I agree with that. But I don’t think that’s been most popular point of view, either. It’s more that Osama didn’t spring out of nowhere, and Clinton was absolutely ** not ** asleep at the switch, and it can be credibly argued that Bush actually *was. *
I’ve read your post 10 times.
I confess to complete stumpitude. I have no idea what you are saying or what your point of view is about anything.
I’m sure it’s not your failure, I’m just letting you know.
Hey, Scylla’s back! Now we’ll finally get an answer about all those perfidious lies! Cool! Can hardly wait.
I haven’t read Franken’s book, I spend my money on drugs and fast women. But I’ve seen the outline the svelte Natasha posted before, in other venues. I have seen nothing that remotely resembles a point by point refutation, only furious bluster about Franken as a person, etc. If only half what he says there is true, it is a damning indictment.
If anyone knows of such a refutation, I urge them to bring it forth. (Though I hear plaintive cries of hamster agony…)
Sure, there’s invective. Tempers run high. Beats the crap out of arguing about the Steelers and the Cowboys.
This is one of the better threads I have read here. I’ve made it through page 9, and I think I still think I can contribute. Forgive me if I’m repeating.
First, to the excluded middle argument. I understand how Republicans will still vote Republican, even if they detest George W. There is a lot to policy. IMHO a lie that cost thousands of lies is criminal, but you have to support somebody, right?
Wrong. You still do have a choice here. To the anti-Bush Republicans, you don’t have to vote Democrat, third-party, or suck it up and vote for Bush. You can just not vote for him. Giving a person your vote is a statement of approval, and while you may disapprove of Bush that doesn’t automatically render support for the other guy. I’m sure that you have stood in an election booth skipping over pages of Assistant to the County Comptroller and Dogcatcher and 481st District Judge (at least in Texas) without giving a positive affirmation of a vote because you didn’t want to elect a wacko. So do it to Bush. This way you can support your John McCains and Arlen Specters without re-electing a liar.
Next, I heard a lot of arguments among my Republican friends that even though Bush was not a great mind, he was surrounded by great minds and that would make everything OK. This debate is exactly why this doesn’t work, and why we need if not a great mind, a true leader in the White House. Before the presidency, IMHO Bush had no mind to invade Iraq or Afghanistan. He was in the Rumsfeld/defense contractor camp. His Operation Ignore was not isolated to terra. His foreign policy concerns were getting US troops back to the US and building us a huge (and operationally and scientifically tenuous) missile shield. He structured his entire foreign policy against this. Restructure the armed forces with new, flashy weapons so my defense contractors can buy Porsches. Cut off negotiations between the Koreas to give us some convenient threatening-but-not-too-threatening “rogue states.” Accuse Iraq of getting WMDs but not really do anything about it. Certainly don’t entagle the armed forces in messy Kosovo-like situations.
And then came 9/11. Crisis – now we needed to get entangled. So he went to the other minds in the administration that liked entanglement, and suddenly the whole shift of policy went from pseudo-isolationist to neoconservative. Our leader showed absolutely no leadership – he is doing now exactly the opposite of what he promised while campaigning. I remember him standing up in debate and talking about the Powell doctrine, about overwhelming force and exit strategies when military action was necessary, about avoiding nation building. Schadenfraude in a tragic way, I suppose.
Obviously the situation changed at 9/11. But because Bush had shown no leadership in moderating and compromising between different dogmas in foreign policy, we were totally unprepared (and by some accounts are still unprepared) for our operations that followed. NMD and isolation was going to be his solution for everything, even though the naysayers all thought that terrorism was a much more likely event than rogue ICBM attack. So our armed forces went into Iraq in a restructured mode – they won handily when it came to the flashy new weapons and the defeat of conventional forces (in the Rumsfeld/Powell camp) but have not been succeeding in the new paradigm to which they jumped (neoconservative nation building and rooting out terra).
Part of being a leader means synthesizing all viewpoints presented and picking the wisest course (which is usually of moderation). Bush hasn’t. Instead, he has picked a relative extreme in dogma and stuck with it despite the naysayers and evidence to the contrary. It bit him on the butt when it came to intelligence about Iraq and WMDs. It is biting the whole world on the butt when it comes to adequate resource allocation for the war on terror and rebuilding Iraq.
