I can honestly say that the next hour of your life would be better spent simply watching her sleep than reading/posting in this, or any other for that matter, thread. Of that assertion I am confident. Diversify your interests later, obsess now.
Enjoy,
Steven
I commend friend Tee’s addressing the facts of the situation v. Mr. Franken. That’s what I urged on friend Scylla, to no avail. As I have no real knowledge of these events, I have no comment. My view largely reflects that of Dewey (if I understand him right), that our negligence and ignorance was pervasive for years (the Unlocked Door) and cannot be rightly laid at the feet of any Administration of any party.
As said, I’m not that hot on Mr. Franken. But to shrilly brand him a liar without addressing the facts is symptomatic of a kind of puerile partisanship that Tee can rise above, while some others clearly cannot.
Besides, Stoid is at hand, and the facts are at her delicate fingertips. If a new one needs be ripped, I am entirely satisfied that she needs no assistance from me.
minty!
You devil!
A thousand gratulations from the land of the Majestic Moose!
:smack:
English: congratulations.
Swedish: gratulationer
Fuckin’ Swinglish.
Anyway, you know what I mean.
minty
Your response to my post in re: Clinton’s inaction was to bash Bush.
I believe Dewey is pointing out that blaming either Clinton or Bush for 9/11 is wrong.
Let he who is without horrible, horrible partisanship cast the first stone.
The only “revisionist historian” here is you. You used quotation marks when paraphrasing millroyj’s post to make his remarks seem harsher than they actually were, and you failed to indicate both that you were paraphrasing and whom you were paraphrasing (“the guy” is not terribly specific). Rather than dig through twelve pages for a post, I took you at your word that the words you were posting were accurate. I guess I misjudged your honesty.
Here’s what millroyj actually wrote:
Here’s how you paraphrased it:
It’s pretty clear to me that there’s a difference between saying 9-11 “came about because of” a lack of response to the Yemen attack, and saying that the lack of response to the Yemen attack “contributed to” future attacks. The former places full blame at Clinton’s feet, the latter simply makes post-Yemen inaction one of many factors contributing to future attacks.
I didn’t say anything about millroyj’s post because it didn’t seem terribly controversial to me. Unless you believe that Bubba could do no wrong, it doesn’t seem much of a stretch to say that the Clinton administration made decisions that might have indirectly contributed to the attacks. And that’s not a searing indictment of Clinton: all administrations face decisions that might contrbute to adverse future happenings in some unforeseen way. And criticizing Clinton’s response to those attacks does not forestall praise of positive steps taken by his administration.
Of course, what millroyj wrote was quite different than the cartoonish caricature represented by your paraphrase. If millroyj had written the words you attributed to him, I would have condemned them, as I did when you first wrote your paraphrase.
And yeah, I still think your reply to millroyj was stupid.
I should point out that other posters have gotten into rather serious trouble by attributing words to others that they had not in fact written. Use quotation marks inaccurately at your peril.
“Field office” may have been a poor adjective on my part. My point is, critical information died in the middle bureaucracy rather than reach important decisionmakers in Washington – Rowley, for instance, faults “midlevel officials” who blocked her office’s attempts to get FASA warrants. That’s a problem of bureaucratic fiefdoms that persist from administration to administration, and not something attributable to any particular president.
snip Where the heck were you to condemn the guy who started this Clinton/Bush hijack by making the claim that “this came about because Clinton’s ineffectiveness at doing anything emboldened the terror mongers. ‘Hey, nothing happened after we killed those sailors in Yemen, let’s go for a bunch of civilians on their own soil!’” snip
At last! Whoopee! After… lets see… seven? years of responding to minty green in dozens of threads all over the boards, at last he responds! I’m not invisible after all! Even if it is “the guy” instead of cedric45. :->
minty, YOU started the so called hijack. YOU stated it was Bush who failed to stop 9-11 and had nothing to do with Clinton. My post was to (spitefully, of course) remind you that the plan was hatched long before Bush was even running for president. Osama doesn’t care who’s in office as long as he can kill Americans despite the illusions of DTC that they WAITED until Bush was elected. Both of you are using 9-11 to push your own agendas. Maybe Bush is doing that too but there’s no doubt about what you are doing. If it’s wrong for him, why is it right for you?
Yes. We agree.
You may commence having your heart attack now.
Tee:
Just a point of order: you seem to be refuting one of Franken’s claims by referring to the occurrence of meetings that aren’t relevant to it. Here is the claim:
You state that this claim is a lie by referencing a series of 4 “senior-level” meetings that took place between May and July of 2001, ostensibly addressing the issue of Al-Queda.
