This is a sleight of hand.
Partly we have regulations that are on the books and then taken off. Partly we have enforcing regulations that remain. See Post #15 above for that. The Bush administration laid off enforcing oversight to the point of firing people for being too aggressive (aka doing their job).
I see it more as dodging the question…and obviously I have a different opinion as to who is doing so at this point…
I read post #15…and I’m not seeing how this impacted our current financial and economic crisis. Again, afaik most of the de-regulation effecting the current crisis (both the housing and the hedge funds aspect) were pre-Bush. No? Smoke and mirrors? Fine…then prove it and I’ll be more than happy to retract and agree with you. I have no real stake in this, nor reason to play ‘sleight of hand’ games on this issue since I think Bush was a disaster as a president.
-XT
I am unaware of what regulations must be specified by Congress and signed into law and what regulations are simply drawn up by the likes of the SEC in the course of doing their job. Not to mention what happens if the SEC, at the instruction of the administration, simply eases up on its policing efforts. You can have a law banning smoking marijuana but if the local police do not enforce it at all then what?
My post in #15 says, “As for Mr. Bush’s banking regulators, they once brandished a chain saw over a 9,000-page pile of regulations as they promised to ease burdens on the industry. When states tried to use consumer protection laws to crack down on predatory lending, the comptroller of the currency blocked the effort, asserting that states had no authority over national banks.”
Sounds to me like the Bush administration oversaw the gutting of regulations intended to oversee the financial industry and went so far as to actively block some state’s efforts to impose stricter regulation. Further, they promised a “kinder, gentler” SEC and fired one head of the SEC for being too aggressive in doing his job.
If that does not count as “proof” to you then please debunk the New York Times and its article based on “interviews with dozens of current and former administration officials.”
You got better? Have at it.
(paraphrasing a joke)
…But not a land war. We couldn’t win. There’s like, a brazillion of them.
There’s two legitimate schools of thought on government services. Some people feel they accomplish things that could not be accomplished otherwise and therefore deserve the money they cost. Other people argue that these services do not justify the cost and they should be eliminated. Both groups have some valid points to make.
But then there’s the third school that seems to have become the foundation of modern conservative policies. It claims that government services accomplish nothing but then goes ahead and finances them anyway. They act like an agency like FEMA can’t serve any useful purpose in responding to a major emergency so you might as well use it as a public sinecure for political cronies.
“Hi, I’m new here, and I’d like to recapitulate half of the history of GD for the last eight years, all at once.” :p;)
auburntiger11, I think you’ll have a more productive experience here if you read some previous threads and maybe narrow your questions some more. This thread is just going to explode in a dozen different well-trodden directions.
I see that I am kind of out numbered in my opinion of things. It’s great though I enjoy hearing the other side of the argument so I can come up with my own thoughts on these issues.
With the war though, at the time immediatly after the attacks, we had to do something, and I am thankfull we had a president to have to balls to do it even though looking back it wasn’t the best decision based on the results we have today. I do not know what everybody on here thought we should do after the attacks but it is just too easy to say, eight years later, what we should have done.
We as civilians do not know what all our military leaders knew when deciding on the attacks, mabe if they didn’t use DMD’s as an excuse and simply that we believe that is where our attackers are this might be a whole new ballgame. I just have to trust what they did what they thought was right at the time because regardless of what you say you have know idea about what all our goverment knew at the time.
We must also realize this, our country has a very hard time leaving another country that we have occupied, in fact I don’t think we ever have. We are stationed in 100+ countries around the world and will continue to do so.
You need to get your head around one VERY important point.
Iraq and Saddam Hussein had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11. Bush piggy-backed on our national fear after 9/11 to attack Iraq. He used WMD as a premise for that attack, and to engage our fear, despite them having very good evidence that no such things existed in Iraq.
That is why people say it is like Japan bombing Pearl Harbor and Roosevelt deciding to invade Brazil because of it. It is that absurd.
But what we did was wrong. As stated mutiple times above, Iraq had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks. Going into Afghanistan was the right course of action, and I believe any POTUS would have authorized the action.
It’s absurd because it’s a really stupid analogy. The US didn’t have a history of conflict with Brazil, so there was absolutely zero reason we’d invade Brazil if attacked by Japan. We DID have a history of conflict with Iraq, so there was a non-zero (though admittedly low) reason to invade Iraq.
A better (but still flawed) analogy would be being attacked by Japan and invading Germany. That’s because Roosevelt was looking for a political reason to go to war with Germany similar to what Bush was looking for to do the same in Iraq.
Using the Brazil analogy though is so over the top the folks doing so are simply making themselves look biased to the point that there is no sense debating with…and it’s a shame because it really WAS stupid for the US to invade Iraq. But taking it to that level really doesn’t do the argument any good…quite the opposite.
I think you have a flawed perception of events. Right after 9/11 we DID so quite a bit. For one thing we applied a lot of pressure on the Taliban in Afghanistan to give up the members of AQ that were in various bases in that country. Failing to do so, we were able to assemble a coalition of forces from other countries and began military operations against the Taliban and Afghanistan.
THIS was the right thing to do. Then we invaded Iraq. This wasn’t about balls or guts…it was sheer stupidity both at the time and today.
