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Not as much downtime for me today, dangit, so my answers will be a little briefer than normal.
(I know what you're about to say, Shakka, and all I can say is "yo mama" again!  )
| quote: | Originally posted by tecnolover
That just depends on whether our elected president would be like the president of Spain or not. I would certainly hope we would never elect such a weak leader.
Sorry, Spain no offense but I honestly wished your president would have stood up to those bullies with some balls like a lot of the other US allies have. The worst thing you can do is to show fear to the enemy. I really wish your response would have been to send even more of your troops into Iraq. That would have been a defeat for terrorism instead of a victory. |
Just a quick point about Spain's elections - surely you're not suggesting that the Spanish voters elected their new president as a result of fear from Al Qaeda?
You do realize that they did, in fact, elect their new leader because their incumbent willingly and blatantly lied to them as to the real culprits of the train attacks. They, of course, smelled this out from the getgo, and couple this fact with the highly unpopular sentiment about their involvement in Iraq, this easily pushed the voters towards the challenger. Again, it wasn’t out of fear and submission to Al Qaeda – rather, it was because they had enough bullshit from their incumbent.
| quote: | | Ah, Opus you just reminded me of a point I forgot to mention. The presidents cabinet and VP. Bush admin was strongly favored IMO over Kerry because of the incredible strength of the cabinet and VP. How can you even compare an Edwards with the likes of Cheney. And the powerful cabinet of Rumsfeld, Powell and Condaleeza Rice. Bush surrounded himself with fabulous people. All great leaders do. |
Cheney’s popularity was, shall we say, quite unpopular. Rummy was in the same spot as well – both guys’ approval ratings have consistently been in the tank since post-Iraq invasion and haven’t improved much since. This is consistent in nearly all polls. Powell and Rice, of course, are another story, and their approval ratings have been consistently high. In terms of “leadership”, most folks agree with the 4 individuals you mentioned that Powell and Rice are considered great leaders.
I don’t doubt Rummy’s intelligence and to a certain degree I don’t doubt his “strategery” (couldn’t help it), and I could easily say the same for Cheney. But most folks, even a good number of Conservatives shudder at the thought of either neocon leading our country. And that’s beside the running joke that Cheney is ACTUALLY running the country right now (no, I don’t prescribe to that idea, BTW, at least not fully).
| quote: | | quote: | ***mmghgpeafsdghgh***
Sorry, I just had a little throw-up in my mouth to clean out there. |
It is quite easy for people to laugh at this Opus, but Speedracer is right. A lot of it did come down to that. Bush has established himself and people knew where he stood on many diferent grounds. Go ahead and gag and choke and laugh but morality is very important. I know you liberals forget this, ofcourse if your candidate had any maybe you'de be flauting it also. Woah did I say that? Forgive my bluntness sometimes. Really I'm not a mean guy just sometimes a bit blunt. Just take some of my blunt comments and diminish them by 1/3 and you will have my accurate sentiments. |
No need to ask forgiveness – shit I’m blunt as fuck around here. But I do try to defend my bluntness as much as possible. The rhetoric of Kerry not having any morality vs. Bush truly makes me sick if it weren’t so damn laughable. I think we’re going to see just how the far Right has effectively painted itself in a corner with all this talk about morality and “moral values”, which seemingly have effectively filtered down to the Christian Right’s agenda on just a small handful of issues (gays, guns, abortion). For some reason the Christian Right has had a major brain fart on some of the most relevant aspects of Jesus’ societal and sociological messages to His followers, which I have stated in another thread somewhere But these societal messages of Jesus which I consider most relevant and supercede other messages of homosexuality, gun rights, and abortion (which are fairly difficult to find anywhere in the 4 gospels), seem amiss with this administration. And what’s more, it seems that Bush knows DAMN well what he’s doing and advocating, yet he continues to do it anyway.
