I’ts been my, perhaps mistaken understanding, that homosexuals come from the union of two hetereosexuals. Even more remarkable is, much more often than not, both the male and female of said union(s), are avowedly straight; having of course, at one point during their sexual development, chosesn to adopt the ‘straight’ lifestyle over the ‘queer’ lifestyle.

Makes one wonder what sort of example is being set by parents whose children ‘choose’ to be queer over straight? Given all the benefits to be had by straights in our society, those particular families must be horrific to live in, when the children eschew the wonders and glories that are straightdom and opt for the fear and worry of being queer.

lol @ gay marriage

Yeah because homosexuals choose to be gay and heterosexuals choose not to.
You obviously do not know anyone who is gay. Furthermore, it is people like you who do not deserve to raise children. Passing along your ignorance is far worse than anything two people with alternate lifestyles could ever do.

Marriage was started by churches. Who are you to define it for them?

“Marriage was started by churches. Who are you to define it for them?”

And some churches recognize gay marriage. What’s your point aside from showing your ignorance? What do you not understand about equal rights? Nobody is saying that they want to force any church to perform a marriage that they do not sanction. Get a clue.

Thanks for the article, Rob. Best of luck to you!

I don’t remember choosing to be straight, it never crossed my mind. I think all these people who believe homosexuality is a choice have themselves made a choice to remain in the closet. For us straight folks the issue doesn’t seem to come up, you self-hating closet-cases.

Gay marriage is coming, hide your precious babies!!! They might meet a leather daddy, which we would all be forced to marry if activist judges get their way!!!

“Religious opponents of gay rights are essentially calling upon the government to bring about a state of affairs that would better satisfy their own religious views at the expense of others'. That does not appear to be a function of government that the drafters of the Establishment Clause had in mind.”

So Polygamy is also ok right? the one man one woman thing is largely religious, so don’t force your religion on me and say I can’t practice polygamy. Since a lot of our criminal law is based on the ten commandments killing, stealing…I think we need to get rid of that too. Don’t force your religion on me rob.

Rob, no matter how thoughtful you think your articles may be, you’ll never be as cute as Rob Deters. Give it up, guy.

Rob, your hairstyle ain’t makin’ it. You belong on the next episode of Queer Eye. Yes, Rob, you do need help in that area ASAP!

OK, Rob, maybe I was a little harsh about your hairstyle, but seriously, you can do better! Whaddaya say?

I think Rob’s hair makes him look hot. rarrrr!

don’t talk to gay people.. you’ll get AIDS.. (blatant ignorance bitches lol)

“So Polygamy is also ok right? the one man one woman thing is largely religious, so don’t force your religion on me and say I can’t practice polygamy”

I don’t think anyone has ever argued that there is a distinct group who for biological reasons are compelled to marry multiple partners (though it may be a biological impulse in all of us). Again, this goes back to whether you think homosexuality is a choice. If you do, then I agree with the poster above in guessing that you are simply fighting your own gay urges because straight people don’t face a “choice”.

“Don’t force your religion on me”

Umm the stealing and killing rules do have their roots in the 10 commandments, but if you are interested in the survival of humans, its a good thing to let genetic defects kill off the bad humans while the better ones slowly evolve..

In addition, without those 10 commandments.. you would have probably been dead by now.. since most activists, anarchists, protesters, etc.. are weaklings.. and extremely annoying.. kind of like cockroaches that most would love to step on..

as for actual religion, Bible, Koran, etc- based.. that’s another thing which you don’t have to adhere to..

as for gays, they’ll probably go to heaven but all their protesting and activism just makes them in the top 5 annoying classes of people.. wish i could just kick ‘em in the balls.. lol

Lesbians are HOT! Except those with short hair! And Any Traces of Hair. And Those That Play Rugby. But Porn Lesbians Are H.O.T! So is Paris Hilton Though, Tira Banks -> HOT, Trangender -> NOT.

LGBT should have a civil war between L G B & T.

But Porn Lesbians Are H.O.T!

Not necessarily. Many of the those “lesbians” are actually straight girls who are willing to do something they really don’t enjoy doing to make some cash. In fact, many of them are teenage runaways, in case you haven’t noticed how underage a lot of them seem to be.

Hey, no guilt trip on ya, I just want to help correct your perception. I’m a lez and I look at porn too, but having learned the truth about how the porn industry works, I’d feel extremely awkward pinching my poozle while clicking through galleries of underage girls who may be trying to earn cash to survive and not just to buy a new iPod.

The issue is whether the governement should be in the business of telling people who they can and can’t marry. I don’t beleive in big government as a true conservative, and therfore I am for gay marraige. It is not the government’s place to tell people who they can and can’t marry.

great article rob. some really ignorant comments but we’re all used to it. don’t question the validity of peoples’ sexualities people. you don’t make any logical arguments. you’ve lost and bigotry will eventually fail.

Wait until they get married and then later find out there’s no divorce - LOL.

What’s next? Marriage between men and horses?

But seriously, just stop sticking things where they don’t belong and the world will be a better place.

“What’s next? Marriage between men and horses?”

Yer thinking of Sweden:

Animal sex is not illegal in Sweden, and every year between 200 and 300 pets are injured because of sexual assaults.

The estimate was presented by Svenska Veterinärforbundet, the Swedish veterinary organization, and it is now trying to make the authorities and the public more aware of animals' suffering. The organization claim the problem has increased during the last couple of years, even if most people are unaware of it.

"We have seen an increase since 1999 when child pornography became illegal," said Johan Beck-Friis. "It appears, in other words, as there are some people who have replaced children with animals. In both circumstances, it is sex with defenceless individuals."

http://pub.tv2.no/nettavisen/english/article177749.ece

Saying gay marriage would allow for marriage to animals is a logical fallacy:the slippery slope.

Why hasn’t hetero-marraige led to marraige to animals? Is there something about hetero marriage that makes this slippery slope impossible which same-sex marriage makes possible?

The answer of course is no. And besides who gives a fuck if people marry animals? I’d rather marry a mollusk than most conservatives here.

“Why hasn’t hetero-marraige led to marraige to animals?”

Marraige between man and woman is primarily predicated on sex for the purpose of procreation.

Sex between humans and animals does not lead to progeny (except possibly in your case).

In the case of human cells’ invading the germ line, the chimeric animals might then carry human eggs and sperm, and in mating could therefore generate a fertilized human egg. Hardly anyone would desire to be conceived by a pair of mice. To forestall such discomforting possibilities, the committee ruled that chimeric animals should not be allowed to mate.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/03/science/03chim.html

“Marraige between man and woman is primarily predicated on sex for the purpose of procreation.”

This is so obviously wrong I barely know where to begin.

1) There is no need to be married to have children as many people in our society have proven. Therefore, there is no link between procreation and marraige.

2) There is no reason that a man and a woman are inherently better parents than 2 men or two women and your statement blatantly ignores the many same sex couples with children and the many hetero couples who do not.

3) Marriage has nothing to do with biology. It is a social institution that was founded to guarantee the passage of property and wealth from generation to generation.

4) If we take your argument to be true than any marriage of people who do not have children or of people who cannot have children should also be dissolved or disallowed.

5)There is absolutely no reason to be against equality in marriage unless you hate gay people and think that they do not deserve the same rights that hetero people do. All of the arguments advanced above against gay marraige are simply justifications for your beleife that the “gay lifestyle” is immoral. Perhaps you should take a look at your own morality before you start casting aspersions on others.

Right now I’m embedded in the deep south for my job and I can honestly say that their public school system is just atrocious, as evident by the undereducated people abound. It is really amazing how easy it is to tell the difference between somebody educated in the south and somebody educated in the north. It is not that the southerners are stupid, it just that their school systems and funding for education are just laughable. And what was the biggest issue in the bible belt this year? Gay marriage. Who cares if we are all a bunch of morons who can’t speak, but we mustn’t let the queers get married! It’s truly amazing to me how people will vote against their own well being just to cock block someone else that has nothing to do with them but that they don’t agree with.

“Marriage has nothing to do with biology. It is a social institution that was founded to guarantee the passage of property and wealth from generation to generation.”

How’re those generations generated? Seems that “sex for the purpose of procreation” might be involved. Also, most of “passage of property and wealth from generation to generation” seems to involve a biological connection between those generations.

For me it’s all about financial incentives for the breeding of future taxpayers. I’d limit the benefits of marriage to only those raising future taxpayers if I could - and I wouldn’t care about their sexual orientation.

I’m also against off-shoring procreation as I don’t think that the immigrants will be as predisposed to pay taxes to support SS for old people to whom they have no biological or cultural connection what-so-ever.

Canada seems to believe otherwise.

“Canada’s low birth rate, about 1.61 children per couple, means the country needs immigrants to maintain its population of 33 million, Rosenblatt said. The United States is holding steady at 2.08 children per couple.”

http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/0503canada03.html

There is no need for marriage to procreate. End of argument. If you are against equal marriage then either you think that the government should be in the business of telling people who they can marry, or you think that gay “people” do not deserve the same rights as straight “people”. Those are the two possibilites of the argument. Have fun with your stupidity asslicks.

Whether they are married or not has no effect on whether same sex couples have children or not. Therfore your above argument is logically flawed. This issue has nothing to do with children as gay people have children all the time-take a look at the cover of this week’s Isthmus- when they are not married as do straight people.

This is a civil rights issue and being against it is a position that is irreconcilable with logic and ethics.

It’s a financial issue. I’d like to see my mother marry my sister so that Mom would be covered by my sisters insurance. It would sure save the family money and they do love each other. If you object then you must think that the government should be in the business of telling people who they can marry.

LMFAO. Your argument is totally specious. I seriously hope you are kidding. It is an example of the slippery slope fallacy, and an example of the conservative simpistic tendency to think in black and white. We legislate gradations all the time. Ex. We allow someone to shoot someone in self-defense but not for whatever reason they wish. Allowing self-defense shooting doesn’t mean that everyone is allowed to shoot anyone else willy nilly.

We allow only people over the age of 18 and who are citizens to vote. This doesn’t mean that everyone has the right to vote or that no one has that right.

We allow for different punishments in murder cases.

and so on and so on and so on.

It is, as I said above, completely specious reasoning conjured to fit your preconceived bias of disliking gays.

We allow gay people to have sex, but we don’t allow bestiality or incest. Why would allowing gay people to get married all of a sudden mean that we would sanction incestuous or bestial marriage? Completely specious and faulty reasoning.

Why don’t you just admit that the real reason you don’t want two people of the same sex to have equal rights in marriage is that you dislike gay people and are a homophobe?

With all the important issues in the world I can’t beleive that conservatives think that the mst important one is gay marriage.

Hey our boys are getting slaughtered in a war that it is now proven Bush lied about, but hey! We can’t let them fags marry! That would be bad for the country! Oh and let’s approve another 80 billion fo reconstruction in Iraq so we can line Halliburton’s pockets! But those gays getting healthcare is impinging on my pocketbook!

Sickening and really just pathetic. You must be really uncoomfortable with your own sexuality to be that up in arms about denying other people the right to live as they please.

“…but we don’t allow bestiality or incest.”

See the Sweden link up-thread for example of slippery slope been slid. And what’s wrong about incest that isn’t wrong about same-sex sex?

still beating that dead horse? What’s wrong with same sex sex that isn’t wrong with hetero-sex? Can you prove to me that homo-sex is in any way detrimental to our society when hetero sex is not? If anything it is the opposite. More people should be gay so we wouldn’t have so many unplanned pregnancies and idiotic parents running around both of which add to our social and economic problems.

I refuse to engage your bestiality debate because it is completely specious. Marriage is not an institution that extends to animals or inanimate objects.

I will comment though, that your homophobia is really shining through. Why not let two people who love one another get married? Is there somoething so terribly wrong with that?

See this guy thinks that homosex is unnatural and therefore no matter what logic you use on him he will keep coming back to his stupid talking points.

Better to just ignore him and hope he comes out of the closet someday before he has to hire a dominant top behind his wife’s back.

The sweden thread has nothing to do with this debate. It says that pedophiles have replaced children with animals.

Pedophilia has nothing to do with homosexuality. Just more of your ignorance,fear,and prejudice shining through.

It’s not about “living your life as you please”… you fags already do that….but demanding we accept and condone your fucked up lifestyles and diseases is a different matter

I completely agree with the guy above me. It is one thing for homosexuals to be allowed to live their lives as they please, it is totally different to ask that society put a stamp of approval on that devient and disease-filled behavior.

1.) Same sex behavior is unnatural and a proven health risk. It is more of a health risk than smoking or using drugs. Society does not condone smoking, and using drugs is illegal because society cares about the health and welfare of its citizens. Why does the same not apply to same sex behavior? Has anyone ever wondered why gays and lesbians live shorter lives than heterosexuals? In the case of gays, the difference is significant.

2.) The is a connection between homosexuality and pedophilia. Gays are more likely to be child molesters. There exists research to back this up.

3.) This IS NOT a civil rights issue. Civil rights are based on INNATE and IMMUTABLE characteristics, such as race and gender. NO ONE has ever proven homosexuality to inborn… it is most likely a developmental condition. It does not make sense to make sexual feelings and sexual behavior a civil rights issue. Blacks were denied the right to vote and were once held as slaves. can the same be said of homosexuals? Don’t think so.

Thank you.

Truthful

1) Wrong. The majorit of HIV cases are now among heterosexual women.

2)There is no connection. There is also research proving that the holocaust doesn’t exist. Looking at a prebuscent child is just as disgusting for a normal gay person as it is for a normal heterosexual person. I would like to see these studies. A quick google serach showed that all of the studies I could find that “proved” this were all from Christian sites that are anti-gay. Less biased research done by universities finds “The empirical research does not show that gay or bisexual men are any more likely than heterosexual men to molest children. This is not to argue that homosexual and bisexual men never molest children. But there is no scientific basis for asserting that they are more likely than heterosexual men to do so. And, as explained above, many child molesters cannot be characterized as having an adult sexual orientation at all; they are fixated on children.”

3) Rights ARE based on “immutable”characteristics. One of those is that people are people. Your conclusion here assumes your premise that gay people are not equal to heteros otherwise as people hey should have the same rights. Equal marraige is a cicil rights issue. I bet you would ahve been arguing against blacks being allowed to vote as well? Afater all what would be next? Pigs voting? Sickening…

As I have said above numerous times. Your ignorance and homophobia are clear here. Why do you care so much? I can only conclude that you feel threatened in some way by gay people. I am sorry that you are so unsure of your own sexuality that you need society to tell you that it is wrong. As a straight man, that’s right I am straight, I can’t see why two guys getting married (or two women) could possibly bother you. All of your reasons are merely manufactured to fit your homphobic biases. Unlike you social conservatives, as a liberal, I am for giving MORE people freedoms not for denying people freedoms.

Conservatives are all about the government telling people what they can and can’t do now. Whatever happened to your party/philosophy?

A simple question for those that think that being gay is a “lifestyle choice”: Why would anyone choose a lifestyle that makes them the butt of jokes and slurs (the above usage of “you fags” for example), relegates them to second class citizenship where they do not have the same rights as other Americans, and where they are accused of having heinous criminal tendencies like “pedophilia” and “spreading disease”?

What a lifestyle! Where can I sign up? It sounds great!

Give me a fucking break. I bet you bumpkin- backwater homphobes also think that poor people choose to be poor and blacks and hispanics choose to go to jail in higher numbers. Pathetic.

“The is a connection between homosexuality and pedophilia. Gays are more likely to be child molesters. There exists research to back this up.”

That’s right! Let’s lock up all the Catholic priests and throw away the key!

“There is also research proving that the holocaust doesn’t exist.”

Where the fuck did that come from? What does the Holocaust have to do with any of this, other than the Nazis wanted to kill all homosexuals?

Yeah, sure, there’s research proving the Holocaust never happened. It’s all been conducted by people who are so thoroughly discredited that only the most bigoted morons on the planet believe anything they have to say.

So why don’t you take your Holocaust denial and go fuck yourself, you twisted piece of shit?

Hey buddy, calm down. I think it was pretty obvious that the guy quoting the Holocaust “studies” only to prove how moronic it is to quote “scientific studies” when they are ran by conservative ideologues.

Yeah, learn to read in context before lashing out jackass.

So let me get what you are saying: Studies showing a link between homosexuality and pedophilia are inaccurate, because they are “conservative”? So by that “logic”, are studies showing the opposite inaccurate, because they are liberal?

There is a difference between conservatives citing a study as proof of a certain point of view and conservatives (or liberals, or libertarians, etc) commissioning a study to prove their point of view. There is a huge difference.

Are you suggesting that gay groups are somehow honest and impartial? Can any serious person claim taht to be the case? Gay groups are the quite stealthy and manipulative (and good at it, judging from some of the comments here)and I am always skeptical of what they say.

Tell me this: Why has NAMBLA participated in gay parades? Why is a well-known NAMBLA member and activist now a writer (or until recently was)for the gay magazine “Guide”? Why was NAMBLA part of the international gay organization, which subsequently got kicked out of the UN after the revelation was made? Why have gay groups across the country and across the world asked for the lowering of age of consent laws (thereby aiding child molesters and pedophiles)? Could this all be a conservative plot to make gays look bad?

(Before someone jumps on that, I am NOT saying that all or most gays are pedophiles, but simply that gays are more likely that heterosexual males to be interested in children. There is an obvious homosexual tendency to be with young boys, while there is almost no corresponding heterosexual tendency to be with young girls).

Truthful

http://psychology.ucdavis.edu/rainbow/html/facts_molestation.html

Before you claim that homosexuals are more likely to molest children look at this link. Most child molesters are neither gay nor straight. They do not have an adult sexual preference.

Also, continuing to spread the MYTH that gays molest children and will ruin society is just ignorant and makes you look like a horse’s ass.

If you are going to call yourself “Truthful” try and look at all the facts. And I would trust UC Davis over a religious group any day of the week.

“Are you suggesting that gay groups are somehow honest and impartial?”

Well if studies that contradicted the religious right “studies” were done by a group like Gay Men for America or something then you would have a valid point. Unfortunately for you all such studies are done by research universities that have, you know, qualifications to study science, unlike the privately funded religious right groups.

Is irony lost on these people? How can they dare have the audacity to accuse liberal gay activists of supporting pedophilia when it is their catholic priests who rape boy after little boy. You hypercritical conservatives can all go to hell, and take your pedophillia embrassing religion with you.

homosexuality is NOT an immutable characteristic, and is therefore NOT entitled to Constitutional protection

“Homosexuality is NOT an immutable characteristic, and is therefore NOT entitled to Constitutional protection”

This makes absolutely no sense. As I pointed out above, this assumes the premise that being homosexual makes you somehow inferior to straight people. If you start with that premise then you will end up with your conclusion because your premise already assumes it.

The equal protection clause is based on people not on sexuality, and therefore the question can only apply if you beleive that homosexuals are not people with equal rights needing protection.

You look really dumb here as you keep constructing house-of-cards arguments to support an insupportable position. Just admit that you are against eqality in marriage because of your personal beliefs and that is completely a bigoted opinion based on misperception and homphobia

There is a difference between a study done by a research institution conducted scientifically, and a study done by religious groups that think that gays are immoral. Oh what a surprise when their studies back-up their beliefs!

This is indicative with a larger problem that conservatives have. They ignore any facts or evidence that don’t fit with their preconceived biases. Their justification for this is that if something doesn’t agree with them it must be “liberal”. So when a news story favors Bush in the media they agree with it and point to it as evidence, but when it talks about Bush’s SS plan does nothing for solvency they scream “liberal media”. It’s a really twisted way of looking at the world, and makes arguing with them almost impossible.

