Yes, that’s a brilliant philosophy that’s been proven effective in the past – just look at Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden, two noteworthy graduates of this policy. :rolleyes:
But then, anyone dumb enough to support Bush as this time is clearly not bright enough to think beyond black-and-white, “you’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists” platitudes.
(And ElvisL1ves scores the winning goal, though I won’t hold my breath waiting for Shodan and Starving Artist to recognize that…)
Your cites were far from relevant. They had nothing to do with proving what you were being challenged on.
Bush asserting linkages of Saddam with Al Qaeda, or buying uranium from Niger, or having WMD’s all have nothing do with what we were discussing. You claimed that Bush lied about Saddam’s collusion with Al Qaeda regarding 9/11. That is what I challenged you on. It’s quite clear that you are simply trying to divert attention from this by bringing up other topics.
Yikes is right! Look at all the straw men! Yellowcake from Niger hasn’t even been brought up yet in this thread until this post where you mentioned it. I have never said anyone is a liar except for you. I haven’t said in this thread any pretext for starting the war are valid or not valid.
You contradict yourself from one sentance to the next. It’s not because I support Bush that you consider me evil. It’s because I support the bush regime that in your opinion OK’s torture.
What’s the difference between supporting Bush and supporting the Bush regime? C’mon, just admit it. It couldn’t be clearer, and you’ve already stated it several times. Anyone who doesn’t hate Bush as you do is evil, debased, foolish and a villain.
:::Sigh::::
“Debating” the Bushbots is akin to playing Whack-a-Mole – no matter how many times you smack those suckers in the nuggin’ they just keep popping back up.
This thread alone is a good example of that. I mean, here we have at least two dimwits, trying to actually deny the fact that Bushco did everything in his power to fuse AQ and Saddam all into one big nasty “ball of terror” in order to get their invasion mojo on. How the fuck do they think that an astonishing 70% of all Americans came to believe Saddam was linked to 9/11?
Talk about disingenuous! I mean, beyond what’s already been posted, think random quotes like these (all of five minutes worth of Googling) had anything to do with that fact?
Source: Bush asserts AQ has ties to Iraq’s Hussein
Source: Cheney Lectures Russert on Iraq-9/11 Link
Source: State Goverment/Secretary
Source: Powell (Bush) ties Saddam regime to al Qaeda
Tell you what, when you Bushbots get through convincingly explaining how these examples don’t prove the willful misinformation campaign to tie the two together, I’ll provide a few hundred more.
Whack! Whack! Whack! Die already ya freaking mole!
I already said all this on the first page. If you are to dim to remember, that’s your problem.
Again, I said it on the first page.
And it is not my opinion that Bush’s adminstration OKs torture. It’a fact. Rumsfeld, Bush’s employee, authorized torture. There’s no rom to dsagree. He signed the bloody order. You really have no clue, do you?
No, you don’t have to hate Bush. He seems to be a genuinely likeable guy on his own. But it seems to me that common human decency would require disliking the things his administration has done. YMM clearly V.
Anyway, it’s pointless debating someone who seem to borrow his tactics from the Monty Python Argument Clinic.
Time to enhance our vocabulary:
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?r=10&q=equivocate
It is very naïve to pretend Bush is not doing a misleading effort when he talks and puts Iraq in the proximity of the war on terror; however, let’s take the point that this is not what the president did on this or other speeches, let’s pretend that the president did not equate 9/11 to Iraq.
We are still left with the sad reality that many people still believe the Iraq was directly related to 9/11, we are left with the sad spectacle of a president making a speech where he equivocates in the extreme, just to keep the easily misled into remaining so:
In this case, Bush supporters think they are very clever seeing that the words in reality show the president did not meant to equate Iraq with 9/11, first: there is plenty of evidence he is making speeches geared to create misleading headlines, (which also shows how dumb is to think the media is liberal) second: while they pat themselves in the back, supporters of the president choose to ignore the obvious contempt the president has for many of the American citizens. If you belong to a board that fights ignorance, this should make you more suspicious, not more supportive of the misleader in chief.
