Al Qaeda hadn’t then existed for “decades”, since it wasn’t founded until 1988.
Yes, I’m aware of that. Point is, these rebels had been faithful to al Qaeda for a long time.
OK, now I get it: if Clinton allegedly had sex with someone, and rumors of that liaison came to light, that was Clinton trashing those women.
Interesting definition.
IOW, since a President had extramarital sex, it was fair game for a prosecutor to share the intimate details of that sex with the entire world.
I’ll remind you of this, the next time you’re expounding on the virtues of limited government.
So do you support invading Pakistan?
Then you still need correction.
Northern Iraq is the home of the Kurds, who did not and do not associate with the Arabs of al Qaida. The Kurdish independence movement crosses several different national boundaries, but has very little religious connections and has nothing to do with Islamist groups, particuarly not with al Qaida.
When, following the first Gulf War, the Kurds of the North–as the Shia of the South–each took the first president Bush’s encouragement to revolt as a sign that the U.S. would support that revolt and began to take open steps for secession, at which point, Saddam Hussein sent in the army to crush them. At that point, the U.S. and U.K. called a halt to those actions and set up the No Fly and No Intervention zones of the North and South. A couple of years later, knowing that they were safe from Hussein in that region, al Qaida set up a small training camp in the North, although they stayed away from the Kurdish local population and fled the region when U.S. troops arrived in the Spring of 2003.
There were never any “al Qaida supported rebels” in the North.
How about Aso Muhammad Hassan, who joined the IMK in '91 and whose IMK ID card turned up on an al Qaeda computer?
My turn! My turn!
Read for comprehension much? 
The facts, whether I want them to be or not, are exactly what they are. And given that I know my motivations much better than what you think you know about them, I can tell you unequivocally that ‘merely’ is most appropriate in the context I used it.
I will now repeat what I stated originally and which I’ve already repeated once. Here goes another repetition, hopefully this one will stick.
I originally brought up Clinton’s lies as an illustration of the dishonesty that so thoroughly permeates his character. The quickest and easiest way to do that while allowing the least room for inevitable partisan denials was to mention lies that everyone knows he told and can’t refute. The purpose was to point out to mhendo that just because the Clinton administration denies to the 9/11 Commission that the Sudanese offered bin Laden, it in no way means that it is telling the truth. He lied under oath re the Lewinski affair; he lied to everyone about Genifer Flowers (and he’s on tape telling her to lie about their affair as well), and he shook his finger in our face and lied to us about how he didn’t have 'sexyul relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinski.
In other words, my focus, whether you want to believe it or not, was on Clinton’s dishonesty and lack of credibility before the 9/11 Commission and the Lewinski affair was the easiest and most foolproof way to illustrate it.
Then Equipoise inserted the words ‘blow job’ into the thread and tried to shift the focus away from the subject of Clinton’s absolute dearth of honesty and make it into another alleged tighty-righty complaint about blowjobs.
And true to form, you fell for it. Largely because you wanted to.
I’m not gonna waste time arguing over this. Instead I’ll just ask for a cite of where I ever addressed the 9/11 Commision at all. You know (or you would if you thought about it)and I know that my comments were limited solely to the credibility of the Clinton administration’s denials to it.
Perhaps you are also aware that his claim is unrefuted?
Still, where there’s smoke there’s usually fire, and there have been way too many allegations from way too many people over the years that Clinton deliberately passed on nabbing/killing bin Laden for me to doubt Ijaz’ claims.
Secondly, there is the matter of Michael Scheuer’s claims (the first link in my original post). As a 22-year CIA man and former head of the Counterterrorist Center’s bin Laden unit, his comments hardly rate as a"second-hand news report". This from Cal Thomas’ site (I know, I know, he’s a rightie…still, contrary to popular opinion around here, that doesn’t equate to ‘automatically wrong’:
"One credible source is Michael Scheuer, a 22-year CIA veteran who used to head the Counterterrorist Center’s bin Laden unit. Scheuer, who is referred to as “Mike” in the 9/11 Commission Report, wrote a July 5 op-ed column in The Washington Times. In it, he referred to former “terrorism czar” Richard Clarke and Clarke’s assertion in his book “Against All Enemies” that the CIA failed to put operatives in Afghanistan to kill bin Laden, relying instead on Afghan locals. Scheuer writes, “In spring 1998, I briefed Mr. Clarke and senior CIA, Department of Defense and FBI officers on a plan to kidnap bin Laden. Mr. Clarke’s reaction was that ‘it was just a thinly disguised attempt to assassinate bin Laden.’ I replied that if he wanted bin Laden dead, we could do the job quickly. Mr. Clarke’s response was that the president did not want bin Laden assassinated, and that we had no authority to do so.”