“Why would anyone choose a lifestyle that makes them the butt of jokes and slurs”

There are a number of bad habits and addictions that one wonders why people choose. Many result in death, disease or disfigurement. Achoholics and crack addicts come to mind - why would anyone choose those lifestyles?

I think it’s just mental people who need extra attention and were never loved by their parents.

oh and equal protection arguments for homos always fail and always will

But, alas, they won’t fail for moronic small penised and angry because of it redneck pricks like you.

If it is possible to believe that a black man doesn’t choose to be black, he only exists, then why can’t you believe that somone is just gay? Someone might say a stupid person would only rely on shallow, superficial evidence of born traits, but I say if these rednecks place so much of their faith in an invisible man in the sky why can’t they believe that there is something inside gay people that makes them the way they are?

because there is no credible scientific evidence to support your assertion

There isn’t any scientific evidence to support a man in the sky who watches everything you do and loves you but will knowingly send you to burn for all eternity either.

There are a number of bad habits and addictions that one wonders why people choose.

And here folks, is the crux of it, as I said, you believe being gay is immoral, that is the same thing as a drug addiction and therefore when you start with that premise it is impossible to convince you otherwise.

No point in arguing anymore then, they don’t listen to opinions that are different from what they already believe.

One last question though: Why should the state sanction marriage between men and women considering that it the number one scene of child abuse, child molestation, domestic abuse, murder, beating, robbery, domestic disturbances, theft and drug sales?

those are ridiculous assertions with no factual evidence

why does the state pay for your AIDS treatment when you could have prevented it by not sticking things where they don’t belong?

http://english.pravda.ru/accidents/21/96/383/14637_pedophile.html

“why does the state pay for your AIDS treatment when you could have prevented it by not sticking things where they don’t belong?”

I feel sorry for this poster and his general ignorance.

“those are ridiculous assertions with no factual evidence”

Wow, it’s amazing how fast these people will resort to logical arguments when it is against their institutions. But when it comes to gay they can make all the ridiculous assertions they want. And by the way, they aren’t assertions, they are actual fact. I mean just look at some of these things: of course heterosexual relationships have more domestic abuse because there are more heterosexual relationships, of course there is more molestation and abuse because they have greater access to children then a homosexual couple. The point is not that one lifestyle is better than the other. The point, moron, is that there are stupid assholes in ever catagory of humanity (like, for example, yourself), and you can make the same moronic arguments against heterosexual love just as much as homosexual love because anyone who is only out to prove their own belief correct will always find evidence to support their own close minded view.

Any guy who likes a woman’s boobs is unnatural. Boobs have no place in procreation. Neither does the ass. If you look at a girl’s ass and like it you are a deviant and should not be allowed to marry. Sex is only for procreation and if you like boobs and asses you are obviously immoral.

Also, since IV drug users spread diseases we shouldn’t allow them to marry either. If anyone has ever had a common cold they shouldn’t be allowed to marry either because they spread diseases with all their sneezing and nose blowing, and allowing them to marry would be the state sanctioning the spread of common colds. Actually, to make it line up with the case of gays better, we should ban anyone from getting married that has the POTENTIAL to spread the common cold and engages in risky behaviors like touching things in public or breathing in a common space.

Marriage should only be about penile insertion into vaginas preferrably through some sort of sterile plastic sheet. Sex is not meant to be enjoyed.

“Boobs have no place in procreation.”

What would be the point of procreation if the procreated have nothing to eat?

“Neither does the ass.”

Never did understand the whole “can’t be to thin” thing - What would be the point of procreation if the procreated can’t get out because the pelvis is too small?

“Also, since IV drug users spread diseases we shouldn’t allow them to marry either.”

I agree completely.

lmfao. Sarcasm is lost on these dolts.

You never answered the question gay boy — why should I have to pay for your sinful disease?

As an independant, it is easy to see how both coservatives and liberals choose to believe whatever it is that backs up there point of view, so none of you should be suprised by the other sides bias. The biggest problem with have in this country is that neither side is willing to admit that they are actually all the same when it comes to dismissing the others points of view as biased. Case in point is Liberals who listen to Air America believe Rush is biased but air america isn’t and Conservatives who listen to Rush but complain that air america is biased. Face it. Both air america and Rush ARE very biased and generally only present 1 side of every story, which is unfortunately the story behind almost ALL political info we receive.

“You never answered the question gay boy — why should I have to pay for your sinful disease?”

I am not a “gay boy” in fact I am not even gay. Yes, as hard as it might be for you to believe straight people hate ignorant homophobes like you too.

I will answer your question with another question “Why should gay people have to pay to educate you hickabilly children who you teach to hate them?”

to the independent above: I appreciate you trying to weigh both sides. The problem is that the mainstream media is NOT liberal. It is not conservative either. It is corporate. In my opinion this makes it more conservative than liberal since the conservative party is more aligned toward corporate interests.

Take for instance this Blair memo that came out last week. Where is the outrage? The memo PROVES that Bush manufactured intelligence to get us into Iraq, yet the American media is completely silent on it.

What about the growing insurgensy in Iraq that experts are saying will lead to civil war? No coverage of that either.

The fact that a gay prostitute has unfetterd access to the White House? No coverage.

And the list goes on.

I agree with you that Air America nad the like are biased, but they are not journalism, neither is Rush. So I don’t fault either of them for being biased. They are infotainement shows. The real problem is that an increasingly fewer number of mega-corporations run our media and are only going to cover stories that are in their best interest whether that helps liberals or conservatives. The problem is that when it comes to helping people or making money for corporations, the current media will side with corporate intersts every time until they are pushed into recognizing a story by the populace because if they didn’t they would be exposed for the sham they are.

I suggest watching a film of Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent for more info on this. Like I said, independent poster, I appreciate your viewpoint. I just think it is being a bit navie to assume that the MSM is unbiased or equally biased toward liberal and conservative viewpoints. Mediamatters.org, run by a former republican turned liberal, can also shed more light on the conservative bias in the media.

to the independent above: I appreciate you trying to weight both sides. The problem is that the mainstream media is NOT liberal. It is not conservative wither. It is corporate. In my opinion this makes it more conservative than liberal since the conservative party is more aligned toward corporate interests. Take for instance this Blair memo that came out last week. Where is the outrage? The memo PROVES that Bush manufactured intelligence to get us into Iraq, yet the American media is completely silent on it.

What about the growing insurgensy in Iraq that experts are saying will lead to civil war? No coverage of that either.

The fact that a gay prostitute has unfetterd access to the White House? No coverage.

And the list goes on.

I agree with you that Air America nad the like are biased, but they are not journalism, neither is Rush. So I don’t fault either of them for being biased. They are infotainement shows. The real proble is that corporations run our media and are only going to cover stories that are in their best interest whether that helps liberals or conservatives. The problem is that when it comes to helping people or making money for corporations, the current media will side with corporate intersts every time until they are pushed into recognizing a story by the populace because if they didn’t they would be exposed for the sham they are.

I suggest watching a film of Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent for more info on this. Like I said, independent poster, I appreciate your viewpoint. I just think it is being a bit navie to assume that the MSM is unbiased or equally biased toward liberal and conservative viewpoints. Mediamatters.org, run by a former republican turned liberal, can also shed more light onthe conservative bias in the media.

“lmfao. Sarcasm is lost on these dolts.”

Hmmmmm, never heard of the reverse-double sacasm?

“Hmmmmm, never heard of the reverse-double sacasm?”

Never heard of the double reverse triple sarcasm?

For every book or article you mention to try and show the MSM is conservative, i can throw out a book or article that also will show it is liberal.  The problem is deciding where the middle is as a point of reference so one can try to determine where the MSM falls.  To a ditto head the MSM will come across as liberal, where an avid Michael Moore fan the MSM will come across as conservative.   I appreciate your suggestion of reading Chomsky and would suggest you read the book Bias, which is by Bernard Goldberg a liberal turned conservative who worked in the MSM. If your assumption that MSM is naturally conservative because most of it is corporate owned, how do you explain why then are Newspapers so liberal, considering most of them,like the networks are corporate owned?

The more things change… Roughly ten years ago, I celebrated the criminal indictment of Elliott Abrams for lying to Congress by writing an Op-Ed in the New York Times on the increasing acceptance of official deception. (I was just starting my dissertation on the topic back then.) The piece got bogged down, however, when an editor refused to allow me even to imply that then-President Bush was also lying to the country. I noted that such reticence made the entire exercise feel a bit absurd. He did not dispute this point but explained that Times policy simply would not allow it. I asked for a compromise. I was offered the following: “Either take it out and a million people will read you tomorrow, or leave it in and send it around to your friends.” (It was a better line before e-mail.) Anyway, I took it out, but I think it was the last time I’ve appeared on that page.

President Bush is a liar. There, I said it, but most of the mainstream media won’t. Liberal pundits Michael Kinsley, Paul Krugman and Richard Cohen have addressed the issue on the Op-Ed pages, but almost all news pages and network broadcasts pretend not to notice. In the one significant effort by a national daily to deal with Bush’s consistent pattern of mendacity, the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank could not bring himself (or was not allowed) to utter the crucial words. Instead, readers were treated to such complicated linguistic circumlocutions as: Bush’s statements represented “embroidering key assertions” and were clearly “dubious, if not wrong.” The President’s “rhetoric has taken some flights of fancy,” he has “taken some liberties,” “omitted qualifiers” and “simply outpace[d] the facts.” But “Bush lied”? Never.

Ben Bradlee explains, “Even the very best newspapers have never learned how to handle public figures who lie with a straight face. No editor would dare print this version of Nixon’s first comments on Watergate for instance. ‘The Watergate break-in involved matters of national security, President Nixon told a national TV audience last night, and for that reason he would be unable to comment on the bizarre burglary. That is a lie.’”

CONTINUED BELOW Part of the reason is deference to the office and the belief that the American public will not accept a mere reporter calling the President a liar. Part of the reason is the culture of Washington—where it is somehow worse to call a person a liar in public than to be one. A final reason is political. Some reporters are just political activists with columns who prefer useful lies to the truth. For instance, Robert Novak once told me that he “admired” Elliott Abrams for lying to him in a television interview about illegal US acts of war against Nicaragua because he agreed with the cause.

Let us note, moreover, that Bradlee’s observation, offered in 1997, did not apply to President Clinton. Reporters were positively eager to call Clinton a liar, although his lies were about private matters about which many of us, including many reporters, lie all the time. “I’d like to be able to tell my children, ‘You should tell the truth,’” Stuart Taylor Jr. of the National Journal said on Meet the Press. “I’d like to be able to tell them, ‘You should respect the President.’ And I’d like to be able to tell them both things at the same time.” David Gergen, who had worked for both Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon as well as Clinton and therefore could not claim to be a stranger to official dishonesty, decried what he termed “the deep and searing violation [that] took place when he not only lied to the country, but co-opted his friends and lied to them.” Chris Matthews kvetched, “Clinton lies knowing that you know he’s lying. It’s brutal and it subjugates the person who’s being lied to. I resent deeply being constantly lied to.” George Will, a frequent apologist for the lies of Reagan and now Bush, went so far as to insist that Clinton’s “calculated, sustained lying has involved an extraordinarily corrupting assault on language, which is the uniquely human capacity that makes persuasion, and hence popular government, possible.”

George W. Bush does not lie about sex, I suppose—merely about war and peace. Most particularly he has consistently lied about Iraq’s nuclear capabilities as well as its missile-delivery capabilities. Take a look at Milbank’s gingerly worded page-one October 22 Post story if you doubt me. To cite just two particularly egregious examples, Bush tried to frighten Americans by claiming that Iraq possesses a fleet of unmanned aircraft that could be used “for missions targeting the United States.” Previously he insisted that a report by the International Atomic Energy Agency revealed the Iraqis to be “six months away from developing a weapon.” Both of these statements are false, but they are working. Nearly three-quarters of Americans surveyed think that Saddam is currently helping Al Qaeda; 71 percent think it is likely he was personally involved in the 9/11 attacks.

What I want to know is why this kind of lying is apparently OK. Isn’t it worse to refer “repeatedly to intelligence…that remains largely unverified”—as the Wall Street Journal puts it—in order to trick the nation into war, as Bush and other top US officials have done, than to lie about a blowjob? Isn’t it worse to put “pressure…on the intelligence agencies to deliberately slant estimates,” as USA Today worded its report? Isn’t it more damaging to offer “cooked information,” in the words of the CIA’s former chief of counterterrorism, when you are asking young men and women to die for your lies? Don’t we revile Lyndon Johnson for having done just that with his dishonest Gulf of Tonkin resolution?

Here’s Bradlee again: “Just think for a minute how history might have changed if Americans had known then that their leaders felt the war was going to hell in a handbasket. In the next seven years, thousands of American lives and more thousands of Asian lives would have been saved. The country might never have lost faith in its leaders.”

Reporters and editors who “protect” their readers and viewers from the truth about Bush’s lies are doing the nation—and ultimately George W. Bush—no favors. Take a look at the names at that long black wall on the Mall. Consider the tragic legacy of LBJ’s failed presidency. Ask yourself just who is being served when the media allow Bush to lie, repeatedly, with impunity, in order to take the nation into war.

Dude, don’t post full articles. Its really annoying.

I think that thinking that bias is completely relative is an error. If the media were liberal, why did it turn Monica Lewinsky into a 4 year media spectacle? On the other hand there is a GAY PROSTITUTE in the Bush White House who was allowed to come and go as he pleased with no check out or check in times on occasions when there were no press conferences, and we have not heard a peep out of the media on that.

Anyone who thinks if Clinton had a female prostitute in the white house, let alone a gay one, the media wouldn’t have been all over it is naive.

Whether you think the press SHOULD do this is not the point, (I personally don’t) the point is that for the media the Bush administration is beyond repraoch. Name one critical story that the media has published on Bush? One. The Dan Rather memos (most of which were true and the 2 in question have never been proven forged) is the only case I can think of. The problem is that if the media reports that people died in Iraq conservatives scream “MEDIA BIAS! MEDIA BIAS!”. This is not media bias, it is reporting a fact.

As I said, if you think that corporations like GE and VIACOM care moer about being unbiased than about their bottom line, you are willfully naive.

Every other country in the world understands what the US is doing right now in Iraq and that it is wrong. The only reason that more Americans don’t realize this is that the media doesn’t report stories that undermine the President’s position.

The country is woefully unprepared for a terror attack almost 4 years later. A Cesna flew in the DC airspace yesterday and people were running around like headless chickens. The administration has done almost nothing to make us more secure at home, and by violating international law to invade Iraq has made Iraq a recruiting ground for terrorists for years to come. I didn’t want Saddam there either, but we should have waitied for UN approval so that America wasn’t sepcifically targeted. Now we have between 30 and 100 thousand ded civilians whose relatives will hate the Us for years to come. The media never reports any of this. When was the last time you heard a Iraqi casualty count on the news?

There is little discussion of issues of political importance, instead we get murders and runaway brides 24 hours a day.

You can claim that there are “sources on both sides”. Well, as I said above, there are sources that claim the holocaust didn’t happen and that Global warming is a myth as well. That doesn’t make it so. There are sources and then there are sources.

I am intersted in a FREE press, one that is independent of finacial contributions from political sources. One that will report all the facts and allow us to make up our own minds. So I agree with you on that point, but to think that big business is not biased in the direction of big business is just willfully naive.

Don’t think that the media is conservative? Take a look at this article published by ABC itself today:

ABC NEWS SUMMARY Brides gotta run, planes gotta stray, and cable news networks gotta find a way to fill a lot of programming hours as cheaply as possible. (CNBC gets to talk about the booming April retail sales numbers, and the NRA’s television network will replay the Secretary of State on Larry King over and over.)

We say with all the genuine apolitical and non-partisan human concern that we can muster that the death and carnage in Iraq is truly staggering.

And/but we are sort of resigned to the Notion that it simply isn’t going to break through to American news organizations, or, for the most part, Americans.

And there you have it. They acknowledge that it is a humanitarian disaster, but they won’t cover it because of profit reasons.

‘nuff said.

it’s about time they open some treatment centers to cure these gays of their obvious mental disease

” Global warming is a myth “

We may not know for some time - science is more political than science on this issue:

“I don’t have firm conclusions about the phenomenon of global warming (is it occuring in any sustained way?) or of the likely causes for it if it is occurring. I know just enough about modeling and simulation of weather and climate to know I’m way in over my head on that one. What increasingly appears to be the case, however, is that the public, scientific debate on these issues is deliberately being distorted.”

http://www.windsofchange.net/archives/006762.php

On the temperature of the Earth: http://www.jerrypournelle.com/view/view350.html#temperature

SATELLITES RECORD WEAKENING NORTH ATLANTIC CURRENT

Whether the trend is part of a natural cycle or the result of other factors related to global warming is unknown. http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/news/topstory/2004/0415gyre.html

The most significant discrepancy with Oreskes’ results concern abstracts that are undecided whether human activities are the dominant driving force of recent warming. My analysis shows that a significant number of abstracts reject what Oreskes calls the ‘consensus view’. In fact, there are almost three times as many abstracts that are unconvinced of the notion of anthropogenic climate change than those that explicitly endorse it http://www.jerrypournelle.com/mail/mail360.html#Saturday

Gay rights are a myth.

We may not know about global warming until it is too late!

Common sense dictates that you prepare for acatastrophe by doing your best to prevent it, not throwing up your hands and saying “Well some people disagree, so let’s just keep pumping pollution into the atmosphere.”

lobal Warming: Fact vs. Myth

How do we know global warming is real? Who is responsible, and how can it be addressed? These pages summarize what is known - and some of the prevalent misconceptions - regarding this critical environmental problem.

MYTH: Even if the Earth is warming, we can’t be sure how much, if any, of the warming is caused by human activities.

FACT: There is international scientific consensus that most of the warming over the last 50 years is due to human activities, not natural causes.

Over millions of years, animals and plants lived, died and were compressed to form huge deposits of oil, gas and coal. In little more than 300 years, however, we have burned a large amount of this storehouse of carbon to supply energy. Today, the by-products of fossil fuel use - billions of tons of carbon (in the form of carbon dioxide), methane, and other greenhouse gases - form a blanket around the Earth, trapping heat form the sun, unnaturally raising temperatures on the ground, and steadily changing our climate.

The impacts associated with this deceptively small change in temperature are evident in all corners of the globe. There is heavier rainfall in some areas, and droughts in others. Glaciers are melting, Spring is arriving earlier, oceans are warming, and coral reefs are dying.

[Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 2001. Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis, Technical Summary.]

MYTH: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts an increase in the global average temperature of only 2.5

All well and good if your blind faith in the “Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change” is well placed. Maybe it’s the one UN controlled organization that is always right and maybe not.

The IPCC has often been accused of being an implacable monolith and of having imposed a dogma of contrived consensus for politically motivated reasons. Some scientists, even within the climate community, have expressed reservations regarding the “consensus science” produced by the Panel. There are those who say that the IPCC should try to ensure a more balanced, informed and professional treatment of the economic and statistical aspects of its work.

Is the IPCC promoting nuclear power plants, it’s the only realistic means of reducing carbon dioxide emissions in the short term.

AWESOME! GOOD JOB!

Maybe you should look beyond the IPCC?

