EFFin’ Unsound

– posted by thehim

HorsesAss has a new troll these days. He goes by the name ‘Piper Scott’ and he continues a long legacy of mental retardation that has been passed along from Righton to Janet S to Rufus to Puddybud to recent EffU favorite Marvin Stamn. Every troll has their idiosynchracies, and while Piper may be the single dumbest troll we’ve ever had when it comes to understanding Iraq and the war on terror, he’s slightly less retarded on other issues. He’s also remarkably chickenshit when it comes to actually engaging in a debate. He will often post, get his ass handed to him, then quickly change the subject to bagpipes or some other nonsense to avoid having to explain away his idiotic comments. This is one reason (along with some real life commitments) that this post has been so long in the making. One of the beauties of our old friend Marvin is that when he started digging a hole, he’d just keep digging. Crackpiper at least has some sense to stop digging, but few people have left more holes than him.

In real life, Piper Scott is Scott St. Clair, the manager of an HR consulting firm. The one thing that he’s demonstrated for us, and this became crystalized in some recent threads, is that the wingnut movement really is the culmination of America’s dying sense of personal responsibility. Every word that Piper types, every thought that he has, is rooted in an intense desire to never have to face the consequences for any of his decisions. He is the 8-year-old who stomps his feet and screams when his mom won’t buy him the shiny new toy or makes him clean his room. As America’s slow death of personal responsibility has finally taken a human form in the Oval Office these past 7 years, it’s entertaining (but sad) to look at the broken, incoherent thoughts of those who are most responsible for him being there.

Here’s a brief rundown of some of Crackpiper’s great moments.

Global Warming

These are some comments that the Crackpiper left in the thread linked above on Al Gore winning the Nobel Peace Prize. Like the rest of wingnuttia, Crackpiper was thrown into full Gore Derangement Syndrome by the news. And as expected, his entire perspective comes from pure horror at the prospect of actually having to lift a finger to help the planet. Personable responsibility - RIP.

In re Al Gore??? There’s more of the politic than prophet about him. He reminds me of the Population Bomb extremists during the late 60’s. The sky didn’t fall then, and somehow I don’t see it falling now.

What I do see is an attempt to shut down growth and prosperity in developed nations while giving undeveloped ones a free pass. Thank you…but no thank you.

…

The problem with all this stuff is that it has as underlying premises that growth and prosperity are somehow evil, and that the only thing to do is take, take, take from people and limit, limit, limit their freedoms.

…

Here’s something that baffles me…When alarmists say this, that or the other is the warmest “on record” what does that mean??? Only that it’s the warmest since somebody started writing this stuff down. Could things have been warmer prior to that…like over thousands and thousands of years??? And could not other factors contribute??

Skeptic that I am, I’m not about to fall prey to some Chicken Little schtick and join the herd. Call me an iconoclast, but I remain unpersuaded.

…

The prevailing wisdom of its day had the sun rotating around the earth.

Is it theory or is it fact? If it’s fact, then there must not be any doubt whatsoever in the minds of anyone, correct? Can you say that; can you say that not one single reputable academically and experientially qualified scientist takes even the slightest issue with Al Gore, et al?

BTW…this past summer in the PNW sucked from a weather standpoint! Cool, damp, dreary…screwed up my veggie patch for certain…

…

Can historians disagree? Of course; I once read one who stupidly claimed WW II was Churchill’s fault because he provoked Hitler. That he wasn’t PM until 1940 and was dismissed as a crank by both Tory and Labor leadership until just prior to the invasion of Poland wasn’t relevent. It was all Churchill’s fault.

I’d love to hear what Sir Winston would say about global warming…

…

Isn’t what most people take as the theory of evolution by now discredited?

Sir Winston Churchill Always Agrees With Him…Or Not

You’ll notice above that Crackpiper has a tendency to invoke the name of Winston Churchill in the belief that somehow Churchill would be ideologically aligned with Bush today on every issue. In the thread linked above, this obvious idiocy was taken to extreme proportions:

Crackpiper (comment #225): “Churchill was a small-d democrat, a believer in King and Country, and a huge fan of the private sector. Socialized medicine didn’t become a reality until after Churchill was voted out in 1945. Honestly, a reason he was voted out was because the Conservative Party of which he was the leader, was vehemently opposed to it.”

