Thread: Maybe the worst sitting President ever....

Originally Posted by Mr Earl

^ the only good news would be for US to be in a position to make a graceful exit.
Unfortunately it's looking like we will be having a continued military presence in Iraq for generations as we have had in Germany, Korea, Japan, and other places around the world.

We have a continued presence in Germany, Japan, and Korea because of the Cold War. We aren't going to have a long presence in Iraq; people are tired of wasting billions per day in some country that the President cannot pronounce correctly when our schools suck, our roads and bridges are crumbling, etc.

We should withdraw like we did from Vietnam. It's not like Vietnam is turning out to be that bad afterall.

Originally Posted by Anonymous Coward

They just want us out of their lives, out of their countries and to mind our own business.

A-fucking men.

We were not terrorized until (1) we starting interfering in their internal affairs (Operation Ajax anyone?) and (2) started taking the side of Israel.

Man, it just would be so easy to end the war on terror but America is just too f-ing stupid.

Reduce consumption of oil, stop meddling in their affairs, stop unilaterally supporting Israel. Three tenets to end terrorism without another war, another trillion spent, another U.S. soldier's life lost in vain.

Originally Posted by Anonymous Coward

. When asked when we'd make progress against terrorists he said it only happen when governments stopped lying and telling people that the terrorists were out to destroy our lifestyle and take away our freedoms. Nonsense. They just want us out of their lives, out of their countries and to mind our own business.

So when they hoot an howl "death to america" they are just joking right.
When Ahmadinejad says he want's to wipe Israel off the map he's just being misunderstood.

When Daniel Pearl, Nick Berg, and Paul Johnson had their heads hacked off it was just an accident.
The terrorists bombings around the world are just desperate pleas to "leave us alone"!
9/11 was a small misunderstanding.
They want to be left alone to drag women off busses and shoot them for registering to vote.
Oh yea all the jihadist terrorism is just an innocent plea to be "left alone".
If you can honestly believe that you really haven't been paying much attention for the past 30 years.

Originally Posted by Mr Earl

When Daniel Pearl, Nick Berg, and Paul Johnson had their heads hacked off it was just an accident.

nope. seemed pretty deliberate to me.

it's a shame about pearl because he was a journalist, but the other two were despicable war profiteers and got what they deserved.

but in the end, even pearl was profiting from war.

and when you consider that tens of thousands of innocent iraqis have been slaughtered because of this intellectually incurious president and his incompetent and/or evil administration, their deaths are beyond insignificant.

I suppose the invasions of oil-rich nations is just a plea to be left alone as well.

I suppose the overthrow of legitimate governments multiple times is just another way of saying "We care, here, here's some democracy. Never mind the guy in the back taking all your oil."

I suppose it's easier and cheaper in terms of dollars and lives to keep supporting Israel, meddling in the internal affairs of nations, and continuing to promote and sell the worst kinds of vehicles on the planet rather than doing the moral and right thing.

I suppose a just and moral U.S. foreign policy over the past 50 years would have not only kept 9-11 from happening but also Pearl, Berg, and Johnson likely would all be alive (in addition to hundreds of thousands of others as well).

I suppose that if we have left Iran alone in 1953 then there would be no Ahmadinejad wanting nukes to bring balance in the Middle East against those who already have them.

Was 9/11 really that bad?
The attacks were a horrible act of mass murder, but history says we're overreacting.
By David A. Bell
January 28, 2007

IMAGINE THAT on 9/11, six hours after the assault on the twin towers and the Pentagon, terrorists had carried out a second wave of attacks on the United States, taking an additional 3,000 lives. Imagine that six hours after that, there had been yet another wave. Now imagine that the attacks had continued, every six hours, for another four years, until nearly 20 million Americans were dead. This is roughly what the Soviet Union suffered during World War II, and contemplating these numbers may help put in perspective what the United States has so far experienced during the war against terrorism.

It also raises several questions. Has the American reaction to the attacks in fact been a massive overreaction? Is the widespread belief that 9/11 plunged us into one of the deadliest struggles of our time simply wrong? If we did overreact, why did we do so? Does history provide any insight?

