Damn, this sumbitch moves fast! I take a little time off to read some Das Kapital (well…only in translation…) and the whole thing has moved crisply along. Some catching up to do…
Indeed, the Stoid is a woman. I find it hard to imagine not knowing that instantly, given the demure grace of her prose style.
GreatUn Yeah, I got the same impression GIGO got. I also thought your spleen was vented indiscriminately to all and sundry. Here’s your chair. Have a beer. Take your shoes off, stay a while. However, I find your choice of pejorative unfortunate, but perhaps you don’t share my abject veneration (snicker) for the Jade Gate. Must be a Brit thing.
As for where Scylla is, this is pretty standard when he’s getting his butt kicked. Somewhere along the line, someone addresses him calmly and respectfully, which he returns directly to said poster, as a way of demonstrating his own unblemished innocence in the face of scurrilous savagery. This never works. Then he disappears.
And, of course, dear milroyj, who seems eager to be my Betty Noyer. Yes, I am quite aware that one cannot blame Bush for a stupidity 30 years in the making. I am also adept at tying my shoes and making my own oatmeal. Be assured of my kindly and avuncular affection. with the fond hope that when you grow up, you find a pursuit commensurate with your talents.
Now, to post this and check out all the action that took place while a racked my poor mind for another word for “stupid”.
Well ok… perhaps ‘support’ was too strong a word… how about ‘cease to contain’? If we had just gradually and quietly pulled most of our military out of the region… voted for the sanctions to be eased or lifted (in accordance with some of our allies wishes) and slowly began re-normalizing relations the oil would have flowed and prices would have been stable no question about it. By the time Saddam kicked the bucket he would have been in a much more powerful position to transfer authority to his sons and we could have gone from there. You talk as if having a WAR with another country poisons the well in perpetuity… Hell Vietnam, mutliple times more bloody than Gulf War I or II (as it’s shaping up) with a solid communist power in power now has friggin McDonalds and get’s naval port calls from us. I love their catfish fillets. China is our largest trading partner and you remember that nasty Korean War incident right? We won’t discuss Italy, Germany or Japan… Hell we’ve even recently lifted sanctions against Libya! It happens all the time, I think you’re a tad blind if you think it IMPOSSIBLE that this scenario could have happened… IF it was purely about oil.
The second scenario’s implausibility is a strong point in favor of the war, but it certainly could have been adopted by a strong status quo government with a short sighted agenda. If it was only about the oil.
In the third scenario I notice you deliberately left out the part about subsidizing alternative energy sources. For that 90 billion dollars we’re spending in Iraq we could have gone a long long way in the clean coal, thermal depolymerization, nuclear power, wind, solar, hydrogen, hybrid vehicle arena. It would have required a massive effort and investment… similar to a major war and put us at an economic disadvantage in the short term but it could have happened. If it was only about the oil.
Gentlemen and women, if I may, as no fan of GW, attempting to pin any substantial blame for 9/11 on either the Bush or Clinton administration is hopelessly partisan. I don’t think that the folks who carried it out really cared one whit whether the president at the time was a Democrat or a Republican.
While I’m here, it surprises me that people have ignored third parties when considering elections. It is possible to vote for “none of the above,” just choose to do a write in and put down anyone you feel like, or vote for a third party candidate who is listed on your local ballot. Given the US electoral system, the winner will of course be either a Republican or a Democrat, but you can voice your support for a third party or displeasure with either or both of the two main parties without supporting either one of them. Something perhaps to consider, Scylla?
Not my claim, Dewey. My claim was and is that Clinton took the fight against al Qaeda damned seriously, and was pretty damned effective at it. Compare and contrast with the Bush Admin’s 9-month-long indifference towards combatting al Qaeda, as documented in the cites provided above by rjung and one or two others.
Sure, we can vote for a third party candidate. Nader fans thought that in Florida in 2000, and look what happened. Bush is practically drooling at the possibility of a strong third-party candidate. If that happens he’s a lock.
Yours truly isn’t actually attempting to pin the blame on Bush. Just pre-empt (!!!) any suggestion that Clinton wasn’t on the ball re al Qaeda. And rollback milroyj’s idiotic assertion that it was all about the pilot doors or something, when the posts I quoted were specifically addressed to him and his assertion that Clinton’s inaction were in fact to blame.
Propagandists typically try to assert something over and over, hoping that by doing so they can drown out the facts. Just doing my part to make sure that doesn’t happen.
Well, call me nuts, but I’ve always voted for a third party who had some policy that I agreed with as I’m displeased with the two party system as it stands. Bush might not be drooling so much over my stance though, as I’ve decided to break tradition and vote Democrat no matter who they come up with as a protest of his handling of Iraq.