If you have trouble believing that, ask yourself what Bush is currently doing for the major rise in the poverty rate. Ask yourself what Bush is doing to address the problem of the rising levels of the uninsured – and don’t tell me tort reform is the answer, that only amounts to a very minute fraction of the actual problem (something like 1-2% of rising costs). Ask yourself what Bush is doing to shrink the gap between the affluent and the poor, when in fact this gap has continued to grow under his watch as a result of his tax cuts. Ask yourself why he feels it necessary to underfund his own education program, which by the way is doomed for failure in the future anyway. Ask yourself what Bush is doing about our environment and it’s protection. Ask yourself what Bush is doing about genocides in other parts of the world, i.e. Sudan and the Congo.
I know it’s fun as hell for us agnostics/atheists/deists to bash fundy Christians whenever we get the chance, but I really wish the fundies would ask themselves that all-encompassing question a great deal more often:
“What would Jesus do in these situations?”
What would Jesus have you do in these situations, really? And honestly, these problems aren’t exclusive to Christians by any means – regardless of your beliefs you have a fundamental obligation to protect humanity as much as possible. So why aren’t we? Why isn’t Bush? What kind of a Christian professes protecting the “sanctity of marriage” whatever that can of worms means, or wanting to appoint judges that agree with his Christian values (which of course we all interpret that to mean pro-life judges), yet does so very little to protect humanity and the environment in which we live in? What kind of a Christian feels it necessary to appoint these filtered down “moral values” towards their vote in a President, yet sees so very little beyond their backyard on all the real societal problems that Jesus was trying so hard as hell to fucking get across to his disciples and his followers?
Sorry, but again you’ll have to excuse me for burping up a little barf every now and then whenever I hear this.
| quote: | Maybe this isn't the right place for this but let me set the record straight. I consider myself a moderate not a conservative. At least I strive to be moderate. Yes, I'm a strong christian (sheesh, i must hold the record now for saying that word more than anyone here before. ierxium are you keeping a running count? lol) follower. However, I don't agree with Bush on all things. Suprise! I do think his plus's outwiegh his minus's though.
Here's my big beef. The way he went to war with Iraq does not sit so well with me. Not that i'm against us going to war with Iraq because I'm not. It was strategically brilliant and I completely agree that Iraq was the starting point in the peace plan Bush and Blair spoke of. |
They invaded Iraq because of the grave and serious threat of Saddam’s WMD, at least that was what we were told by this Administration over and over prior to our invasion. Only AFTER the invasion and AFTER our Administration realized that there were likely no WMD were other reasons starting to trickle into the equation – humanitarianism, global positioning, etc. These were not the original premises, which was my major beef with this Administration going to Iraq.
Oh yeah, they also gave bin Laden a free pass as they diverted their attention away from him. That kinda “sucks” too.
| quote: | | I know this and accept that and I have justified it to myself because I share Bush's vision. |
Why justify anything to yourself on the premise of the necessity of sharing a vision with a leader? That’s highly illogical, and borders an argument from authority fallacy. Why not simply justify it with yourself on the rationale given alone, rather than an authoritarian figure telling you to just “trust us”?
| quote: | | What i didn't like is that he wasn't fully honest about the exact intentions and stressed WMD and evil Saddam as the main reasons for war. He didn't lie, he just didn't tell the whole truth you might say. |
What would the Bible say about not telling the whole truth? C’mon, this is the same fucking thing as lying and you know it. I certainly don’t need to lecture a Christian about withholding evidence or information in a testimony – I don’t know how the Commandment of not bearing false witness against thy neighbor could be any more clear.
So again I ask you, was that really a Christian thing to do of Bush?
