I know this might seem like a totally off-the-wall suggestion, but try to conjure up a world in which Bush’s political fate is not the most heavily weighted criterion in any given problem, and in which the best outcome for Bush may just not be the best outcome for the country and the world. That’s the world where the rest of us live. Give us a visit now and then.
Indeed.
Found on a cursory search of Google:
I’ve been sitting in stunned awe that there are still actually people, and not just people, but Dopers, who believe that Saddam had WMD’s. I distinctly remember the day, certainly not more than a year after the invasion, when the late great december very stealthily slipped “WMD programs” into a long post, instead of “WMD”'s. In a couple of weeks, that very phrase fell trippingly from our beloved Commander-in-Chief.
I also remember the hugely long threads devoted to this subject, including long dissertations on the aluminum tubes that pretty much tore that ridiculous stupidity to shreds, and the Scylla promise to…well, actually, I really don’t remember what he promised anymore.
Point being, all kinds of people got hoisted on that petard. Now, years later, we’re expected to go back and re-dredge all that crap back up to re-prove the already proven.
Forget it. Go back, use the search function, and do your homework. This is akin to having to re-prove that Creationism isn’t a crackpot notion once every three months.
So, to Shodan and Dr. Deth: asked and answered. To death. If you aren’t convinced by now, you never will be, and after all this time and all the blood spilled and treasure wasted, with this country staring down a huge financial crisis brought on in part by this unnecessary war, convincing anyone who isn’t already is a completely counterproductive waste of time.
The rest of us realize that whoever follows this village idiot into the WH is going to spend his or her’s entire Administration in the thankless task of trying to pick up the shattered pieces of this country’s prestige and credibility while at the same time reassembling its tattered finances and re-outfitting and readying its worn-out and stretched-to-the-limit military, while in the meantime of course paying the bills for the rehab of all the soldiers returning home with horrifying wounds.
Given the size of the task we now face as a nation, wasting time on defenders of this Admin involved in rearguard actions to salvage something of its destroyed reputation is simply not worth the effort.
BTW, just to put a final nail in the bullshit you two are spouting, not a single one of the horrifying wounds our soldiers have suffered in all of the years of this war were caused by a WMD.
Not one.
Zero.
Rien.
Nada.
Sigh. You know sometimes I wish dudes would read rather than kneejerk.
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SH had 10’s of thousands of Tonnes of WMB-* before* Operation Desert Storm. He used them on the Kurds and was convicted of this atrocity. The UN destroyed most of them after that. Many tonnes were unaccounted for. We did find a few of these after the second invasion, but they were rusted out and mostly harmless to anything but the environment.
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Although SH had no significant WMD in Iraq when we invaded for the second time, he still had illegal weapons. Not everything that was on his “no no list” was a CBR weapon. Some were more or less conventional weapons such as the Al Samoud-2 missiles. Although generally not considered a “WMD” they were still banned. And SH had them. OK? Illegal weapons aren’t all WMD’s. The fact that SH had no significant WMD in Iraq when we invaed for the 2nd time does not mean SH did not have Illegal weapons. Do you understand this?
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The facts are the facts, and ignoring these facts just because they don’t fit your political worldview is doing a “head in the sand” and is ignorant.
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However, one can still know the facts and oppose GWB’s invasion. Let me see how many times I put it: "In fact many, many times I have gone on record here to say that the Invasion was wrong, as Iraq did not pose a “clear and present danger to the security or safety of the United States”. and in my post #12 where I called GWB “I’d say “the worst in living memory” however.”
So one last time: SH had no significant WMD in Iraq when we invaded for the second time, but he still had illegal weapons. HOWEVER in no way shape or form did those illegal weapons justify GWB’s invasion of Iraq.
Do you understand now? Or are your knees still jerking too hard to understand? :rolleyes:
I understand exactly. You brought it up. You admit that he had nothing. Yet you still feel invested in somehow, someway, bringing irrelevant bullshit into the discussion.
Your problem.
pantom Can you not see the signs of desperation? To my surprise the Bush diehards now believe the stake has been driven in, the head removed and the body rendered unto ash. It’s the attorney scandal.
The signs are plain, Shodan is retreating to the position that as the argument is lost and the history written, the words that measure out these losses have no meaning: Up is down, black is white and you cannot prove otherwise.
Likewise Clothahump is stirring deep in the boards, with utterances of his usual, albeit commendably loyal, quality. Name another self-identified conservative here and chances are the profile will be imitative. It’s just that there are different ways in which these people adopt a full surrender.
This late & fierce attachment to this oddity of “illegal weapons” as a sort of legal fact, is puzzling to me too. It’s no more though than the noisy gurgle of water down the drain.