The history books are full of Clintonian skullduggery that couldn’t be proven but which anybody with half a brain knows happened. Whitewater, dissapearing documents in the aftermath of Vince Foster’s death which suddenly appeared in the White House living quarters, Clinton’s behavior toward various women he regarded as bimbos (and which would have people screaming for prison time had he been a Republican), etc., etc. If it weren’t for the blue dress, he’d be wagging his finger and denying Lewinski to this day.
Any cop will tell you there are countless times when they know full well who commited some crime but they scrounge up the evidence necessary to take it to court. The Clinton’s are merely slippery enough, and protected by the gravitas of the office itself in which overwhelming and undeniable evidence would be necessary to result in a commission like the 9/11 Commission bring in a finding of Clinton’s culpabilty, to have avoided being brought to task for their many misdeeds. And it in no way means or proves that those misdeeds never took place.
You are dumb. You’re a dummy. I never said I didn’t bring up Clinton. I never said I didn’t bring him up five times. I did say I didn’t bring up the blowjob, but rather the dishonesty that was illuminated by his behavior in the wake of it.
If you weren’t dumb and were intellectually honest you would have recognized that. However, there is a perfectly good explanation of just what I did say and what was meant by it in this post just above. Try reading for comprehension; you might learn something.
Thank you, darling. Yes, I’m one of the few holdouts from the era in which most people in this country behaved civilly. Of course, that was before liberal permissiveness, and its concomitant sense of entitlement to behave any way one wants to, overtook the country. But of course we had racism then and the only way to fix that was to create a society in which everyone acted like assholes. :rolleyes:
So yay, us!
Nope, nothing yet. But you can be sure that once (if?) I find it, you’ll be the first to know as I take it out of my ass and stick it up yours. Let’s hope for a satisfactory conclusion all around, eh?
ETA:
Well, be that as it may, the definition isn’t mine. The trashing took place when Clinton and his attorneys lied about their truthful allegations and attempted to paint them as sluts, bimbos and troublemakers in order to cover his own lying, duplicitous, and revolting behavior toward women he viewed merely as sexual objects.
Starving Artist, why don’t you go start a thread on Bill Clinton? Honestly, I think a lot of people might agree with you on certain points. I know I would. However, it’s frustrating for you to hijack threads about George Bush with your bringing up of TOTALLY IRRELEVANT stuff about Bill Clinton. You can’t respond to “George Bush is an incompetent liar” with “Bill Clinton was a liar!” That is a non sequiter. Either defend George Bush on his own merits or STFU.
He brought up Vince Foster. VINCE FOSTER!
Awesome.
No he didn’t! Read for comprehension! He clearly brought up the DOCUMENTS that disappeared, in the wake of Vince Foster’s DEATH! Not Vince Foster; the fact of his death! YOU are the first person to bring up Vince Foster! YOU!
Your intellectual dishonesty is truly shameless! It’s just like you constantly bringing up Clinton’s sex scandal! WHAT? Who said that? You see? Someone just mentioned Clinton’s sexual activity! WHAT? They just did it again! Who keeps talking about Clinton’s sex life? WHAT? Stop it this instant! This thread is about Bush’s legacy, not about Clinton’s sex acts! WHAT?
LAUGH That was great!
Hint: Insert at least three paragraphs of filler between each pair of mutually exclusive statements. That maintains at least a pretense of respect for the reader’s intelligence.
Kyla, with all due respect (and I do mean that despite your “STFU”), I did not enter this thread with the intent to turn it into a full-on condemnation of Bill Clinton, nor am I interested in doing so. So, let me say (yet again) that my sole purpose in making my very first post here was to question Equipoise as to why she seemed to hold Bush more culpable in the events of 9/11. Her reasoning was that he and Powell ignored the good and noble (and even more importantly, correct) information coming from Richard Clarke, and that he not done so 9/11 might very likely have been prevented.
In other words, she was essentially blaming Bush for not stopping 9/11 when he had very good information coming from an upper level member of the previous administration.
So, I simply asked if she didn’t hold Clinton at least as culpable if not more so.
My thing in this regard is that if Clarke knew so much, why didn’t Clinton himself act on his information? He had much closer and more frequent contact with Clarke than Bush did, so why is it incumbent upon Bush to take action based on Clarke’s information when Clinton himself did not? (And this doesn’t even address the issue that Bush may very well have tended to disregard ominous information from an antagonistic outgoing administration, and particularly so when that administration hadn’t acted on the information itself. I know that if I were Bush, I would be a little reluctant to take action based on Clarke’s word given that Clinton himself did not.)
