Andrew Sullivan has discovered a new force in the universe. Those who commit acts of aggression are most certainly victims rather than criminals. In fact, Andrew is onto something very big here!!
It is actually more than excusing Iran for kidnapping British sailors against the Geneva Conventions because of the “Bush-Cheney torture regime.” No, in fact, Sully’s comparison can be taken to a more fundamental level. Everyone who does something wrong obviously has no ill intent of their own — they were just driven to extremes by examples they’ve seen in modern society. Let’s call it the “Sully Theorum.”
So the first test of the Sully Theorum is obviously this story from Germany:
Desperate mothers are being urged to drop their unwanted babies through hatches at hospitals in Germany in an effort to halt a spate of infanticides that has shocked the country.
At least 23 babies have been killed so far this year, many of them beaten to death or strangled by their mothers before being dumped on wasteland and in dustbins.
Police investigating the murders are at a loss to explain the sudden surge in such cases, which have involved mothers of all ages all over the country.
It is obviously Michael Jackson’s fault that this “solution” is even being considered at all. The Sully Theorum in practice!
-Bruce (GayPatriot)
I’m a victim,
He’s a victim,
She’s a victim,
It’s a victim,
Wouldn’t you like to be a victim too?
Reparations! I want reparations!
That’s sad about the German babies.
I’m not sure I quite see how it fits your Sully Theorem. It might fit better with a theory that Euro-lefto-fascist-greenie-weenie societies have lost the will to reproduce. (Along with the will to defend themselves. The will to survive.)
But Sully has become a grotesque joke for damn sure – no doubts there.
What the hell has happened to Andrew Sullivan? I used to think he was on the right side. He has fallen victim to his own rhetoric.
I am so sick of the victim card. Great blog!
You got the “theorem” all screwed up.
It is: Where one once had trust and respect, it has been lost.
As an example:
Remember in the 1st Gulf War when Iraqis soldiers got in line to surrender?
Because of the Bush Admin’s torture and other “dark side” activities, that will never happen again
And that is why this is the “first strategic crisis created by the Bush-Cheney torture regime”
Not the act, but the fallout.
keogh:
Check out this letter Mark Twain wrote to an ex-pat in Paris who was complaining about how America has lost the respect of European nations because of the Spanish American war.
WHat is it with you leftists and your co-dependent need to get Europe’s approval
vincep312.home.comcast.net/marktwain.html
A Word Of Encouragement For Our Blushing Exiles
And so you are ashamed. I am trying to think out what it can have been that has produced this large attitude of mind and this fine flow of sarcasm. Apparently you are ashamed to look Europe in the face; ashamed of the American name; temporarily ashamed of your nationality. By the light of remarks made to me by an American here in Vienna, I judge that you are ashamed because:
1. We are meddling where we have no business and no right; meddling with the private family matters of a sister nation; intruding upon her sacred right to do as she pleases with her own, unquestioned by anybody.
2. We are doing this under a sham humanitarian pretext.
3. Doing it in order to filch Cuba, the formal and distinct disclaimer in the ultimatum being very, very thin humbug, and easily detectable by you and virtuous Europe.
4. And finally you are ashamed of all this because it is new, and base, and brutal, and dishonest; and because Europe, having had no previous experience of such things, is horrified by it and can never respect us nor associate with us any more.
Brutal, base, dishonest? We? Land Thieves? Shedders of innocent blood? We? Traitors to our official word? We? Are we going to lose Europe’s respect because of this new and dreadful conduct? Russia’s, for instance? Is she lying stretched out on her back in Manchuria, with her head among her Siberian prisons and her feet in Port Arthur, trying to read over the fairy tales she told Lord Salisbury, and not able to do it for crying because we are maneuvering to treacherously smouch Cuba from feeble Spain, and because we are ungently shedding innocent Spanish blood?
Is it France’s respect that we are going to lose? Is our unchivalric conduct troubling a nation which exists to-day because a brave young girl saved it when its poltroons had lost it – a nation which deserted her as one man when her day of peril came? Is our treacherous assault upon a weak people distressing a nation which contributed Bartholomew’s Day to human history? Is our ruthless spirit offending the sensibilities of the nation which gave us the Reign of Terror to read about? Is our unmanly intrusion into the private affairs of a sister nation shocking the feelings of the people who sent Maximilian to Mexico? Are our shabby and pusillanimous ways outraging the fastidious people who have sent an innocent man (Dreyfus) to a living hell, taken to their embraces the slimy guilty one, and submitted to indignities Emile Zola – the manliest man in France?
