When I was in high school, a kid took a cheap metal fork, bent a couple of tines and inserted it into an electrical socket. He was of course knocked on his ass, but survived this totally nonsensical episode.
If you were to ask me why a reasonably intelligent 16 year old thought it was a good idea to do something that, if one had thought about it even for two seconds, was totally non productive and very risky. I have no damned idea what was going through that boy’s mind to conclude, “I should do this now.”
Now, for Bush, I really think he thought he was doing the right thing. But if I scratch a little deeper, and question why he thought Saddam was going to attack Manhattan with anthrax-spewing model airplanes that can’t cover 30 miles, to say nothing of 7,000 miles, I am left similarly mystified at the reasoning.
I have heard so many people boil the war down to “did he have WMD or not?” In my mind, even if he had WMD, that didn’t mean he was a serious threat to the U.S., nor did it justify war. Tons of counties have WMD, but that doesn’t mean we have to invade them.
TonySinclair’s excellent post above should render this irrelevant. Of course Bush thought he was doing the right thing. Everyone is the hero of their own movie. The question isn’t whether he thought he was doing the right thing. The question is whether he was lying.
There are plenty of times where lying is the right thing to do. There are plenty of times where lying is not the right thing to do. I believe that regarding the Iraq war, Bush believed telling lies to get us into a war was the right thing to do.
Yeah, I thought the additional “and what septimus did” was overstating it, but I ran out of edit time before I could remove it.
Anyway, I’ll still describe the action as treasonous (and not because of some idiotic partisan bias, as you suggest), regardless of what a court said or what the penalty turned out to be. If someone wants to sue me for libel, bring it on. Septimus described the outcome inaccurately on several counts, but “treasonous” as an overall descriptor is just fine by me.
Seriously, burned a CIA agent out of petty spite in an effort to get back at her husband because he wasn’t playing ball with the president? “Treason” might not fit, but “treasonous” will do. On further research, “treasonable” would also serve.
If you want to maintain that I’m “OK with spreading ignorance”, that’s cool. You’d be a fucking moron to do so, but hey… freedom.
Arguably, I suppose. I haven’t been following the story closely enough to gauge the extent of the damage he may have caused, and his motivations are certainly better than Libby’s. If Snowden is eventually tried in a U.S. court, I could picture treason being considered as a charge. Not likely, I think, but not off the table. If someone wants to casually describe his actions as “treasonous”, I have no objection.
And your celebratory 5th Avenue parade will be spectacular, I’m sure.
I’m happy to use words like “murder” or “treason” in a common-sense way without a jury conviction for the specific felony. Deliberately outing a covert U.S. agent is clearly treason, IMHO. True, there may be no proof this is what Cheney, Libby, or even Novak did, but my contempt for Cheney is huge so I assume he was quite capable of it. And I don’t think my contempt for Cheney or Rove is misplaced. John, can you name a senior official from the JFK or LBJ Administration who was as evil (“profoundly immoral and malevolent”) as Cheney or Rove?
And, although I may be unclear on some details of the whole affair, I certainly knew the jailing of Miller preceded the conviction of Libby. The chronology was irrelevant to my terse summary.
I will obtain and watch Fog of War and try to educate myself, but I’m afraid my underlying opinion won’t change. Incompetence, however extreme, isn’t evil. Note that Bush-Cheney lies are not the key issue (as marshmallow stated, they thought they were framing a guilty man) since the WMDs were never the real reason they went to war anyway.
Just out of curiosity, septimus, how old are you? I’m thinking if you didn’t live thru the Vietnam War years it might be difficult to appreciate just how bad they were. But in the end if you’re sure your opinion isn’t going to change, then what is the use of further discussion? I and others made the salient points already if not for you, then for others reading.
I was draft-age for the Vietnam War, which became especially personal when I lost my student deferment. Among my peers there was widespread sentiment that the war was stupid and immoral, but I was living in my own “fog” then and geopolitics was not my concern.
Sweet Queen Jane was the least of my problems in those days. But what’s with elucidater calling me “Granpa”? I thought you were an old hippie yourself, 'Luci. In fact, wasn’t that you with the bells and zany beads blowing bubbles in the Golden Gate Park Panhandle in the Spring of '68?
OF course. To avoid *admitting *he didn’t actually have anything that anybody needed to be afraid of. A dictator rules by fear, and if he loses that weapon, he’s done for.
Oh, and magellan01? This is the Pit now. You can go ahead and say what you want to now.
I think one of the problems with comparing the Iraq war to other wars is that it is inextricably associated with Bush/Cheney. And those guys don’t have any counter-accomplishments to redeem them. Yeah, Bush spearheaded funds for AIDS prevention in Africa, but compared to Johnson or other presidents, there really isn’t much. Bush = Iraq and only Iraq in ways that you can say about Johnson or even Nixon.
I mean, if you want to talk about evil, what about sending > 100,000 people of Japanese ancestry (most of whom were US citizens) to concentration camps? But that’s not THE ONLY THING that FDR is known for.
I’m not seeing much value in playing the Quien es mas Evil? game. We have two wars, both of which were unnecessary, started on false pretexts where 100s of thousands of people were killed, 10s of thousands of US troops killed or wounded, and the US government manipulated the political structure of a foreign government. To say they are not comparable is to play the No True Scotsman game.
Off-topic: it’s a sad loss to American history that nobody remembers the name James H. Rowe, Jr., pretty much the only guy in the Roosevelt administration who tried to stop the internment.
