So were Stossel’s pesticide tests. So what? Good for the goose is good for the gander, or do some geese get special treatment? What exactly makes Stossel a sometimes overzealous advocate of truth and Moore a rank dissembler? I can cite lots of inaccuracies that Moore makes and Stossel makes. What makes one excuseable and the other rank? Simply which opinions they hold? The fact that Moore uses film as his mediu and Stossel uses Tv as his medium?
The principal ultimately didn’t know much more about the situation than you or I do now. In addition, the recollection in question was demonstrably and provably WRONG on the key fact of the timeline.
Whether or not the length of time makes any difference is a matter of opinion, but the fact that it happened is not.
First of all, it’s not clear what the figures are: we have two different sources. Second of all, these sorts of mistakes are systematic and always seem to happen in the same direction: proving whatever case Stossel is trying to make. Sometimes the criticism builds big enough that the networks force him to issue an apology… which then still doesn’t seem to warrant a correction for rebroadcast. Often the complaints just don’t build big enough for him to have to bother.
Well, that’s nice and all, but what does that have to do with the price of tea in China? Are all trial lawyers evil and irresponsible now? If Edwards was exceptionally so, wouldn’t the fair man make a case based on his record, rather than trying to associate the deeds of all sorts of other people with him indirectly via profession?
And are you entirely, 100% sure that your or Stossel’s take on lawyer issue is as fair as Moore’s take on homeland security? Lawyers raise prices on all of us, Bush uses the homeland security just to play with our emotions, end of story, easy peasy?
I’m not sure what this has to do with him producing sometimes grossly inaccurate opinion pieces and then calling them journalism.
This is your response to the fact that he fired those who presented contrary data that he then covered up? We weren’t talking about the liberties of free-enterprise, we were talking about the production of propaganda.
You are welcome to argue that it’s commonplace. That doesn’t make it any less deceptive or unbiased when Stossel does it. Your line of argument seems to boil down to Moore is bad and Stossel is not because the very particular things Moore does in the service of bias and deception are bad, but those particular things that Stossel does are not.
Stossel famously mangled Galbraith’s quotes to make him seem to say the opposite of what he was actually saying. He quotes studies that never existed. He presents issues like the increasing prevalence of C-sections devoid of context or alternate cause.
You have quite the selective memory, especially considering that I had admitted to error just several paragraphs before. At least, from now on, I’ll be sure to listen to Stossel with the sound off to make sure I never make the same mistake again.
It’s sort of like its political opposite number, The Clinton Chronicles – throw enough mud, and the audience will see it stick, or not, depending on its existing political predilections.
Actually it’s nothing at all like The Clinton Chronicles. F9/11 is factually accurate and does not make wild accusations of murder and drug smuggling. the two pieces may be politically opposed but that does not make them journalistically symmetrical, even if we allow for Moore’s bias. There is bias and there is insane propanda. CC is the latter.
Try to place yourself and your mind back in time, shortly after that tragic day when thousands of innocent lives were lost. Did we have all of the facts?, definitly not. We, as a nation were caught off guard. Blame it on Bush’s 8 months or blame it on Clinton’s 8 years. It doesn’t matter now, does it. The blood has spilled and the world has changed forever.
When I hear Moore and others continually say that the commander in chief lied to the nation, I just have to wonder what is going through their heads.
When the commander in chief weighs the facts presented to him by his intelligence (whether his own appointed staff or from the former regime), he must make a decision. He does not have the luxury of time nor hindsight. If months or years later the facts presented are later determined to be less than 100% accurate, you can not blame the man for making the decision. Time is a gigantic factor here. When you have Sadaam preventing inspections, possesing the capability and having a history of using weapons of mass dustruction, you can not give him the benefit of the doubt. That is a gamble that I, myself am not willing to take, I thank God we had a man in office at that time that had the guts
to stick his neck out and bring this evil dictator down.
When it is your responsibility to protect the United States of America, you do it no matter what it takes, with no question. You do not appoint a 9/11 commission and wait for three years for them to disect the details (before and after the terror strike) and come up with reccomendations for preventing and defending the nation against terrorism. When I hear John Kerrry ask why did it take 3 years before Bush acted on the 9/11 comission’s recommendations, I have to ask, what should Bush have done? Should he have waited for 3 years and not changed a single thing until the comission made their findings?
Bush made the necessary adjustments and the nation has not had another attack. Kerry points out the fact thought Bush deemed the comission unnecessary at the time, well 3 years later I can see that it was not immediately necessary.
President Bush did, and continues to do an outstanding job of defending and proventing terrorism on American soil.
