CentralCoaster

Say it ain't so! Lets all get our hoods on and put a stop to this!

RK1

Works for me.

LineArrayNut

none of those religions or races are responsible for killing over 3000 Americans in this century in an act of terrorism and continue to be avowed to do it again. Islam has. These are facts. And it's not his appointees' religion nor race nor creed nor background that I disagree with, it's their ACTIONS. To disavow a link between actions and this religion is disingenuous at best and suicidal at worst.

Moto Man

Well the Japanese are Asian; And they did kill 2,403 people in Pearl Harbor in a single day. And it happened less than a century ago.

LineArrayNut

you can't spell and are dense. what's the 20th century? what's the 21st century? Do you think I put the qualifier in so I could practice my typing?
lol

LineArrayNut

Tracking abuse by political allies could be 'distracting'
ACORN -- the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now -- is stinking up Washington.
And this is far more significant than if a suspiciously large number of operatives for a purely "private" outfit had been found systematically bending and breaking the law, because ACORN receives and spends taxpayer money -- lots of it -- and had carried the imprimatur of official partnerships with the IRS, the Census Bureau ... the kind of "cred" that in the political world comes only from "who you know."


Yes, ACORN has friends in high places -- friends who are still stonewalling attempts to trace where all that tax money went ... perhaps because they know who still has cookie crumbs all over their hands.
It didn't start with those undercover videos made by a couple of independent filmmakers posing as a prostitute and her pimp, visiting various ACORN offices around the country and getting helpful advice on how to hide their income and "qualify" for a tax-subsidized mortgage to set up a house of ill repute, declaring three of their dozen (albeit imaginary) underage illegal immigrant prostitutes as "dependents."
That was just a final shoe dropping loudly enough that the problem could no longer be ignored.
Here in Clark County, Registrar of Voters Larry Lomax said last year he saw "rampant fraud in the 2,000 to 3,000 registrations ACORN turns in every week," with some 48 percent of those forms being "clearly fraudulent."
The Las Vegas headquarters of ACORN, "a Democrat-allied organization," was raided after being "accused of submitting multiple voter registrations with duplicate and false names," the Washington Times reported last fall. The outfit claimed it had registered to vote in Nevada, among others, the starting lineup of the Dallas Cowboys.
The raid "set off a skirmish over efforts to expand the electorate on behalf of Sen. Barack Obama," the Times reported.
Mr. Lomax noted ACORN had hired 59 inmates from a work-release program at a nearby prison and that some inmates who had been convicted of identity theft had been made supervisors. "That led some local wags to joke that at least ACORN was hiring specialists to do their work," reported John Fund at The Politico, last November.
ACORN's 2008 Las Vegas field director, Christopher Edwards, pleased guilty last spring to two gross misdemeanor counts of conspiracy to commit compensation for registration of voters, in a deal that saw him agree to testify against fellow defendants.
Fox News' Eric Shawn reported there were at least 11 investigations across the country involving thousands of potentially fraudulent ACORN forms. Yet none of this was sufficient to block President Obama and his congressional minions from upping federal subsidies to outfits such as Mr. Obama's former associates at ACORN from the mere millions to the billions of dollars in their "economic stimulus" bill last winter.
Only when presented with the undeniable evidence of the "pimp and ho" videotape did the IRS last week announce it would terminate ACORN's participation in the agency's Volunteer Income Tax Assistance program -- shortly after the Census Bureau advised ACORN it could forget about helping with its decennial head count.
Smoke? Fire? Washington Democratic leaders have opted to just lay low and not smell nothin'.
Despite all this evidence and a request in writing by 28 GOP senators -- and despite the fact the U.S. Senate voted 83-7 on Sept. 14 to block ACORN from bidding for any more federal grant money -- "Senate Democrat Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., is refusing to hold a Senate hearing on ACORN's activities," the National Republican Senatorial Committee complained Wednesday.
Mr. Reid replied additional investigations might distract lawmakers from addressing more important matters, including health care and economic recovery.
"It's become increasingly clear that ACORN may have manipulated tens of thousands of ballots in last year's federal election -- an area where Congress has clear oversight responsibilities -- yet Harry Reid won't lift a finger," said NRSC spokesman Brian Walsh. "It's hard to see his latest roadblock as anything but another example of Harry Reid protecting his liberal allies in Washington while remaining out of touch with his constituents in Nevada."
That's a politically motivated shot, of course. Stripped of the gratuitous elbowing, however, the question does remain: Do Sen. Reid and congressional Democrats really believe that if they just ignore the big mess their pet bear has dumped in the middle of the room, it'll somehow stop stinking?

Moto Man

Sorry for the bad spelling. But seriously now Dense? That's just rude and mean and nasty. Liebelous even? Now it was Dense with irony that you seemed to have picked up on. Go for you! LOL!

20th Century is 100 elapsed years. 21st Century is less and 10 years elapsed.
No I think you made the distinction so that you could conveniently remove Pearl Harbor from your statement. And you did so by making 9 years sound equal to over to a 100. While that attack did not occur in within the last decade / 21st Century it did occur less than 70 years ago.

