Gosh, Bush lovers get so Mad :mad: when we say that Bush lied about WMD, of Course we say it as often as possible!
Bush Lied! :mad:
Bush Lied! :mad: :mad:
Bush Lied! :mad: :mad: :mad:
I mean, things are so grim now for us, what else can we do to have fun right now?
That, and the fact that we think that Bush had decided well before the first election what he was going to do, ignored the reports of the U.N. Inspection Teams, and went ahead with his plans anyway. :smack:
That is, we say it because we think he did lie to us.
We don’t think that either Kerry or Clinton lied to us. But we think that Bush did.
Timing in life is everything. At the critical moment, when the decision to invade or not had to be made, most Democrats and more than a few others, think that Bush had a pretty good idea that he would find no WMD’s in IRAQ but felt it was O.K. to go, because he could say he wasn’t 100.0000000% certain. I am sure he felt that Sadaam was a nasty guy and did very bad things.
But that was not a justifiable reason to rush into Iraq all by our lonesomes alienating so many other nations making apparent liars out of worldwide assets like Sec. of Defense. Powell.
So that’s a lot of it. That and the nagging feeling that the last two elections were stolen.
I know these answers may drive you nuts, but they are actually closer to the truth than most people would write I think. I don’t think they show a particularly good side of people. I just think I’m fairly right about it.
When one is suspecting another of drawing faulty conclusions from incomplete evidence it does not help one’s case to be anything less than extremely thorough. When one is asserting deliberate manipulation(cherry-picking) of evidence to support some pre-concieved plan, then to do less than be as comprehensive as possible in analyzing the situation is to set oneself up for failure when holes in your own analysis appear.
You will not see me call someone a liar without damn good evidence and support for such an assertion. Just as you would never see me fire the first shot without one HELL of a compelling case. Suspicions being good enough and things not passing “the smell test” got us where we are today. I’m deliberately moving away from that mode of operation.
And in this case, the trauma from 9/11, and the public’s desire to see a great leader putting the nation on a resolute course to deal with an external threat made hornswoggling even easier than usual.
The big lie now is the insistence on putting Afghanistan (getting the perpetrators of 9/11 and the protectors of those criminals) in the same level/purpose/effort as Iraq (no 9/11 connections, not Saudi Arabia, Oil)
In Afghanistan, the rest of the word is willing to risk the lives of it’s soldiers, secure in the knowledge that there was a good reason to get there (I am on record of reluctantly accepting going into Afghanistan) French, German, Spanish troops, are still risking their lives together with American troops, but it takes constant lying or equivocation to continue mentioning Afghanistan and Iraq in the same breath.
Back then, when the drums of the Iraq war started, The warning sign appeared when I realized the same nations that were helping us in Afghanistan saw that Iraq was different, as allies, they normally had access to most of the same intelligence as the USA, (or to better ones as it turned out) even with that, they told the US to forget Iraq. Today, the fearless leader continues with his equivocations even when the coalition of the willing is shrinking, an equivocation that even my private college teachers in humanities showed to me that it is equivalent to lie.
Story goes a guy who bought an early Picasso work was worried about its authenticity. Since he lived in France, it wasn’t too difficult to track him down at the beach. The gentleman approached respectfully and acquainted Piccasso with his concern about the painting, and Picasso agreed to look at it. He showed him the picture, and Picasso shook his head disdainfully.
“No! It is not a Picasso!”
The art collector was, of course, devestated.
“Are you sure? Isn’t this your signature at the bottom?”
“Oh, yes, of course I painted it. But its still not a Picasso!”
Exactly, and that has always been a serious problem for many of us. Bush went to war primarily on the strength of rhetoric and fear in order to pursue not WMDs as he stated but his own agenda, and those who noticed this alarming development have been objecting ever since. Of course, they have also been joined by those who are automatically opposed to Bush on less valid grounds, which perhaps results in a less clear message – but we have no control over that rabble.
My hat’s off to you.
Like Clinton before him, Bush had some intelligence on this subject. Clinton realized it was insufficient to go to war, but Bush went about inflating and adding to the evidence as much as possible while playing the politics of fear, and very likely figured that he would find something in Iraq that he could use after the fact to justify his choices and make everyone forget about the irregularities required to get to Baghdad. That, as nearly as I can tell, was his plan.
Simple application of the sceptical method showed that there was no real evidence, only, as already mentioned, smoke and mirrors on an orchestrated scale. What’s been making us sceptics fret since then is that Bush managed to build a great fantasy castle in the clouds, and millions of people moved in right away without even a thought as to the non-existent foundations.
The best thing one can hear on these boards, on any topic but especially on this one, is “after a review of the available evidence I have revised my position…”. That shows that the power of critical thinking continues to exceed that of propaganda, even propaganda as powerful as that of Bushite machinery. It’s a good day.
Don’t forget the groups founded to ‘enhance’ the case that waiting to deal with Hussein entailed an unacceptable threat like the Policy Counter Terrorism Evaluation Group and the Office of Special Plans.
Don’t forget that we allowed Zarqawi to persist in Iraq becauise he bolstered the case for war.
