Teach your grandmother to suck eggs. Damn sure was aware of it. I was aware that a hysteria had swept over my beloved country, that madness was abroad in the land.
And I was aware that persons of a particular political stripe ruthlessly, relentlessly and cynically exploited that bad craziness for every drop of poisonous political advantage they could squeeze.
I also remember that GeeDubya swore up and down that it wasn’t a “go to war” resolution, but a resolution supporting his negotiating position, to offer support for an effort to avoid war. I didn’t believe a word of it. How about you?
He also swore up and down that he was not aiming to go to war, that he was seeking a peaceful solution, even as he set in motion the machinery of war as surely as playing Russian Roulette with an automatic. I didn’t believe a word of it. You?
Can you believe the soldiers would have been better served by not sending them to a war based on lies? There is no reason for them to be killed and wounded. He is responsible for their harm.
LOL, no offense Lobo but you couldnt form a coherent argument at gunpoint. In light of 9/11, a stockpile of WMDs or a WMD dev program had virtually the same amount of threat to the US. (Still waiting for you to say something about the Gore quotes. Or is your shtick is that you ignore stuff you can’t refute?..)
Actually, it is. I provided a cite. If you think it’s false, you can present another one. You’re the one who said they were (or might be) out of context. Go get 'em cowboy, let’s see some proof. You do this all the time by the way - for example, when it’s a survey that shows your position is incorrect, all of a sudden the survey isn’t good enough for you. I invite you to post your survey, with the better methodology you cry for, and all we hear are crickets.
Your wiki attempt is pretty laughable. I’m asking for proof that the Administration deliberately misled America into war, that the books were cooked. You show some innuendo about intel going through non-traditional channels. Sorry, not good enough, and you know it. To prove your allegation, you’re going to have to provide some evidence, a memo or a smoking gun, that outlines that the US knew that there was a) no WMDs, and b) no program to develop them, and c) went to war anyway.
Now, were some in the administration looking for a reason to go after Saddam? You bet. Your wiki article states as much, and I have no doubt that they saw what they wanted to see, in analyzing the intel. But motive alone isn’t enough, IMHO.
I don’t know if I’d use the word hysteria, but on this we mostly agree.
Completely agree.
I know the Dems desperately claimed this in the 2004 primaries so they’d look warm n’ fuzzy to the tie-dye/drum circle crowd, but they’d have to be pretty fckn stupid not to know what they were voting for, at the end of the day.
He wanted a big stick threat to make Saddam knuckle under to the UN inspectors. Without that vote there wouldn’t be much of a credible threat to enforce compliance.
Was he hoping that Saddam would play a game of chicken? Maybe. Some in his administration: probably/definitely.
We’d be laughing. We would still be making jokes about the stupid motherfuckers who cooked up this ridiculous scheme, thinking that it would work. We were attacked by the Keystone Kop terror org.
Oh, puh-leeze! Been a member of that group for forty years and change, and know full well that nobody gives a rat’s what we think. The only politicians who refer to us do so to scare their victims, hippies gonna git yer daughter, boogity boogity. No body panders to us.
The Resolution was invitation from the Republican Party for Democrats with balls and a conscience to commit political suicide and call the President a liar. So yeah, they get a measure of blame. I’m not a Democrat anyway, so you can quit brandishing them at me like waving a crucifix at Dracula. But they didn’t lead, or more to the point, mislead.
We Americans elect a man to be the most powerful single human being on Earth. We don’t draft for the position, a man has to be elected, he has to put himself forward and say “I can do this, you can trust me. I will not consign a hundred thousand innocent people to death and then say ‘oopsy!’ I will not mislead you.”
Read his speech regarding that resolution. It was a battallion of lies and misinformation, marching in goose-step past your wondering eyes. Lies you probably have forgotten, overshadowed by the towering crock o’ shit that was WMD.
I’m not offended, because you aren’t a reasonable observer.
I think that’s your song, actually. I’m waiting for you to get me a cite that isn’t suspect.