Stoid: I do that sometimes, apparently.
Earlier, I mistook you for a man without actually reading your posts very carefully. Airman advised me of your gender and elucidator let me in on your nuances, and for that I am very grateful.
I used the Figaro article to work off of your Franken quotes. I thought it reasonable to expose the duality of a French editorial stating that we had, in fact, accomplished one of our goals in the War on Terror. According to them, we were bloodied, but we got the job done.
Terrorism existed during the Clinton years. His administration worked it differently than the current one. A sieve lets a mixture drip out slowly, exposing the big particles for easy removal. A pastry bag has a “full-to-bursting” point, where all one can do is aim and hope.
My apologies. Thank you for asking.
Ah. Normally I’m not quite so dense. It’s late, and I’m out of practice at this furious citing, typing and shouting stuff. Perhaps you might get a lady a refreshing lemonade, suh? <bat, bat>
Excellent points, ** edwino. **
Don’t tempt a man. I’ve been known to write Keatsians to elucidator, my dear.
I’m going to take a wild guess and say you’ve never read the commission report. Here’s a piece, the beginning of their six recommendations:
this is pretty much where the WMD concerns originated. And I’d love to know how well the Homeland Security Act thing would have gone over had it been mentioned, say, in May 2001.
lokij:
Oh. Perhaps I misunderstood. I thought you meant that Bush was right to lie; that if lying was necessary to accomplishing his policy goals, which you believed to be right, then it was also right to lie to implement those goals.
Ugh. God I hope I don’t come off sounding that self-righteous.
But neither am I so politically complacent as you appear to be – a common malaise among American citizens, I might add. I don’t run into the street to protest every political fib I stumble across (as Stoid pointed out, politicians are genetically programmed to lie), but this situation is special – we are talking about a war, after all. Not to mention the fact that I have invested a great deal of time and energy debating these issues here, and would hate to see all that work go to waste.
Does the general hypocrisy of US politics, especially on the right, strike anyone else? First we have Clinton, drawn and quartered, almost impeached, because he lied about a blow-job. And yet many of the same people who screamed for Clinton’s blood – “He dishonored the office of the president by his lies!” – are now turning an apathetic blind eye to the lies perpetrated by Bush in order to get us into war. I mean, because really, from any sort of “fair” perspective, Bush’s lies are worse than Clinton’s by several orders of magnitude – lying to instigate a war borders on outright treason. Yet not only is there no talk of impeachment whatsoever – there’s even a real risk that Bush will win the reelection! And people who hated Clinton – like Brutus, milroyj, millum and others – are running all over the boards creaming their smarmy pants over Bush’s “Thanksgiving surprise.” The double-standard is really transparent.
Disgusting.
It’s true that there are Bush-bashers out there whose disdain for the current administration is fairly irrational – they would hate Bush no matter what policies he chose to implement. There are also strong strains of irrational anti-American sentiment over here in Europe, that’s true as well. (I myself have one rather unbelievable story to tell about that, by the way, should the opportunity ever present itself.) Such sentiments are, to my mind, as morally reprehensible as knee-jerk, uncritical American patriotism, their mirror image.
But we have to separate the wheat from the chaff. There is also a reasonable critique of the current administration’s policies as well as the foreign policy history of the US. No matter how the right tries to stuff all of us into one box, there’s more to the protests and the criticisms than mere Bush-bashing and American-hating. Personally, I suspect that those who are most quick to accuse the other side of partisan bias are those who suffer from it themselves; since they choose their political affiliations on that basis, they can’t conceive that someone else might not. (I’m not saying you belong to that category, by the way, just making a general observation.)
Finally, its worth mentioning as well, I think, that when the US pursues stupid, brutal, or counter-productive policies in the world at large, it tends to also provide more fodder not just for the “reasonable critics,” but also for the continued irrational hatred of the US that one finds abroad. It’s hard for the irrational America bashers to maintain their assumed moral superiority when the facts contradict them; but unfortunately, with regard to Bush, most of the facts do not.
Elvis:
:smack:
Yes, the Sudan. Thanks for correcting an old man’s failing memory.
Airman:
I second Stoid’s defense.
