This does not compute.

Am I completely misinformed, or did Bush dismantle the distribution of condoms and education about safer sex, actually raising the numbers of those newly infected in places like Ghana, that had reduced their numbers before he started spouting his crap?

Rule 1 of organized evangelical christian churches: you are graded on a Christian curve but everybody else gets demerits for a hair out of place.  Bush: started a war, killed hundreds of thousands of people, did a few good things for AIDS.  WIN!

Anybody non-christian (and not powerful… that’s an important cock-sucking requirement for the Warrens of this world) who does sterling work trying to control AIDS’ spread:  NOT IMPORTANT!

Face it: it’s like being in a company where everybody works like dogs and does great work.  One day the owner’s nephew changes the coffee filter.  The next thing you know the owner is promoting him, talking about how he Gets Things Done!  And the rest of you are still in the shitter.

Political evangelical christians: Self-referential, self-worshipping, self-congratulatory scumbags.

That repulsive sycophant. Warren’s spiritual prostitution knows no limits.

I need to shout this from the mountaintops. Rick Warren will never be anything but a whited sepulchre.

Apparently “PEACE” has nothing at all, whatsoever, to do with the actual word “peace”.

War is PEACE
FREEDOM is Slavery
Ignorance is STRENGTH

Etc…

The President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief [PEPFAR] has saved millions of lives in the past five years, so it is fitting that he be awarded the first ‘International Medal of PEACE.’

Saved millions?  Enough to counteract the millions who have been infected since he prevented the distribution of condoms and the proper health education about preventing AIDS with safe sex practices instead of abstinence only? 

Enough to counteract the estimated 2.5 million Iraqis that have been killed, maimed, orphaned, widowed, or displaced thanks to his attack on a country that did not attack us and did not have the means to attack us?

Enough to counteract the deaths, maimings, and enslavement of women in Afghanistan after our invasion?  The Taliban is back with a vengence, and Karzai wants the US to negotiate with them (yep, negotiate with terrorists) and get out, leaving that country no better than when we first entered.

Enough to counteract the deaths by Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s and all other diseases that can be helped by stem cell research.  I personally hate Reagan and W’s father for taking 12 years of research away from my grandfather: 12 years he didn’t have to waste.  Yes, Nancy saw the light at the end, but only b/c it was her precious Ronnie.  Otherwise, she was fine with prioritizing potential snowflakes over real live breathing people.  “I got mine; fuck all y’all” at it’s finest.

Oh, btw, MikeEss won this thread.  I’m just too pissed not to rant.

After Jan 20 can these worthless liars please just SHUT UP?

Oops, blasphemed a little early.

You can’t counteract one human’s death with another’s life.  People aren’t fungible that way.  By starting a war of choice, W eliminated any possibility of earning a “peace” award in anything other than NewSpeak.

Doubleplusungood.

Though apparently this is how he’s going to save his legacy.  Regency U is probably coming up with an alternative “Christian” Nobel Peace Prize for him to display in his library, supposing anyone ever lets him build it.

President George W. Bush will be presented with the “International Medal of PEACE” by Dr. Rick Warren on behalf of the Global PEACE Coalition during the Saddleback Civil Forum on Global Health, to be held at the Newseum in Washington, on the 20th anniversary of World AIDS Day, Dec. 1.

Cool.  I’d like to see him wearing it, in Geneva…

*snorts*

Also:

pandemic diseases, extreme poverty, illiteracy, corruption and injustice and spiritual emptiness

Hmm… one of these things does not quite resemble the others.

@Phoenician: I think you mean The Hague.

Also, I like how this is the first “International Medal of PEACE” which means the neocons have probably been begging Warren for months to come up with something for when this schmuck leaves office.

This is scary.  Bush did manage to move a lot of money towards fighting AIDS in developing nations, but the thing is that I suspect he did it only as a gimme to the religious right.  Like they realized that we’re fighting AIDS whether they like it or not, so if it’s going to happen, they get to control it.  And they have NO real interest in protecting people from the disease.  They think god gave them AIDS so they could proselytize to the unbelievers about their form of Christianity---extremely patriarchal and hostile to sexuality---and they approach it from that way.  Not only is it rude and demeaning, it won’t be nearly as effective as strategies that meet people where they’re at.  We know what works---the strategies that dramatically reduced the transmission rate in the gay community in the U.S. didn’t preach about not being gay or other ridiculous, demeaning stuff.  It was condoms + respect.  Condoms + respect.  Condoms + respect. 

