Sam, I have always admired you as a poster. You are demonstrating much more patience than I would have under the circumstances.
Ah. A case in point.
Seen any terrorist attacks here at home lately, Steve?
Seek help.
This is esprecially precious.
Pakistan.
I wear a grape lollipop on a string around my neck to keep the elephants away.
See? It works!
I know the idea that the policy changes after 9/11 are actually working is a concept that many of you can’t accept. That’s fine. Just keep your heads in the sand and your thumbs in your mouth and let the adults handle things.
No, it’s just that we like to see evidence when assertions such as yours are made. What’s the evidence that these “policy changes” are working?
The lack of body parts strewn all over the place like they were after 9/11.
The lack of elephants near me is evidence that the lollipop works.
No, of course *you * did not. Many of the rest of us out here in the “reality-based community” are, though.
The circularity comes in considering that “evidence” to be the basis for holding that position in the first place. You assumed your conclusion. That is dishonest.
The evaluation *starts * with the evidence. If an assessment of the evidence forces the conclusion that Bush has been irresponsible, that’s honest. Your pathetic attempt to dismiss facts as being the result of a desperate desire shows that you don’t even understand what intellectual honesty is, much less practice it.
Much less than your own puppylike belief in the Swifties, for one. For another, the memo had exactly jack to do with Bush’s own irresponsible conduct thirty years earlier.
Kindly provide an example of the “critical analysis” you have provided that has withstood even mild scrutiny.
Not in general. It’s *your * nature, though.
Back up. You also are assuming your conclusion, that war was necessary/inevitable. It was not necessary to make him blink or not.
Now that deserves some explication on your part. What parties and what sabotage?
[qutoe]They weren’t lies; he just didn’t have them in the amounts we feared.
[/quote]
Behold the extent that a desperate need to avoid accepting responsibility can take. **Sam ** at least dodges the issue. Saddam
No, they did not have the same access. Bush suppressed any mention of alternative hypotheses, or any hedging or uncertainties, first.
Even accepting that summation to be accurate and fair (it is not), what does a moral person do in the face of such uncertainty? Start a war and get people killed anyway, or not?
Do either of you accept any responsibility for all of the thousands of deaths Bush has caused in Iraq or not? If not, why not? Do you have an honest answer?
On preview: Evil One, the list of US and other casualties is updated daily here. The largest part of them involve “strewn body parts”.
“You know, I’ve often thought of becoming a golf club.”
Being a Democrat and liking Clinton a lot as President if less as governor, I can’t help but wonder if all the Senators found evelopes on their porch the morning of the vote containing pictures of them getting a BJ, or with a duck, or whatever. 
BTW, how did Liberman vote?
Sam: You are underestimating the severity of waging war. I agree that it’s absurd the amount of virtiol thrown at Bush over very debatable policy decisions like tax issues or ANWAR drilling. But there is no more serious, no more deadly act that a nation’s government can take than waging war. This war was simply not necessary. Simply not necessary. And you can’t blame people for anger, even hatred, towards Bush for sending this country in that direction.
But the problem with a lot of people here is that denouncing the war is not enough. You have to hate Bush for everything he does or else your a moron; just one of the “sheeple”. It’s hard to take any debate seriously when people debating can’t even use Bush’s name properly. It has to be BushCo, Shrub, Chimpface or Fearless Misleader. As shrill as some of the righties can be around here, I don’t recall even one instance during the campaign of someone mocking Kerry’s name.
I prefer ‘Monkey Boy’ or ‘Ook-Ook’.
I did hear Kerry referred to as ‘Lurch’ and ‘Herman Munster’. Oh, and ‘The Flip-Flopper’ seemed to be fairly popular.
False conclusion, I’m afraid. al Qaida had a practice (mentioned often in U.S. intelligence reports) of spending several years developing a terrorist attack on a major target. So while it is possible (and to be hoped) that our intervention in Afghanistan actually disrupted that organization to the point where the next major attack will not be attempted until 2008 or 2010 instead of 2006, there is clearly no evidence nor any reason to believe that our adventure in Iraq has had any impact on their next attack on the U.S.
