Monday, August 13, 2007

Request for Ostrich zingers...

Urgent request for your favorite hypocritical moments

For my Kos posting of the Ostrich Papers, I want to supplement with a list of favorite YouTube Hypocrisy Moments... short blips that you can force your ostrich to watch in short jolts.

One of you offered The Agonist by Sean Paul Kelly --  a real doozy!

NEEDED! Things I've seen but do not have handy...

Bush standing in front of the MISSION ACCOMPLISHED sign... and then later blaming the sailors for it when the White House had ordered it made.

Bush criticizing Clinton during the Balkans war about needing an exit strategy before committing our men to war.

Bush promising budget surpluses.

ANY neocon claiming that “we lost Vietnam because clueless amateur politicians meddled and bullied professional sodiers....

ANY online site that has all sorts of this kind of stuff.

Thanks guys.

See: The Ostrich Papers: What if Bill Clinton had...

18 comments:

Nato Welch said...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JE48XHKG64

You'll love this one, David.

I know it's not what you ordered, but you will appreciate the balance.

It's a video of Al Gore criticizing President Bush **Sr.** for "ignoring" Iraq's WMD programs and terrorism ties after gulf war I. In 1992.

It really threw me for a loop when I saw it. And now, in contrast to this clip of Cheney in 1994, it makes a strange kind of sense.

Anonymous said...

Again, not specifically asked for:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7xyd_IRgGs&NR=1

I think the very last statement by GWB at the end of that one is, well, uh ...

Anonymous said...

From a Boing Boing link, Dick Cheney on why America shouldn't invade Iraq (1994):

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=9a8_1186873756

Unknown said...

Like so many others, Dr. Brin is shutting 50% of the population out of his discussion by providing URLs to YouTube video clips.

YouTube requires broadband, and roughly half the American population with internet access find themselves locked out of broadband internet service at present. (Note that about 30% of the adult American population refuse to use computers at home and have no interest in the internet. This means the actual percentage of the American adult population with broadband internet is actually 50% of (100% - $30%) = 35%. This will worsen. I expect that soon, broadband will become the minimum requirement for participation in civil affairs, including voting -- at which point half the population of America will find themselves effectively disenfranchised.

It's interesting to note how elites like Dr. Brin casually assume that everyone has broadband, everyone drives a car, everyone owns a TV, everyone participating in this discussion makes enough money to pay taxes (if you early less than roughly $7,600, you don't make enough to pay taxes in America), everyone participating in this discussion has some form of health insurance, and so on. I know many highly intelligent and superbly well educated people who don't have and can't get broadband internet, don't have and can't get health insurance (usually because they are self-employed), don't make enough money to qualify to pay taxes and in fact get an EIC (again, usually because they're self-employed), don't have a car and don't use one, don't have a TV and have no desire to own one, etc.

It might not be the best idea to piss in the face of 50% of the people who frequent the dailykos website. On the other hand, perhaps everyone with dialup who gets hit with half a dozen URls to youtube clips requiring broadband will conclude that everyone who makes more money than they do and who lives in an urban center must be much smarter and more knowledgeable than they are, and so take Dr. Brin's arguments on faith.

Well, it sounded credible when Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner and Simon Nelson Patten said it in the 1880s. I guess you had to be there...

Speaking of elites and grass roots movements by the dirty filthy Great Unwashed bottom 80% of the American population, several weeks ago I mentioned in passing the possibility of a general strike as one example of how the people in America still hold the ultimate power over the government. Now someone has called for a general strike on 9/11 of 2007, and the movement appears to be exponentiating:

http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_michael__070813_general_strike_in_us.htm

Tony Fisk said...

It disenfranchises not just the dialup users, but the limited broadband users. (this from a 200Mb/ month user... a pox on those sites where the movie starts downloading immediately!)

However, Zorgon, I think you'll find David is quite conversant with bandwidth issues.

David Brin said...

n8o thanks, it does seem at first sight to be a flip by Gore... except for this. Nobody ever said that Saddam had no links to terror or to bad stuff! What W was criticized for is blaming Saddam for 9/11 when the WMDs didn't show up! And that was spot on. There has never been a hint that Saddam was involved in 9/11.

And even if he was, should we not logically have gone after a country that was proved to have bankrolled 90% of 9/11 and supplied most of the manpower and equipment and doctrines?

Gore was spot on to shiv Bush Sr for leaving Saddam in power in 91. I call it the Shame of 91. The worst stain on our honor in living memory. Dig it, Bush SR asked - by radio - in his own voice - for the people of southern Iraq to "rise up against Saddam! We are on our way!"

They rose up. Then Bush ordered a surprised Gen Schwarzkopf to simply stop... to shake hands with Saddam's stunned generals, and let them go about slaughtering their people...

...then the same neocons expected those Iraqi people to greet us with kisses and flowers after they endured 12 more years of living hell.

And their excuses for this betrayal? Not wanting to get sucked into a quagmire? OMG OMG OMG All we had to do was go to Basra and give the Shiites their own "no fly zone"... just like we gave the Kurds. Let Saddam and the Tikritis stew in the middle until somebody killed him.

These monsters should have lost all credibility THEN...
-----

Zorgon, I wish you would re-read your latest. It was filled with invective that I feel was absolutely undeserved, at any level. It hurt and was completely beneath you.
------

What I really want is that video of W in 96 or so, criticizing Clinton for sending troops to Bosnia "without an exit strategy or timetable to come home." Anybody know that one?