A lot of developing countries already have the patriarchal values preached by Bush & Co., and you know what?  Those values make the problem worse. Because the first rule of the patriachy is not to respect women, and respect is the most important part of safer sex practices.  The fundie hyper-focus on female virginity until marriage doesn’t do much for women in parts of the world where getting married increases your risk of contracting HIV. The whole situation bothers me.  It seems to me that they’re buying people off with money for medications as a way to distract from their anti-protection policy ideas.

Even as the most unpopular president in history, they can’t stop worshipping him.

“It pisses off liberals! It’s a perfect strategy! We’ll never lose an election again!”

I can’t define obscenity, but i know it when I see it.

I think this is part and parcel of the Bonovox end game though ... he goes around convincing self-important decisionmakers to do at least something because they will get various egostrokes for it.  Then they follow through and, even if it isn’t what is really needed or as much, at least it goes in the right direction and somebody hands them a meaningless award for it and the behavior gets reinforced.

Rick Warren, purpose-driven dickhead.

Huh? What? *boggle*

Are we SURE this isn’t from the Onion? SURE??

Shameless plug: Check out Robert Price’s infinitely better “Reason Driven Life” - rips Warren’s “Purpose Driven Life” a new one, but does the ripping in a gentle, loving manner. I love Price.

Hmmmm. When they list “the five ‘global goliaths’ – giant problems negatively impacting society worldwide,” WAR doesn’t make the cut. Interesting agenda for an organization calling itself the “Global PEACE Coalition,” no?

In other news, up is down, black is white, and shit is shinola.

These people are a really fun combination of evil and stupid.

OK, there has to be a reason PEACE is all capitalized like that.  It’s got to be an acronym, right?

Putz
Eliminating
All
Competent
Endeavors?

I don’t know; I’m sure someone can come up with a better acronym than that; something that actually makes sense in our reality and not Orwell’s.

First Annual ... that says it all right there.

Funny, I work in public health policy research and there are a number of people I know who are tied in to the global public health community, have worked for the UN, etc. 

Nobody has even heard of this Saddleback Civil Forum Global Public Health event at all.

Interesting.

It’s hard to draw any conclusion other than that they’re deliberately trying to drive satirists out of business.

Look at the good news.  It allows Obama in 2012 to have the high-ground in declining another debate at the obligatory knee bending before our Christian Betters.  When Warren calls he can shrug and say, “hey, you’re just another GOP PR firm.  Get lost”.

Whatever.  This is meaningless christianist psychobabble not much different from the self-important crap spewed by the reverend moon (he gets lots of awards too).

The really sad thing is that Obama is legitimized this idiotfest with an appearance by video.  Sad.  Quit catering to the megachurches President Obama.  You won.

Redshift has a point.

I wonder if this is the “F--- You” to the Nobel Peace Prize committee. “You gave Al Gore one? Fine. We’ll make our OWN prize.”

I think this is Warren’s attempt to get back in the good graces of the rest of the wingnuts after allowing Obama’s image in his church and making all those environmental noises.

Rick Warren is a fraud. What do you expect from someone who made bazillions off of his “The Bullshit Driven Life” series.

Oh come on - Bush deserves credit for doing more to save lives in Africa than any other previous president. He deserves some type of recognition for that.

As to this whole argument that seems to be a common theme on this thread - that the invasion of Iraq somehow nullifies his admirable efforts in Africa - that is really bizarre.

Sure people died as a direct result of that war - but its hard to imagine an Iraq without lots of unnecessary death and travesty - to say that Bush is somehow ultimately responsible for Iraq’s problems is patently ludicrous.

Say we hadn’t invaded and Saddam was still in power. Pray tell, how is that a more advantageous to your average Iraqi?

Most estimates of Iraqi civilian deaths put the human cost of the war around 100k with some approaching 1 million. However, at least that amount, and likely considerably more, were dying from the UN sanctions placed on Iraq. One source puts the deaths between 1995-2001 at 567k among Iraqi children alone.

So say we hadn’t invaded - you can pretty much bet on the fact that a comparable amount of Iraqi’s would have died because of the sanctions, in the last 5 years anyway - with probably more child victims than the war violence has caused.

Also keep in mind that the various sectarian problems stalking Iraq today were not created by the war. They were always there - just allowed to surface in the absence of a strong central authority. It stands to reason that if Iraq hadn’t been invaded by us in 2003 it still would face the problems it has know - like potential civil war - but just at a later date.

