Replies

I'd like to thank everyone who's given me such a warm welcome. I may visit every so often, though I'm not sure how often I'll actually post replies/comments. I'm happy that you who welcomed me are interested in intelligent debate and discussion of views, though, and that may be enough to entice me to post on those items I feel most passionately about. E.G.C.'s reply to this post contains the first issues that have gotten my attention here on FR, and that I feel the need to clear up. Before I begin my argument, I'd like to make clear that I have no problem with E.G.C. him/herself, or his/her having a different opinion than my own--however, I do think that pointing out the factual errors behind those opinions is something that needs to be done for everybody, and thus I welcome any civilized replies regarding my opinions, should there be any facts I overlooked in constructing this post. [WARNING: LIBERAL RANTING FOLLOWS. READ AT YOUR OWN RISK.] Keith Olbermann is showing himself to be an absolute paranoid goofball. As he sees it, one bad apple is representative of the whole bunch. -> I understand your position here, in terms of all of you being lumped together as bad apples. However, I have seen such behavior on both sides of the political spectrum, directed to the other side. Liberals and Conservatives are equally guilty of seeing one individual's views as representative of an entire group. I'm willing to admit that I have committed this fallacy many, many times during the time I've been intensely interested in politics... As Keith and his kind see it, it's not Saddam or Al-queida that poses a National Security threat to this country. It's christians and conservatives who pose this threat. -> ...and this line from E.G.C. suggests that he or she is guilty of it as well, assuming my interpretation of "his kind" as meaning "liberals" is accurate--and I apologize if I assume incorrectly. However, regardless of whether or not a logical fallacy was intended there, the views of Mr. Olbermann and his fellow liberals have been seriously misrepresented. Christians and Conservatives as a whole are not seen as a greater threat to our security than Al-Qaeda, and Mr. Olbermann has never expressed such a view. What he, and other liberals, do feel is that some policies advocated by some Conservatives are a danger to the safety of our nation, its citizens, and its soldiers. The most recent, high-profile example of this is the Military Commissions Act of 2006 (MCA06 for the rest of this post), which gives the President the power to declare--through a tribunal whose members are chosen by the President or Secretary of Defense--any person an Unlawful Enemy Combatant (UEC), allowing them to be detained indefinitely and denying them the rights to a fair trial contesting their imprisonment, to have competent legal representation in court, and to have access to all the evidence against them. Now, before you call me paranoid, I must ask: as a vocal Conservative, would you trust a Democratic President, with the power to indefinitely imprison anyone believed to be supporting our enemies, to resist the draw of that power toward silencing his domestic critics? As a wise man said, and people the world over have seen proven in the past, "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." The MCA06 also has a ban on torture. In another circumstance, this might be enough for me to consider supporting at least part of the legislation. Unfortunately, however, the same piece of legislation grants the power to define what constitutes torture to the President exclusively, thus making it a porous ban at best. This part of the law doesn't make me fear for my own safety, but for that of the troops. What if we were to enter a war with Iran, Syria, or North Korea, and they were to put our uniformed men and women through some of the same ordeals that have been alleged as happening in Guantanamo Bay Prison? We filed charges of war crimes for water-boarding after WWII, for example, and now it is alleged that we are committing the same act (in the interests of full disclosure, I must admit that I have little doubt the allegations are true, though I pray that I am wrong). What Mr. Olbermann has essentially done is branded everyone of us as terrorists or potential terrorists who need to be spied on. -> President George W. Bush was saying almost the same thing about liberals in the run-up to the midterm elections. On several occasions, he has stated--with various levels of explicitness--that a vote for the Democrats is a vote for the terrorists. As for Mr. Olbermann's taking it on himself to protect the nation, you are somewhat accurate. Mr. Olbermann does what few true newsmen (i.e. NOT Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert) have really done during this administration: he calls out the President and Congress on what appear to be abuses of political power. He has taken it upon himself to protect us not from the politicians' conservative base of supporters, but from the politicians themselves. I pray that he will continue to do so with the new Democratic Congress, as well, though neither he nor I deny that he is a left-wing individual and that his reporting likely mirrors that opinion. This kind of B.S. and C.F. is why PMSDNC is contuining to and will continue to lose audience. [Because Olbermann and others on MSNBC are afraid of] people with differing points of view than they have... -> I cut out a large section of the remainder of the post simply because it is so dripping with hatred for those who have a different opinion than E.G.C. does. Part of my pointing to this section at all is to show the hypocrisy in their statement, yes, but also to make clear that those paragraphs, where Mr. Olbermann is referred to as a "low life douche bag" who is "chicken-hearted and scared" of those who disagree with him, is the exact antithesis of intelligent debate and civilized discourse. And could the same thing not be said about O'Reilly, who cuts off phone calls from and yells over the speaking of those who disagree with him. Additionally, saying that MSNBC is losing viewers is entirely false. On Election Night, MSNBC's programs had significant increases in their viewers--Keith actually had about 66-75% of Bill O'Reilly's audience, and MSNBC had several time slots that night that outdid the programs on Fox News at the same time. I apologize for ranting on for so long, and I thank anyone who read the whole of the post--which has taken me about an hour to write. I think that it would do all FR readers good to read this in its entirety, as it is a look into the mind and opinions of the average liberal individual. I look forward to future opportunities to give this insight, assuming that I'm not declared a UEC and shipped to Gitmo before I have a chance to do so. ;)