Actually, here’s a quote from Winston Churchill:

“The discoveries of healing science must be the inheritance of all […] Disease must be attacked whether it occurs in the poorest or the richest man or woman, simply on the ground that it is the enemy […] Our policy is to create a national health service in order to secure that everybody in the country, irrespective of means, age, sex, or occupation, shall have equal opportunities to benefit from the best and most up-to-date medical and allied services available”

Getting his ass handed to him by Darryl over State Senator Eric Oemig

This one is kind of obscure and won’t make sense to people outside of Washington, but I’m including it because it’s one of the rare times that Crackpiper actually dug in his heels tried to explain away one of the idiotic things he said rather than run away with his tail between his legs.

He started off on a tangent about State Senator Eric Oemig, who introduced a piece of legislation this fall to call for the impeachment of President Bush, something that can be done by State Legislatures.

I agree with you up to a point. But I would offer as Exhibit A in the political liars club, 45th Legislative District Sen. Eric Oemig, who lied to the people in this district by promising to be a centrist, bi-partisan legislator who would focus on education, health care, and transportation.

Yet before the cab pulled away from the curb on his first day in Olympia, he banged the hard left impeachment drum, which has turned about to be just about his numero uno issue. Forgotten were his campaign promises about representing the moderate 45th District.

Darryl responded to this supposed “lie”:

You, apparently, don’t know the definition of a lie.

If Eric Oemig had said, “I will not sponsor a resolution calling for Washington State to petition Congress to impeach the President,” then one could say he lied. But he didn’t.

If Eric had said I will not get involved in holding the Bush Administration accountable for their lies, deception, illegal spying, or incompetence” then you would be correct.

But Eric said no such thing.

Darryl then listed out a long series of bills that he sponsored or co-sponsored concerning education, health, transportation, elections, and the environment. But Crackpiper didn’t quite understand how this completely undermined the accusation he was levelling, and continued to believe that he could use his own mischaracterization of the inherent extremism of just one of the 150 bills Oemig sponsored as a way to call him a lair. He wrote:

Listen…The guy claimed to be one thing when he ran for office, he went to Olympia when he was elected to office, then he immediately did his Mr. Hyde thing when he go there.

Darryl, who, as a Professor at UW, actually understands things like statistics and variability responsed:

Nope, he did not. You are confusing the analytical concepts of variability with average. Just because he had a few positions that were farther to the left, doesn’t constitute going Hyde. On average, his positions come out a little left of center.

But Piper continued to maintain that Oemig lied:

He LIED to the people when he got real specific with things he was going to do once elected yet strangely didn’t mention what now appears to be his real agenda.

And if you don’t think the people in the 45th think he lied, then heigh your fanny out here and chat with some of them…At least the ones who don’t blow a gasket at the mention of his name…or those who have colorful metaphors and choice epithets that they associate with his name such that you’d think he was given them as names at birth.

Darryl had some fun with this one:

As I have shown, he has a very strong record doing the things you claim he said he would do!

Actually, I live almost on the border of the 45 in the 48, and interact with plenty of folks from the 45. I’ve never heard any animosity toward him from friends in the 45. And, you have only shown that you are incapable of a rational assessment of his record. So I’ll have to go with my empirical evidence, while admitting that it is rather incomplete…. (Not that that in any way validates your opinion, since you have shown a strong predilection toward irrationality in this issue—rather, I am just willing to be up front with the limits of the evidence I’ve collected directly).

So now that Crackpipers silly “all the imaginary people I talk to agree with me” defense didn’t go over so well, he continued to dig his hole even more by trying to sound all legal and shit:

Here’s the deal…Eric Oemig misrepresented himself to the voters…At law, the misrepresentation of a material fact is tantamount to a lie, ergo he’s a LIAR.

Hahaha! At this point, I don’t know how Darryl was able to stop laughing long enough to type.

Let me guess…you aren’t a lawyer. Nothing you have presented looks like “misrepresentation of a material fact,” by which I suspect you mean breach of contract by false pretense or false promises. Again…unless he made specific promises that he would never deal with impeachment, the impeachment memorial is, but, a tiny part of his overall record. And his overall record is completely consistent with how even YOU (in your anger/ideologically altered reality) suggested he represented himself.