“The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which is supposed to act as the world’s honest broker on global warming issues, is now hopelessly compromised. One prominent scientist resigned in protest at one of its lead authors associating himself with scientifically unsupported assertions. One of the world’s most prominent economists judiciously terms the panel’s handling of economic data as “at fault” and questions how representative of current economic thought the panel is.”

“…the organization needs to reinvent itself free from the biases and self-affirmation exercises that currently plague it.”

http://www.techcentralstation.com/013105E.html

Don’t bother trying to reason with these conservatives. Consider this:

They think global warming is a myth even though there is an international scientific consensus on it existing.

BUT The bearded man in the sky whom there is absolutely no evidence for, exists 100% certainly.

These same people think that bombing hundreds of thousands of women and children and killing them is spreading freedom.

These same people think that poor people choose to be poor and blacks and hispanics choose to go to jail and live in pverty in higher numbers.

These same people see nothing wrong with ssending other people to die for a cause that they won’t join up for.

These same people think that they shouldn’t have to pay their fair share of taxes but should be allowed to use public resources whenever they need to.

So, please please please, liberals who come here: Just stop arguing with them. They are complete hypocritical imbeciles. There is no hope of ever reaching them with logic because they will never be convinced away from their backwater, hick, homophobic, priveleged, guns and god, corporations before people, me before everyone else, virulent strain of anger and greed.

So just stop arguing with them and go have a beer. They are unhappy souls whose parents obviously ever loved them and are just looking for attention by being the biggest assholes they can be.

Just ignore them and go have a beer.

 Why do you assume all republicans/conservatives are religious fanatics and are selfish rich people?  You complain about their arguments when your arguments are basically same.Argument being.  My sources of news and information are more reliable than your sources of news and information.

Something you might find amazing is that all the examples the poster above made about the MSM not wanting to report stuff, all your examples WERE covered by Fox News. HMMM kinda makes you wonder doesnt it?

The Chicken Littles were sure we’d be gravely over-populated, starving and/or eating soylent green by now. Today they run the IPCC.

(PS. Im a confirmed athiest - not an agnostic, an athiest, a registered Bright. I don’t believe in superstition, religious OR “scientific”).

There are a great many more environmental romantics than there are scientists. That's fortunate, since their inspiration means that most people in developed socie

Ahh this beer tastes good doesn’t it fellow libs?

Ignoring sure is the way to go when it comes to conservatrolls.

http://bigpicture.typepad.com/writing/2004/11/redblueworld.html

The real mandate.

Sooooo, beer goggles aren’t just for bar time anymore!

not if you are a liberal — how else can a person so stupid make it through the day

Liberals drink your beeeeeeeers!

We deserve them! Look at who we have to breathe the same air as!

na na na na boo boo

The beauty of it is that you are losers — we have everything - Congress, the Presidency, the Supreme Court and the governorships……what do you stupid liberals have? Tammy Baldwin LOL

“The beauty of it is that you are losers — we have everything - Congress, the Presidency, the Supreme Court and the governorships……what do you stupid liberals have? Tammy Baldwin LOL”

Remember that when the country goes to crap and the administration down in flames. Remember that when we invade Iran next month. Remember that Dems had nothing to do with it because they have no power. Here is your chance Republicans! Prove us wrong! Turn around the massive deicit! Make us safe from a terrorist attack! Clean up the environment!

If those 3 things happen in the next 4 years, I will become a Republican for life. Unlike you, I don’t see this as a football game where I root for one team or another. I am for whichever party gets the job done. So far what I have seen on the Republican watch:

Massive deficit spending Increased cost of living Less job security Fewer jobs and higher unemployment The largest terrorist attack ever on our soil Routine torture and detention of prisoners that have not been charged Increased polution

So that is Bush Junior’s track record so far. There shouldn’t be any room for excuses since Republicans control every branch of government. Let’s see what you can do.

9-11 was Clinton’s fault.

” 9-11 was Clinton’s fault.”

Oh? Was this because he didn’t have any time to prevent terrorism because he was busy defending himself against a ridiculous impeachment investigation that prevented him from doing his job?

Republicans: All for personal responsibility until it comes to them taking some.

If something happens on your watch it is your fault. Period. He had over a year in office to make any changes in National Security policy.

If 9-11 was anyone’s “fault” it was Bush I’s. He was the one that put the military bases in Saudi Arabia which was Bin Ladne’s reasonfor attacking on 9-11.

Keep shifting the blame wacko. Your precious president could never have made a mistake, right? Despite the fact that he is best friends with the Bin Laden’s and that he is an oil man, I bet that had no influence over our invasion either.

Keep on drinking the Kool-Aid you ignorant fucker.

We will just never know what notations were on those documents that Berger stuffed in his socks and then destroyed but they may have been harmful to the “Clinton didn’t know” meme.

Put away your tinfoil hat buddy.

Berger plead guity - read the paper buddy.

It is a conspiracy that those documents had anything to do with 9-11. Where are the documents? The evidence? There is none.

You look good in that tinfoil hat. I hear it keeps the “liberal” media from brainwashing you into believing in science and due process.

These idiot liberals have been watching too many michael moore videos

“Where are the documents? The evidence? There is none.”

Of course not, Berger confessed to shedding the documents. Why do you suppose he did that? The only reasonble explanation is that he wanted to eliminate the notations made by Clinton administration officials.

Lmfao. So it was all Clinton’s fault as usual. I suppose our record trade deficit is his fault as well? And the quagmire in Iraq?

Low recruiting? Clinton’s fault.

Gay prostitute in the White House? Clinton did that as well.

The fact Bush didn’t even read memo entitled “Bin Laden determined to strike in US”? That was Clinton as well.

That evil Bill. He always seems to pop up everytime it would seem like the Bush administration utterly mishandled things.

Give it up. You take credit for anything good and anything bad blame on a guy who left office 5 years ago. Lmfao. Please stop. You are making my sides hurt. So silly…LMFAO

I guess “personal responsisiblity” is a fine mantra to scream at mothers whose husbands left them and need welfare to temporarily support their kids while they get back on their feet, but when it comes to Junior Bush the mantra is “The buck stops anywhere but here!”

#1 The story about the gay prostitute turned out to be false. #2 Noone needed a memo to know that Bin Laden wanted to strike inside the US considering HE ALREADY HAD. And yes Clinton choose not to respond. The problem was’nt knowing he wated to attak us, it was knowing when and where. Unfortunately you cannot argue the fact that the Clinton years had a negative effect on intelligence gathering. But i know you’ll try. #3 Quagmire in Iraq? By who’s definition? Let me guess YOURS(unbised of course. #4 Please explain how Bush has anything to do with the trade deficit? #5 Most replublicans have no problem helping those less fortunate, I work for a non-profit that is primarly funded by wealthy replublicans. And NO its not a political non-profit! #6 I’m guessing that example of the women who’s husband left her is the exception not the rule. Chances are that person was never married and KNEW the father was’nt going to stick around long before she ever opened her legs to him!! #7 Not all conservatives/republicans are religious, so stop insuniating that. Thanks. #8 Please tell me what you think Berger’s agenda was?

1) Actually it was quite true. Look at the Secret Service notes for his visits. Here is the story that was never covered by the mainstream media: http://americablog.blogspot.com/2005/02/man-called-jeff.html

2) If Bush was so aware and Clinton so incompetent, why didn’t Bush take steps before 9-11? If Bush was aware that Osama might attack, why did he go into the school classromm AFTER the first plane struck the tower?

3) 1600 dead soldiers, deaths on the rise, 3 years and no exit strategy, 1000k civilians killed. The country still not rebuilt. 4 billion dollars missing. Sounds like a quagmire to me.

4)Lmfao. It is not the trade deficit, but the dudget deficit. Bush has increased spending while decreasing revenue. Therfore we now have a massive deficit.

5)By definition republicans do not want to help others. That is in your party platform.

6)Proves the above point.

7)Where did I insinuate that? There’s no evidence for that in my post, but I guess since you like to make up conspiracy theories based on no evidence that is hardly surprising.

8) Please tell me what Cheney’s agenda is in closed door meetings with energy companies that he won’t allow the publiuc to access the minutes of? Maybe that we are going to give them the oil profits after we falsify info so we can invade Iraq?

“why didn’t Bush take steps before 9-11?”

“Congressional leaders are scrambling to begin impeachment proceedings against President George W. Bush following several unprecedented federal security measures that critics say constitute an unconscionable assault on American civil liberties.”

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/kathleenparker/kp20020522.shtml

No doubt it’s now going too far with the “security measures” but the pendulum never stops in the middle and the government screws up anything it touches.

Never the less, the USA is at war with people that teach their children that everybody that does not believe EXACTLY what they believe should be killed to the last man, woman and child. As bad as you think of Bush and his crew, they are pretty mild compared to the evil fanatics that set out to kill innocent civilians.

“Maybe that we are going to give them the oil profits”

There was absolutely more money to be made by being a friend of Saddam. If oil was the objective we should have left him in Kuwait. He would have taken Saudi Arabia next and he’d be pumping all three counties dry to pay for more palaces and arms. He’d probably be marching on Iran (again) by now.

Please. C’mon. Who among us hasn’t shoved classified documents into his pants and jacket by accident? It happens.

You’re reviewing some notes — OK, classified notes, but it’s not like they’re the secret formula for Coke or anything. Somehow they get in your clothing. Maybe you’re the sort of person who’s always putting things in your pants, and every night you empty out the contents — a gallon of milk, some lawn statuary, some D-cell batteries, one shoe, loose rosary beads. And hey, what’s this? Dang: classified documents.

Well, better do the right thing, and return them. But somehow they get cut up and thrown away. You’re bad. But it’s not like you were intending to sell them to the Chinese, or worse, Fox News.

Justice concluded that he didn’t really mean to destroy or cover up evidence of Clinton administration failings that might come up in 9/11 hearings. But it seems somewhat inconsistent with Berger’s own admission that he scissored the things to shreds, no? Ah, but they were copies, that’s all. Nothing more. But were they copies with damning notes in the margins, perhaps? And that’s why he took five, destroyed three and “misfiled” the other two?

We’ll never know! The cement fist of Official Media Incuriosity has descended, and that’s the end of that chapter.

But imagine the howls if a Bush administration official had admitted to stealing documents about terrorist threat warnings. Air America hosts would get nodes on their vocal cords the size of grapefruits from shouting about the crime and the sentence. And people would listen, for once: It would be news. Big news. Bad news, with all the hot juicy elements of a great political scandal: Stolen documents. A lying official. Suspect testimony. Terrorist warnings unheeded. Rumors of pants. But no: It’s lost in the backwash of grief over the pope, never to be mentioned again.

http://www.newhousenews.com/archive/lileks040605.html

1600 Americans dead in Iraq. 15,000 injured. 100,000 civilians dead and this has what to do with Clinton?

I am no fan of Clinton either by the way…but blaming 9-11 on Clinton is like blaming it on Bush I. After all, if Reagan and Bush I hadn’t trained Osama in tactical operations and supported him in Afghanistan making him into a hero, then he would never have had the popular base or training necessary to execute attacks. If Bush I hadn’t placed military bases in the Muslim Holy land then Osama wouldn’t have attacked. IfRumsfeld hadn’t given Saddam weapons then he wouldn’t have been a “threat” to his neighbors. etc etc. etc.

This line of reasoning is stupid. It could go all the way back to Adam and Eve. The buck has to stop somewhere and it SHOULD stop with Bush-though he is incapable of admitting a mistake. He should have come out after 9-11 and said “We were caught unaware. No one expected this, but we should have foreseen it based on intelligence gathered in the last 20 years (ie under both Dems and Reps). However, we are now aware of these terrorists and their intetions and we will go and get them in Afghanistan and then take precatuions to make sure it doenst happen again.”

Instead he bungled it by getting us into a war in Iraq that was planned before 9-11 and in which “facts were fixed around policy” (Blair memo). This is incontrovertible.

Like many Dems. I was for invading Afghanistan, but Iraq was exploiting 9-11 for his own political agenda. He didn’t listen to a slew of experts who told him that it would be a long unwinnable war-including his own Colin Powell who had first hand experience in Vietnam while Bush was shirking his National Guard duty.

Really, please Republicans, if you think Iraq is a success you are being blind. There is no winning that war. It is a war of attrition now and it was obvious it was going to be that way from the start. The Bush administration went in on evidence that was scanty at best, knowingly fabricated at worst and 1600 of our soldiers are dead.

You can’t blame Iraq on Clinton altough you might try. At what point do things stop being Clinton’s fault? The administration had plenty of time to do a national security review between when Bush took office and 9-11. Call it an oversight or an unexpected blindspot if you will, but trying to blame it on Clinton is just sheer nonsense and you know it.

Since Bush has taken office and invaded countries that cannot compete with our conventional military, he has escalated the nuclear arms race. Now NK and Iran are going to have nuclear capabilities. Invading Iraq was a bad idea and has made the world a more dangerous place than ever.

Meanwhile, Bush holds hands with the Saudi leaders when most of the terrorists were Saudis. If there is a country that should be scrutinized it is Suadi Arabia. Brutal dictators, no democracy, produced the hijackers of 9-11 and instead we have Bush HOLDING HANDS with them.

As far as it being cheaper to keep Saddam in power. That is absurd. The oil companies are NOT METERING the oil in Iraq. They are just atking it for free without a penny going to Iraq. Check for yourself Executive Order 13303 gives oil companies the right to all profits resulting from oil in Iraq. This is the money that was supposed to be going toward reconstruction. The Bushies are fleecing us by handing over no-bid contracts to personal friends and then giving them 70 billion dollar bonues because they didn’t “screw up”. Are you kidding me? i can’t beleive you Repubs aren’t pissed baout the way they are stealing “your” tax money. This is billions of dollars making the other things you rail against look like small change (bike path improvements, raises for state employees).

I just really can’t understand how you can support EVERYTHING this administration does. I lean more liberal, but that doesn’t mean that I support everything that Dems do. Come on! There are obviously problms here. The American people know it too despite the corporate stranglehold on our media that squashes an dissent. It’s sad actually that you place your party before your country. YOu and I have more in common than you and Bush or Clinton and I. If we could just get past this ridiculous mentatility that parties are like football teams we might actually get something accomplished, but you seem utterly unwilling to admit that Iraq was a disaster and still is, and that Bush’s policy of spending and getting us into debt very well might be ruining our economy. It’s sad…

Based on your arguments, every war in history would have been bungled at one point during the war. I am not a replublican, in fact I have voted independent, democrat and replublican in presidential elections and every time i did’nt expect them to be perfect, nor did i need to agree with them on every issue. A few flaws in your argument are 100,000 civilians killed(where does that number come from? Ive heard 30,000 - 100,000 which is kinda a big span) What is a slew of people? and what made them more beleivable than the people who did’nt say it is an unwinnable war? I see dissent in the news everyday, so i’m not real sure what your point is about the media. The GAO found that haliburton was the ONLY company that could do what was needed in Iraq.(by the way Clinton’s administration also contracted with them) My main point about Clinton is that if your going to put forth the theory that Bush LIED about WMD’s then alot of other people apparently were lying as well. Do you really believe that North Korea and Iran started trying to make Nuclear weapons after Bush was elected? My guess is had it not been for Bush, we wouldnt know anything about their plans until it was too late.

Your statement that there’s no winning the war in Iraq, SAYS WHO? YOU…

Iraq is unwinnable. It’s simply a fact. As soon as we leave civil war is going to break out. Saddam was a brutal dictator, but kept the country together with his iron fist. We are not making any progress in Iraq as far as stopping the insurgency. This si because they are not going to recognize any government the US puts in place. Its an unwinnable situation. We can DECLARE victory, but Bush already did that, and we are still there. The administration doesn;t want a pullout, they want bases there. So there was never any endgame here other than setting up strategic military positions. The gov’t used terror to justify invading a country that they wanted to invade before 9-11.

As far as Clinton lying-of course he lied! That’s what politicians do! All we can do is attempt to minimize this. That’s why we need a real third party that will get the corporate shills out of our government. Both the Dems and Reps are awash in corporate money. Until that ends there will never be democracy in this country again. The difference between the two is just who is bribing them and that controls their actions.

Halliburton can be contracted. I am fine with that. However, they should not be handed over a 70 billion dollar bonus simply for not screwing up! Especially not when we are already deficit spending at a higher rate thatn ever in our history.

What I said was thatBush bungled the so called “war on terror” by invading Iraq. Iraq created more terrorists rather than helping to solve the problem. Common sense tells you that you can’t simply kill off all the terrorists. We can’t apitualte to terrorists either. However, we can begin to recognize that the reason that they are supported by more than just an extreme fringe of Muslims is that the Middle East has some legtimate beefs with our foreign policy. That would be a start. Unilateral bombing and taking over of countries is exactly the reason theat we have been targeted in the first place. It simply increases the cycle of violence and hatred.

It is clear to most of the American people (57%) that Bush mishandled the war in Iraq. We were not adequately prepared. bush fired genreals that told him that they neeeded more troops and that this was not going to be an easy win. He willfully ignored any evidence that wasn’t waht he wanted to hear. That is a problem with the current administration that seems endemic to me. If someone speaks against the radical neo-con agenda they are let go. Most Americans are not for what the neo-cons support: global empire, consolidation of power in the exec branch, less environmental and civil regulation, deficit spending, etc. They have managed to keep power becasue of their powerful corporate alllies in the media and in their treasury chests.

Let’s be clear. I am not a conservative, but I would be okay with an old school conservative president who wanted less gov’t spending, less world intervention, more freedom for states etc. That is a philosophy I can work with, and argue with. The current administration (and to a lesser exten Clinton before him and of course Bush I and Reagan before him) is not conservative fiscally or socially. They want to spend moeny we don’t have, want to dismantle regulations that protect people from corporate polluters and unethical practices (like CC companies being able to raise your CC rate for any reason-and no I don’t have a CC), and want to consolidate power in the executive branch effectively bypassing the checks and balance to the constitution.

I am actually concerned for our country’s future. We are a debtor country and are still spending, but other nations are showing an unwillingness to buy our debt anymore (T-bill sales dropped 47% in March and can no longer cover our trade gap). We are meddling in countries and sending our troops to die without thinking it over carefully or haivng exit strategies. We are policing the lives of individuals and erdoing constitutional protected rights-warrants are no longer needed, privacy rights are no longer present, the free press has been eroded. This is what I mean. You and I can argue about the practicalities of conservatism or liberalism all day-and I am fine with that, but what we currently have is an administration that is neither. They are radical and do not represent the American people’s beliefs or intersts. It genuinely makes me concerned.

This is an example of the kind of conservative I would like to see in charge of the republican party instead of the neocons:

http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/cgi-bin/roberts.cgi

Bush didn’t win the elcetion. He stole it. That is enough evidence for me.