It is absolutely incredible how quickly people forget.
When the President of the United States makes a statement based on what he believes is the most accurate information available at the time, and later that information proves to be less than genuine, that statement is not a lie.
A perfect example of a lie would be if the President of the United States proclaims to the nation that he did not have sexual relations with an intern, and scientific evidence proves otherwise.
People forget about the suffering, the tradgedy, the shock, and the horror of that day. I would hope my government would try and stop a repeat of that event at any cost.
Great distrust and dislike of America by the rest of the world is nothing new, many nations have short memories too. Many prominent businessmen contributed large amounts of money to the Nazi party (including Henry Ford) with the endorsement of the US and most of the rest of the world.
I liked the review that Airman gave, it was objective. Here is my PIREP: there are numorous Alpha Hotels in this forum. Talleyho.
He knew that the FAA and NORAD had certain standard operating procedures and statutory mandates, and that nothing he (or any other human being) could come up with in five minutes while in a Florida elementary school would be any better than those.
“It was only when the SECOND plane hit that people realized what was truly going on.” That, of course, is false. Until the 9/11 Commission Report, no one person had any idea about all the things that were “truly going on”. Do you need help with any other homework?
He did leave the classroom after about five minutes or so. But your hysteria about him being completely out of the loop is quite laughable. By your standards, no president should ever leave the Situation Room because he could not make decisions as Commander in Chief while he is, say, at a summit meeting in Moscow. I presume you make exceptions for blow jobs in the Oval Office closet however, since I have never heard you criticize President Cigar for being out of the loop and incapable of commanding during his orgasms.
Well, if you would get your information from the 9/11 Commission Report instead of from a Michael Moore film, you would know that they had standing orders, and that “the FAA was mandated by law to regulate the safety and security of civil aviation” and that NORAD’s responsibility “was, and is, to defend the airspace of North America and protect the continent”. You would know that “NEADS commanders and officers actively sought out information, and made the best judgments they could on the basis of what they knew. Individual FAA controllers, facility managers, and Command Center managers thought outside the box in recommending a nationwide alert, in ground-stopping local traffic, and, ultimately, in deciding to land all aircraft and executing that unprecedented order flawlessly.” In a remarkably bried period of time, the whole sky above the US had been cleared, and the president indeed had given authority to shoot down commercial aircraft. (Page 37)
Um, actually that’s what I told you. Does this ability of yours to ignore the obvious come naturally, or did you have to study for decades at the feet of Marx and Hillary to master it?
Far From Perfect. The example you want is when said President declares that the state of knowledge of certain things is refined to the level of absolute certainty and is beyond any doubt, when in fact there are great big pools of doubt. The knowledge doesn’t amount to much more than a balance of speculations.
I’m saying that you’re not giving an accurate portrayal of the events of that day from the perspective of that day. The president was in a secure location. The onus of the Secret Service was to secure the president. It’s the simplest possible modus ponens.
But that’s ridiculous. There was no wave of Soviet MIGs flying into US territory and carpet bombing cities. There was a hijacked plane. Sometime later, there was another one. The president understood the difference between a CNN banner slogan, “America at War”, and the reports he had gotten from the White House about a couple of planes. No one even knew at this time whether the terrorists were foreign or domestic. The first thoughts of many people were of a McVeigh type assault. Prior to 9/11, after all, Oklahoma City had been the worst terrorist attack in the history of the United States. And certainly, no one knew that the buildings were going to fall and kill thousands of people. They weren’t supposed to collapse, and only after much retrospection and inspection do we even know why they did. All possible agencies were going at full speed, from the FAA to NORAD to the New York City Fire Departement.
Which was precisely how Bush himself saw it. From the 9/11 Commission Report: “The President told us his instinct was to project calm, not to have the country see an excited reaction at a moment of crisis… The President felt he should project strength and calm until he could better understand what was happening.”
Oh, you knew this? And you told no one? Well then you, sir, are to blame for 9/11. If we’d all had your knowledge, it would have been a whole different day.
Funny timing, that. That’s very similar to what happened to President Bartlett just last night when he first got news that his daughter, Zoey, was missing and that there was an agent dead at the scene. His reaction was to drop first the family photographs he was holding and then his drink while he stared in disbelief across the room at his wife. After allowing him a few minutes to collect himself, the head of Secret Service escorted him to the Situation Room where he was unable even to keep up with the conversation. He never once even thought of rushing to the scene to see things for himself because he knew that he would be grabbed under the arms and dragged off to be sedated.
