My father (who is decidely not pro-Bush) received this from one of his many pro-Bush friends. He asked my help in reviewing for truth and accuracy.
I am not looking for anti-Bush/pro-Bush propaganda here; there are plenty of other threads for that. Rather I am looking for logical refutation (or endorsement) of statements made here.
Have at it: play nice.
“Saudam” looks to me like a misspelling of “Saddam”, but then again, it could also be a misspelling of “Sudan”, which would be closer to the actual claim against Clinton. Some sort of a bizarre bastard offspring of “Saddam” and “Sudan”, the result of Bush Administration propaganda about a Saddam-al Qaeda link, and the mutagenic properties of glurge, I guess.
From this October 2001 Slate magazine article Should We Blame Clinton? by Jacob Weisberg:
So, in typical e-mail glurge fashion, U.S. acquiescence in the Sudanese government’s deportation of bin Laden to Afghanistan rather than Saudi Arabia–before bin Laden had succeeded in becoming a mass murderer yet–gets slurred into the U.S. turning down three U.S. refusals of offers by Saddam (or rather “Saudam”) to turn bin Laden directly over to the U.S. (Which offer Saddam was never in a position to make, of course.)
Phew. That’s the problem with those damned glurgemails; they spew out however many paragraphs of half-truths, distorions, spin, factoids, and maybe even outright facts, and it takes as long or longer as the entire original e-mail just to discuss one sentence.
Check out this link at Buzzflash.
I’ve included an excerpt from the text of that article below. I don’t know who de Wit is or what he is basing his claims on, but you asked for commentary.
CJ
From Prof. Cary de Wit:
"The original author conflates the invasion of Iraq with the ‘War on Terror.’ Most liberals don’t.
The Taliban may have been crushed, but it has sprung back with a vengeance, and women in Afghanistan are hardly feeling liberated.
Regional tribal warlords rule most of the country, and opium production is up to pre-Taliban levels.
There were UN International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors in North Korea until Bush called Kim Jong Il a pygmy and named NK to the Axis of Evil. NK then kicked them out. As far as I know, NK hasn’t allowed inspectors in since.
Bush didn’t put nuke inspectors in Iran or Libya, the UN IAEA did.
Libya’s cooperation with IAEA is credited by most of the people involved (not politicians or the press) to long-term, persistent diplomacy and delicate negotiations over the past decade. By the way, it’s spelled Libya, not “Lybia.”
The IAEA is the same agency that Bush and Cheney attempted to discredit
during the runnup to the Iraq invasion because the IAEA Director General, Mohamed ElBaradei, stated that there was no credible evidence that Iraq had nuclear weapons or had reconstituted any of it’s pre-1990 nuclear programs.
Other than that, I couldn’t agree more with Mr. Harden."
First the boasting about the speed they killed this or that is silly. So what if Iraq fell in X weeks if the US is still banging heads there more than a year later ? The US military is good... be the president Republican or Democratic. Never mind the fact that acting fast without thought seems a Bush given. So its silly boasting and irrelevant.
“Liberated” Iraq ? Doubtful. More important: Why ?
Crippled Al Qaida relatively. Al Qaeda has increased its stature and has outsourced its terrorism to any extremist all over the world. Terror is on the rise.
Put inspectors ?! Come on. Iran and Lybia opened up voluntarily to IAE inspectors… not US ones. North Korea hasn’t collaborated much from the last I heard… so that is false.
Captured a terrorist ? Saddam was a dictator, not a terrorist. So trying to stick the terrorist label on Iraq is silly attempt at justify it. Nevermind that he was a US ally before that.
“Bush did all this abroad” as if people dying outside the US is more acceptable ? Especially if some of them are american ? 300 average an year ? Most died in a one year period not 2 year period. What about victims of increased attacks elsewhere ? Iraqi dead ? Are they not important ?
Finally “not allowing another attack”… Luck or Real effort ? Bush has been pretty slack with port and airport security. Especially overspending in the wrong areas and underspending in internal security.
