Lost another friend because of Bush

[kcwayne]

I got an email addressed to "All my bleeding heart liberal friends" that contained a typically repulsive diatribe that purported being a letter from Rumsfeld ridiculing anyone who thinks that there is something wrong with torturing people at Abu Ghraib.

My ex friend is Jewish, but I didn't realize he lived on the dark side. I sent him the following response to his email:

What distinguishes the moral position promoted here from that of the perpetrators of Dachau and Auswitz other than efficiency and scale?

His response:
Value systems; Bush is courageous and right - the Nazi's were evil and wrong.

My Response:
We certainly cannot disagree more about that.Adieu

I am usually a pretty good judge of character. I missed that one by a Texas mile.

[yardwork]

1. Sickening. Good for you to let this "person" know why you were dropping

Every totalitarian state in the history of the world has believed that they are justified because they are "right." Most of them claim that they are justified in the name of their God.

We live in dark days.

[XanaDUer]

2. This whole thing has separated out

whole reams of people for me. The worst is finding out that, oh, about 99% of my family has drunk deeply of the Kool-Aid.

Only one relative still speaks to me. That is fine with me at this point.

As for friends, I am fairly lucky. It is my friends who are much more in line with what is happening and do not give me a hard time-they think this whole thing is obscene.

Good luck.

ON EDIT: The irony is that what * is doing is more in line to the lead up of what the Nazis did. Go figure. But, there are just people who like to feel morally superior and/or outraged.

[mourningdove92]

3. Sometimes I just cannot help but wonder.

I mean, when I hear right wingers talk about how "courageous, moral, wonderful" etc....ARE WE TALKING ABOUT THE SAME PERSON?

When I watch him speak, all I can see is the arrogant smirk on his face. All I hear is his riduculous, over used, platitudes....and again, that smirk.

Don't they see those things??? Don't they hear them?

[The River]

26. They Don't Want To Know

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x3017179

[Turbineguy]

4. My room mate from college

voted for Bush. He's been my dear friend for more than 30 years.

I'm not going to let Bush ruin a friendship like that.

"....the terrorists will have won!"

[XanaDUer]

5. But what can you do

when the * supporters insist you believe, and if you do not, then they want to drop you?

Not a lot you can do about that.

With one relative, I said that we can agree to disagree on politics, but that was not good enough. It was his way or the highway.

[mopaul]

6. like a hog starin' at a wristwatch....

they just...don't...get it....

[AlCzervik]

7. He really is a divider

That sucks but you know the true believers don't want to hear us. Bush is their guy no matter what, same kind of people that stuck with Nixon.

[superconnected]

8. wow my very good friend is jewish and he REALLY is against Bush

He made me drop everything and go see F911 when it came out.

Sorry you lost your friend.

[karynnj]

11. That's more typical than being for Bush

I think Kerry got about 75% of the Jewish vote. My husband and I wrote a LTE (pro-Kerry) to our local Jewish paper and had a huge number of people comment positively at synagogue. I knew no one there pro-Bush.)

[Mend]

9. Which branch of the military

is your ex-friend enlisting in? Since he supports this crap, surely he is going to go fight the good fight. Maybe he can apply some electrodes if he gets guard duty.

[kcwayne]

14. Interestingly enough, he is Canadian

So obviously his ass is not on the line, not to mention that they rarely draft 55 year old men. As least so far...

[Mend]

25. Please tell him our army will take him....

he should just come on down. US kids went up in 1940 to fight with the Canadians in WWII ....

[pnutchuck]

10. I live in Paris with my Jewish boyfriend

and many of his friends and family are supporters of Bush because they feel he is the only President who has shown any balls against the Arabs. Personally, I tell them all that they are completely lost in their own hatreds to see the parallels between Bush and Hitler.

Luckily, my boyfriend has had the benefit of my leftist point of view and shares with me my absolute fear of Bush. However, I'm afraid that many Jewish people are supporters of Bush simply for his apparent hardline stance against terrorism.

If only they could view Bush from afar, without their prejudices, they would be able to see how much harm he is doing for world peace.

On edit: to clarify, many Jewish people, I'm speaking of the the French and others that I know from Israel.

[kcwayne]

15. This is exactly where my friend is coming from

He hates Arabs as much or more than the Nazis hates Jews is what I read between the lines. Hating Arabs and wishing them all dead is "good and brave", killing Jews is "evil". It is hard to understand such "logic".