After all, Saddam would have died either through assassination or natural causes at some point - leaving Iraq in the same type of power vacuum it faced in 2003. Except in that eventuality it wouldn’t have 120k American troops to mediate the violence and promote democracy.

And also don’t try to say that we could simply have modified the sanctions - we tried that - Saddam just hoarded all the food and medical supplies in his warehouses. Also if we had completely dropped the sanctions that would mean giving a murderous regime access to materials that he could have used to perpetuate even more wars and deaths.

So in other words, none of the alternatives to the Iraq war, leaving sanctions in place or removing them, seem terribly attractive. Ultimately they still lead to eventual sectarian violence, cause uncessesary deaths in the interim and/or leave a brutal tyrant in power.

In the end I just don’t see how not invading would be such a stellar outcome for the Iraqi’s - especially in the long term.

Dear ProgTroll:

The estimates of cost-of-war that you cite, with a mode of 600,000 some years back, were of excess deaths. That is, after accounting for the murderous brutality of Saddam’s government.

Your connection with reality becomes more tenuous from their. (Albeit your reasoning makes a great justification for the US’s 2004 invasion and occupation of Darfur, which—oh, wait.)

Let’s see...:

Iraq’s health has deteriorated to a level not seen since the 1950s, said Joseph Chamie, former director of the U.N. Population Division and an Iraq specialist. “They were at the forefront”, he said, referring to health care just before the 1991 Persian Gulf War. “Now they’re looking more and more like a country in sub-Saharan Africa."[299] Malnutrition rates have risen from 19% before the US-led invasion to a national average of 28% four years later.[300] Some 60-70% of Iraqi children are suffering from psychological problems.[301] 68% of Iraqis have no access to safe drinking water. A cholera outbreak in northern Iraq is thought to be the result of poor water quality.[302] As many as half of Iraqi doctors have left the country since 2003.[303]

In December 2007 the Iraqi government announced plans to cut food rations and subsidies by almost 50 per cent as part of its overall 2008 budget because of insufficient funds and rising inflation. Apart from the cut in subsidies, Baghdad also wants to reduce the number of people dependent on the rationing system by five million. Rationing was first introduced in 1991 after the UN Security Council imposed sanctions on Iraq but the country has seen an alarming rise in poverty since the 2003 invasion. Nearly 10 million Iraqi’s living in poverty now depend heavily on the rationing system.

And the reason why we think Bush should be in front of the Hague (thanks CDG) is because starting an aggressive war is a crime against humanity under international law.

On the positive side, the power of the market has improved prices in Iraq.  Reportedly you can hire someone to kill a woman for only $100, and prostitutes will work for just food.  Another triumph for the Western free market model.

Shorter Progressive Prince on Iraqi sectarianism: Since grenades are dangerous, what difference does it make to pull the pin out?

Small correction to Phoenician’s statement - aggressive war is illegal on its own account.  See Nuremberg.

Small correction to Phoenician’s statement - aggressive war is illegal on its own account.  See Nuremberg.

I don’t think we’re disagreeing.  It’s illegal, and it is a crime against humanity - like murder or rape are illegal, and also violations of human rights.

Say we hadn’t invaded and Saddam was still in power. Pray tell, how is that a more advantageous to your average Iraqi?

Your average Iraqi.

Now this seems perfectly reasonable to me.

Who has done more than George W. Bush to support extreme poverty, illiteracy, corruption and injustice, and spiritual emptiness? (I fixed their punctuation.) Four out of five isn’t bad; and the successes of his ham-handed, ideologically limited, campaign against AIDS shouldn’t be counted against him.

Eurgh. And to think I used to respect Rick Warren.

On the other hand, that Bush feels the need to whitewash his record, rather than letting it stand on its own, only adds to my schadenfreude--much like how none of the conservatives who were licking his boots in 2004 & ‘05 now want to be associated with him.

Still no comfort for so many people being dead, though.

International Medal of PEACE: A bullshit award given out by a bullshitter to the grand master of bullshit.

Rick Warren is a whore who has his head stuffed so far up Bush’s ass that oxygen deprivation has obviously done permanent brain-damage.

Congratulations President Bush and may God bless you.

Congratulations President Bush

For being so great that they had to invent an award just so they could give it to you.

and may God bless you.

Yes.  May He bring you all the joy you have brought to others.