What’s wrong with this picture #2?
Again, an excerpt from Ryan Lizza’s New Yorker piece on Barack Obama’s foreign policy:
During the peak of the protests in Iran, Jared Cohen, a young staffer at the State Department who worked for Slaughter, contacted officials at Twitter and asked the company not to perform a planned upgrade that would have shut down the service temporarily in Iran, where protesters were using it to get information to the international media. The move violated Obama’s rule of non-interference.
White House officials “were so mad that somebody had actually ”˜interfered’ in Iranian politics, because they were doing their damnedest to not interfere,” the former Administration official said. “Now, to be fair to them, it was also the understanding that if we interfered it could look like the Green movement was Western-backed, but that really wasn’t the core of it. The core of it was we were still trying to engage the Iranian government and we did not want to do anything that made us side with the protesters. To the Secretary’s credit, she realized, I think, before other people, that this is ridiculous, that we had to change our line.” The official said that Cohen “almost lost his job over it. If it had been up to the White House, they would have fired him.”
Fools, knaves, or some toxic combination of the two?
Both. No question.
Would the concept of evil apply – intentional malicious action or inaction with the goal to harm, without receiving an personal benefit or reward.
I have read that the reason the Administration is silent over Assad Jr”s slaughtering of innocents is that it believes that Assad is the key to “peace” with Israel. As if “peace” is possible with a murderous thug like Assad Jr. Like father, like son. Hama rules, doncha’ remember?
Similarly, the Administration believed that that by being “neutral” in Iran, it would be able to “engage” the Mullahs in the nuclear issue et al. The best “engagement” with the Mullahs regarding nuclear issues was done with stuxnet. THAT is the “engagement” the Mullahs understand.
That the Administration would consider firing Cohen over Twitter is a shame. Perhaps we should call it Twittergate.
At last, a choice we can believe in: “toxic combination.”
Fools, knaves, or some toxic combination of the two?
The knaves theory is getting harder and harder to ignore.
The counterargument is that they are fools who think they are demonstrating how much smarter they are than everybody else.
As usual, Barry Rubin has a good essay on this at pajamas media. I also recommend Bruce Brawer’s essay.
Isn’t it incredibly sad that the only country founded on an ideology of freedom has come to this.
There’s a point at which you’re such a big goddamned fool you become a knave. It’s the point at which you’re so goddamned foolish you lie, compromise whatever principles you have left, and take steps harmful to yourself and others because you think there’s some short-term political benefit.
Recall that not too long ago the left accepted without question not only that we must “interfere” in apartheid South Africa, but that anyone who didn’t want to was a racist.
Perhaps Orwell summed up the whole Obama administration with this sentence,”What can you do against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?”
Obama was bounced from one communist re-education camp after another for most of his life. He is so seriously maleducated as to be psychotic. He is in fact a dangerously insane thug.
It’s a little bit too late and too much blood has been spilled to talk about simply foolishness.
The question “knaves or fools” implies that these people live in the same moral universe as we, and either do not understand that their actions are immoral (“fools”), or knowingly embrace immorality (“knaves”). But it can be worse than that: they live in another moral universe, and their ideas of good and bad are very different from ours. Were Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot knaves or fools? No, they were anti-human villains. Modern day liberals are approaching the territory when we can not anymore suppose that they have the same core values and norms that normal people have.
One thing I learned when I went to law school is how may people really and truly hate America, think America is inherently a bad place, and want to see bad things done to America.
Some of this can be explained by Evan Syat’s “Regurgitating the Apple” theory. But a lot more can simply be explained by the idea that they honestly believe America is inherently bad and hurting America and any who side with her, is therefore inherently good.
The same evil is ascribed to “heterosexual white males” or any of those characteristics separately.
.
Obama most certainly hates America or at lest the American Revolution.
And it is hate, a deep seeded ingrained hate.
.
.
I believe the words you’re searching for is something along the lines of “c-sucking walking, talking humaniform excreta masquerading as something only slightly less odious, but far more odiferous”?