Certainly, if we look at nothing but our enemies' objectives, it is hard to see any indication of an overreaction. The people who attacked us in 2001 are indeed hate-filled fanatics who would like nothing better than to destroy this country. But desire is not the same thing as capacity, and although Islamist extremists can certainly do huge amounts of harm around the world, it is quite different to suggest that they can threaten the existence of the United States.

Yet a great many Americans, particularly on the right, have failed to make this distinction. For them, the "Islamo-fascist" enemy has inherited not just Adolf Hitler's implacable hatreds but his capacity to destroy. The conservative author Norman Podhoretz has gone so far as to say that we are fighting World War IV (No. III being the Cold War).

But it is no disrespect to the victims of 9/11, or to the men and women of our armed forces, to say that, by the standards of past wars, the war against terrorism has so far inflicted a very small human cost on the United States. As an instance of mass murder, the attacks were unspeakable, but they still pale in comparison with any number of military assaults on civilian targets of the recent past, from Hiroshima on down.

Even if one counts our dead in Iraq and Afghanistan as casualties of the war against terrorism, which brings us to about 6,500, we should remember that roughly the same number of Americans die every two months in automobile accidents.

Of course, the 9/11 attacks also conjured up the possibility of far deadlier attacks to come. But then, we were hardly ignorant of these threats before, as a glance at just about any thriller from the 1990s will testify. And despite the even more nightmarish fantasies of the post-9/11 era (e.g. the TV show "24's" nuclear attack on Los Angeles), Islamist terrorists have not come close to deploying weapons other than knives, guns and conventional explosives. A war it may be, but does it really deserve comparison to World War II and its 50 million dead? Not every adversary is an apocalyptic threat.

So why has there been such an overreaction? Unfortunately, the commentators who detect one have generally explained it in a tired, predictably ideological way: calling the United States a uniquely paranoid aggressor that always overreacts to provocation.

In a recent book, for instance, political scientist John Mueller evaluated the threat that terrorists pose to the United States and convincingly concluded that it has been, to quote his title, "Overblown." But he undercut his own argument by adding that the United States has overreacted to every threat in its recent history, including even Pearl Harbor (rather than trying to defeat Japan, he argued, we should have tried containment!).

Seeing international conflict in apocalyptic terms — viewing every threat as existential — is hardly a uniquely American habit. To a certain degree, it is a universal human one. But it is also, more specifically, a Western one, which paradoxically has its origins in one of the most optimistic periods of human history: the 18th century Enlightenment.

Until this period, most people in the West took warfare for granted as an utterly unavoidable part of the social order. Western states fought constantly and devoted most of their disposable resources to this purpose; during the 1700s, no more than six or seven years passed without at least one major European power at war.

The Enlightenment, however, popularized the notion that war was a barbaric relic of mankind's infancy, an anachronism that should soon vanish from the Earth. Human societies, wrote the influential thinkers of the time, followed a common path of historical evolution from savage beginnings toward ever-greater levels of peaceful civilization, politeness and commercial exchange.

The unexpected consequence of this change was that those who considered themselves "enlightened," but who still thought they needed to go to war, found it hard to justify war as anything other than an apocalyptic struggle for survival against an irredeemably evil enemy. In such struggles, of course, there could be no reason to practice restraint or to treat the enemy as an honorable opponent.

Ever since, the enlightened dream of perpetual peace and the nightmare of modern total war have been bound closely to each other in the West. Precisely when the Enlightenment hopes glowed most brightly, wars often took on an especially hideous character.

The Enlightenment was followed by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, which touched every European state, sparked vicious guerrilla conflicts across the Continent and killed millions (including, probably, a higher proportion of young Frenchmen than died from 1914 to 1918).

During the hopeful early years of the 20th century, journalist Norman Angell's huge bestseller, "The Great Illusion," argued that wars had become too expensive to fight. Then came the unspeakable horrors of World War I. And the end of the Cold War, which seemed to promise the worldwide triumph of peace and democracy in a more stable unipolar world, has been followed by the wars in the Balkans, the Persian Gulf War and the present global upheaval. In each of these conflicts, the United States has justified the use of force by labeling its foe a new Hitler, not only in evil intentions but in potential capacity.

