The extra plates are only 260 dollars.
Yeah, but call me a crazy, free-spending liberal, I think they should get the entire new jacket.
Spin, spin, spin. Always spin with you idiots. Your problem is that you start with the assumption that whatever it is that Bush and the administration is doing, it is wrong, evil, stupid, misguided, etc…,pick the adjective of the day. You then argue whatever the issue is, bending the facts to fit your forgone conclusion. You did it right here in this post. “Bush controls the State Department” Oh, that’s to make it tell him only what he wants to hear. “Bush controls the Pentagon” Oh, that’s to avoid doing anything that might cause him embarrassment, or effort. You guys are worse than the most ardent fundie ever to grace these boards. Your mind is made up, don’t bother confusing you with the facts or, God forbid, common sense.
I’ve been a Democrat my entire life. I till at the windmill of partisan morons like yourself because you are destroying and marginalizing a once proud party. In any case, on this issue I don’t think it has a single thing to do with George Bush. Presidents come and go in D.C., it’s bureaucracy that’s eternal, and that is the problem here.
I tried. Couldn’t find it in a few minutes of searching. Sorry. Why don’t you go ahead and tell me his name to show how dumb I am.
Really? Seems to me that Bush has made quite a lot happen since 9/11. Isn’t that why you and your ilk despise him so? Because you don’t like what he has done? You can’t even keep your arguments straight in the same fucking paragraph.
I wonder if Bush had to personally pay for his flight suit and codpiece, or if the government was able to foot the bill for his military equipment? I wonder how much that equipment related to the needs of his mission?
We’re the ones who know what we’re arguing. Not you.
Wrong again. It is not an assumption, but a conclusion, derived from the facts, and it isn’t every time, either.
If you have a different reason to offer, one consistent with the facts, let’s hear it. But you don’t. Or are you claiming he doesn’t have any more control over the State Department than he does over the Defense Department?
Ibid.
If you have any facts to “confuse” us with, you haven’t done dick to present them. You always have the opportunity, though.
If you have any idea who you mean, you can find out. Or maybe you’re just making up shit so you can complain about other people, like our similarly-choleric friend Unc?
But not provide body armor, that is. The subject of the thread, don’tcha know. Wipe the spittle off your lips and try to explain why this is different.
*Now * you’re getting it. Perhaps you can take the next step and explain why that’s a bad thing.
As already stated, you can’t even force yourself to make the effort to find out what they are. As long as it’s criticism of Bush, it’s simple reflexive hatred at work, right? And you hope to convince others with the soundness of that argument. The attendants are never going to let you hold sharp objects again unless you can get yourself under a little better control than that.
How would the massive bureaucracy every process a payment for that?
In fairness to the lefties, Dave, this isn’t a particularly bad place from which to begin with this president. It seems, even to me, more often than not, that wherever Bush happens to be on the largest issues of the day, he’s arrived through wrong or stupid intentions. I won’t go so far as to say evil, however, but only because I think Bush, in his heart, doesn’t intend ill towards anyone. He’s just not inquisitive or thoughtful enough to explore things beyond the myopia of his own too-firmly-held convictions. Not a good characteristic at all in a leader.
Please point to any one (or more) fabrication I’ve posted in this thread.
Aaaaauuuuururruruaaghrghrghgjhghggjgj!
[Repeat for twenty minutes. You may have some small conception of how frustrating it is to try and talk to you.]
That’s what I’ve been trying to explain to you. It’s gonna take forever. You can propose a newer, better system if you like. Please take it to Congress or the DOD if you do. I would be very happy. But as it currently stands we’ll be lucky if it comes out this decade no matter who is President. This is department that regularly takes so long to approve gear that it’s often obsolete by release time and they have to scrap the whole plan. It has been this way more or less since WW2.
…
Lefty Dopers often criticize righty Dopers about sucking up to Bush. They can’;t imagie that anyone on this earth mgiht ever agree with him. Everything is his fault in some fashion. Everything he does or doesn’t do is wrong.
Ladies and gentlemen, you do a disservice to your cause. Buhs is not perfect. I disagrre with him on a wide range of things. I think he’s made mistakes in foreign policy. I think he’s made mistakes in domestic policy. I worry he’s too close to some corporations, and I worry that he might be overstepping the bounds of privacy. Most of all, I worry he might miss something. I worry that he and his staff might axe the wrong program, listen to the wrong people, or not push Congess hard enough on the right issues.
But these are human failings. Bush is not the depraved monster you try to paint him as. He’s not Satan incarnate, nor is he Hitler reborn. He’s another man trying to do his best. When you try and make mountins out of molehills, or blame him personally for things which have been going awry for decades, or simply make stories up whole cloth, you only make it harder for the rest of us to have a serious discussion. You not only do yourself a disservice, you do a disservice to the entire left, and the country.