Stoid:
You and I seem to see eye-to-eye on most of these issues. I also want to return the compliment; and I couldn’t be more in agreement with your point about “the changed rules” after 9/11. Yet another propaganda ploy by the US right!
The only thing that has changed, as far as I can tell, is that the US has lost its “illusion of invulnerability.” Welcome to the rest of the world, America! The response of the US elite to the loss of that illusion, however, has been less than edifying. But there you go.
Anyway, I also see some room for hope. To me what is perhaps most hopeful is the fact that Bush lost the last popular election. He seems to have forgotten that. Do you think any of those who voted for Gore last time around have changed their stripes during the last 3 years? Very few, I’d guess. And, at the same time, I suspect Bush’s clumsy “rightwingism” is alienating large sections of the public that originally supported him. I would bet that Airman isn’t the only member of the armed forces who’s poised to vote against him in the next election, for example.
Finally, thanks for the excellent information on Clinton’s counter-terrorism policies. I’ve special ordered Franken’s book after reading about it here, and am going to pick it up next week.
Dennis Miller’s line about how GeeDubya surrounds himself with intelligent men the same way a doughnut hole surrounds itself with doughnut.
Yes, I do know him as a poster, which makes his absurd little post all the more disturbing. I’ll give a pass to a drive-by crank, but not to a longtime poster whose words generally carry weight around here.
I am addressing what was said, namely that the lack of 3,000 deaths on Clinton’s watch is evidence of his antiterror efforts – the meaning being, clear to anyone with a grasp of the English language, that 9-11 would not have happened had Clinton been in the White House. Quit being such a goddamned apologist and suckup to minty, frcryinoutloud. **
Bullshit. You pull together random threads, ala Oliver Stone, and then take a gigantic fucking leap to this absurd conclusion. Let’s keep this simple: what program(s) in place under Clinton but not in place under Bush do you think would have prevented 9-11?
Your whole goddamned post is absurd. Yes, FBI field agents wrote some memos that in hindsight seem quite prophetic. It is tragic that they didn’t end up in the right hands sooner. But would they have ended up in the right hands under Clinton? On what basis do you assert that?
You point to some high-level memos that said a threat was imminent, one of which mentioned airplanes. But how many other possible types of attacks were listed? Was airline hijacking considered the most likely mode of attack? Or was it just a brief one-off item buried in a much longer list?
You mention Clinton’s order to allow Bin Laden’s assassination, but are silent on his allowing the Sudanese to set him free. You also don’t indicate whether or not the “shoot on sight” order remained in effect when Bush took office.
You also praise Clinton for not going after Al-Qaeda in the waning days of his presidency because it would look bad – handing Bush a war in his first days in office. Why is that something worthy of praise? Isn’t that Clinton giving his legacy and public image higher priority than national security? If intervention was the right thing to do, why hesitate? Bush Sr. sent us into Somalia in the waning days of his presidency – why couldn’t Clinton do the same?
And, of course, your post includes budget requests made in the days immediately before 9-11, requests which did not increase spending on terrorism. This raises several points. First of all, it should be blazingly obvious that a budget request made on 9-10 could not possibly affect the events of the next day. Furthermore, one needs to ask if, based on the information we had on 9-10, the current budget was reasonably considered sufficient to get the job done. Finally, we need to ask, if we needed to be spending so much more on antiterrorism efforts, where are the massive antiterror budget increases under Clinton?
Again: I’m not assigning blame. 9-11 exploited problems that trancend specific administrations. Both Clinton and Bush, and their predecessors, each failed to do what was necessary. I’m actually not bothered by that, because until 9-11 I don’t think anyone really had any idea what was necessary. It’s shamefully partisan to say otherwise.
**
Well sure! You are perfidious my big fat stupid lying stoner. In the classic words of Coldfire, YOU are the liberal December. Elvislies is perfidious, but just in a basic monocellular fashion, and Minty Green has this really cool blind hubris thing going with his self righteous hypocrisy. It’s like he has this big wart on his nose that he pretends isn’t there as he points out the blemishes of others. I mean, you wanna see Weaseling “I’m not saying Bush is responsbile for 9/11. No not me.” Then you have your whole band of drive-by idiots that just show up for an insult or two. You need look no further than yourself and your select comrades for war opposition perfidy, my dear little pissboy. You’re like a guy that falls into the outhouse bunghole, standing there up to his chin in it, saying “where’s the shit? I don’t see any shit.”
