What if I said.

[TheMercenary]

Actually they did not lie. They gave opinions of they way they remembered things that happened and the majority of people disagreed with Kerry. That is a fact. Did Kerry lie? Maybe. At the least he overstated what he knew from rumor and second hand information. Kerry's military career is questionable. No one can dispute he got the medals he did, they can however dispute the manner in which he obtained them as other who were with him recalled the events. He had the guts to go before Congress for personal gain. You know nothing about the other 18 men so you would be hard pressed to hold their credentials against the one.

[Shawnee123]

So, tell me again. Do you want us to believe 18 men or one man?

[TheMercenary]

Originally Posted by Shawnee123

So, tell me again. Do you want us to believe 18 men or one man?

I don't want you to believe anything. What I said is that there is a difference of opinion as to what the facts were at the time. I stated this:

The opinions of 18 men with no axe to grind vs. one man with the desire to obtain a powerful politcal position with all the perks? I'll stand with the 18.
http://www.snopes.com/politics/kerry/swift.asp

[Urbane Guerrilla]

As you see, Paul Ireland, I am vindicated, you are not. Do your homework next time, and quit the madness.

[Radar]

You can read what the guys who were actually with him when he EARNED his combat medals here:

http://www.snopes.com/politics/kerry/service.asp

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Well, Radar, your grandiose hollerings cast you in the role of blockhead, which seems an odd one for a man of your parts. You're rather losing your self-possession, aren't you?

There's no shame in being guided by me; I'm not here to steer you wrong, but to steer you right.

Kerry, as Senator, hardly missed any opportunity to weigh in against the Republic's interest, particularly when there were Communist interests involved, viz., his votes on the Contras: uniformly pro-Sandinista, and given the Sandinistas' record of being both collectivist and incompetent, that's hard to forgive, and illustrative of the man's altogether ridiculous priorities. He was no apostle of either democracy or the Republic's interests in foreign arenas, and that, Radar, is a matter of record. It was good for the nation to vote against Kerry, and that is precisely what we did, by a popular vote margin of three and a half million. Would that it had been thirty-five. It's just sensible to shrink the influence those socialist Democrats wield in our nation, which sensibility seems largely to escape you, for reasons I can't fathom. You've explained them some as you see them, but what I hear tells me they aren't good enough for me to adopt. The Republicans think like libertarians a good bit more than the Democrats can, however much they fail at putting such precepts into actual practice. The Dems, intoxicated on socialist ideas, don't even pay them lip service. So, I don't think voting for Dems is good for us on the domestic front, and frankly, the Dems are completely absent on the foreign-policy front.

Now for you to have any understanding of where I'm coming from in foreign policy, here's the material you must read: The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the 21st Century and Blueprint For Action: a Future Worth Creating, both by Thomas P.M. Barnett. You'll enjoy the read -- Barnett's a lucid and engaging writer. One or two of the ideas he's put forth I don't agree with: he declares the era of great-power war is finished, and that warfare in the future is all going to be in the Non-Integrating Gap states and the Seam States that border the Gap's fringes. War being a part of the human condition -- we're our own natural enemy simply because there is nothing else on the planet as lethal as we humans -- I am wary of such happy pronouncements. At best, I think we are in for a lengthy, but still in the end temporary, condition of peace within the world's Economically Functional Core, a/k/a the developed world.

Barnett's Website

The guy seems to have quite a vision, and it checks out pretty well. So far, I'm fascinated.

[Flint]

Originally Posted by Urbane Guerrilla

...the Swift Boaters were never refuted on a single point of fact.

Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce

Snopes did.

Originally Posted by Urbane Guerrilla

A Wiki summary, FWIW in giving a rounded view of the affair.

Snopes calls your bluff, and your rebuttal is from Wikipedia?

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Not so much a rebuttal, as a filling-in for a more complete picture. One filling-in works pretty much as well as another. One can always scour the primary sources again, if one thinks one should. Kerry's had his integrity well impeached, and I reckon he would not as President have been an improvement over Carter. Democrat foreign policy... bah. Hopeless, and it's chronic.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Returning more or less to the original topic, something that fastens the albatross that is Jeremiah Wright around Obama's neck.

Ann does too. Out of 'Context' or Out of His Mind?

Larry Elder, too, in a standard sort of Elder column.

[Happy Monkey]

Originally Posted by Urbane Guerrilla

Returning more or less to the original topic, something that fastens the albatross that is Jeremiah Wright around Obama's neck.

Originally Posted by Bozell

Pardon me if I can’t exactly remember Walter Cronkite vilifying Martin Luther King for opposing the Vietnam War.

Maybe not Cronkite, who was also opposed to the war, but

Originally Posted by wikipedia

King also was opposed to the Vietnam War on the grounds that the war took money and resources that could have been spent on the War on Poverty. The United States Congress was spending more and more on the military and less and less on anti-poverty programs at the same time. He summed up this aspect with "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."
King was long hated by many white southern segregationists, but this speech turned the more mainstream media against him. Time called the speech "demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi", and The Washington Post declared that King had "diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people."

It was a pretty incoherent article. It starts off by sneering at the idea that King was vilified for his views on Vietnam, then spends several paragraphs vilifying King for his views on Vietnam and equating King and Wright, which is not a comparison that is likely to turn many people off to Wright. If you want to pile on, saying "he's just like MLK!" doesn't seem to be the greatest strategy. Unless you're Bozell's target audience, I guess.

[spudcon]

While I think MLK had the right idea about how to bring about change, his quote "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death." takes him outside the realm of his philosophy. There is no place in the Constitution that allows our government to spend more on "social uplifts" than it does on military defense. There is no clause about social uplifts. Like many other great men, when they talk about things outside their own expertise, they blunder. In Jeremiah Wright's case, I haven't heard evidence of expertise in anything except bigotry.

[tw]

Originally Posted by Urbane Guerrilla

Well, Radar, your grandiose hollerings cast you in the role of blockhead, which seems an odd one for a man of your parts. You're rather losing your self-possession, aren't you?

Why are routine personal attacks by Urbane Guerrilla acceptable when even April never did that and got banned?

At what point are personal attacks, routine in every Urbane Guerrilla post, called acceptable Cellar behavior.

We have seen a few people banned for so much less. Why is UG's behavior exempt?

UG never posts without personal attacks. And that is acceptable. No. That is a double standard ... UT.

[lookout123]

pot? meet kettle.

[tw]

Originally Posted by lookout123

pot? meet kettle.

And your citation is ... ?

Cited is another example of what UG posts routinely ... personal attacks. Not even April nor marichiko did anything so anti-social and despicable. Even Barak was not a problem.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

I was going to ask who the hell this April was...

But now instead I wonder that tw continues his "poor me" chant, after I ridiculed/exposed its nature. The man can't help it, he must invite contempt.

Should I get really sadistic, and refuse to give him any?