# Please help truth-check this (Bush v Clinton) **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [October 27, 2007, 3:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-help-truth-check-this-bush-v-clinton/424187 "2007-10-27T03:06:05Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![ElvisL1ves](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/5daacb/32.png) [@ElvisL1ves](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ElvisL1ves)\ **Post date:** [October 27, 2007, 2:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-help-truth-check-this-bush-v-clinton/424187/21 "2007-10-27T14:28:30Z")
Worked for the Swiftboaters, didn’t it? ---
**Author:** ![Johnny\_L.A](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johnny_l.a/32/1084_2.png) [@Johnny\_L.A](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johnny_L.A)\ **Post date:** [October 27, 2007, 3:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-help-truth-check-this-bush-v-clinton/424187/22 "2007-10-27T15:21:46Z")
Aiyiyi. Too much at once, and I haven’t had coffee yet. I’ll slog my way through the rest of it, but I have to comment on this one now. [QUOTE=ambushed] Just an aside, but there is one question that I have not heard a Democratic candidate answer – what would they have done had they been President on 9/11? The anti-Bush crowd insists that it was a mistake to go into Afghanistan and Iraq. Assuming that is true, what would they have done? Work through the U.N. to develop more sanctions? That has a poor track record. Open a dialogue with Saddam and ask him to stop being a bad guy? He laughed at U.N. sanctions. [/QUOTE] This is humbug. I’m anit-Bush, and I **don’t** think it was a mistake to go to Afghanistan. If they needed some over-age guy with destroyed knees to fly a Black Hawk for them, I would have said ‘Sign me up!’ In my opinion attacking Afghanistan was justified and appropriate. But then he goes on to link 9/11 with Iraq. One has nothing to do with the other! If he can’t understand that, then he won’t understand anything. The Bush Administration did a very good job of linking Saddam with the 9/11 attacks. But even they came clean and admitted this was not true. (They still slip it in occasionally though.) ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [October 27, 2007, 3:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-help-truth-check-this-bush-v-clinton/424187/23 "2007-10-27T15:29:20Z")
_The Nation_ has a cover story this week on [“The New Right-Wing Smear Machine”](http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071112/hayes) – “new” in that it is based not on mass media or even blogs, but forwarded e-mails, which can be used to propagate and repeat and reinforce any lie even long after it has been publicly debunked. **ambushed’s** friend appears to be an eager participant. > [@](#): > > Such is the power of the right-wing smear forward, a vehicle for the dissemination of character assassination that has escaped the scrutiny directed at the Limbaughs and Coulters and O’Reillys but one that is as potent as it is invisible. In 2004 putative firsthand accounts of Kerry’s performance in Vietnam traveled through e-mail in right-wing circles, presaging the Swift Boat attacks. Last winter a forward began circulating accusing Barack Obama of being a secret Muslim schooled in a radical madrassa (about which more later). While the story was later fed through familiar right-wing megaphones, even making it onto Fox, it has continued to circulate via e-mail long after being definitively debunked by CNN. In other words, the few weeks the smear spent in the glare of the mainstream media was just a tiny portion of a long life cycle, most of which has been spent darting from inbox to inbox. > > \ > > Rumormongering and whisper campaigns are as old as politics itself (throughout Thomas Jefferson’s presidency opposition newspapers and pamphlets spread the word of his affair with Sally Hemings), but never has there been a medium as perfectly suited to the widespread anonymous diffusion of misinformation as e-mail. David Mikkelson, who, along with his wife, Barbara, founded and runs the website [Snopes.com](http://Snopes.com), knows this better than anyone. Devoted exclusively to debunking (and occasionally confirming) urban legends and e-mail-circulated apocrypha, Snopes attracts 4-5 million unique visitors a month, making it one of the Internet’s most popular sites. In the early days, Mikkelson says, there were hardly any political urban legends, but that changed in 2000. “A lot of the things that were circulating in the world at large, things like ridiculing Al Gore for supposedly inventing the