Yet as the comparison with the Soviet experience should remind us, the war against terrorism has not yet been much of a war at all, let alone a war to end all wars. It is a messy, difficult, long-term struggle against exceptionally dangerous criminals who actually like nothing better than being put on the same level of historical importance as Hitler — can you imagine a better recruiting tool? To fight them effectively, we need coolness, resolve and stamina. But we also need to overcome long habit and remind ourselves that not every enemy is in fact a threat to our existence.

David A. Bell, a professor of history at Johns Hopkins University and a contributing editor for the New Republic, is the author of The First Total War: Napoleon's Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It.

Originally Posted by Mr Earl

I think the russians are doing fairly well selling arms to the Iranians as well.
And if you own stock in Kalishnikov rifles you should be happy.

What's this got to do with the Bush admins actions following 9/11, if anything at all?

Fleischer then and now: There's a telling difference
Once an unwavering administration foot soldier, the ex-White House spokesman gives an insider's account.
By Greg Miller, LA Times Staff Writer
January 30, 2007

WASHINGTON — As White House press secretary, Ari Fleischer was known for staying strictly on message, the public face of an administration reluctant to acknowledge mistakes or internal rifts.

But Fleischer was behind a different microphone Monday: He spent hours testifying in federal court on what it was like behind the scenes in 2003 when a key part of the Bush administration's case for war with Iraq disintegrated.

During more than three hours of testimony that offered a rare glimpse inside the usually secretive Bush White House, Fleischer showed little of the unyielding discipline that defined his tenure as press secretary. He pointed fingers at a former colleague, acknowledged frustration at how powerless he often was to sway the media, and described in detail the frantic White House efforts to contain a spreading public relations debacle.

At one point Fleischer described the dismay he felt as it became increasingly clear that the White House could no longer back one of President Bush's most alarming remarks in his 2003 State of the Union speech — that Iraq was seeking to acquire uranium from Africa.

After initially clinging to the claim, Fleisher said he was told that "the ground might be shifting" and that the credibility of his previous statements on the matter was crumbling. "The worst place to stand as White House press secretary," Fleischer said, "is when the ground is shifting."

Fleischer testified after being granted immunity by prosecutors, and his accounts could be damaging to Libby's defense. The former White House spokesman said he first learned of the CIA officer's identity from Libby, three days before Libby claims he heard the officer's name from news reporters. The CIA officer, Valerie Plame, is married to former U.S. Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, a critic of the Iraq war whom the administration was trying to discredit.

But in some ways the legal significance of Fleischer's testimony was overshadowed by the insider account he provided into the administration's handling of the unraveling of its case for war with Iraq.

That unraveling accelerated July 6, 2003, when Wilson disclosed in a newspaper column that he had been sent by the U.S. government to Niger in 2002 to investigate the uranium claim and found it baseless — about 11 months before Bush repeated the allegation in the State of the Union address.

At first, Fleischer said, he tried to contain the damage by telling reporters that Wilson's account amounted to "Zero. Nada. Nothing new there."

White House officials hoped the story would die after acknowledging problems with the Niger claim and admitting the day after Wilson's column appeared that it "did not rise to the level" of a mention in a State of the Union address. Instead, Fleischer said, "that basically started the controversy and made it flame up and become the dominant issue."

During a five-day trip to Africa that same week, Condoleezza Rice told reporters that the Niger claim had been cleared by the CIA, something the agency vigorously disputed. "Had the director of Central Intelligence wanted those words out," she said, "they would have come out."

Fleischer said that only opened a new front in the fight. "The White House seems to be blaming the CIA," he said, noting that he called the agency's press office to tell them about Rice's remarks, and that the agency's public affairs director at the time, Bill Harlow, "was not happy."

Nor was Fleischer happy with the news coverage the next day. "Nothing close to it," he said. "The whole trip was mired in controversy about those 16 words," referring to the sentence in the president's State of the Union speech.