If you still think the 2004 election was legitimate, then here are some other things you must also believe if you really believe that George W. Bush won the election:

1. That the exit polls were WRONG.
2. That Zogby's 5pm election day calls for Kerry winning OH and FL were WRONG. He was exactly RIGHT in his 2000 final poll.
3. That Harris' last minute polling for Kerry was WRONG. He was exactly RIGHT in his 2000 final poll.
4. That the Incumbent Rule (that undecideds break for the challenger) was WRONG.
5. That the 50% Rule was WRONG (that an incumbent doesn't do better than his final polling)
6. That the Approval Rating Rule was WRONG (that an incumbent with less than 50% approval will most likely lose the election)
7. That Greg Palast was WRONG when he said that even before the election, 1 million votes were stolen from Kerry. He was the ONLY reporter to break the fact that 90,000 Florida blacks were disenfranchised in 2000.
8. That it was just a COINCIDENCE that the exit polls were CORRECT where there WAS a PAPER TRAIL and INCORRECT (+5% for Bush) where there was NO PAPER TRAIL.
9. That the surge in new young voters had NO positive effect for Kerry.
10. That Bush BEAT 99-1 mathematical odds in winning the election.
11. That Kerry did WORSE than Gore against an opponent who LOST the support of SCORES of Republican newspapers who were for Bush in 2000.
12. That Bush did better than an 18 national poll average which showed him tied with Kerry at 47. In other words, Bush got 80% of the undecided vote to end up with a 51-48 majority - when ALL professional pollsters agree that the undecided vote ALWAYS goes to the challenger.
13. That voting machines made by Republicans with no paper trail and with no software publication, which have been proven by thousands of computer scientists to be vulnerable in scores of ways, were NOT tampered with in this election.
14. That people who voted for Bush were not anxious to speak to exit pollsters in the states that Bush had to win (like Florida and Ohio) where the exit polls were off, but wanted to be polled in states that he had sewn up (like Arizona, Louisiana and Arkansas) where the exit polls were exactly correct.
15. That Democrats who voted for Kerry were very anxious to be exit-polled, especially in Florida and Ohio (and that this is what accounts for the discrepancy between the exit polls and the actual votes in these two critical states).
16. That women were much more likely to be polled early in the day in Florida and Ohio. That is another reason why the exit polls were wrong in those states. In those states in which the exit polls were correct to within one percent, women did not come out early.
17. That network newscasters who claim that those who consider the possibility of fraud are just wild conspiracy theorists do not have an agenda.
18. That it is just a coincidence that only since the 2000 presidential election have exit polls failed to agree with the actual vote - and that Bush won both disputed elections.
19. That exit polls are not to be trusted in the United States, even though they are used throughout the world to monitor elections for fraud.
20. That even though more votes were cast than there were eligible voters in many precincts of critical states, it is not an issue that needs to be covered in the media.
21. That the absence of a paper ballot trail for touch screen computers does not encourage fraud, even though they have been proven by hundreds of computer experts to be highly vulnerable to fraudulent attack.
22. That statistical tests which indicate a high probability of fraud are just conspiratorial junk science.
23. That Bush's vote tallies could exceed his exit poll percentage in FL by 4%. Based on 2846 individuals exit polled, the polling margin of error was 1.84%. The odds of this occurrence: 1 out of 1667.
24. That his vote tallies could exceed his exit poll percentage in OH by 3%. Based on 1963 individuals exit polled, the polling margin of error was 2.21%. The odds of this occurrence: 1 out of 333.
25. That his vote tallies could exceed his exit poll percentages in 41 out of 51 states. The odds of this occurrence: 1 out of 135,000.
26. That his vote tallies could exceed the margin of error in 16 states. Not one state vote tally exceeded the MOE for Kerry. The odds of this occurrence: 1 out of 13.5 Trillion.
27. That his vote tallies could exceed a 2% exit poll margin of error in 23 states. The probability of this occurrence: as close to ZERO as you can get.
28. That of 88 documented touch screen incidents, 86 voters would see their vote for Kerry come up Bush - and only TWO from Bush to Kerry. The probability of this occurrence: as close to ZERO as you can get.
29. That Mitofsky (who ran the exit polls), with 25 years of experience, has lost his exit polling touch.
30. That by disputing the Ukrainian elections, the Bush administration would base its case on the accuracy of U.S. sponsored exit polling, while at the same time ignoring exit polls in the U.S. presidential election, which the media reported Kerry was winning handily.
31. That Bush could overcome Kerry's 50.8% - 48.2% lead in the National Exit Poll Sub-sample (13,047 polled) and win the popular vote: 51.2% - 48.4%, a 3.0% increase from the exit poll to the vote tally, far beyond the 0.86% margin of error. The odds of this occurrence: 1 out of 282 Billion.
32. According to a London-based insurance actuary, the odds of all of these things happening in ONE election, let alone two elections in a row, are too astronomical to be calculated!

WOW - what a long list of bullshit!

The mainstream media is just so in love with Bush and his policies that they have buried all these stories - yeah, that’s the ticket.

Better make sure your tin-foil hat is on nice and tight - and watch out for those black helicopters!

FUCK YOUR THOUGHTS AND YOUR FEELINGS, YOU DON’T KNOW WARREN G. HARDING!

Please give me one valid reason for not wanting paper trails on voting machines? and explain why Republicans would vote against paper trails if they were planning on winning the election fair and square?

CAlling me a tinfoil hat wearer doesn’t Disprove the facts above.

Deal with the facts.

Refute the facts.

Otherwise you are just slinging insults meant to illegitimize my position.

If it is so outrageous, and I asuch a wacko, then tell me why I am wrong.

Jim Lampley The Biggest Story of Our Lives

At 5:00 p.m. Eastern time on Election Day, I checked the sportsbook odds in Las Vegas and via the offshore bookmakers to see the odds as of that moment on the Presidential election. John Kerry was a two-to-one favorite. You can look it up.

People who have lived in the sports world as I have, bettors in particular, have a feel for what I am about to say about this: these people are extremely scientific in their assessments. These people understand which information to trust and which indicators to consult in determining where to place a dividing line to influence bets, and they are not in the business of being completely wrong. Oddsmakers consulted exit polling and knew what it meant and acknowledged in their oddsmaking at that moment that John Kerry was winning the election.

And he most certainly was, at least if the votes had been fairly and legally counted. What happened instead was the biggest crime in the history of the nation, and the collective media silence which has followed is the greatest fourth-estate failure ever on our soil.

Many of the participants in this blog have graduate school educations. It is damned near impossible to go to graduate school in any but the most artistic disciplines without having to learn about the basics of social research and its uncanny accuracy and validity. We know that professionally conceived samples simply do not yield results which vary six, eight, ten points from eventual data returns, thaty’s why there are identifiable margins for error. We know that margins for error are valid, and that results have fallen within the error range for every Presidential election for the past fifty years prior to last fall. NEVER have exit polls varied by beyond-error margins in a single state, not since 1948 when this kind of polling began. In this past election it happened in ten states, all of them swing states, all of them in Bush’s favor. Coincidence? Of course not.

Karl Rove isn’t capable of conceiving and executing such a grandiose crime? Wake up. They did it. The silence of traditional media on this subject is enough to establish their newfound bankruptcy. The revolution will have to start here. I challenge every other thinker at the Huffington Post: is there any greater imperative than to reverse this crime and reestablish democracy in America? Why the mass silence? Let’s go to work with the circumstantial evidence, begin to narrow from the outside in, and find some witnesses who will turn. That’s how they cracked Watergate. This is bigger, and I never dreamed I would say that in my baby boomer lifetime.

“If it is so outrageous, and I asuch a wacko, then tell me why I am wrong.”

When it doesn’t seem to even have risen to the standards of 60 Minutes or NEWSWEEK then I gotta call bullshit.

For all it’s faults, the electorial college at least limits these crazy stories to a couple of states. The recounts would still be going on today if the total popular vote was used.

http://www.huffingtonstoast.com/

MUCH tastier than Huffington Post!

I am still waiting for someone to explain to me how Bush beat billion to one odds.

AND why Republicans would vote against paper trails for voting machines.

Wasn’t it the democracts who pushed for electronic voting in the first place? Remember the infamous “butterfly ballot - it was designed by a dummycrat.

I myself would prefer paper ballots marked with pencils and counted by humans, as long as there were safeguards against fraud.

ps. Billion to one odds? Only in your fantasy world.

pps. What are the odds that Kerry will EVER allow his military records to become public? Now there’s a true long-shot!

Final precinct-level data just released by the Ohio secretary of state illuminate surprising details about President Bush's victory in this battleground state. And campaign leaders for Bush and Sen. John Kerry are revealing for the first time how they struggled in the final hours to win Ohio.

http://election.redstate.org/story/2005/5/16/85110/7427

Contrary to the best efforts of conspiracy theorists across the country, the Evaluation of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004 prepared by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International or the National Election Pool (NEP), which was just released to the public, finds that exit polls do not support the allegations of fraud due to rigging of voting equipment.

This report validates most of the arguments that Republicans and statisticians made about why the exit polls were incorrect. It also laid bare the whining of the far left that cannot let the election result stand. Less exciting than the standard conspiracies, it looks like sampling error and other factors lead to more Kerry voters being interviewed and less Bush supporters. More from the report below.

On November 2, 2004, the Election System created by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International for the National Election Pool (NEP) produced election estimates and exit poll data for analysis in 120 races in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. In addition, between January and March 2004, Edison and Mitofsky conducted exit polls for 23 Democratic Primaries and Caucuses. For every election, the system delivered on its main goals: there were no incorrect NEP winner projections, and the exit poll data produced on election day were used on-air and in print by the six members of the NEP (AP, ABC, CBS, CNN, FOX and NBC) as well as several dozen media organizations who subscribed to that data. However, the estimates produced by the exit poll data on November 2nd were not as accurate as we have produced with previous exit polls. Our investigation of the differences between the exit poll estimates and the actual vote count point to one primary reason: in a number of precincts a higher than average Within Precinct Error most likely due to Kerry voters participating in the exit polls at a higher rate than Bush voters. There have been partisan overstatements in previous elections, more often overstating the Democrat, but occasionally overstating the Republican. While the size of the average exit poll error has varied, it was higher in 2004 than in previous years for which we have data. This report measures the errors in the exit poll estimates and attempts to identify the factors that contributed to these errors.

The exit poll estimates in the 2004 general election overstated John Kerry’s share of the vote nationally and in many states. There were 26 states in which the estimates produced by the exit poll data overstated the vote for John Kerry by more than one standard error, and there were four states in which the exit poll estimates overstated the vote for George W. Bush by more than one standard error. The inaccuracies in the exit poll estimates were not due to the sample selection of the polling locations at which the exit polls were conducted. We have not discovered any systematic problem in how the exit poll data were collected and processed. Exit polls do not support the allegations of fraud due to rigging of voting equipment.

It is difficult to pinpoint precisely the reasons that, in general, Kerry voters were more likely to participate in the exit polls than Bush voters. There were certainly motivational factors that are impossible to quantify, but which led to Kerry voters being less likely than Bush voters to refuse to take the survey. In addition there are interactions between respondents and interviewers that can contribute to differential non-response rates. We can identify some factors that appear to have contributed, even in a small way, to the discrepancy. These include:

Distance restrictions imposed upon our interviewers by election officials at the state and local level

Weather conditions which lowered completion rates at certain polling locations

Multiple precincts voting at the same location as the precinct in our sample

Polling locations with a large number of total voters where a smaller portion of voters was selected to be asked to fill out questionnaires

Interviewer characteristics such as age, which were more often related to precinct error this year than in past elections We plan further analysis on the following factors:

Interviewer training and election day procedures

Interviewing rate calculations

Interviewer characteristics

Precinct characteristics * Questionnaire length and design We also suggest the following changes for future exit polls:

Working to improve cooperation with state and local election officials Evaluation of Edison/Mitofsky Election System page 5 January 19, 2005

Improvements in interviewing training procedures

Changes in our procedures for hiring, recruiting and monitoring interviewers

Even with these improvements, differences in response rates between Democratic and Republican voters may still occur in future elections. However, we believe that these steps will help to minimize the discrepancies.

It is also important to note that the exit poll estimates did not lead to a single incorrect NEP winner projection on election night. The Election Night System does not rely solely on exit polls in its computations and estimates. After voting is completed, reported vote totals are entered into the system. Edison/Mitofsky and the NEP members do not project the outcome of close races until a significant number of actual votes are counted. As in past elections, the final exit poll data used for analysis in 2004 was adjusted to match the actual vote returns by geographic region within each state. Thus, the discrepancy due to differing response rates was minimized and did not significantly affect the analysis of the vote. The exit polls reliably describe the composition of the electorate and how certain demographic subgroups voted.

http://election.redstate.org/story/2005/1/19/14112/5589

Contrary to the best efforts of conspiracy theorists across the country, the Evaluation of Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004 prepared by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International or the National Election Pool (NEP), which was just released to the public, finds that exit polls do not support the allegations of fraud due to rigging of voting equipment.

This report validates most of the arguments that Republicans and statisticians made about why the exit polls were incorrect. It also laid bare the whining of the far left that cannot let the election result stand. Less exciting than the standard conspiracies, it looks like sampling error and other factors lead to more Kerry voters being interviewed and less Bush supporters. More from the report below.

On November 2, 2004, the Election System created by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International for the National Election Pool (NEP) produced election estimates and exit poll data for analysis in 120 races in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. In addition, between January and March 2004, Edison and Mitofsky conducted exit polls for 23 Democratic Primaries and Caucuses. For every election, the system delivered on its main goals: there were no incorrect NEP winner projections, and the exit poll data produced on election day were used on-air and in print by the six members of the NEP (AP, ABC, CBS, CNN, FOX and NBC) as well as several dozen media organizations who subscribed to that data. However, the estimates produced by the exit poll data on November 2nd were not as accurate as we have produced with previous exit polls. Our investigation of the differences between the exit poll estimates and the actual vote count point to one primary reason: in a number of precincts a higher than average Within Precinct Error most likely due to Kerry voters participating in the exit polls at a higher rate than Bush voters. There have been partisan overstatements in previous elections, more often overstating the Democrat, but occasionally overstating the Republican. While the size of the average exit poll error has varied, it was higher in 2004 than in previous years for which we have data. This report measures the errors in the exit poll estimates and attempts to identify the factors that contributed to these errors.

The exit poll estimates in the 2004 general election overstated John Kerry’s share of the vote nationally and in many states. There were 26 states in which the estimates produced by the exit poll data overstated the vote for John Kerry by more than one standard error, and there were four states in which the exit poll estimates overstated the vote for George W. Bush by more than one standard error. The inaccuracies in the exit poll estimates were not due to the sample selection of the polling locations at which the exit polls were conducted. We have not discovered any systematic problem in how the exit poll data were collected and processed. Exit polls do not support the allegations of fraud due to rigging of voting equipment.

It is difficult to pinpoint precisely the reasons that, in general, Kerry voters were more likely to participate in the exit polls than Bush voters. There were certainly motivational factors that are impossible to quantify, but which led to Kerry voters being less likely than Bush voters to refuse to take the survey. In addition there are interactions between respondents and interviewers that can contribute to differential non-response rates. We can identify some factors that appear to have contributed, even in a small way, to the discrepancy. These include:

Distance restrictions imposed upon our interviewers by election officials at the state and local level

Weather conditions which lowered completion rates at certain polling locations

Multiple precincts voting at the same location as the precinct in our sample

Polling locations with a large number of total voters where a smaller portion of voters was selected to be asked to fill out questionnaires

Interviewer characteristics such as age, which were more often related to precinct error this year than in past elections We plan further analysis on the following factors:

Interviewer training and election day procedures

Interviewing rate calculations

Interviewer characteristics

Precinct characteristics * Questionnaire length and design We also suggest the following changes for future exit polls:

Working to improve cooperation with state and local election officials Evaluation of Edison/Mitofsky Election System page 5 January 19, 2005

Improvements in interviewing training procedures

Changes in our procedures for hiring, recruiting and monitoring interviewers

Even with these improvements, differences in response rates between Democratic and Republican voters may still occur in future elections. However, we believe that these steps will help to minimize the discrepancies.

It is also important to note that the exit poll estimates did not lead to a single incorrect NEP winner projection on election night. The Election Night System does not rely solely on exit polls in its computations and estimates. After voting is completed, reported vote totals are entered into the system. Edison/Mitofsky and the NEP members do not project the outcome of close races until a significant number of actual votes are counted. As in past elections, the final exit poll data used for analysis in 2004 was adjusted to match the actual vote returns by geographic region within each state. Thus, the discrepancy due to differing response rates was minimized and did not significantly affect the analysis of the vote. The exit polls reliably describe the composition of the electorate and how certain demographic subgroups voted.

http://election.redstate.org/story/2005/1/19/14112/5589

I suppose you think this guy is a shill for Bush? Somehow I think NOT!

Steve Rosenthal is the chief executive officer of America Coming Together. He was the political director of the AFL-CIO from 1996 to 2002.

Okay, We Lost Ohio. The Question Is, Why?

By Steve Rosenthal Sunday, December 5, 2004; Page B03

When it came to getting out the Democratic vote in Ohio during the presidential election, we hit our target numbers. My organization, America Coming Together, along with our 32 America Votes partner organizations, the Democratic National Committee and the Kerry-Edwards campaign not only exceeded our turnout goals for the Buckeye State, but far exceeded anything the Democrats have done in the past.

And we still lost. President Bush won the election by fewer than 130,000 votes out of 5.6 million cast in Ohio, according to the state’s latest figures. We added 554,000 votes to our totals, but the Republicans countered with 508,000, enough to keep the state in their column.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A34157-2004Dec3.html

Sorry to introduce something on topic but…

Q. When is it politically correct to beat gays and kill women?

A. When the beaters and killers are “oppressed Muslims”!

http://www.reason.com/cy/cy051705.shtml

On April 30, American journalist Chris Crain became the victim of a hate crime in Amsterdam. While walking in the street holding hands with his partner, he was savagely beaten by seven men shouting antigay slurs. A few days later, Scott Long, director of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Program at the Human Rights Watch, expressed some sympathy for the gay-bashers. Crain’s attackers were reportedly Moroccan immigrants.

Do Muslims support the normalization of gay rights?

The election was stolen, but it doesn’t matter. The faster the country goes to crap, the faster we can seced from the Southern states that are screwing the rest of the country over.

Republicnas: How does it feel to know that the only reason your party is in power is because of a bunch of brain-dead hicks that think Dinosaurs were on Noah’s Ark?

That must really inspire confidence.

Another conservative voice of reason, John Cole:

http://www.balloon-juice.com/archives/005188.html

And that is what is most disturbing about the short-sighted and indefensible position of the ‘uber-patriots.’ Put aside the demagoguery, the denial, and the smears. Put aside the wishful thinking, the demonization of the media, and the claims that anyone who is outraged by this abuse is un-American, anti-military, hyperventilating over nothing, or out to get the President (which I am decidedly not). Instead, spend 1/10th of the energy you spend defending the status quo and urge the Republicans to use our majority status and the trappings of power we now enjoy with the control of Congress and the Presidency, and stop the torture and abuse. Do that, and your critics won’t have anything to complain about.

Why is it that few, if any, members of the Republican party have called for congressional investigations? I wonder if that would be the same response for Hugh and the Republicans in Congress if Clinton were President? We have time for investigating the use of steroids in professional sports, seemingly endless debates about Senate filibusters, and a whole bevy of unimportant issues, but when it comes to torture, the prevailing attitude is ‘Let’s just pretend nothing happened and villify anyone who refuses to go along.’

If some have their way, a full accounting of the nefarious misdeeds of a few won’t happen, because that would require that we accept blame for what has been done in our name, and that might require a level of candor and responsibility that many do not seem to possess. That would require an honest and open debate, a full documentation of events, and accountability. As it is, I will leave it to Hugh and the rest of his supporters to figure out how the status quo is the ‘Christian’ response to torture and murder. Maybe he is just taking a page from the Catholic church’s response to child abuse. SNIP

“The election was stolen, but it doesn’t matter.”

Gore’s Legacy - no election will ever not be stolen again.

