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[SalmonGod]

I was 20 in 2003, in a heavily conservative state.  There was enough opposition to the war to populate protests in the hundreds of thousands (although non anywhere near me), and to make heated debate on the subject common conversation at the time.  But not enough opposition that there was any political reward to be found in opposing it as an official.

I had a couple Iraqi classmates who still had friends and family there, who opposed the war (even though they hated Saddam).  I learned from them the day bombing actually began... which was long before any authorization of force had passed through legislature.  They were quite pissed that there was absolutely zero media attention or official acknowledgement that this was happening.

[mainiac]

I think you're over-reacting.  Since I think this started out with you mostly responding to me and things exploding from there, here is the sequence of events as I see it.

Here's how I see it now.

I say something.  Wobbly responds to it.  I reply to wobbly, quoting them.  You decide its about you.

[Dutchling]

All I remember from the Iraq war as a kid is a song we used to sing. It's about how Bush is bombing Iraq with "machines and guns". To this tune, for obvious reasons...

[Aqizzar]

There's not a lot I can add to this Iraq War fight, except that I was 16 when it started in 2003, and as part of a school project (in my suburban Texas district), I went around opinion poling about a hundred of my fellow students about why they thought their country was invading Iraq.  Out of that hundred, around a dozen answered some variation of "fighting terrorists".  Exactly two gave the actually stated reason of finding nuclear weapons (or chemical or biological weapons or whatever it was we were supposed to find), and neither of them believed that was the honest reason.  I think three or four answered "I don't know".  The other four-fifths were all some combination of "oil", "money", "distraction", etc etc etc.

Cynicism may always be a safe bet, but they were hardly the only people with serious doubts about why that war was happening before it full started.  When uneducated, shiftless teenagers are the quietest people calling bullshit on your case, you have a pretty weak case.

I do remember a time when yes, there were a number of people shouting from the rooftops that not supporting unilateral invasion on questionable pretext of a country no one had given a shit about in ten years was grounds for being sent to anti-patriot internment camp.  They were also a distinct minority.  But like so many other times in American politics, the loudest side of the argument managed to cow the larger opposition into acquiescence.  And a lot people thought stopping the war was a lost cause before it began.  And a lot of people thought it was a decent goal with probable cause, who later genuinely recanted because sometimes you judge wrong.

I do agree with mainiac that we should be willing to judge people's past decisions with a little bit of nuance, and frankly his reaction up there was the same thought I've had about the ultra-cynical circle-jerk this forum has been for... well as long as I've noticed, really.

All that being said, fuck anybody who was in Congress in 2003 and voted to authorize that war.  Nuance is nuance, but there was nothing to fucking parse about that decision.

[RedKing]

I was one of those who strongly suspected we weren't going to stop the crazy train with an extra side of crazy that was the Iraq War Express. But it was worth trying to put on the brakes nonetheless. I marched the first time on my 27th birthday on a pleasantly warm late October day. It didn't really do shit to help, and it was mostly ignored or downplayed by the media.

I went back and marched again in January 2003 on a day when it was pissing rain and just about one degree above freezing. There were about as many people at that protest as at the first one. There were, by my estimation, 80,000-120,000 protesters. There were about 100 counter-protesters there with one of Ahmed Chalabi's spokesmen. (Remember him? The "Iraqi National Congress" guy that gave us all kinds of juicy intel that later turned out to be a steaming pile of horseshit?)

And I got to go home and see the protest and the counter-protest given equal mention, as if it had been a "closely divided" gathering. That's when I knew for sure that none of this was going to do a damn bit of good.


I remember saying at work that this was a huge mistake on the day that we started bombing. I had one co-worker berate me, call into question my patriotism and more or less tell me to go fuck myself. In 2006, in the midst of daily casualties, I overheard that same co-worker say, "I knew we should have never gone in there to start with."
It took all my willpower (and the desire to hang on to a job) to keep from punching that fucker square in the face.

The war is a personal thing for me, because my half-brother saw three tours, one in the Navy, two in the Army. He had multiple vehicles blown out from under him by IEDs. He's survived mostly intact, but he does have PTSD. I didn't realize until recently (and I don't think he did either) when he freaked out last July 4th while at a fireworks show. He probably has some long-term TBI (traumatic brain injury) from all the IED near-misses (including one where his Grizzly was bent in half by an EFP and he woke up in Germany). And although he survived, his marriage didn't.

Every single Senator and Congressperson that voted for the war voted to put him (and every other service member) in those situations for a complete and total LIE. If that isn't enough to make a person angry, I don't what is anymore. I will probably never be satisfied, because Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld will never be prosecuted. I used to wonder why people had such a vendetta against Henry Kissinger decades after Vietnam. Now I get it.