At this point, Crackpiper finally gave up and realized how much of an ass he was making of himself and checked out. I only included small parts of the overall thread, and Darryl had a lot of other hilarious comebacks to his idiocy, so feel free to check out the whole beautiful exchange.

Fighting the Terrorists

While Crackpiper has demonstrated some world class idiocy on a number of subjects, there’s no subject where he delves into complete and total retardation more than Iraq. I say this with some trepidation as he has two sons serving overseas (and I have no reason to question that, as I’m sure he does, and I’m sure they serve very honorably). But his notions of what America’s role in the world should be, his odd understanding of justice, and his belief that invading Iraq was not only the right thing to do, but that the mission is actually still winnable, border on the completely insane.

In one of his early visits to HA, he decided in a mad fit of boldness to challenge everyone on this subject in the thread linked above:

Just so you’ll know: I have two sons (out of five children, three in-law children, and one - two by the end of the week - grandchildren) in the military, one a soldier and the other a Marine.

While I’m the first to admit that beaucoup mistakes were made in Iraq, I’m still firmly convinced that it was the right thing to do at the time (for a lot of different reasons), and we need to do what’s necessary to finish the job.

Take your shots…

Hilarity obviously ensued. As he started to realize that he was dealing with people like SeattleJew and myself, who actually have a great deal of knowledge about the innerworkings of the Middle East, he began to quickly start changing the subject, spouting out the boilerplate wingnutese for all of the other Middle East hotspots that he’d likely have difficulty finding on a map (and of course, the bogeyman du jour, Iran). Thinking that he could escape the humiliation through pure volume of bullshit, he started leaving some really long comments.  Here was my full smackdown of his craziness (Crackpiper in italics, my response non-italic)

Iraqi Kurds and Turkey…Think gasoline and a match. Turkey has its own ethnic Kurds with whom to deal, and the last thing it wants is cross-fertilization between its Kurds and Iraqi Kurds.

That’s true, but the answer is not to go back to the way Saddam treated the Kurds in order to prevent it. The answer is to help Turkey deal with Kurdish terrorist groups and ensure that Kurds have a respectable level of autonomy over their own affairs without interfering with Turkey’s territorial integrity. Definitely not as easy as it sounds. But I’d be perfectly happy if American troops remained stationed in Kurdish regions (and even happier if there were a more international troop coalition).

Blue Helmets…Huh??? One of the greatest failures in the history of international diplomacy is the concept of blue-helmeted peace keeping forces. Think massacre…Think impotent…

What’s happening now in Iraq isn’t looking much better than many of the failed UN attempts at keeping the peace. Actually, it looks worse. The UN was a bold idea that has never lived up to its idealistic goals. The solution is not to get rid of it, but to figure out how to make it better and more effective and doing peacekeeping.

While SJ didn’t suggest the Blue Helmets come under the auspices of the UN, most do, which brings me to how ridiculous and hypocritical that body is. Witness putting a thug like Bashir Assad and his Syrian government on the UN Human Rights Commission…Ghastly!

You say this, but yesterday you did not seem bothered at all about our treatment of Jose Padilla or many of the other tactics that we use in the “war on terror.” Either you care about human rights or you don’t. But condemning Syria while believing that it’s ok for the US to do the same things is blatant hypocrisy.

As an aside…Religious extremists in Saudi Arabia or Iran are given greater respect by many posters at HA while religious conservatives in the U.S. are hounded unmercifully…Where’s the open-minded tolerance in that?

This is a silly generalization that has no basis in reality. People who use religious extremism to kill innocent people or to impose their will on them are wrong whether they’re in Riyadh, Nablus, or Kentucky.

The Iraqi government is a huge disppointment not only to the U.S., but also to the Iraqi people, and therein lies the rub. If victory is defined as a relatively self-sufficient Iraq, then indeed we’re a long way from home. But I’ll never forget the images of purple-stained fingers and stories of 70-mile walks in order to vote. In one sense, the Iraqi people are like us: they hunger for a self-determination of their very own.

Yes, but one thing you’ve conveniently forgotten is that the main group they elected ran on a platform where one of their promises was to bring an end to the US occupation. Once they were elected, though, they were unable to do that. The Iraqi people certainly hunger for self-determination, and that’s why it’s so important for us to establish a timetable for leaving, so that Iraqis can plan for that time. Instead, we’ve decided that we’re staying there indefinitely and will leave whenever we feel like it. All this has done is played into the hands of those who don’t want the Iraqi people to be self-determinant (folks like Al-Qaeda and Iran).