Actually, the world where the Usual Suspects live is the one where the worst possible outcome for Bush is the most heavily weighted consideration in anything.
I suspect, in some cases, given a theoretical choice between “Iraqis die by the tens of thousands and Bush is impeached” and “Iraq stabilizes over the long run and Bush finishes his term”, they will go for the first.
Of course, if it changes to “Iraq stabilizes and Bush is impeached”, or “Iraq is partitioned and Bush is impeached”, or “al-Queda surrenders and Bush is impeached”, they would go for that instead. Which I think underlies some of the automatic opposition to the surge. They were afraid, not that it wouldn’t succeed, but that it might.
Regards,
Shodan
Actually, Shodan, being in opposition to your views often enough to be deemed one of your Usual Suspects, Iwant to categorically call “Bullshit” on this post. I’m standing for an America which abides by constitutional safeguards and the rule of law, and is honored as a leader in human rights worldwide.
My motives have run from “he was chosen President, let’s give him a chance” to “Is he just trying to see how many mistakes one man can make as president?” as time has progressed. You’ll find I started by saying “Supreme Court judgment=rule of law” in the 2000 election fiasco, defended his post-9/11 actions, right down to initially supporting the invasion of Iraq (for reasons Airman Doors can validate) and being initially reluctant to support impeachment.
Right now, he’s a disaster with seemingly no connection to the world in which freedom=guaranteed rights, even for those with whom you disagree, not merely a slogan to trump up patriotism, and one makes judgments based on facts, rather than trying to tailor the facts to suit one’s preferences.
“Your team” is fond of bringing up Clinton, so let me ask you: If Clinton had gotten the majority of the U.S. army bogged down and accumulating casualties on a daily basis while failing to pacify Bosnia and Somalia, had insisted that everything he did was for the highest of motives while imputing disloyal and treasonous motives or at best partisan sniping to everything you Republicans had to say in criticizing his policies, had attempted to press through unqualified extreme left wing ideologues for court benches, had completely fumbled a massive natural disaster, and was finally defying Congressional subpoenas for his staff, instead of merely getting a blowjob and allegedly lying about it under oath, (a) wouldn’t you be up in arms to impeach him?, and (b) do you honestly think that we on the left side would be defending him?
Hear, hear, and wild applause.
If somehow the Iraq war is “won” and they put Bush’s face on Mount Rushmore, I will be thrilled and worship him as a military genius. The consequences of failure are too painful to contemplate, as imminent as they appear even now. But in time-tested military terms, the “surge of 30,000” grossly violates 2 principles of war , namely mass and surprise. A 10% escalation is insufficient to achieve anything, and it’s not going to surprise anybody. On those grounds alone it should be tossed out. A tripling of force and a nationwide mobilization is the only credible approach here, and even that is not a guarantee.
So, this shows how easily your argument can be reversed against you… if overwhelming force would solve the problem, why is Bush proposing this piddling “surge” of battle-weary troops, instead of a full-scale draft of overwhelming force? Because deep down he’s afraid it wouldn’t work, and the political consequences would be too terrible. He’s choosing the next-best strategy of patching this leaky ship until 2008, when it can fail on someone else’s watch.
You really must take into account the almost pathological need for supporters of the administration to justify their every move. They take their cue from GW himself who must have been overcriticised as a child because he can admit no mistake.
Jon Stewart played a video clip the other night that displayed clearly this need of supporters to justify and excuse. The clip was a news conference by the guy that Cheney shot. He was virtually apologizing for the distress that the incident must have caused the Vice President and his family. Now that’s loyalty and virtually throwing yourself over the rail to save the ship.
I need to comment on the absolutely extraordinary weirdness of a militaristic, pro-imperialist person like yourself bringing up 1984, of all things.
George Orwell was a democratic socialist. He was an amazing person, in that he had as little patience and less regard for the totalitarian left as he did for the right. I keep him as one of my guiding lights, since I believe that if he were alive today, he would have the same complete contempt I do for Chavez down in Venezuela, while feeling that Lula, over in Brazil, was more of an ordinary politician who is disappointing in the ordinary ways. Both of these are self-professed socialists, but one is a power-mad idiot, while the other is a man who has demonstrated that he understands democracy.
Bush is a lot more like Chavez than he is like Lula.
I could go over all of the different ways in which this is true, but I’m not going to waste my time. Anyone who’s ever lived in a third-world country and suddenly realized, in a way that someone living in the U.S. never has to, or better put had to in the past, that you’d better stay out of the way of the authorities if you want to keep what you earn and maintain whatever limited freedom you have knows what I mean. I was born here in the U.S., and up until now I never had that sense here. I do now. That’s all the proof I need.