Allow me to reiterate: When posting a cite, it is your job to make sure it has pedigree, it isn’t my job to prove a janky cite that you’ve posted is bad.
I addressed the Gore quotes if you want to re-read the thread. They are after 911.
Please, try to read and understand the issue before you reflexively attack. Kay?
You provided a blog… or something, I’m not sure what that page is supposed to be. Even if you were to accept that the dayglow page with the animated GIFs as factual quotes, they are not pertinent to the subject.
You specifically said they pointed to WMDs in Iraq, but the quotes, as they are typed by the blogger or whatever, aren’t about that. They are about development programs.
No, this isn’t how it is done. You’re the one offering the internet equivalent of a smeared napkin.
As I said, once more because you don’t appear to be catching this:
Your cite looks hinky. You are the one offering it, it’s not our job to search for a good cite.
The cite doesn’t say things you said it did. So even if the blog or whatever is correct, it isn’t a cite that claims what you are suggesting it claims.
Your survey was done by mail, with the logo of a specifically conservative company on the envelope and had unprofessional methodology.
This is a perfect example of what you’re doing here. Your cite is garbage, but you don’t care, because it says what you want to say.
In the thread you’re referring to the poll was garbage, it was done unprofessionally and there is strong pollster bias. This means that it can’t be trusted. It doesn’t mean that I have to find a poll that goes against it, one may not exist. What it means is you haven’t made the case for your assertion. This is logic and reasoning 101. You should know this by now.
You don’t care if what you cite is true or not, don’t you understand why that is a bad thing?
I provided evidence. Do you know that proof only exists in math? All I can do is provide evidence.
They were doing what you’re doing in this very thread. You are sticking to untrustworthy info that doesn’t really say what you think it says.
This is actually pretty funny, you’re a meta-example of the defects in the reasoning of the right.
Beyond this, Bush was (at this stage) heavily dependent on Cheney and Wolfowitz for the information that he based his decisions on. The fact that Cheney, Wolfowitz and Feith were able to simultaneously bully, cow and corrupt the critical intelligence infrastructure responsible for serving the President still surprises me to this day. You’d like to think that someone would have stood up and said “enough” to these games, but no one with any power did. It was all CYA all the time. Makes you wonder about those serving in government. The book “Fiasco” has some excellent history on how these decisions were made and the build up to the war.
Having said this, Bush seemed very personally intent of punishing Saddam as an “evil” man. I kind of wonder if her would have found a way to go after him regardless of the real intelligence.
A scathing review, that would be slightly more weighty if 70% of your posts didn’t boil down to, “Democrats do it tooooooooooooooooo!”
I assume the jousting portion of this thread is done and we can get back to what sort of grand gesture the Shrubleyah can make to not be seen as the biggest failure of the new century?
No, faced with a certain narrow segment of militant Islamic terrorists, Bush then chose pretty much all of Islam as his enemy when he decided to start a war against a country that had nothing to do with the attacks.
I’ve often thought this, actually even before we invaded Iraq.
It always seemed to me that the junior Bush had a particular hard-on for Saddam Hussein and that that probably had something to do with his daddy.
I’ve just never been sure if it was because of the alleged “contract” SH had out on his daddy’s life or if he wanted to finish the job that daddy started (capturing or killing SH) but didn’t finish - maybe proving something to the old man in the process.
Frankly, I don’t think Bush’s reputation can be repaired. What we should be concentrating on is repairing our own reputation-we elected him, we believed the bullshit(or buckled under it), then we actually reelected him. If we allow some spinmeisters to “repair” his reputation, we’ll look even more like insensitive boobs than we already do.
Continued personal comments and insults will bring warnings for anyone else in this thread. Insult each other in the Pit if you must, but you can’t do it here.
Perhaps he could build on that by establishing one or more Albert Schweitzer/Mother Theresa-esque hospitals/hospices for AIDS sufferers in Africa. If he seems sincere about it, he could build his reputation up to a Carter-style “He meant well, but just wasn’t up to the job of president” level.
