--- Davd Brin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > --- Terrific, Gautam. I am glad to be proved wrong, > and you have done so. > > But note this is exactly what I was asking you and > you > veered away from my challenge. > > During this entire session, I demonstrated my > bipartisanship by casting a skeptical eye in all > directions. You and John seemed incapable of > noticing > or commenting on embarrassments so severe that even > lifelong republicans are cringeing. > > 1. Like the Patriot Act. > > 2. Like unbelievable Guantanamo. > > 3. Like the blatant scapegoating of the CIA to cover > cynical and outright lies. > > 4. Like the utter betrayal of the same people in 91 who > Rumsfeld incredibly predicted would greet us with > kisses this time around. > > 5. Like the utter lack of any "trickle down" from a > trillion dollars given to 20,000 frat brothers > including 1000 Saudi sheiks. (Actually, you now > claim > that you have noticed this in the past. I am glad. > Sorry I never saw that.) > > 6. Or John's total inability to find one decision of > this > administration that ever ran against the interests > of > either the Saudi princes or Halliburton. > > Now I will let you have the last word. I must then > say goodbye.
The problem with the above, Dr. Brin, is your premises. Someone beyond partisanship isn't someone who agrees with you on the stuff above. In fact, I'd say most of the stuff above is charges made by the _most partisan_ of Democrats. Someone who agreed with what you said would be very partisan indeed. I've numbered your statements above for convenience in my response - the numbers were inserted by me, not written into your original post. 1. What _specific_ abuses of the PATRIOT act would you name? One of the most interesting (to me) findings of the 9/11 Commission was that many of the reforms that the commissioners found to be very necessary...were in the PATRIOT act. In fact, I'm so far unaware of _any_ major abuses made under the PATRIOT act (as opposed to the atrocious behavior of, for example, the INS, which is using powers that long predate the PATRIOT Act.) Agreeing that the PATRIOT act is atrocious isn't the act of someone non-partisan, it's the act of someone who has bought into the Democratic Party's critiques wholesale. It might even be right (I'm not a legal expert, and it's not my field) but it's not something that you can just assume to be true. 2. Same thing with Guantanamo. In fact, we've just found out that people _released_ from Guantanamo have been busily attacking American troops. So maybe the problem isn't that we're holding people for no cause but the opposite. I don't know. But it's not clear or obvious that there are problems there, or that if they are they are the problems you (seem to be) implying. 3. The 9/11 Commission has found something that lots of people, ranging from real experts like Reuel Marc Gerecht to amateurs like, well, me, that the CIA is really fairly incompetent due to a variety of measures, starting with the Church "reforms" a long time ago. It's not scapegoating to point that out - in fact, it's just the beginning of starting to solve the problem. In fact, I'd say _defending_ the performance of the CIA is kind of hard for me to understand. If there's one thing that the independent 9/11 Commission _and_ Bob Woodward's book agree on it's that Bush wasn't lying, he was given poor information. Witness Tenet's "Slam dunk" comment to Bush on finding WMD. Unless you want to argue that Bob Woodward is a Republican partisan, I think it's hard to make this argument at all. I think it's _definitely_ impossible to just assert it and assume that all reasonable people will agree with you. 4. You and I have already differed on this. But to reiterate - doing anything in 1991 would have done diplomatic damage that vastly exceeds anything done by our recent invasion of Iraq. We had _given our word_ to every Arab nation that our only purpose in the Middle East was to free Kuwait. If we had done anything else, not only would they have withdrawn from the coalition, they might have started shooting the other way. We _certainly_ would have had to effectively conquer Saudi Arabia, since they would have immediately withdrawn their permission for us to be there. The only figure of any significance in American politics whom I am aware was arguing that we should go all the way in 1991 was Bill Kristol, now editor of the Weekly Standard. I'm guessing that Kristol is not one of your favorite people. 5. "Frat brothers" and is, to put it mildly, not the language of a non-partisan. My parents (for example), not exactly frat brothers, benefited from the tax cuts. For that matter, _my_ tax rate went down, which I certainly appreciated. 6. As John and I have pointed out, the invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq were disastrously against the interests of the Saudi Princes. They strenuously objected and basically had to be forced into supporting it by a very clever publicity campaign conducted by Rumsfeld and the Pentagon. They were open in both public and private that they opposed the second war, and the only reason they didn't say anything about the first is that they new nothing short of God himself could have stopped us from taking out the Taliban. The Halliburton thing, again, is one of those odd Democratic beliefs that is, so far as I can tell, entirely immune to rational argument. In a very short form, Dick Cheney has bought insurance that ensures that, if Halliburton goes bankrupt (or, alternately, if it becomes bigger than Wal-Mart) he is financially unaffected. Speaking now as Managing Director of the Two Rivers Group, one of whose major clients is a Halliburton competitor, the primary reasons Halliburton gets military contracts is because 1) they're really good and 2) they're one of only a handful (quite often, the _only_ company) that can deliver the support services that the military needs. Just to round up. Non-partisan _cannot_ be defined as "I agree with David Brin." It somehow has to be something along the lines of reasonable people in both parties would agree that this belief is reasonable. Not that this is true, just that it is reasonable. My "non-partisan" meter has always been David Gergen (moderate Republican who worked brilliantly for President Clinton), actually. Sam Huntington (conservative Democrat who served in the Carter Administration) is another person like that. Or heck, I am, by every empirical measure of which I am aware, a moderate-to-liberal Republican on most issues when measured against the full spectrum of the American public. Of the six points you made, I would say that if I took it to either David or Sam, they might not agree with _any_ of them. If they did agree with them, they would both, I am quite certain, say that reasonable people could disagree with them. So you just can't say that failing to agree with you on points like the ones you have named defines someone as unbiased or non-partisan. Agreeing with you on those points would, in my opinion, make someone very much the opposite. ===== Gautam Mukunda [EMAIL PROTECTED] "Freedom is not free" http://www.mukunda.blogspot.com __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Address AutoComplete - You start. We finish. http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
