Yep, I love it. “I got voted back in, so everything we did must have been absolutely right.”
Brilliant, George. No wonder they don’t let him talk without Rove with his hand up his - no, not that, up his back controlling him.
My wife and I reacted by unleashing a vigorous stream of obscenities at the television, which are still dripping off of it into a steaming pool on the carpet. I wish I could attend the coronation and do the same to King George.
Maybe now he thinks he’s all grown up and is going to say what he thinks and he doesn’t care what anyone else thinks and his daddy is going to be so proud of him because he’s all grown up and says what he thinks.
reads article But…but…but…
I knew there would be additional stupidity over the next four years when he received his “mandate”, but the level of CLUELESSNESS that this shows is almost unbelievable.
I’d say more, but after reading that article I’m spending a great deal of time opening and closing my mouth much like a fish, wanting to say things but being stunned into speechlessness.
sigh I won’t leave, THIS is my country, but…damn…
Why not say it? Seriously, do you think that this will change any of his supporter’s minds? Hell - it’s probably their next talking point.
It’s party before country for Bush supporters. Any Republicans that would be turned off by this sort of thing already abandoned Bush a year ago when it became indisputable to anyone capable of critical thinking that this man’s administration has been an utter disaster.
Once again, the bottom line for the Party Before Country Republicans is winning. Winning validates all. Getting a bill passed is a win. Exerting your will in any venue is good. The outcome is irrelevant. The means are irrelevant.
One of my Republican brothers recently told me that he has turned away from this administration. I can only hope that enough other GOP Republicans love America to put a stop to this.
Where are the Bushco defenders??
Not a one has anything to say?
Just so. The honest conservatives are our main hope right now. But how many are left? How many have been run off or silenced by the DeLay Jacobins?
Anybody heard anything from “Big John” McCain?
They think anyone who dislikes and distrusts Bush is hateful and borderline insane. It appears the futility of reasoning with a Bush critic has made them disinterested in participation, since debate only leads to the usual flood of facts (from which we extrapolate to form plausible hypotheses about his bewildering behavior, given our inability to read Bush’s thoughts with perfect fidelity), all of which displeases them immensely.
I remember before the election, I had asked about all the failed strategies, and how they alone were reason not to vote for Bush.
The response?
Bush wasn’t the one that made those failed strategies. He isn’t the military or tactical mastermind.
That sounds to me like they expected Bush to eliminate those who came up with the failed strategies.
Intelligent conservatives have just been betrayed by Bush again, and I can only hope this finally pushes them over the top.
He isn’t a mastermind at anything.
Plenty to say, but I doubt its anything you want to hear.
GW, once again, is right. You and yours seem to be operating under the delusion that of course Bushista heads should roll over Iraq. Any right thinking person can see that, right? The problem is, it’s not like the Iraq issue popped up after the elections; people knew what happened under GW, and guess what? Enough of the electorate liked it to return the man to office.
As Dubya said:
As long as your line of thinking remains so amazingly narrow and prejudiced, there are going to be many more ’ I will add my own when I recover, and am no longer too stunned to type’ moments in the American Left’s future.
What ‘failed strategies’ would those be?
Among many others: Using Al Qaeda friendly warlords and their men to try and get Bin Laden, sending in an extremely insufficient number of troops to secure Iraq (the army even admitted they had nowhere near the men they needed, and that they were forced to let nuclear material be looted for use in potential dirty bombs), believing Chalabi because he told them what they wanted to hear (that Iraq had WMD and would welcome us), letting Chalabi steal secrets from us and then killing Iraqis and American soldiers by trusting his pretty lies, having inadequate plans for restoring Iraq or dealing with insurgency (again, caused by both stupidity and by believing sweet lies), allowing an environment in which Iraqis are mistreated badly and tortured (adding to the hatred of us and making it next to impossible to ever change), sending our troops in a rush without the proper equipment leading to more deaths of American troops, and too many more to list. I’m sure you can look back at old threads that go into more detail.
The point is, I think intelligent conservatives expected Bush to take action to correct these problems. Now he has betrayed them, without warning them in advance (before the election) that he was planning on this.
yeah-- the torture of having to subscribe to the WP to read the article!!! Dayum!
Brutus: What ‘failed strategies’ would those be?
Well, certainly the Administration’s strategies for predicting the costs and outcome of the invasion and occupation of Iraq failed pretty catastrophically.
