Tennis05 said:
thanks to everyone for replying and helping clear this up a bit. i am so glad we have a place where these issues can be debated among fans.
so do you think this is just something for politicians and the media to harp on without knowing the full story? is it cause people almost expect/hope that U2 and Bono will be hypocritical after 20+ years of music and activism that stood for something?
A few Irish politicians have harped on it. But overall, back to Tennis 05, yes, people are trying to discredit someone who is:
A) Having an impact
B)Puts his money where his mouth is
The good thing is we have sites like this, but more importantly, we have a little thing called google that can give us answers to about any question we ask. Sure, all of our hits will come from sources w/ bias, etc, but we can collect and process alot of information and decide for ourselves how to answer the question. Example, Bush kept saying there were WMD in Iraq in 2002- the papers reported this. Go to google, and one of your hits would be a guy named Scott Ritter, the head weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998 and a former Marine. He said well before the war, in numerous interviews available online, that the President was full of it- he knew that all of the weapons had been verifiably destroyed in the 1990s and any attempts to reconstitute them would have been eminently detectable by intelligence. In other words, Bush would have had more than 'trust me to go on.' Who was right? Who was giving the more reasonable explanation? But trust him too many did. If only a few more people would have used google before opening their mouths, maybe 4000 dead and 25K wounded could have been prevented. Same thing applies in U2's case, it is clear, doing a little research into how much taxes they pay to Ireland still, what was earned outside of Ireland, the amount of aid Netherlands gives, etc that this was a sloppy, poorly researched attempt to grab headlines and try to expose a hypocrite, and if there is one thing the media loves, it is exposing hypocrites. A little problem: Bono is one of the few people in public life that really is not much of a hypocrite.