Is it Spain’s respect that we are going to lose? Is she sitting sadly conning her great history and contrasting it with our meddling, cruel, perfidious one – our shameful history of foreign robberies, humanitarian shams, and annihilations of weak and unoffending nations? Is she remembering with pride how she sent Columbus home in chains; how she sent half of the harmless West Indians into slavery and the rest to the grave, leaving not one alive; how she robbed and slaughtered the Inca’s gentle race, then beguiled the Inca into her power with fair promises and burned him at the stake; how she drenched the New World in blood, and earned and got the name of The Nation With The Bloody Footprint; how she drove all the Jews out of Spain in a day, allowing them to sell their property, but forbidding them to carry any money out of the country; how she roasted heretics by the thousands and thousands in her public squares, generation after generation, her kings and her priests looking on as at a holiday show; how her Holy Inquisition imported hell into the earth; how she was the first to institute it and the last to give it up – and then only under compulsion; how, with a spirit unmodified by time, she still tortures her prisoners to-day; how, with her ancient passion for pain and blood unchanged, she still crowds the arena with ladies and gentlemen and priests to see with delight a bull harried and persecuted and a gored horse dragging his entrails on the ground; and how, with this incredible character surviving all attempts to civilize it, her Duke of Alva rises again in the person of General Weyler – to-day the most idolized personage in Spain – and we see a hundred thousand women and children shut up in pens and pitilessly starved to death?
Are we indeed going to lose Spain’s respect? Is there no way to avoid this calamity – or this compliment? Are we going to lose her respect because we have made a promise in our ultimatum which she thinks we shall break? And meantime is she trying to recall some promise of her own which she has kept?
Is the Professional Official Fibber of Europe really troubled with our morals? Dear Parisian friend, are you taking seriously the daily remark of the newspaper and the orater about “this noble nation with an illustrious history”? That is mere kindness, mere charity for a people in temporary hard luck. The newspaper and the orator do not mean it. They wink when they say it.
And so you are ashamed. Do not be ashamed; there is no occasion for it.
[Mark Twain. Written in 1898, first published in 1923 – Ed.]
Vince,
I have read that before as it has inexplicability been used as defense of torture. It is a great example of Twain’s patriotism and wit but has nothing to do with the fact that in the next war, the enemy will not line up and surrender to our troops because of Bush and his crew’s torture.
keogh : are you retarded… the US has yet to fight an army that is also a signor of the Geneva Conventions.. none of our enemies have ever adhered to them.
And it’s irrelevent if someone used Twain’s letter to support torture… that doesn’t take away from the fact it demostrates how effete america-haters are pained over some mythical admiration europe once had for america for 100s of years now. Let Europe despise us all they want.. they’re vanishing . we dont need them
***…but has nothing to do with the fact that in the next war, the enemy will not line up and surrender to our troops because of Bush and his crew’s torture.***
WHAT?????!!!! Thank God my day is almost over! I cannot take much more of this psycho-babble.
“Let Europe despise us all they want”
Europe? I am talking about the next opposing army our troops face. Because of Bush’s torture our next enemy will not line up on the side of the road with their arms raised in surrender.
Which is the point of Sullivan’s post…
“Let Europe despise us all they want”
Europe? I am talking about the next opposing army our troops face. Because of Bush’s torture our next enemy will not line up on the side of the road with their arms raised in surrender.
Which is the point of Sullivan’s post…
“Because of Bush’s torture our next enemy will not line up on the side of the road with their arms raised in surrender.”
Good. Gives us one good reason to kill them all without having ACLU attorneys, Gitmo defenders, Hollyweird stars and their ilk caterwauling from here to eternity.
Lock and load!
Regards,
Peter H.
And this really shows the problem with leftists like keogh; he honestly believes the jihadists he’s protecting and supporting would surrender.
Surrender is a means of preserving one’s life in the face of overwhelming force; given that the jihadists use suicide bombing as a primary tactic, I don’t think they care much about preserving their lives.
