Bill Maher, "We Have Been the Cowards."

Bill Maher of "Politically Incorrect" pissed off many viewers recently when he said:


"We have been the cowards, lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That's cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, it's not cowardly."

If an SS trooper murdered Jewish civilians on one day and sacrificed himself to save his unit on the next, was he a coward?


Who cares?

The term "coward" as used in reference to this matter is completetly devoid of its original meaning. It has become a synonym for "bad person" and no longer relates to cowardice as understood by those who only use proper English. I determined the day of the event that most everyone who used the word to address the perpetrators of the crimes on 9/11 was not speaking very intelligently.


Maher is correct in stating that almost all modern warfare is fought in an anonymous fashion. The acts of 9-11 were less anonymous than shooting missiles.


KJS

Mahar makes a living pissing people off. But he is right. CNN's Greenfield has said the same thing. These people are not cowards. They have delusional and fanatical beliefs and are willing to die for these beliefs. They are willing to take outrageous risks to further their cause. They target civilians on a large scale because they feel this will have the greatest adverse effect on our way of life. This is a lot of things, but it's not cowardly. I think the reason you hear the term "coward" more often than any other description is because people know that these fanatics take pride in their bravery, and that calling them cowards is thought to be a penetrating insult.


There are a litany of accurate nouns and adjectives that could describe them, but I don't really think coward is one of them.

The idea that firing from a shoot-box 2000 miles away is cowardice is absurd in the extreme. In the movies, the "good guy(tm)" jumps out and gets into a knife fight with the enemy soldier. In reality, the competent soldier uses a suppressed handgun and puts a bullet into the enemy's brain from twenty-five meters and is never discovered.


There is no place for grandstanding in warfare. You kill the enemy from behind rocks, behind trees, from a shoot-box 2000 miles away, with a rifle from 800 meters, with artillery called in by radio half a mile away, with land mines, with any mechanism that minimizes the risk to yourself.


It's not cowardice, it's common sense.


Jeff

Maher said last night that he was referring to Clinton's lacking the courage to respond to the bombings of our embassies in Africa in a meaningful way. He took the easy way out by bombing a couple of factories. When he found that the factories had nothing to do with the Bin Laden organization, he forgot the whole thing. He was faced with the need to mount the same type of operation that we are undertaking now in order to defeat these people, and chose the coward's way out. He launched some missles, gave a sound bite, and went back to worrying about the Lewinsky situation which was at its peak.

The World Trade Center: The Price Of Pansyhood


by Fred Reed, former Marine


A few unorganized thoughts regarding the events in New York:


(1) We lost. Our moral posturing about our degradation is merely embarrassing. We have been made fools of, expertly and calculatedly, in the greatest military defeat the country has suffered since we fled from Viet Nam. The Moslem world is laughing and dancing in the streets. The rest of the earth, while often sympathetic, sees us as the weak and helpless nation that we are.


The casualty figures aren't in, but 10,000 dead seems reasonable, and we wring our hands and speak of grief therapy.


We lost.


(2) We cannot stop it from happening again. Thousands of aircraft constantly use O'Hare, a few minutes flying time from the Sears Tower.


(3) Our politicians and talking heads speak of "a cowardly act of terrorism." It was neither cowardly nor, I think, terrorism. Hijacking an aircraft and driving it into a building isn't cowardly. Would you do it? It requires great courage and dedication -- which our enemies have, and we do not. One may mince words, but to me the attack looked like an act of war. Not having bombing craft of their own, they used ours. When we bombed Hanoi and Hamburg, was that terrorism?


(4) The attack was beautifully conceived and executed. These guys are good. They were clearly looking to inflict the maximum humiliation on the United States, in the most visible way possible, and they did. The sight of those two towers collapsing will leave nobody's mind. If we do nothing of importance in return, and it is my guess that we won't, the entire earth will see that we are a nation of epicenes. Silly cruise-missile attacks on Afghanistan will just heighten the indignity.


(5) In watching the coverage, I was struck by the tone of passive acquiescence. Not once, in hours of listening, did I hear anyone express anger. No one said, coldly but in deadly seriousness, "People are going to die for this, a whole lot of people." There was talk of tracking down bin Laden and bringing him to justice. "Terrorism experts" spoke of months of investigation to find who was responsible, which means we will do nothing. Blonde bimbos babbled of coping strategies and counseling and how our children needed support. There was no talk of retaliation.


