That’s true. If he’d had even a smidgeon of charisma he’d have won handily.
It is when the economy is bad, and it has a long way to go to get George out of the woods.
Could we maybe NOT hijack this into a discussion of Election2K? I mean, I know it’s Such An Important Subject, but we’ve got something a little more currently pressing here…
Maybe because the Bushies have bought off the Major US Media Companies by having Powell Jr. ignore the massive public outcry and remove the long-standing restrictions on multiple media outlet ownership in a city- something they wanted very badly. All they had to do is toe the line and not question the Bush Administration line.
If you are really good at spreading the company line and bashing Dems, Bush will personally give you the reach around. See i.e. News Corps’ desire to see the Echostar-Direct TV merger blocked. It was funny to watch how fast the see no evil, hear no evil Justice Department blocked the deal once ole Rupert made his desires clear. Fortunately, the Justice folks found not a single thing wrong with the News Corp’s own merger plans though. Gee I wonder why? Fair and balanced my ass. . . .
Blair in the UK is not nearly as lucky, as his own party is ready to reem him out in public over the “phantom menace” of Iraqi WMDs. Remember Tony, it is important to have your own media outlet if you are going to bald-faced lie to your people.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A12476-2003Jun4.html?nav=hptop_ts
I’d agree it’s “potentially more serious than Watergate.” Cover-up of a hotel room break-in vs unwarranted military invasion of a country? No fucking contest.
Watergate was more than about a hotel-room break-in; it was fundamentally about Nixon & Co. sabotaging an election, starting by choosing their opponent. (How much the Nixonian dirty tricks damaged the campaigns of most of McGovern’s rivals can be argued, but there’s no doubt that that was what they were trying to do. And they got off one lucky stroke that shot down Muskie’s campaign.)
I’d say that’s up there in the same neighborhood as blatantly lying to the country to get us into war. You can argue which one’s a bigger deal, but they’re both impeachment-sized matters, IMHO.
And by comparison with the real McCoy, lying - even under oath - about a blowjob is restored to its appropriate place as a comparative triviality.
I guess what really bothers me the most are two things.
The first is that drumming up a bullshit war is damned near an American tradition. (See, e.g., the Mexican War, Spanish-American War; See also, Wilson’s “he kept us out of war” campaign, Roosevelt’s oil embargo on Japan, and the Gulf of Tonkin as examples of the U.S. manipulating circumstances to try to fight the good fight at the time and place of its own choosing.) Many of us look upon the machinations of James K. Polk and William Randolph Hearst as ruthless and transparent manipulations of the American public and foreign policy.
Some of us also looked upon those machinations as absurd and impossible to recreate in the modern era–at least I did. Well, dammit, now we’ve got primary evidence that the American public remains just as fucking stupid as they were when they were drinking swamp water. I find that to be depressing beyond mere words.
The other thing that really bothers me is that I could have supported the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. Go take a look back at some of my nearly incoherent rants in the aftermath of 9/11–I was one of the guys out there saying that there are governments out there that needed to be knocked over, and people who needed to be hunted down and killed.
The thing is that the future I envisioned was a cooperative international effort to police those nations that cannot police themselves, hopefully raising the standard of living in those places while allowing them broad self-determination. We had the support; we had moral outrage on our side; we had the chance to make the world a better place.
It didn’t happen by a long shot. I don’t give a damn what anyone here or anywhere else says, when a government can squander near unanimous worldwide sympathy and support on a major issue and instead find itself nearly diplomatically isolated in a mere eighteen months, someone fucked up, and it wasn’t the goddamned French.
Now I’m looking at Friday, February 12, 1999 as the high-water mark of American power and culture. That was the day the small minded idiots made a mockery of our country, retook the government, and sent us on the path to the ancient history department.
We may get bigger, richer, meaner, whatever, but I’m worried we may never be as great.
We had the power to do such tremendous good, and we traded that power for the ephemeral ability to do the right things for the wrong reasons. Will the rest of the world ever forgive us for that?
IMO, We don’t blame America, we blame that selfserving Administration who are riding roughshod over the trust of the people.
I think that its natural to talk about the next election because that is the only way Bush is going to be punished for stuff like this.
Thats one thing I mentioned a while ago in some thread about the democratic contenders. Dean has been anti-war for a while and I predicted that while it looked bad for him then he gets to enjoy all the benifits of the fallout from the Iraqi war. I am willing to bet that Dean will edge out the other candidates with his use of the internet.
As far as punishment right now goes I’d like to see the media not get all over this. If the media never seriously starts talking about it it will be a fresh topic at election time. People will get to feel as if Bush is a liar as they are voting.
People will get to feel as if Bush is a liar every day for the rest of their lives, up to and including any election day on which he plays any part whatsoever.
iampunha, I think it’s just fine to talk about '04. Most of us in this thread know two things: our President is a liar and a manipulator, and he’ll win again if we can’t throw a decent opponent at him.
Shit, General Wesley Clark is the perfect candidate. Look at what he’s got over the current disaster:
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Very well educated: first in his class at West Point; Rhodes scholar.
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Well spoken. Most of you probably recognize him as the polished color-commentator on CNN during the last war.
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A general, by implication suggesting that he knows what he’s talking about when it comes to national security. That doesn’t translate to support from the Pentagon, though. They hated him.
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A winner. Pulled off the Kosovo thing with nary a hitch, though his record will be smeared by the usual scum.