VTRsurfer

Everybody sing along now....Barak Hussein Obama MMM MMM MMM

RK1

I think LAN made the distinction so he could launch a sneak attack on you when you mentioned Pearl Harbor. He's inscrutable!

RK1

I think there's a pancake syrup joke in there somewhere.

VTRsurfer

You'd have to go back to LineArray's post #464 and watch the video.

RK1

Oh I know. I saw that vid when it was originally posted in June, although there was no background info at the time and saw it again when LAN posted it.

I still think it would make a good jingle for a waffle syrup commercial. Dang when i have to explain what i thought was a witty quip!

RK1

I'm Senator Robert C. Byrd, (D-W Va.) and I approve of this post!

CentralCoaster

Well, I disavow that link. Islam isn't responsible for killing Americans any more than Libertarianism is responsible for bombing a building in Oklahoma City.

So I guess "this century" sounds more impressive for your argument than "in the past 9 years". 9 years is a blip on the radar.

Most people want to live in peace and security, it's human nature. Don't judge 25% of the world's population for what the lunatic fringe does.




FWIW, the Japanese military sneak attacked a U.S. military base. The U.S. on the other hand, killed 150,000 Japanese, mostly civilians.

One sounds like an act of war, the other sounds more like an act of terror. I guess it's convenient to point fingers from the other side of the fence.

nuhawk

Yeah, sometimes it's convenient. Other times you just use the bigger hammer.

RK1

Not 150,000 and not mostly civilians either.

The Japanese lost 2,120,000 military and 580,000 civilians. We killed most of them.

Almost all of the civilian deaths came in the bombing raids at the end of the war.

By that time the Japanese had murdered, by conservative estimate, six million civilians in the countries they occupied and had murdered 400,000 prisoners of war.

There is absolutely nothing the ***** did to people in concentration camps that the Japanese didn't do to civilians on a similar massive scale.

Rape, torture, medical experiments, weapons tests on live persons, poison gas tests etc. When they got hungry they ate civilians.

If the nukes hadn't been dropped, an invasion would have been needed.

The Japanese knew it and were arming children and old women with swords, bamboo spears, bow and arrows, blunderbusses from 16th century.

The invasion would have cost hundreds of thousands of American lives and likely millions of Japanese.

There are a lot of old men, kids, grand kids etc. who wouldn't be here if it had been played any other way.

War is hell. I'm glad we won.

k-d-williams

Meant to post this a month ago...


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exURU...feature=browch

k-d-williams

In 1952 President Truman established one day a year as a National Day of Prayer.

In 1988, President Reagan designated the first Thursday in May of each year as the National Day of Prayer.

This year however, President Obama, decided to cancel the ceremony at the White House not wanting to offend anyone.

Presidential candidate Barack Obama declared the USA was no longer a Christian nation. Now see if you can wrap your brain around this:

On September 25, 2009 from 4am until 7pm, a National Day of Prayer for the Muslim religion will be held on Capitol Hill, beside the White House. They are expecting over 50,000 muslims that day in DC.


The website (yes, there is a very informative website) is: www..islamoncapitolhill.com
Pay particular attention to the very bottom of the page: "OUR TIME HAS COME". Could it be that the REAL agenda of the President is becoming more plain? The evidence is there.

CentralCoaster

Anyone group can declare a national day of whatever the hell they want. And anyone with the proper permits can gather in the capital to celebrate it.

There is no white house-sanctioned ceremony for this Muslim NDP, nor was there one for the Christian NDP. Just because Bush decided to make a big event of it in past years, does not obligate Obama to do the same.

CentralCoaster

Did the Japanese civilians imprison and kill 400,000 citizens of other countries? If they didn't, why do you condone killing them?

Do you support State-sponsored terrorism as long as it's your State doing the killing?

All the "justifications" for dropping the bombs you cited are opinions and speculation. There are plenty more opinions and speculations that say the complete opposite.


The 150,000 I referred to is a conservative estimate of the amount killed from the atom bombs, I'm not talking about any other bombing raids.

RK1

WWII wasn't like any war since. It wasn't soldiers go off to fight and the rest of go out for dinner and a movie.

The entire population of Japan was mobilized for the war economy.Civilians died when we bombed the armament, munitions, war material factories.

Then they moved production into residential neighborhoods and homes and died when we bombed those. There was no way to win the war without bombing killing them.

If the Emperor had sent them all away for a long holiday and staffed all war production with soldiers, I'm sure that would have been fine with FDR, Truman and the military.

It's nice to try not to kill civilians in war but not to the point that you lose a lot more of your own people. It's a lot easier now with the systems we have than it was 65 years ago.

The real truth is by the end of the war with so many tens of millions of people dead, the bastards who started it refusing to give up, Americans, Canadians, Brits etc just wanted to utterly crush the enemy as quicky as humanly possible and get it over with.

I don't want to kill anybody let alone civilians but yes, in war I want my country to win and if that means killing civilians producing war material or in the way, I'd prefer that to losing a lot more Americans.

Like Sherman said, war really is hell, just get it over with as quickly as possible.

I'll tell you something else I believe. People who try to fight a war with your attitude get a lot more people killed (on both sides) in the long run and are more likely to lose.