It’s what you wanted. You poor, oppressed, insane attention whore. :rolleyes:
I’m guessing that Bush knew very little about FAA and NORAD standard operating procedures. Why would he? And I’m also guessing that he, in fact, didn’t know whether anything he could come up with in five minutes would be any good. But neither of my guesses matter much, they’re just obvious answers to your attempted misdirections.
Moore shows Bush sitting around, doing nothing useful, and not even informing himself of the situation. That’s the critical point.
That’t the craziest shit I’ve heard in quite a while, even from a bipolar loon like you.
If you’d been able to point out the instance where people were banging on the closet door and saying “Bill! Bill! There’s a fucking emergency!” and Bill didn’t emerge for seven minutes, you might have something of a point.
Well then, Moore was wrong if he showed that. According to the 9/11 Commission Report, the president was informed by his Chief of Staff that a second plane had hit the towers. And the fact that Moore, if you aren’t lying for once, suggested that projecting calmness in a crisis is not something useful, then Moore is as stupid as you are.
Yeah. I guess you’d claim that because the President was actually able to continue breathing throughout the crisis, and thereby kept himself alive, he was doing something useful. :rolleyes:
And BTW, if your recent postings are intended to be balanced attacks on both parties, in the hope of encouraging people to vote for the Libertarians, I doubt that it’s going to work.
Your recent work is pure loony propaganda, devoid of logic and truth. As I said earlier, you’ve already used up whatever shred of credibility you retained after your previous bipolar episodes.
We’ll have a gangbang, oh yes we will,
because to gangbang gives us such a thrill…
Ah, so you know:
a) That Bush knew, while sitting in the classroom, that the FAA and NORAD were players in reacting to the attack on America;
b) that he knew what their procedures and statutory mandates were; and
c) that he knew that the execution of none of those mandates required his approval.
You know a great deal about what Bush was thinking as he sat in that chair, rocking slightly back and forth, staring into space.
What you originally referred to: “Max’s much more broad assertion that everybody had it all nailed down except Bush.” I’ll let Max explain for himself what he meant if he wants, but what what you quote is considerably different in meaning from your paraphrase.
Ah, more of the deliberate misreading.
My standards were that, when you’re the President of the United States, and an aide comes in and tells you that America is under attack, but is unable to give you details because of who else is in the room, it behooves you to go and get those details, because you don’t know if a quick Presidential decision is necessary until you do.
So yeah, if Clinton’s cock was in Monica’s mouth, and an aide hollered over the speakerphone that America was under attack, I would expect Clinton not to spend 5-7 minutes letting Monica finish the blowjob since there wasn’t anything he could do. I would expect him to get his cock out of her mouth and zip up his pants immediately, and respond with alacrity to the national emergency.
Your silly BS that begins with “By your standards” depends on the ridiculous assumption that there’s no difference between my standards for Presidential action before being told that America is under attack, and immediately after being told that.
Remember, this stupid debate you started is all about Bush’s reaction to receiving that particular news.
I guess I’d better emphasize the word ‘immediately’ in the bolding above, otherwise you’ll tell me that I’ve said a President shouldn’t be out of touch with his aides for five minutes anytime over the duration of a war.
Maybe you’re not aware that quoting random passages from the 9/11 report doesn’t answer my question: is there any evidence that he gave such an order before going into the classroom?
It doesn’t matter if I’m watching a Daffy Duck cartoon, and if you’re reading Summa Theologica. The answer still has to match the question, or it’s of no value. Answering “how old are you?” by saying “fuschia” is wonderfully surreal, and that’s pretty much where you’re taking this discussion.
Actually, you didn’t tell me; in our discussion, I was the one to bring up his name.
At any rate, there was Bush, in the classroom. Andy Card came in and told him America was under attack. There are three possibilities here about Bush receiving instructions from the Secret Service to stay put: either (1) Andy Card delivered those instructions, or (2) the Secret Service entered the room and delivered those instructions, or (3) no such instructions were given to the President. There’s also the fourth possibility, which I raised, that (4) Andy Card told Bush on his own authority to stay put.
I’d ask you to pick a number from 1 to 4, but I’m afraid you’d choose Upper Volta.
I feel like I need to just copy and paste my entire previous post, as you seem to have ignored most of it.
Let me repeat myself:
So, which do you think it was? (a), (b) or other?
