Cut And…Um…Run and Grab The Trimmer
I always Tivo The Daily Show, so sorry if Jon beat me to this one.
Florida Republican Representative Ric Keller (also his gay porn name) seems to have a firm grasp on the Iraq problem:
"Imagine your next-door neighbor refuses to mow his lawn and the weeds are all the way up to his waist. You decide you're going to mow his lawn for him every single week. The neighbor never says, 'Thank you.' He hates you and sometimes he takes out a gun and shoots at you," Keller said. "Under these circumstances, do you keep mowing his lawn forever? Do you send even more of your family members over to mow his lawn? Or do you say to that neighbor, 'You better step it up and mow your own lawn or there's going to be serious consequences for you'?"
I'm pretty sure Ric Keller just called everyone on the planet a retarded dumbass.
February 15th, 2007 at 9:35 am
I knew I shouldn’t have shot at the guy! Man, he kept mowing down my marijuana, mistaking it for weeds! I mean, cut a fella a break Ric!
Seriously, I can’t believe a 3 term congressperson tries to simplify something that is impacting the entire world of these people to a hillbilly taking target practice at a neighbor.
February 15th, 2007 at 10:12 am
You can’t believe a congressman would use a simplified example to support his policy argument? Yeah, that’s pretty crazy.
Honestly, it’s a pretty good example. He should probably mention that we’re also spending $100 billion on gas and mower blades to mow the dude’s lawn.
February 15th, 2007 at 10:30 am
One wonders what his serious consequences are. The “police” ( UN ) are arguing over which kind of donut goes best with the new java blend coffe at the local Crispy Cream shop, and having accidentally run over his dog and a couple of his children while mowing his lawn sorta has him thinking he’s suffering a bit of consequences as it is. What exactly are we going to do to him if he doesn’t start mowing his own lawn? Not only was it a stupid analogy, his threat is hollow short of commiting atrocities on a massive scale.
February 15th, 2007 at 10:49 am
It’s a terrible example Axe. If you really want to use the analogy, you’d have to include details like:
- According to you, his yard was overgrown with weeds. But when you actually got there, there were no weeds to be found.
- According to you, the very same criminals that set fire to your garage last week are living in his back yard. But this turns out to be wrong.
- You’re mowing his lawn because you not only want it to help your own property value, but you covet the extremely rich soil that lies under his lawn.
- You not only mowed his lawn, but you went into his house, beat the shit out of him, raped his wife, and killed one of his children. You then imposed your own set of household rules on him and his family, all the while telling him you’re there to help him.
- In the middle of the night you occasionally break into his house and abduct him or his wife or his kids, and keep them for weeks at a time. When you return them, you don’t even apologize or give a reason as to why you abducted them.
- You tell his neighbors that you will pay them $500 if they tell you any member of his family is a criminal. When they point out the criminals, you abduct the accused criminal, torture them, and detain them indefinitely without ever giving a reason for it.
- His lawn looks a fuckload worse than it was when you started. It’s actually dangerous to walk through most of his lawn now, except for a very tiny green gazebo in the corner.
- After all you’ve done for him, you bitch about how ungrateful he is, and you can’t figure out why he keeps shooting at you.
February 15th, 2007 at 11:24 am
LOL Mox. Don’t forget the next point:
- You tell him how messed up his lawn is while neglecting to look at your own lawn. Your lawn, which had weeds up to your knees, has now grown weeds up to your neck.
Ax, my point was I can’t believe that we can continue to vote for such idiocy for 3 terms. Yes, I do consider myself naive on this point.
February 15th, 2007 at 11:32 am
A Congressman is like a series of tubes…
February 15th, 2007 at 1:17 pm
Let me understand. The guy mowing the lawn is under fire, and all he can do is tell the shooter how much trouble he’s going to be in? I had no idea that Louis Tully was mowing lawns these days.
February 16th, 2007 at 7:38 am
This part just plain isn’t true.
February 16th, 2007 at 8:17 am
I’m not sure it isn’t completely false, either.
February 16th, 2007 at 8:48 am
Care to explain that position Bartoneus? You’re not really arguing that Iraq /hasn’t/ become a dangerous place are you? (not trying to be combative here, just curious)
February 16th, 2007 at 9:37 am
Bartoneus, the problem is that you picked just the one point to be untrue? Now you must defend your position while no proof is being supplied for the original statements, other than, “TV told me so.”
Fact is, neither side are necessarily true that anyone will be proving any time soon. Sure doesn’t stop people from stating baseless political opinion as truth. Before you go arguing that, tell me how long you lived in Iraq before the war started and how many families you’ve visited and interviewed since then? How many Iraq gov’t facilities did you go through? You haven’t? Oh, but the little people in the TV have right? They wouldn’t have a reason for bias would they? No. The morons running the war wouldn’t have a bias either would they? ‘Course not.
