Sometimes I think W deliberately pretends to be stupider than he is, for the sake of “regular guy” appeal. He’s no longer facing re-election, but by now the habit has become ingrained.
If there’s anything to be gleaned from this and Iraq, it’s that the intelligence community doesn’t know jack shit, period. Why do we pay these people at all? I can guess as well as they can, apparently.
So your eyes can get stuck like that if you keep crossing them!
Can you explain the context of this for those of us who have no idea why that might be the case?
I usually go with, “FUCK YOU! FUCK YOU! FUCK YOU! FUUUUCK YOU!!! AAAAAAGH!” Not particularly eloquent, but it’s as coherent as I usually get.
Well, you could start here. Yeah, yeah, it’s Wikipedia, but you will find no shortage of cites regarding this issue. This doesn’t address why they’re not a democracy, but is definitely one of the main catalysts for why our relations are so bad, and our responsibility for it. We’ve sewn and have been reaping since then.
Nitpick: Revolutionary Guard.
And I fail to see a real difference between declaring the guard to be terrorists and declaring their whole country to be a terrorist supporting state, which we’ve done for years with little controversy.
To be fair, I doubt that any of us has read the actual report. I suspect that it is usually couched in terms of probabilities rather then certainties. It’s the interpretation of the reports that seem to cause the problems, not the reports themselves.
The real stupidity is when Bush supporters call the Iran pres an idiot and a madman, drunk on power who might blow up the world with nukes- uh hello? That’s exaclty what your hero is, but somehow its ok because he’s from the US?
50 years ago the US and Britain backed a coup that overthrew the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran and installed a Western-friendly monarch. Now we’re criticizing the quality of their democracy. How is there no irony there?
Because we are in a War on Terror. When the military forces of a foreign country are at war with our military forces, it generally is called “war”.
Iran had a democratically elected leader, Mohammad Mosaddeq. The CIA overthrew him and installed a dictator, the Shah of Iran. The Shah’s rule was brutal and repressive. The Islamic Revolution, which put the mullahs in power, was a response to the Shah’s rule. Both links have good info about the US’s involvement in the destruction of Iran’s democracy.
To attain eloquency and fluidity in your primal scream, end it with “…you fucking FUCK!”
What did Bush have to do with that, though? (Not so much directed at you, but at the poster her said it was ironic and hypocritical for Bush to criticize Iran on democracy.)
He is the face of our nation. Which is why his bumbling anti-diplomacy pisses me off so much. It doesn’t matter that he personally didn’t overthrow the democratically elected government of Iran or whether he personally believes that Iran was trying to build nukes. He speaks as the voice of the United States. The United States as a nation should not appear to hold others to higher standards than we hold ourselves or eager to jump to incorrect conclusions based on scanty evidence. He makes us look bad, and we can’t expect people to dismiss his statements as just his own personal opinions.
While I agree that Bush’s is diplomacy is bumbling, I think it’s absurd to say that no president can ever criticize another government because we did bad things in that country 50 years ago (or whenever). And I don’t see that he’s holding Iran to a higher standard than we hold ourselves wrt their so-called democracy. They are a democracy in name only.
BTW, it would be nice to have a link to exactly what Bush said and in what context before we fly off the handle about it. I did a little searching but came up with nada. If it was today, maybe it won’t appear on the WH web site until tomorrow.
It’s not even that. It’s that we as a nation refuse to fully acknowledge our mistakes. George W. Bush is currently the spokeperson for our country, but he by no means is not the only President who has made the same mistake. They all have to a certain extent. Those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
I’m not clear on what role President Bush had in the overthrow of Mosaddeq.
My understanding of the OP’s complaint was that it was ironic for Bush, specifically, to make the comments he did. If the OP meant that it was ironic for the US, as an entity, to adopt that position, I suppose I can see the point.
Well, I can’t find much to disagree with in that post. How it relates to the post you quoted from me, I do not know. Perhaps you didn’t mean it to relate, in which case I’m not sure why you quoted it.