| quote: | | There was the possibility of WMD and the threat to Israel and yes Saddam was a evil man. Imo there was probably just barely enough intel of WMD to be able to justify the war to US citizens and congress. |
Uhh, there was plenty of conflicting evidence of that intel as well, which was not passed down from this Administration to the public. In hindsight after what the 9/11 and Duelfer reports have clearly demonstrated to us about Saddam having no WMD, it would have been nice of this Administration to come clean at that time. And by conflicting intelligence, I mean this:
| quote: | FEBRUARY 23 & 24, 2001 – COLIN POWELL SAYS IRAQ IS CONTAINED: "I think we ought to declare [the containment policy] a success. We have kept him contained, kept him in his box." He added Saddam "is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors" and that "he threatens not the United States." [Source: State Department, 2/23/01 and 2/24/01]
SEPTEMBER 16, 2001 – CHENEY ACKNOWLEDGES IRAQ IS CONTAINED: Vice President Dick Cheney said that "Saddam Hussein is bottled up" – a confirmation of the intelligence he had received. [Source: Meet the Press, 9/16/2001]
SEPTEMBER 2001 – WHITE HOUSE CREATES OFFICE TO CIRCUMVENT INTEL AGENCIES: The Pentagon creates the Office of Special Plans "in order to find evidence of what Wolfowitz and his boss, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, believed to be true-that Saddam Hussein had close ties to Al Qaeda, and that Iraq had an enormous arsenal of chemical, biological, and possibly even nuclear weapons that threatened the region and, potentially, the United States…The rising influence of the Office of Special Plans was accompanied by a decline in the influence of the C.I.A. and the D.I.A. bringing about a crucial change of direction in the American intelligence community." The office, hand-picked by the Administration, specifically "cherry-picked intelligence that supported its pre-existing position and ignoring all the rest" while officials deliberately "bypassed the government's customary procedures for vetting intelligence." [Sources: New Yorker, 5/12/03; Atlantic Monthly, 1/04; New Yorker, 10/20/03]
2002: Intel Agencies Repeatedly Warn White House of Its Weak WMD Case
Throughout 2002, the CIA, DIA, Department of Energy and United Nations all warned the Bush Administration that its selective use of intelligence was painting a weak WMD case. Those warnings were repeatedly ignored.
JANUARY, 2002 – TENET DOES NOT MENTION IRAQ IN NUCLEAR THREAT REPORT: "In CIA Director George Tenet's January 2002 review of global weapons-technology proliferation, he did not even mention a nuclear threat from Iraq, though he did warn of one from North Korea." [Source: The New Republic, 6/30/03]
FEBRUARY 6, 2002 – CIA SAYS IRAQ HAS NOT PROVIDED WMD TO TERRORISTS: "The Central Intelligence Agency has no evidence that Iraq has engaged in terrorist operations against the United States in nearly a decade, and the agency is also convinced that President Saddam Hussein has not provided chemical or biological weapons to Al Qaeda or related terrorist groups, according to several American intelligence officials." [Source: NY Times, 2/6/02]
APRIL 15, 2002 – WOLFOWITZ ANGERED AT CIA FOR NOT UNDERMINING U.N. REPORT: After receiving a CIA report that concluded that Hans Blix had conducted inspections of Iraq's declared nuclear power plants "fully within the parameters he could operate" when Blix was head of the international agency responsible for these inspections prior to the Gulf War, a report indicated that "Wolfowitz ‘hit the ceiling’ because the CIA failed to provide sufficient ammunition to undermine Blix and, by association, the new U.N. weapons inspection program." [Source: W. Post, 4/15/02]
SUMMER, 2002 – CIA WARNINGS TO WHITE HOUSE EXPOSED: "In the late summer of 2002, Sen. Graham had requested from Tenet an analysis of the Iraqi threat. According to knowledgeable sources, he received a 25-page classified response reflecting the balanced view that had prevailed earlier among the intelligence agencies--noting, for example, that evidence of an Iraqi nuclear program or a link to Al Qaeda was inconclusive. Early that September, the committee also received the DIA's classified analysis, which reflected the same cautious assessments. But committee members became worried when, midway through the month, they received a new CIA analysis of the threat that highlighted the Bush administration's claims and consigned skepticism to footnotes." [Source: The New Republic, 6/30/03]
SEPTEMBER, 2002 – DIA TELLS WHITE HOUSE NO EVIDENCE OF CHEMICAL WEAPONS: "An unclassified excerpt of a 2002 Defense Intelligence Agency study on Iraq's chemical warfare program in which it stated that there is ‘no reliable information on whether Iraq is producing and stockpiling chemical weapons, or where Iraq has - or will - establish its chemical warfare agent production facilities.’" The report also said, "A substantial amount of Iraq's chemical warfare agents, precursors, munitions, and production equipment were destroyed between 1991 and 1998 as a result of Operation Desert Storm and UNSCOM (United Nations Special Commission) actions." [Source: Carnegie Endowment for Peace, 6/13/03; DIA report, 2002]