In the war against terror (TWAT) Iraq was a side show at best, now after the conquest of it, it is beginning to turn into a terrorist breeding ground, One has to blame the radicals in the field, but it is obvious to me that Bush is also responsible, It was an unnecessary second front in the TWAT (that sounds really dirty 
), To add more insult to the injurious comparison, many times I have heard that his administration members compare Bush to Churchill! Well, Churchill did made a pact with the devil (Stalin) to defeat a worse one (Hitler)
Many extreme rightists think we were supporting Saddam, but this is stupid, besides having him more neutered, the possibility of him going into exile was an avenue that Bush ignored, there were many scenarios were we could have gotten rid of Saddam without invading, they only required the patience of the leaders of the greatest generation. And one of the great lessons of the great leaders of WWII was that eventually the other devil was going to be taken care of, it was a question of priorities, now I see that if Bush had been president during WWII, he would have declared war to the Soviet Union by the end of the war in Europe (Patton would have been his favorite general). It would have been the most idiotic move in history, the only good news is that this is not like WWII, and the damage looks to be more manageable, however, it remains an idiotic move.
It was a move that Hitler would have approved, and this is why I do think comparing this to WWII is so wrong: We did what Osama wished us to do in Iraq.
News for you peanut brain: thousands of those killers would be shepherds, farmers or wedding singers if their relatives had not been killed by the troops, (I am not naïve, many of those people killed deserved it, but it is beginning to look like what for us is an acceptable level of collateral damage, for the people of Iraq it is not) I think that a modified but strong secular Iraqi force would have kept the order in place, one of the big idiocies of this war was getting rid of the Iraqi military as a way of controlling the state, It is looking that the reason for the swift dismantling was once again the ideological fantasies of the administration, it convinced them that the people would greet them as liberators and that they would comply with all the dictates of “the knights in shining armor”.
One has then to notice that one of the recent changes in the Iraq plan was to hire former generals of the defeated republican guard, as I see it, it was a tacit admission of the idiocy of allowing ideology to cloud your decisions.
In the war against terror, Iraq is collateral baggage.
[sub](and that last word was not a misspelling)[/sub]
I trust that everyone following this thread (which has to some extent degenerated into spittle spewing and name calling) recognizes that this is all futile. The initial grump, as I recall it, was the President’s persistent and repeated public statements asserting, implying or inferring Saddam’s complicity in the catastrophe of September 11, 2001. The response from a few of our friends has been to scream like stuck hogs that the President ( and his band of merry men) have never said any such thing and that anybody who says he (and they) did is just motivated by hate, HATE, HATE of our President and all his works. Our friends persist in this position in the face of repeated demonstrations that the President and his boys have done just that. This is no debate; it isn’t even a good long term rant, since a good rant requires some unifying factual basis in order to be artistically pleasing. It is just contradiction.
I suppose there are people who are so invested in an idea that no amount of fact and reason will shift them, but that sort of pig headed allegiance is simply not rational. To rabidly assert that the President has not done what he demonstratibly has done and then label the people who recognize that as liars, unthinking Bush haters, haters of the United States, and simple minded is not worthy of rational and reasonable men. It is worthy of five year olds disputing ownership of a toy in a sandbox.
It is almost as if the order has gone out that this position is to be held at all hazards and at any cost.
Your one cite regarding this is very weak. It offers no such proof. You can’t cite me the order what Rummy signed where he authorized the torture of children. In the absence of this I will reserve judgement. Since you’ve shown your nature to lie regarding Bush’s supposedly claiming that Saddam was behind 9/11, I see no reason to believe you about Rummy authorizing torture. Anyway, it’s long past put up or shut up time. If you had anything, we would have seen it by now.
It’s odd that you have such a problem with my debating style. I haven’t really offered up much of an opinion on anything. I’ve tried to avoid locking horns with you point by point. All I’ve done is ask you to prove your outragious claims. Something which you have been entirely unable to do. What you have done is insult me and anyone who dares to disagree with the conclusions you have already come to.
I don’t post on weekends, and I’m usually busy on Mondays. My apologies if I didn’t respond to anybody’s posts sufficiently. It’s tough getting to everything when dealing with such odds.
The grump was in fact about Bush trying to draw parallels between his own present conflicts and WW2 - and by implication, portraying himself as a great war-leader doing unquestionable good for the whole world.
