A friend posted one among a number of comments I’ve seen talking about keeping the Republicans in power other wise ‘the children‘ (Democrats) will be back and ruin the country. I’m not sure where this phrase comes from, but it seems to be confused at best. Ironically it is being used* with reference to the situation in North Korea. ThinkProgress has a nice summary of the situation there:
North Korea’s bombs are built with plutonium. They produce their plutonium in a reactor they built during the Reagan presidency, starting around 1984. They separated enough plutonium for perhaps two bombs during the first Bush presidency.
When they tried to make more plutonium under President Bill Clinton, he said he would go to war to stop them. He had plans prepared for the attack. The North Koreans backed down.
Bill Clinton froze the program in its tracks. North Korea did not separate a gram of plutonium while Bill Clinton was in office. He also stopped their missile tests.
George Bush walked away from the deal in his first months in office. In March 2001, Secretary of State Colin Powell said he wanted “to continue the process begun under Clinton.” Bush cut him down.
…
He [Bush] failed. He issued threats and drew lines in the sand. The North Koreans walked right past them. They threw out the IAEA inspectors in December 2002, while Bush was preparing to invade Iraq. The month after the invasion, they withdrew from the Non-Proliferation Treaty. In 2005, they reprocessed plutonium from the fuel rods Clinton had made them keep in pools under IAEA inspection. They took another load of fuel out of the reactor and processed more plutonium. They reloaded the reactor to make even more plutonium. They tested missiles, they made bombs, now they have tested a bomb.
(*Note: I don’t mean it’s being used ironically, sadly)
2 Comments
I look at speckblog every so often and I just get overwhelmed: where do you begin? I mean I don’t own the mental hip waders to go into that swamp. And of course there isn’t much response when you post something like this from the author.
I did ask why the lack of comments – apparently it’s because he was spending too much time he doesn’t really have arguing his side. A fair reason I guess.
It did highlight after a brief trawl round that most sites from the Right don’t seem to allow comments, whereas most from the Left do. I wonder if this relates to the ‘moral certainty’ that the Right subscribes to; once an opinion is posted that’s pretty much the end of the discussion. So the Democrats are weak on terrorism not because they attacked a country that was way down the list of threats to us (oh wait…) but because it has been stated, so no need to comment.
That’s not (particularly) a criticism of SpeckBlog, btw, though I do get distressed at some of the statements on there.