Oliver Willis

28 Responses to “The Crazy Cons”

1. 1 JWG
   Jul 21st, 2006 at 10:07 pm

   more ability to influence the situation [in Lebanon]

   What influence, exactly, is the US not able to exert in the current conflict?

2. 2 Bill L.
   Jul 22nd, 2006 at 12:07 am

   The U.S. is no longer seen as anything but an oppressor and blind loyalist to the Israelis. Anyone with an ounce of perspective on this unfolding conflagration can see how that might undermine attempts to broker a ceasefire much less any real hope for lasting peace. What’s more, our military is so drained by the Iraq conflict that we simply cannot risk opening up another front without exposing all our soldiers to extreme risk. It’s just blatant stupidity to think that insurgent attacks wont spike if we directly intervene militarily. What’s more, if we divert resources to Israel, we expose those soldiers in Iraq to even greater danger. Even worse, other countries and terrorist groups might see a divided U.S. military as a prime opportunity to strike in both locations, Israel/Lebanon and Iraq. An army divided is simply weaker on two fronts, and we can’t even hold Iraq right now (let’s not get into Afghanistan). Consider as well that both Syria and Iran may see direct U.S. involvement as justification to directly become involved (at least beyond limited arms supplies and financing).

   Of course, the real problem here is not what influence the U.S. cannot exert, it is the influence it can exert but won’t, and that’s reeling in Israel. Why do that when you are getting exactly the escalation in the bs W.O.T. that scares voters and pushes stupid Dems into backing yet more disastrous Mid-East debacles? Let’s be clear about this. Bush does not want tensions coming down in any way, shape or form.

3. 3 JWG
   Jul 22nd, 2006 at 7:07 am

   undermine attempts to broker a ceasefire much less any real hope for lasting peace

   A ceasefire before Israel finishes destroying the terrorists’ ability to operate out of southern Lebanon would not be in our interests. Likewise, “lasting peace” can only happen when governments stop supporting terrorists…peace is not gained by withdrawing before the job is finished.

4. 4 Jay C
   Jul 22nd, 2006 at 8:07 am

   I can only chuckle at the notion of a paranoid loon like Paul Krugman calling other people ‘crazies.’

   Cripes. Mr. Pot, meet Mr. Kettle.

   And I continue to be amazed at the left’s…..brain damage (that’s the only thing I can think of) on this issue. “Lasting peace”? When the HELL are you people going to get it through your thick heads that there is no such thing as “lasting peace” with Hezbollah and Hamas. “Lasting peace” to them means nothing more than the total destruction if Israel. All cease fires do is allow these terrorist organizations to build up their arsenals.

   It’s people with that absolutely moronic mindset that determined a terrorist like Yasser Arafat deserved a Nobel Peace Prize (forever tarnishing it forever in my view).

   Wake the hell up already.

5. 5 Jadegold
   Jul 22nd, 2006 at 9:07 am

   Red Dawn must have been on last night for Jay Caruso to get his chickenhawk down up.

   Note the complete deflection away from the issue at hand by Jay.

   Here’s a brief precis of what is being talked about, Jay Caruso:

   1. The fact is this appointed administration has been wrong about everything with respect to foreign policy. Why should we expect a better outcome when “deciders” like AWOL George Bush haven’t the wherewithal to acknowledge the realities of the situation?

   2. What has the Nobel Prize got to do with anything?

6. 6 drpedro
   Jul 22nd, 2006 at 10:07 am

   The irony to these comments about israel is that this situation is a complete repudiation of the one foreign policy “success” the democrats used to claim for clinton.

   The Wye River accords essential called for Israel to roll over and expose its underbelly to the palestinians. And in the name of peace…they did. In response they were on the receiving end of the Intifadeh.

   Israel and N.Korea are just two examples of the short-sightedness and general Pollyanna attitude that the democrats bring to foreign policy. Conveniently, the policies breakdown after the knucklehead behind them is gone, and as usual, the grown ups are going to have to clean up after the liberals.

7. 7 Jay C
   Jul 22nd, 2006 at 10:07 am

   Red Dawn must have been on last night for Jay Caruso to get his chickenhawk down up.

   I love it when somethat never served calls somebody else a chickenhawk.

   Note the complete deflection away from the issue at hand by Jay.

   There was no deflection whatsoever.

   The fact is this appointed administration has been wrong about everything with respect to foreign policy.

   That’s not a fact. It’s your opinion and that has as much worth as a 3 dollar bill.

   What has the Nobel Prize got to do with anything?

   One has to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in order to win it. The fact that it was awarded to a terrorist like Yasser Arafat and celebrated in left wing circles is a true indicator into their mindset and shows their views on “lasting peace” are worthless.

8. 8 midderpidge
   Jul 22nd, 2006 at 10:07 am

   Crazies about sums them up. Just reading some of the posts that support them pretty much reaffirms the title.