....

It would be better if you could post a link to the articles and just quote the beginning or bits which support your argument, String Cheese, i.e. add a few words of your own.

^I'm far too lazy to think that much. Odd that some people get scolded for posting nothing but a link and now I'm being scolded for publishing excepts from an article.

I give up....

I don't see much wrong with that. Many newspaper sites require registration. With the name of the writer and paper it took me about 30 seconds to locate.

At least it's not some random garbage from a blog

Originally Posted by String Cheese

Odd that some people get scolded for posting nothing but a link and now I'm being scolded for publishing excepts from an article.

I give up....

Sorry, didn't mean to "scold" you, I thought I'd give a bit of guidance to a newbie with 6 posts.

Any excerpt and/or cut-and-paste deserves a link so we can read more, and it gives credibility.

If there's no link, I do get suspicious.

Not saying I should be, but I am.

Lot of head-trippers out there.


If there's no link, no thanks.

^A link a salient comment or two perhaps.
Otherwise it's spam man, for the trash can.

Originally Posted by Mr Earl

Otherwise it's spam man, for the trash can.

Careful what you wish for...

^since this is the issues forum I wont say what I'm thinking!
But it shouldn't be too hard to figure out.

From a White House news release: "Mrs. Laura Bush announced today that William 'Bill' Yosses has been named the White House Executive Pastry Chef."
Here's a photo.
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Mary Lu Carnevale blogs for the Wall Street Journal: "Not in the White House press release: Yosses is also co-author of the cookbook ' Desserts for Dummies.'"

White House Watch -- News on President George W Bush and the Bush Administration - washingtonpost.com

Bush is just following his daddy's, and Reagans economic plan-sell bullets and body bags, it shores up the economy till you leave office, and gets you rich. He's got a lot in common with Taksin, in my opinion, though he's much worse. More Iraqi civilians have died by Bush's invasion of terror, than Saddam has been accused of murdering. Yet Amerikans are only now unhappy with him? What a depressing joke, the richest nation in the world, arguably, shelved their morals on the grounds of 9/11. Why no public outcry ever, except from Michael Moore, on Daddy Bush's biz ties with the Bin Ladens? Why no hullabaloo on the lucrative contracts for buddies of Bush like Halliburton, an example being the 345 Million dollars Already paid to them for the possible future building of detention camps all over Amerika?

More lies from the worst President in history:

Bush shoots for 'Jaws,' delivers 'Jaws 2' - Countdown with Keith Olbermann - MSNBC.com

“We cannot know the full extent of the attacks that we and our allies have prevented,” Mr. Bush noted, “but here is some of what we do know: We stopped an al-Qaida plot to fly a hijacked airplane into the tallest building on the West Coast.”

This would, of course, sir, be the purported plot to knock down the 73-story building in Los Angeles, the one once known as the Library Tower — the one you personally revealed so breathlessly a year ago next month.

It was embarrassing enough that you mistakenly referred to the structure as the “Liberty Tower.”

But within hours it was also revealed that authorities in Los Angeles had had no idea you were going to make any of the details — whether serious or fanciful — public.

More ominously, the L.A. Times source who debunked the Library Tower story said that those who could correctly measure the flimsiness of the scheme “feared political retaliation for providing a different characterization of the plan than that of the president.”


Who terrorized Southern California that day, Mr. Bush?

Originally Posted by Mr Earl

This is inaccurate Iraqi body counts have been highly exaggerated.

Actually I wouldn't be surprised if the number of dead American soldiers is above the 10,000 mark

The Pentagon is known to manipulate numbers so it doesn't look too bad, they did it in Vietnam when the numbers turned out to be 3 or 4 times the official numbers. They even made a movie about that story.

Anyway 11,000 dead American soldiers is probably a "conservative" estimate, not including the one who died from their suffering after they were counted as "casualties"

50-60,000 seems reasonable since 2003.

Unless Mr. Earl is willing to (yet again fail to) provide contradictory evidence.