Yeah, it’s a real “Look upon my works ye mighty and despair” tome of unimpeachable knowledge, a real signature academic work. "Behold, I am Al Franken, look at my logic! I will invoke the Logos “Socrates is immortal!’ You see? I have proven it,” He wheels about the same false assumptions and selectivity that is the only stock in trade of partisan hacks the world over. Your like the freepers creaming over the latest Coulter bile. “Well gee Stoid,” you say, “While I haven’t actually read the book, I clearly do agree with you that everything in it must be true, because as of yet I have not yet seen anybody try to prove that everything in it, item by item is not true.”
That’s not the way it works you dimwitted doltophile! Mein Kampf is not a love story about a boy and his dog because nobody has gone through it and posted a word by word refutation signifying that it’s not!
“Where’s the perfidy?” You are the perfidy. It is all around you. It is a binding force between you and the rest of the disenchanted wing nut left, from which you draw your power.
“Where is the perfidy” It is within you and your ilk. It fills and infuses you like the “12% solution” they inject into the slabs of slimy grey meat and Walmart, so that they can pretend it’s fresh.
Wow. All that bluster and bile, and still no actual argument.
Scylla, I’ve avoided joining in this thread in any negative way (I merely posted once to praise another poster’s good conservatism), because I didn’t want to sidetrack the thorough examination of your… position into another claim that you’re being followed around and persecuted.
But I gotta post now just to encourage you to continue on as you are. You’ve given beautiful examples of double talk, weaselling and dishonesty, and I dare say your effort is helping, in its small and slimy way, to showcase the raw nature of the neocon beast in a way that honest and forthright debate could not.
Shine a flashlight on a pile of shit and fewer people will step in it.
xeno, does that mean you’re encouraging him to actually provide some examples of those perfidious lies, not just pretend to by calling other people “perfidious liars” as he just did?
**
Well so good of you to wash your hands of it, Pontius.
ElvisL1ves: Nah, I want him to keep weaselling. Makes it obvious.
Scylla: It would be pretty easy for me to play Pilate, what with you climbing up there by yourself and all, but no thanks. I’m not the one slyly asking “What is truth?” in this thread.
Exactly that. That nothing like 9/11 happened on Clinton’s watch, in large part due to his administration’s vigilance against al Qaeda. I did not claim, and do not claim, that a continuation of Clinton’s vigilance would have prevented 9/11, since such a claim is completely unprovable. But it damn well would have helped.
What would have happened if the Bushies had actually paid attention to the plan Richard Clarke developed at Clinton’s direction? Would the FBI then maybe have paid attention to all the reports of suspicious Muslim militants suddenly taking flight training in the U.S.? Would they have followed up on the known meetings of various 9/11 figures with known members of al Qaeda, in Malaysia, Spain, and elsewhere? Would they have tightened immigration and visa scrutiny? Would Clarke’s proposed covert war against the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan have disrupted the control and financing of the hijackers?
Beats me. But they’d have been a lot better than Bush’s Operation Ignore, which indisputably failed to detect what, in retrospect, looks like it darned well should have been discovered.
Only one weasel.
Scylla: What happened to your vow not to discuss this further with me? Just more situational ethics on your part? Figure that he shifting of the discussion to terrorism means that the danger of getting called on your weaseling in re: lies vs. negligence is over, so your putative dignity is no longer threatened? Can’t find the “Ignore” button?
Looks more like a meltdown to me.
Scylla, You are just hitting the trifecta of ad hominems in a single post: abusive, circumstantial, and tu quoque.
xenophon41 is right, there was no argument in that post, only bile, clever bile :dubious: but still no argument or rebuttal, remember: it was a reply to me that caused the constant calls to clear up your volley that non-followers of Bush (By now, it is obvious they are not only liberals now) used perfidious lies against the war, please provide some examples of those perfidious lies.
Better pull that plank out of your own eye before you go splinter-hunting.
I don’t know what’s worse: your absurdist apologetic spin proffered in defense of your silly rhetoric, or your pointless, partisan Monday-morning quarterbacking.