SEPTEMBER 20, 2002 – DEPT. OF ENERGY TELLS WHITE HOUSE OF NUKE DOUBTS: "Doubts about the quality of some of the evidence that the United States is using to make its case that Iraq is trying to build a nuclear bomb emerged Thursday. While National Security Adviser Condi Rice stated on 9/8 that imported aluminum tubes ‘are only really suited for nuclear weapons programs, centrifuge programs’ a growing number of experts say that the administration has not presented convincing evidence that the tubes were intended for use in uranium enrichment rather than for artillery rocket tubes or other uses. Former U.N. weapons inspector David Albright said he found significant disagreement among scientists within the Department of Energy and other agencies about the certainty of the evidence." [Source: UPI, 9/20/02]
OCTOBER 2002 – CIA DIRECTLY WARNS WHITE HOUSE: "The CIA sent two memos to the White House in October voicing strong doubts about a claim President Bush made three months later in the State of the Union address that Iraq was trying to buy nuclear materials in Africa." [Source: Washington Post, 7/23/03]
OCTOBER 2002 — STATE DEPT. WARNS WHITE HOUSE ON NUKE CHARGES: The State Department’s Intelligence and Research Department dissented from the conclusion in the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq’s WMD capabilities that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. "The activities we have detected do not ... add up to a compelling case that Iraq is currently pursuing what INR would consider to be an integrated and comprehensive approach to acquiring nuclear weapons." INR accepted the judgment by Energy Department technical experts that aluminum tubes Iraq was seeking to acquire, which was the central basis for the conclusion that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program, were ill-suited to build centrifuges for enriching uranium. [Source, Declassified Iraq NIE released 7/2003]
OCTOBER 2002 – AIR FORCE WARNS WHITE HOUSE: "The government organization most knowledgeable about the United States' UAV program -- the Air Force's National Air and Space Intelligence Center -- had sharply disputed the notion that Iraq's UAVs were being designed as attack weapons" – a WMD claim President Bush used in his October 7 speech on Iraqi WMD, just three days before the congressional vote authorizing the president to use force. [Source: Washington Post, 9/26/03]
2003: WH Pressures Intel Agencies to Conform; Ignores More Warnings
Instead of listening to the repeated warnings from the intelligence community, intelligence officials say the White House instead pressured them to conform their reports to fit a pre-determined policy. Meanwhile, more evidence from international institutions poured in that the White House’s claims were not well-grounded.
LATE 2002-EARLY 2003 – CHENEY PRESSURES CIA TO CHANGE INTELLIGENCE: "Vice President Dick Cheney's repeated trips to CIA headquarters in the run-up to the war for unusual, face-to-face sessions with intelligence analysts poring over Iraqi data. The pressure on the intelligence community to document the administration's claims that the Iraqi regime had ties to al-Qaida and was pursuing a nuclear weapons capacity was ‘unremitting,’ said former CIA counterterrorism chief Vince Cannistraro, echoing several other intelligence veterans interviewed." Additionally, CIA officials "charged that the hard-liners in the Defense Department and vice president's office had 'pressured' agency analysts to paint a dire picture of Saddam's capabilities and intentions." [Sources: Dallas Morning News, 7/28/03; Newsweek, 7/28/03]
JANUARY, 2003 – STATE DEPT. INTEL BUREAU REITERATE WARNING TO POWELL: "The Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), the State Department's in-house analysis unit, and nuclear experts at the Department of Energy are understood to have explicitly warned Secretary of State Colin Powell during the preparation of his speech that the evidence was questionable. The Bureau reiterated to Mr. Powell during the preparation of his February speech that its analysts were not persuaded that the aluminum tubes the Administration was citing could be used in centrifuges to enrich uranium." [Source: Financial Times, 7/30/03]
FEBRUARY 14, 2003 – UN WARNS WHITE HOUSE THAT NO WMD HAVE BEEN FOUND: "In their third progress report since U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441 was passed in November, inspectors told the council they had not found any weapons of mass destruction." Weapons inspector Hans Blix told the U.N. Security Council they had been unable to find any WMD in Iraq and that more time was needed for inspections. [Source: CNN, 2/14/03]
