At 08:12 AM 4/26/2005 -0700, Nick Arnett wrote: >On Tue, 26 Apr 2005 08:19:18 -0400, JDG wrote > >> The problem with the above is that when a child needs to get a permission >> slip for an activity, the child doesn't "seriously consider the opinions" >> of his or her parents, the child gets, well, *permission.* > >That's the point! Bush was saying that if the United States sought other >nations' participation in the decision to go to war, we would be acting like a >child, submitting to other authorities, disallowed to think for ourselves. We >can't do that because we're a grown-up country, not a child. > >International relations cannot be modeled as a set of parents and children, so >Bush and Cheney's use of the metaphor was wrong. But it was politically >clever because the truth in the metaphor makes the whole statement seem true. >Advertisers do this all the time -- say something true that is irrelevant... >and say it again and again. > >The falsehood isn't *in* the metaphor, the falsehood *is* the metaphor because >it implies that serious consideration of other nations' wishes would reduce us >to the status of a child... which is baloney. It was not reasonable to reduce >the whole question of how we cooperate with our *brother and sister* nations >to "asking permission," since that is a context of submission, not >negotiation.
There you go again, conflating "serious consideration" with "asking permission." As best as I can tell Nick, yours and Dave's arguments requires the non-existence of people arguing that UNSC re-authorization was a *prerequisite* for Gulf War II. In fact, as you well know, there were a *great*many*people* making this argument. Why do you continue to dismiss the possibility that Bush was arguing against precisely this line of argumentation, and continue to insist upon conflating "asking permission" with "serious consideration"????? JDG _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