Internet,” started to be passed along via e-mail, as well as “a photograph of Gore holding a gun intended to mock him for not holding it safely.” > > From the beginning, the vast majority of these Internet-disseminated rumors have come from the right. (Snopes lists about fifty e-mails about George W. Bush, split evenly between adulatory accounts of him saluting wounded soldiers or witnessing to a wayward teenager, and accounts of real and invented malapropisms. In contrast, every single one of the twenty-two e-mails about John Kerry is negative.) For conservatives, these e-mails neatly reinforce preconceptions, bending the facts of the world in line with their ideological framework: liberals, immigrants, hippies and celebrities are always the enemy; soldiers and conservatives, the besieged heroes. The stories of the former’s perfidy and the latter’s heroism are, of course, never told by the liberal media. So it’s left to the conservative underground to get the truth out. And since the general story and the roles stay the same, often the actual characters are interchangeable. > > “A lot of the chain letters that were accusing Al Gore of things in 2000 were recycled in 2004 and changed to Kerry,” says John Ratliff, who runs a site called [BreakTheChain.org](http://BreakTheChain.org), which, like Snopes, devotes itself to debunking chain e-mails. One e-mail falsely described a Senate committee hearing in the 1980s where Oliver North offered an impassioned Cassandra-like warning about the threat of Osama bin Laden, only to be dismissed by a condescending Democratic senator. Originally it was Al Gore who played the role of the senator, but by 2004 it had changed to John Kerry. “You just plug in your political front-runner du jour,” Ratliff says. ---
**Author:** ![Baldwin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/baldwin/32/7264_2.png) [@Baldwin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Baldwin)\ **Post date:** [October 27, 2007, 4:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-help-truth-check-this-bush-v-clinton/424187/24 "2007-10-27T16:04:08Z")
[QUOTE=ambushed’s relative] Just an aside, but there is one question that I have not heard a Democratic candidate answer – what would they have done had they been President on 9/11? The anti-Bush crowd insists that it was a mistake to go into Afghanistan and Iraq. Assuming that is true, what would they have done? Work through the U.N. to develop more sanctions? That has a poor track record. Open a dialogue with Saddam and ask him to stop being a bad guy? He laughed at U.N. sanctions. [/QUOTE] The part I’ve underlined seems to me the most telling portion of the whole diatribe. If your relative, as implied here, really believes that Hussein was responsible for 9/11, then he’s bought into a whole self-supporting mythology that it may impossible to argue him out of. ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [October 27, 2007, 4:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-help-truth-check-this-bush-v-clinton/424187/25 "2007-10-27T16:12:29Z")
ambushed writes (quoting from an E-mail): \> On to Hillary. Little has been said about her college education. She had \> professors who were, and still are, Marxists. Many have said that she is a true \> believer. That’s probably a little too much. However, I do believe that she firmly \> believes in big government and big taxes. I do not. I understand what Gerald \> Ford meant when he said that “a government big enough to give you \> everything you want, is also big enough to take it all away.” This paragraph is truly a despicable piece of garbage. In what sense has little been said about her college education? It’s quite well-known where she studied, who she studied with, and what courses she took. What’s a Marxist for the purposes of this claim? Do they have to claim to be a Marxist, or does the person who wrote this E-mail think that anyone even slightly more liberal economically than himself is a Marxist? The notion that there were significant numbers of Marxists either as professors or students in universities in the late 1960’s or early 1970’s, when Hillary Clinton was an undergraduate and a law student, is wrong. I was in college in the early 1970’s, at a college that was considered distinctly “hippie-weirdo-freak-commie-fag-junkie” (really, that was what the locals thought of us as), and Marxism was definitely a fringe view. The middle political position was slightly liberal. They were some conservatives and some libertarians, and they outnumbered the few students who would consider themselves in any sense to be Marxists (and there were no professors who declared