But I digress.
Now, why did I have to take it upon myself to challenge her on this point?
Well, partly because it looks to me like if anyone is responsible for not taking action on Clarke’s information it would be Clinton, but primarily because I wanted to shine a light on Equipoise’s hypocrisy and her attempt to shift almost all of the blame onto Bush.
elucidator likes to accuse me of being a ‘conservative gadfly who delights in pricking the hypocrisies of the left’, and while there is an element of truth in the fact that I do frequently try to prick these hypocrisies, I’m far from delighted to have to do so. Few things would please me more than to have no hypocrisies to prick.
Now, why is it that I take it upon myself to do that?
I imagine that you may be thinking to yourself that it’s because it’s so easy, 
but while it is indeed easy that’s not the primary motivation. My motivation in exposing these hypocrisies is to try to point out to readers who may not yet have made up their minds that there are two sides to every story and that they are not getting a realistic view of the issues due to the overwhelming and frequently erroneous ways that Bush/Republicans/conservatives are portrayed around here.
In other words, it’s my way of trying to keep the anti-conservative noise to signal ratio around here (in conjunction with the board’s other conservative posters) to something like at least 98:2.
When all one reads around here is “Bush/Republicans/conservatives are teh suxxor!” and it goes unchallenged, it can appear that this viewpoint is correct because so many people are trumpeting it and no one is contesting it.
So I contest it in the hope that thinking and unbiased readers can be exposed to the fact that a lot of what passes for political commentary around here is little more than fanatical partisan ranting, and that perhaps things are not so cut-and-dried as they appear when based on the endless anti-right agitation that goes on around here.
Now, if people had confined themselves to what Equipoise said and what I said to her in return, that would likely have been the limit and scope of my participation here. But, as is almost always the case, allegations are almost instantaneous that I am lying; stupid; a troll; my cites or observations are wrong; etc., etc. And then there is the fact that I often have to post as like this simply because of the huge number of times that I’m accused of saying something I never said or accused of saying something completely different than what I actually said.
So that leads to my making additional posts to address these accusations and inaccuracies, and this results in my having to delve further and further into certain things than I had originally intended simply in order to keep things on an even keel, and round and round it goes.
So in closing, if you simply want me to remain quiet and allow posters such as Equipoise to spew their biased and poisonous rantings to go unchallenged, I’m afraid I’m going to have to decline.
I would be happy, however, to limit my comments to the subjects I raise, but I’m afraid you’re going to have to talk to posters like the majority of the ones in this thread first because it is their fault that things have gone as far astray as they have.
I agree wholeheartedly that they are mutually exclusive. (Perhaps I should have inserted a rolleyes smilie to make that fact obvious to the sarcastically-challenged.)
That’s why it drives me nuts when lefties claim that fucking up the decency that existed pre-1968 was necessary in order to eliminate racism.
In case you’ve missed it, I’ve spoken on this issue several times before.
Clinton DID listen to Richard Clarke, and Clinton DID try to do something about bin Laden. You’d tear your eyeballs out before you’d admit that.
But, please do carry on. You’re very entertaining.
In our case it went like this:
George: Come with me in my excellent adventure. I am sure this will turn profitable, I could feel inclined to share it with you. Besides, I am going to be very… er, *disappointed *if you don’t.
Our Dumbass Prez: Wow, that sounds cool! I get to hang out with the big kids!
Our Minister of Foreign Relations: Are you nuts?! I quit!
A few months later, our troops, who joined the “Coalition” on the condition that a) They’d be under Spain’s command, and b) They do not be put in active combat zone, leave right after Spain did.
Young soldier comes home, shoots his entire family and blows up the top of his head. The other managed not to do the same, and we’ll never know how fucked up they came back.
Wait, what?
Yeah, he made a few half-hearted stabs at it, mostly during crucial moments of Lewinski grand jury testimony when he wanted to boost his approval rating so as to avoid impeachment. (For example, didn’t he bomb the aspirin factory just hours after finally announcing an ‘improper’ relationship with Lewinski?)
Still, this thread is rife with credible reports that he intentionally pursued a hands-off policy regarding bin Laden.
Pop quiz: Which president received a national security alert advisement from his own administration (and not a previous one) that “Bin Laden was determined to strike in the U.S.” and did not apparently do anything upon receipt of this warning?
A. James Madison
B. Martin Van Buren
C. Bill Clinton
D. George W. Bush
At least the Indian interior minister had the decency to resign following his failure to pick up on and prevent the Mumbai attacks. Not one Bush administration official resigned in disgrace for 9/11.
Shorter Bush: If only the intelligence (that we faked) had been right, people would still like me.