[SalmonGod]

I think you're over-reacting.  Since I think this started out with you mostly responding to me and things exploding from there, here is the sequence of events as I see it.

Here's how I see it now.

I say something.  Wobbly responds to it.  I reply to wobbly, quoting them.  You decide its about you.

Wobbly interjected once (two posts but they were back-to-back) along with weird, zangi, and nenjin.  So while you were quoting wobbly, the entire content of the post was snark that didn't directly answer him or anyone, and your last post that was direct in nature seemed directed at me.  So while I interpreted it as indirectly lashing out at everyone on that side of the issue, it seemed especially to match the attitude you've had towards my political perspective for a long time, in combination with that sequence of posts.  So perhaps it was narcissistic of me, but that's why I read it that way.

because Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld will never be prosecuted.

This right here is why I can't understand how anyone isn't cynical as all hell towards politics.  Through my entire politically aware life, the most publically visible and damaging criminals with the most damning evidence against them have never received more than a very rare and weak slap on the wrist, while petty criminal's lives are ended or ruined by the tens of thousands.  No one with power is ever held accountable for what they do with it.  When this changes, I'll accept criticism of my cynical nature.

[mainiac]

So perhaps it was narcissistic of me, but that's why I read it that way.

Perhaps it's narcissistic of me but when I'm in the middle of bitching about people pidgeonholing others I would like them to pay enough attention to not pidgeonhole me.

[Aqizzar]

Change of pace, here's a piece of research from a few months ago that I just happened across.

Tobin Grant of the Religious News Service put together a gigantic sample of 36,000 Americans, asking them simply: What religious denomination they consider themselves, whether they feel "the government" (leaving them to assume which) should provide more or less public services, and whether the government should be more or less invested in protecting morality (leaving them to assume what that means).  Anyone who's invested more than two braincells in the Standard American debate of "big versus small government" has noticed that a government can be Small Business and Big Morals (or vice versa) at the same time, so I found the result pretty fascinating.

And because both choices were binary, and no one is ever satisfied with the status quo, it sends everybody to their respective corners:

Spoiler: Big Huge Graph (click to show/hide)

This is a composite I edited together of the All Religions graph and the Catholic Specific graph (Catholics in America are so numerous and divided that they deserve to be parsed a bit on their own).  The original does say "not for redistribution" but whatever.  And if you value your digestion, don't bother reading the comment sections.

Top Right corner is the capital-C Conservative segment, God Guns n' Gays, so on and so forth.
Bottom Left corner is the capital-L Liberal segment, the Secular Humanists and their ilk.
Bottom Right corner constitutes most of the often-dismissed "silent majority", largely non-interventionist voters including but not limited to card-carrying libertarians.
Top Left corner is so often forgotten that it doesn't have a common title, but is surprisingly large, highly religious, non-wealthy, and non-white.

I love this graph because you can watch every political battle of the last forty years play out just by drawing a line between the top-left and bottom-right corners.

The post-Vietnam Democratic party has been a noften wobbly coalition composed of the whole lower-left half, composed of voters who want serious economic support and voters who want the government out of everything it doesn't absolutely need to be involved in.  The result is a party platform balanced on that big no-man's-land in the lower left, with politicians who have to be spiritual without being preachy, and economic policies that have to be well-intentioned without being expensive.  And the divisions in this structure crop up occasionally, like that "Proposition 8" rollback of gay marriage in California a few years ago, where large numbers of Black and Latino voters who typically vote Democrat turned out against something people usually put in their party's supposed platform.  (Because in the end, American voters are people, not party members.)

Meanwhile the post-Carter Republican party has been pretty comfortable, crafting a platform that promises to get the government out of everywhere except your bedroom and foreign wars, which happens to sit right on top of a large portion of highly motivated voters.  However, there's a constant if often quiet tension between Southern and Northern Protestants, about how public or private their religious values should be regarding their politics.

Every election cycle in recent memory has revolved around one of three factors:

Whether the largely pacifistic people along the bottom stretch will be motivated enough to vote in numbers comparable to the emotionally charged voters of the upper-right.  This is main concern of any politician in New York or California.

How many Latino voters might be motivated to not just vote at all, but put also aside a lot of historical (and current) misgivings to vote for a Republican party that more aligns with their logical values.  In Texas and the Sunbelt, Liberals win here by being family-oriented without sounding like soft-skulled hippies, and Conservatives win by sounding protectionist without saying anything racist.

And especially, how many of the Rockefeller Republicans and Reagan Democrats in the bottom-right can be talked into supporting any politician, and whether they'll vote based on their eternally worrisome finances or on how supportive they are of their gay nephew.  Pretty much every politician east of the Rockies and north of the Mason-Dixon line is constantly talking about these people, and basically nobody else, because they're easily the most numerous and malleable of all voters, from a party breakdown perspective.