As a May 2004 article remarked,
We also know that the intelligence strategies used to estimate the WMD threat from Iraq prior to the invasion were a failure. Military strategies in Fallujah failed to “break the back of the insurgency”, as was being claimed a few months ago. On the domestic front, the Administration’s economic strategies failed to accomplish their predictions for job creation. There are quite a few other examples, but were you really unaware of all of these?
Yeah, why trust a general when you have the word of Chalabi to reassure.
Which reminds me: The CIA repeatedly warned the administration that Chalabi was a criminal and a liar, and guess who the administration chose to trust?
That’s right: the one who told them what they wanted to hear.
… but I’m sure Bush supporters meant to eliminate any responsibility for these mistakes. Bush made it quite clear that that is what they would be doing if they voted for him.
We already knew this is the reality (that a majority voted to reelect Bush), but it is the soundness of this logic that is the entire crux of this debate. Why does bringing up Bush’s rather narrow victory over and over equate, in your mind, to a refutation of the idea that such a verdict in the court of oppinion amounts to no form of “validation”, but rather an example of the power of deception? From out point of view, there was no justification for attacking Iraq, which recent events have definitively borne out. There were no WMDs, and there never was an imminent threat. Al Qaeda and OBL had nothing to do with Saddam. They were enemies, for heaven’s sake. Given the shoddy rational and factual pretense for the war, it strains credibility that WMDs were the real motivation behind it. Certainly Bush made no secret of his desire to see Saddam removed prior to 9/11, and Middle East regime change is entirely consistent with the openly stated goals of the Neoconservative movement. All this seems to add up to a grand deception. But, amazingly, Bush was able to very effectively equate the invasion with TWAT, and kept evoking 9/11 in what appears to be shamelss populist fearmongering to maintain a sense of constant urgency. Invasion seems to have been seriously contemplated prior to 9/11, and a virtual inevitability once 9/11 provided a sellable excuse.
The results have been nothing less than disasterous in Iraq, and anger against the US in the Islamic world is so inflamed, it’s difficult to see how any of this has made anyone safer, either in the near or long term. It’s difficult to see how one can be optimistic about the course of the war, given the steadily deteriorating security situation on the ground, nor how one could be optimistic about the future prospects for Iraq once the US inevitably withdraws, given the violently partisan politics of the various factions within the borders of Iraq, and their decades-, if not centuries-old grudges with one another. No margin of victory makes any of these problems go away, nor does the accusation of knee-jerk pessimism of the part of the Bush critics mitigate any of these very real problems. It’s not just an issue of perception. It’s an issue of very factual information that is streaming at us despite Bush’s near-constant state of public (and probably private) denial of the immensity of the problem. Once this problem was not our responsibility. Now nearly all of it is, and it’s not only disheartening to some of us, it’s downraight terrifying, when we realize what our country is capable of doing.
I just don’t see how the vote changes any of the above.
I know you guys seem to think we can miracle hundreds of thousands of troops to any point on the globe within short periods of time (and keep them supplied), but that just ain’t so. We made use of indigenous forces to rather good effect.
Sure, when we finally do get Bin Laden, it will be gratifying to see him and Lyndie England and Charles Graner share the same cell, but it takes a serious disconnect with reality to see our mission in Afghanistan as anything but a success. A phenomenal success, given the hurdles involved.
It was commonly believed, you know, that Iraq did have WMD. Even by the UN, or what were they doing upholding an embargo and ordering weapons inspections in the first place? As for ‘being welcomed’, I don’t see evidence of us not being welcome, outside of the Sunni minority.
Ah. Even presuming that is true (which has hardly been proven), how do the misdeeds of Chalabli constitute a failure of GWs strategy?
I remember this one. The dust had not settled on our thunderruns into Baghdad and you guys were hollering that the infrastructure was not fully up to speed yet in Iraq.
If you believe not enough is being done, it is only because you don’t have a clue as to what is being done. For example:
[quote]
or dealing with insurgency…
[/quote
Ya, not many people expected various and sundry Sunnis and imports to be such idiots about it, but it has garned them all sorts of sypathetic press among certain circles. Still, the plan for dealing with ‘insurgency’ is ‘fight a counter-insurgency’ campaign, and that is what is being done, to good effect. I think the problem here is more one of unrealistic expectations on your part than failures in strategy.
But that is a damned sight different from your ‘all those failed strategies’ line. GW has shown himself to be adaptive where needed, and contrary to the amount of obsessing he gets from the Left, he is not God. He cannot see into the future and provide a flawless roadmap that will lead to a chicken in every pot. What he can, and does, do is act the best he can on a given situation, given the information and resources at hand.