Hey Mises and Hayek were crackpots according to you, so I’m pleased with your choice of slander, thanks.
This is incorrect. At the link in my previous post - oh here it is again,
It’s clear that many other people, both American and elsewhere, realized the weaknesses with Bush’s case for going to war. Bush and his administration ignored, falsified or ginned up the information they needed to sell the war effort, which was on their agenda from Bush’s very first National Security Meeting.
Here’s another article that sums it up better -
Bonus link to an article about the Chilicot Report, by British Intelligence, detailing the lies told by Bush & Tony Blair in the run-up to war.
Dude - nobody here thinks Hillary is anything but a hawk. The disconnect is why you think pathological bully Donald “Why Can’t We Use Nukes?” Trump is going to refrain from using the nukes once he finds the button.
I have often, on this very MB, said that she is too hawkish for my tastes. But what crazy logic. I can claim that Trump is a warmonger without making any claim one way or another about Hilary.
We know what Hilary’s record is. She’s in the Hawkish side of the Democratic Party. We don’t know what Trump would do, so we can only listen to what he says. You get treated to plenty of his recklessly bellicose statements in the thread I linked to. No need to do that again.
It took willful gullibility to believe the lies. Anyone who wasn’t trying to convince themselves knew better. And, they affirmed their support (and their own moral bankruptcy) when they re-elected Bush, mass murderer and torturer.
Trump’s likely to do even more damage, though. Worldwide economic collapse at the least, with all the suffering that involves. And an excellent chance of multiple wars, and a significant chance of nuclear weapons being used. He’s arrogant and incompetent enough to blunder his way into such a scenario.
This is nothing more than pandering to those who chose to believe the administration despite overwhelming evidence that they were lying.
The evidence for their lies were repeatedly posted on this message board between November 2002 and March 2003. The reason that so many people accepted the lies was good old fashioned jingoism and they bear the responsibility for not opposing the Bush Administration’s actions. They may not bear as much responsibility as Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Bush and Company, but simply claiming “they were lied to” does not mean that they surrender their duties to be informed citizens when the lies had all been exposed (aside from Faux News), long before the invasion.
If it is your contention that Bush was the idiot puppet that the extreme Left has portrayed him, you are welcome to that belief. It seems a rather silly defense.
Before Bush was elected, he declared that his father should have invaded Iraq at the end of the First Gulf War.
Bush leaned heavily on the Project for the New American Century for ideas, (bringing a significant number of that group’s members into his administration): that the was the group that had been promoting unilateral aggression by the U.S. to allow the U.S. to maintain its military primacy in the world.
Richard Clarke reported that in the days following the WTC/Pentagon attacks, Bush kept demanding that the various agencies needed to find a link between the attacks and Hussein. (There were no such links, of course.)
The Office of Special Plans was deliberately set up outside the normal intelligence channels to vet intelligence and pass on claims against Iraq. This despite the fact that not one of the 18 members of the OSP had any training in intelligence and that every single one of the claims for WMD that they broadcast was proven to be false, generally within a day or so of their release. (Most of the OSP members were publicity flacks.)
Colin Powell has been quoted as saying that the “intelligence” that he was bringing to the United Nations was bullshit.
Hans Blix and the UN inspection teams found no evidence of any WMDs in the winter of 2002/2003. They reported that Iraq was not leaping to respond to every inquiry, but that every inquiry was being addressed and none of them demonstrated any evidence that Iraq had any WMDs.
When we invaded, not one of the claimed sites of WMD manufacture or storage were even secured by our own military–we KNEW that there was nothing to find.
Now, you may wish to view Bush as an idiot who was too stupid to read the civil press reports debunking every single OSP claim of WMD, including claims of “nuclear tubes” and yellowcake, too fixated on following his own pre-election claim that he and PNAC wanted to invade Iraq to actually listen to Colin Powell or the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and too lacking in interest to realize that his primary advisers on intelligence were a bunch of advertising clowns.
If you hold him in such low opinion, simply to avoid calling him a liar, you are welcome to such a view.
I’ve made my stance pretty clear in the other thread. You insisted on using Hillary’s stump speeches and other flowery nonsense to suggest she is more peaceful than Trump. I prefer looking at her record, because we actually have that to look at. I even cited her support for a no-fly zone, a plan that would require more troops than Trump has called for.
You backed up your claims rather lamely in that thread. I could have cited a bumper sticker when making a claim that Trump will make America great again and had as much of an effect.
Bush, aides made 935 false statement in run-up to war.
The administration itself even admitted it lied.
The idea that Bush is stupid is a fiction created by the media, much like the fiction that Obama is a Muslim or Hillary is uncommonly terrible as far as politicians go.
The Bush administration deliberately misled the American public about the quality of the evidence they had the WMDs existed in Iraq. All signs indicate they truly believed the facts would vindicate them, but they were wrong. Rather than waiting for the facts to bear out the justification, they said what they needed to say to sell the war.
To reiterate: The Bush Administration didn’t lie about their belief that Iraq had WMDs, they lied about the level of substantiation they had for their assumptions. Anybody paying attention at that time knew this to be the case. I’m a liberal but I see huge blind spots on a consistent basis in the Democratic and even more left-wing parties. That said, if there was ever a textbook case of liberals accurately assessing a political situation and predicting the impending disaster, it was with the Iraq war.
