Liberals dominate the media....this has been announced by Rush Limbaugh. And Thomas Sowell. And Ann Coulter. And Rich Lowry. And Bill O'Reilly. And William Safire. And Robert Novak. And William F. Buckley, Jr. And George Will.

BLAH BLAH BLAH. If you read any of them instead of picking through the recyclables of colbert and maher, you'd know the difference. Most Americans still get their news from the teevee, and despite FOX most of the ratings are still with the "everyone else." A shame and a sham, how else could the Obamessiah get this far saying nothing?

The net and new media are newer than the manure from the 60s through early 90s. Give it more time, then you'll really have something to fume about.

Liberals dominate the media....this has been announced by Rush Limbaugh. And Thomas Sowell. And Ann Coulter. And Rich Lowry. And Bill O'Reilly. And William Safire. And Robert Novak. And William F. Buckley, Jr. And George Will.

And John Gibson. And Michelle Malkin. And David Brooks. And Tony Snow. And Tony Blankely. And Fred Barnes. And Britt Hume. And Larry Kudlow. And Sean Hannity. And David Horowitz. And William Kristol. And Hugh Hewitt.

And Oliver North. And Joe Scarborough. And Pat Buchanan. And John McLaughlin. And Cal Thomas. And Joe Klein. And James Kilpatrick. And Tucker Carlson. And Deroy Murdock. And Michael Savage. And Charles Krauthammer. And Stephen Moore. And Alan Keyes.

And Gary Bauer. And Mort Kondracke. And Andrew Sullivan. And Nicholas von Hoffman. And Neil Cavuto. And Matt Drudge. And Mike Rosen. And Dave Kopel. And John Caldara.

The mainstream media in this country are dominated by liberals. Look at how they all gave Bill Clinton a pass on the whole Monica Lewsinsky affair. Remember? It was never in the news. We never heard any of the salacious details.

You all seem to be saying Chomsky won the debate because you agree with him. Well, I agree with Chomsky (here) too, and I still think Buckley, who I find a fascinating worm of a human, won the debate.

In this debate it is Buckley who uses stylistic tricks (dominating the talking time, calling something 'semantical', using big words when little ones would suffice, using run on sentences etc...) to control the tempo and subject. In a later debate between Dershowitz and an old Chomsky, it is Chomsky who keeps dipping into the bag of tricks -- repeating his talking points, ignoring direct contradictions, waving dismissively at his opponent, continually pointing to obscure references. But that is just the subtleties of debate. At the core, he is a pure theorist. Does he believe that a nation-state has the right to go to war ever? I suspect he does, and if we were to have an administration that believed it was inappropriate to go to war ever, Chomsky would attack that position and make very good arguments for war. He attacks whatever the status quo is. It's a service, but it doesn't lead to startling consistency or even popularity with those on "your side." If you are curious about that sort of thing, look up Chomsky's positions having to do with anything associated with World War 2 justifications and the Holocaust--including Holocaust deniers.

I agree with Netrunner, Buckley was just being facetious most of this debate. I don't believe he actually thought that there isn't a difference between economic support for a country and sending in armed forces; he seemed to just bring it up to sideline the debate.

The France WWII example that Buckley brings up was a total red herring. Chomsky is absolutely correct that it's a different situation entirely to what they were discussing. Fighting an enemy you are openly at war with wherever they have troops is blatantly different from providing covert assistance to an insurgency against a third power who you aren't at open war with (Afghanistan in the 80s for instance), but Buckley tries to pass it off as the same thing.

I think what's scariest about this video is Buckley's apparent conviction that it is right to intervene militarily in another country's affairs if you are concerned about some "future threat." It just echoes Bush's doctrine and reasons for invading Iraq a little too closely...

I agree with the OP that the smarmy Buckley won this one. When Buckley states that Chomsky is being evasive I think he hit it on the nose. Chomsky kept digressing into areas he knew his opponent didn't know and thus the discussion kept trailing away from the original discussion which was has America ever interfered with a country for purely altruistic reasons. Chomsky says that has never been the case but Buckley gets him by pointing out that US and its allies invaded France. Chomsky tries to say it is different than the involvement in the Greek Civil War but Buckley points out that it really isn't. Chomsky is willing to say that the Vichy France (German controlled French puppet government) government was unlawful and should of been removed so the rightful French government can be reinstated. This is very similar to the US helping the anti-communists remove the Russian backed communist insurgents. Both instances have an invading foreign force trying to overthrow the government, and succeeded in the case of France, and the US comes in and helps the sovereign government remove the invaders. The problem is that Chomsky made a blanket statement which is always a bad idea when it comes to anything.

I've never seen more than brief clips of this debate before. I find myself transfixed, wondering what kind of country this used to be if they televised stuff like this...and people actually tuned in.

We really have declined as a civilization.

Still, while I'm no historical scholar, and when they ventured away from WWII and Vietnam, I was lost for what allegorical point they were trying to make at times, the whole thing appeared to boil down to the precursor of this:

http://www.videosift.com/video/Bill-OReilly-cuts-mic-of-retired-Army-Colonel-Ann-Wright

Buckley interrupts, generalizes, minimizes all attempts by Chomsky to categorize different types of intervention as being qualitatively different in terms of their morality (with Buckley even contending that military aid isn't substantially different from economic aid) by calling them "differences in nomenclature".

Buckley has been to school, and his demeanor and vocabulary show it, but his reasoning is just as dogmatic as BillO's.

As far as who won the argument, I think it ended about as conclusively as the video of BillO cutting a mic. If Buckley won, it was simply because he filibustered Chomsky from getting a chance to fully make his point without having to field silly assertions every 30 seconds.