FEBRUARY 15, 2003 – IAEA WARNS WHITE HOUSE NO NUCLEAR EVIDENCE: The head of the IAEA told the U.N. in February that "We have to date found no evidence of ongoing prohibited nuclear or nuclear-related activities in Iraq." The IAEA examined "2,000 pages of documents seized Jan. 16 from an Iraqi scientist's home -- evidence, the Americans said, that the Iraqi regime was hiding government documents in private homes. The documents, including some marked classified, appear to be the scientist's personal files." However, "the documents, which contained information about the use of laser technology to enrich uranium, refer to activities and sites known to the IAEA and do not change the agency's conclusions about Iraq's laser enrichment program." [Source: Wash. Post, 2/15/03]
FEBURARY 24, 2003 – CIA WARNS WHITE HOUSE ‘NO DIRECT EVIDENCE’ OF WMD: "A CIA report on proliferation released this week says the intelligence community has no ‘direct evidence’ that Iraq has succeeded in reconstituting its biological, chemical, nuclear or long-range missile programs in the two years since U.N. weapons inspectors left and U.S. planes bombed Iraqi facilities. ‘We do not have any direct evidence that Iraq has used the period since Desert Fox to reconstitute its Weapons of Mass Destruction programs,’ said the agency in its semi-annual report on proliferation activities." [NBC News, 2/24/03]
MARCH 7, 2003 – IAEA REITERATES TO WHITE HOUSE NO EVIDENCE OF NUKES: IAEA Director Mohamed ElBaradei said nuclear experts have found "no indication" that Iraq has tried to import high-strength aluminum tubes or specialized ring magnets for centrifuge enrichment of uranium. For months, American officials had "cited Iraq's importation of these tubes as evidence that Mr. Hussein's scientists have been seeking to develop a nuclear capability." ElBaradei also noted said "the IAEA has concluded, with the concurrence of outside experts, that documents which formed the basis for the [President Bush’s assertion] of recent uranium transactions between Iraq and Niger are in fact not authentic." When questioned about this on Meet the Press, Vice President Dick Cheney simply said "Mr. ElBaradei is, frankly, wrong." [Source: NY Times, 3/7/03: Meet the Press, 3/16/03] |
And judging by this piece in the NYTimes, outlining how Rice new full well ahead of time that those aluminum tubes were most likely for small artillery rockets and NOT for “nukular” weapons, I’d say that they’re more than just “slightly” guilty of withholding evidence:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/03/i...ner=rssuserland
| quote: | | Bush went with that because in his opinion the US citizens and congress would not understand the main reason. |
No, it’s likely because they wouldn’t buy it at that time. We had plenty of other things on our agenda to worry about, esp. trying to kill bin Laden and eliminate Al Qaeda and the Taliban completely. We also had plenty of other problems to worry about too – esp. when the debt began to climb, and the holes in our Homeland Security were all too huge. But instead we invaded a country that, granted, needed to be dealt with sooner or later, but clearly we had more ranking problems to deal with first.
| quote: | | Also they would not justify the invasion of foreign country without direct threat to the USA. Bush needed the US public and allied nation support. Was this wrong? Yes it was to some degree because it was a bit decietful as his father was about the first Gulf War. Same technique used. No lies, just not telling the entire truth in order to gain public support. |
Again I wonder how “Christian” and “moral” this really is.
| quote: | | Yet everything Bush senior and Bush junior have done has been in our nations best interst imo. Gulf war I was about oil which is the life blood of our nation. To deny this and underestimate the dependence our nation has on this is plain ignorance. |
I don’t deny this at all. Of course you could also throw in protecting one of our allies, which they don’t seem very grateful to us at all for this, but that’s another story.
| quote: | | Gulf war II is about the spreading of democracy in the middle east. The results of which if genuinely sucessful could be of biblical proportions and bring about peace in the middle east and reduce the terrorist threat to the US and worldwide and ensure an oil flow to the US for at least a decade. Not to mention the benefits of the Iraq people. The benefits are worth the risks of our soldiers. So was it wrong what Bush did? Yes. But I have forgave him for it and I see the larger picture of what is at stake. Can all of you? |
So lemme get this straight – our President, by withholding the actual intentions of invading Iraq and ousting Saddam and in essence, bold face lying to the public, should be forgiven because his ACTUAL plans, which are entirely idealistic and not realistic in nature, are a good idea?
