patrick.net

Bellingham Bill says

Obviously,

Ugh. Read your own Wiki article, the Barbary states were attacking Americans (unlike the Gulf of Tonkin), Jefferson didn't conscript Americans, Jefferson had authority from Congress, and the action was quite limited. Then, read the Pentagon Papers. Or, go back to ignoring me and scores of other people.

LBJ thought he was getting a limited action, too.

And he went to Congress for authority to take care of the upstart communists in Hanoi threatening our national interest there.

"Volunteer" troops bleed and die just the same as draftees so that's orthogonal.

go back to ignoring me and scores of other people.

Probably should, actually. Morons here have overrun the place.

Seeing you defend LBJ's decision to launch the Viet Nam draft, I'm unsurprised you also defend Obamacare. It is funny to see you say that morons have overrun PatNet, I wonder if you are proudly claiming credit for leading that assault too.

Dan8267 says

I don't see how you would connect Wilson to slavery, but in any case, INTJs can be good or evil just like any other personality type. Here are some more examples of INTJs that I think you'd find to be on the light side of the force.

Those people suffer from hypocrisy, maybe not Wilson he was just the worst president the US has ever had, considering how much damage he caused maybe that is hypocrisy in itself.

A lot of verbiage and I still don't understand what an INTJ is? Maybe that is the intention?

Bellingham Bill says

Obviously, if we had known what we were getting into in 1962-65 we wouldn't have committed as we did. Throw in some troops, kick some commie ass, go home after a year or three.

We had the knowledge of what we were getting into. Just like the Iraq war numerous respected high ranking generals wrote extensively about exactly what the situation was and would develop into. Just like the Iraq war these people were marginalized or driven out of the service by a Sec of Def (Mcnamara and Rumsfeld) with unlimited ego and desire for war.

Bellingham Bill says

he went to Congress for authority to take care of the upstart communists in Hanoi threatening our national interest there.

Remember the POS ford EXP version of the escort in the 80's. When ford told the auto press they were dropping it because sales hadn't met expectations someone pointed out that the EXP was a slow, ugly, poor handling, unreliable, two seater and asked what exactly ford's sales expectations had been.

What exactly was the US national interest in a dirt poor agricultural country that was 90% mountainous jungle, 10% rice paddy with no infrastructure, no manufacturing, no natural resources, no geographic signifigance that was 12,000 miles away?

The domino theory was a joke. Communism succeeded so well in the 50's and 60's because it provided a means to drive out the hated repressive colonialists or post colonialist dictators who were ruthlessly exploiting the resources leaving almost the entire population in dire poverty. The US policy then and now is based on force and the big stick. The US time and time again took the position of supporting corrupt, repressive, reviled, self serving governments despised by the population because they were "anti communist" then wondering why they fell.

BTW I've read 2 different accounts of LBJ's presidency that say that he actually had the telegram stating the August 4th incident probably never happened in his pocket while he made his speech to congress asking for the gulf of tonkin resolution. LBJ wanted to go to war and was willing to do whatever it took to get there. Just like Bush.

Dan8267 says

You remember that argument. It's the one where I quoted the American Political Science Review while you quoted Wikipedia, the go to source for idiots.

You don't get to claim the position of quality when it comes to evidence gathering.

I can't recall ever quoting Wikipedia in a previous debate with you. Can you find where I did that? If you cannot, I await your apology for either (a) a false accusation or (b) intentional dishonesty by trying to twist the conversation elsewhere. I also can't recall any conversation with you about Bachmann, nor am I a participant in the thread that you link. You should apologize for your confusion on that one too.

Also, given that you allegedly review government documents, why not give a read of the CU decision a try? You might learn something contrary to your completely incorrect beliefs of it now.

Dan8267 says

Whether or not the founding fathers believed that rights came from a god is irrelevant. In our government, rights are defined by law. They come from Congress, not your fictitious god. Get over it.

But thank you for your post. Claiming that rights "come from Congress" is probably the clearest example in this thread of the massive, irreconcilable gap between Thomas Jefferson and any of today's so-called liberal that believes as you do. Any commonality between today's Democrats or liberals with Thomas Jefferson on other issues is meaningless beyond this gap.

BTW, can you tell us which rights are specifically granted by Congress? Most of them seem to be written in the fashion of "Congress shall not interfere with 'the right of x" where x is not otherwise defined, and therefore assumed to already be held by the people. Perhaps the fact that this doesn't fit into a clear mathematical box is the reason you can't understand it.

indigenous says

A lot of verbiage and I still don't understand what an INTJ is? Maybe that is the intention?

It's the Meyer's Briggs Type Inventory, a type of personality assessment designed in part to help people understand how to work with people of various other types, and that is very frequently abused and applied in contexts where it doesn't belong, or using it in a way to signify something when it is meaningless (such as Dan's comparison of himself with Jefferson). This is one topic that, while I have never looked it up on Wikipedia, is probably one that is safe to look up there, if you were interested. But it's really totally irrelevant to this thread, other than an expression of Dan talking about things which he knows little of, but thinks he does simply because he's smart in general.

Paralithodes says

I can't recall ever quoting Wikipedia in a previous debate with you.

Back when you went by the handle Shrek, before MarsAttacks and the several other handles you used. Too bad Patrick kept nuking your comments. I always thought it was better to keep the posts to demonstrate how ridiculous they were.

curious2 says

Seeing you defend LBJ's decision to launch the Viet Nam draft

The Vietnam-era draft was a left-over from the 40s. Plus the US was experiencing a massive rise of 19 year olds in the 1960s (baby boom really got rolling in the late 40s) so shipping some of them off to fight the godless communist bastards in Indochina seemed like a good idea at the time, just like stopping the communist expansion in Korea was probably a good idea, even in retrospect.

Intervening in Vietnam to save the Thieu regime was a really tough call, given our mostly successful experience in Korea.

Failing to act would give the conservatives tons of ammunition for calling LBJ and the Dems pussies and not serious about containing communism, just like Truman failed to save China when he had the chance.

Against this LBJ had to make the call that our armed forces would prove not sufficiently more capable than the French to defeat the communists in SE Asia.

This would be a priori, in 1965, preposterous!

But after 3+ years of jungle slog, we began to understand that the guerrillas had pretty good freedom of movement within SVN, since the place was so covered with jungle and the interior was mostly uninhabited and the borders with Laos and Cambodia very porous.

Plus the Thieu regime mostly sucked and many if not most non-Catholic Southerners just wanted the wars over already.

And we couldn't really bomb the Hanoi regime to the bargaining table, since they were so poor they didn't have much worth preserving from the USAF & USN anyway.

The only way to win was to isolate the north from its support, which meant going to war with Russia and/or China, or somehow getting China to fight on our side, something our diplomacy was not sufficiently flexible enough to pursue in the 1960s.

So yeah, given our stupid domestic politics -- the conservative mouth-breather vote that appears when war is on the menu -- LBJ was railroaded into intervening in Vietnam as he did.

Obama has always had a nuanced, tactical view of health reform. First get the government involved, then move towards universal single payer over time. He's long said we can't get to there in one jump, and he's clearly right.

We don't have a single Democratic senator in the progressive caucus. Not one!

By the way, this looks like the full timeline, up to Obama.

http://www.davidwalbert.com/2011/07/01/timeline-of-u-s-political-parties/