I think you’re claiming it’s (a), but that’s contradicted by two things:
(1) the quote from the SS saying that they wanted to move Bush to a safer location
(2) if the school was actually the safest possible place for him to be, they would have kept him there for hours instead of moving him to whatever air force base (or what have you) they actually moved him to
Again, I’m not sure what your point is. My point is that the news that the second tower had been hit was a clear turning point. Before that, (and of course, it’s not quite clear exactly what information Bush, or his staff, had access to), you had a plane that had crashed into one tower of the WTC. Could just be an accident. Probably won’t knock the building over. After all, a plane crashed into the Empire State Building back in the 1940’s. Obviously, it’s big news, and a tragedy for the people who were killed, but it’s not what we now recognize as America Under Attack. The moment another plane hits the second tower, however:
(a) there’s no longer any possibility that this is an accident
(b) that means that there definitely is a “who” in “who is attacking us?”
(c) how many more planes are out there, about to crash into things?
and so forth.
Yes, it’s certainly true that there was great confusion and many conflicting stories being heard, etc. But are you claiming that the second tower being hit didn’t drastically increase the seriousness of the situation?
(Oh, and my memory of the day itself is that almost everyone was saying “it’s middle eastern terrorists” and a few sensible people were saying “let’s not jump to conclusions… remember Timothy McVeigh”. Sure, he was mentioned, but only as a counterexample, not as a leading theory.)
There may be nothing further to say here, if you believe this claim. I find it far more likely that that’s just covering up. After all, why wouldn’t he say that, in retrospect?
But the idea that he was sitting there, his brain racing a mile a minute to process the information he’d received about the dire events of the day, and made the conscious decision that the best thing he could do for his country was sit there and read to elementary school kids, just strikes me as preposterous. I mean, who cares whether he projects strength and calm to the kids? No one else in the country is going to notice, as we were all glued to our TVs watching the towers burn. Nor, had he gotten up and calmly left, would the kids have been on the internet in moments spreading rumors of the president’s horrible panic, which would have spread around the country like wildfire, crumbling our collective national resolve.
So if he did actually make that decision, as he claims, it was idiotic. Far more likely, in my opinion, is that he’s basically a clod and just sat there reading until someone told him to do otherwise. (In fairness, some or all of that might have been shock/confusion/denial. But whatever it was, I refuse to believe that that was his consciously chosen action in order to be the best damn president he could be.)
Again, my response is… HUH?
OK, let’s sum up this section of the conversation up to this point:
Lib:It is the job of the military to handle military matters. If we learned anything at all from Vietnam, it was exactly that. All the president need say is keep an eye on this, respond with appropriate force, and keep me informed. If he goes far beyond that, he is an obsessive-compulsive Jimmy Carter or Lyndon Johnson.
Max:And what does that have to do with 9/11? 9/11 was FAR more than just a military matter. Yes, purely military matters should not have minute-by-minute presidential interruption. So?
Lib:Oh, you knew this? And you told no one? Well then you, sir, are to blame for 9/11. If we’d all had your knowledge, it would have been a whole different day.
Ok, so as I see it, you’re making the quit reasonable claim that in purely military matters, the president shouldn’t be overmanaging. When an airstrike is in progress, the president shouldn’t be calling every two minutes to see how they’re doing and offer ignorant suggestions. Very well. I agree. So does everyone, I expect.
I then respond by asking what the relevance of that was to 9/11, which was obviously not a purely military matter. In fact, it was hardly a military matter at all, on the day itself.
You then berate me for having special knowledge about 9/11, or something else vague but insulting.
Which is IDIOTIC AND IRRELEVANT. In fact, you should be insulting Bush. If, in fact, you’re claiming that Bush didn’t do anything because he didn’t want to meddle in what was purely a military matter, then you’re claiming that HE had special magical knowledge. The only way your insulting me would make the slightest shred of sense was if 9/11 was somehow something which, on the surface of it, appeared overwhelmingly likely to be a purely military matter, and I was claiming that I had knowledge that the surface appearance was incorrect. Instead, it appeared immediately (and still appears, and in fact was) to be a far-more-than-military matter. Thus, your initial comparison was pointless. Thus, your random mocking of me was irrelevant and beneath you.
First of all, I don’t know whether to applaud you or mock you for citing The West Wing here. I suppose I’ll just go with it.
Secondly, please stop talking about “rushing to the scene” and other acts of hysteria. No one in the history of this thread has ever suggested that Bush should have rushed around, flailing his arms, spouting out orders, telling people to do things just because he could. Rather, we have suggested that he should have calmly gotten up, excused himself, and began discussing the situation with his aids (or, if you prefer, CONTINUED to discuss the situation with his aids).