Actually I think that is Bush’s legacy.

Nope - even Dick Nixon was un-willing to contest a stolen election, he thought it would be bad for the country. Gore had no such compunction.

But you see…If Bush hadn’t been appointed by the Supreme Court and had allowed all the votes to be counted, Gore wouldn’t have had to contest the election. So actually the election being stolen is Bush’s legacy…

Bush our two-time appointed resident. What a mandate!

It sure is funny how exit polls were accurate in states with no black box voting machines, but in states with no paper trail the exit polls were mysteriously wrong..and always to Bush’s benefit!

It must have been the exit polls fault, not those black box machines with no way to verify results. I think I will just take Diebold’s word that they are not rigged after all it isn’t like he said “I will deliver Ohio to you” or anything like that to Bush.

Oh yeah. Another thing. I am sure it was simply a system glitch that everytime the machines made a verifiable mistake they went to Bush.

No, the election was fair and square. All those machines were definitely not hacked into and Bush beat billion to one odds in winning.

Geez, I wish he would teach me how to do that so I could win the lottery!

It really up in the air as to who first “stole” a presidential election - what is certain is that Gore was the first to contest the supposed theft - so the “stolen election” meme will forever be Gore’s legacy.

The legacy is to the person who stole the election and crushed American Democracy forever. The day that Bush was appointed president by the Supreme Court will be forever viewed as the beginning of the end of the experiment of democracy in the United States.

Bush’s legacy will also be the mistrust of the Us and the ruining of our economy.

He has showed our weakness to other countries in the world and taken us to the brink of nuclear war. He has rolled back environmental protections and alienated our allies.

When he invades Iran next month the 1000,000 civilians dead in Iraq will be forgotten amidst the massive pile of corpses that we will leave in our wake.

If there is a hell, GW is certainly going there. a lot of Dems too, I admit, but a special place will be saved for this traitor to country, democracy, reason, and humanity. I just hope we can stop him before it is too late by taking back the Senate in 2006

” The day that Bush was appointed president by the Supreme Court…”

Ther was no day like that, there was only a decision that there had been enough recounts. All subsequnt studies showed Bush winning FL.

The Presidential Election of 2000 was stolen by the Bush-Cheney Campaign and the Florida GOP, Jeb Bush, Katherine Harris, County Election Officials, the U.S. Supreme Court, the Media, and Attorney General John Ashcroft.

The list below documents all of the crimes that were committed to steal the election. These were not isolated instances of carelessness - they were deliberate election fraud. We believe these crimes are so serious that they should be given a name: FLORIDAGATE.

FLORIDAGATE is the nation’s biggest scandal since Watergate. So why isn’t the mainstream media reporting the story? Because the media - especially the huge broadcast networks - were participants in the crime, and are now participants in the coverup. So is Attorney General John Ashcroft, who should be investigating these crimes. Meanwhile, Democratic leaders in Washington are afraid to demand a thorough investigation, because they know they would be viciously attacked by the Republican propaganda machine.

We demand a thorough investigation of FLORIDAGATE. Sign our petition.

We are fighting a heroic battle to bring FLORIDAGATE to the attention of the American people - and the world. We need your support! Please contribute today.

To comment on the crimes cited below, click here.

Read the Boston Statement detailing how Bush stole the presidency. Bush-Cheney Campaign and the Florida GOP

1. Absentee ballot law (FL GOP)

   The Florida Republican Party sent a letter with Jeb’s signature and the Florida state seal urging Florida Republicans to vote by absentee ballots. But Florida law (which was made even stricter in 1998) is not a “vote-by-mail” system - voters must have a valid reason for voting by mail. The Republican Party was thus encouraging Republican voters to break the law.

   Florida’s absentee ballot laws were tightened because of the 1997 Miami absentee ballot scandal that resulted in the voiding of ALL absentees and the overturn of the election. The man who engineered that massive fraud - Mayoral candidate Xavier Suarez - played a key role in the GOP absentee effort in 2000.

2. Absentee Ballot Law, Voting Rights Act (FL GOP, Seminole County, Martin County)

   With the active assistance of GOP Election Supervisors, FL GOP officials sent GOP operatives to illegally alter over 2,500 defective Republican absentee ballot applications, while at least 550 Democratic applications were ignored.

3. Conspiracy to Interfere with the Lawful Count of the Votes (Jeb Bush, Katherine Harris)

   When the TV networks called Florida for Gore, Bush campaign spokespeople (Rove, Matalin, etc.) went on TV to declare the results were wrong and would soon be changed. Was there already a plan to use state and local government powers to interfere with the lawful counting of votes?

4. FL Absentee Ballot Law

   Pressured canvassing boards in Republican counties to violate Florida’s election laws and count clearly illegal overseas Republican absentee ballots, while fighting to prevent Democratic counties from counting similar absentee ballots

5. 14th Amendment, Voting Rights Act

   Forced hand counting of heavily Republican absentee ballots that the machines couldn’t read - while delaying and blocking hand counting of poll-cast ballots in heavily Democratic counties that the machines couldn’t read, thus treating ballots differently and discriminating against black voters * GOP Stalling Tactics in Palm Beach

6. Legal ethics

   Urged courts to block hand counts in Democratic counties in FL while urging courts to conduct hand counts in NM

7. Interference with Administration of Elections; Assault (Rep. John Sweeney, Congressional staff, etc)

   On 11/21, organized a riot in Miami/Dade County that intimidated the canvassing board into stopping its hand count, and then assaulted Joe Geller, chair of the Dade County Democratic executive committee. This riot was paid for by the Bush recount committee.

8. Abuse of Congressional office for partisan politics; politicization of active-duty military (Rep. Steve Buyer, Rep. Tillie Fowler, Michael Higgins, Rob Carter)

   On 11/22, Rep. Buyer gave the Pentagon a list of active duty sailors whose ballots had been rejected as invalid, which was provided by Florida Republican operative Rob Carter. Buyer demanded their e-mail addresses immediately. Buyer’s aide Michael Higgins then contacted the sailors and put them in touch with Carter, who enlisted these sailors in a propaganda campaign to attack Vice President Al Gore as anti-military, and to pressure county officials to count invalid ballots. Carter also supplied Rep. Tillie Fowler with stories from service members, which she used to denounce Gore at a rally.

9. FEC Disclosure

   Failure to disclose how the $8 million the Bush campaign raised for its Florida recount effort

   1. IRS Disclosure

      Failure to disclose the occupation and employer of thousands of recount donors

Governor Jeb Bush

1. Absentee Ballot Law

   Letter sent by Florida Republican Party with Jeb’s signature and the Florida state seal urged Florida Republicans to vote by absentee ballot, regardless of whether they had a valid legal reason for doing so.

2. Abuse of State Seal

   Letter sent by Florida Republican party with Jeb’s signature and the Florida state seal urging Florida Republicans to vote by absentee ballots

3. Abuse of Office for Partisan Purposes; Interference with Administration of Elections

   Jeb and his staff made 95 phone calls made to Bush/Cheney Presidential campaign after Jeb said he’d recused himself; he visited the Bush/GOP headquarters in Tallahassee; he participated in at least 1 Bush strategy conference call; 6 of the 95 calls were on the day GOP thugs stopped the Miami-Dade recount

4. Abuse of Office for Partisan Purposes

   Called special session of legislature to intimidate county officials and judges

5. 14th Amendment (Florida Legislature)

   2001 Election Reform law perpetuates the election problems that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled to be in violation of the 14th Amendment.

Secretary of State Katherine Harris

1. Voting Rights Act Section 5 (Bucky Mitchell, Michael Cochran, Elaine Baxter)

   Misrepresentation of the felons list statute, failure to provide available documents directly relevant to the pre-clearance review

2. Voting Rights Act Section 5 (Clay Roberts, Bucky Mitchell)

   Knowing failure to obtain pre-clearance for significant changes in policies and procedures pursuant to the implementation of the felons list law which resulted in the removal of legal voters from the registration rolls in at least one of 5 pre-clearance counties in Florida

3. Disenfranchisement of Legal Voters

   Knowingly purged felons from states where voting rights were automatically restored upon release, contrary to clear court rulings. Knowingly included non-felons in its purge through its “wide net” policy (accepting a 90% name-match in 1999, and an 80% match in 2000).

4. Ballot Design Law

   Sent out a sample ballot design to county elections supervisors that split the 10 Presidential candidates on the ballots onto 2 pages

5. Uniform Administration of Election Law: Assistance to Voters

   Failure to oversee training of poll workers to ensure proper assistance to voters

6. Americans with Disabilities Act (Jeb Bush, Counties)

   Failure to make voting machines fully accessible to the handicapped

7. Mandatory Machine Recount Law

   20 counties never did the mandatory machine recount as required by state election law.

8. Overseas Absentee Ballot Law

   Allowed illegal overseas absentee ballots to be counted and included in the certified total

9. Uniform Administration of Election Law

   Coordination (conspiracy) between Harris lawyers and Bush/GOP lawyers; Deliberate misinterpretation of the law for partisan purposes

   1. Uniform Administration of Elections: Hand Recount Law

      Inconsistent application of hand count law: accepted manual recounts from some counties, but denied Palm Beach permission to conduct hand count

   2. Use of Government Office for Politics

      Allowed Republican operatives Andrew Goodman and J.M. Stipanovich to use her state computers and offices during the recount; Communications Director Donald Tighe admitted writing partisan speeches during the campaign.

      These political activities were found on Harris’ computer. 1) On 1/29/00, a speech written for a Republican meeting that declared: “We are READY TO LEAD!” 2) On 3/14/00, a set of campaign talking points for George W. Bush. 3) On 11/14/00, an examination of the campaign finances of FL Supreme Court Justice Barbara Pariente - who was reviewing important election cases. 4) A list of contributors to Harris’ 1998 Democratic opponent, Karen Gievers (undated).

      Harris claims Stipanovich and Goodman were “volunteers,” but Goodman billed Harris $12,000 for his work, and Harris initially approved the bill (Palm Beach Post, 8/23/01)

   3. Abuse of Discretion in Violation of Florida Supreme Court Order

      The Florida Supreme Court ordered Harris to accept the Palm Beach recount until 9 a.m. on 11/27; she refused to accept them after 5 p.m. on 11/26

   4. Conflict of Interest; Use of Office for Political Gain

      While overseeing the recount, Harris expressed interest in appointment as Ambassador under Bush

   5. Public Records

      Reinstalled Windows and erased files on state computers used by Republican operatives Andrew Goodman and J.M Stipanovich

County Election Officials

1. Voter Registration Law and Voting Rights Act

   Failure to process thousands of voter registration forms before the election, including many from historically black colleges

2. Absentee Ballot Law (Okaloosa)

   Sent hundreds or thousands of absentee ballots to voters who did NOT request one

3. Absentee Ballot Law (Bay)

   Republicans turned in “handfuls” and in one case a suitcase-full of absentee ballots in defiance of a law that provides people may submit no more than two absentee ballots other than their own or that of a family member

4. Ballot design law (Palm Beach)

   Butterfly ballot

5. Sample ballot law (Duval)

   Sample ballot differed significantly from actual ballot - sample ballot listed 10 candidates on 1 page, while actual ballot spread candidates over 2 pages

6. Voting Rights Act

   Substandard voting machinery in predominantly minority precincts that produced ballot spoilage up to 40%; Failure to provide voter assistance in Spanish (Osceola County) and Creole (Miami-Dade); reports of intimidation of minority voters

7. Voting machine law (Punch Card)

   Failure to properly maintain machines, including misalignment and accumulation of chads

8. Election Day law

   Closed polling places without notice; Turned away voters who were on line at 7 pm when polls closed

9. Voting machine law (Miami-Dade)

   Use of malfunctioning voting machines

   1. Voting Machine Law (Optiscan)

      Failure to provide machine-readable pens

   2. Voting Machine Law (Palm Beach)

      Misaligned ballots, as described by Rabbi Yellin; Use of malfunctioning voting machines in county elections office

      • Miami Herald 8/28/01: Democratic State Representative Calls for Criminal Investigation of Teresa Lepore

   3. Negligence (Palm Beach)

      Failure to respond to complaints about confusing ballot and voting mistakes

   4. Intent of the voter

      Nearly all counties failed to count machine-unreadable votes where the intent of the voter was clear. This includes “write-in overvotes” that must specifically be counted by law.

      • Palm Beach Canvassing Board rejects dimpled ballots

   5. Mandatory machine recount law

      20 counties never did the mandatory machine recount as required by state election law.

   6. Racial Discrimination (Escambia)

      Disabled optiscan technology that prevents errors on poll-cast votes, but “duplicated” (fixed) absentee votes with errors.

   7. Different Treatment of Machine-Unreadable Ballots

      Various Republican counties hand-counted absentee ballots that could not be machine-read (thus favoring Republicans), but refused to hand-count poll-cast ballots that could not be machine-read (thus harming Democrats)

   8. Ballot tampering fraud (Escambia and other Northern counties)

      Estimated 7,100 ballots were destroyed in 11 counties

   9. Ballot tampering; Open meetings law (Optiscan)

      Secret duplication of 10,000 optiscan-unreadable absentee ballots in 26 heavily Republican counties in central and north Florida. These ballots favored George W. Bush by more than 2 to 1.

   10. Fraud (Duval)

       Republican elections supervisor John Stafford lied about the number of under and overvotes to the Gore campaign during the 72-hour window for requesting a recount, telling the Gore campaign there were only 2-300 votes disqualified, when there were actually 27,000.

   11. Recount law (Miami-Dade)

       Refusal to conduct hand count

   12. Absentee Ballot Law (Orange)

       Refused to count stateside absentees postmarked before Election Day, while counting overseas absentees with no postmark or date

   13. Public Records Law (Palm Beach)

       Destruction of computer records of 2000 Presidential vote

U.S. Supreme Court

1. Conflict of Interest

   Four members of the Supreme Court majority in Bush v. Gore had conflicts and should have recused themselves: O’Connor, Thomas, Scalia, and Rehnquist. In August 2001, three Justices recused themselves from the case of Napoleon Beazley, who was sentenced to death for the murder of the father of J. Michael Luttig, a well-connected federal appeals court judge.

2. US Law on Emergency Injunctive Relief

   Granted emergency relief to George W. Bush to stop the manual 4. Count of 60,000 uncounted votes as ordered by the Florida Supreme Court, on the theory that counting all of the votes would cause “irreparable harm” to Bush.

3. 14th Amendment

   In Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court declared the the 14th Amendment prohibited variations in vote counting by county officials, contrary to all precedents - and explicitly refused to set a precedent for future cases. In the same ruling, the Court accepted 2,490 overseas absentee ballots that were counted without any consistent standard and produced a net gain of 630 votes for Bush - greater than his 537-vote margin of victory.

4. Presidential Elections; Appointment of Electors (3 USC Chapter 1 Section 5)

   On December 12, 2000, the Supreme Court intentionally misrepresented the law as saying that Electors had to be chosen by December 12, when the true deadline was December 18.

Media

1. Corporate Contribution to Federal Campaign (FOX)

   George W. Bush spoke by phone with his cousin John Ellis at FOX News shortly before FOX incorrectly projected Bush as the winner at 2 a.m. on Election Night, which prompted Al Gore to temporarily concede and defined him as the presumptive loser.

2. Corporate Contributions to Federal Campaign; Broadcast License Requirement to Serve the Public Interest (FOX, NBC, ABC, CBS)

   The broadcast networks consistenly ignored Bush’s flaws and inconsistencies, while scrutinizing Gore’s flaws and inconsistencies

3. Corporate Contribution to Federal Campaign; Violation of Broadcast License (NBC/Jack Welch)

   On Election Night, GE CEO Jack Welch reportedly ordered the network to call Florida for Bush, even though the results were too close to call. * Rep. Henry Waxman’s Repeated Requests for Videotapes Promised by NBC News President Andrew Lack

Attorney General John Ashcroft

1. Failure to Investigate

   DoJ has received THOUSANDS of complaints, but is investigating only 12. Complaints include serious allegations of fraud, such as pre-punched ballots in heavily African American and Democratic precincts in Miami/Dade and Broward Counties

My, what a big long list of bull shit you have!

I bring facts and you call names.

From the Republican playbook: When backed into a corner because the facts PROVE you are wrong, start calling names.

That might work on the hick, racists, creationist, illiterates that make up the Republican base, but it doesn’t play well to the rest of the country.

When we get the message out that this vote was rigged and the one in 2004 as well, that Bush rigged the intelligence to invade Iraq, and that 100’s of thousands of people are dead because of the repugs greed and bloodlust, you will still be calling names as we put Bush in jail and try him for war crimes.

I guess you might as well give up then, if the evil genius Bush is too much for you.

Wait twenty years and we’ll see if the people of the Middle East don’t consider Bush to be their liberator.

I lived thru BS about Reagan and now he is recognized as the liberator of those formerly enslaved by the old Soviet system.

But you just keep baying at the moon, it won’t matter in the end.

Kerry conceded, but then he’s really a Bush shill, unlike the true Dummycrat.

“…can only mean the Dems, lacking anything to rally around for the next four years, want to keep the victim-magic going and will hang on long enough to create the auro of ‘another stolen election’ for their base.”

http://instapundit.com/archives/018981.php

Still waiting for a Repubican to explain to me why Republicans voted against paper trails…

If they weren’t planning on stealing the election, why didn’t they want the results to be verifiable?

Why were the exit polls ‘wrong’ only in states with no paper trail?

Still waiting for you to stop calling names and actually answer my question.

Reagan was no “liberator” and is only praised in right wing circle jerks like you have been visiting.

The Soviets wanted to end the Cold War back in the 70’s but the same neocons who are in power now kept it going:

This war was fabricated and 9-11 was used as an excuse. Try reading for a change and look at the quotes from public documents below. PNAC was planning this war as early as 1998.

umsfeld & Bush’s Iraq War Plan Was Formulated In 1998

By Jason Leopold

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz undertook a full-fledged lobbying campaign in 1998 to get former President Bill Clinton to start a war with Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein's regime claiming that the country posed a threat to the United States, according to documents obtained from a former Clinton aide.

This new information begs the question: what is really driving the Bush Administration's desire to start a war with Iraq if two of Bush's future top defense officials were already planting the seeds for an attack five years ago?

In 1998, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were working in the private sector. Both were involved with the right-wing think tank Project for a New American Century, which was established in 1997 by William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, to promote global leadership and dictate American foreign policy.

While Clinton was dealing with the worldwide threat from Al-Qaeda and Osama Bin Laden, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz wrote to Clinton urging him to use military force against Iraq and remove Hussein from power because the country posed a threat to the United States due to its alleged ability to develop weapons of mass destruction.

The Jan 26, 1998 letter sent to Clinton from the Project for the New American Century said a war with Iraq should be initiated even if the United States could not muster support from its allies in the United Nations. Kristol also signed the letter.

"We are writing you because we are convinced that current American policy toward Iraq is not succeeding, and that we may soon face a threat in the Middle East more serious than any we have known since the end of the Cold War," says the letter. "In your upcoming State of the Union Address, you have an opportunity to chart a clear and determined course for meeting this threat. We urge you to seize that opportunity, and to enunciate a new strategy that would secure the interests of the U.S. and our friends and allies around the world. That strategy should aim, above all, at the removal of Saddam Hussein's regime from power."

