Comments Posted By nickleby
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PRESIDENT OBAMA HATES WHITE PEOPLE AND WANTS THEM TO DIE
It appears that grasping irony is not one of your strong suits.
First, and totally free of irony, thanks for the reply; though we obviously have some different political beliefs, I think it's important that we keep conversation open. (Otherwise I never would've posted in the first place.)
Second, as for the point of your original post (which, without its irony, I take to be: if it is ridiculous to lambaste Obama now, then it must have been ridiculous to lambaste Bush then--hence, liberals who attacked Bush are hypocrites for defending Obama), two things:
1) you did not point out the irony of your post to people here who said conservative things that missed your irony, so I decided to take your post on face-value: as a thought-experiment to see what happens if we compare these two scenarios; and
2) in order to make the case for hypocrisy you have to make the case for the comparability of the two scenarios (i.e., people feel different ways based on who is in charge even though they are confronted by the same scenarios); now, not only did your original post not make the case that these scenarios were similar, but you made the case that they are very different (which you emphasized in your response to me, on how Katrina is so much worse than a harsh winter).
(And as several of your commenters have pointed out, there's a further incompatibility in comparing a 2-week old administration with a 250-week old administration (those numbers are rough, but help to point out that the difference is an order of magnitude).)
So, at the end of the day, we seem to be left not with a demonstration that liberals are hypocrites for supporting Obama even though he hasn't responded aggressively to winter, but with an argument demonstrating that the two scenarios are totally different, and that comparing them only points out how different they are.
Which is to say, you go an awful long way to point out that two different things are different.
If, however, I've missed some of your irony, I'd be happy to be corrected; I admit that recognizing irony--especially over the internet--may not be my strong suit.
Comment Posted By nickleby On 2.02.2009 @ 14:40
Not entirely persuasive, as several commenters have commented: you're comparing a 13-day old administration's response to winter to a 5-year old administration's response to a hurricane.
Until Obama says the equivalent of "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job," comparing the two is only going to legitimate the idea that the federal government should've been more involved in Katrina relief.
Now, I might agree with the idea that the federal government could've done more right off the bat--after all, Bush could fly home from vacation to try to intervene on the state-level in the case of Terri Schiavo, but was willing to sit back and merely complement his failing subordinates in the case of Katrina--but I don't think that you would want to legitimate the idea that the federal government should be more involved in disaster relief because it just makes the Bush administration look more like a failure in that respect.
It appears that grasping irony is not one of your strong suits. Of course there is little to compare between the two - except the legions of lefties like you who have suddenly discovered that the feds have little business in the initial stages of disaster relief and that FEMA's response is predicated on the condition of roads and bridges that would allow their massive relief efforts to reach the people most affected.
And the very nature of Katrina also disproves your point about Bush. No modern industrialized city has ever suffered the kind of destruction suffered by NO. None. Not London during the blitz (about 20% destroyed) or Tokyo during the fire bombings (about 30% gone) and not even Berlin (about 50%). More than 80% of NO was under water at one time. Katrina affected more than 570,000 structures with almost half - 225,000 - destroyed or condemned.
To believe Obama or Bush or any president with any level of a competent FEMA in existence could have dealt with that kind of disastser either in its immediate aftermath or even 3 years running is irrational (it took more than a decade to rebuild London and parts of Berlin in East Germany were NEVER rebuilt until reunification). But that doesn't fit your tidy little narrative about Bush. Hence, the heavy handed, over the top irony of my post, showing your hypocrisy and the hypocrisy of those who used Katrina for political purposes.
ed.
Comment Posted By nickleby On 2.02.2009 @ 12:07
