Time to take some remedial sarcasm classes. I’m not honestly suggesting that should I criticize Bush, the F.B.I. will be right over to persuade me to retract my comments. After all, they couldn’t catch a cold in Antartic("$£&(!!^£)£*%( **-----CONNECTION LOST------ **
Seriously though, what Bush is saying is that these people’s opinions are, because of their source, bad. He’s saying “Hey, i’m trying to protect the country, a noble goal, and i’m going to do it within the law, a noble method - but foreigners just keep on criticising my noble efforts”. I’m not saying my opinion, or anyone else’s opinions definetly have merit and we should all be listened to; merely that an automatic assumption that all these criticisms are invalid solely because they come from non-Americans is a foolish position to take.
As a certified, bony fide American…American, hell, I’m a Texan, that counts double!..as an American citizen, I hereby confer a share of my bitching rights to friend jjim and friend Revenant. This places them on an equal basis for bellyaching about what a shitstain we have for a “leader”. By the same principle, I am empowered to bitch about Laptop Tony to an extent equal to theirs, so long as I refrain from sneering at thier Royally Dysfunctional Family and thier “cuisine”.
Yeah, totally. And he was probably, like, welcoming their opinions. Yeah, that’s what I get from his statement. He just mentioned it in passing, to, like, make sure his international brethren that he’s ordering shot, rendition’d and “alternatively questioned” feel extra valued. Like, totally.
Let’s imagine two fictional scenarios. There are no WMD (just like today) but the toppling of Saddam went smoothly, the new democratic regime came in with little internal strife, and we are implementing our exit strategy. Iraqis are thrilled to escape the yoke of Saddam, we are liberators. Did this security decision suddenly become sound defense strategy?
Second scenario, there WERE large stocks of WMD and there WERE plans to give those weapons to terrorist organizations, all found with rock solid UN-approved proof. The war is the same stinking hole it is today. Do you think Iraqis would be happy about our decision, given that their country is a shambles? Does their unhappiness suggest that we shouldn’t have gone to war?
In the first scenario, it was still a bad decision to go to war, even though Iraqis are happy. At best you managed not to fuck things up too much. In the second, it was a sound decision to go to war, even though Iraqis were made unhappy by it.
Yup! Bombed the shit out of an aspirin factory to prove it, too!
Of course, arresting, capturing or killing bin Laden when we had the chance would have helped, too…but alas your leader’s advisors felt it wasn’t ‘politically expedient’ to do so at that time…and thus, given that political expediency was the very rudder that guided his administration, your leader passed up the opportunity to have taken an action that, as it turns out, would have avoided 9/11 and its subsequent events altogether.
Now, since I know I’ll be challenged on this perfectly well-known fact by the ‘usual suspects’ (with a tip of the hat to you-know-who ), I’ll post just a few of the virtually endless cites on the matter:
Interestingly enough, according to review information in the last cite above, one of the reasons Clinton didn’t move against bin Laden was because of perceived public disapproval of U.S. military action.
Yep, he knew his demographic well. Far better to pass the problem off to someone else down the line and let his supporters rail against them instead…which, of course, is exactly what’s been going on around here, ad nauseum. :rolleyes:
I seriously doubt that there’s a poster on this board who could have done as good a job of protecting this country and its citizens from terrorist attack since 9/11 as Bush has done. It’s easy to cry, wail, moan and second-guess everything he has done, especially when when you aren’t the ones who bear responsibility for keeping this country and its citizens safe, but I’d far rather have Bush looking out for this country’s welfare than Clinton/Gore/Kerry any day.
And then countries like Spain toss out the leaders that listened to Bush. Or on a smaller scale, individual officials and citizens ignore terrorist or other activity aimed against us, or actively support such activity, because we’ve enraged them.
Only Americans are allowed to question the President. However, questioning the President is unAmerican. Therefore, no Americans disagree with the president.
So what did attacking Iraq have to do with Terrorism again?
The Clinton criticism might be valid, but on the other hand, the US failed to do anything about Castro for decades and that was a failing by both parties. I am not sure why you are convince Clinton could have removed Bin Laden.
I am glad you would rather have Bush than Clinton/Gore/Kerry, that is your right. But tell the truth, don’t you think we would have been better off with a real military man, a Colin Powell or even John McCain? Personally I think Bush was unqualified to lead us after 9/11 and has done a terrible job, but trying to look at it from the right wing’s point of view, surely there were many better potential leaders. His father was a far better Foreign Policy leader. I wish he had been in office when this came down.
Of course, I was talking about people in general as opposed to the Clinton administration in particular, but I suppose if braying like a jackass again makes you feel better then by all means.
If only he’d done a little better job protecting it before 9/11.
WOuld that be the same Bush who not only doesn’t know where bin Laden is but publicly stated that he doesn’t care and doesn’t think about it?
I think I’ve done a better job than Bush has over the last 5 years of protecting America. In that time I’ve mostly gone to work, gone to the pub, played some hockey, gone skiing, a bit of diving, that sort of thing. In doing so, I have managed not to incite hundreds of thousands of people to despise the USA with a passion, and give them reason to want to attack you.
Bush, on the other hand, has managed to make the USA somewhat less popular than it used to be. By “somewhat”, I mean “almost completely”. By “less popular than is used to be”, I mean “despised”. I hate to think what al-Qaeda’s stationery bill for application forms must be these days, because the various wee policies of the Bush admin must have been the greatest recruiting drive they’ve ever had.
My memory is fuzzy, so please remind me what Bush did about terrorism prior to 9/11. How did he address the warnings re: Bin Laden from the previous administration? There must be some recorded speech, debate, campaign promise, essay, etc. from Bush prior to 9/11 that showed how serious he was about stopping terrorism. A single link would be sufficient.
That’s a book. In the absence of quotes or paraphrases, complete with page numbers, whether a book (or any other voluminous material) is in fact a cite that supports your argument is effectively an untestable claim.
Now, you’re citing Joe Blow who’s blowing off steam while commenting on a Regnery book. Now that’s a really strong cite. I yield.
Any of us lefty posters could have saved 2670 American lives (and counting) quite easily during that time, by not invading Iraq.
Piece of cake.
When you realize that almost as many Americans have died in Iraq as died on 9/11, and far more Americans have been seriously wounded in Iraq as were seriously wounded on 9/11, it comes down to this: even if Clinton was 100% responsible for 9/11, and Bush wasn’t responsible for it at all (“you’ve covered your ass” - Bush, 8/6/01), then Bush has effectively pulled even, in terms of unnecessary American casualties in the GWoT.
But what it all comes down to, in the view of the Right, is that Clinton was not supposed to miss even the most remote opportunity to get bin Laden, even before he’d been behind any major attacks on the U.S., but Bush wasn’t supposed to do anything about terror between 1/20/01 and 9/11/01, and it’s no big deal that he hasn’t managed to bring bin Laden to justice (or to a fiery end) in the five years since he killed 3000 Americans.
), I’ll post just a few of the virtually endless cites on the matter: