Hmmm... not all was immediately recycled:

Be sure to wait at least two hours after eating before reading that article!

Fascinating though, this is important to remember when we are overcome by nostalgia... :O)

Lets not forget who lost the election.

Every single one of us, including those that think they "won."

Rob

I've had enough of "stole the election" to do me for the rest of my life.

Please be kind enough to read the CNN article:
http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2001/florida.ballots/stories/main.html

and the USA Today article:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2001-02-25-recount.htm

Both articles detail the fact that MEDIA-SPONSORED HAND RECOUNTS of the 2000 Florida ballots would have resulted in a Bush win almost any way they would have been counted, and DEFINITELY would have resulted in a Bush win had they been recounted in the way Gore was advocating.

Believe what you want to, but when two liberal news outlets like the Clinton News Network and USAToday say Gore would have lost, isn't it time to give it up?

Whatever your views on the war, in the 2000 election your boy lost. Like the web site says, MOVEON!

"Please be kind enough to read the CNN article:
http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2001/florida.ballots/stories/main.html

and the USA Today article:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2001-02-25-recount.htm

Both articles detail the fact that MEDIA-SPONSORED HAND RECOUNTS of the 2000 Florida ballots would have resulted in a Bush win almost any way they would have been counted, and DEFINITELY would have resulted in a Bush win had they been recounted in the way Gore was advocating.

Believe what you want to, but when two liberal news outlets like the Clinton News Network and USAToday say Gore would have lost, isn't it time to give it up?

Whatever your views on the war, in the 2000 election your boy lost. Like the web site says, MOVEON!"

No insult intended, but why would you believe any of these sources? Do you really? You get your news from corporations, and actually believe it?

I read this thread and all it does is reinforce the points I made in the huge thread regarding the media and how I illustrated with specific examples that it covers for the current administration and in fact sold the public the justification for the invasion of Iraq without really questioning it. Why do you think some of the posters throw around the term "liberals" when they don't even understand what it means? Media conditioning and parroting.

John

"Believe what you want to, but when two liberal news outlets like the Clinton News Network and USAToday say Gore would have lost, isn't it time to give it up?"

Sadly we will never know how it would have turned out. As for my being my boy, you couldnt be further from the truth. Personally, I HATE ALL politicians and if they all were shot dead it would NOTphase me a bit.

Maybe when the days of the politicians who live under the same rules, policies, and conditions that they force the rest of the nation to live under, then they will gain some respect. Isnt it funny how a bunch of old men sit around and decide to fight a war and then offer up our children to go and die for the politicians' causes? If that doesnt bother you, then you are a bigger man than me.

Isnt it funny how a bunch of old men sit around and decide to fight a war and then offer up our children to go and die for the politicians' causes? If that doesnt bother you, then you are a bigger man than me.
========
Actually Michael Moore pointed that out very well in his film despite the fact that the media assisted in discrediting it and turning Moore into a Right wing catch phrase.

I am definitely not a fan of Michael Moore but what he says is TRUE. I have yet to see one politician volunteer to send any of their family members to war before they send others. Do you also notice that the people that fight in the wars are usually more poor than the politicians who make major bank on salary and lobbyist money?

While on the subject of terror, isnt it ironic that more civilian lives were lost than the lives of those who make policy and they tell us that terrorists attack because they disagree with Ameircan policy. So to me, that means those that make policy should be the ones who should shed blood at the hands of a terrorist before any civilian should. Strange it NEVER works out that way.

I thought these Sony forums were for discussing the products?

It's very sad that many users have been banned and threads have been purged here regarding any critical comments about the products, but this kind of political way-off-topic nonsense seems to endure.

Randy,

You don't have to read the OT posts, just ignore them.

Sometimes they are about, say, video lighting or microphones, sometimes they are about other things that affect us deeply.

Clicking through is entirely voluntary.

Take another look at my previous post in this thread about the wikipedia listings for the range of political thought in the U.S. (Notice that I deliberately did not include "Democrat" and "Republican" in the list. These two parties are simply vehicles of expediency. Neither one has anything resembling a coherent political philosophy.)

Anyway, wouldn't it be wonderful if the broadcast media made it a point to seek opinions from ALL these different viewpoints? What I wouldn't give to see a no holds-barred, nationally televised debate between an anarchist, a neo-con, a paleo-con, a Bob LaFollette-style progressive and a libertarian about the news of the day! Sure would beat the typical George Stephanopoulous / George Will punditocracy!

I agree that some OT posts perhaps make sense if they are in any way related to media production.

But what place does political or religious discussion have here? How does this help an end-user trying to find information remotely related to Sony's products?

Why should my search results here be cluttered up with heated discussions on world-affairs and liberal/conservative bashing?