The congressman is an idiot with a crappy analogy, which one of them isn’t a moron? Stop voting for people who WANT to be elected and maybe we’d get somewhere.
February 16th, 2007 at 10:32 am
Tim: you are correct there
moxcamel: It is public knowledge that Iraq has been a dangerous place for quite a long time. The difference now is that instead of the instituted leader(s) of the country being the entire reason it’s dangerous, now the danger comes from other places. I’m not arguing that Iraq hasn’t become a dangerous place, because it already was to begin with.
BugHunter: Only that one point really bothered me, because he was insinuating that Iraq was a peachy-keen safe place before we got there. It wasn’t. Read something, anything, about Saddam Hussein and tell me he wasn’t running the country towards hell. I don’t have to have ever even been to Iraq to know that, what you do need to have been there for is to know how it is now that he’s gone. I just find it hard to believe that it’s WORSE with Saddam gone.
All that we hear, see, and read is filtered and plotted. This is all we really have to base our opinions on, but everyone brings all of their baggage into it as well. If you don’t like Bush, and you focus on the fact that he lied to start the war in Iraq, that doesn’t mean the place isn’t better off in the end for it.
And thank you for responded in composed and rational ways, as opposed to just starting flame wars and avoiding any sort of relevant discussion! It makes everyone happier in the end.
February 16th, 2007 at 10:59 am
I happen to believe Iraq is a mess on many levels, but my comment was satire, Bughunter, and meant to be “truthy” but I never said it should be taken as absolute truth. Sorry but I’m just not going to start prefacing my comments with “This is just my opinion and not meant to be taken as absolute truth…” And no, Bartoneus doesn’t have to defend anything, because this isn’t a debate or trial. I’m curious as to why he would say what he did, but I’m not going to get up in his face to demand he quote chapter and verse. This is a blog, not a congressional hearing.
So do I understand your point to be that you can only have an opinion on something if you’ve lived through every single aspect of it yourself? Am I to understand that you yourself have no opinions on Iraq because you haven’t been there both before and after the invasion? Or do you have access to some kind of special news sources that have been untainted by biased journalism?
For what it’s worth, I watch very little television and can’t remember the last time I watched CNN or Fox or any of the big “TV” outlets. But it wouldn’t really satisfy you if I were to list where I get my news, because you’re always going to be able to fall back on your “you weren’t there” straw man.
Honestly Bughunter, I see a lot of crassness behind your words, but almost never anything of substance. You’re happy to attack and make baseless assumptions about where people are getting their information, but you don’t ever seem to offer anything up of substance. Maybe that’s by design, I don’t know. But you could certainly start by not being so effing combative.
Bartoneus: I see what you mean. I think everyone will agree Saddam was a bad bad man, and he did some horrible things. But I also think that for the average Iraqi citizen, life was *better* (not great, but better) than it is now. For example, under Saddam Hussein women didn’t have to wear burkhas. Under the new government they still don’t have to wear burkhas by law, but most women do anyway because if they don’t they’re automatically targeted by extremists. Also, the average Iraqi had power almost 24×7. Now they have it anywhere from 0-4 hours per day. And by all accounts, you could drive down the streets of Baghdad without much of a chance of getting blown up. Again, I’m talking about the average Iraqi citizen. Certainly there was a lot of shadowy crap happening, and god help you if you had any level of actual power, but for the guy running a tea shop or working in a factory I think most of them would tell you that conditions were better under the old regime. That may change over time (I hope!) but right now things pretty much suck ass.
February 16th, 2007 at 2:19 pm
I apologize for the length of this comment.
I am pretty “effing combative”, there is no denying that. You want some substance though, understandable. Here goes.
Because you already know that Saddam was a not nice guy who needed to be removed from a volitile middle east I’ll assume you mean the excuse of WMDs to invade as well as the excuse to find and exterminate the terrorists in our “War on Terror”. The gov’t has not said that they found any WMDs and the terrorists are still out there. So, the media says that there were no WMDs and never were, and that the terrorists were not in Iraq.
What if we royally screwed up the invasion (which we did) by not sending enough troops (which we didn’t) and by not securing the border (how dumb can we get?), could enriched uranium be smuggled across the border before our commanding idiots figured out which way is up? Truth is, we as the public don’t know, so why side with the media? Why not take the opinion that we really needed to do something about Iraq, but the guys in charge can’t form a battle plan to save our lives. They learned nothing from previous “police actions”. Even though they aren’t it doing very well, at least they are pursuing the only realistic course of action.
