Posted on 04/30/2014 8:13:49 AM PDT by Flame Retardant
Man, the 12 minute speech Sarah Palin gave to the NRA convention is awful. It's just witless, red-meat blathering, delivered in that nasal whine of hers that makes it sound like she's chewing wads of tinfoil. For people who like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing they like.
Fast-forward in the video to the 6:30 mark, though, and listen to what she says about terrorists. It's part of a long harangue about lily-livered liberals, delivered in such a way that makes Archie Bunker sound like Cicero. Money quote:
"Oh, but you can't offend them, can't make them feel uncomfortable, not even a smidgen. Well, if I were in charge, they would know that waterboarding is how we baptize terrorists."OK, stop. Not only is this woman, putatively a Christian, praising torture, but she is comparing it to a holy sacrament of the Christian faith. It's disgusting--but even more disgusting, those NRA members, many of whom are no doubt Christians, cheered wildly for her....
Palin and all those who cheered her sacrilegious jibe ought to be ashamed of themselves. For us Christians, baptism is the entry into new life. Palin invoked it to celebrate torture. Even if you don't believe that waterboarding is torture, surely you agree that it should not be compared to baptism, and that such a comparison should be laughed at. What does it say about the character of a person that they could make that joking comparison, and that so many people would cheer for it. Nothing good--and nothing that does honor to the cause of Jesus Christ.
If I thought that kind of hateful declaration and abuse of the Christian religion was what conservatism stood for, I wouldn't be able to call myself a conservative...
(Excerpt) Read more at theamericanconservative.com ...
Misusing the quote is creating a lie, Reagan was no libertarian.
While campaigning in 1975, Reagan opened his interview with the small libertarian publication, for it’s pure libertarian audience, with a quote that reveals the commonality between his conservative economics (his degree was in economics) and their so called “libertarian” economics.
Then he starts telling them how he disagrees with libertarianism and supports social conservatism and a strong and aggressive national defense, he even gently argues with them on gambling and prostitution.
Reagan’s politics are no mystery, his writings and speeches are all out there, his life is an open book, and Reagan was no libertarian.
Even if there were no moral objections whatsoever to waterboarding, it would still be sacrilegious to equate it to sacred baptism, just as it would be sacrilegious to equate my morning shower or a dip in the jacuzzi to unwind with sacred baptism.
Water boarding against non-federal employees of the US. government, is extremely rare, almost non-existent.
The claim and evidence, is that we only water-boarded 3 terrorists, (we have water-boarded 10s of thousands of federal government employees), we knew who they were, they were not people just picked up in traffic stops and suspected of possibly having some useful information.
What I think most supporters are unwilling to think through about the inherent evil of torture is the way it violates human dignity: by reducing a person from an end to a means.
A person who has lost or suffered grave compromise of his free will so that he can no longer obey his conscience, is no longer a moral subject as God intends.
This view also has a bearing on considerations of suicide: the guilt of those who act from extreme duress, fear, anguish, etc. may be less imputable for those reasons and allows us at least to hope that in such cases the souls of such may not be lost forever. One thinks immediately of the many who perished at the WTC on 9/11, leaping to escape the flames. Is the guilt for their deaths fully imputable to them? I believe the terrorists who did the harm bear the mortal share of the guilt. The iniquitous injustice done to the victims of 9/11, robbed of their ability to obey their consciences, does seem to relate them in a mysterious way to those subsequently tortured in pursuit of the guilty.
See the CCC:
675 Before Christ’s second coming the Church must pass through a final trial that will shake the faith of many believers. The persecution that accompanies her pilgrimage on earth will unveil the “mystery of iniquity” in the form of a religious deception offering men an apparent solution to their problems at the price of apostasy from the truth.
1865 Sin creates a proclivity to sin; it engenders vice by repetition of the same acts. This results in perverse inclinations which cloud conscience and corrupt the concrete judgment of good and evil. Thus sin tends to reproduce itself and reinforce itself, but it cannot destroy the moral sense at its root.
Did you see post 104?
What are you, twelve years old?
1. It’s probably asking a lot of a woman who was baptized Catholic and has family in the Church but who’s spent most of her life in Assemblies of God and then non-denominational congregations and got her education in the faith there to think like a Catholic on this sort of thing. Actually, no “probably” about it. It is asking a lot.
2. I think that line, as the context shows, was as much or more out of frustration with current administration policy than a literal statement of Palin Administration policy. You can rightly deplore how she said it, and still admit she has a point. Nidal Hasan is not just your normal garden-variety federal employee gone postal. The Tsarnaevs aren’t just college kids whose prank went horribly wrong. Islamic terrorism, organized or irregular, isn’t just a crime, it’s war and should be treated as such. Waterboarding isn’t necessary. Torture isn’t necessary. Being honest with ourselves about the nature of the situation is.
3. The behavior of much of the professional class, and even some of the rank-and-file, in the GOP and conservative movement toward Sarah Palin from August 2008 to the present has been, and continues to be, to their shame.
He has a good point, flame retardant is off to a pretty weird start.
Plus Catholic voters oppose her, and her party and her pro-life politics.
You just refuse to respond anything that challenges you on this water-boarding issue, don’t you.
You want to sell a point of view, while ignoring the facts and pretending that no one is posting them to you.
I don’t respond to frivolous assertions.
I haven’t made any frivolous assumptions, I have been posting you hard cold facts on a subject that you have revealed a lack of knowledge about.
That is why you have been refusing to respond.
And even if you set aside the moral objections, making somebody tell you what he thinks you want to hear (which has no connection to reality) simply isn’t useful.
Flame Retardant didn't just start posting with this thread. He has been posting since 4/21. Prior to starting this thread, he had made about 25 posts. And he really doesn't look like a troll in those posts.
Yeah, I know his weird posting history.
That isn't what high level interrogations do. Interrogation is not just a blind fishing expedition by a couple of ignorant boobs, who don't know what they are looking for.
That is why certain military units spend so much training in resisting interrogation, and why so many thousands of federal employees are water-boarded.
According to your reasoning, once someone realizes they can just make up things and don't need to be honest, then professional interrogation is useless.
I am not a fan of the echo chamber mode that this place becomes sometimes. Nor of sniffing at newbies, save obvious trolls. Nor of the mindset that equates any criticism of Palin with treason.
The article is legit - I heard Levin go off on it last evening.
Palin did what Bundy did - went off topic. The sad thing about it is that both chose, wittingly or not, to use things that dehumanize. That is always going to blow up.
I do believe she has a role to play. She needs to be careful not to overplay it.
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