Most importanly, my reaction is once again, “huh?”. So if Bartlett had been in a classroom reading to kids, and an aid had come in and whispered in his ear “your daughter has been kidnapped and the agent protecting her is dead”, what do you think he would have done?
Anyhow, you completely ignored several other parts of my post, and I’d appreciate a response, or at least an acknowledgement that, for whatever reason, you’re not going to respond.
And this is the most important one, as it’s the root reason that I responded to this thread in the first place. Ignore everything else in this post if you like, but please fully respond to this:
Suddenly, its all clear to me, the essential fact: that wasn’t the President!
Think about it! The Leader, that endless font of strategic thinking and geopolitical perspicacity, is the single most important person in our government. As Mr. Ridge so rightly pointed out, our progress and boundless success in the War on Terror is entirely attributable to GeeDubya (Praise the Leader!). It would be folly to risk such an invaluable resource simply for a mere photo opp. (Anybody who follows the animated documentary South Park knows what I’m talking about, those little shits are dangerous!)
The reason the ringer looks panic stricken and clueless, like a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs, is because he is panic stricken and clueless, the script contains no reference to sudden attacks, he is glancing side to side desperately looking for the prompter!
Now, if he were actually the President, Commander in Chief, etc. that would be a very bad thing. But he isn’t! He’s just some guy from Central Casting, somebody who looks pretty close to Emilio Estevez’s daddy in West Wing, only not as smart! (Too smart isn’t good, Americans get nervous if you’re too smart…)
The real GW Bush is a bald, chubby, Dr. Evil looking guy who can say “evildoers” out of just one side of his mouth, without the rest of his lips even moving! He is too valuable to risk, so he is kept perpetually in a secure place while his doppelganger goes around doing the piddly-shit photo opps!
Its not that the Emperor has no clothes! Its that the Nekkid Guy isn’t the Emperor!
So, let’s look at that day from the perspective of that day. The President didn’t yet know jack about the attack, other than that it existed, and that each WTC tower had been flown into by a plane.
It’s wonderful to present calmness in the face of crisis, but it’s more imperative, if decisiveness is invested in the office you hold, to try to find out what the crisis is. He didn’t know much about the crisis, and he wasn’t going to gain additional information by sitting in the classroom, unless secret messages from the Illuminati were encoded into the words of The Pet Goat.
And the proper course of action, when one does not have all the facts, is to invade a sovereign nation that had nothing to do with it?
Incredible indeed. Incredible how you forget that Bush’s own counter-terrorism expert, Richard Clarke, painted us a picture not of a president misled by “less than 100% accurate” (understatement of the century) information, but of a president already intent on invading Iraq from his very first day in office.
Incredible how you forget that Bush was warned by the very intelligence agencies on which he supposedly relied, that the information was not reliable. Incredible how you forget that Bush used the discredited “yellowcake” intelligence in his S.O.U. address, 6 months AFTER it had been taken out of a previous speech. Incredible how you forget that EVEN TO THIS DAY, Bush continues to sneakily imply a connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda, even though the 9/11 Commission has concluded that no such connection ever existed.
Yep - pretty incredible.
Too bad that’s not what happened.
Yes, that was a lie too. Which do you think is the greater lie - a lie about a blowjob, or a lie to justify killing over 900 American soldiers and thousands of Iraqi citizens?
I would hope so too. I would hope that they would focus on that, rather than diverting valuable resources towards an irrelevant war, when the relevant war isn’t finished yet. Unfortunately, they’re not.
Not even gonna dignify that garbage with an answer.
Yes, since your screen-name is johnkerrymunster, I’m sure you know a lot about being objective. :rolleyes:
Well, could you get the group to appoint you as head knocker? You know, you go on and on about Bush wasting five minutes, all the while insisting that I waste five hours responding to five people with five different approaches to the same point, namely, to work backwards from the premise that Bush is an idiot to the conclusiont that whatever he did that day of necessity must have been idiotic. But that is not what I am arguing against. I know that Bush is an idiot, but lots of people in power are idiots, and lack of academic intelligence is not the problem. The problem is lack of character. If you believe that Bush sat there staring into space without thinking about anything at all, then you have less sense than he. He was thinking about how he could use this event to unify and galvanize the nation in order to further his agenda of increasing his wealth and power. Academic intelligence is not the only kind. Smart people make fun of intelligent people all the time, because intelligent people sit around bickering over piddly shit like this five fucking minutes while the smart people pick their pockets and sneak away with everything they own. I honestly can’t keep up with all of you, so you win. No, I do not concede you points, I just plain quit. Like the Amish girl Ruth, I just don’t care.