   Didn’t Tom Delay recently suggest the War on Terror should be renamed the War on Islam or something like that?

   Nutjobs

9. 9 Leroy Brown
   Jul 22nd, 2006 at 11:07 am

   When the HELL are you people going to get it through your thick heads that there is no such thing as  lasting peace with Hezbollah and Hamas.

   Kind like how you can’t actually win a war on terror, since its a technique, not a country? Perpetual war for perpetual peace, anyone?

   Oh and for the inevitible “Nuh uh!” from the right, let me save you some time and ask, how do you “win” the war on terror?

10. 10 duros62
    Jul 22nd, 2006 at 12:07 pm

    “…how do you  win the war on terror?

    Lobotomies. Lots and lots of lobotomies.

11. 11 Jadegold
    Jul 22nd, 2006 at 3:07 pm

    I love it when somethat never served calls somebody else a chickenhawk

    I do too. Whom would that be?

    There was no deflection whatsoever.

    Let’s see — we’re discussing how the cons never seem to get it right and than you start in about the Nobel Peace Prize.

    I’m sure there’s a link somewhere there.

    One has to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in order to win it.

    Wow.

12. 12 Oliver Willis
    Jul 22nd, 2006 at 5:07 pm

    Wake the hell up! Invade another country and send more Americans to die, if Bush does it it’s okay.

    Riiight. And Paul Krugman is the crazy one for thinking that’s a bad idea.

    Clearly only the worst kind of people get the Nobel Peace Prize.

13. 13 Bill L.
    Jul 22nd, 2006 at 5:07 pm

    1.)Hexbollah can scream for the death of Israel for the next thousand years and they won’t have the capability of wiping out .1% of it, much less the whole nation. That’s not to say Israel doesn’t have the right to attack Hezbollah, but as has been gone over before, such a response depends on a sense of reasonable proportion which Israel has not remotely demonstrated.

    2.)In case some of our more war happy posters have forgotten, this is precisely the same bullshit that was shoveled some 24 years ago when Israel attacked Lebanon in 1982 to purportedly wipe out Palestinean strongholds and settle down with a pacified Lebanon. Didn’t work out, did it?

    3.)If Iraq has established anything, it’s that air power is great for destroying infrastructure and terrible for taking out terrorists (even al Zarqawi couldn’t be taken out in a “precision” air strike without killing civilians). They result in significant civilian casualties and do more to turn public opinion against the attacker than the terrorists.

    4.)As for the Wye River accords, they hardly called for Israel to “roll over.” In fact, the Wye River accords (Oslo) suffered from a number of serious problems, many of them deal breakers for the Palestineans. Naturally the MSM ignored any of the details and instead spun the story as major concessions by Israel, again skipping right over the fact that the Israelis are illegally occupying the West Bank and shouldn’t be there in the first place.

14. 14 simianceo
    Jul 22nd, 2006 at 7:07 pm

    Clearly only the worst kind of people get the Nobel Peace Prize.

    No, the worst kind of people get Nobel Prizes in economics.

15. 15 Rounds77
    Jul 22nd, 2006 at 7:07 pm

    Cons don’t like the Nobel Peace Prize because they don’t like peace.

16. 16 chum
    Jul 22nd, 2006 at 8:07 pm

    For a paranoid loon Krugman has been one of the few columnists in the country who was spot on in identfying the pitfalls we’d encounter with neocon lunacy. Oh wait, they have a 10-50 year plan that has yet to play out. When peace breaks out in 2050 Kristol and his crowd will go down in history as visionaries, regardless of how things turn out.

    Hey, it worked for Reagan who more than any other President got us into this predicament we’re in now. It started when he negogiated behind Carter’s back to release the Iranian hostages, but only after the election. It continued when he sent marines into Beruit and let them get slaughtered and turned Lebanon over to Syria. Abandoning the Afghan freedom fighters after they kicked out the Russians, oh I could go on and on with the messes many of the same people in the current administration are supposed to now fix. Where the hell are those Reagan papers?

    For an economist, Krugman is one of the few people with balls enough to call a con a con - and it is catching on.

17. 17 z adura
    Jul 22nd, 2006 at 10:07 pm

    It must be strange to be Paul Krugman. For years, he was villified by the far-left for promoting the benefits of free trade. Now, to be seen by those on the right as a crazy leftist loon…

18. 18 Jay C
    Jul 23rd, 2006 at 8:07 am

    I do too. Whom would that be?

    That would be you.

19. 19 Jay C
    Jul 23rd, 2006 at 8:07 am

    Wake the hell up! Invade another country and send more Americans to die, if Bush does it it s okay.

    So sayeth the man that says we should be sending troops to other countries all over the world to “kill terrorists” where not a single soldier will die.

    Can I get a ticket to Oliver’s Fantasyland?

