The two faces of America
By glazou on Friday 3 December 2004, 04:47 - Bushisms - Permalink
- Bob Metcalfe, during the W3C Tenth Anniversary's celebration: "John Kerry lost the election, thank God".
- the security officer at the airport looking at my french passport "tell your friends in France we're sorry".
Comments
Why did Bob Metcalfe spoke about John Kerry ? the meeting was not about US election. Shall we have more details ?
That certainly is impressive that a security officer say something like that to a random French traveler.
I mean, that shows, if it was needed, that not all americans have nothing to do about the rest of the world. And even then, i don't think that many people here in France, if we where in the same situation, would say something like that to a foreigner...
I'm patiently waiting for the French to start apologizing to the world for electing a criminal (at best) that is Chirac.
Or should Americans assume that the French people approve of his cozy past and present relationship with Saddam and his closer and closer connections with the Oil for Food scandal.
For a country who's people claim to occupy the moral high ground of the world to have slimebag like Chirac as a leader doesn't make sense.
Or are the French so blinded with Anti-Bush and Anti-American hatred that they'll support criminals like Chirac in any endeavor so long as it is against the US?
Uri
Uri Geller: The difference is that Chirac is not a threat for *the rest of the world* and is not invading countries.
www.sorryeverybody.com/ga...
So if I understand correctly, the French logic goes something like this:
- Chirac and UN friends accept bribes and support Saddam = Good
- Bush/Blair invade Iraq, imprison Saddam, free Iraqi people = Bad
Europeans should be ashamed, there should be a eurosaresorry.com website where people have signs apologizing to the Iraqi people.
Uri
Note for Uri Geller : your are pathetic, and that's your own problem, but you're also boring, and on this blog, it's mine. So please go away. Now. You're banned.
This is such an idiotic statement I had to go double-check that the W3C was the "World Wide Web Consortium" and not the "World Wide Wrestling Corporation".
Interesting comment from the security officer, too.
Chirac is certainly no angel, but I really can't stand this attitude of Bush's supporters, which consists in attacking other people whenever their idol is found at fault. How does this justify the illegitimate president's irresponsible actions? Chirac could be a blood-drinking, virgin-raping child molester, would that make it OK to go to war on false pretenses?
LordJohnWhorfin: right, even a crook like Chirac can express interesting - and intelligent - opinions. In fact, he's bad on domestic purposes, and quite acceptable on international matters. And Chirac is certainly not a criminal. Call him a crook if you want, but not a criminal. The gap is wide between misdemeanor and crime. That's why Uri Geller is banned from this place. I am fed up with his fox-news-level propaganda.
I just come back from a week in the US. It's absolutely amazing how much your media filter or present international news. I am not saying we have much better news reports here, but at least, listening to the french Arte and RFI, the british BBC, and reading the spanish El Pais, gives you ten times more details and certainly a hundred times more international news than all the news sources in the US.
The Christian Science Monitor seems to be one US newspaper that has some good international (& national) journalism:
csmonitor.com/
LordJohnWhorfin, you hate when people jump up to defend the man, but you fail to recognize that it's normally not about defense as much as about calling the attacker on his false statements.
For example, you state that the war was entered on false pretenses, but it wasn't. You state that Bush was illegitimate, but he wasn't. These are very simple, objectively false statements, but if I correct you on them you would say that I'm stepping up to defend Bush (and you hate that).
We can get into the whole "irresponsible" thing and argue about that, but these other two are simply not reality.
The war was entered to destroy Saddam's weapons of mass destruction and the entire country of Iraq in the process.
Weapons of mass destruction have not been found. Period.
But of course the right-wingers in this country, the US, seem to have forgotten that period before Bush declared war where he tried to get other nations involved at the UN, sent Poweel to the UN with "Proof" of wmd, and the whole media propaganda war the bush administration put to the people expressly stating if we didn't do something about his wmd, he would use them.
These fluffy headed wingers are a disgrace to every American. Their uncanny ability to promote revisionism that suits them needs to be checked in the future if an open and honest democracy can ever be regained for the American public.