Well, I think your trust in our government to do the right thing is misplaced…to say the least.
Sort of a catch 22, don’t you think?
-XT
We knew what to do, then, as well. We went into Afghanistan, (where bin Laden was actually living), and we helped the Afghans overthrow the Taliban regime, giving us the opportunity to help rebuild that country in a more prgressive manner. (Not that we would have done it right, but we had the opportunity.)
The Iraq invasion was over a year later, over the objections of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the military, with no clear goals, and against a country that had nothing to do with the WTC/Pentagon attacks and who was not, (at that time), a significant sponsor of terrorism. (After Bush began rattling his sabre, Hussein paid out some money to the families of a few suicide bombers in the Middle East and he had supported one group of terrorists acting against Iran and another group attacking Turkey–both of which were small potatoes. He had no part in al Qaida or Hezbollah or Hamas or any other major terrorist organization. (We are now using the services of the anti-Iran terrorist group, so it was a bit hypocritical of us to condemn him for that.))
Please consult a calendar. There was a gap of 18 months between September 11th and the invasion of Iraq, with another war started in the meantime.
It was a stupid decision on its own terms in 2002 and 2003.
Some of us knew the war was a stupid idea before it started, so I don’t accept any criticism for hindsight.
We know what was said in public, and that nearly all of it was false.
That’s unfortunate, but luckily, not all of us do that.
Reason #58 not to go in in the first place.
I obviously need to do my homework before I try to discuss anything militarily with a bunch of military experts. I am just coming to you with my own opinion and after speaking with and listening to several military personnel about this matter. I just dont believe most of the replies on this thread are what everyone believed the day we were first attacking iraq. I mean if you get all your secret military information from the news channel that favors your party then I am sorry for you. I am sure people will be sorry for me in what I believe so save yourself.
Nobody here has claimed military expertise.
Who were they, and what did you discuss with them?
In other words, having made some mistakes and failed to make a good argument, you’re now accusing everybody else of being dishonest. Good show.
It’s what I belived then and what I believe now.
Its what I believed then. Its what I* know *now.
Well, the information we were getting then was falsified by the administration. So yeah, perhaps on the day of the invasion the public and Congress did overwhelmingly believe that Hussein did have WMD or was trying to get them.
Thing is it was all bullshit and the administration knew it.
Recall the Valerie Plame scandal? Valerie Plame was a CIA operative outted by the administration in retribution for her husband’s OP/ED piece in the New York Times titled, What I Didn’t Find in Africa. The writer of that piece was Joseph Wilson, Valerie’s husband, who was sent by the administration to find evidence of Hussein trying to buy uranium from Niger. He did not find that evidence, told the administration as much, yet Bush went ahead and said in his State of the Union address: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.”
But it wasn’t so. Wilson blew the whistle on them and they outted his wife as a CIA agent (effectively ending her career in that regard not to mention being a hideous thing to do to an intelligence operative) to punish him.
Nice huh?
There are lots of other examples of where there was good evidence that Bush was wrong about WMD in Iraq which Bush largely ignored or swept under the rug. We have done those threads here at length. Feel free to search this Board for those discussions. Lots of good information there.
TL;DR version
Bush bullshitted everyone. So what you “believed” was based on faulty information at the time.
It’s unquestionable that a lot of people have changed their minds about the war; they believed some silly promises that it could be done on the cheap and over in a few months, but when this proved to be very wrong and the war became more painful than they expected, they changed their minds. Many of them should have been smarter in the first place, but not everybody thought this was a great idea at the time. I’m not sure what auburntiger11 hopes to accomplish by waving it all off as second-guessing.
This hasn’t been a military discussion. No military expertise is required to understand it, and no military expertise can support any of your positions.
Do you disagree with either of the following statements?
The 9/11 attacks were carried out by Saudi Nationals with support from the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Iraq played no role whatever in the attacks and had no working relationship of any kind with al Qaeda, the Taliban or Osama bin Laden.
If you agree that both of those statements are true, then you have no basis for alleging that the invasion of Iraq had anything to do with 9/11.
For the record, there was some VERY spirited discussion on this board in the run up to Iraq and a great many of us on this board (and in the public at large) were HIGHLY skeptical of Bush’s justifications for the invasion and we opposed it vociferously. Not only were all of our misgivings proven to be valid, things turned out even worse than we thought.
Hell, even most of us who opposed the invasion thought we’d find some kind of banned weapons. We thought we were already cynical, but even we misunderstimated the W adminstrations capacity for shameless mendacity. We were such children then.
And most of us who did support (at least nominally) the war in Iraq at the time have since regretted this stance once the facts started really coming out. Myself, while I don’t agree with many on this board that Bush et al KNEW the info was false, it’s fairly obvious that Bush and his merry men were not only wrong but stupidly and blindly wrong, glossing over or cherry picking data in order to convince themselves and the rest of the country that the case for Saddam and Iraq being a clear danger/threat to the US was much stronger than it in fact was…and this is pretty much an overstatement. To state it bluntly there WAS no case at all.
And so we are in a war that we didn’t need to be in…and it’s a war we WOULDN’T have been in had Gore been president (to bring this back to the original OP). As others have said, no special military knowledge is necessary to arrive at this conclusion.
-XT