"We urge you to turn your Administration’s attention to implementing a strategy for removing Saddam’s regime from power. This will require a full complement of diplomatic, political and military efforts. Although we are fully aware of the dangers and difficulties in implementing this policy, we believe the dangers of failing to do so are far greater. We believe the U.S. has the authority under existing UN resolutions to take the necessary steps, including military steps, to protect our vital interests in the Gulf. In any case, American policy cannot continue to be crippled by a misguided insistence on unanimity in the UN Security Council," says the letter.

The full contents of the Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz letter can be viewed at: http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqclintonletter.htm (and attached below)

Clinton rebuffed the advice from the future Bush Administration officials saying he was focusing his attention on dismantling Al-Qaeda cells, according to a copy of the response Clinton sent to Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Kristol.

Unsatisfied with Clinton's response, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Kristol and others from the Project for the New American Century wrote another letter on May 29, 1998 to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Senate Republican Majority Leader Trent Lott saying that the United States should, "establish and maintain a strong U.S. military presence in the region, and be prepared to use that force to protect our vital interests in the Gulf - and, if necessary, to help remove Saddam from power."

"We should take whatever steps are necessary to challenge Saddam Hussein’s claim to be Iraq’s legitimate ruler, including indicting him as a war criminal," says the letter to Gingrich and Lott.

"U.S. policy should have as its explicit goal removing Saddam Hussein’s regime from power and establishing a peaceful and democratic Iraq in its place. We recognize that this goal will not be achieved easily. But the alternative is to leave the initiative to Saddam, who will continue to strengthen his position at home and in the region. Only the U.S. can lead the way in demonstrating that his rule is not legitimate and that time is not on the side of his regime."

The letter to Gingrich and Lott can be viewed at: http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqletter1998.htm (and attached below)

The White House would not comment on the letters, or on whether Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz possessed any intelligence information that suggested Iraq posed an imminent threat to the United States at the time. The letters offered no hard evidence that Iraq was in possession of weapons of mass destruction.

The Clinton aide said the former President believed that the policy of, "containing Saddam Hussein in a box", was successful and that the Iraqi regime did not pose any threat to U.S. interests at the time.

President Clinton, "never considered war with Iraq an option," the former aide said. "We were encouraged by the UN weapons inspectors and believed they had a good handle on the situation."

Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Kristol, however, disagreed; saying the only way to deal with Hussein was by initiating a full-scale war.

"The policy of "containment" of Saddam Hussein has been steadily eroding over the past several months," Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Kristol wrote in their letter to Clinton.

"As recent events have demonstrated, we can no longer depend on our partners in the Gulf War coalition to continue to uphold the sanctions or to punish Saddam when he blocks or evades UN inspections. It hardly needs to be added that if Saddam does acquire the capability to deliver weapons of mass destruction, as he is almost certain to do if we continue along the present course, the safety of American troops in the region, of our friends and allies like Israel and the moderate Arab states, and a significant portion of the world's supply of oil will all be put at hazard. The only acceptable strategy is one that eliminates the possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction. In the near term, this means a willingness to undertake military action as diplomacy is clearly failing. In the long term, it means removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power. That now needs to become the aim of American foreign policy.”

Those alleged threats posed by Iraq, and the advice Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Weekly Standard Editor William Kristol, first offered the attention of the Clinton Administration five years ago have now become the blueprint for how the Bush Administration is dealing with the Iraq.

The existence of the Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz "war" letters is just another reason to question the Bush Administration's desire to go to war with Iraq now instead of dealing with other pressing issues such as Al-Qaeda. Because the letters were written in 1998 it proves that this war was planned well before 9-11 and casts further doubt on the administration’s claims that Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9-11 terrorist attacks, and that this is a key part of their motivation.

If you’d stop putting things where they don’t belong none of this would be a problem.

“If you’d stop putting things where they don’t belong none of this would be a problem.”

Actually if you stopped voicing your ignorant comments the world would be a much better place. Its people like you, not homosexuals, that ruin everything.

So instead of refuting arguments logically, Republicans use a smoke screen as usual:

Liberal media!

Tin foil hat!

Flip flop!

dummycrat!

you spelled X wrong!

This doesn’t belong here!

All just ways to avoid dealing with the facts . You are wrong. The election was stolen, Republicans didn’t want a paper trail because they were stealing it, they lied to us about Iraq, they are lying to us about Iran, and people are dead and dying because of your ignorance. You have blood on your hands.

“Reagan was no “liberator” and is only praised in right wing circle jerks like you have been visiting.”

But then maybe you should read what Lech Walesa had to say about it:

Friday, June 11, 2004

Lech Walesa, winner of the 1983 Nobel Peace Prize, was president of Poland from 1990 to 1995 GDANSK, Poland— Lech Walesa, winner of the 1983 Nobel Peace Prize, was president of Poland from 1990 to 1995. He shared his thoughts today about Ronald Reagan,

When talking about Ronald Reagan, I have to be personal. We in Poland took him so personally. Why? Because we owe him our liberty. This can’t be said often enough by people who lived under oppression for half a century, until communism fell in 1989.

Poles fought for their freedom for so many years that they hold in special esteem those who backed them in their struggle. Support was the test of friendship. President Reagan was such a friend. His policy of aiding democratic movements in Central and Eastern Europe in the dark days of the Cold War meant a lot to us.

We knew he believed in a few simple principles such as human rights, democracy and civil society. He was someone who was convinced that the citizen is not for the state, but vice-versa, and that freedom is an innate right.

I often wondered why Ronald Reagan did this, taking the risks he did, in supporting us at Solidarity, as well as dissident movements in other countries behind the Iron Curtain, while pushing a defense buildup that pushed the Soviet economy over the brink. Let’s remember that it was a time of recession in the U.S. and a time when the American public was more interested in their own domestic affairs.

It took a leader with a vision to convince them that there are greater things worth fighting for. Did he seek any profit in such a policy?

Though our freedom movements were in line with the foreign policy of the United States, I doubt it.

I distinguish between two kinds of politicians. There are those who view politics as a tactical game, a game in which they do not reveal any individuality, in which they lose their own face. There are, however, leaders for whom politics is a means of defending and furthering values. For them, it is a moral pursuit.

They do so because the values they cherish are endangered. They’re convinced that there are values worth living for, and even values worth dying for.

Otherwise they would consider their life and work pointless. Only such politicians are great politicians and Ronald Reagan was one of them.

The 1980s were a curious time—a time of realization that a new age was upon us. Communism was coming to an end. It had used up its means and possibilities. The ground was set for change. But this change needed the cooperation, or unspoken understanding, of different political players.

Now, from the perspective of our time, it is obvious that like the pieces of a global chain of events, Ronald Reagan, John Paul II, Margaret Thatcher and even Mikhail Gorbachev helped bring about this new age in Europe. We at Solidarity like to claim more than a little credit, too, for bringing about the end of the Cold War.

In the Europe of the 1980s, Ronald Reagan presented a vision. For us in Central and Eastern Europe, that meant freedom from the Soviets. Mr. Reagan was no ostrich who hoped that problems might just go away. He thought that problems are there to be faced. This is exactly what he did.

Every time I met President Reagan, at his private estate in California or at the Lenin shipyard here in Gdansk, I was amazed by his modesty and even temper. He didn’t fit the stereotype of the world leader that he was.

Privately, we were like opposite sides of a magnet: He was always composed; I was a raging tower of emotions eager to act. We were so different yet we never had a problem with understanding one another.

I respected his honesty and good humor. It gave me confidence in his policies and his resolve. He supported my struggle, but what unified us, unmistakably, were our similar values and shared goals.

I have often been asked in the United States to sign the poster that many Americans consider very significant. Prepared for the first almost-free parliamentary elections in Poland in 1989, the poster shows Gary Cooper as the lonely sheriff in the American Western, “High Noon.” Under the headline “At High Noon” runs the red Solidarity banner and the date—June 4, 1989—of the poll. It

was a simple but effective gimmick that, at the time, was misunderstood by the Communists. They, in fact, tried to ridicule the freedom movement in Poland as an invention of the “Wild” West, especially the U.S.

But the poster had the opposite impact: Cowboys in Western clothes had become a powerful symbol for Poles. Cowboys fight for justice, fight against evil, and fight for freedom, both physical and spiritual. Solidarity trounced the Communists in that election, paving the way for a democratic government in Poland.

It is always so touching when people bring this poster up to me to autograph it. They have cherished it for so many years and it has become the emblem of the battle that we all fought together.

As I say repeatedly, we owe so much to all those who supported us. Perhaps in the early years, we didn’t express enough gratitude. We were so busy introducing all the necessary economic and political reforms in our reborn country.

Yet President Ronald Reagan must have realized what remarkable changes he brought to Poland, and indeed the rest of the world. And I hope he felt gratified.

He should have.

Here is another opinion on what REagan’s legacy is:

Ronald Reagan’s Legacy by Mark Weisbrot

Ronald Reagan was a man who fought for what he believed in, and he changed the world more than probably any American in the twentieth century. He changed not only the conservative movement, the Republican party, his country and the world — but also his opponents, known as liberals. As a result of his achievements, the typical liberal Member of Congress today sits to the right of Richard Nixon on a number of economic issues, including tax policy.

The Great Communicator, as he was called, was capable of charming millions of Americans with his soothing, grandfatherly demeanor. In 1984 there were polls indicating that most of those who voted to re-elect him disagreed with him on the issues. In short, the “Reagan revolution” would probably never have happened without his unrivalled leadership skills.

His death has unleashed a torrent of commentary on the significance of this revolution, and so it is important to set the record straight. His economic policies were mostly a failure. Partly this was because he had promised something arithmetically impossible: to increase military spending, cut taxes, and balance the budget. He kept the first two promises, delivering the largest peacetime military build-up in American history, and cutting taxes massively, mostly for upper-income households.

But budget deficits soared to record heights. The national debt doubled, as a percentage of the economy, before Mr. Reagan’s successors were able to bring it under control. This “military Keynesianism” did pull the economy out of the 1982 recession, but the 1980s still chalked up the slowest growth of any decade in the post-World War II era. And income was redistributed to the wealthy as never before: during the 1980s, most of the country’s income gains went to the top 1 or 2 percent of households.

Mr. Reagan also helped redistribute American income and wealth with a bold assault on American labor. In 1981 he summarily fired 12,000 air traffic controllers who went on strike for better working conditions. This ushered in a new and dark era of labor relations, with employers now free to “permanently replace” striking workers. The median real wage failed to grow during the decade of the 1980s.

The Reagan revolution caused even more economic damage internationally, for example by changing policy at the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. Thus began the era of “structural adjustment” — a set of economic policies that has become so discredited worldwide that the IMF and World Bank no longer use the term. The 1980s became “the lost decade” for Latin America, the region most affected by Washington’s foreign economic policy. Income per person actually shrank for the decade, a rare historical event, and the region has yet to come close to its pre-1980s growth rates.

Mr. Reagan is often credited with having caused the collapse of the Soviet Union, but this is doubtful. He did use the Cold War as a pretext for other interventions, including funding and support for horrific violence against the civilian population of Central America. In 1999 the United Nations determined that the massacres of tens of thousands of Guatemalans, mostly indigenous people, constituted “genocide.” These massacres — often involving grotesque torture — reached their peak under the rule of Mr. Reagan’s ally, the Guatemalan General Rios Montt. Tens of thousands of Salvadorans were also murdered during Mr. Reagan’s presidency by death squads affiliated with the U.S.-funded Salvadoran military.

But it was Mr. Reagan’s efforts to overthrow the government — democratically elected in 1984 — of poor, underdeveloped Nicaragua that almost brought down his presidency. Congress cut off aid to Mr. Reagan’s proxy army, the Contras, as a result of pressure from Americans — led by religious groups — who were disgusted by the Contras’ tactics of murdering unarmed teachers and health care workers.

The Reagan administration continued to run the war from the basement of the White House, and paid for part of it with the proceeds of illegal arms sales to Iran. Hence the Iran-Contra scandal, in which Mr. Reagan escaped prosecution because his subordinates claimed that he had no knowledge of their crimes.

The Reagan revolution continues today: the “war on terror” has replaced the Cold War as pretext for intervention abroad, including the disastrous war in Iraq. Tax cuts for the rich and huge increases in military spending have revived the era of giant budget deficits. As the Great Communicator used to say, “There they go again.”

That the same Weisbrot that shills for President Chávez - yeah he knows more about what happened in Poland and eastern Europe than Lech Walesa - NOT!

Among the lesser known, but perhaps most dangerous, of the featured speakers is one Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the grandiloquently named Center for Economic and Policy Research. A member in good standing of the DC lefty think-tank community, Weisbrot strikes me as the most dangerous kind of chavista apologist, because the propaganda he publishes out of CEPR comes cloaked in the stylistic conventions of academia, and that makes it look to the uninitiated like more or less credible independent analysis. If you've followed the issues he covers, though, you can recognize his writing as more or less unadulterated government propaganda. In a sense, what's most remarkable about his analysis is its failure to go an inch beyond tired old chavista arguments founded on misrepresentation that enjoy near-zero credibility among anyone who knows anything about the issues at hand.

No doubt Reagan spent alot of money, but then he won WW III without a lot of bloodshed. I grew up wondering if (and sometimes when) the world would end in a nuclear holocaust. My children didn’t have any “duck and cover” drills to prepare for a nuclear attack. I give Reagan credit for that. Before Reagan there was no thought of winning the Cold War - only co-existing:

One day in 1977 Ronald Reagan asked Richard Allen, who would become his first national security adviser, if Mr. Allen would like to hear his theory of the Cold War. “Some people think I’m simplistic,” Mr. Reagan said, “but there’s a difference between being simplistic and being simple. My theory of the Cold War is that we win and they lose. What do you think about that?”

The Soviet Union certainly did suffer from economic stagnation. But its economy had been growing feebly since at least the early ’70s. What changed during the ’80s wasn’t so much the economy of the U.S.S.R. as the economy of the U.S., which responded to the policies of Mr. Reagan by growing dramatically. By the time he left office, American output had expanded by an amount nearly equal to the entire economy of what was then West Germany.

And by launching the Strategic Defense Initiative, he had confronted the Soviets with the need to make massive new investments in their nuclear arsenal. “We didn’t have to build a complete version of SDI to make their calculations difficult,” Henry Kissinger says. “If the Soviets no longer knew how many missiles would get through, then they might have had to launch hundreds more to have had a chance of success. You can see why SDI had them so rattled.” The Soviet case of imperial overreach came courtesy of Ronald Reagan.

During the ’70s, the U.S. looked like a nation in decline, just about as Karl Marx would have predicted. “The symptoms of … [a] crisis in the American spirit are all around us,” President Carter said in an address from the Oval Office on July 15, 1979. Then, in 1981, Ronald Reagan took office. “The crisis we are facing today,” he said in his first inaugural address, requires “our willingness to believe in ourselves and to believe in our capacity to perform great deeds… . And after all, why shouldn’t we believe that? We are Americans.” The American people responded with renewed patriotism and self-confidence. “Morning Again in America,” the campaign slogan for Mr. Reagan’s 1984 re-election campaign, may have been derided in the media, but it captured the mood of the nation that returned him to office by 49 out of 50 states.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110005211

Actually the Soveit Union was not beat by Reagan’s sepnding at all.

Did Reagan’s Military Build-Up Really Lead to Victory in the Cold War? By Lawrence S. Wittner Mr. Wittner teaches history at the State University of New York/Albany. His latest book is Toward Nuclear Abolition: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1971 to the Present (Stanford University Press).

Lawrence Wittner’s latest book

In an op-ed published in the New York Times on January 5, Professor Kiron Skinner, co-editor of Reagan: A Life in Letters, repeats the familiar refrain of Republican triumphalists that Ronald Reagan’s aggressive rhetoric and military policies improved Soviet-American relations and led to the end of the Cold War.

This fairy tale may warm the hearts of true believers in the efficacy of military buildups and wars, but it has little resemblance to reality.

In fact, Soviet-American relations went into a deep freeze until early 1985. Horrified by the Reagan administration’s nuclear buildup and loose talk of nuclear war, the Soviet government ratcheted up its own military might. The new Soviet party leader, Yuri Andropov, concluded that “peace cannot be obtained from the imperialists by begging for it. It can be upheld only by relying on the invincible might of the Soviet armed forces.” Responding to U.S. missile deployment in Western Europe in December 1983, the Kremlin broke off arms control negotiations, resumed the SS-20 nuclear missile deployment that it had previously halted, placed SS-23 nuclear missiles in East Germany and Czechoslovakia , and moved Soviet nuclear submarines closer to the coasts of the United States . In late 1984, the Kremlin incorporated a 45 percent increase in military spending into its next five-year plan.

Reagan’s “evil empire” speech of March 1983 was widely noted in the Soviet Union , recalled Vladimir Slipchenko, then a member of the Soviet General Staff. “The military, the armed forces … used this,” he added, “as a reason to begin a very intense preparation inside the military for a state of war.” Furthermore, “we started to run huge strategic exercises… . These were the first military exercises in which we really tested our mobilization. We didn’t just exercise the ground forces but also the strategic arms.” Therefore, “for the military, the period when we were called the evil empire was actually very good and useful, because we achieved a very high military readiness… . We also rehearsed the situation when a non-nuclear war might turn into a nuclear war.”

Soviet leaders, terrified that the Reagan administration was preparing a nuclear first strike against their country, nearly launched a nuclear war. In November 1983, during NATO’s Able Archer military exercises, the jittery Soviet government became convinced that, under cover of the exercises, a U.S. nuclear attack upon the Soviet Union was underway. Consequently, Soviet nuclear forces were alerted, command staffs reviewed their strike missions, and nuclear weapons were readied for action. “The world did not quite reach the edge of the nuclear abyss,” recalled Oleg Gordievsky, a U.S. intelligence agent within the KGB. “But during Able Archer 83 it had … come frighteningly close.”

Thus, as Anatoly Dobrynin, the longtime Soviet ambassador to the United States, recalled: “The impact of Reagan’s hard-line policy … was exactly the opposite of the one intended by Washington . It strengthened those in the Politburo, the Central Committee, and the security apparatus who had been pressing for a mirror-image of Reagan’s own policy.”

In the period up to early 1985, it was Reagan who began a policy reversal. Reagan entered the White House as a fanatic foe of the Soviet Union and as a staunch opponent of every nuclear arms control and disarmament agreement negotiated by his Democratic and Republican predecessors. Not surprisingly, he and his entourage initially called for a massive nuclear buildup and talked glibly of waging nuclear war. But, battered by antinuclear protests, frustrated by Congress, badgered by uneasy allies, and confronted by an obdurate Soviet leadership, Reagan softened his hard line. His administration opened arms control negotiations, championed a “zero option” for Euromissiles, compromised on strategic nuclear weapons, and observed the limits of the unratified SALT II treaty (which, previously, Reagan had condemned as “appeasement”). Starting in April 1982, Reagan began declaring publicly that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” He added: “To those who protest against nuclear war, I can only say: `I’m with you!’”

As these last remarks indicate, Reagan was seriously rattled by popular agitation against the nuclear arms race. In October 1983, in the context of the massive protests against Euromissile deployment, he told his startled secretary of state: “If things get hotter and hotter and arms control remains an issue, maybe I should go see Andropov and propose eliminating all nuclear weapons.” On January 16, 1984, he followed up on this idea. Over the objections of other administration officials, he delivered a remarkable public address, calling for peace with the Soviet Union and a nuclear-free world.

In short, in the period leading up to March 1985, Reagan and Soviet officials confronted each other eyeball-to-eyeball, and it was Reagan who repeatedly blinked.