[QUOTE=Der Trihs]
Trump’s likely to do even more damage, though. Worldwide economic collapse at the least, with all the suffering that involves. And an excellent chance of multiple wars, and a significant chance of nuclear weapons being used. He’s arrogant and incompetent enough to blunder his way into such a scenario.
[/QUOTE]
I was speaking to a very liberal friend the other day and he said he felt compelled to do everything to keep Trump from gaining power, because it would be like ‘doing nothing to stop Hitler.’ I said, ‘‘Well, Trump’s not as competent as Hitler.’’ He thought that was funny, but I was quite serious. I suspect we overstate the danger as we imagine the ‘worst case scenario,’ but for those things to play out, entire networks of people would have to be complicit, and I don’t see that many people who actually know what they’re doing buying his bullshit. Trump at his most fascist-y just wouldn’t get his ideas off the ground in our current Congress, or our current military. The difference between Trump and Bush is that Bush’s bullshit was plausible.
Is this correct? Mises I get. But I’m a little surprised if MfM thinks Hayek is a crackpot. Wrong, sure. Overzealous, certainly. But crackpot seems like a stretch.
Merneith, I’m at work now but will check out your link later tonight, well-poisoning words like “con man”, etc, notwithstanding.
Hussein had used gas and other weapons against Iran and his own people.
Following the First Gulf War, under the threat of further invasion, he shut down his manufacturing and destroyed his stockpiles. Evidence of that was being gathered at the time that the UN withdrew its inspectors after it was discovered that some U.S. members of the team were spying in Iraq outside the charter of their inspections.
Once the UN teams had left, Hussein did try to play a game of "no denial’ to keep up the appearance that he still had WMDs.
However, once Blix led a new UN inspection team into Iraq in the fall of 2002, it became obvious to everyone that Hussein did not have any WMDs. I defy you to find any of the countries that you claim “believed” in the WMDs making such a statement after September, 2002. The liars in the U.S. and U.K. excepted.
Where have you been in the last 12 years that you are not aware that Chalabi is widely recognized as a con man? You missed the Petra Bank scandal? (It was only in all the news media–even Faux News.
To correct the record, they are somewhat fringy, but not crackpots AFAIK. Hayek defended Pinochet with some vigor, saying that the Chilean general and tyrant was an improvement over the democratically elected Allende, which was not a mainstream view in his day or any other. Outside of Chile of course: banning free speech will do that. This wasn’t just a passing remark: Hayek wrote articles actively praising Pinochet, who overthrew Allende in a coup, and attacking human rights critics. Hayek’s longstanding fascination with the concept of temporary dictators is fringy, but not crackpot.
You tube commentators mumbling about fiat money today do trend towards crackpottery. The term itself though is a standard part of mainstream textbooks.
Not a crackpot. [del]Brad DeLong[/del] Bob Solow (even better!) notes that there is a good Hayek and a bad Hayek. http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2014/08/weekend-reading-robert-solow-hayek-friedman-and-the-illusions-of-conservative-economics.html
Trump is not an ideologue. But attention seeking showboats can be dangerous, but in a different way. Much of our governmental institutions is grounded on norms, and Trump is invested in neither party nor our system of government. You can’t just assume that the GOP and Democratic Congress will unify to stop Trump from breaking the law. In practice, that could prove difficult.
For example, the President’s power of the pardon faces few limits. You can order illegal acts, fire investigators and pardon law breakers as necessary. The President has ultimate power as Commander in Chief: the power of the purse is a rather partial limiter. And if the President insists he has the authority, the judicial branch is typically reluctant to get into the middle of an executive/legislative dispute in a timely manner.
Hitler was a dangerous ideologue. But consider Francisco Solano López, the leader of the Paraguay during the War of the Triple Alliance. Paraguay took on Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina during the 1800s. All at the same time. It did not end well for Paraguay, demographically speaking. Incompetents can do severe damage. Paraguayan War | Military Wiki | Fandom
You certainly did. And you had your ass handed to you in the process!
So when you call Trump the “peace candidate,” it’s not that YOU are lying. It’s that someone else lied, and you’re just passing it along?
Wow, you really planned this whole thing out.
Bush’s lies were not plausible. As well, the Republicans are largely falling in line behind him, and the Democrats have been almost totally spineless and deferential to the Republicans my entire life; I wouldn’t rely on either of them to restrain Trump. And as said he can do a great deal on his own.
And I was thinking more of what he’s do out of incompetence than malice, anyway. Wrecking the modern alliance system, collapsing the world economy and producing general chaos in the world is likely to cause major wars even if he does nothing else. And many of the things he want would require or liekly escalate to war, and other forms of mass killing. His “make the Mexicans pay for a wall” for example would probably result in war with Mexico. And his deportation of “illegals” and Muslims plan is certain to escalate into a general internal campaign of persecution.
No it wouldn’t.
That said, I can imagine Donald Trump actually transforming the Der’s routinely expressed hellscape into something resembling prophesy.
Donald Trump. He makes Der Trihs seem calm, measured, sane and prophetic. Brrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
ETA: OBTW, nice to seen you around Der. Your posts don’t fit too badly in the pit, oddly enough. Set against the other rants here, the hyperbole almost blends into the background. Almost.
The real question is whether David Brooks will look his grandchildren in the eye and tell them he voted for a evil war based on a lie.
The rest is mere posturing.