My oldest son, an army staff sergeant journalist, was in Baghdad during the last election, and he was impressed by both the resolve of the people to vote, and their willingness to stand up to thugs when given support.

And many of those people have now fled to Syria.

Current efforts to bargain with Sunni tribal chieftans to get them to turn against al-Quida are good and paying dividends. But I’m not sure it could have been done earlier. Sometimes things just have to ripen before the fruit is ready to be picked…But that’s just my opinion.

That’s an odd reading of what’s going on. The tribal chieftains are clearly not our friends. In fact, one of the leaders that Bush met with last week in Anbar would be accurately described as a gangster in this country. They want to fight Al Qaeda because the organization has become so powerful there that they’re actually threatening to overtake the hold on power the Baathists and other allied Sunnis had. Even if the Baathists win that battle, they’ll then just point their guns back at the elected government, and us. But I’m not even sure we’ll see that rosy of a scenario. Al Qaeda may actually become entrenched there and western Iraq could become another Waziristan.

Charles Krauthammer is a commentator I respect, and a recent column of his declared him open to some sort of partition of Iraq vaguely akin to Sen. Joseph Biden’s approach. It shouldn’t be ruled out as a matter of course.

I don’t necessarily think a partition of Iraq is something that we should be pushing for, but at this point, I worry that it’s somewhat inevitable.

While I’m willing to live and let live with countries whose political leadership has all the charm and grace of dog vomit (been to the Ukraine lately?), I do draw some lines, which brings me to why I think going into Iraq in 2003 was necessary…So hang on!

I haven’t been the Ukraine, but I was in Egypt in May, and they have a situation where there’s little political freedom, but certainly no need to send US troops in. The people of the Middle East will slowly win their battles against totalitarian regimes, but invading them in order to do so will be counterproductive on that front.

Every intelligence agency in the world believed he had WMD’s, and it wasn’t simply because the U.S. said so.

Incorrect.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/b lumenthal/2007/09/06/bush_wmd/

http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/04/ 23/cia.iraq/index.html

They had their own assessments and data from which they made their own conclusions. Certainly, Saddam, machismo braggert and bully that he was, fostered those beliefs since it made him look tough.

That’s true, but it’s not an excuse to take his words at face value. UN inspectors were doing their jobs effectively (feel free to read the UNMOVIC reports from early 2003) and were well on their way to making it clear that Saddam no longer had WMD capabilities. We went to war in Iraq because Bush wanted to, not because we had to.

Umpteen UN resolutions called for him to disarm, fully cooperate with weapons inspectors, generally clean up his act…”or else.” It finally came time to “or else.”

This is absurd. He had already disarmed, and repeatedly told the truth about that. Is your memory a bit faulty?

Saddam’s Iraq was a serious de-stabilizing threat to the region, an overt threat to the peace and security of Israel, and, as a consequence, a threat to the U.S. Diplomacy had been tried up the kazoo in order to get him to behave differently, all to no avail. He still rattled his sabers.

He wasn’t a threat to anyone. He got smacked down in 1991 by us, and none of his neighbors felt unduly threatened by him. In fact, that’s why the Saudis actually tried several times in 2002 to get us to reconsider invading. If Saddam was such a threat to the region, why on Earth would the Saudis have done that? They knew that an invasion would destabilize the region more than anything.

Now…call me impetuous if you wish, but I’m very serious about what I said earlier about nobody getting a pass; anybody that rattles sabers against the peace and security of the United States, either directly or by extension, and keeps on doing it after being repeatedly and nicely asked to stop…ought to have those sabers jammed down their freakin’ throats!

That’s fine and good. The problem is that Iraq wasn’t rattling sabers, Bush was. You got fooled because you were (like the media) too lazy to confirm whether or not the things our president was telling us were true. I wasn’t. Saddam was not threatening us and had no ability to strike us.

I have a sister and two nieces who live in NYC, and one of my nieces was in school literally in the shadow of one of the Twin Towers. My sister, an executive with the organization that owns and operates St. Vincent Hospital, spent days on end simply answering calls from people begging for information about this relative, that friend…someone they loved. All she could say was, “We have nothing…”

Well, when it comes to excuses for why we invaded Iraq, you also have nothing.

