Is Obama hurting the Democratic Party by not joining forces with Hilla

[Occhidiangela]

Thank you, Jester, for taking the time to make posts on these threads. Your opinions and mine are very similar and it's nice to have someone articulate, uh, articulate them.

I feel that my country, having now abused those in its charge, has sent the signal to anyone who captures any of our servicemen, or diplomats, or tourists, that it is justified to use torture on them. It was a short-sighted action that has done long-term damage.

I find your first link interesting in terms of this subthread:

You are using definition 1. Occhi is using definition 2.

I might leave it at that, except we've had this sort of definition thing before. I think the term was "bomb" and Occhi informed us that anything that is a bomb has to be dropped from an airplane, things in cars that blow up are "explosive devices". That means of course that the British had planes when they attacked Fort McHenry in the War of 1812. Musta been a secret weapon. Of course, we all know that the real definition of bomb refers to a disagreement between a comic and an audience.

-V

I am fully aware of McCain's outspoken position on the limitations of torture in interrogation, for starters, and that he was opposed to torture as a policy. This goes as far back as late 2005, from what I recall.

Consider his political motivation for doing so, as well as his personal motivation. Isolating the two strikes me as a narrow viewpoint. Now, let's see. Afghanistan, the war, started in 2001. Gitmo as a detention facility opened for business shortly thereafter. (IIRC early 2002, but it may have been started, conceptually, a bit earlier.) Am I to believe that John McCain, as well as each and every Senator and Representative on the various oversight committees, willfully looked the other way until it was politically convenient for them not to? How long did that take? Why? Could political advantage be a reason?

As to bombs, IIRC, we were discussing a difference between missiles and bombs, and I do not recall any point I made that a bomb cannot be something not dropped from an airplane. The commonly used remote control bombs in Iraq and Chechnya and elsewhere are referred to as Improvised Explosive Devices for a good and sufficient reason: they are a particular class of weapon for which there is a counter, or a set of ways to counter, that are not applicable to a simple gravity bomb, nor a laser or GPS guided bomb, or even a car bomb like the one used in Beirut against the Marine Barracks.

George Patton would have referred to them as booby traps.

As to your reference to 1812, we aren't having a conversation in 1812. Do you have a point, or do you refer to descendants of Africans in America as darkies, as they often did in 1812?

Occhi