themselves to be Marxists). Hillary Clinton would have presumably encountered no more Marxist professors at Wellesley and Yale Law School than George Bush would have encountered at Yale and Harvard Business School. The writer of this E-mail makes no attempt to specify which professors he thinks are Marxists, let alone prove that Hillary met them or was in any way influenced by them. This is a ridiculous guilt-by-association argument. A person who believes in “big government and big taxes” is not thereby a Marxist. Both conservatives and liberals believe in big government, just in different parts of the government being big. Wanting to raise taxes doesn’t make you a Marxist either. It may mean, for instance, that you want avoid increasing the federal deficit. The writer of this E-mail hasn’t even made any attempt to show that Hillary believes in big government and higher taxes. ---
**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\ **Post date:** [October 27, 2007, 4:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-help-truth-check-this-bush-v-clinton/424187/26 "2007-10-27T16:58:57Z")
[QUOTE=CJJ\*] I think the posters in this thread have done an admirable job of debunking this claptrap, but I have to wonder at this point why anybody bothers with idiots like this (not **ambushed** , but the person he quotes). Debating these clowns legitimizes their frame; it’s like the “teach the debate” strategy Intelligent Design uses to bamboozle local school boards. The only thing this guy needs is a healthy dose of ridicule and scorn; his post proves his ignorance, so let it stand as is. There’s a reason legitimate historians don’t argue with Holocaust deniers… [/QUOTE] Good point. I should have added that whoever wrote that junk is a True Believer-- someone who will NEVER agree with any Democrat and is just looking for whatever excuse he can find to justify (ha!) his political position It really is a waste of time debating with someone like that. ---
**Author:** ![Zoe](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/a4c791/32.png) [@Zoe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Zoe)\ **Post date:** [October 27, 2007, 5:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-help-truth-check-this-bush-v-clinton/424187/27 "2007-10-27T17:53:34Z")
I don’t think my experience in Nashville was all that unique, but I had no trouble finding Marxists and hardcore Socialists during the Seventies. I was acquainted with one who ran for a national office. Her ex-husband was a friend and had met my first husband through their shared political interests. One of my teaching colleagues was a Marxist. Her students (and most of the other teachers) had no idea. Her political beliefs were not something that she discussed in the classroom. At present I know a young woman who completely lives her Communistic ideals. She is the daughter of the person who ran for national office. None of these people are into the violent overthrow of the government. The only reason they tend to be so quiet about their beliefs is that people make automatic assumptions about their character and beliefs when the label “Communist” is used. It becomes “Commie” and they become the red-eyed evil enemy with fangs and talons. ---
**Author:** ![Spiny\_Norman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/9de0a6/32.png) [@Spiny\_Norman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spiny_Norman)\ **Post date:** [October 27, 2007, 6:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-help-truth-check-this-bush-v-clinton/424187/28 "2007-10-27T18:16:26Z")
> [@](#): > > This of course happened when Bill was President. The troops were sent into Somalia without a clearly defined mission, and they were pulled out when a fight ensued. And Somalia has turned into a disaster. That is leadership? Bush I ordered the invasion, then left office and left Clinton holding the bag. That is leadership? The US has enemies, sure enough. It also has traditional friends. But GWB has pretty much managed to make himself despised even among friends, which makes it much tougher for any government to align themselves with the US. When he leaves, overseas governments will at least have the option of cooperating with the US without having to defend themselves (too much) to their electorate. ---
