here’s my rosie’s comment megapost:

this is like the “botched joke”. kerry said that the military service is something stupid people opt into. the liberal blogger who witnessed the entire speech in person and blogged about it at 1:00 in the morning after the speech before the controvesy set in believed that was what he meant, agreed with the sentiment and thought he was brave for saying so.
but when people started expressing outrage at the plain meaning of his words, liberals invesnted this silly “botched joke” defense, which resembles the lionel huts joke from the simpsons: “works on contingency? no! money down.” (the simpsons has a sleazy lawer character named lionel huts. in one episode thy go to his office with his business card, which reads, “works on contingency! no money down!” but he quotes them a huge per-hour fee. when they object, showing him his business card, he takes it back and scribbles in some extra punctuation so it says “works on contingency? no! money down.”)
kerry didn’t intend it either as a joke or as something which would get out and reach military families. he was speaking at an on-campus democrat fundraiser about education. his intention was to deliver a bitter moral pill to the young democratics in attendence about the need to strengthen and expand educational programs so poor and underachieving students don’t “end up in iraq”.
this was the sort of transparent deception john kerry’s pr flacs attempted the night after the controversy broke, releasing two consecutive versions allegedly, of the “original” speech. here’s a picture of one of them: littlegreenfootballs(dot)com/weblog/pictures/20061102KerryEd its(dot)jpg
and olberman is making similar adjustments to the text and context of rosie’s remarks here, saying she said “who ‘is’ the terrorists” when she asked “who ‘are’ the the terrorists” and suggesting that the only people reading the comment as referring to the troops were “fox noise” which is plainly false. he made these distortions deliberately, understanding perfectly the plain meaning of her words and recognizing their malign nature. two ironies in this:
first, dispite rosies protestations that her words are being spun, her critics are addressing the plain meaning of her words and her cohorts are doing the spinning. second, rosie’s protestations are hipocritical. in the fuller video of the clip, rosie insists repeatedly on conflating insurgent and al qaeda fighters with “the iraqi people” as a whole and putting those words in hasselbeck’s mouth as they sat right accross from one another. the exchange was eggregious:…
RO: “the enemies in iraq?”
EH: “al qaeda…”
RO: “the enmies in iraq?”
EH: “…al qaeda…”

RO: “well, you know what elizabeth? if the enmies are innocent civilians in iraq, i don’t want to play that kind of football.”
so rosie’s protestations of a “spin” on her words which was not “spin”, but legiimate outrade at her own plainly spoken words, are grossly hipocritical and do not merit consideration.
her statement, apart from implicating u.s. troops in “terrorism”, were factually incorrect.
here are three links which analise the 650,000 figure arrived at by a ucla professor who ran for office as a democrat against the war and published by a medical journal which lost it’s reputation for scientific rigor when it fomented an anti-vaccination scare based on a report they had to retract.
timesonline(dot)co(dot)uk/tol/news/world/iraq/article1469636 (dot)ece

rhul(dot)ac(dot)uk/Economics/Research/conflict-analysis /iraq-mortality/

iraqbodycount(dot)org/press/pr14(dot)php
as it pertains to the conceit that u.s. troops killed 650,000 iraqis, it should be noted tat neither the lancet study, nor the more verifiable iraqbodycount total count strictly u.s. weapon fire towards their totals, nor do they attempt to distinguish between civilians and combatants. sunni carbombers and their victims are counted together in both of these studies.
the “650,000″ study counts what it calls “excess deaths”, that is, it takes the saddam era health ministry stats and compares it to their survey. interestingly, the result shows that iraq has a LOWER infant mortality rate amidst the invasion and insurgency than in peacetime.
further glaring inconsistencies stand out with the “650,000″ study. 9/10 of the interviewees were reported as having produced death certificates, while coresponding records exist for less than a sixth of the total. this means half a million phantom death certificates.
other reviewers of the study question whether as many interviews could have even occurred as were reported in the survey’s methodology, noting that for the numbers to work out, 40 interviews per day would leave 15 minutes per interview including walking from the previous interview, finding a home were someone was home, getting their consent and conducting the interview. each day being a ten hour day.

others have noted that the “cluster sampling” methodology used reliably produces larger estimates the fewer clusters used, and that the nuber of clusters used in the “650,000″ study used one sixth the number of clusters used by whorld health organization surveys in other war zones which had produced more accurate tallies.
rosie believes that the troops are terrorists engaged in terrorism. she may not believe that the troops themselves believe that they are engaged in terrorism and accordingly grant them the benefit of the doubt and instead rationizes that thay are too stupid or naive to recognize that they are engaged in terrorism, but in rosie’s view, they are. this is the philosophy of “support the troops butnot the war”. it is very empowering to those who spew it.
the prerequisite for believing you can oppose a given war, but not the volunteers fighting it, is to believe oneself to be a soothseer atop the mountain and the troops almost childlike in their ignorance and innocense. it must be, in the soothseers mind, that the troops barely recognize that the bullets they fire kill or their targets human. this is why progressives insist on referring to the troops as “our kids”.

jummy on May 30, 2007 at 12:42 PM

benrand on May 30, 2007 at 3:51 PM

see my post above. rosie did it in the very conversation in question.

in the fuller video of the clip, rosie insists repeatedly on conflating insurgent and al qaeda fighters with “the iraqi people” as a whole and putting those words in hasselbeck’s mouth as they sat right accross from one another. the exchange was eggregious:…

RO: “the enemies in iraq?”
EH: “al qaeda…”
RO: “the enmies in iraq?”
EH: “…al qaeda…”
RO: “well, you know what elizabeth? if the enmies are innocent civilians in iraq, i don’t want to play that kind of football.”

it won’t end with rosie either. i remember the first view clip i watched, the first youtube vid i commented under, was one where hasslebeck was made out to be some screaming loonie for saying something against abortion. walters practicly stopped the show. when they came back from break, walters, with exaggerated fatigue, said something allong the lines of, “we can all have opinions, even passionate opinions – we just had a thing with mel gibson and some anti-semitic opinions – but we have to be able to discuss our opinions without hate and screaming at each other”.

jummy on May 30, 2007 at 4:04 PM