So blowing up the limbs off of tens of thousands of innocent children and the heads off of innocent Iraqi men and women is justified NOT because their dictator possessed WMD stockpiles, but because our President simply told us that at first but had actual intentions of spreading our version of democracy to a region that has never seen or understood democracy in the first place?
And what if they reject this democracy based on these premises I just described? What then?
And sending our brave men and women off to war to fight not just to disarm a dictator, but to spread this ideological and untested vision of American style democracy to a region that, shall we say, doesn’t want shit to do with any style of government that has our fingerprints on it? Are you seriously stating that this idea was worth the tens of thousands of limbs blown off our friends and loved ones, as well as over 1100 of those soldiers already dead?
Seriously, do you have any fucking clue as to just how unpopular we are over there?
I do hope you realize that they didn’t exactly “welcome us with open arms” as Rummy professed thanks much in part to listening to that lying sack of shit, Ahmed Chalabi. If you think that our invasion in Falujia will quell the Iraqi citizen dissent overall that much, you’re simply not being realistic at all.
I’ve avoided making parallels to Vietnam as much as possible throughout this war and post-war campaign, simply because I thought the differences were just a bit too much more than the similarities. But one striking similarity is becoming all too painfully evident – the natives want us the fuck out, and they’re not exactly being helpful, nor do they share our ideological vision very much at all. If things continue to fall to crap, which I readily predict, there’s no God in this universe that’s going to tell Bush to keep our men and women in there while they continue to get picked off like shooting fish in a barrel. No fucking way will Bush stay there, and there is quiet but strong sentiment on the Hill by none other than Conservatives who are saying this. Novak had a column on this about a month ago, can’t find it right now.
| quote: | | I know you are a conspiracist Opus. Bush had nothing to do with 9/11 and I'm sick of all you Michael Moore sheep conspiricists with your idiotic fictions. I think a lot of the reason Bush didn't win by a greater margin wasn't anything to do with Kerry (as i've said before it could have been donald duck running. made no dif) it had to do with a small but influential hate sentiment in the US for Bush and I think Moore and a lot of these conspiricists are to blame. These last few years have seen more of these wacked ideas come into the mainstream via media outlets than possibly ever in US history. Well it didn't work! So all you M. Moore sheep can just go and climb back in your little holes now for another 4 more years. |
Umm, what the fuck? Where the hell did you get this “conspiracy” bullshit from? Oh sure, I entertain those ideas, but I do try my best to keep them at arm’s length. Seriously, how did you surmise this from what I stated? How on earth did you think I said that Bush was behind 9/11? Christ I don’t even think Moore himself goes as far to say that, does he? Regardless, that has absolutely nothing to do with what I stated.
All I stated was that utilizing fear plays well into a leader’s hands. This is no secret whatsoever, and most leaders have utilized this to their advantage one way or another. The fear that Bush had the ability to utilize was great, and it was a particularly big hurdle for any challenger to climb over. I made the reference about the RNC convention being in New York because Bush at one time plainly stated that he will NOT politicize 9/11, yet that was precisely what he did during his convention, as well as one of his first campaign commercials. In essence, Bush simply couldn’t help himself here – utilizing 9/11 for political gain was exactly what Bush had to do.
Sorry Shakka, this was long as hell. Oh well.
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Whence September dusk grows crisper still,
with leaves all crimson conquered,
I yearn to shout,
and dance about,
and stick pickles in my honker...
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h and if you are going to try to somehow argue that anytime a people don't agree with another group of people.. this is technically imposing their belief system on them, don't bother with the keystrokes. The argument can equally be made that homo's are imposing their perverted ways on society as well. No one is forcing anyone to convert to anothers ways, therfore 'impose' isn't really the correct word. Maybe you meant 'influence'. In which case yes, i suppose my beliefs do influence others just as everything in our environment does to one degree or another. 