The policy changes are cosmetic crap, that really only authorize the government to spy on its own citizens (Patriot Act, Real ID, etc). The war policy was already in place, and there only needed to be an excuse (re the Downing Street memo). There were no WMD at all (re the UN and CIA reports). Where’s Osama? Pakistan. Well duh. We had him and let him slip out of our fingers by farming the job out to local warlords (like maybe we still need him to be our boogeyman and didn’t want to catch him). During the election debates, Osama was no longer important according to Bush. Did you miss that? What happened to “where comin’ ta getcha”?
I am an adult. I’m 52 years old. I was in the Army, I have a degree, am a former (as in ex) Republican, and have worked in the defense industry (both the private sector and government side). Not exactly the sort of profile a bleeding heart liberal dove would have, is it? Don’t give me any of your “adult” bullshit. I’m adult enough to resent any administration (composed of cowards and draft dodgers) that gets our people killed, or anyone else’s people killed over ego and ambition and stupidity. I resent that they think I’m so damn stupid they can lie to me and then change the lie whenever it suits them. The slogans changed quite a bit during the election debates. Yeah, I take that personally.
As far as the far out there religious right, do a search for quotes and “mission statements” for the people and groups I named. I think you’ll be shocked and appalled. R.J. Rushdooney, Gary North, Paul Cameron, Pat Robertson, D. James Kennedy, Francis Schaeffer, Dominionist, Christian Reconstructionist. Read what John Danforth says about them. Read the Southern Poverty Law Center report.
Then get back to us.
I may have my head in the sand (don’t think so) but yours is firmly locked in your ass.
I may not have been clear in my brief response. I was not referencing the Iraq war when I mentioned “policy changes”. I was referring to the attacks on Al Qaida in Afghanistan, the Patriot Act, the announced policy of preemption and everything else that added up to being proactive in preventing and disrupting terrorism.
It’s somewhat frustrating to hear people say that GWB has done nothing that makes us safer. The bottom line is that we just don’t know either way. If the CIA or FBI is successful in penetrating a terror cell, the last thing they are going to do is tell us about it. None of us on the outside has any idea how many plots have been disrupted or how many people have been arrested. I feel safe in saying that only the most blindly partisan among us would seriously say that “nothing GWB has done has made any difference”.
A case could be made that by initiating a war of aggression against a sovereign nation, and by justifying that war by presenting ‘evidence’ to the world that has been shown to be false, that Bush and his administration has made us less safe. Saddam was an evil man as much as his idol Stalin, but he did keep the terrorist groups in Iraq under control (or to be more accurate, ruthlessly subjugated them).
Steve, the “adult” comment was made to Johnny L.A. based on his apparent low level of capability to add something to the discussion beyond one sentence of marginal relevance.
That said, your comment about the people you oppose “creaming their pants” when they saw people jumping out of the World Trade Center was in poor taste and intellectually dishonest. Are you seriously saying that some people saw 9/11 as a political opportunity and were happy that it happened?
As for the mission statements of the religious right, I don’t take them any more seriously than I do the mission statements of the American Communist Party. They don’t have the numbers to turn the country into what they want it to be.
Saddam did blink. Testimony of Hans Blix, chief weapons inspector, pre-war.
Enjoy,
Steven
Fuck you very much, Evil One. Apparently you have a low level of capability to comprehend hyperbolic analogies. :rolleyes:
Time will tell whether this was the right decision or not. It turns out that the Marshall Plan was the right call. Yalta was not, at least for the eastern europeans. In twenty years, will Iraq be an example of democracy in the middle east that leads other to follow or a killing ground mired in civil war? It’s still to early to tell at this point. Are you one of those people who refuses to see the link between our action in Afghanistan and Iraq and the change of heart in Libya and the withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon? And what do you think the consequences would have been to leave Saddam in place?
The terrorism problem had been building for a generation before 9/11 and it won’t be solved overnight.