I think we’re all rather missing the real 9/11 lesson, which is this: any damn fool can pull off a terrorist attack if his own survival is not relevant. These guys were incredibly lucky, the Keystone Kops of Terror pulled it off. They were assisted by our own blind stupidity (the Unlocked Door, I mean, get real)
They are our worst nightmare, because all of our military power is useless. You can’t fight smallpox with a machine gun. You can launch an artillery barrage against an incoming fog. Very loud, very impressive, entirely impotent.
We flexed our muscle in Afghanistan, and deprived the terrorist of a place to meet, and to train men in how to do that football practice jump-through-the-old-tires thingy. And so what?
To combat terror requires plodding detective work, and snitches. Mostly snitches. International cooperation is crucial. We had that, once upon a time, until GeeDubya succumbed to the fantasy that he is a Leader of Men. He couldn’t lead a scout troop on a field trip to the Mall. But he is surrounded by flatterers who wrap him in cotton, filter his news, and advance thier agendas. He’s probably a decent enough fellow, but woefully out of his league.
As for Iraq: My Goddess, how absurd. Bonny and Clyde are on a rampage, so we send J. Edgar Hoover to shoot Eleanor Roosevelt. Galacticly stupid.
Dewey of course I know that! Why do you think I aimed there?
Then what possible reason could you have for including the “3,000 people didn’t die on Clinton’s watch” line in your insipid little post? What were you trying to imply, if not that 9-11 would not have happened if Clinton had remained in office? It’s a shitty, weaselly bit of rhetoric, made particularly ironic by your labeling of other posters as weasels in this very thread. **
Nothing listed has the slightest bit of anything to do with preventing 9-11. Nothing save the UAV flights represents a change in policy from the Clinton to Bush administrations. Bush is no more blameless for 9-11 than Clinton.
And FTR, I don’t particularly blame Clinton or Bush for that tragedy. The fact of the matter is, this country had serious security problems that trancended particular administrations. I’m not inclined to assign blame on that particular question just to win cheap political points. Unlike some people.
Well, no you can’t blame Bush, obviously. And no, you can’t take this faux high-minded stance that the cites above don’t prove something.
Looking at what they do rather than what they say, the Bushies, as soon as they could get away with it, diverted resources away from the hunt for bin Laden and al Qaeda, and towards their pet project in Iraq. Which means that today, as I write this, this Administration is still being negligent in its duty to keep us secure.
It’s all one utterly revolting picture of incompetence, duplicity, and negligence, punctuated only by a less than one year focus on the actual problem of our actual enemies.
Or you could abandon the disingenuous Democratic party slut visage and reveal that the “cite” supporting Clinton’s legendary vigilance is only one half of a debate between 2 salon.com pundits.
According to the other half of the argument here Clinton bears responsibility for 9/11 through his gross negligence, exhibiting such “vigilance” as removing all arabic speaking operatives from Afghanistan and letting Bin Laden go free when presented with the opportunity to get him in custody.
If this is your source for Clinton’s vigilance,“integrity” would suggest you present and weight the whole thing, not just the half you like.
I don’t care if you proffered something coined by “comrade elucidator”. Then again, it seems as if you may be coming around after all…
Remember, it was you who placed the September 11 Tableau atop matchstick legs.
Dewey, that’s preposterous. You know minty green, as you know a great many of the posters here. It is more than insulting to his intelligence if you suggest he’s unaware of the terrorist attacks during President Clinton’s administration. I’ll let you two (and on preview, three with Scylla) split hairs over the seeds of the Big Attack.
President Bush just so happens to have been in charge during the entirely unprecedented, most devastating terrorist attack ever on US soil. That this administration calls the hijackers “unsophisticated” is particularly telling, I must add.
Arabic isn’t even on the list! Not only that, Arabic isn’t even in the same freakin’ language family: Arabic is a Semitic language, utterly unrelated to either Pashto or Dari. English is closer than Arabic to what they speak over there.
I suppose if the Iraq war completely collapses into a morass of utter chaos, that’ll be Clinton’s fault too, right? There’s gotta be a way to blame him for that…
My beloved Boris took the words right out of my head, improved upon them considerably, and shared them all with you.
I grow so fatigued at these panicked assertions about how “the rules have changed” “it’s a different world now” and blah,blah blah !
No, the world hasn’t changed. The world is exactly the same as it’s always been (except for the poor souls who lost their lives, of course). Al Queda didn’t invent the next nuclear bomb, people! There was nothing particularly special about what they * actually did. * We are just completely blown away by what they * accidentally managed to accomplish. * Even THEY didn’t realize how spectacularly successful they were going to be. The acts undertaken were deliberate, and ridiculously simple. The consequences of those actions were jaw-dropping.
** Dewey… **sigh… I really can’t stand it when people insist that qualified statements are absolute. That is such bullshit, it doesn’t deserve a response. Stop it, address what is actually said as opposed to what you feverishly suppose is meant, and you might get a worthwhile debate. But stomping your foot and stating unequivocally that “a little” plainly means “none” and “a lot” means “all” just makes you seem simple-minded, and you are certainly not that, we all well know.
