Military What was done is being undone...Iraq

Discussion in 'Free Speech Alley' started by mancha, Jun 12, 2014.

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  1. red55

    red55 curmudgeon Staff Member

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    The Chris Christie scandal was not about causing a traffic jam, it was about overt political retaliation against a public official by a potential Presidential candidate. That is a bigger story than lost emails by a mid-level bureaucrat.
     
    red55, Jun 29, 2014
    #141
  2. mctiger

    mctiger RIP, and thanks for the music Staff Member

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    Uhh, the missing email story stems back to allegations that the White House used the IRS to target and harass conservative organizations. Pot, meet kettle.

    Also, nice to see we agree about the biased reporting of the VA scandal.
     
    mctiger, Jun 29, 2014
    #142
  3. alfredeneuman

    alfredeneuman Founding Member

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    Man, dude, that's pathetic if you really think that.
     
    alfredeneuman, Jun 29, 2014
    #143
  4. red55

    red55 curmudgeon Staff Member

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    Well, that story got a ton of coverage didn't it? I was saying that the email sub-drama mentioned doesn't quite compare with Christiegate in terms of story value. O'Reilly cherry-picked a poor analogue to drive the argument in the direction he wanted to go. He's a clever, eloquent, Machiavellian bastard. I like him a lot, but he's completely dubious, duplicitous, and cannot in good sense be trusted.

    I don't remember agreeing with that. I don't think O'Reilly numbers are accurate. The VA story has been huge on all the media. No one could have missed it if they watch the news. The VA has been broken for a long time and everybody on the political spectrum wants to see it addressed.
     
    red55, Jun 29, 2014
    #144
  5. mctiger

    mctiger RIP, and thanks for the music Staff Member

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    You're trying to obfuscate my original point, which is that the networks jumped on a story that was damaging to the right, but delayed reporting on a hot topic that was damaging to the left. You won't accept O'Reilly as a source? How about the Media Research Center?

    They also questioned the quality of the reporting:

    http://www.mrc.org/media-reality-ch...terans-scandal-just-5-seconds-criticism-obama
     
    mctiger, Jun 29, 2014
    #145
  6. red55

    red55 curmudgeon Staff Member

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    Are you serious? You are kidding, right? Here is how Wikipedia describes the Media Research Center.

    The Media Research Center (MRC) is a politically conservative content analysis organization based in Reston, Virginia, founded in 1987 by activist L. Brent Bozell III. Its stated mission is to "prove—through sound scientific research—that liberal bias in the media does exist and undermines traditional American values" and to neutralize the perceived liberal bias of the mainstream media.​

    Yeah, yeah I have trouble accepting the MRC as a legitimate source of facts on media bias. They are overtly and openly a biased media. :D

    What a shock! The MRC automatically decides that this is Obama's fault!

    The VA has been around for many decades, you know. Obama did not create it and does not participate in its everyday operations. The problems there are bureaucratic and everybody knows it. Obama is responsible for appointing a chief administrator of the VA. That head has now resigned. Did the MRC expect a show trying to get to the bottom of the VA problem to devote a lot of time to The President? Does the MRC imagine that the President ordered the VA to be inefficient? His job is to appoint capable people and General Shinseki was a widely applauded appointment. He failed to fix the problems at the VA and now he is gone. Obama ordered an investigation into the issue soon after it was reported, people were fired, higher people resigned and Obama has said that he will not tolerate the situation and has ordered steps to address it. That seems like a responsible response to me.
     
    red55, Jun 29, 2014
    #146
  7. mctiger

    mctiger RIP, and thanks for the music Staff Member

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    So show me something that says their facts - story broke on April 23, networks didn't cover it until May 6 - are incorrect.
     
    mctiger, Jun 29, 2014
    #147
  8. red55

    red55 curmudgeon Staff Member

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    I challenged your source as biased. You can prove it or you can't. I don't have to prove anything, it was your allegation.