From cj finn’s link, quoting an earlier version of the glurge e-mail, which was in turn quoting a supposed letter to the editor from a North Carolina newspaper; emphasis added:
Fascinating. It’s like watching evolution in action. No doubt after a few more iterations it will have mutated into the ideologically correct “Saddam”.
Based on current news reports, I would say that we are NOT in complete control of Iraq OR Afghanistan.
I’d also say that the statement about “major hostilities have ended” was a goddamn crock.
The US was in Bosnia under NATO.
France is part of NATO.
actually:
So the UN had something to do with it.
http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/Bosnia/updates/dec95/12-20/ceremony2/
Probably just confused Bosnia with Serbia/Kosovo. The bombing of Serbia and Kosovo, IIRC, did not have any UN mandate. (Nor NATO, for that matter. Didn’t the Greeks threaten to veto (in NATO) any vote to bomb Serbia?)
It is a land of many mountains, many groups of people, and few vowels. Easy to make a mistake!
Yeah, the Clinton military sure did a bangup job, no? 
But no military, no matter how good, can be without the weakness of crummy leaders who scoffed at plans to ensure their continued safety and told them that there would be open arms and flowers instead of constant threats melding in and out of the populace and scattered death.
At this point in the game, there are certain phrases that I will key on to determine if someone is news-saavy or not. Someone who says “The terrorists attacked us because they hate our freedom” is someone I immediately peg as an unreliable source of information.
Similarly, “The Sudanese government offered to turn bin Laden to Clinton” should be treated as a sign of total idiocy.
(Oh, look! Condi Rice just tossed out the “terrorists hate our freedom” line! Ten points for me!)
While the Bosnia situation was terribly complex and poorly handled, and neverminding that France is part of NATO, and also neverminding that the Republicans cried like schoolgirls through the entire thing, does this mean that Bush would have stood by and let the genocide continue?
I believe the reasoning here was that the Clinton administration was not sure they had enough evidence to convict bin Laden. While to some people, that may be a minor issue now, it would be a huge issue at the time. Unlawful prosecution of an international citizen would have been politically damaging, and would likely have made ObL a great martyr.
Well, granted, though “liberating” countries isn’t quite a bragging point. Hitler “liberated” Czechoslovakia and Austria without anyone blinking an eye.
The real question here is - what is the state of those two “liberated” countries? In Afghanistan, warlords are still controlling good chunks of the land, government officials are being assassinated monthly, the economy is whirling, illegal opium exports are growing, etc etc. It isn’t possible to deny that good change has come out of it, but I wouldn’t cap as a rosey and democratic wonderland. In Iraq, well, we haven’t done diddly squat other than capture Saddam. We’re sitting on top of a civil war, and no one really knows what kind of government we can leave it with.
Actually, the Taliban are still quite active in southern Afghanistan. Pakistan is going absolutely nuts about them, but Bush has refused to do anything about the situation.
Questionably. No doubt, we’ve captured and killed a few head honchos, but assuming that putting Xes through their faces on a most wanted list means that Al Qaeda is any weaker is a fallacy. We also managed to give Al Qaeda the best kind of publicity they could dream of - they may be more underground now, but they are no less powerful. Neither does this say anything about other terrorist groups, or anti-American sentiment in the region.
Bush did that personally, did he?
Granted. He also allies with terrorists who slaughter as many. Pakistan doesn’t exactly have a shining reputation in the not-committing-genocide department.
We lost 600 soldiers in combat action in Iraq, yes. I don’t understand, is this a bragging point?
I don’t know if I would credit the Bush Administration for preventing another terrorist attack at home. AQ is not the kind of organization that does daily strikes to wear us down - they organize large, grand schemes that take years to plan and carry out.
First of all, what kind of numbnut says that we have Iraq?
Second of all, it tends to be easier when you aren’t worried about killing 10,000 civilians and spending $200 billion in the process.
But not as much time as it took the Bush Administration to launch an investigation into 9/11.
I’m sure they got shiny medals for it, too. Well deserved, they performed excellently.
Yea, probably, though I think Israel could give us a run for our money, person-to-person, and the Brits aren’t slouches, either.
