Posted on 11/16/2001 1:04:08 PM PST by Mean Daddy
Dr. Sowell takes Klintoon and other elites to the woodshed on the latest round of feel good initiatives. He takes apart the argument that we are being punished for our sins because of slavery (which still exists in some Muslim countries) and our behavior in the Crusades (didn't know Billary was that old!).
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http://www.georgetown.edu/admin/publicaffairs/protocol_events/events/clinton_glf110701.htmIt's quite outrageous. Clinton says things that undermine the Bush administration's efforts like:
First, we have to win the fight we are in ...
So what I want to say to you first is, we have to support the war in Afghanistan and the work at home,
Now, if you accept that analysis, I hope the first thing I said is more compelling. We've got to win the fight we're in.
After these traitorous comments, he gives us a good dose of anti-capitalist victim-glorifying rhetoric:
Democracy is a stabilizing force. It provides a nonviolent means for resolving disputes. I believe that. And it's no accident that most of these terrorists come from non-democratic countries. If you live in a country where you're never required to take responsibility for yourself, where you never even have to ask whether there's something you should be doing to solve your own problems, then people are kept in a kind of a permanent state of collective immaturity and it becomes quite east for them to believe that someone else's success is the cause of their distress.
After those shocking words, he delivers this bit of statist rhetoric and moral relativism:
And I think this is a very, very important point. I have seen so many instances where peoples simply did not have any reference point because they were never required to take responsibility for themselves. If your families had raised you and they were so worried that you were going to hurt yourself that from the time that you were six 'til the time it came time for you to go to Georgetown they never let out of house, you would have still been six emotionally, if you had never been able to leave the house. That's what it's like if you never get to have a say in your own life.
Why hasn't the mainstream press shown more outrage? Maybe they read the speech?
First, we have to win the fight we are in and in that I urge you to keep three things in mind. First of all, terror, the killing of noncombatants for economic, political, or religious reasons has a very long history as long as organized combat itself, and yet, it has never succeeded as a military strategy standing on its own, but it has been around a long time. Those of us who come from various European lineages are not blameless. Indeed, in the first Crusade, when the Christian soldiers took Jerusalem, they first burned a synagogue with 300 Jews in it, and proceeded to kill every woman and child who was Muslim on the Temple mound. The contemporaneous descriptions of the event describe soldiers walking on the Temple mound, a holy place to Christians, with blood running up to their knees. I can tell you that that story is still being told to today in the Middle East and we are still paying for it. Here in the United States, we were founded as a nation that practiced slavery and slaves were, quite frequently, killed even though they were innocent. This country once looked the other way when significant numbers of Native Americans were dispossessed and killed to get their land or their mineral rights or because they were thought of as less than fully human and we are still paying the price today. Even in the 20th century in America people were terrorized or killed because of their race. And even today, though we have continued to walk, sometimes to stumble, in the right direction, we still have the occasional hate crime rooted in race, religion, or sexual orientation. So terror has a long history.
The second point I want to make is, in that long history, no terrorist campaign standing on its own has ever won, and conventional military strategies that have included terrorism with it have won because of conventional military power, and terrorism has normally been a negative. I will just give you one example from my childhood. In the Civil War, General Sherman waged a brilliant military campaign to cut through the South and go to Atlanta. It was significant and very helpful in bringing the Civil War to a close in a way to, thank God, save the Union. On the way, General Sherman practiced a relatively mild form of terrorism-he did not kill civilians, but he burned all the farms and then he burned Atlanta, trying to break the spirit of the Confederates. It had nothing whatever to do with winning the Civil War, but it was a story that was told for a hundred years later, and prevented America from coming together as we might otherwise have done. When I was a boy growing up in the segregated South, when we should have been thinking about how we were going to integrate the schools and give people equal opportunity, people were making excuses for unconscionable behavior by talking about what Sherman had done a hundred years ago. So, it is important to remember that normally terrorism has backfired and never has it succeeded on its own.
I am STILL furious about this speech; no doubt this is why we haven't seen his ugly face on TV this week. Wouldn't want to answer questions about it, would he?
It is a sad sad day we have reached. The commentators of the conservative movement are now as irrelevant, as angry, as dishonest, as the pundits of the left. We used to have the high ground. Too bad.
Clinton's speech hit many notes - it rambled, and was badly written. The statements I highlighted emphasize personal responsibility. They could have been lifted from a Reagan speech. He also gave vent to the typical, reflexive liberal white guilt whine. This is tiresome and unnecessary. His views of foreign aid, while pretty standard in the Democratic party, are simply wrong.