Bush is a business man and a politician. I have to agree that it’s extremely likely he has a motive that benefits him personally. My fault for voting for him. My only defence is that I wasn’t voting FOR him as much as voting AGAINST the other guys.
You don’t think you went a little too far with this one? I’m not saying that all of that didn’t actually happen, but it’s a war, and men do terrible things, especially in war. It would be nice if we were the honorable white knights all the time, but there are going to be some bad eggs in the military just like in any neighborhood here at home. Iraq has to be locked down in martial law before turning it over to the people. They must be afraid to step out of line and feel safe in trusting the good guys are going to protect them by hurting the bad guys very very badly. We’ve done that the wrong ways in a handful of cases, but the premise of creating a military state before handing the reins over is the right way to go about liberating a country. If you know another way other than complete show of military force, please say so, how would you have invaded Iraq and made it safe for them?
Already discussed a bit of this. It’s a pretty grey area to get into. It is dangerous right now, but it’s not like it wasn’t dangerous before, now it’s just different. Bush didn’t send in enough troops there wasn’t enough lock down in short enough time. The invasion was a joke. The only way to correct that is to send a lot more now, luckily the re-enlistment % is so much higher than it has ever been that this may be doable. It is a sound tactic to hit your enemy so hard that he cannot get back up to fight (Ender’s game
).
This mixes too many people in to the same boat. There are Iraqis that are grateful for helping them. They appreciate their new buildings we build for them. They are happy to have a place to enjoy the huge increase in personal electronics that they now have, which are sucking up so much power that they have outages all the freaking time. The ungrateful ones are those who don’t get to rape and murder at will any more, I don’t really want their gratitude, I’d just as soon that kind be “detain them indefinitely without ever giving a reason for it.”
February 16th, 2007 at 2:57 pm
I was going to write a point-by-point retort to your post, until I came to this paragraph:
My jaw literally dropped when I read this. No smileys or lol’s, so even though it sounds like something from the Colbert Report, I have to make the leap that you’re seriously suggesting that a massive influx of personal electronics into an economy with an 80% unemployment rate is causing 20 hour power outages across Baghdad.
Anyway, it’s pretty obvious that one of us has a gross misunderstanding of the issues. If it’s me, then I guess I’ll just retreat to my cocoon of ignorance. The alternative is just too bizarre for me to cope with.
February 16th, 2007 at 3:11 pm
Where can I find one of these?
February 16th, 2007 at 4:02 pm
It is not out of the realm of possibility that increases in tech availability would not impact a minimal Energy infrastructure. Just because there is an 80% unemployment rate doesn’t mean the products aren’t getting to the public.
Giving away free electronics like TVs and radios or other appliance for the use in daily life is a way to raise the living standards and conditions some people might be living in. It would also help the distribution of information and help control that information. Great tool to use for the simple fact that the govt would want to exert as much control as possible over every aspect of the indigenous population lives.
Other ways of this stuff getting to the public would be though illicit means. With all those people out of work whose to say they won’t turn to the chance for a quick bit of cash or some form of barter system for their food. 1 TV = 2 days meat. Or what ever. It not like the law enforcement over there is the best on earth right now. Plenty of room for an organized crime ring to set up a few thefts of depots with disposable people needing to steal to live. So what if a few things go missing and find there way to Habib’s house.
Add to this all the damage and collateral damage from the battles before, during and after we hit their cites with missiles from the skies and miles away. It no wonder that the extra telephone Basra added to his house would bring down a power grid.
Time for putting up or shutting up over there. Too damn many cooks in the kitchen. Get in take the stuff and get out. We are past the time we need to be there any more. Grab all the really big nasty weapons and roll out. Let them sort it out….oh we can’t? Oh that’s right they have a lot of what WE need for the use of our SUVs and shit. I wonder how this war will look to our descendants when they are driving around in vehicles powered by truly clean energy sources.
February 20th, 2007 at 11:00 am
Ummm guys the power is off because the various factions in Iraq all want their people to be as miserable under the current Iraqi government/US occupation as they can possibly make them. For alqueda it brings converts, for the suni it brings more suni who want to return to controll of the country, for the shia it brings in more people into the mahdi army( these guys want an islamic stat based on the Iranian model ). Every singel dissatisfied customer of the current government is a potential recruit to one of the power hungry factions out there. Ergo every time someone fixes a power line, or tranformer, or power station, one of these groups goes out and blows it up.
The idea that new eletronics gadgets are responsible for the power being out is completely ignoring the larger reason for it. It’s out because every Iraqi with any power who doesn’t support the government wants it to be out.