**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\ **Post date:** [October 27, 2007, 6:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-help-truth-check-this-bush-v-clinton/424187/29 "2007-10-27T18:46:55Z")
[QUOTE=Spiny Norman] Bush I ordered the invasion, then left office and left Clinton holding the bag. That is leadership? [/QUOTE] To be fair, though, it’s not like he just quit being president and Clinton had to come in an clean up. There was an election, and he lost. Although he sent the troops in after the 1992 elections (just barely), was he supposed to pull them out just because he was leaving office in Jan? You might argue that it was foolish to send them in originally, but it’s not evidence of lack of leadership that the deployment extended into Clinton’s term. ---
**Author:** ![ManiacMan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/b782af/32.png) [@ManiacMan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ManiacMan)\ **Post date:** [October 27, 2007, 8:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-help-truth-check-this-bush-v-clinton/424187/30 "2007-10-27T20:40:37Z")
Leadership would have been displayed had Clinton actually displayed some. :rolleyes: ---
**Author:** ![Captain\_Carrot](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f0a364/32.png) [@Captain\_Carrot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Captain_Carrot)\ **Post date:** [October 27, 2007, 9:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-help-truth-check-this-bush-v-clinton/424187/31 "2007-10-27T21:10:40Z")
What does that even mean, **ManiacMan**? I’m honestly confused, here. ---
**Author:** ![F.U.Shakespeare](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/aca169/32.png) [@F.U.Shakespeare](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/F.U.Shakespeare)\ **Post date:** [October 27, 2007, 9:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-help-truth-check-this-bush-v-clinton/424187/32 "2007-10-27T21:30:25Z")
[QUOTE=John Mace] Good point. I should have added that whoever wrote that junk is a True Believer-- someone who will NEVER agree with any Democrat and is just looking for whatever excuse he can find to justify (ha!) his political position It really is a waste of time debating with someone like that. [/QUOTE] I agree that you’re not going to change the mind of someone who’s chosen to accept falsehoods to justify their hatred. However, I think it’s important to confront such crap when it’s spewed at us. If other people are reading (or listening), a rational, well-documented rebuttal can work wonders in defusing the slander. And although rebuttal can be done with humor, simply ridiculing the crap can obfuscate the fact that it’s a lie. As for ignoring it, that’s what the swiftboaters of the world want you to do. ---
**Author:** ![Der\_Trihs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/der_trihs/32/233_2.png) [@Der\_Trihs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Der_Trihs)\ **Post date:** [October 27, 2007, 9:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-help-truth-check-this-bush-v-clinton/424187/33 "2007-10-27T21:47:42Z")
[QUOTE=John Mace] No WMDs. No Democracy spreading around the Middle East. The only winner in the Iraq war is Iran. They’re loving every minute of it. [/QUOTE] And antidemocratic forces in the ME in general are loving it. We’ve managed to convince enormous amounts of people that “democracy” means “chaos and mass death”. Consider [Syria :](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/25/AR2006102501893.html) > [@](#): > > DAMASCUS, Syria – Horror at the bloodshed accompanying the U.S. effort to bring democracy to Iraq has accomplished what human rights activists, analysts and others say Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had been unable to do by himself: silence public demands for democratic reforms here. > > \< snip \> > > “Now, talking about democracy and freedom has become very difficult and sensitive,” Salam said. “The people are not believing these thoughts anymore. When the U.S. came to Iraq, it came in the name of democracy and freedom. But all we see are bodies, bodies, bodies.” ---
**Author:** ![ManiacMan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/b782af/32.png) [@ManiacMan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ManiacMan)\ **Post date:** [October 27, 2007, 9:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-help-truth-check-this-bush-v-clinton/424187/34 "2007-10-27T21:53:48Z")
All of those dead bodies are being supplied by whom? ---
**Author:** ![Der\_Trihs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/der_trihs/32/233_2.png) [@Der\_Trihs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Der_Trihs)\ **Post date:** [October 27, 2007, 9:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-help-truth-check-this-bush-v-clinton/424187/35 "2007-10-27T21:56:47Z")
[QUOTE=ManiacMan] All of those dead bodies are being supplied by whom? [/QUOTE] Us. We are the ones responsible for the devastation in Iraq. ---