I don’t see what this has to do with why Bush is so superior, though. Our military was “Great, The Greatest” when Clinton was president, too. Does this statement imply that America’s inherent worthiness come from military strength, gunboat diplomacy, threat of force, and imperialism, rather than superior values and government? Isn’t this the kind of thinking that started all of our problems in the Middle East in the first place? Is our solution to every problem brute force?
The mail concentrates largely on Democrat and Clinton bashing while hypocritically pointing out that Bush kicked a lot of people’s asses, and is thus cool. A Bushie will cream over it, a democrat will think it is stupid. That’s how these things go.
OK,
The US bombed Serbia and Kosovo under NATO.
France is part of NATO.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/303126.stm
Bonus cite, since I’m feeling all Google-y today:
So the UN had something to do with it.
NATO & Kosovo: Historical Overview (parentheses mine)
From this October 2001 Slate magazine article Should We Blame Clinton? by Jacob Weisberg:
So, in typical e-mail glurge fashion, U.S. acquiescence in the Sudanese government’s deportation of bin Laden to Afghanistan rather than Saudi Arabia–**before bin Laden had succeeded in becoming a mass murderer ** yet–gets slurred into the U.S. turning down three U.S. refusals of offers by Saddam (or rather “Saudam”) to turn bin Laden directly over to the U.S. (Which offer Saddam was never in a position to make, of course.)
I don’t belive that glurge should be fought with more glurge. Osama was already a mass-murderer by that time, he had been one for a while. No if we restrict the mass-murderer to a mass-murderer of Americans, well then it is still mistaken, as on February 26, 1993 six people were murdered and hundreds were injured in the first bombimg of the WTC.
“The memorial fountain, designed by
sculptor Elyn Zimmerman, was dedicated
to the victims: Port Authority employees
Robert Kirkpatrick, Steven Knapp,
William Macko, and Monica Rodriguez
Smith and her unborn child, to John
DiGiovanni, a visitor to the World Trade
Center, and to Wilfredo Mercado, a former
employee of Windows on the World.” from Cite (Adobe)
So yes, I agree that Clinton did not turn down an offer to have Osama deported to the US, or that the offer was made, but I don’t agree with the contention that the Clinton Administration or the US government had no knowledge that Osama was.
I went through this same glurge for a friend of mine whose mother sent it to her. Didn’t save my reply though.
Even if one grants the author his point, all that he establishes is that GWB isn’t the “worst president in history.” Sad when this is what your supporters are reduced to- “Well, he’s not the worst president in history.”
I sent twenty-two cases of vowels through a late night tv charity. What the hell happened to 'em?
I think that the point of this glurge is that Bush’s invasion of Iraq is just as bad as Clinton’s venture in the land of few vowels, ergo, Bush isn’t “worst president in history.” At worst, he’s in a dead heat with Clinton.
Iraq itself’s been liberated several times in the past century. They should be one of the most liberated nations on the planet at this point.
Well, Bush worked up “concern.” That counts for something doesn’t it?
I wish I could remember who was saying it… IIRC, it was an Indonesian fella who commented that al Qaeda is now a brand name. All of a sudden, by means of sensationalized reports and through hopeful attribution, the number of “al Qaeda related” and “aQ linked” groups has grown dramatically.
Bush did the "without firing a shot " part. The inspector part, well… let’s just say that he had a little help.
You have to see this through the lense of demonstrating that GWB’s not the “worst president in history.”
It’s not a brag so much as it’s just an example of, “He’s not that bad. I mean it’s only 300 a year.”
Bush did all this while not allowing another fire-breathing dragon attack at home, as well. I don’t worry about fire-breathing dragons while GWB’s on watch.
You missed the fundamental theme of this glurge even though it was explicitly stated. It’s not about GWB being superior, it about him not being the “worst president in history.”
Re-read it with this in mind.
Our family has a little place on the island of Krk. Not Kirk or Krak or something a bit more vowelorific, just Krk. Now, sure its a beautiful little island, but after a few centuries, you would think someone would say, “Hey, thats fucked up. Lets put a vowel up in that beatch, Zdanko.” Nope. Easy to spell, though.
You donation was probably sold on the black market.
Prob’ly bought up by those greedy Hawaiians.