To begin with, it does not appear that those meetings were concerned with Clark’s proposals.
But even more telling, I think, is the fact that it appears to have taken the Bush administration more than a year and a half to actually produce any concrete response to the Al-Queda threat. As your own cite points out, “it took 34 months for the DCI’s declaration of war against al-Qaeda to be translated into a draft plan of action and this draft had not been seen and approved by Bush until after September 11.” This despite the fact that, apparently, Bush had been warned about how dangerous Al-Queda was by Clinton’s staff. The quoted section seems to indict Bush rather than absolve him.
Having said that, the very interesting article you cite supports Dewey’s point; in the end, the “intelligence failure” that led to 9/11 can’t be blamed on any single administration, but appears to be a structural weakness. Various information-gathering agencies did’t share their intelligence, and there was no one specifically responsible for putting the pieces of this puzzle together in advance.
Lawyers breed? Who knew?
Indeed, gaze upon the sleeping babe while you can. Soon enough they morph into huge drug-addled layabouts with the temperment of a wolverine and the habits of the sloth.
Dewey Its not so much agreeing with an acolyte of the Forces of Darkness that might bring on a cardiac incident as hearing someone publicly confess to graduation from Baylor (The Athens on the Brazos)…
Baylor’s 2:1 female-male ratio impacted heavily on my 18-year old mind when I was picking colleges. My priorities were a little different back then. I did hurry to Austin for law school…
Commendable. Baylor would be the perfect place for a young man to maintan the purity of his precious bodily fluids, if his religious convictions forbid a Capuchin monastery.
Feh. Baylor gals go out to bars and other such places as much as any other. They just lie about it on Sunday morning.
If we want to blame past Presidents, I can alwas heartily recommend Dereliction of Duty by Robert Patterson.
Patterson was an Air Force Lieutenant and spent a couple of years as the attache travelling with Clinton, and was at times his nuclear officer. He had intimate and ongoing access to Clinton. When on rotation he’d stay with him all day and night.
He has some startling anecdotes and makes some serious charges. He claims to be an eyewitness on Air Force One when Clinton was fondling a stewardess. Bill Clinton lost the nuclear codes and didn’t give a shit.
More importantly he had the opportunity to take out OBL at a known location in 1998, and, I forget what it was, but he was to distracted by fundraising or something like that and just blew it off.
He cheats at golf all the time, is terrorized by Hillary who he lies to constantly. He blatantly looked down the dress of Mrs. Patterson while holding her captive in a handshake for like 30 seconds. He hated the military, and was truly careless and unbothered by military losses, and had no regard for the safety of his men, was consistently irresponsible and uninterested in national security, needing to be browbeaten to do anything at all. All of this is laid out one anecdote at a time very credibly.
Without coming out and saying it, Patterson pretty much lays the 9/11 blame squarely on Clinton’s shoulders.
Patterson puts this forth as a firsthand eyewitness and participant in the events described, and claims no axe to grind but rather that it was duty to describe these events so terrible and irresponsible were they.
To my knowledge there is no refutation or denial of any of the events described.
I’d be curious to see what you think about this set of facts, Stoid and Elucidator.
Rather than keep you waiting, I’ll tell you what I think. The guy hates Clinton. His claim to impartiality is false. While I have no reason to doubt any of the anecdotes, I am sure they have been selected and told so as to paint as a horrible a picture as possible of the man. As such, I discount it, concluding that it can’t actually give me a useful and accurate picture of Clinton overrall.
It’s just interesting. Despite it’s credibility it’s clearly not the kind of thing you can use to draw conclusions, unless you’re a total moron.
In terms of credibility, this is leaps and bounds ahead of an openly biased humorist engaging in parody.
I would guess though that if you give credibility to the conclusion generated by Franken’s collection of facts, than you must find Pattersons unimpeachable proof of gross negligence.
If you don’t, why not?
For my part, I don’t, because what Franken says (specially on the gotcha moments against right wing blowhards) is mostly based in other published sources that usually have more than one source verifying the information.
Really Scylla! I am beginning to think you are not trying.
Well there’s no one handy cite for this. The administrations changed in early 2001 but the intelligence agencies didn’t. George Tenet has been the Director of Central Intelligence since 1997 so he’s been a part of both administrations, as has Clarke. Bin Laden was under indictment for bombing two of our embassies in 1998. Bush was in office less than a year before striking at al-qaida in the aftermath of 9/11/01.