[pnutchuck]

19. I do understand the fear the Israelis suffer everyday from

terrorist attacks, but recreating the Crusades is not going give them peace. From all I've I seen on the news since 2000, between Sharon and Bush, they have not only increased the number of terrorist attacts around the world, but increased the number of Islamic fundamentalists who support the terror.

[sandnsea]

12. "free the poor Iraqis"

How's that not being a "bleeding heart"?

Whenever we talk about the Iraqi's, we're bleeding hearts. When they do, they're patriots. They are so easily duped. Sorry about your friend.

[XanaDUer]

13. In the course of one conversation...

my relative went from talking about * "spreading democracy to the Iraquis" to "we should just nuke all those towelheads."

This is what we are dealing with, folks.

If anyone has figured out a way to get them to see the light, please share it. I personally feel that slamming my head against a brickwall is more productive at this point.

[hollowdweller]

18. I've experienced the same thing! People who during the WMD lying phase

were going on about that, then when no WMD were found they accused me of being callous to the suffering of the Iraqi people and how great Bush was to free them, and then they started talking about nuking them when the insurgency started!

I mean why did Saddam do mass killing? To keep the lid on the whole thing! It wasn't right but I seriously doubt that there's any other way than repression to keep the country together. Then there's the Kurds, who have basically been our allies and long suffering. If the country broke up they could probably be relatively stable but the south would be killing each other for years just like in Lebanon if we left, but we have really almost been screwing the Kurds.

[XanaDUer]

20. I was attempting to be polite with him

he called me uninformed and ignorant of the facts (I am neither ignorant nor uninformed. I know more about current events and history than most people, and certainly more than my idiot relative.)


Anyway, he kept e-mailing me nutso RW e-mails with the "proof" that Hussein has WMDs. Then I asked, 'Well, you do know that Bush himself has admitted that there were none, right?'

Big gulp. This was right after Bush admitted the lie but blamed intelligence (read-CLINTON).

Finally, he went on about how terrorism has "no borders" etc., and I said, 'You're correct. So, if there are no borders, why are we in Iraq?'

Then, suddenly, we went from freeing those poor, oppressed Iraqis (I guess by killing them) to "nuking the towel heads."

So much for reasoned discussions with well-informed Bush supporters.

[pnutchuck]

23. I failed to separate my group mail box between RW and LW

anyway, during the campaign, I emailed out a lot of LW, anti-Bush stuff and got dropped by half my family and many of my friends.

There is no reasoning, even with proof, they consider us tin foil hat conspiricists. And when we're in a world war, or the nukes drop over head, they will just turn to us and tell us "see? we told YOU so!"

[sandnsea]

22. Well don't do that

Slam their head into a brick wall maybe. teehee

But I've heard that kind of thing on so many issues. I think it's a matter of convicing/reminding them that Democratic policies have worked. Otherwise they're just going to flip all around and eventually revert to the "fuck 'em all" attitude. Maybe that's a part of human nature that the right has really figured out how to exploit the most.

[XanaDUer]

24. Lol.

I won't.

Here was another reason from relative that I MUST SUPPORT BUSH:

If I had children, I would support Bush.

Try to get your mind around that one!

:crazy:

That Bush was going to defeat terrorism in the next four years. I guess by nuking them all, who knows?

[radar]

16. There's an article about the Hitler/Bush similarities...

....On the What Really Happened site...

The Rise Of The Fourth Reich
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/reich.html

Everyone likes to say, "Hitler did this", and, "Hitler did that". But the truth is Hitler did very little. He was a world class tyrant, but the evil actually done by the Third Reich, from the slave-labor camps to WW2 was all done by German citizens who were afraid to question if what they were told by their government was the truth or not, and who because they did not want to admit to themselves that they were afraid to question the government, refused to see the truth behind the Reichstag Fire, refused to see the invasion by Poland was a staged fake, and followed Hitler into national disaster....

* The army as a whole & the people didn't rise up to support the conspirators that attempted to kill Hitler in '44; and parents were still letting their children join the hitler youth to fight in '45.

[hollowdweller]

17. Texas being the operative word here

[theresistance]

21. I'm sorry to hear that

isn't that the lamest excuse? I've heard that from many others. Bush's wars and killing and torture are all okay because its "courageous" and for good "moral" reasons, to bring about "democracy" etc. Just read the speeches of Hitler - everything was for the "German people", taking German "culture" to the East and so on...

[Biased Liberal Media]

27. I have a hard time remaining friends with people who voted for *

and an even harder time being the daughter of brainwashed parents who voted for *. It's been a VERY trying time.