I’m hoping that this is temporary. But I’m realistic too. Things like this, once lost, are rarely regained. To quote Ben Franklin,
I don’t know if we’re yet that far gone, but given that virtually no one cares that this President can rewrite the Geneva Conventions and therefore redefine torture in whatever way he feels like, and that no one who voted against the bill that empowered him in this way was voted out of office, Republican or Democrat, I am not hopeful. The fact that a militarist who is completely blind to the implications of this like yourself can cite 1984 without shame makes me even less hopeful.
:dubious: Nobody on the left side of this board is “afraid” of that. It’s not going to happen, and we know it would be better for all if it did happen.
Hear, hear. You have that feeling too? As things stand now I get the feeling that the President could declare at his pleasure that I am a danger to the peace and security of the US. Some of our lawyers will say that is alarmist and as a citizen I could enforce my rights. That’s true provided I can come up with $300 an hour or $4000 a day if we have to go to court.
I have come to the tentative conclusion that the US experiment in self-government is on the verge of failure. The great majority of people don’t understand the basis for our government. The don’t understand that all power is with the people. That Constitution merely sets out the mechanics of a government and enumerates the exact powers that the government has. Most important of all It also places specific limitations on governmental powers. What amazes me is that even many of our lawyers invert that whole idea and claim that our rights are granted by the Constitution.
This president is a sophomoric ninny. He was elected by the Supreme Court once and the people after they had seen him in action.
Who wouldn’t be discouraged about the future of the experiment in self-government?
Having traveled to both Europe and the US within the past couple of months, I can safely say that going through immigration in the US has some sort of surreal feeling to it…as if you’re entering a police state. Never mind exiting. Some dude felt me up – and even told me he was going to “pat my scrotum” :rolleyes: – while another bitch was busy tearing apart the insoles of my brand new Nike’s. They said the “puff machine/box” they put everyone through had “detected traces of explosives in me.”
Fuckin’ A! I had Mexican the night before. Assholes.
Seriously, having lived and travelled there for so many years it was just too bizarre. You feel right-down naked and impotent.
Meanwhile, when I flew to my native country, Spain, the people in charge couldn’t have been more affable. Yeah, I went through a machine, but that was that. They took a look at my passport and said, “welcome home, Sir.” I remember the days when it was the same in the US – since I had a green-card (never wanted US citizenship, although I met all requirements) they’d say and act the same way.
Not anymore. From what others have told me, the curent experience is akin to crossing the Berlin wall back in the day. Only in reverse.
Sad really.
In a related article, John Dean (who knows a thing or two about Presidential powers) writes about “Bush’s push towards a unitary Executive”:
Herr Bush is more like it.
And this was furthered by a complaisant Republican and cowardly Demcratic Congress that waved the USA Patriot Act through without hearings. To “complaisant” and “cowardly” you can add shiftless and careless because most of the Congress had little or no idea what the provisions of the act were.
Here they were dealing with a piece of legislation that affected civil rights and was claimed to be vital to the defense of the US. They didn’t have the gumption to stay up a little late and study it and have their staffs do likewise so they could be assured that it was “necessary and proper.” As far as I’m concerned that as close to dereliction of duty as you can get.
PS. In addition the electorate, as a group, is so inattentive as to be virtually comatose, except when it comes to keeping their tax cuts. In the next election incumbents were returned to their seats if they wanted them.
Faugh. Is there any room for me to move to Spain?
Yep, “comatose” is pretty fitting in light of what is happening before their very eyes. I myself, don’t understand the sheep-like behavior. Where’s the independent streak Americans were always known for? And what’s next? Reticular branding? They already take a picture and fingerprint you when going through immigration – never mind asking a thousand idiotic questions.
And BTW, my departure experience was hardly unique. They had an American elderly couple (in their seventies or so) going through the same ritual – both of them I might add! The man was fuming…but again, nothing they could do about it.
But of course. Just tell them you’re Canadian though 
On a side note, the economic growth, standard of living and all around positive-vibes you get when traveling around Spain are absolutely amazing. High-rise buildings going up everywhere, tremendous amount of construction, impeccable roads, new industries rising left and right, food, cheap and out of this world. I mean there’s this whole new vibrancy to the place that I used to call home that left me super-impressed – hadn’t been back in eight years (I’d been traveling to the US to see my son instead) and it just blew me away.
When I finally finish with my Real Estate businesses here and liquidate my other assets, I’m seriously considering moving back as well. I was that favorably impressed.
PS-Just as a small example of what I speak of, the new and humongous terminal at Madrid’s Barajas airport is simply breath-taking:
It should be nuked from space. Its the only way to be sure…
-XT