Only in March 1985, with the advent of Mikhail Gorbachev, did Reagan find a Soviet leader ready to implement a program of peace and disarmament. Gorbachev, of course, differed from his immediate predecessors in that he came from the ranks of Soviet reformers, who favored peace and democratization. What is not as well known is that Gorbachev’s ideas were profoundly influenced by the world nuclear disarmament movement. As he declared: “The new thinking took into account and absorbed the conclusions and demands of … the public and the scientific community, of the movements of physicians, scientists, and ecologists, and of various antiwar organizations.” Thus, Gorbachev and his circle were ready to reject the traditional “peace through strength” basis of Soviet (and American) foreign policy. In subsequent years, he and Reagan pushed past the obstacles erected by the hawks in both their countries to halt the nuclear arms race and end the Cold War.

If the contrasting version of these events—the triumphalist version trumpeted by Professor Skinner—is to hold water, surely there should be some evidence for it in Soviet sources. After all, the foundation of the triumphalist case is the idea that the Soviet Union surrendered when confronted with U.S. military “strength.” But despite the numerous Soviet documents that have been declassified, the many statements that have been made by former Soviet officials, and the memoirs that have been written by former Soviet leaders, no evidence for the triumphalist contention has emerged.

Furthermore, former Soviet officials have repeatedly rejected it. Asked if a U.S. government hard line had forced the Soviet government to become more conciliatory, Aleksandr Yakovlev, one of Gorbachev’s top foreign policy advisors, replied: “It played no role. None. I can tell you with the fullest responsibility.” Arbatov, also a key Gorbachev foreign policy advisor, called the idea that a U.S. military buildup helped alter Soviet policy “absolute nonsense.” Soviet changes, he said, “not only ripened inside the country but originated within it.” Dobrynin did give the U.S. government some credit, but not for the efficacy of its military strength. “If Reagan “had not abandoned his hostile stance toward the Soviet Union ,” recalled the Soviet diplomat, “Gorbachev would not have been able to launch his reforms and his `new thinking,’” but “would have been forced to continue the conservative foreign and domestic policies of his predecessors.” When Gorbachev was asked about the triumphalist claim, made during the 1992 presidential campaign of George H.W. Bush, he replied simply: “I suppose these are necessary things in a campaign. But if this idea is serious, then it is a very big delusion.”

Should we believe in illusions? For decades, U.S. government officials, historians, and the pundits told us that the Kennedy administration’s military mobilization during the Cuban missile crisis led to its peaceful resolution. Then, suddenly, key U.S. officials revealed that the crisis had been overcome thanks to U.S. concessions. Now the hawks are again busy, pumping us up with triumphalist fantasies about the end of the Cold War. Should we not feel some skepticism about this process, particularly when—as in the case of Professor Skinner—it is openly employed to justify current U.S. foreign policy?

Are you really trying to tell me that Mr. Peanut would have won WW III - that Reagan made no difference?

One thing for sure, Jimmy Carter would NEVER have worried the Soviets. The USSR would have sent in tanks to crush the Polish revolution. Soviet control was maintained by hard-line puppet Communist dictatorships backed by secret police and ultimately by the Soviet Red Army. Twice, in Hungary in 1956 and in Czechoslovakia in 1968, Soviet tanks were used to suppress attempts at freedom, while in the divided city of Berlin a wall was erected in 1961 to keep the people in. In Poland in 1981 the Soviets considered intervention but stepped back from the brink.

You can trot out all the left-wing BS artists you want, but without Reagan the USSR would still exist, the Berlin Wall would still be there and eastern Europe would still be under Soviet control.

G.W.Bush and John Kerry accidentally wound up at the same barbershop at the same time while stopping for a little touchup while campaigning. As they sat in adjacent chairs, worked on by different barbers, not a word was spoken. The barbers were even afraid to start a conversation, for fear it would turn to politics.

As the barbers each finished their haircuts, the one working on Kerry reached for some scented hair tonic to splash on, but Kerry quickly held up his hand, smiled, and said, “No thanks, Johnny! My wife, Ta-ray-za (Teresa), will smell that and think I’ve been gallivanting in a whorehouse!” Everyone in his entourage laughed.

The other barber turned to Bush and said, “I suppose you don’t want any tonic on your hair either, Mr. President?”

Bush replied, “No, go ahead, Mike. My wife doesn’t know what the inside of a whorehouse smells like!”

“are you really trying to tell me that Mr. Peanut would have won WW III - that Reagan made no difference?”

No, actually Gorbachev and other high up Soviet officials are telling you that Reagan’s anatgonisitic military policies made them more resolute in the arms race, and that it was only when Reagan backed down taht they backed down.

For your review:

“Reagan’s “evil empire” speech of March 1983 was widely noted in the Soviet Union , recalled Vladimir Slipchenko, then a member of the Soviet General Staff. “The military, the armed forces … used this,” he added, “as a reason to begin a very intense preparation inside the military for a state of war.” Furthermore, “we started to run huge strategic exercises… . These were the first military exercises in which we really tested our mobilization. We didn’t just exercise the ground forces but also the strategic arms.” Therefore, “for the military, the period when we were called the evil empire was actually very good and useful, because we achieved a very high military readiness… . We also rehearsed the situation when a non-nuclear war might turn into a nuclear war.”

“Soviet leaders, terrified that the Reagan administration was preparing a nuclear first strike against their country, nearly launched a nuclear war.”

“Asked if a U.S. government hard line had forced the Soviet government to become more conciliatory, Aleksandr Yakovlev, one of Gorbachev’s top foreign policy advisors, replied: “It played no role. None. I can tell you with the fullest responsibility.” Arbatov, also a key Gorbachev foreign policy advisor, called the idea that a U.S. military buildup helped alter Soviet policy “absolute nonsense.” Soviet changes, he said, “not only ripened inside the country but originated within it.” Dobrynin did give the U.S. government some credit, but not for the efficacy of its military strength. “If Reagan “had not abandoned his hostile stance toward the Soviet Union ,” recalled the Soviet diplomat, “Gorbachev would not have been able to launch his reforms and his `new thinking,’” but “would have been forced to continue the conservative foreign and domestic policies of his predecessors.” When Gorbachev was asked about the triumphalist claim, made during the 1992 presidential campaign of George H.W. Bush, he replied simply: “I suppose these are necessary things in a campaign. But if this idea is serious, then it is a very big delusion.”

So how are you going to spin those so you can sling to your pre-held bias despite the facts clearly proving you wrong?

Insofar as leaders of either country are assigned credit for ending the Cold War, Reagan deserves the lion's share. He led the US during the reign of three Soviet Leaders. He was tough, as he should have been, with the first two, and recognized the willingness and desire to negotiate in Gorbachev, a leader from a different generation than all previous Soviet leaders.

On Reagan you are just as right now as these people were then:

Thursday, June 10, 2004

WHAT THEY SAID: In honor of president Reagan’s funeral, here’s a useful corrective to the notion that his legacy was always celebrated. Today, almost everyone concedes his historical significance. But that wasn’t what was said at the time. Here’s a smattering of commentary from the 1980s.

“A few years from now, I believe, Reaganism will seem a weird and improbable memory, a strange interlude of national hallucination, rather as the McCarthyism of the early 1950s and the youth rebellion of the late 1960s appear to us today.” - Arthur “Always Wrong” Schlesinger, Washington Post, May 1, 1988.

“I wonder how many people, reading about the [Evil Empire’] speech or seeing bits on television, really noticed its outrageous character… Primitive: that is the only word for it. … What is the world to think when the greatest of powers is led by a man who applies to the most difficult human problem a simplistic theology — one in fact rejected by most theologians?… What must the leaders of Western Europe think of such a speech? They look to the head of the alliance for rhetoric that can persuade them and their constituents. What they get from Ronald Reagan is a mirror image of crude Soviet rhetoric. And it is more than rhetoric: everyone must sense that. The real Ronald Reagan was speaking in Orlando. The exaggeration and the simplicities are there not only in the rhetoric but in the process by which he makes decisions.” - Anthony Lewis, New York Times, March 10, 1983

“Something like the speech to the evangelicals is not presidential, it’s not something a president should say. If the Russians are infinitely evil and we are infinitely good, then the logical first step is a nuclear first strike. Words like that frighten the American public and antagonize the Soviets. What good is that?” - Rick Hertzberg, New Yorker macher, quoted in the Washington Post, March 29, 1983.

“President Reagan has substituted a mindless militarism for a foreign policy, rattling arms from El Salvador to Saudi Arabia, frightening our friends from Japan to West Germany. He proposes a 50 percent increase in 'defense expenditures.' Much of it will be dissipated in the self-defeating spiral of an open-ended nuclear-arms race that poses a greater threat to our own internal and external security than all the Communist propaganda that ever emanated from Moscow. Already, the cost of Reagan policies is devastating to our country in economic strength, in diplomatic influence, in national security, in moral stature.” — John B. Oakes, former senior editor, New York Times, November 1, 1981.

“All evidence indicates that the Reagan administration has abandoned both containment and détente for a very different objective: destroying the Soviet Union as a world power and possibly even its Communist system. [This is a] potentially fatal form of Sovietphobia… a pathological rather than a healthy response to the Soviet Union.” — Princeton Professor Stephen Cohen, 1983.

“‘We’ve really got to start talking,’ says George Ball, undersecretary of state in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. ‘The fact is we’ve let these fellows get away with murder, and the situation now is much too serious for that.’ To ideological men like Ronald Reagan, new information is only useful if it confirms old prejudices. Though he is shrewd enough to bend and budge under pressure (hence, for example, his abandonment of old positions on Taiwan), in his heart Reagan knows he has always been right about the nature of the world, of communism, of America’s proper role.” - Robert Kaiser, Washington Post, October 30, 1983.

“Are we rushing headlong into the next step of those 40 years of progressions by which we do something then they do something, by which we pretend that we’re going to build this and it will somehow strengthen our deterrent then they do it, and low and behold, the next thing we know is, the President of the United States is addressing the nation saying, 'My fellow Americans, I hate to tell you this, but the Soviet Union is deploying more of these, and we have to respond, and I’m asking the Congress for more money in order to respond.' Star Wars is guaranteed to do that, and it’s guaranteed to threaten the heavens — the one line we haven’t yet crossed with weaponry: the heavens.” — Senator John Kerry, on SDI, the program that brought the evil empire to its knees, August 5, 1986.

“In his distaste for bilateral efforts to manage the superpower rivalry and his instinctive predilection for unilateral ones, Reagan is counting on American technological and economic predominance to prevail in the end. The most striking, and questionable, theme in his star wars speech was his apparent belief that the U.S. could mobilize its scientific community and its economic resources in quest of an impenetrable antiballistic-missile shield over the entire nation without triggering perilously destabilizing countermeasures, both offensive and defensive, on the part of the U.S.S.R. Reagan’s views notwithstanding, there is little reason to hope that the many handicaps of the Soviet economy will be decisively advantageous to the U.S. in the long run, allowing the U.S. to 'beat' the U.S.S.R. in an arms race.” — Strobe Talbott, Time, April 18, 1983.

“Ronald Reagan came to Europe to persuade people that he is not the shallow, nuclear cowboy of certain unkind assessments. Said White House spokesman David Gergen, on the eve of departure, 'Some in Europe do not know or understand him.' But now that the president has been among them for over a week, Europeans may think they got him right the first time. In Rome, he made a stab at identifying himself as a 'pilgrim for peace.' But by the time he got to London he had reverted to type as a cold warrior. And yesterday in Bonn, he reiterated his commitment to 'peace through strength' — which is fancy talk for continuing the nuclear arms race.” - Mary McGrory, Washington Post, June 10, 1982.

Rest in peace, Mr President. And know that after all these years, you were right - and all these people were clearly, emphatically, embarrassingly, wrong.

http://www.andrewsullivan.com/index.php?dishinc=archives/20040606dish_archive.html#108692129124348215

This morning Dinesh D’Souza punctures the left’s retrospective conviction that Communism’s fall was inevitable, and that Reagan therefore had nothing to do with it:

Writing on Ronald Reagan’s achievements in Newsweek, historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. notes, “Reagan’s admirers contend that his costly re-armament program caused the Soviet collapse. Maybe so; but surely the thing that did in the Russians was that time had proved communism an economic, political and moral disaster.” Funny: Here’s Schlesinger in 1982, observing that “Those in the United States who think the Soviet Union is on the verge of economic and social collapse” are “wishful thinkers who are only kidding themselves.”

Many historians and pundits have refused to credit Ronald Reagan’s policies for helping to bring about the Cold War victory, blaming communism’s chronic economic problems. Yet, like Scheslinger, they failed to describe it as inevitable while Reagan was actually in office.

In 1982, the learned Sovietologist Seweryn Bialer of Columbia University wrote in Foreign Affairs: “The Soviet Union is not now nor will it be during the next decade in the throes of a true systemic crisis, for it boasts enormous unused reserves of political and social stability.”

But the genius award undoubtedly goes to Lester Thurow, an MIT economist and well-known author who, as late as 1989, wrote: “Can economic command significantly … accelerate the growth process? The remarkable performance of the Soviet Union suggests that it can… . Today the Soviet Union is a country whose economic achievements bear comparison with those of the United States.”

http://powerlineblog.com/archives/006865.php#006865

Anybody who thinks Carter would have won WW III (also known as the Cold War) is an idiot. He probably would have kept them in business by giving them bribe money if his North Korea disaster is any example of his skills.

We are old enough to recall how Carter proudly announced that the United States had overcome its “inordinate fear of Communism,” famously planted a kiss on the cheek of Leonid Brezhnev, and then reacted with shock when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan.

We also recall how followers of Ayatollah Khomeni took 67 Americans hostage at the American embassy in Tehran. Over the succeeding 444 days, the Carter administration tried idle threats, vain pleas, and ineffectual military action to resolve the hostage crisis. Only the landslide election and subsequent inauguration of Ronald Reagan ultimately freed the hostages and ended the protracted national humiliation.

Henry Kissinger observed that the Carter administration had managed the extraordinary feat of having achieved, at one and the same time, “the worst relations with our allies, the worst relations with our adversaries, and the most serious upheavals in the developing world since the end of the Second World War.”

http://oliverkamm.typepad.com/blog/2004/06/thepeacenikpr.html

In truth, while most issues of recent political history are ‘open questions’, the particular issue that Mrs Kendall alighted upon is not. We have the testimony of Aleksandr Bessmertnykh and Eduard Shevardnadze, both Soviet Foreign Minister under Mikhail Gorbachev: they are adamant that Reagan’s Strategic Defence Initiative was crucial in convincing the Soviet Union that it had no alternative to concluding arms control agreements and undertaking internal reform.

Reagan’s political skills encompassed being able to convince American conservatives that he was one of them; yet he was not. Indeed on the nuclear issue - the one above all on which European protestors converged to denounce him - he was far the most left-wing President ever to hold office. I value Reagan in many respects and consider his commitment to the ideals of political liberty to have been admirable. As the historian Robert Conquest has pointed out, those who complained at Reagan’s designation of the USSR as an ‘evil empire’ never explained whether it was the noun or the adjective they objected to. But the principal reason for my admiration is that Reagan was not the resolute conservative President he is widely assumed to have been.

Reagan seems to have been strongly influenced by the Soviet response to the US and Nato military exercise in November 1983 known as ‘Able Archer’. Oleg Gordievsky, then a British agent in the KGB, confirms that the Soviet leadership genuinely mistook this as evidence of a planned nuclear attack, to which their own military doctrine prescribed a pre-emptive nuclear strike. For reasons that remain unknown to western analysts, they obviously did not follow that course. Almost from that moment, Reagan changed the emphasis of his diplomacy towards bilateral summitry and rhetorical reassurance, and took personal charge of foreign policy from his own State Department bureaucracy. The evidence of this shift is presented in compelling detail in Beth A. Fischer’s The Reagan Reversal, and I would recommend this lucid and illuminating analysis to any reader who doubts my account.

What does this tell us about Reagan? First, he was prepared to adapt his statecraft to the world around him. Secondly, his biblical literalism and belief in Armageddon, so far from making him a ‘trigger-happy’ President, impressed upon him the urgency of preventing nuclear war. Thirdly, his personal direction of foreign policy refutes the notion of Reagan as a President dependent on his advisers. Fourthly, he put in place this change of policy before the advent on the scene of Time magazine’s badly-chosen ‘Man of the Decade’, Mikhail Gorbachev; fifthly, the fact that the Soviet leadership so grotesquely misconstrued western intentions supports not the conventional peace movement case for detente and disarmament, but the liberal anti-Communist conviction - which Reagan articulated brilliantly - that pacific relations depend ultimately on the supersession of dictatorship rather than on negotiation with it. All of these points are immensely to the credit of President Reagan, and are exactly contrary to the conventional image of him as being inept and uninterested.

This just shows why it is impossible to argue with consevatives for even when confronted with the fact that you are obviously wrong, you still cling to your party beleifs. You put party before country, before liberty, and certainly before facts…

GORBACHEV SAID THAT REAGAN HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH THE SOVIET UNION”S COLLAPSE!!!!!!!!!

AND THAT REAGAN”S “TOUGHNESS” CAUSED THEM TO BECOME MORE RESOLUTE!!!

But like I said, I am sure your conservative, Reagan loving right-wing pundits are completely unbiased in their analysis and know much more about what happened in the Soviet governement than the people who were actually there leading it and making the decisions.

Goddamn you are fucking stupid and annoying. I hope something heavy falls on your head so I can pull the plug on you like Terry Schiavo and make the world a better place.

So these guys don’t count?

We have the testimony of Aleksandr Bessmertnykh and Eduard Shevardnadze, both Soviet Foreign Minister under Mikhail Gorbachev: they are adamant that Reagan’s Strategic Defence Initiative was crucial in convincing the Soviet Union that it had no alternative to concluding arms control agreements and undertaking internal reform.

“AND THAT REAGAN”S “TOUGHNESS” CAUSED THEM TO BECOME MORE RESOLUTE!!!”

So resolute that they lost - bozo. You always go to the losers to find out why the game went the way it did?

Look into the Gorbachev archives a little - don’t just cherry-pick to match your bias.

Gorbachev said that every time he came to America, he went to California to pay his respects to President Reagan. This time, he said, he wasn’t sure that Reagan still recognized him. Nevertheless, Gorbachev said, as long as Reagan lived, whether Reagan knew him or not, he would never come to America without going to see him. It’s funny how, after a few years, I’ve forgotten everything Gorbachev said about policy matters, but I’ve never forgotten that human tribute.

http://powerlineblog.com/archives/006881.php

What’s next? You going to tell me how Neville Chamberlain was right all along? That there would have been peace if not for right-wing idiots that wanted war?

ps. I see you’ve arrived at the usual left-wing fascist solution of killing anyone who doesn’t toe the party line.

Why is that republicans are all idiots just because you can find 1 person to quote who backs up your argument. I guess i missed the memo that said Gorbachev is the end all to credible info about the former USSR.

LMFAO. Uhhhh Gorbachev was the one who was in the reform party when the Cold War ended. He was the leader of the Soviet Union. I think he might know a little more about what influenced his policy decisions than your right wing pundits.

I suppose that you think that Soviet journalists know what influences American policy better than the President does? No?

Well just reverse it and that’s what your saying about the Soviet Union.

Again, here is what Gorby said

” When Gorbachev was asked about the triumphalist claim [that Reagan’s policies brought about the end of the ColdWar], made during the 1992 presidential campaign of George H.W. Bush, he replied simply: “I suppose these are necessary things in a campaign. But if this idea is serious, then it is a very big delusion.”