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An apparent moderate. This has got to be the thing that scares the Pubbies the worst. Just like our buddy George W. did last time, Clark will have the luxury of creating his platform out of thin air as he requires it. If he’s smart, he’ll actually stick to his position if he wins, unlike our current wolf in sheep’s clothing.
With the right campaign this guy could dodge practically every piece of doo the Republicans keep in their shit-smearing bag. You watch–this guy is so dangerous that he’ll bring out the very worst the Republicans have. And we all know how bad that can be.
People will feel it, but it will be ancient history by the time people are actually going to vote. If it does not get much airtime the mantra “He lied about WMDs” would go nicely against all of the 9/11 patriotic stuff that Bush is going to try to use. Because the rather cynical defense of “It was good anywais” doesn’t work for patriots who want to have a blind trust that everything their president does is good.
Now Bush will probably have lied about something else by then, but I think that WMDs during election time have the chance to hurt him the most as long as it isn’t old news by then.
Call for an investigation now rising in the U.S. Bush Lapdog questions motives of those wanting an investigation:
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/afp/20030603/pl_afp/us_politics_iraq_wmd_030603233019
The new spin control:
:rolleyes:
More on the Bush Admistration dirty little secret:
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/030609/usnews/9intell.htm
and
Oops, Bush’s leading chickenhawk actually dares tells the truth:
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/iraq/story/0,12956,970334,00.html
What now Curious George?
Tom Tomorrow says that the Guardian quote is doctored. Though Wolfowitz does indeed refer to Iraq’s economic advantage in having oil, he clearly does not intend to suggest that the war was “about oil”.
As Marse Tom points out, we don’t need bogus ammunition. The truths is more than adequate.
http://www.thismodernworld.com/
This is how the Guardian described a comment Paul Wolfowitz made:
The US deputy defence secretary, Paul Wolfowitz - who has already undermined Tony Blair’s position over weapons of mass destruction (WMD) by describing them as a “bureaucratic” excuse for war - has now gone further by claiming the real motive was that Iraq is “swimming” in oil.
The latest comments were made by Mr Wolfowitz in an address to delegates at an Asian security summit in Singapore at the weekend, and reported today by German newspapers Der Tagesspiegel and Die Welt.
Asked why a nuclear power such as North Korea was being treated differently from Iraq, where hardly any weapons of mass destruction had been found, the deputy defence minister said: “Let’s look at it simply. The most important difference between North Korea and Iraq is that economically, we just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil.”
I initially took this at face value. But this is what Wolfowitz actually said:
“Look, the primarily difference – to put it a little too simply – between North Korea and Iraq is that we had virtually no economic options with Iraq because the country floats on a sea of oil. In the case of North Korea, the country is teetering on the edge of economic collapse and that I believe is a major point of leverage whereas the military picture with North Korea is very different from that with Iraq. The problems in both cases have some similarities but the solutions have got to be tailored to the circumstances which are very different.”
This space is no friend of Paul Wolfowitz, but bad information really annoys me. These guys do enough, it’s not like anyone has to make up stuff about them to make them seem worse.
Oh, I totally agree. When I said Election2K I meant the election wherein Bush and Gore ran. I’d rather not see this thread become “Bush won” “nope, he didn’t.” “Yes, he did. Supremes said so.” etc.
Didn’t.
You know, I can’t wait to read All The President’s Men… 2004.
iampunha & co.: The little hijack about the economy that I started was inspired by this thought, that the circumstances surrounding a scandal are almost as important as the scandal itself.
What’s forgotten about Watergate is the following:
1 - The economy was lousy. Inflation had run up to levels not seen in a generation or more. Ditto unemployment. The stock market was taking a tumble that would prove to be the worst since The Big One in '29.
2 - The Arab Oil Embargo, a contributor to all of the above, had occurred in '73.
3 - The Vietnam War was winding down to a conclusion that did not look like a happy one. This was demoralizing in the extreme.
Given all of this, Nixon’s popularity began diving almost as soon as the Inaugural Parade was finished. Watergate, under circumstances like these, could become a major issue. So Nixon, even though he was never impeached, was still driven from office.
Clinton, on the other hand, was riding on top of a terrific economy, and no major wars anywhere. Indeed, as Sofa King pointed out above, Bosnia had gone off without a hitch. This gave him a reservoir of popularity from which to draw when the going got tough, and so, even though he was impeached, he was never driven from office.
Bush, IMO, will be able to draw from much the same reservoir. He won his war, and the economy, while not doing great, is nowhere near as bad off as it was in '74. So it will take a lot for this scandal to cost him the election in '04. There’s certainly no question of his ever getting anywhere close to impeachment, despite the fact that this lie, unlike Watergate & Monica, actually cost lives, lots of them. But the war was won, and that’s the most important thing. That will overshadow the economy, unless we hit a crisis at least as bad as the one in '73 and '74, and I don’t see that coming.
DeLay said
“MORAL leadership. Don’t leave home without it.”
Winning the war was not the point. Opponents of the war were not opposed because they thought we would lose. Invading Iraq was no great accomplishment for the uS military, and Bush had nothing to do with the mechanical execution of the invasion anyway.
What is significant is what the public reaction will be when it really sinks in that he lied about the necessity for the invasion. His economy is still in the toilet and will only get worse. The neocons who pull his strings have become drunk with their own success and a new round of severely right wing legislation will soon pass his desk (including the truly repugnant “partial-birth” abortion bill).
As for the war overshadowing the economy…we need look no further than Bush Sr. to debunk that notion.