities from Daesh. They are volunteering to protect OTHERS from a nasty force of hatred. If you gave me a choice of ten Kurdish peshmerga putting themselves in danger to protect relative peace and safety, or twenty Iraqi regular army in a battle because they are a pseudo-professional army, I would take the Kurds.
The long active peshmerga remind me of the people of the brief Sunni uprising. Both were people on the defensive, albeit at different times and different durations. They both became warriors against Al-Queda. The Kurds are now warriors against Daesh. I hope the people of the Sunni uprising join them. They are the essential ground forces that the West and the Sunni Arab world will not provide to fight Daesh.
Most Kurds who are in danger are the Iraqi warriors who chose to fight totalitarianism. Turkish Kurds in the war are likewise volunteers experienced in battle against Istanbul. The Syrian Kurds are the real victims, people who had virtually zero war experience but who are now attacked by Syria, Russian airstrikes and Turkey. The Syrian Kurds faced no special problems until long after the US invasion. They are the minority part of the Kurds who are worse off today than under Saddam, but only because they had limited involvement with each other when he was in power, and only secondarily because of the US invasion.
I stand corrected, and agree with you that the Kurds are great fighters. I am especially impressed by the female fighters who are kicking ass against Daesh.
We replaced a tyrant with a government that doesn’t have control of the land within its boundaries, replaced a Sunni regime with a Shia regime, upsetting the balance of power in the Middle East, and so freaked out the Sunni population that many reluctantly support ISIS.
This is a philosophical absolute for me. Electing a government is ALWAYS in principle preferable to otherwise, even if the latter does a better job “making the trains run on time” or doing anything else. There is zero room for debate on that point in my mind. Even here at home, democracy was hardly universal at first and it could be argued there are still issues, but even our initial attempts were an improvement over the British colonial regime that gave us no elected representation in Parliament.
Just saying.
The paragraphs in the Wikipedia article you linked make it pretty clear they weren’t real elections until 1987.
…I just fell into the trap of following your tangent about Iraq, but this comment doesn’t have much to do with whether she should apologize over her accusation against Trump. I added a couple more replies downthread, but don’t really have anything more to add that I haven’t said elsewhere.
Is that ISIS/ISIL is a direct result of (1) the 2003-2009 folly in Iraq + (2) significant and serious bumbling mistakes by the present administration, which took an existing bad situation and made it quite a bit worse.
At some point, certainly by the 7th year of the administration, you can’t blame Bush for Obama’s persistent effort to put out Bush’s fire with gasoline. At some point, the resulting conflagration is as much Obama’s fire as it is Bush’s. We are well past that point.
wrapping my mind around all this. Mr. Crudeness makes remarks that do not put the US in a good light. Then enters another candidate to hurl back a remark with practiced inaccuracy. We know HRC prepares heavily for these debates. Nothing comes out unless it has been thoroughly rehearsed for impact. Now agreed Mr. Trump is a crass individual, but why give him leverage by putting yourself in a position of saying something unreliable.
I don’t see that any leverage has been offered to Mr. Trump.
I’ve never seen a “warm bucket of spit“, have you? I’ve never had a problem distinguishing a candidate from the hindquarters of an actual horse.
I think Ms. Clinton correctly called out Mr. Trump for who and what he is, and correctly called out his supporters for what they are actually doing. I think the media is profoundly uncomfortable about that, as is (not surprisingly) Mr. Trump himself.
I think this is going pretty much as anticipated, and I hope Ms. Clinton continues making these devastatingly accurate and correct statements.
A metaphor has a tenor and a vehicle in which x is compared to y.
Clinton said,
Her first sentence is hyperbole. Okay as far as that goes. That’s a claim. Trump has to refute it. However, there’s no comparison, implied or otherwise, in the second sentence. It’s a statement of fact. It’s literal.
Her statement could have been more precise, but there’s no reason to apologize. It’s not worth correcting. Fck ’em.
there are video(s) being distributed by ISSIS. Her source of information were conjectures, not prima facie evidence. This is careless speech leaving the door open for Mr. Trump to make some hay at her expense. I agree the thought was in the right direction, but were stretched for effect. To garner votes from independents or shaky Republicans it does not help.
Six 6s for you, as Judy would say.