OK first off, when someone refers to us, that reference seems to somehow imply that this is a liberal majority nation. That's absolute nonsense. This whether anyone wants to believe it or not is still a conservative majority nation.

Secondly, whether anyone wants to believe it or not, these news media organizations aren't our friends, they're our enemies and I'm going to continue to address these issues. Mr. Olbermann is not someone you want to defend on a conservative news forum. His audience is shrinking and everybody knows it. This isn't the kind of person I want governing my community, state or country.

And quite frankly this Democrat Congress isn't going to last very long. Tax and spend is not something people are willing to go for.

My problem with Mr. Olbermann is he seems to think he and his kind are the United States of America and the rest of us aren't. I'm not the only person who feels this way. there are far more who agree with me than agree differently. that's all there is to it.

When I said "Intelligent debate is healthy and informative", I didn't mean to imply that everyone here partook in the exercise. ;^)

First off, I apologize for my post getting lumped together like that. Apparently running it through the spell-check on here destroyed the line breaks I had put in. It was far easier to read when I typed it.

Secondly, E.G.C., the way you speak to me about how liberals don't seem to like people speaking their mind is highy hypocritical. President Bush and his administration have said that anyone who questions their decisions is akin to a Nazi appeaser/person who would tolerate slavery pre-Civil War/etc.

And the President did, at one point, suggest that it was inappropriate to think that any actions by the US or its troops during the war on terror can be similar to the actions of those we are fighting.

I'm not going to try to debate whether this country is more conservative or liberal. I don't have any independent studies to prove my opinion, and you haven't presented any to prove yours. The more rational side of me suggests that the country is fairly evenly split, but I can't prove this any more than I can prove that the country is more liberal or you can prove the country is more conservative.

Finally, E.G.C., I don't believe you actually tried to argue anything that my long post said, aside from saying that it was unwise for me to defend Mr. Olbermann on this website. I already knew that, by the way; I was well aware that this site would have people that would flame me for my opinions, but I was hoping there would be just as many who were interested in truly enlightened discussion, as well.

I am not trying to force anyone into having the same opinions as I do, and I tried to make that clear in my post. Believe it or not, E.G.C., we Democrats want this country to be secure just as you Republicans do. The only difference between the two parties, at least where National Security is concerned, is the means by which we want to reach those ends.

Finally, I would ask that E.G.C.--and all others who read my posts--please do me one favor, and try to present some argument to the factual points I made when replying to my posts. I'm willing to re-post the essay with the proper line breaks, if there is any interest in my doing so.

Now, before you call me paranoid, I must ask...

It is paranoia. Are you really suggesting that a Republican president would arrest Noam Chomsky under the provisions of MCA06? Or a Democratic one would imprison Ann Coulter? Patent nonsense.

The old saw you cite - composed by a famous conservative, by the way - about absolute power corrupting absolutely, does not apply to the president of the United States, because he has never wielded absolute power and, as long as the US remains a constitutional democracy, he (or she) never will. Chomsky and Coulter, protected by the Bill of Rights, are safe. They'll never be tossed into prison on a presidential whim. If any president were mentally disturbed enough to try it, the ultimate check and balance -- an election -- would act as the corrective it is meant to be.

But in times of war, special powers must be assigned to the Commander in Chief in the interests of the welfare of the entire American people. So it was for Lincoln, and for FDR, and so also it must be for any president, from either party, who commands the US military effort against global terror. MCA06 concerns itself with enemy combatants as defined by those in charge of waging the war. If you cannot muster the confidence in those so charged to apply the criteria fairly, then I can only question whether anyone could ever exercise legitimate power, however delimited, in a manner which you would find satisfactory.