Saw your last post, no, I don’t have to prove I’m right, you have to prove I’m wrong.
Oh, that’s another one, i forget the latin. Don’t try and pretend I said those things when I didn’t, doesn’t work.
I should also say that my easy answer to any evidence you find is that “of course GWB let libby take the fall. As long as he’s president, he can give a presidential pardon for any conviction. As history shows, Libby was in fact found guilty. Therefore, somebody committed treason, it’s just a question of who and how many.” You just have to show he didn’t have knowledge of it before the fact.
Sorry, but you are completely ass-backwards here. By your logic, I could declare that you exposed Valerie Plame’s identity and demand that you be jailed unless you could prove you didn’t.
The burden of proof rests with the positive claimant. Do the words “Innocent until proven guilty” ring a bell?
Impeachment is not intended to be a weapon for political enemies. Impeachment is a last resort method of removing a highly corrupt or unstable person from office. Thankfully its never been successfully used. Congress came close to impeaching Andrew Johnson for trying to implement Lincoln’s plan to mercifully reintroduce the Southern states back into the Union. Powerful interests wanted to profit off the south and came within a few votes of removing Johnson from office.
IMHO…
Nixon was showing signs of instability and probably would have been impeached, He wisely resigned.
Bush made mistakes but never came close to meeting the criteria for impeachment. Neither did Clinton. His enemies backed him into a corner over a Blow Job. He lied in a deposition and they tried to use that as an excuse for impeachment. Thankfully the votes weren’t there.
Successfully using impeachment as a political weapon would set up a very dangerous precedent. imho
Wow, we might need new latin words for this one. So you’ve:
a. Completely sidestepped my argument,
b. Accused me of doing what I said GWB did,
c. Stated it in a way inferring I am automatically wrong, and
d. Brought in a new argument that is completely unrelated to what we were discussing before.
Getting back to the OP, one of the facts of American politics, back then and now, is that getting in to a war is very popular and that popularity is very easy to manipulate.
No, they did it. The Senate came close to “convicting” (removing) him, but he was indeed impeached by the House.
What do you think those are?
You speak of it in the hypothetical. The impeachment of Clinton was certainly a political weapon, and did set a dangerous precedent, one which played a role in Bush not getting impeached.
Rockefeller’s own individual opinion, which you falsely suggest was the full committee’s, and which you have pretty pathetically cherry-picked:
[/quote]
“It is my belief that the Bush Administration was fixated on Iraq, and used the 9/11 attacks by al Qa’ida as justification for overthrowing Saddam Hussein. To accomplish this, top Administration officials made repeated statements that falsely linked Iraq and al Qa’ida as a single threat and insinuated that Iraq played a role in 9/11. Sadly, the Bush Administration led the nation into war under false pretenses. While the report highlights many of the problems with the intelligence and criticizes the Bush Administration for its handling of the lead up to the war and its reasons for doing so, the report also supports in many cases that claims made by the Bush Administration about Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction programs were “generally substantiated by the intelligence”.
“There is no question we all relied on flawed intelligence. But, there is a fundamental difference between relying on incorrect intelligence and deliberately painting a picture to the American people that you know is not fully accurate."
[/quote]
As in, you for some reason fail to note that the intelligence that “generally supported” the claim was bullshit, and widely known to be bullshit. You may recall some discussion of that point, hmmm? Perhaps about Cheney picking his own “Team B” that would tell him what he wanted to hear, not what the evidence said? Ring any bells?
I got my words mixed up. I thought impeachment required successfully removing someone from office. Not just the attempt. My mistake.
AFAIK Clinton was never impeached. They talked about it, but I’m pretty sure it never actually reached a vote. Didn’t they censure him or something? I can’t recall. I know his law license in Arkansas was suspended.
The Judiciary Committee passed four articles of impeachment. All four were then voted upon by the full House of Representatives. Two passed. Cite.
President Clinton was then tried by the Senate, with Chief Justice of the United States William Rehnquist presiding. He was acquitted on February 12, 1999. Cite.
My call is that Presidential Candidate GW Bush followed the same GOP tradition for selecting a running mate that Eisenhower, Nixon, GHW Bush, and that later, John McCain followed. That tradition is, when choosing a running mate, chose what I call “Impeachment Insurance”. Would the Democrats ever pursue impeachment when the result could be a President Nixon, President Spiro Agnew, President Dan Quayle, President Dick Cheney, or President Sarah Palin? Nixon didn’t get impeached until AFTER Agnew was gone and Ford was his VP.
Your memory is a lot better than mine. I mostly recall the disgust I had for all the wasted investigations that tried to take Clinton down. Whitewater, then Vince Fosters suicide, they even investigated Hillary’s Futures trading from the mid 1970’s. The politically motivated attacks just never stopped. Then Bill gets a blow job and lies about it. Giving his enemies just what they so desperately wanted.
Or Syria when they recently used weapons of mass destruction against their own people. It’s nice to know we believe so strongly in our principles.
I never understood the argument in the first place—WE have weapons of mass destruction, in the sense of nuclear weapons or even the smallpox virus. Shouldn’t people be able to invade us on the same justification, or is it okay because we’re so open about it?
I don’t think that’s true. I’ve been browsing old GD threads from the run-up to the Iraq War, and it’s actually quite rare to find a poster unequivocally state that they believe there to be no WMDs, let alone that they’re certain about it. For instance, this thread specifically invites people to come out and make that claim. AFAICT, while several posters express varying degrees of skepticism about the administration’s claims, only two come right out and say it, and one of those (even sven) qualifies her statement by saying: “He certainly has some amount of chemical weapons…”.
After looking at some of these threads, I’d say a majority of the board wanted inspections to continue, thought the administration was playing fast & loose with some of their evidence, thought that Iraq was not a serious threat to the U.S., but held that Saddam probably or quite possibly had a meaningful stockpile. Examples of “I don’t think there are any WMDs” are few and far between.
The statement was made that “everyone believed” it. Not believing something is not the same as believing the opposite to be true. Most of us did not believe flatly that it was not true, wanting to give the President the benefit of greater access to information, although there were certainly growing suspicions that were going to reach full maturity once the UN report came out.
The fact that the invading forces then completely bypassed the locations the administration had claimed were WMD sites provided all the remaining evidence one should need that they were simply lying.
??? If someone posts a claim, and someone else says, “You didn’t back that up with any cites,” is that really fallacious? Simply addressing the person isn’t “attacking” the person.
The standard examples of ad hominem are abusive speech and guilt by association. “Yes, but you’re a member of the Labor Party, so I know you’re against freedom.”
Saying, “You didn’t justify that point sufficiently” isn’t invalid. It’s often the most reasonable thing one can say.
That has popped up ever since there was an internet. I remember people saying Clinton was going to declare martial law and stay on as president. Then I heard it about Bush. I’m sure I will start seeing it about Obama soon. People were probably saying it about Washington but didn’t have the internet to spread it.
Very few of his political opponents feel that way either. I’ve seen quite a few who despise his policies but who had personal contact state how he was on top of everything and his attempt at homespun charm and lack of communication skills masked his intelligence and he was completely in charge. I know around here no matter what anyone says about him would not change the opinion that he is a dummy any more than I can convince certain acquaintances that Obama isn’t an evil dictator.
I don’t think its worth it getting in the middle of those two. They won’t listen to each other why would they listen to you?