Quote***********
We are working on a project about the run up to the war in Iraq---I was pro-war--now i think that this "adventure" is one of the worst moments in American history. More to come when we finish it.
End Quote***********

One of the worst Executive Decisions in History!!! Yep, right there with Viet Nam. I'm a disabled Nam Vet so I see this differently...I'm taking it personal. The way this war is being fought is Nam all over again. Syria is now North Viet Nam. Can't go there and get the bad guy, can’t cross that boarder so lets just stay right here and let them bomb the crap out of us. What really killing me is the way Vets are being treated by this Administration. Bush is cutting the budget for Vets yet again, and once again it's the Vets that pay the ultimate price both during the war and after the fighting has stopped.

I’m registered as an American Independent .

> "Why should my search results here be cluttered up with heated discussions on world-affairs and liberal/conservative bashing?"

Randy - what would you be searching for that would lead you here?

Although Vegas brings us together, we are a community in a troubled world, and once in a while we're gonna discuss things. It doesn't take over from the main purpose of the forum, and it produces some pretty far-sighted reading and some of us may even consider making video on the topic.

Is this really discussion? Or is it going to turn into another Google, "highlight, paste and patch" pissing contest?

Redd,

I'm curious about your posts. Sometimes text can leave out inflections, I don't think you are being sarcastic, but I want to make sure.

Is your position that the Iraq War is as bad a decsion/execution as the Vietnam War? The reason I ask is this seems at odds with your earlier post. The author of the Time artilce seems to be saying something close to what you are saying. Were you for the invasion of Iraq, but think the exectuion was incompetent? I personally think this is a far more dangerous issue than Vietnam because Vietnam was not a strategically important country wheras Iraq is. When Vietnam felt to the communists, it did not matter so much to the world. The idea of a stable, democratic Iraq that is a model to its neighbors seems pretty far off these days. The possibility of a three-way civil war, a weakened, quasi-failed state or a Shiite-republic aligned with Iran all seem greater possibilities.

**********

As for the the idea that Saddam represented the same threat as Hitler, it's pretty ludicrous. Hitler was not a threat only to Jews, he was an existential threat to the United States, let alone Britain and the other countries of Europe. That is, the decision was never, ever, let Hitler pursue the Holocaust and we will be left alone. During WWII the entire nation was asked to sacrifice and the war transformed our society. Saddam in 2003 did not even control his entire country. The Kurds were pretty much autonomous in the north and the no-fly zones were effective in the north and south. We could bomb any place in Iraq at will. In 1994 in response to Iraqi involvement in a plot to kill Bush I, we destroyed the headquarters of Iraqi intelligence, which ended Iraq's terrorist ambitions. In 1996 we bombed Iraqi air defenses to expand the no-fly zones. In 1998 when Iraq kicked the UN inspectors out, we bombed in retaliation. The UK and US flew literally hundreds of thousands of sorties (280,000 by 2001) over Iraq in the last ten years and we never lost a pilot. Think about that. Hundreds of thousands of sorties without a casualty. Even when we began heavily bombing Iraq in late 2002 we didn't lose a pilot.

The author of the Time article is Daniel Benjamin who co-authored The Age of Sacred Terrorism, Radical Islam's War against America . He was one of the people trying to sound the alarm about Al Qaeda before 9/11 So the guy is not a peacenik and he is not arguing for appeasment. He is arguing that we understand who our enemies are and how to fight them. The idea that he is a 21st century Neville Chamberlain is a joke.

Also plenty of people were against this war were conservatives and/or Republicans. Tom Clancy, for gosh sakes, thinks this war was a mistake and lacked a casus belli. (If you follow the link, you will see one of the difference between the conservative Clancy and neo-conservative kingpin Richard Perle. By the way, it is rare to find a neo-conservative with military experience.) Is Clancy too big a peacenik for you? How about Norman Schwarzkopf? One of the more interesting articles I've read recently was Eliot Cohen's op-ed A Hawk Questions Himself as His Son Goes to War. Cohen is a military historian and neoconservative. In 2002 President Bush took care to be photographed several times carrying Cohen's book Supreme Command. The book dealt with civilian control over the military. Bush did this during the debate about going to war and it was taken as a signal that Bush intended to go to Iraq and that he was not going to listen to the concerns raised by Gen. Zinni, Gen. Shinseki, or retired Generals like Colin Powell or Brent Scowcroft. It's too hard to summarize Cohen's article and the complex emotions he talks about, you should check out the whole thing. The gist is knowing what he knows now, he does not know if he would have supported the decision to invade Iraq if he knew how incompetently the war would be planned and prosecuted.