CentralCoaster

Well then, by your terms Al Qaida did a pretty commendable job then.

The purpose of the a-bombs was to scare the hell out of the Japanese government. It was 100% about fear, and had very little to do with disabling their military production.

If the Axis powers had won WW2, Truman and his cabinet would have been tried as war criminals for dropping the a-bombs.

Yes, war is hell. I guess what I'm getting at is some are bound by a moral code, and they condemn anyone else that isn't. That code changes over time. When it comes down to it, the enemy, or even us, might do whatever it takes to top the other guy.

In the revolutionary war, there were rules the British fought by, they marched down in nice rows in open pastures and got riddled with bullets by Americans with guerilla tactics, hiding in trees and using decoys and sneak attacks.

200+ years later, we're going through the streets of Iraq, getting shot at by an enemy disguised in civilian clothes, hiding in homes. And we're condemning them for it?

We're asking other countries for nuclear proliferation, meanwhile we're packing more nukes than anyone.

Do you see the hypocrisy in all this? I do. That's not to say I don't support my country being the only one with nukes, or doing whatever it takes to win our battles, but I'm not confused and claiming we're somehow morally superior to our enemies. The only difference I see, is they're weaker, and therefore more desperate.

It isn't without consequences though. Our past actions make it harder to coax others through diplomacy. "Do as I say, not as I do." And if you can't reason with a threat, what is your last option? To crush them by force.

drew_c14

I've intentionally stayed out of this thread until now, but I have to jump in for just a second. You can't possibly compare what we did to end the war in the Pacific to what was done to us on 9-11. Yes, both can loosely be considered "acts of terror". The major distinction though is that one was done to save millions of lives and the other was done to further a flawed cause.

We had a fairly good idea what the outcome of dropping the bombs on Japan would be, and we were right.

Bin Laden was completely and totally wrong in his assumption of what would happen after 9-11. He thought we would just launch a few cruise missiles like Clinton had done in the past. He had no idea that we would respond like we did.

nuhawk

That's right, Drew! And you and the guys brought the big hammer.

autoteach

your definitions of terrorism and the situations under which they occur are skewed. I am not saying that the atom bomb was a good thing. But, the situation under which we dropped the atom bomb was much different than the situation under which planes were crashed into a commercial building, or the same building was bombed, or all the car bombs, or fill in the blank. War is hell, and if we could all live in peace, that would be great, but that will never happen.

Take some time to think about the whole thing. Is it okay for a thug to murder? Is it okay for the cop to shoot the thug? They both are killing another human, is it hypocrisy.

VTRsurfer

Well put autoteach.

RK1

CC;

In my opinion the moral equivalence argument is simplistic and shallow.

I don't think it's fair to philosophize and pontificate ignoring reality on the ground either. The goal of the Germans and Japanese was to conquer, occupy and enslave as much of the world as possible. The goal of the Allies was to force surrender of the aggressors, rebuilt their nations, assist them in establishing representative government and then LEAVING.

Yes, the A bombs were dropped to "scare the hell out of the Japanese government", and force their surrender. No kiddin'? Isn't enemy surrender the goal of every war that's ever been waged?

What was the goal of the 9/11 attacks? Did they think we'd all convert to Islam and bow toward Mecca? Or was it simply to kill as many innocents as possible for the sick pleasure of doing so and for bragging rights in the more sick and twisted corners of Islam?

Imagine this;

The USA develops the A bomb in 1942 instead of 1945. If we drop them on several Japanese and German cities we can "scare" those governments into surrendering. Yes, we'll kill several hundreds of thousands of people, mostly civilian, but save the lives of tens of millions who died in the last three years of the war.

The decision is yours. What shall we do? Which decision is the high minded and morally superior one?

autoteach

It is simple, RK1, Don't fight. If everyone gets along, no one gets hurt. Tell the sociopathic people to behave. Look, its working already.

And, if you ask Al Qaida, the goal wasn't to kill innocents, it was to kill insolents.

CentralCoaster

Ok, if we're talking hypotheticals... How about you build a time machine and go back to 1918 when a young guy named Adolf Hitler was a decorated WW1 soldier, and shoot him in the head. You would have saved millions of lives right? Would it still be wrong to shoot him?

Your logic assumes there was no better solution than killing hundreds of thousands of innocent japanese citizens who were out on that day planting gardens, playing in the park, or on their way to work at the local Mitsubishi factory. I guess we'll never know.

""...in [July] 1945... Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act. ...the Secretary, upon giving me the news of the successful bomb test in New Mexico, and of the plan for using it, asked for my reaction, apparently expecting a vigorous assent.

From Dwight Eisenhower who was General of the Army in 1945:

"During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of 'face'. The Secretary was deeply perturbed by my attitude..."


Here's a few other opinions:

http://www.doug-long.com/quotes.htm

CentralCoaster

Here's something that rings true today, from some of the Manhattan Project scientists:

"It will be very difficult to persuade the world that a nation which was capable of secretly preparing and suddenly releasing a weapon, as indiscriminate as the rocket bomb and a thousand times more destructive, is to be trusted in its proclaimed desire of having such weapons abolished by international agreement."