The easiest interpretation is that the intelligence community under Tenet was tracking and taking preventative measures against the group since the bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, but had no comprehensive plan of attack until very shortly - days maybe - before 9/11. There’s roughly 34 months. One had been formulated in those meetings which concerned al-qaida, which Franken says never happened, but as of September 11 Bush hadn’t yet signed off on it, which is at least not in dispute. Immediately thereafter they went gung-ho.
My opinion, pulled out of thin air and based loosely on this Novak column (which is not particularly helpful in other respects) is: Clarke is a bit hawkish. Clinton wasn’t fond of the idea of a military response, bombing the hell out of Afghanistan immediately and neither were Bush and company, or maybe it was the surrounding international issues stopping them…who knows. This may be a “failure” on the part of each, but I can also understand the hesitancy to follow the Clarke plan to the letter.
Scylla:
First, Patterson is (was?) A lieutenant colonel, not a lieutenant–according to Amazon. Are you sure you have read the book and you’re not just relying on some secondary scource?
Second, all this has precious little to do with whether or not the President and his people knowingly and deliberately perpetrated a fraud on the American people in order to stage an invasion of Iraq. You now acknowledge that a fraud was perpetrated, although you muddy the picture with off and on references to mistake. If mistake then the President and his people are incompetent. If deliberate then the President and his people committed fraud. You tell us that the fraud/incompetence is admirable because the President had a hidden agenda–to establish American homogeny by slapping down the most obvious challenge to American power and that this some how is not only admirable but essential to the nation’s security.
We are now engaged in a great tangential pissing match testing whether the fundamental question–the President’s fraud–can be kept as the topic of discussion, or whether we will pass into a pissing match about who facilitated the horror of September 11, 2001. While it sounds a lot like the “who lost China” pissing match that dominated national politics in the late 40s and early 50s, there seems to be a fair amount of agreement that there is plenty of blame to go around pretty evenly. The fact remains that whether or not President paid the deference to his military staff they thought they had coming, whether or not he ogled Mrs. Patterson’s bosom, whether or not he mislaid the launch codes, whether or not he missed a chance to blow BinLaden to smithereens does nothing to conceal the fact that President did throw high explosives at BinLaden and that until 9/11 President Bush and his people paid little of any attention to BinLaden.
You might take a look at the Scoops item that is cited and linked earlier in this rambling and convoluted thread.
Clinton’s philandering and golf etiquette has damn’d little to do with your half hearted concession that President Bush and his people worked a fraud on the American people. What sunrises me is that you quiver with rage at the thought of Bill Clinton cheating at golf but you don’t mind George Bush cheating with national war policy and foreign affairs.
It strikes me that it might help things if every President got a good hummer every once in a while.
Let’s see, that would be Regnery Publishing, would it not? Also known as Remainder House? Whose books on bestseller lists are almost invariably followed by the dagger sign, the one that indicates bulk sales?
(For those who don’t know, bulk sales are institutional sales, usually in large lots at considerable discount. Corporations and such like can buy books in bulk, distribute them to, for instance, employees and take a sweet tax cut for “educational” efforts.)
Publisher of such deathless tomes of statesmanship as:
Shut Up & Sing: How Elites from Hollywood, Politics, and the UN Are Subverting America By Laura Ingraham
Persecution: How Liberals Are Waging War Against Christianity By David Limbaugh
Losing Bin Laden: How Bill Clinton’s Failures Unleashed Global Terror By Rich Miniter
and dont forget these stocking stuffers!
High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton, by the delightfully equine Ann Coulter
Leftism Revisited: From de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Pol Pot Eric von Kuehnelt-Leddihn
and no home library is complete without Witness by Whittaker Chambers.
as well as
Betrayal: How the Clinton Administration Undermined American Security by Bill Gertz…
Oddly enough, it seems they didn’t publish Newt Gangrene’s science fiction masterpiece, 1945!
One can only hope that you didn’t spend perfectly good money, when toilet paper is so inexpensive. Or you could have sent it to our beloved Stoid and at least gotten some genuine, pure-D, hard-core sex porn.
And unless I’m very much mistaken, Regnery House is closely identified with Lucianne Goldberg, “literary agent” and scandal monger, without whom Linda Tripp would be half a million poorer.
Regnery House, the Pravda of the nut-bar right! And to think you once sneered at me for mentioning MediaWhoresOnline!
Well, at least you didn’t try to cite American Spectator
Yet.
Relax, everybody. Don’t get all upset. The Spavmeister lives in Iowa, the “hummer” he’s referring to is a kazoo.
Carry on.