The more I learn about the arrogance of the ideologues who planned this war the more I am shocked. They really did believe the war would be short and we could impose a government headed by our preferred exile Ahmad Chalabi. For the first time since WWII reconstruction was moved within the Pentagon. This shut out the experts in the State department so all our institutional memory/expertise of our recent experiences was purposely declined. All the planning from the State Department's Future of Iraq project was willfully ignored, too pessimistic you see. Douglas Feith was put in charge and he selected people not on their capabilities, but on their ideology. He reportedly turned away people who spoke Arabic. He turned down those in the Pentagon who had reconstruction experience, also too pessimistic. Who did he choose to run Cvil Administration in postwar-Iraq, that is the guy who was in charge of getting the new Iraqi government up and running? A diplomat with expertise in running a country? Someone who had done reconstruction before? Someone who knew aobut Iraq? No, he chose Michael Mobbs who did some arms control work under Reagan in the 80's but recently represented companies who wanted to do business in Russia. He is also Douglas Feith's law partner and a friend of Richard Perle and Donald Rumsfeld. Nothing in his background suggests he was the right guy to have control of 12 of Iraq's 23 ministries. Someday people are going to learn that we did not put the best America has to offer to face this daunting task in Iraq.

I believe prior to Iraq, when we had our focus on the Taliban in Afghanistan, we had the right front to really begin fighting the war on terror and to track down the terrorist mastermind(s) behind the horrific attacks on 09/11/01, but we lightened up on that unattractive, difficult to videotape, mountain pursuit and invaded Iraq, which was then described as a separate matter, involving WMD's.

It's hard to not think that the administration really wanted a more TV-friendly war, out of which images and phrases like "Shock and Awe" could lead to TV moments like on the deck of that aircraft carrier, when, in his bomber jacket, our President declared, "mission accomplished!" I remember people around me doing some verbal high-fiving that day, but I was incredulous, because I knew that the “mission” hadn’t even begun. In the years since, we have been blowing up stuff and getting blown up over there in the made-up front for the war on terror while the worlds real terror networks have continued to plan and plot.

And sadly, Afghanistan has also returned to being one of the world's biggest opium producers. Our policy there is to leave the drug lords alone so long as they help us finger Taliban/Al Queda.

I guess we figure the enemy of our enemy is our friend, but with friends like opium growers (and the attendant violence and killings over illicit drug money), who needs enemies?

Bob.

"I guess we figure the enemy of our enemy is our friend, but with friends like opium growers (and the attendant violence and killings over illicit drug money), who needs enemies?"

Dont forget that drug money also finds its way into terrorists bank accounts as well to further fund more attacks. Bush truly is THE dumbest moron ever to lead our country and we have had some real dumb asses.

One question I have not heard answered yet is where in the hell do we as a country get off telling other countries that they have to embrace democracy? Doesnt a free society mean that the government of other countries decide how to govern themeselves? So why was it ok for USA to fight the British for our right to govern ourselves but then we turn around 200+ years later and then dictate to other countries how they MUST embrace freedom and democracy? What was once a hippie nation has turned into a hyprocrite nation.

Were we every really a hippie nation? I mean at the height of the hippiedom Nixon won two elections.

EDIT:

I mean even after the 26th Ammendment was passed in 1971 and 18 year-olds got the right to vote, Nixon's victory was even bigger.

Catch phrases such "freedom" and "democracy" can be a problem in themselves, because they have cultural undertones that often aren't recognised by the speaker. While we say that the Greeks "invented" democracy, this was a very different reality to the USA version and certainly to British philosophy. We can go back to Macarthy to see a very unpleasant version of democracy and freedom, and the present "anti-terrorism" laws aren't exactly in line with either of those terms. To ensure our own rights we must also protect the rights of others, so glib thinking and rash law making to protect "freedom" is dangerous to us all.

What do we mean by freedom? What does freedom mean to others? If you remember the Laslo Pyramid of Needs, at the lowest level, the foundation, are survival needs (food, security, health), and at the highest level, the very peak, is self actuation (freedom to choose what you do). In western society it is easy to regard "freedom" as freedom to choose, but this means nothing when the lower levels of the pyramid are empty.

Now why would we discuss this sort of thing in this forum? Well you need people who can think, people who are used to dealing with complex problems with many variables seldom having ideal solutions, and people who make wise choices. Clearly these are Vegas editors. You couldn't go to a Mac site.

Today there was published a thoughtful essay on terrorism laws written by a former conservative prime minister of Australia which is, I think, worth reading:

http://www.theage.com.au/news/opinion/lets-not-compromise-the-rule-of-law/2005/07/12/1120934239578.html?oneclick=true

You forgot to mention this is part of a whole "Point/Counterpoint" type of thing.
... Why That's Ridiculous is the other point. Note that I am not syaing I agree with either - I just thought to be fair one should point out and link the "full" story.