Reply #44: you keep changing the issue on me [View All]

and in the process you keep on trying to fuse all of them into a single one, on which there is Dean's Way and there is Bush's Way. You keep on illustrating my point of trying to turn everything into Leninist issues of The One Big Truth.


Do you think it was ok for the party not to speak out on Iraq?

It never came to a consensus on it. Dictator/Iraqi suffering- true. Democratic government to install- unavailable. WMDs-bogus or near trivial at best. Running low level military conflict and political war-of-nerves with the U.S.- yes. Reason enough to go to war- no. Reason enough to resist war- kind of. The Democratic plan was to let Iraq go the way of Castro's Cuba. (OTOH, the Bay of Pigs got tried by a Democrat.)

It sounds as though you think it was harmful to say it, as though it is only "someone's truth." Or perhaps you are saying it did not matter and was not important.

Why is your truth the Absolute Truth, rather than a relative one?

Actually you are defending Bush's position in a way. That his truth is as good as ours on this topic of Iraq.

Nice guilt-by-associatation attempt, but not true. Btw, simpleminded emotional 'associationism' is a deliberate Republican method in political debate.

And again, the usual implications about the self-importance of Dean folks and their truths. That really gets to me. It implies that we "worship" or "adore" or something like that.

If you need an operative word to plug in there it is "hate" or "vehemently oppose". Idolatries can be negative toward the supposed object- but these seem invariably to be oh-so-complimentary to the egos and abilities of the people wielding them.

Actually for most of us, it is respect for the truth that no one was really talking about.

Yeah, those mau-mauing megaphone blasts of Dean dogmatism throughout November/December/January didn't actually happen.

Either Saddam and Iraq were part of 9/11 or they were not. It is not my truth or your truth. They either caused it or they did not.

Of course this is so. No one has disagreed with you on facts, only on the selective choice and interpretation of them. But as true as this one fact may be, your Republican and war-supporter neighbors don't necessarily consider this one crucial. Their own culture and social order and religion are in crisis, they see the collision of it with the Islamic world, they hope to revive their own by intensifying the conflict. The occasion for WW1 was trivial to all sides, they simply knew This One Was Coming and Now Is The Time For It.