And if that wasn’t enough, I just saw an excerpt of a speech of his on TV tonight (no cite, sorry) comparing Blair to Churchill. :dubious:
For the fifth or sixth time in this thread alone…the “present conflict” is the war on terrorism as a whole! It is being fought globally and in many ways. It is being fought diplomatically, it is being fought financially, it is being fought in cooperation with many of the other countries around the world that have terrorists in their midst, and it is being fought militarily. Once again, the war in Iraq in only a *part * of the war on terror, hence it is only a part of our “present conflict.” Bush is trying to rally the country not to lose its will to prosecute the war on terror, which includes but does not single out Iraq.
Does this prove something to you? I can’t imagine what you are driving at. If by Germany’s ally you mean Japan, the USA declared war on them as a DIRECT RESULT of a sneak attack on the USA. What would you expect the USA to have done? Are you trying to say that Germany was justified in declaring war on the USA because the USA declared war on the German ally Japan? And that the USA was somehow not justified in declaring war on Germany? The point of your post completely escapes me—please, fight my ignorance but be kind as I might be a touch slow.
The problem Starving Artist, is that Iraq was not a part on the war on terror, the left had doubts that it was, now those doubts have been confirmed many, many times, by the evidence. What I see Bush is doing, is to continue to spoil the war against terror by demagogically putting Iraq in the same column, remember: all the “traitorous” French, Spaniards, Canadians and Germans are fighting at this moment alongside Americans in Afghanistan, the rest of the world (except the shrinking carrot and stick coalition) sees the war in Iraq as virtually unrelated to the TWAT.
And by spoiling, I mean that once many more people figure out that they were had, the silliness of putting Iraq in the TWAT, will cause the formerly uninformed people, to even doubt about our justified efforts in Afghanistan, IMHO.
For the eighteenth million time, THE “WAR OT TERROR” DOES NOT EXIST. You’ve fallen hook, line and sinker for the Bush admin’s perpetual-war policy, and it’s working.
My point was in reaction to the pirrelevant comments about Germany declaring war on the US.
God damn unreal! You seem to be arguing against the extremely blatant FACT that Iraq is the central issue confronting this Administration by somehow blending it into TWAT. Yeah, ok, fine, you’d have as much luck as trying to hide an elephant with a roll of Charming. And I’ll even let you use a triple roll.
Look, pal, Iraq has most certainly become the central issue in the whole misguided TWAT that Bushco keeps peddling – and that you’ve obvioulsy bought into, hook, line and sinker.
I mean, WTF do you think Bush is doing in Italy and France right now? Hint: Iraq Iraq Iraq Iraq, and for good measure, some more Iraq. Groveling, as best as he knows how, in hopes of saving his political life.
Take Iraq out of the equation, and most of the worldwide turmoil goes with it. So, in essense, there’s your whole putrid TWAT.
So how the fuck can you not “single it out”? Unless one’s an ostrich of course. You’d know about that, right…
Found a great little talk show on streaming video. Hosted by a scholar named Saul Landau, from Cal Poly Pomona, it features a series of interviews with some highly qualified guests.
I found the interviews with Karen Kwiatkowski, Steve Wasserman and Chalmers Johnson, particularly enlightening and on topic for this thread. Thought some of you might enjoy them as well.
Very interesting - thanks (even if I am having trouble keeping the streams connected - maybe you’ve made them too popular 
)
Let me get this straight. A year ago, y’all were complaining about Bush acting unilaterally, but now that he is going to our allies, you complain about that too. Whatever. :rolleyes:
Nice rewrite of history. Two years ago, many of us were complaining that Bush was (a) relying on the goodwill/sychophancy of Blair, Berlusconi etc, and (b) predicting that he’d strongarm smaller nations into a position of compliance by economic means. All Bush is doing at the minute with his jaunt round Europe is reaffirming the membership of his ‘club’.
milroyj: your word for today, applicable to Bush, is waffle. Look up for the verb definition, it is a word applied unfairly to other political candidates.
His ‘club’? I’ll give you Berlusconi, but the Pope is part of his club? And Chirac? I understand Schroeder is going to be at the D-Day ceremonies, and I imagine that he and Bush will talk. He’s part of the club, too?
Hey, now, this is a Bush-bashing thread. If you want to talk about Monsieur Kerry, start your own thread!