Next time, please document your own assertions, but it turns out you are right.
Cynthia Ann McKinney (born March 17, 1955) is a former US Congresswoman and a member of the Green Party since 2007. As a member of the Democratic Party, she served six terms as a member of the United States House of Representatives…
McKinney gained national attention for remarks she made following the 2001 US attacks, charging that the United States had advance knowledge of the attacks and that US President George W. Bush may have been aware of the incipient attack and allowed them to happen.
The truth about the Republican Party may justify hate for it. This does not mean that those who tell the truth about the Republican Party hate it. They are just being honest.
Republicans like to point out that President Clinton had opportunities to kill Osama bin Laden, but did not take them. This does not mean that Clinton wanted bin Laden to hit the United States.
Speaking only for myself, I do not think Bush was evil enough to plan 9/11, or allow it to happen if he knew it was going to happen. I do not think he was competent enough to have detected it and prevented it.
He received a few warnings, but he was probably distracted.
Since the end of the Roosevelt administration there have been Republicans who wanted to repeal the reforms of the New Deal. This is what President Eisenhower thought about them:
Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas.5 Their number is negligible and they are stupid. http://www.eisenhowermemorial.org/presidential-papers/first-term/documents/1147.cfm
This attitude dominated the Republican Party until the campaign of 1980. Since then the Republican Party has been dominated by those who wanted to restore laissez faire capitalism, and those who adhered to and continue to adhere to bizarre economic theories like Supply Side Economics.
What we need in the United States is a conservative party in the Eisenhower mold. We need a party that respects and studies the past, but which does not want to restore it. We need a party that is skeptical of untried economic experiments, and that recognizes when previous experiments have failed. In short, we need a party that conserves, rather than destroys.
I have spend over an hour reading every comment in this thread. I am impressed, and almost awed by the quality of the comments, and by the civility with which they have been presented. I hope my comments are considered to be up to the prevailing standard.
Thanks for putting up those cites. I meant to do that myself, but I’ve been a bit busy the past couple days since I last posted in this thread. I appreciate it!
The most bizarre theory I can think of is that George W. Bush planned 9/11. I voted against him twice, and think he did a lot of harm to the United States. Nevertheless, I do not think he is evil enough to do something like that.
Also, there are plenty of journalists who grew up reading about how Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein became rich and famous by destroying the Nixon administration after Nixon had been reelected in a landslide. These would have loved to expose a Bushite conspiracy to blow up the World Trade Center. You can bet leading newspapers would have given them the assignment if there was any reason to suspect a conspiracy.
Addressing high unemployment by laying off government workers is asinine - and “austerity measures” means just that. Especially when these austerity measures are combined with tax cuts.
Read about Texas justice some time. At least some of those men were clearly innocent.
Not that is a content free response. No one said all. We’re not Abraham pleading for Sodom here.
Again you miss the point. I was not objecting to you or I or the man in the moon calling these people evil. I was objecting the the President of the United States being so diplomatically stupid that he called them evil in a big speech. Try to think about it.
We say “You are evil we will destroy you” and then say “why are you going for nuclear weapons?”
And NONE of the people or countries he put into the “Axis of Evil” (which, ironically, was a phrase that David Frum coined) had anything to do with 9/11. Iran actually offered us military aid against the Taliban, an organization that the Iranian government vehemently opposed (along with Al Qaeda).
Total agreement. We need a strong opposition party (whichever party it happens to be!) to keep the ruling party from corruption.
People constantly miss this point with regard to defense attorneys. Defense lawyers aren’t there to “get their client off,” but to make sure the prosecution actually does a proper job in presenting their case. Likewise, the opposition party in the U.S. isn’t there to block legislation, or prevent judges from being approved, or impeach the president for partisan reasons, but to keep the process open and honest.
We need political parties that believe in what is best for the country, not what is best for themselves.
I believe the Democratic party is more open and honest, and somewhat less corrupt than the Republican party, today, largely because the Democratic Party is, itself, so much a coalition of interests that it serves (roughly speaking) as its own “opposition.” A Democratic member of Congress is (somewhat) more likely to blow the whistle on a corrupt fellow-Democrat than a Republican member is to expose wrongdoing by a fellow Republican.
Neither party is spotless; no political party ever can be. But the Republicans have lost sight of the small-d democratic purpose for their own existence.
Go ask the dead of Iraq how non-evil Bush is, how much respect for human life he has. Not evil enough? Even if you postulate the most extreme conspiracy scenario, that he had the Towers wired with explosives and personally pushed a big red button to blow them up, that would still be an order of magnitude or two less evil than Iraq.
That would imply that we should institute survival of the fittest policies.
But more seriously not all environmental concerns are equal. And what we do on global warming isn’t going to matter once China, India, and Brazil unleash their potential.
Interesting book… I shall look into it
And the mainstream GOP isn’t doing anything rally stupid if it wants to get elected.
You’ve GOT to be kidding. The GOP mainstream platform is MADE of stupid, that’s why I and many others oppose them. Deregulating financial institutions, stupid. Trickle down economics, stupid. Starting wars on false pretenses, stupid. Denying global warming: stupid. Getting rid of Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, stupid. Shutting down agencies to keep air and water clean, stupid. If they attempt to enact the policies they are advocating, it’s gonna be really, really stupid.
I’ve left out a lot of the evil stuff, the mainstream stupid is reason enough to not vote for the GOP.
Yes, Clinton did take the probabilities of success and of the death of innocents into account. He did have other opportunities that he did take - but those self-same Republicans then claimed he was just attempting to distract people from the blowjob story.
That’s really, really dumb, and you know it. If he set up 9/11, it would still cover all the people dying in Iraq, plus the people dying in 9/11 itself, plus the added secrecy he’s apparently had the power to invoke.
And that’s not even getting into the fact that it’s pretty clear that Bush was convinced he was doing the right thing in Iraq, and there’s no such argument for 9/11. And my claim that Bush was mostly being led around by other people, and thus is just as evil as a child being made to do something evil.
It’s all about containing the bad shit. Fossil fuels, when burned, emmit CO and CO2. Over the long run, it’s wreaking havoc on the environment and atmosphere and cannot be easily contained and segregated (e.g. 300 million cars spewing CO into the air).
Nuclear power creates waste that’s imminently far more dangerous than coal, and with the added bonus of possible core meltdowns. However, this waste is far more easily contained and segregated, provided we find a nice spot on this planet to let the stuff chill for 20,000 years or so. Also – clean emmisions.
So, Nuclear power is a nice stepping stone to ween ourselves off of coal, and on toward renewable, clean sources (like solar, wind and hydroelectric) which will become far, far more cost effective and applicable as we develop and refine the technologies over the next couple decades.
As the globe becomes ever more reliant on high technology, it becomes all the more crucial to let the experts forge and reforge guidelines, regulations and laws governing these tecnologies. Other developing countries will have to follow suit.
That’s the really sad thing; the mentality that a political party should be elected out of pure competition alone, as if there should be no rules on foul play and they just keep hitting and hitting below the belt to keep their title.
Say what? It would have the exact same “justification” as Iraq; that all those people are being killed for a greater purpose. Nor do I see any evidence that Bush considers mass murder wrong in the first place, as long as he’s the one doing the murdering.