The Iraqi army surrendered to the Americans in 1991 because Saddam sent out drafted old men and boys who had no desire to fight or to die to be speed bumps for US tanks. So they didn’t fight, they surrendered instead.
To make some morality play out of it ignores (deliberately?) the fact that those mass surrenders were an unprecidented and unique event in History.
When we went to Baghdad this time we just ignored Saddam’s troops, for the most part, until we got there and when Saddam was deposed we sent the uniformed Iraqi troops home. For the most part. If someone was in the Iraqi army, even if they were an officer, we just said, “Go home.”
Our treatment of legal enemy combatants hasn’t been harmed at all and no one has been given any reason to think that they wouldn’t be treated decently by the US if they lost to us in war.
The trick, keogh, is to follow the geneva conventions and wear a uniform.
I’m not talking about suicide bombers. Nice try at changing the subject though…
It used to be, if you were held by Americans, you had a reasonable expectation that you would be treated well. It did not matter if your country signed a piece of paper or not. This reputation has been used with great effect by American psy-ops.
That expectation, reputation and weapon is now gone thanks to Bush’s torture. Which was the point of Sullivan’s post and one of the many reasons vets such as McCain were so anti-torture.
People:
America is a soft touch. We all know it. Everyone around the world knows it. If you live in a Third World country with no opportunities, you can’t have a more blessed fate than to surrender to (or be captured by) the Americans. We’ve given the mass murderers at Gitmo the best medical care, food, Korans and living conditions of their entire lives.
For Sullivan, keogh, etc. to gab about supposed (but actually non-existent) “Bush’s torture” is the ultimate in self-indulgent and meaningless rhetoric. A “performance exercise” in nihilism and absurdity, on their part.
And more: By draining the word “torture” of all meaning, Sullivan, et. al., insult real victims of real torture. Something they know nothing about… and, I pray fervently, that they will never have to know about.
“Because of Bush’s torture our next enemy will not line up on the side of the road with their arms raised in surrender.”
Good. Gives us one good reason to kill them all without having ACLU attorneys, Gitmo defenders, Hollyweird stars and their ilk caterwauling from here to eternity.
Lock and load!
Regards,
Peter H.
+++++++++++++++++++++++
here……….here…………..
a dead enemy is always better than a captured enemey……..
you win wars by destroying the enemy……..that means to kill and keep killing the enemy soldiers and citizens until they can no longer fight…….bombing enemy cities kills the enemies citizens and hinders their ability to wage war…..
the only shameful thing about America is the bleeding heart leftists and liberals that care more for other countries than America.
no shame……..only pride…………in America…..
The Texican.
Live Free and Die Free.
God Family America Freedom the only choice at any cost.
It used to be, if you were held by Americans, you had a reasonable expectation that you would be treated well.
1. You shouldn’t use crack.
2. They didn’t surrender easily because they thought they’d be treated well by us. They surrendered because they didn’t want their A$$ stomped into the sand. They saw what we did to their air force, infantry, artillery, cavalry etc. and they didn’t want any part of it. Anything was better than fertilizing sand.
Same reason they surrendered so easily in OIF.
If we accept your asinine assertion, then we must conclude that al-NYT intended to help our “future enemies” by running 30+ days of Abu Grahib photos on the front page, right?
Further, if you really gave a flying fcuk about our soldiers and how well they face “future enemies”, then you would logically oppose al-NYT and the rest of the al-Qaeda cheerleading liberal media, no?
I doubt the “used to be” in how prisoners of war were treated. I think it’s probably a bit like the “used to be” we had a great popularity in Europe. Never was such a thing. We maybe could never compare to what *our* soldiers could expect from our enemies but I suspect that “Bush’s torture” is actually an improvement overall from how we interrogated prisoners in previous conflicts.
And I’ll just repeat this oh so unimportant bit…. we didn’t even bother *holding* legal combatants this time around. We just told them to go home.
More on Sully. Yet more on Sully.
It’s more interesting to discuss Sully, than, say, jimmy of the lower-case-libtroll clan.
BTW – Tom DeLay is out of Congress, no thanks to anti-Americans like you. So why don’t you change your web address to something more appropriate, like “iamalibtard.com?” Or are you still afraid to moveon.org?
Regards,
Peter H.
It’s spelled “theorem.”
toooooooooooooooooooo gayyyyyyyyyyyyy.