Our most successful war ever. Not one US casualty and dictators toppled and victims rescued and a Europe given its first peace in 4,000 years. And our popularity everywhere - including muslim lands - went UP.

Naum said...

Wow, I didn't realize the broadband in the home figures were still < 50%.

It's been 12 years since the mass public was introduced to the web and internet. Yet America is not completely wired — this is a disgrace.

I realize some have no use for the internet and are quite content in not embracing it, but the missed educational opportunities, cultural discovery, especially for youth is troubling. No doubt, libraries and schools offer alternatives, but having access to such a tool in the home is so much richer.

Woozle said...

My own small collection is here -- so far it's just a couple of items (the GOP 2000 platform vs. "stay the course", and "Mission Accomplished"), but it does have the advantage of being suitable for printing -- for any non-internet ostriches.

I'll add the ones posted here as soon as I have a chance to check them over so I can include summaries.

Anonymous said...

Zorgon my man, these people don't vote anyway, so who cares as to what they think. Now if we had a large national grass-root organization that could educated them on the power of the vote and as to where their interest lay, that would be really nice.

Oh, wait we use to have such an organization, UNIONS, but they had a nice shit covered shiv stabbed in their back by the LIBERALS during the miracle of 47, it took a few years but it killed them.

SpaceGhoti said...

Will this help?

http://www.youtube.com/v/Fze2J2Ve9is

Bush in a post-Iraq war interview with a not-exactly submissive Irish reporter. It was, incidentally, the last time that reporter was allowed to ask any questions of our Glorious Leader.

gg said...

He discusses "nation building" in this debate from 2000.

http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2000/debates/transcripts/u221003.html

You can surf through some 2000 debate videos here: http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=2000+bush+debate&hl=en

Anonymous said...

Well Brin did you see the Shia leader of Iraq is openly claiming genocide is occuring, and pushing for intervention by Shia sates.

http://www.gulf-daily-news.com/Story.asp?Article=190580&Sn=WORL&IssueID=30147

http://washingtontimes.com/article/20070813/FOREIGN/108130030/1003

This should be no suprise as the ethic clensing of Bagdad is a open secret with the US puting up a wall around the remaing Sunni Getto, and Iraqi Christans and other minoritys fleeing for their lives in record numbers to other nations.

To me this is a message that honest conservitves will lisen to. Some still belive we wanted to help the Iraqi people and our policys have made the situation worse. Realy this could be a whole posting on Daily KOS. comparing Republican vs Democrat genocide prevention.

Anonymous said...

175 people dead in Iraq TODAY.

Ten in the bombing that destroyed one of one of the last publicly accessible bridges linking Baghdad with the north.

James Fallows recommends seeing No End in Sight to mark Karl Rove's departure.

This documentary -- a look at how the Bush administration's egregiously inept policies doomed Iraq to civil war -- is the kind of thing that network TV should be showing in prime time, but which they don't because they don't have the balls.

Because they're sell-outs and greed-heads and are incompetent in their use of the public airwaves.

David Brin said...

Off topic, but here's a flash from the Arlington Institute:


More than a year ago, The Arlington Institute sponsored a speech by Dr. David Martin as one of its TAI Presents series. Dr. Martin explained the problems with the subprime market and how he and his team had analyzed the historical default rate of the underlying mortgage holders. The defaults will increase significantly beginning the last part of 2007 and become significantly established in the early part of 2008 he said. That will threaten the integrity of large numbers of banks as they hold a large percentage of their reserves in real estate instruments that are built around the subprime mortgages. The U.S. will be constrained by its dependency upon China – our banker. The ultimate stabilization of the system just might come from Islamic financial institutions, over in that part of the world where we’re now bombing the Islamists. You can listen to (and read) Dr. Martin’s speech here.

http://www.arlingtoninstitute .org/tai/david-martins-speech -economic-fragilities

Go after MANY ostriches! The bruises you lay may not open now, but if the economy turns....

Tony Fisk said...

Opening another front:

'Who could have known...?'

Bush being warned before Katrina struck New Orleans.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11627394/

'Heckuva job Brownie'
www.youtube.com/watch?v=RO2xi0uLnj8

(the fridge says so, too)

I think a juxtaposition of Bush saying he'd 'take care' of any Whitehouse leakers, with him announcing the commutation of Scooter's prison sentence would be priceless as well.

harry potter5 said...

May or may not be useful; Fox News caught editing Wikipedia to further its political agendas:

http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/08/wikipedia_is_on.html

List of edits by Fox:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/12.167.224.228

Deliciously sleazy.

Floyd Gilmore said...

Why do I suddenly feel like I'm in a rewrite of 1984?

What would George Orwell have made of our electronic state of existence?

Now we have a war of editors, cutting and swiping at every little citation that is posted in public.

I hope you can find all the video citations you're looking for. If I stumble over anything of significance, I'll post a link.

Anonymous said...

Um, regarding youtube, I'm on dial-up and watch them all the time. Maybe folks just need to learn how to use it while on dial-up.

Here's how: Hit play, and make sure that the video has started. Then hit pause. The video will continue to download. Wait a while (sometimes, quite a while). Then hit play again and you can see the whole video.

Admittedly, the wait can take a while, but it still works. Go do something else while you are waiting!