20. 20 Jay C
    Jul 23rd, 2006 at 10:07 am

    Care to make a wager on that, Jay?

    Go for it.

    Let’s see the evidence.

    Prove it.

21. 21 Jadegold
    Jul 23rd, 2006 at 10:07 am

    That would be you.

    Care to make a wager on that, Jay?

    It’s sure to be money in your pocket since I’ve never served, right?

22. 22 Hedley
    Jul 23rd, 2006 at 12:07 pm

    So now Bush is responsible for the lack of success in Israel’s 60 years struggle for security and independence. All the presidents who have come and gone, all who have tried to leave their mark on the mideast, and it is all George W. Bush’s fault. Someone should go tell President Clinton because he blamed Arafat for his failure to solve the issue, maybe he should have blamed President Bush instead.

    Someone on TV said it best (it may have been O’Reilly, but I don’t recall), if the Arabs put down their weapons there would be peace tomorrow. If Israel put down its weapons, it would be destroyed.

    If the peaceniks and international community spent a fraction of the energy they spend criticizing and condemning Israel’s every move criticizing the Arab suicide bombers and terrorists, there could have been peace decades ago.

23. 23 southpaw
    Jul 23rd, 2006 at 2:07 pm

    The way I see it. The only way we are to win the war on terror is to pull all our troops and allies out of the middle east, and then since we are supposed to be the world super power, give em hell. Not with nukes but with chemical weapons of mass destruction. We could take out one big city or country at a time until they either surrender or they all are dead. I realize a lot of innocent civilians will be killed but they probably won’t survive 25 years of the way we are fighing the war on terror now.

24. 24 Leroy Brown
    Jul 23rd, 2006 at 2:07 pm

    If the peaceniks and international community spent a fraction of the energy they spend criticizing and condemning Israel s every move criticizing the Arab suicide bombers and terrorists, there could have been peace decades ago.

    Absolutely, because if there’s one thing suicide bombers fear, its getting their feelings hurt.

25. 25 Bushwacked
    Jul 24th, 2006 at 8:07 pm

    If the peaceniks and international community spent a fraction of the energy they spend criticizing and condemning Israel s every move criticizing the Arab suicide bombers and terrorists, there could have been peace decades ago.

    And& & & & ..
    If this administration had spent as much time on actually evaluating the intelligence or planning for the peace (preferably both), as they did on trashing those who tried to stop this lunacy in the first place, Iraq may not be the disaster it is now and we could be actually spending more time tracking down the real enemy who killed 3000 Americans.

26. 26 Bushwacked
    Jul 24th, 2006 at 10:07 pm

    Israel will do whatever they have to do to defend themselves and it is difficult, if not impossible, to assess blame to them for this war. However, I am not sure that bombing airports, bridges and power plants in some sort of “tit for tat” strategy will resolve this crisis either. I am not saying they should just sit and take it but it is better to to have a response that is limited to where the missles are coming from and the Hezbollah forces themselves. Killing innocent civilians can only further galvanize hatred of Isreal amoung the Lebanese people and increase support for the very ones the Isreali military is trying to defeat.

27. 27 JayTea
    Jul 25th, 2006 at 2:07 am

    Bushwacked, the infrastructure attacks are not “tit for tat” attacks. The bridges and airport attacks are to keep Iran and Syria from resupplying and reinforcing Hezbollah. The attacks are going on where the missiles are coming from and being stored — Hezbollah does that as close as they can to civilians. In fact, Israel found a minor arsenal inside a mosque.

    I would argue that the Israeli response so far IS proportional to Hezbollah’s attacks — it’s just that Israel has compressed about 20 years of Hezbollah attacks into a couple of weeks.

    Finally, when Israel pulled out of Lebanon the last time, the UN set up camp on the border and said that it would secure it so both sides would be safe. Ever since then, there has been an unending stream of attacks from Lebanon by Hezbollah, several cross-border raids and kidnappings (one with the apparent assistance of UN officials, and a massive coverup of that assistance that extended right up to Kofi Annan and continues to this day), and by all accounts the importing of 13,000 rockets and missiles by Hezbollah into the areas supposedly “secured” by the UN.

    Under the principles of the Geneva Conventions, combatants are to stay away from civilians as much as possible, and if they don’t and some are killed, it is NOT the responsibility of the attacker, but the ones who got too close to the civilians — in this case, Hezbollah.

    You remember Hezbollah, right? They’re the group that, up until 9/11, had killed more Americans than any other terrorist group.

    J.

28. 28 Nimrod Gently
    Jul 25th, 2006 at 7:07 pm

    I would argue that the Israeli response so far IS proportional to Hezbollah s attacks  it s just that Israel has compressed about 20 years of Hezbollah attacks into a couple of weeks.

    Which is a bad thing, is the point everyone else was making.

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