From this CNN article:
Wilkerson was Former Secretary of State Colin Powell’s chief of staff
This article is a great inside look at how badly we executed this war and who pushed for it.
Backs up what I keep saying. Cheney and Rumsfeld are evil and Bush is just a puppet.
Jim
Can’t he be all three?
Jim. You’re a bright guy. Seriously. Do not give the trained monkey the excuse of being “just a puppet.” He deserves to take responsibility for his actions. He had a choice in whether or not to run this country into the ground. He had a choice in whether or not to send young people to die to line his buddies’ pockets. He had a choice in whether to take the goodwill we once held around the world and grind it to nothing. If nothing else, he is guilty of the sin of apathy and the sin of treating other people like things. Let him hang.
I completely agree. Bush is criminally negligent but I really think Cheney and Rummy are on another level. Bush is a jerk and too dumb to be POTUS.
Cheney is actually pure evil. He does so much that is so wrong and he is still getting away with it.
If we rebuilt Bush’s cabinet with some honest and skilled people, his decision making would probably improve dramatically. I say this because I don’t think he makes many of the decision himself.
Jim
I am going to bump this once for the evening crowd.
I also saw that the EU might punish members that had CIA Black Sights set up.
http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/europe/11/28/eu.prisons.ap/index.html
Jim
“Aloof” is what Bush is? It sounds more like
I gotta go with Chris Matthews on this one. As he said (paraphrased) on Harball just a few days ago: These guys [like Wilkerson] were on the inside and did nothing. They make me sick now that they’re on the outside and want to paint those remaining as some evil cabal. They should’ve resigned if they were so disgusted by the goings on. I have no respect for them.
You don’t need to respect them. Just heed them.
He did resign. What are you talking about?
Jim
I thought he just went out with Powell, at the end of his term. Am I wrong about about that? That doesn’t fall under “resigning” in my book.
He retired from Govt. service when Powell did. So if you choose not to accept that as a resignation I’ll have to concede he did not resign until Powell did.
He is a lifetime republican and he is disgusted with Cheney & Rumsfeld. It sounds like he and a few other tried to supply better advise to the POTUS but Powell was largely ignored.
Jim
I guess my point is that if you are resigning in protest, you don’t just wait until the term lapses. This is **war **we’re talking about, not just some minor policy issue like whether the tax rate should be 28% or 30%. If either Powell or Wilkerson thought the war was wrong, they should’ve walked out the door the day Bush began the invasion, if not earlier.
Right, they should have walked out instead of trying to change policy. That makes perfect sense. If they did, you probably would have slammed them for not supporting the President.
Jim
I don’t see any evidence that Powell tried to change policy. He went in front of the freakin’ UN to try to convince them to suppor the war, for God’s sake.
No, I would not have slammed them for not supporting the president, and I have no idea why you’d think that. Perhaps you are confusing me with someone who supported the war. I never have. I just like a little bit of integrity in my government officials, and I get peeved when they start acting holier than thou.
Either way, someone would call them unpatriotic anti-Americans. Who cares whether they resigned, quit, or retired? What matters is, are they telling the truth. That’s the only thing that matters. If Bush were not “aloof” (nice charitable word), maybe he could give logical explanations that have some basis in fact. Personally, I always thought he didn’t know what the hell he was doing, and even worse, didn’t care.
He "out"ted those as idiots two the same way I am now outing Michael Jackson as a freak.
Ok, I remember the lead up to the war a little differently. I remember Powell pushing for time to build a coalition.
I apologize for thinking you were a kneejerk Bush supporter, when you brought up Chris Matthews, I assumed the worst. My Bad, again I am sorry.
Jim
Powell was a moderate if anything, but he had a military background. That means follow your orders and question later, in private. Powell wanted to build a real coalition, and I think he also wanted to give the inspectors a chance to finish up. However, he yielded to those who “outranked” him. It cost him his reputation.
I have assumed that he tried to influence thinking on policies, was rebuffed and that’s why he isn’t Secretary of State.
Did you by any chance see the Meet the Press interview on the beach where one of Powell’s aids moved the camera off of him at a certain point in the questioning? He ordered her to move away and he continued the interview with Russert. I would have loved to have seen an explaination for what happened.
[/hijack]
On Hardball tonight, Pulitizer Prize winner Seymore Hersh (I’m uncertain of the spelling) said that Cheney and Rove keep Bush in a sort of religious Utopian gray area (not the exact wording) regarding the war and feed him whatever information that want him to have. The implication is that Bush truly believes in what he is doing and believes more than ever that democracy can be established by force in Iraq. Hersh has written more about it in the current edition of The New Yorker.
The power of an emtional commitment to something - anything - can never be underestimated. It happens with politicians, it happens in companies (mine here had to implement a change to the website that was retrogressive and supported by no one because the doddery old chairman, with his knighthood, suggested it at a directors’ meeting), and it happens here. In fact, it’s behind many of the strange, inequitable, and otherwise difficult to explain decisions that are made here.
A fact of life. Not a very palatable one - but one none the less.
I’ve been closely following Mr. Hersh for a long time. His reporting on the Bushivik march to war has been harrowing to read, and thus far has proved spot on in every major respect. If only half what he says is true, its a terrible indictment. As it happens, I thinks its almost all true.