The problem I have is that many conservatives and people on this board have called this speech treasonous or worse, and suggested he is undermining President Bush. Clinton stated clearly at least three times that we must support the war in Afghanistan, and must win the war in Afghanistan. It is irresponsible for these commentators to charge someone with treason under these circumstances. It is divisive at time when the country needs unity. We should save the vitriol for the very real instances in which lefties (generally on college campuses) have genuinely made outrageous statements against the war.
The response of some of the posters here is simply Pavlovian. Clinton lied under oath, he sold secrets to the Chinese, he perhaps permanently diminished the highest office of the greatest nation in the world. Now, he makes a relatively mundane comment about slavery and people pretend they're surprised and outraged. What a joke. Some of you guys just can't let go of the guy - and some formerly honest commentators are basically lying to you, making a mountain out of a molehill to get you riled. Too bad.
I don't know who you are, or where you came from, but you haven't been here quite long enough to come along and tell us all how we think and why we are posting what we post. Leave that to the tinfoil hatters, will you?
If you don't think it's treasonous, fine. I fail to see why you have to criticize those who do.
More "education"!
BTW, three lines out of a 90 minute speech don't amount to a hill of beans.
I think treason is a serious charge. I think that Clinton's actions with regard to Chinese campaign money are suitably called treasonous. If he publically voices support for the war, he isn't committing treason with respect to the war effort. I apologize for getting riled up about this, but frankly I was a bit stunned when I read the speech and found that it had been (in my view) flatly misrepresented. I saw a guy on O'Reilly who said that Clinton failed to support the war effort anywhere in the speech. The Washington Times article calling the speech treasonous also fails to mention that he voiced support for the war. It may be 3 lines out of a 90 minute speech, but if you're leveling a charge of treason, I think it is very deceptive not to at least mention that those lines are in there. I feel that there is a fundamental dishonesty in the way this speech is portrayed.
Another thread mentions the statements made by a group of college professors (the Middle East Studies Association) which seem to me to be quite anti-American. I think that these statements and actions need to be exposed. However, if the Middle East Studies Association had officially stated that it is in support of the war, I think that that statement would need to be taken into account in evaluating that group's patriotism. That doesn't mean that their statements would then be immune from criticism, but only that the important fact of their stated stance on the war effort would need to be, in fairness, dealt with.
I happen to believe that in times of war, that former presidents, especially ones who had a chance to actually do something about terrorism and failed to do so, should keep their self-serving mouths shut.
And I believe when they don't, it's IS treasonous. It's called aiding and abetting the enemy; you can believe we're going to hear those words thrown back in our faces sometimes in the future.
Besides all that, to equate slavery to the WTC attacks, IS treasonous, IMO.
I'm sorry, but I just feel that when a former president of the United States, who keep his mouth shut anyway, comes out and agrees with the American-haters and the "We brought this one ourselves,"Here, I certainly think there is room for disagreement. I think his comments here were pretty murky. Did he really say that 9/11 is payback for slavery? 9/11 is payback for the Crusades? I think this is too stupid for even Clinton. He said "still paying a price." That could mean many things, not just 9/11, and to say it's 9/11 doesn't make any sense. To say that he said "we brought this on ourselves" is the proper interpretation of his vague statements isn't really justified.
he is on the verge of dividing this country (Of course, why would he change, that's always been his M.O.?) and he is close, IMO, to running what, for all intents and purposes, is a shadow government.I don't know what you mean here. How does Clinton now run a shadow government?
I happen to believe that in times of war, that former presidents, especially ones who had a chance to actually do something about terrorism and failed to do so, should keep their self-serving mouths shut.No problem here. So, if Clinton says something stupid, but not treasonous, keep him out of the news. I'm all for it.
And I believe when they don't, it's IS treasonous. It's called aiding and abetting the enemy; you can believe we're going to hear those words thrown back in our faces sometimes in the future.Words have meaning. "Treason" has a meaning - saying you support the war effort isn't treason or aiding and abetting the enemy.
Besides all that, to equate slavery to the WTC attacks, IS treasonous, IMO.I think it is dumb to equate the two - and it's not clear what Clinton was saying. If it were, the interpretation would be (a paraphrase): "Slavery was a great wrong, as was the WTC attack. We ended slavery through a war, and we need to win the war in Afghanistan." A dumb statement, certainly, but not treasonous.
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