I guarentee you that any of the wingers that criticize France, or at least 95% of them know nothing about the country, its culture, and history. It's a disgrace how uneducated many of them are about other cultures, but Rebuplicans cling to poor education for life support anyways.
It is more than a "blunder" that Bush sent only 20,000 troops to topple Saddam, leaving a black hole of anarchy instead of any form of security for the civilians in that country.
It is more than a blunder that we haven't made sure our troops are trained in Arabic language they can use to gain real information on the ground and actually take the right people for interrogations.
Unfortunately the fluffy headed wingers don't get it, and they will demonize anyone to make their ridiculous claims.
The comments on this thread are truly breathtaking.
"In fact, he's (Chirac) bad on domestic purposes, and quite acceptable on international matters. And Chirac is certainly not a criminal."
He's not a criminal? You mean he hasn't been convicted yet. Quite acceptable? So Daniel, you supported Chirac in blocking the US/British from deposing of a genocidal tyrant whose role model was Stalin?
So you're basically saying that the world would be better off if Saddam and the Taliban were still in power?
Just trying to understand how the sophisticated, informed, nuanced, Europeans think.
Mike
My scale of value is international stability. The question is then "is the world more or less stable now than before the war in Iraq?". The answer os completely obvious. The only positive change in the middle east came from an unexpected event, Arafat's death. About Iraq specifically, the US played with fire. What happens now between sunnits and shi'its could be easily predicted. I think I even predicted it in this blog. So to answer more precisely your point, Saddam was a real SOB, we do ALL agree. He was a murderer, a tyrant. But the world is NOT safer w/o him, it is exactly the contrary.
If you don't understand this, I recommend you take a course of geopolitics, history and religion about the middle east ; after a few years of knowledge of the people and civilizations there, you'll start seeing the point.
So only enlightened Europeans/American leftists are worthy of freedom?
Arabs and their 3rd world ilk can rot under murderous regimes as long as those regimes don't rock the international "boat"?
Don't know if you knew or not but Saddam had 2 sons that were worse than he was - hoping for an Arafat event to solve Iraq is ridiculous.
When you have a chance to remove a cancer you should do so, you don't close your eyes and hope it doesn't affect you (or worse try and profit from it) - which seems to be the modus operandi for euro's these days.
Bush I f*cked up in this regard. Bush II/Blair have it right.
BTW, save the condescending crap, I have 20+ relatives who are Iraqi and fled to the US because of Saddam.
Mike
Wawsowski, what do you mean by "So you're basically saying that the world would be better off if Saddam and the Taliban were still in power?"
DUH !
France was and is still in Afghanistan , boy, fighting terrorism... you should read more - or change your source.
Anything else, who helped talibans during the afghanistan/USSR war ?
So you're basically saying that the world would be better off if Saddam and the Taliban were still in power? -- Mike
Well, perhaps there were better ways of helping the Iraqi people to achieve democracy than carpet bombing them into anarchy.
Let's look at the good and bad of the occupation:
Good:
- No more Saddam
- No more political imprisonment, torture and secret executions
- Possibility of Kurdistan (good for Kurds)
- Cheaper oil for the 11 miles-per-gallon (44 l/100 km) Hummers
Bad:
- Imprisonment, torture by American troops
- Foreign terrorist infiltration
- Lawlessness, instability
- Destroyed basic infrastructure, no water/electricity/roads
- Puppet government that is likely to meld into an islamic state, possibly through a civil war
- Possiblity of Kurdistan (bad for Turkey, Iran, Saudis)
- Gun wielding, trigger happy, video-game-bred, low-iq, scared-to-death redneck occupational force, likely to stay 2-3 more years with very high casualities. These kids should be in college, learning, instead of getting enough trauma to fuck up their lives and lives attached to theirs.
- A neocon(=fascist) Pentagon leadership bent on showing the world "who's your Daddy?"
- Newly minted credibility for a criminally retarded (as a direct result of substance abuse) president. BTW, since when is 52% equates to "credibility". In my book it is just barely making it. Even that is due to some Christian fundamentalis beliefs?
And to hear that most of us just call it: "better off?" WTF, open your eyes Mike!