**Author:** ![Antonius\_Block](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/51bf81/32.png) [@Antonius\_Block](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Antonius_Block)\ **Post date:** [October 27, 2007, 9:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-help-truth-check-this-bush-v-clinton/424187/36 "2007-10-27T21:59:24Z")
[QUOTE=ambushed] (not his _own_ views of course) …he hasn’t stolen any White House furniture (like Bill and Hillary did). [/QUOTE] This is rather a pointless comparison. The claims (debunked in earlier posts) were that the Clintons stole furniture _when leaving the White House in 2001._ Until GWB leaves office, one cannot estimate his furniture-stealing tendencies. ---
**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\ **Post date:** [October 27, 2007, 10:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-help-truth-check-this-bush-v-clinton/424187/37 "2007-10-27T22:00:56Z")
[QUOTE=F. U. Shakespeare] I agree that you’re not going to change the mind of someone who’s chosen to accept falsehoods to justify their hatred. However, I think it’s important to confront such crap when it’s spewed at us. If other people are reading (or listening), a rational, well-documented rebuttal can work wonders in defusing the slander. And although rebuttal can be done with humor, simply ridiculing the crap can obfuscate the fact that it’s a lie. As for ignoring it, that’s what the swiftboaters of the world want you to do. [/QUOTE] Perhaps I wasn’t clear, but I meant on a one-to-one basis. Sure, if someone posts that junk on a message board, it should be shot down. But it’s unlikely you will convince a “true believer” that he is wrong. > [@DT](#): > > And antidemocratic forces in the ME in general are loving it. We’ve managed to convince enormous amounts of people that “democracy” means “chaos and mass death”. Well, it often doesn mean “chaos and mass death”-- especially when practiced in a country that was artificially created in the first place. Bush et all just weren’t smart enough to realize that. Actually, it’s hard to think of many countries that came into existence without lots of bloodshed. Canada? Czechoslovakia split up pretty peacefully. I’m sure there are a few more, but they are the exception, not the rule. I’m afraid that much of the M.E. will have to, at some point, go through what Europe went through in the last few hundred years-- lots and lots of wars until people are generally OK with how the borders are drawn. Should Iraq be one country or 3, or 10? Only time will tell. ---
**Author:** ![ManiacMan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/b782af/32.png) [@ManiacMan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ManiacMan)\ **Post date:** [October 27, 2007, 10:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-help-truth-check-this-bush-v-clinton/424187/38 "2007-10-27T22:02:06Z")
[QUOTE=Der Trihs] Us. We are the ones responsible for the devastation in Iraq. [/QUOTE] Don’t you mean that radical islamic terrorists are responsible? ---
**Author:** ![Der\_Trihs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/der_trihs/32/233_2.png) [@Der\_Trihs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Der_Trihs)\ **Post date:** [October 27, 2007, 10:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-help-truth-check-this-bush-v-clinton/424187/39 "2007-10-27T22:09:26Z")
[QUOTE=ManiacMan] Don’t you mean that radical islamic terrorists are responsible? [/QUOTE] The ones that had no power in Iraq before we leveled the place ? Radical Islam had no power in Iraq before we gave it that power. Saddam was a **secular** dictator. And radical Islam is only one contributor to the death and suffering in Iraq. We’ve killed plenty of people directly, turned the place into an anarchy so that every little political faction or criminal can kill as they wish, destroyed the infrastructure so they suffer and die from plain old physical needs, and so on. ---
**Author:** ![ManiacMan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/b782af/32.png) [@ManiacMan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ManiacMan)\ **Post date:** [October 27, 2007, 10:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-help-truth-check-this-bush-v-clinton/424187/40 "2007-10-27T22:11:21Z")
What about all those people Saddam killed to take power and all those people he killed (along with his sons) to keep power? They seemed to be pretty radical to me… [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-help-truth-check-this-bush-v-clinton/424187.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/please-help-truth-check-this-bush-v-clinton/424187.md?page=3)