[RedKing]

Fascinating graph, Aqizzar. I'm kinda shocked at where some of the denominations (specifically Orthodox and Seventh-Day Adventist) fall. I would have pegged them much further into the upper-right corner. (My SO was raised Adventist, so I've gotten to hear about their particular brand of cray-cray).

Also amused that Unitarians are even less in favor of "the morality police" than agnostics and atheists. (My ex-wife is Unitarian and is raising our kids UU, which I view as sort of the fish oil pill of religions -- doesn't do any harm, but I don't know that it has any real utility either).

I'm not surprised that the "black" denominations cluster in the upper-left. I think if the African-American community wasn't so typically socio-economically disadvantaged, they'd gravitate to the right. Which seems to present a counter-intuitive lesson: Improve the economic standing of black communities and you potentially create more Republican voters.

[Cearnaigh]

I'm not surprised that the "black" denominations cluster in the upper-left. I think if the African-American community wasn't so typically socio-economically disadvantaged, they'd gravitate to the right. Which seems to present a counter-intuitive lesson: Improve the economic standing of black communities and you potentially create more Republican voters.

That would involve the white man benefiting the oppressed minority, when he has an easy platform keepin' him nice an' down in the gutter.

Anyway, that's a stereotypical, cynical and hyperbolic statement that doesn't begin to encompass the socio-economic situation of the black community in America, or the obstacles laid in their path to climbing their way out of the lower classes, but suffice to say policies supported by our Government and ignorance has kept them in squalor for decades upon decades, and without massive change to the way we conduct politics, they, and other disadvantaged people who have very little hope of personal success, will largely remain in abject poverty.

[Frumple]

Which seems to present a counter-intuitive lesson: Improve the economic standing of black communities and you potentially create more Republican voters.

Not so much counter-intuitive as blatantly obvious. If you enfranchise the more or less most disenfranchised portion of the voting population, of course you're going to have more republican voters. You're going to have more voters period...

Guess you could mean relatively more, compared to the whole mass that comes in? It'll be a helluva' different political landscape when that actually happens, though. Not sure how effective extrapolations on the current condition would be.

[Aqizzar]

Which seems to present a counter-intuitive lesson: Improve the economic standing of black communities and you potentially create more Republican voters.

Not so much counter-intuitive as blatantly obvious. If you enfranchise the more or less most disenfranchised portion of the voting population, of course you're going to have more republican voters. You're going to have more voters period...

Guess you could mean relatively more, compared to the whole mass that comes in? It'll be a helluva' different political landscape when that actually happens, though. Not sure how effective extrapolations on the current condition would be.

Once in a blue moon, a clear-eyed Republican strategist comes along and makes a decent argument (to punditry show hosts, not so much to actual candidates) that if the Republican party stopped giving black voters good reasons to continue to not trust them in the slightest, they might find the (more economically moderate) Republican party platforms are actually reasonably attractive to them taken in whole measure.

There are a couple problems with this strategy.  For one, you're talking about overcoming literally generations of well-stoked mistrust between Republican figureheads and black voters in general.  For another, it would require black voters to not just feel their economic situation has improved but that Republican politicians were responsible for that, and on the whole all voters tend to thank/blame whoever they want to regardless of technical realities.  And not to forget, you're talking about a shrinking 10% of the population, which typically votes in the lowest margins of any demographic.  There's just no real reason for the Republican party to invest in that, compared to motivating other people to vote more reliably.

Long story short, it would at least require planning more than two or three election cycles into the future, something basically everyone connected to political strategy has a very hard time doing.

[Lord Shonus]

And because both choices were binary, and no one is ever satisfied with the status quo, it sends everybody to their respective corners:

Spoiler: Big Huge Graph (click to show/hide)

Is the size of the bubble supposed to represent the size of the demographic or the spread in responses?

[Frumple]

Size of the demographic, eyeballing it. Would be about representative of religious demographics in the states, from what I recall of latest numbers. Checking the links in the post backs that up -- representative of size of the group relative to the national demographics.

[Karlito]

(My ex-wife is Unitarian and is raising our kids UU, which I view as sort of the fish oil pill of religions -- doesn't do any harm, but I don't know that it has any real utility either).

Heh, I was raised UU, and I got a chuckle out of that. Definitely fits a lot of the Sunday school stuff I had to sit through as a kid. I still have a few good friends from some of the interchurch activities in high school, so I guess all-in-all it was a net benefit.

Not at all surprised to see them as the most bottom-left of all the groups though.