A good place to find answers to your questions is Al Franken’s book, which, while it is meant to be funny and is without question the work of a hardcore lefty, has not been shown to be incorrect in any facts it offers.
There are two chapters devoted to the questions we are discussing here, and the answers are…well, they are there., and his sources for everything in both chapters are given in his endnotes and are primarily * The Washington Post, the New York Times, National Review and New Republic *
Among the things he cites for Clinton as good anti-terrorism prez:
The capture and imprisonment of the WTC bombers from 1993, which prevented attacks against the Pope, and some US airlines that the terrorists had planned.
He also thwarted attacks that were planned against The UN, The FBI, the Isreali Embassy, LA and Boston airports, Lincoln and Holland tunnels, and the George Washingto Bridge. There were all plans that never came to fruition because Clinton tripled the counterterroism budget for the FBI, doubled counterterrorism funding overall. They “rolled up” as he puts it, AQ cells in twenty different countries, and he created a top-level national security post to coordinate all federal CT activity.
he also describes how the Republicans fought Clinton on all the CT spending.
He refers to other items that have been listed here (that you haven’t acknowledged yet) like his assasination authorization on Osama. In fact, two of Reagan’s CT officials praised Clinton, one of them sayint that the only criticism he had with Clinton’s work in that area was his obsession with Bin Laden, which he felt made him stronger. The other one said Clinton was correct to focus on Bin Laden.
According to an article in Time, after Cole, Clinton put Richard Clark in charge of coming up with a comprehensive plan to take out Al Queda, which Clark presented to Sandy berger and others on Dec 20, 2000. As a senior Bush official put it, the plan including everything that “we’ve done * since * 9/11”
It wasn’t implemented immediately because it was only a few weeks before Bush took over. A Clinton official said they’d be handing Bush a war when he took office.
Now here’s what Franken call’s Bush’s “Operation ignore”:
First we have Condi Rice lying about the briefing she had with Berger. Nice.
He then goes on to describe how a commission led by Gary Hart and Warren Rudman issued a report calling for the creation of a “National Homeland Security Agency” because mass casualty terrorism directed against the US was of serious and growing concern.
As we know, nothing was done.
Meanwhile, Clark, who had stayed on at Rice’s request, was trying to get his anti-AQ plan going. He presented an updated plan. Nothing happened. Some meetings were talked about being scheduled. NEver were.
Then we had the Kenneth Williams memo about the concerns over the middle eastern students at flight schools. He suggested that AQ operatives might be trying to infiltrate. Nuthin’.
According to the Washington Post, Clarke and Tenet were going nuts. In mid-July, tenet briefed Rice that there was going to be a major attack.
On July 16, a meeting was finally held. Where more meetings were planned. But given that George needed to take August off, (Franken points out that it was longest Presidential vacation in 32 years) the meetings were put off.
But Tenet sent a memo to Bush on vacation: “Bin Laden Determined to Striek in US” The report warned that AQ might be planning to hijack airplanes.
A couple of days later, bush said to some reporters: “I’ve got a lot of national security issues that we’re working on - Iraq, Macedonia, very worrisome right now”.
August 16 the INS arrested Zacharias Moussaoui, a flight school student who seemed to have little interest in learning how to take off or land. The arresting agent wrote that he seemed like “The type of person who could fly something into the World Trade Center.”
Thomas J. Pickard, acting FBI director, was alarmed by the report and the mounting threats, and met with Ashcroft to request $58 million from Justice to hire new field agents, translators, and intelligence analysts to imprrove the FBI’s ability to handle the threats. On Sept 10, he got his answer: “No.”
On Sept 9, Congress proposed a boost of $600 million for anti-terror programs. the money was to come from Rumsfeld’s missile defense program, which was estimated to eventually cost up to $238 billion. “Congress’s proposal to shift $0.6 billion over to counterterror programs incurred Rummy’s ire, and he threatened a presidential veto.”
On 9/10 Ashcroft sent his justice Department budget request to Bush, including spending increases in 68 different programs, none of which dealt with terrorism. In his memo listing his 7 top priorities, terrorism was not listed.
I think it’s safe to speculate that if Clinton himself, or even his * programs * had been in effect, there is a much better chance that 9/11 would not have occurred. Not a sure thing, but a much better chance than we had with Bush.
When and how did Clinton give his warning? How do you know they were ready to execute their plan and then waited 9 months into the Bush admistration? Osama send you a memo? This infers that had Gore won they’d have called the whole thing off. Your post is 100% verbal masterbation!
This thread is growing faster than I can read and respond. And it’s 1:30 am here! Still, the assertation that Osama waited to carry out his attacks is BS.