I like the old Revolutionary War flag that had a rattlesnake upon it and the legend, “Don’t Tread On Me!” You’re either for us…or against us; only the Swiss get to be neutral in this fight, and even they’re now cracking down on Islamic extremism within Switzerland.

And there are a lot of Iraqis who can identify with that right now. Much like our founding fathers, they want to run their own affairs and not be told to pass oil laws dictated to them by a foreign power.

Shall I press my luck with more?

Why not? Once you’ve embarrassed yourself to this level with your lack of knowledge, it really can’t get worse.

It’s neither the purpose nor in the best interest of the United States for it to seek or act in order to obtain the approval of others. While it’s nice to have others with whom to partner or simply hang with, we need to be prepared to go it alone if that’s what’s in the best interests of the people of the United States.

That’s true. But anybody with half a brain can tell that invading Iraq and spending hundreds of billions of dollars to occupy it was certainly not in our best interests.

It’s interesting to note that the so-called failed opportunity peace overtures to Iran of 2003 had Iran demanding bi-lateral talks with the U.S. with the U.S. insisting they be multi-lateral and regional in nature. Damned if we do, and damned if we don’t. When we insist upon including others, and talks fail, we get blamed. Shades of North Korea.

With power comes responsibility. That seems to be another important lesson that your generation of slackers has conveniently ignored.

I don’t believe in coincidences, so it was fascinating to watch how quickly after the U.S. invaded Iraq that Muammar Khaddafi “saw the light.”

Qaddafi started making concessions in 2000. Do you believe in the tooth fairy, too?

So-called Iranian moderates…That sad and sorry song has verses dating back to barely a week after the overthrow of the Shah; it’s a lot of smoke and mirrors.

Repeat after me: There are NO Iranian moderates; there are NO Iranian moderates…

Even for you, this is a misinformed statement. The Iranian populace is actually quite moderate and pro-western in their outlook. They just don’t have the ability to make the changes in the government that they desire.

These illusory “peace and friendship overtures” remind me of B’rer Rabbit’s plea not to be thrown into the briar patch…Into that black hole of despair, I wish not to be sucked.

Well, those of us who don’t live our lives through our television sets know a little more than you.

Iran is a bad act. Period! You can’t always blame the sins of others on George W. Bush, neo-cons, Karl Rove, or Dick Cheney. Iran is just plain bad irrespective of anyone else.

Over the past two decades, since the passing of Khomeini, Iranian society has been split between moderates and the hardliners. Saying “Iran is just plain bad” undercuts the moderates in this fight and when our government does it, it’s counterproductive.

Mad Cow Disease…I don’t mind other countries being wary of the U.S. and kept slightly off balance; they won’t then take us so easily for granted…Remember, we don’t exist to please or be submissive to others. We’ll do the best we can to get along, but it’s not the highest value or virtue.

There’s a big difference between being strong and being reckless. If other countries think that we’re tough but fair, we’ll be respected and feared. If other countries think we’re tough but unfair, we’ll be feared, but the lack of respect will hurt us in the end.

The election of Nikolas Sarkozy in France is interesting. Given the choice between the clearly pro-U.S. Sarkozy and the anti-U.S. what’s her face (forgettable and forgotten), even the French voted in their self-interest. Not to say Sarkozy will be as cozy as Tony Blair, but there’s no mistaking his election as anything other than an affirmation of the power and leadership of the U.S….even under G.W.

As someone who was actually in France during the election, I’m not sure how you came to this conclusion. The U.S. and the Iraq War played very little role in what happened over there. To say that the French elected Sarkozy to cement better relations with the U.S. has no basis in reality.

What’s amazingly sad about all of this is that Crackpiper refused to truly engage either myself or SeattleJew on any of this (and as anyone who reads this site regularly knows, SeattleJew and I often far from like-minded on many of these topics either). It was like he thought that if he spouted enough disjointed nonsensical remarks with no basis in reality, we’d all be so impressed with the volume of right-wing talking points swimming around in his head that we’d have to defer to his wisdom. The whole thing really made it clear why the very first thing he mentioned were that his sons were serving. Because that’s the only argument he has for why things are going well. And it’s a tragedy that what we’re doing in Iraq has come to that.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 24th, 2007 at 8:22 am and is filed under TheHim. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.