    Here is the timeline:

    April 9th: Rep. Jeff Miller, R-Fla., chairman of the House Committee on Veterans' Affairs, says during a hearing that dozens of VA hospital patients in Phoenix may have died while awaiting medical care.

    April 16: A Phoenix rally organized by Concerned Veterans for America and attended by Rep. David Schweikert, R-Ariz., draws 150 veterans and their supporters calling for solutions to the controversy.

    April 28: Obama orders General Shinseki to investigate and reports it at a news conference in Manilla.

    May 1: U.S. Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric Shinseki places Helman and two others on administrative leave.

    May 2: Mitchell goes public with her allegations about mismanagement of the Phoenix VA system and her concerns about wait times, noting that she and a co-worker moved to protect some documents as evidence.​

    These things were reported.

    ​
    So exactly who 'broke' the story on April 23? That was weeks after two Congressmen called public attention to it. Wikipedia says that CNN reported the story on May 30. If it was liberal bias to delay the story, why didn't FOXNews break it earlier?
     
    red55, Jun 29, 2014
    #148
  9. uscvball

    uscvball Founding Member

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    And back to Iraq/ISIS and establishing an Islamic state....

    "Emboldened by a weakened Iraqi government that is struggling to stop their murderous advance, the extremists of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria declared over the weekend that they have set up a caliphate spanning large areas of the two countries....the group said in the message Sunday, which CNN couldn't independently confirm, that its flag now flies from Aleppo province in northwestern Syria to Diyala province in eastern Iraq. It announced that it was changing its name to just the "Islamic State."

    And the vaunted Iraqi forces? "Today Iraq special forces launched a counter-offensive, they lost one helicopter right off the bat and the other two went to the wrong location." Brilliant.

    "As militants with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) sweep across Syria and northern Iraq, they've drawn thousands of foreign fighters to aid their insurgency. And apart from the role those fighters have played in aggravating the already-bloody conflict, analysts say, they could also pose a big threat to global security and U.S. counterterrorism efforts in the years ahead.

    ISIS "is not just a threat in Baghdad or even Syria. It's a real threat to the West, because it's able to recruit fighters, train them, send them out, and then possibly redeploy them back West," said CBS News Senior National Security Analyst Juan Zarate, a national security adviser under former President George W. Bush.

    Officials estimate that 5,000 foreign nationals have flocked to Iraq and Syria to fight the governments there, bringing the total number of ISIS fighters to somewhere between 15,000 and 20,000. Of the 5,000 foreigners there, the FBI estimates that maybe 100 are Americans.

    The concern is that the foreigners recruited by ISIS could become more radicalized after their time on the battlefield and return home to "attack their fellow citizens in the West," Zarate said Wednesday.

    The fighters "turn in [their] passport, get paid for it, the passports then get reconfigured and sold to others heading back west," he said. "There's an entire infrastructure to getting people in and out, money in and out, and it's very easy then to have people hidden in that mix. The challenge then is: who's coming out to potentially attack [other] countries?"

    Zarate also warned that ISIS' ability to control territory could give extremists a safe harbor to plan and execute terror attacks.

    "ISIS...is demonstrating that the imaginings of a caliphate -- a physical space that erases the old borders, [Osama] bin Laden's dream - is actually possible," he said. "This is a group that's making it a reality."

    Former CIA Director Michael Morell told "CBS This Morning" earlier this month that ISIS' first goal is "to set up that caliphate and, it's not just in Iraq and in Syria."

    "Their second goal then is to use that as a safe haven to attack the United States," he warned.
     
    uscvball, Jun 30, 2014
    #149
  10. mctiger

    mctiger RIP, and thanks for the music Staff Member

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    You haven't proven it didn't happen yet. I made an allegation - Network TV has a left-wing bias. I backed it up with a source - that's my proof. You may choose to challenge the source's motivation, but that doesn't mean they're wrong. What do you expect....a link to CBS News exposing their own bias?
     
    mctiger, Jun 30, 2014
    #150
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