Overheard a conversation the other day. Two people were discussing that they had been sexually abused as children, he by his mother, and she by her father.

Apparently both blame the Catholic Church (rather than their parents) not just for allowing such activity to happen, but for breeding such activity due to repression of natural human nature, etc.

What almost made me laugh out loud was "Did you know Hitler was a Catholic, and most of the Nazis were too?"

Wow, both unture and Irrelevant. Thats a real winner.

He was a Vegetarian as well, so I guess its time to start rounding up the PETA crowd also.

And was also once Time Magazine's Man of the year.

Myself, I like to blame Baptists for the ills of the world. That was a joke. Everyone knows it's the evangelicals that are ruining everything.

They always forget that he was a ******* nutjob. That couldn't have had anything to do with it though.

Where do you get that from Trolo? We all know that he was the evil wizard Xenu in disguise, not some deranged madman with delusions of grandeur.

He was also a nobel peace prize nominee.

Well in all fairness, he did once convince Neville Chamberlain, the then Prime Minister of England that there would be peace in their time.

Don't forget he liked to paint, artists are all nazis too.

It's easy to convince someone of something when you tell them what they want to hear.

Like--

Bush will bring us through this war just fine.

Bush can fix anything!

(Why do I get the feeling we're not really talking about the same thing?)

Like--

Bush is evil and has the blackest heart ever, the son of satan himself!!!

Now now, you don't think I really believe that?

Poor guy has got strings to hold him down. He might be a real boy someday, but I doubt it.

Surely that can fix anything, Nymm.

Trolo, you apparently didn't read my sig! I hate Bush and his big oil friends too! All the cool people are in that club! :D

No, not necessarily YOU, but those people are out there.

Since I was at work when this started....

-Hitler also loved his dog. All dog lovers are evil!

Fixed it for you. I'm more partial to Miller myself.

See, thats why some on the left hate him. (Not pointing fingers at anyone here at the SH) They simultaneously think he is a dunce, but all of his nefarious plans work, making him into some sort of evil genius. Wouldn't you hate it if you thought some dummy kept outsmarting you?

Yes, his (read: Cheney's and Rumsfeld's) plan for Iraq was a real winner, wasn't it?

And don't bother with the "Everyone always points to Iraq, Bush has done lots besides that!" card. Iraq was the largest decision of his two terms, and it has been an incredible failure.

Honestly, I feel kind of bad for Bush. Because I realize he probably hasn't made a single decision in 6 years. And with his approval ratings so low, he's gotta be feeling it--"But, but, they told me to! Don't hate me!"

Lets see. Free Elections, no more rape rooms, homicidal maniac dictator on trial for his crimes....

Did every little detail go according to plan? No. (Just like any other war in the history of the world) But on the whole, I'd call it a glowing success.

Yeah let's just forget about the real reason we went there. (Was it oil or WMDs? Or maybe a reason we haven't thought of yet?)

If we dethroned every evil dictator that had rape rooms and killed a bunch of people we'd be in Somalia or Rwanda or 10,000 other locales around the world.

Glowing isn't quite the word I'd use. And we'll see how long that government infrastructure lasts. It's not looking too great right now.

Also, as Kinare notes, our altruistic side was hardly what landed us there.

There were multiple reasons. We've been over this a million times already, haven't we?

Financial support for terrorist organizations
WMDs
Violation of cease fire agreements from the gulf war
Attacks on US personnel patrolling the no-fly zone
violation of the UN sanctions
the murders of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis
Keeping of political prisoners

etc. etc. etc.

And yes, part of it was in US self interest. I'd be violently opposed to any similar action by our government that wasn't in our self interest. Leaving him in power, and leaving these sort of issues unresolved would have been counter to that same self interest.

Remind me which other human rights abusers we've taken a hard line with lately? Slobodon Milosevic and...? No, I guess that's it.

I can probably find about a dozen or more countries that violate these rules on a regular basis. I don't recall Colin Powell talking to the UN for 3 hours about how Saddam killed hundreds of his countrymen and women, or violated the no fly zones. He talked about mobile WMD labs and pointed at over head pictures of buildings and trucks.

Don't get me wrong, I was scared when I saw that presentation on CNN, but that's because I was operating under the naive assumption that government officials wouldn't outright LIE about something so freaking important.

The Bush administration made a vigorous defense of all of the these reasons prior to the war. WMDs were one among many items mentioned. Maybe not in that particular speech, but all of these and more were discussed in extensive detail prior to the war.

And for the record, WMDand WMD precursors Have been found.

Enriched Uranium, Sarin Gas, Mustard Gas, Cyclosarin among them. I know I've posted it here many times before, even if people want to pretend that we didn't find them. Did we find them in the quantities the current administration, previous administrations and intelligence from every other country predicted? No. But did we find them, did we find programs ready to be restarted as soon as sanctions were lifted? Indeed we did.

Sure, I'll be happy to. The United States, via small-level troop deployment (akin to that of the aforementioned Bosnian crisis), through the United Nations has been involved in:

2005 Second Sudanese Civil War
2004 Cote d'lvoire Civil War
2004 Burundi Civil War
2004 Haiti Rebellion
2003 Liberian Civil War
1999-2005 Indonisian invastion and occupation of East Timor
1999-2005 Sierra Leone civil war
2000 Ethiopia-Eritrean War
1999 Second Congo War
1999 Kosovo / Bosnia War (-- Milosevic here!)
1993 Abkhazian War
1991 Moroccan occupation in western Sahara

Guess they don't get a lot of media coverage. Congo has, due to UN groundtroopers being accused of rape of women and children.

I'd say the Taliban count as well.

And which one of those was a full-scale, preemptive invasion? Keep digging.

The overthrow of the Taliban was a bonus result of our hunt for terrorists in Afghanistan, but I'll give you that one anyways.

So we've got a grand total of two in a sea of human rights abusers. What I'm getting at here is that that argument for our invasion is a load of crap. And we've been trading with China for years, no matter how many of their citizens disappear. Because the strength of our economy has always come before human rights, regardless of how much harping our government does on them.