Kinda scary that the country is getting to have this debate again almost 40 years later. You'd have thought we learned our lessons from Vietnam.

I guess they did in a sense. From the point of view of someone who came out of Vietnam thinking it was a good thing until all those damned hippies ruined it by protesting, they've corrected many of their mistakes from Vietnam. A target country with lots of strategic and economic benefits to us. No draft. Big media campaign to build fear of the enemy, and to frame all dissent as "un-American". Censorship of protests. Censorship of footage of carnage from Iraq. Censorship of the funerals. The unloading of the coffins. Message-force-multipliers.

They learned a lot of lessons. Too bad they didn't learn that the war itself won't work.

IMO Buckley continuously fell back on wordplay, digression and semantics to defend (or escape) his stance. He actually backpeddles so hard that he resorts to calling Chomsky out for "start(ing) your line of discussion at a moment that is historically useful for you". I do believe the whole point of a debate is to present your argument and to back it with facts which support that point. If the facts don't match your argument... well...

Its not as if he was able to refute Chomsky's history. His half hearted attempt to one up Chomsky in that line of discussion ended with Buckley backed into a corner with nowhere to. Instead he resorted to attacking Chomsky for having a well researched argument.

Damn those unfortunate facts.


........



Buckley: "there are people who do believe that america... inherited the responsibility for trying to abort international holocaust..."





Who did we inherit this responsibility from, and what crystal ball are we using to determine what will be a supposed "international holocaust"?

Buckley is just a ego-driven thesauruses, Chomsky says it like it is.

Leave Buckley alone! He invented the geodesic dome!

Actually KOMMIE and co. keep up the criticsm. Seems like Yahtzee approves and feeds off of it.

http://www.fullyramblomatic.com/

14/3/08: Driving Me Mad
...
You see, I have this theory that the internet is causing a general mediocritisation of human culture, because you can put pretty much any piece of work on the internet and no matter how hugely it sucks dolphin jizz you'll find some dick who's prepared to tell you it's brilliant. This is the principle on which Deviantart appears to be founded.

But the cruellest thing you can do to an artist is tell them their work is flawless when it isn't. It gives them no incentive to improve or try new things, which a creative person must always strive to do. And it tends to foster the kind of monstrous egos the webcomic sphere grows like mushrooms in the shit-spattered dark. Tim Buckley of Ctrl-Alt-Del is notorious for having a zero tolerance for any criticism, constructive or otherwise, often deleting it unregarded from his forums, or declaring them invalid for half-baked reasons. It seems blanket praise has already done its damage to this fevered ego.

wow, I just now noticed how much his voice sounded like Jeff Buckley in tracks like this. ... maybe its just me.

Wish I'd caught this thread when it started, it's a subject I'm interested in.

dgandhi touched on the biggest problem with the "corporations are persons" line, that's about half of the problem. The other half is a Supreme Court decision called Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U.S. 1 (1976), better known as money equals speech though many argue with that interpretation.

A bit of info on what we're dealing with can be found at the following two links. The first is the text of Joel Gora, professor of law at Brooklyn law school, in a presentation to the Committee on Rules and Administration in 2000. He offers some insight into how the law is applied though I don't agree with him in every case that it's being applied properly.

http://rules.senate.gov/hearings/2000/032200gora.htm

Second is Ira Glasser of the ACLU presenting arguments for the same committee on the same issue with some other perspectives on what it all means.

http://rules.senate.gov/hearings/2000/032200glas.htm

In short it's a mess and open to a lot of interpretation, a decent part of the problem I think stems from the Buckley v. Valeo decision itself and we'll need to revisit that at the highest level, Supreme Court again or Federal law which clarifies the existing decision, before anything can be settled let alone will be. Reform has been tried and as often as not ruled to be unconstitutional due to that decision. Where it's not unconstitutional it seems ineffective instead.

I think Mr. Buckley modified his views later in life...unlike those on the left who still adore Castro...

Here are just 4 of my favorite William F. Buckley Quotes:

"Franco is a part, and an integral part, of Western civilization... [the] convergence of the multifarious political philosophical, religious, and cultural tendencies that have shaped Spanish history... the man to whom the Spanish people look--as the Chinese have looked to Chiang [Kaishek], for all his faults--for leadership."--William F. Buckley, National Review, March 9, 1957

"General Franco is an authentic national hero... [with the] talents, the perseverance, and the sense of the righteousness of his cause, that were required to wrest Spain from the hands of the visionaries, ideologues, Marxists, and nihilists that were imposing... a regime so grotesque as to do violence to the Spanish soul, to deny, even, Spain's historical destiny. He saved the day.... The need was imperative... for a national policy [to]... make this concession to Churchill this morning, that one to Hitler this afternoon.... Franco reigns... supreme. He is not an oppressive dictator.... only as oppressive as is necessary to maintain total power..."--William F. Buckley, National Review, October 26, 1957

"The central question that emerges... is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas where it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes--the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race." --William F. Buckley, National Review, August 24, 1957

"He was a prophet...McCarthy's record is... not only much better than his critics allege, but, given his metier, extremely good...he should not be remembered as the man who didn't produce 57 Communist Party cards but as the man who brought public pressure to bear on the State Department to revise its practices and to eliminate from responsible positions flagrant security risks"--William F. Buckley in his book McCarthy and his Enemies


William F. Buckley: friend to fascists and segregationists everywhere.

Buckley: socking liberals so they stayed plastered for 50 years.

mr. fish can blow it out his tailfin.