I don’t think blaming Bush for lack of armor for both cars and troops is unfair. He tells us that he thinks about Iraq every day but apparently he didn’t bother to think about how the troops were dying. He also apparently didn’t bother to think of a solution to armor vehicles. I mean comeon we aren’t talking about rocket science here. All you really need to do is get some welders and get some steel. Any decent auto-repair shop has the equipment necessary to make these repairs and its not as though welders are non-existant in this country. The failure to get these upgrades done rests soley on the upper leadership of the military and that includes the President.
I also don’t think its making a mountain out of a molehill. The body armor alone could have prevented 15% of the fatalities in Iraq. Who knows how many armoring vehicles could have saved? The fact that these issues are still unresolved two and a half years into the war is unacceptable. It shows that Bush lacks either the ability to comprehend what is going on in Iraq or he doesn’t care very much. Neither are acceptable.
As far as I recall, I’ve never talked to you
However, since you’ve asked; let me explain this to you: This is not about Bush. It’s about the Republicans who control everything, who can’t get their heads out of their ass long enough to get flack jackets to the troops on the ground. It’s about a system that is broken. It’s about a good-ol’-boys network which works only for the people who are connected. It’s a fucking over the little guy. But mostly it’s about a bunch of folks who believe that if their guys are involved, then it must be OK.
It’s about “you’re doing a heckofa job Brownie”, it’s about the gross incompetence of an Administration who started a war, and half-assed it from there out. It’s about the Republican party, and as its leader; so yeah, maybe at it’s core it is indeed, in an obtuse way, about Bush. The buck has to stop somewhere. But then again, shit flow downhill, doesn’t it?
The study you refer to in post 19:
“It takes the Marine Corps five fucking months after that statement to request the study. If thats not bad enough even when they request it the study isn’t done for another four months. Want to know why? Becuase they couldn’t find a measely 100,000 dollars to pay for it. One hundred fucking thousand dollars.”
“So they finally get around their sheer incompetence to finally get a study done on how Marines were dying and what they could do to stop it. What they found suggests that 300 American Soldiers that died in the war could have been saved by increased body armor”
and post 45:
“The problem is that it took the military 20 freaking months to even begin studying how the soldiers were dying in Iraq”
and post 47:
"Again, you have missed the point by about a mile and a half. Its not the President’s job to find $100,000 to do the study. Its the President’s job to ensure that we are at least putting forth a semblance of an effort to protect our troops. I ask you again, does the Marines taking 5 months to find $100,000 dollars to study how to better protect our troops indicitive of an organization that comprehends the situation in Iraq and the urgency needed to protect our troops? "
and post 50:
“The fact that the vehicles are still not armored and the fact that this study took so long to even initiate are evidence of him not doing his job”
So that is five times you’ve referenced this study. I’ve asked you to link to this study (the contents of which you claim such familiarity,) so that I might judge it firsthand. I’ve asked this several times.
Now you say “Dude what study are you talking about?.. …It’s not a study.”
So, in answer to your question of “What study?” I’d like you to link to the one you’ve mentioned five times. OK.
The strong suspicion that I have concerning your lack of intelligence is becoming a certainty at this point. Now I wonder how you manage to type. How much RAM are you running in the ole gray matter?
I have read the article which represents an investment on my part of more brainpower than you are apparently capable of expending in a decade.
At this point I no longer feel responsible for correcting your stupidity. A cite to the study, please.
Elvis, you must tell me what OP you are referring to. This is from the one that I read (Bolding added for the comprehension challenged).
Now, do you really want to tell me that that is a non partisan proposal, opened for legitimate debate? Nonetheless, one was actually developing until treis and Hentor came in spouting the same old Bush sux, the administration sux, Republicans sux bullshit.
Here’s an exercise for you, if you have the guts and the integrity to undertake it: Go through this thread and point out where anyone has said that our troops shouldn’t have the very best equipment and protection available, provided of course that it’s mission appropriate( for example, putting SCUBA troops in body armor might indeed provide them with excellent protection against bullet and shrapnel wounds. This would likely be outweighed by the fact that they would be unable to swim and would sink like a stone to the bottom of the sea and drown. That’s not very combat effective, and indeed it is a “trade off”, which is not the dirty word that some of you seem to think it is ). Nobody has. Rather, all that the people who are being labeled “Bush apologists” in this thread have said is that procurement problems should be hung squarely around the necks of the Pentagon’s bureaucracy, and have nothing to do with President Bush. This is a problem that has been around for decades, across administrations of all parties. (Read about the introduction of the M-16 sometime, and how screwed up that was. Same culprits, and this happened in the early 60s under an Democratic administration. It cost lives back then too.) Don’t look too closely, but that’s not apologizing for Bush, it’s an attempt to focus on the real issue. Those of you who continue to ignore that, who only want to have your Bush sux circle jerk, are doing an incredible disservice to the issue here, and to the servicemen who have died because of inadequate armor(if indeed that is the case. There is still some room for debate about that too, but I’ll concede the point as tangential). In your zeal to place blame on Bush for everything, you’ve lost sight of what the issue actually is. I’ve taken issue with your administration bashing in this thread because it’s not just irrelevant to the subject at hand, it’s dangerous, as it reduces the entire debate to nothing more than two groups of people, one group having a Republicans sux wankfest and the other side throwing up their hands in disgust. If there is a real problem here (and I think there is), than discuss what it really is, armed forces procurement procedures, and save the partisan hackmanship for the next meeting of the IFBB at your local union hall.
