hoopsmalone wrote:to mr scorcho
1. If you really can't comprehend what I meant by "Israel and America's security are mutually inclusive" that's your fault, not mine. If you don't realize how vital that alliance is, we can't even begin to have a serious discussion. You say later, "we're not talking about israel",well, maybe not in your myopic, ron paul fantasy land where america is just as guilty as the islamic terrorists who commited the actual murders on 9-11. (Or maybe you think we committed those acts..I'll hit on that later) The bottom line is England and Israel are such strong allies that if they fall prey to an attack from Iran, we WILL intervene, whether ron paul likes it or not.
Did I say we wouldn't? Did Ron Paul say we wouldn't? Nope. He just doesn't think Iran is an immediate threat to our homeland or worth striking pre-emptively. I happen to agree. I never said America was guilty in 9/11. You put those words in my mouth. I said that the reason we were attacked was because of our presence in areas where our presence wasn't desired. I'm aware that Islamic extremists attacked on September 11th. I don't deny that, and I don't deny that we should have brought everyone involved in that plot to justice. I do not believe justice includes attacking before we're attacked.
hoopsmalone wrote:You can point to old ben franklins line about security without privacy all you want, but the bottom line is that was in a totally different era and everything has rapidly progressed since then. (Althought most "progressive" like to overlook that fact) This isn't a war being fought w/ muzzle loaders, its a war on every front, from technological warfare to hand-to-hand combat. If you're such an opponent of ANY troop presence in the middle east, I don't see how you could argue for a decrease in foreign presence AND against the need for a stronger INTERIOR defense, unless you really don't think we should be doing ANYTHING to protect ourselves.
Government doesn't need protection from it's people. People need protection from their government. This country was founded on a rebellion and structured such that if the government ever started to gain powers not granted or desired by the people, such a rebellion would again occur. The principles on which this nation were founded are timeless and technology does not change them. Warrants aren't obsolesced by technology. I don't think the constitutionally granted rights of American citizens are, either. You might want to take a hard look at how you define progressive if you disagree.
hoopsmalone wrote:You use that line about how "more people die from heart attacks each year", well, you know as well as I do,that if as many of those jets had hit their targets as intended on 9-11, this country would be in total disrepair.
As far as I know, only plane missed it's target and no one has ever been quite sure of what it was intended to hit. What jets are you talking about?
hoopsmalone wrote:Fat jim down the street may die of his heart attack tonight, but that whole point is irrelevent when you're comparing it to a potential catastrophic attack that would cripple our economy and throw the entire nation into chaos.
No, it's not relevant. The chaos comes from fear, and fearing something that is statistically improbable is just plain silly. We've worked ourselves up over something that we should be dealing with much more rationally than we are.
hoopsmalone wrote:We can go one of two ways on this , retreat like you want and build a stronger internal security shield, in both the physical sense and the technological sense, or we can continue to seek out the enemy where he hides, a concept that you so admantly oppose.
Yes, I prefer not to attack those who have not attacked us. Call me a moral person.
hoopsmalone wrote:(Don't bother the whole iraq debate on this, because you don't even think we should in Afghanistan or ANYWHERE in the middle east according to Paul's policy)
I was going to wait until the end of my post to say this, but you're speaking ignorantly in this conversation. You've jumped into this thread without having read any of our previous threads about Ron Paul, where I've said I'm about 85% behind him. I believe we should be in Afghanistan as necessary to seek out Al Qaeda and Bin Laden. Iraq? Meh. We're not the U.N.'s attack dog.
hoopsmalone wrote:3. Yes, smart a$$ I'm aware that radical islam rules the entire region---thanks for proving my point, because it's only going to continue to spread, regardless of what we do. Extremists have hated Christians since the US even existed.
So you want to fight a religious ideal with bullets and bombs? You'd better wake up, because Christians as we around here define them are hated by a great number of people, but that doesn't have anything to do with why Al Qaeda attacked us. They don't even hate Israel because they're Jews. They hate them because they feel like they're on their land.
hoopsmalone wrote:"So far the only attacks they have decided to engage in have been on the foreign military forces that are occupying parts of their nations."- You're right, the 93 wtc bombing and Sept 11 were all our fault right? We have nobody to blame but oursevles.
Islamic extremists committed terrible crimes on September 11th. I will never debate that fact. What prompted them to do it, however, was the culmination of many years of them warning us to get out of Saudi Arabia. We were there unnecessarily, we didn't listen and they'd finally had enough. How they handled it was completely wrong and atrocious, but for us to sit here as American citizens and pretend like we wouldn't have been angry if the shoe was on the other foot is ridiculous. If an Islamic nation showed up, fought a war against Canada based out of our country, hung around past their welcome with military bases set up in the United States, people would be enraged.
hoopsmalone wrote:Then again, many of you in the ron paul crowd actually believe that 9-11 was all an inside job, so maybe you're right.
You believe too much media spin. Ron Paul was invited to speak to a 9/11 conspiracy group, by the group. He spoke to them, disagrees with them and that's that. Most of us are just fiscally conservative people who believe someone desperately needs to reign in this government in big ways.
That you would call me a progressive is funny, in a way. The folks in the Ron Paul camp want a
return to constitutional government. We want a return to the government the United States was intended to have. That's not archaic or stupid. It's conservative. It's just plain American. If these ideas seem "progressive", it's just proof that things in this nation have gone way too far already.
everybody in this place needs lighten up.
- By LU Armchair coach