(6) The Israelis, when hit, hit back. They hit back hard. But Israel is run by men. We are run by women. Perhaps two-thirds of the newscasters were blonde drones who spoke of the attack over and over as a tragedy, as though it had been an unusually bad storm -- unfortunate, but inevitable, and now we must get on with our lives. The experts and politicians, nominally male, were effeminate and soft little things. When a feminized society runs up against male enemies -- and bin Laden, whatever else he is, is a man -- it loses. We have.


(7) We haven't conceded that the Moslem world is our enemy, nor that we are at war. We see each defeat and humiliation in isolation, as a unique incident unrelated to anything else. The 241 Marines killed by the truck bomb in Beirut, the extended humiliation of the hostages taken by Iran, the war with Iraq, the bombing of the Cole, the destruction of the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the devastation of the Starke, the Saudi barracks, the dropping of airliner after airliner -- these we see as anecdotes, like pileups of cars on a snowy road. They see these things as war.


We face an enemy more intelligent than we are.


(8) We think we are a superpower. Actually we are not, except in the useless sense of having nuclear weapons. We could win an air war with almost anyone, yes, or a naval war in mid-Pacific. Few Americans realize how small our forces are today, how demoralized and weakened by social experimentation. If we had to fight a ground war in terrain with cover, a war in which we would take casualties, we would lose.


(9) I have heard some grrr-woofwoofery about how we should invade Afghanistan and teach those ragheads a lesson. Has anyone noticed where Afghanistan is? How would we get there? Across Pakistan, a Moslem country? Or through India? Do we suppose Iran would give us overflight rights to bomb another Moslem country? Or will our supply lines go across Russia through Turkmenistan? Do we imagine that we have the airlift or sealift? What effect do we think bombing might have on Afghanistan, a country that is essentially rubble to begin with?


We backed out of Somalia, a Moslem country, when a couple of Gis got killed and dragged through the streets on TV. Afghans are not pansies. They whipped the Russians. Our sensitive and socially-conscious troops would curl up in balls.


(10) To win against a more powerful enemy, one forces him to fight a kind of war for which he isn't prepared. Iraq lost the Gulf War because it fought exactly the kind of war in which American forces are unbeatable: Hussein played to his weaknesses and our strengths. The Vietnamese did the opposite. They defeated us by fighting a guerrilla war that didn't give us anything to hit. They understood us. We didn't understand them.


The Moslem world is doing the same thing. Because their troops, or terrorists as we call them, are not sponsored by a country, we don't know who to hit. Note that Yasser Arafat, bin Laden, and the Taliban are all denying any part in the destruction of New York. At best, we might, with our creaky intelligence apparatus, find Laden and kill him. It's not worth doing: Not only would he have defeated America as nobody ever has, but he would then be a martyr. Face it: The Arabs are smarter than we are.


(11) We are militarily weak because we have done what we usually do: If no enemy is immediately in sight, we cut our forces to the bone, stop most R&D, and focus chiefly on sensitivity training about homosexuals. When we need a military, we don't have one. Then we are inutterably surprised.


(12) The only way we could save any dignity and respect in the world be to hit back so hard as to make teeth rattle around the world. A good approach would be to have NSA fabricate intercepts proving that Libya was responsible, mobilize nationally, invade, and make Libya permanently a US colony. Most Arab countries are militarily helpless, and that is the only kind our forces could defeat. Doing this, doing anything other than whimpering, would require that ancient military virtue known as "balls." Does Katie Couric have them?


©Fred Reed 2001. All rights reserved.

Thank God for real men like Fred Reed and their big balls!


Fucking idiot.


John

I don't think terrorist suicide bombers or terrorist suicide hijackers are necessarily either cowardly or brave. Deluded, yes; insane, perhaps...but believing strongly in Paradise as a reward for their misguided actions, by itself, speaks neither of bravery nor of cowardice.


I do think that deliberately targeting innocent and helpless civilians instead of military targets is cowardly. Thus terrorism may itself be an inherently cowardly philosophy. Maybe terrorists feel unable to attack those whom they would most like to attack and therefore lash out at what they see as the "next best target."


I think that seeking to hurt a party through an attack upon the innocent and helpless who are held dear by that party is a revolting concept, whether it is Terrorism or the attack an enraged motorist made upon a pet dog, which he killed in front of the woman and her children. Either way it seems utterly wrong and viscerally disgusting.

What he really meant is this. America was not willing to sacrifice casualties. And he was right. Just look at policy over the past decade. This policy quite possibly cost us 6,000+ innocent civilians.


that is all,


dannyboy :o)