Listen cockadoodledoo, you claim you have read the article but it seems that you have the reading comprehension of an illiterate 3 year old child. If you would note the second fucking word in the article is “secret”. As in not available to your average Joe like me.
Still by even asking to see the study you are missing the point by a great margin. The point is not that the administration screwed up by not giving them armor when they went over there. The point is that the administration and the military have not been able to supply troops with equipment they have determined necessary.
Gee Dave, what exactly is it you wanted to debate here?
But it’s moer complicated than that. You can’t just bolt armor on and call it a day (and in fact, they were up-armoring the humvees for months before that big news story broke. There’s a major trade-off between speed and protection and a lot of soldiers were adamantly against the armoring! Speed kills… the enemy. It’s always a trade-off.
I understand what you are saying. What I’m saying is that:
(a) This is a decades-old problem which existed under all administrations (Pub and Dem).
(b) The issue isn’t as clear-cut as you think
© Given the number of troops actually involved in combat, sending 100,000 armor plates is a very good supply.
So this makes it ok (and it’s 100,000 plates three years after they suspected the ones that had were inadequate)? But hey; that’s ok! It’s a bureaucracy! There’s nothing we can do! Move on and quit yer bitchin’ you blathering Liberals!
Sometimes discussing the current Administration is like talking to a five year old who just got busted with stolen cookies; face covered with chocolate, and crumbs under his feet: “I didn’t do it! It was my invisible friend! No; it was the dog, No! Hey look over there! Lalalalalalalala!”
No one, nobody, and not a single fucking person in this entire fucking thread thread has fcking said “It’s o-fucking-kay.” That is a fucking complete fucking fabrication on your fucking part. The complaints about the lefties here are only that they seem incapable of even considering that the problem might have roots that don’t sprout from The Shrub.
Lalalalalalalala yer own-fucking-self.
But there are plenty of excuses. It’s that assent by silence? By applying an excuse, aren’t you basically it’s no ones fault and waving it away? Especially if that excuse is the amorphous “bureaucracy”?
Why are you always so hostile? In my minds-eye, I always picture you yelling with an ever so-slightly-bulging vein in your neck.
Seems to me, you and I have a basic misunderstanding which revolves around the word “excuse.” I don’t think I, or anyone else here, has offered anything as means of “excusing” Dubya from his responsiblities, for justifying his actions (or inaction). What I think we’re doing is trying to show you that there just might be alternative explanations for the problem and some additional complexities not previously considered. It appears to me that you’re misinterpreting these things as being excusatory for Bush; that they’re intended to acquit him of his responsibilities. That’s simply not true and it’s not what we’re saying at all. When we introduce “bureaucracy” to the mix, it’s in an attempt to more precisely identify the root cause of the problem.
Simply yelling about Bush - which is what most of this thread comprises - isn’t helpful to solving the problem, because it’s far from certain that that is where the problem lies. I’m an engineer - nothing more than a very methodical problem solver. No problem can ever be effectively solved until the root cause has been precisely identified.
Always? Frankly, I’m not hostile at all. What you see here is just a mode of writing that’s tailored to the forum. And I’ve really only done that in a couple of my many posts in this thread. It’s just creative (although one may certainly argue about the appropriateness of that adjective applied to my yammerings) license; no more, no less.
Oh, you’re an engineer! That explains it (If I used smilies I would insert one here).
You see as a scientist (bio-pharmaceuticals) I look for cures- solutions. If something is broke, I try to fix it. I don’t particularly care why it’s broke, or how it got broke, it’s my job to come up with a solution. Sometimes cause is important, sometimes it isn’t. For example; I’m working on diabetes right now. I don’t particularly care how, or why someone got diabetes, I just want them not to have it anymore. I don’t like excuses, I want solutions.
So in this case, I don’t care what administration is in power, I just want it fixed! I would feel the same way if it we Dems. However, it ain’t. It may not be the Republicans fault (although this may be debatable) but I don’t really care, instead of making excuses, they need to get off their asses (which generally they spend far too much time covering) and fix it! Their supporters, need to demand they do such instead of helping them out of the noose by saying it was beyond their control.
Enlighten me, what else is there?
this is besides the point. The military has decided that it needs the armor. The problem is that they can’t get it.
And I am Saying that blaming it on the bureaucracy is not acceptable.