You are suffering under that “very big delusion” as you have been pumped full of right wing hype in order to justify aggressive military actions.

“Gorbachev was the one who was in the reform party when the Cold War ended.”

Yes and Reagan was the primary reason that there WAS a reform party for Gorby to be in.

Here was Gorbachev speaking at a session of the Politburo in October 1986, days before he traveled to Reykjavik, Iceland to offer Reagan a groundbreaking disarmament plan, including a 50 percent reduction in nuclear arsenals. If he didn’t propose these cuts, Gorbachev told his colleagues:

[W]e will be pulled into an arms race that is beyond our capabilities, and we will lose it because we are at the limit of our capabilities. ... If the new round [of an arms race] begins, the pressures on our economy will be unbelievable.

http://slate.msn.com/id/2102081/

In the last couple years of the Reagan administration, Reagan would propose extravagant measures in arms reductions. His hawkish aides would go along with them, thinking the Soviets would reject them (and the United States would win a propaganda victory). Then, to the surprise of everyone (except perhaps Reagan, who meant the proposals without cynicism), Gorbachev would accept them.

In the end, Reagan and Gorbachev needed each other. Gorbachev needed to move swiftly if his reforms were to take hold. Reagan exerted the pressure that forced him to move swiftly and offered the rewards that made his foes and skeptics in the Politburo think the cutbacks might be worth it.

Gorbachev wasn’t the only decisive presence. If Reagan hadn’t been president—if Jimmy Carter or Walter Mondale had defeated him or if Reagan had died and George H.W. Bush taken his place—Gorbachev almost certainly would not have received the push or reinforcement that he needed. Those other politicians would have been too traditional, too cautious, to push such radical proposals (zero nukes and SDI) or to take Gorbachev’s radicalism at face value.

It was Reagan, in other words, who seems to have been largely responsible for inducing a loss of nerve that caused Moscow to seek a new approach. Gorbachev’s assignment was not merely to find a new way to deal with the country’s economic problems but also to figure out how to cope with the empire’s reversals abroad. For this reason, Ilya Zaslavsky, who served in the Soviet Congress of People’s Deputies, said later that the true originator of perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness) was not Mikhail Gorbachev but Ronald Reagan.

http://www.thehistorynet.com/ahi/blreaganwoncoldwar/index2.html

“Yes and Reagan was the primary reason that there WAS a reform party for Gorby to be in.”

Yes, after Reagan backed down from his “evil empire” rhetoric as the article I posted above noted. Before Reagan showed a willingness to back down from the arms race the Soviets were determined to stick it out.

I don’t give a shit if Reagan gets credit or not,as unlike conservatives I don’t put party allegiances before facts, but don’t tell me that Reagan intimidated the Soviets into submission. It was diplomacy that ended the cold war-after Reagan backed down from his hard line stance.

The reason this is important is because the same thing is happening right now with Iran and NK. Intimidating countries run by the powerful elite only makes them more resolved. Look at what we did after 9-11 as evidence. The government here didn’t think “Gee Osama thinks we’re evil, better cave in and change”. Then of course Bush lied us into Iraq and let Osama -a good friend of his family- get away.

In other words, it is the policy you are advocating that I have a problem with, not the fact that it happened on Reagan’s watch.

But explain this to me:

Why is it to Reagan’s credit and praise that the Cold War ended on his watch, but not Bush’s fault that 9-11 happened on his watch?

You gotta take your pick. You can’t take credit for the good things and blame other people for the bad. Otherwise you need to take a long hard look at yourself as it sure becomes convenenient that the REpublicans do everything perfectly.

Speaking of which, please name one mistake that the Bush administration has made in their foreign policy, an instance where the Dems were correct, so that you can demonstrate that you don’t put your party before your country. Otherwise, I and anyone else stillr eading this will be forced to conclude that you are merely a blind sheep who supports your party whether evidence backs it up or not.

By the way, what do you make of the Downing Street Memo? Still think that Bush was misled by faulty intelligence or are you willing to admit that he outright changed the facts to fit his policy (just as you are doing with Reagan)?

I Used To Be a Neocon

by Drew O’Neill by Drew O’Neill

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Two years ago I was a neocon. I supported Bush's war on Iraq and I called everyone who didn't a liberal Kool-aid drinker. I voted for Bush in 2000 and I listened to Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and just about any right-winger on the radio that I could get a four-word talking point from to use against liberals. I would say things such as “liberals won't defend America,” “shut up and sing,” “freedom is on the march,” and “you're a great American.” I supported the war at first because I bought into the lies and propaganda.

I no longer do. I'm a recovering neocon.

The fact is, the neocon movement is a lot like a cult. I don't remember how I got so involved and the details are hazy on how I got out. I just woke up one day and said “WTF!” and then ran outside to rip the “bring it on” sticker off of my car bumper. What pulled me in to the neocon cult however was a combination of American nationalism and group mentality. It was a time when questioning the government's response to Iraq divided you between being with your country and government at a time of need, or against them. I wanted to be with them.

So this cult took me in and I watched Fox News, I bought Factor Gear and I was brainwashed into common reflexes for liberals and dissenters. When I heard dissent in the media over Iraq I'd call it liberal bias. If someone presented me any website that mentioned a “war for oil” or the phrase “illegal war” I would blow the site off as conspiracy hogwash. When someone would talk ill of the President and his march to war, I would call them a liberal and anti-American. When someone would say that Saddam was not a threat after I was done calling them part of the liberal “hate America” crowd, I would launch into a diatribe that Saddam was Hitler-like and hell bent on world domination. If someone persisted I would take out my wild card:

"Saddam believes he's the reincarnation of King Nebuchadnezzar, and he's harboring Al Queda!"

I couldn't believe these liberals. I was outraged. The audacity of them to question our President during a time of war! I listened to similar sentiments on right wing radio while driving to work to reinforce my belief.

Little did I know at the time, but I was an important part of the neocon movement. I was but a tiny wheel in the machine of neoconservatism, but the survival of the neocon agenda depends on millions of us tiny wheels, or it cannot go anywhere. Most of all the neocon agenda depends on a much bigger wheel, the media. For the neocon machine to roll, the big wheel of the media must pull the millions of tiny wheels without the tiny wheels knowing they are being pulled.

This is a difficult trick that requires the media to be an active participant in government deception. To imply that they do so knowingly would be too conspiratorial, and it would be too grand an operation to be plausible. In truth, the mainstream media doesn't believe they are participating in lies.

During the build-up to the war they were being pulled without knowing it, by the engine of the U. S. government. This swarm of nationalism begat a pro-American media, a complacent media, a lapdog media and a corporate media that to this day will not inform the American public.

When the Bush Administration was found to be creating fake news propaganda for public consumption the media did not inform the public. When the Bush administration marched towards pre-emptive war with Iraq the media was a lapdog instead of a watchdog. When the Bush administration described the assault on the Iraqi public as Shock and Awe, the media used that phrase to scroll alongside the words “War on Terror” without questioning if the assault on Iraq had anything to do with terrorism. When the Bush Administration tore into the U. S. Constitution with the Patriot Act, causing the illegal imprisonment of American citizens while denying them counsel, the media acted more like a timid cocker spaniel than an aggressive Doberman pincher, and failed to defend a sacred American document. When the UK's Downing Street memo implicated the Bush Administration as being hell bent on a pre-emptive invasion on Iraq before even going to the UN, the American media was silent and once again failed to inform the public.

But the tiny wheels still want to call the media liberal. The tiny wheels still want to say the media isn't reporting the good things happening in Iraq. Most of all the tiny wheels do not know about the big wheel that's pulling them. But now I do. That's why I am an ex-neocon and I am in recovery. It's more clear to me now than ever that the most American thing one can do is speak out against the actions of their country because it means you love your country.

And in the end it doesn't matter if we are liberals or conservatives because all that matters is that we are on the side of the U.S. Constitution and of international law. Both of which have been thrown into the toilet by this administration. At least the Qur'an has company.

It was the prisoners who flushed the Koran - not their guards.

Where’s “international law” when innocent hostages are getting their heads chopped off on TV?

Sure pal, no liberal media. What’s yer next act, no liberal professors in Madison?

Not to worry, the USA is soon to be eclipsed by China - I’m sure they’ll do a much better job of observing “international law”. http://www.uscc.gov/researchpapers/2000_2003/reports/analysis.htm

To quote: Conclusion

While industrial and military self-sufficiency was U.S. policy for more than two centuries, that policy no longer exists. Instead, the U.S. Government has elected, through many uncoordinated decisions made over a number of years, to globalize the U.S. economy and its defense industrial base.

Consequently, the U.S. manufacturing sector is rapidly hollowing out. Basic and high technology industries are shifting their production, research and development, and now back office functions to other nations. A host of U.S. policies are encouraging these shifts.

One consequence of this policy shift and the economic hollowing out is that a large and growing portion of the manufactured goods used in both the U.S. economy and the U.S. defense sectors are coming from factories based in other nations. More significant, more than half of all merchandise imported into the United States, other than from Canada and Mexico, now comes from factories located in China and the nations that immediately surround it.

Another result is that as the U.S. military increases its reliance on readily available commercial technologies, it is also relying on suppliers located in other nations. Moreover, many of these components, particularly electronics are coming from China and the nations clustered around it. The two key policy questions this raises are: Would that long supply line across the Pacific be secure in time of war and are reliable alternatives available?

Today, the United States Government does not know the source of many key components used in its weapons systems. Without that knowledge, the Department of Defense cannot assure the reliability of supply during a time of prolonged warfare.

Nor can the United States be assured of the integrity of many items it is using in its vast system of electronic networks that underpin both the domestic and military economies. Increasingly, these networks rely on imported components that are vulnerable to sabotage or being modified to carry “Trojan horse” programs and viruses that could be used against the United States in an information war. Moreover, a number of sources claim that China’s military doctrine is to make a first strike at an adversary’s information system. This is the U.S. “Achilles heel.”

Ultimately, the key concern identified in this study is less that of the transfer of high technology capacities to China, which is inevitable, but the hollowing of the US defense industrial base, which is not.

Actually allegations of putting the Quran in the toilet are completely true as admitted by the state deaprtment:

Pentagon Confirms Koran Incidents ‘Mishandling’ Cases Preceded Guidelines Established in 2003

By Josh White and Dan Eggen Washington Post Staff Writers Friday, May 27, 2005; Page A01

Pentagon officials said yesterday that investigators have identified five incidents of military guards and an interrogator “mishandling” the Koran at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, but characterized the episodes as minor and said most occurred before specific rules on the treatment of Muslim holy items were issued.

Brig. Gen. Jay W. Hood, commander of Joint Task Force Guantanamo, said investigators have looked into 13 specific allegations of Koran desecration at the prison dating to early 2002 and have determined eight of them to be unfounded, lacking credibility or the result of accidental touching of the holy book. Of the five cases of mishandling, three were “very likely” deliberate and two were “very likely accidental,” he said. But Hood declined to provide details, citing an ongoing investigation.”

“Another newly released document, dated January 2004, suggested that the FBI would “finally make an arrest” in connection with “interrogations in June 2003 when an FBI agent was impersonated.” No such arrest has been publicly announced.

In several e-mails, FBI agents angrily complained about the impersonations and suggested that the ruse was aimed in part at avoiding blame for any subsequent public allegations of abuse.

The earlier documents also included e-mails from FBI agents who said they had witnessed Guantanamo Bay detainees being shackled to the floor for days at a time, deprived of food and water and left to defecate on themselves.”

I can smell the freedom! Oh no wait, that’s the shit stink of letting uncharged, indefinitely detained prisoners shit on themselves.

“Actually allegations of putting the Quran in the toilet are completely true as admitted by the state deaprtment:”

Do you even read what you quote? I didn’t see anything about a toilet.

I did read the story and saw this tho:

But the Pentagon said yesterday that the same prisoner, who is still in custody, was reinterviewed on May 14 and “did not corroborate” his earlier claim about the Koran.

and this:

Whitman said in his statement last night that al Qaeda members have been trained to lie about their treatment during incarceration, and that officials at Guantanamo Bay have had “a great deal of sensitivity to the importance of the Koran and other religious items and practices and … extensive procedures were put in place to respect the cultural dignity of the Koran.” In January 2003, the Pentagon issued rules for handling the holy book.

Flushing Out the Story

By Howard Kurtz Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, May 27, 2005; 8:51 AM

The latest, from the New York Times: “An American military inquiry has uncovered five instances in which guards or interrogators at the Guantánamo Bay detention facility in Cuba mishandled the Koran, but found ‘no credible evidence’ to substantiate claims that it was ever flushed down a toilet, the chief of the investigation said on Thursday.

All in all, they are on vacation compared to how prisoners are treated by the terrorists - I’d rather shit myself than have my head cut off.

All Korans should be removed from Gitmo to preclude any possibility of abuse. I understand burning is the prescibed method of disposal. It should be a public and world-wide telivised burning so everyone knows it was done properly. Sometimes, exactly following all the rules can really piss off the rulemakers. After all, the approved method of disposing of US Flags has long been that they be destroyed by burning but look how upset some people get about flag burning they see on TV.

Aren’t NEWSWEEK and the WP owned by the same people?

In this morning’s coverage of Koran abuse allegations at Gitmo, the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, Boston Globe, Reuters, and Associated Press all mention in their lead paragraph that the Pentagon found no credible evidence that a guard flushed the Koran down a toilet. The Washington Post, on the other hand, does not bother to mention the Koran-flushing incident until its fourth paragraph and does not note until the thirteenth paragraph that the detainee who made that allegation has retracted it.

http://michellemalkin.com/archives/002578.htm

A number of detainees were concerned about relatively mundane issues such as lack of privacy, lack of bed sheets, being unwillingly photographed, the guards’ use of profanity, and bad food (like “the zoo,” said one critic). If lack of privacy or bed sheets is a detainee’s main concern, it is doubtful that the detainee is being tortured (unless the definition of “torture” is so ridiculously broad as to be meaningless).

Several detainees indicated they had not experienced any mistreatment whatsoever at Gitmo, including one detainee who claimed he was mistreated at Kandahar prior to his transfer to Cuba.

One detainee disputed claims that guards had mistreated the Koran. The detainee said that riots resulted from claims that a guard dropped the Koran. In actuality, the detainee said, a detainee dropped the Koran then blamed a guard. (This detainee is apparently more skeptical of Koran-abuse allegations than the Washington Post, which neglected to mention this tidbit.)

In one case, Gitmo interrogators apologized to a detainee for interviewing him prior to the end of Ramadan, giving lie to the MSM portrayal of guards and interrogators as Koran-dropping, Koran-kicking, Koran-flushing, Islamophobic thugs.

Don’t take my word for it. But don’t take Kos’s word for it either. Or the Washington Post’s. Go read some or all of the FBI documents yourself and draw your own conclusions.

http://michellemalkin.com/archives/002566.htm

You wanted one mistake the Bush administration has made in foreign policy, here’s 1, Going to the UN before taking Saddam out. Any organization (UN) that claims to care about human rights has no credibility when they sit back and allow dictators like saddam to take and keep power.

Wow, so this is what the extremists idiots do when summer comes and they are loaded with free time. Unless you are discussing Feingold or McCain all politicians are scum.

Yup, that Feingold/McCain election funding disaster was sure an exellent example of the bipartisan bull shit that results from the evil party working with the stupid party to produce an evil stupid law!

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SPAM cleanup on aisle 3

Well, the French elite are pissed off now - even the French proles can’t be counted on to vote as their betters have determined best. Maybe they’ll be able to find some extra votes ala Washington state.

The latest news? France has rejected the EU Constitution, effectively terminating that gigantic mistake for the foreseeable future. Unless, as when Ireland rejected an EU "proposal" a few years back, the EU angrily makes the French vote again and again until it obtains the desired result.

Sort of like how Democrats treat ballot counting in the U.S….

You know you’re a Republican when…

…Saddam was a good guy when Reagan armed him, a bad guy when Bush’s daddy made war on him, a good guy when Cheney did business with him and a bad guy when Bush needed a “we can’t find Bin Laden” diversion.

…trade with Cuba is wrong because the country is Communist, but trade with China and Vietnam is vital to a spirit of international harmony.

…A president lying about an extramarital affair is an impeachable offense. A president lying to enlist support for a war in which thousands die is solid defense policy.

…Jesus loves you, and shares your hatred of homosexuals and Hillary Clinton.

…the best way to improve military morale is to praise the troops in speeches while slashing veterans’ benefits and combat pay.

…providing health care to all Iraqis is sound policy. Providing health care to all Americans is socialism.

…global warming is junk science, but creationism should be taught in schools.

…being a drug addict is a moral failing and a crime, unless you’re a conservative radio host. Then it’s an illness and you need our prayers for your recovery.

Namecalling is a sure sign of one of two things:

An intelligent mind which realizes it is losing the argument; or

A lazy mind no longer willing to engage the argument.

Can i still be a republican if i don’t agree with any of those?

“Can i still be a republican if i don’t agree with any of those?”

I am and I don’t, but then athiest, pro-choice, anti-ID republicans are pretty thin on the ground.

If you don’t want to be called names I would suggest stoppping suppporting the Bush terror regime.

April 12, 2005 By Ernest Partridge, The Crisis Papers

The 2006 mid-term election - a scenario:

By late summer, 2006, the United States is in a desperate condition. Following the collapse of the dollar in international currency markets, there has been a cascade of business failures and mortgage foreclosures, and a precipitous rise in unemployment, as the US economy slides inexorably into a depression. Meanwhile, the June 2005 American attack on Iran and the continuing war in Iraq has made the United States an international pariah state; thus the community of nations shows no inclination whatever to rescue the United States from its economic collapse.

In the run-up to the 2006 election, the mainstream media has once again fallen in line behind the Republicans, blaming the depression on the Clinton Administration, al Qaeda, and/or betrayal by “Old Europe.” The crimes and outrages of the Bush/GOP syndicate have been unreported by the media, as Democratic war veterans running for office against GOP draft-dodgers have once again been castigated as “unpatriotic.”

For their part, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and the religious right have proclaimed that these economic and diplomatic catastrophes manifest God’s judgment on the American people for their toleration of gays, abortion, the ACLU, the teaching of evolution, and independent judges.

This time, the public is unconvinced by the GOP propaganda, as massive protest demonstrations erupt throughout the country. Finally fed up with the lies and greed of the GOP, and finally aware of just how much their livelihood and their future has been plundered by Bushenomics, more than two-thirds of the voters are about to go to the polls determined to throw out the Republican Congress.

While a few honest polls forecast a landslide victory for the Democrats, most of these polls have not been published.

The Republican-owned and Republican-coded “black-box” voting machines once again perform as intended, and the Republicans retain control of Congress.

The astonished and disappointed public is once again told to “get over it.”

Beyond that, my crystal ball becomes cloudy.

The implied question in this scenario is clear: if GOP partisans own the voting machines, count the votes, refuse to allow independent validation of the tallies, and if the Republicans choose to take advantage of this opportunity for fraud, is there any way — any way at all — that the Democrats could win the 2006 election and regain control of Congress?

If not, then why do the Democrats persist in looking hopefully to 2006 - “the next time?” After all, 2002 and 2004 were “the next time,” and there is abundant evidence that in both cases, the peoples’ will was reversed by the Diebold and ES&S black boxes.

Clearly, the Democratic Party and its allies look forward to victory in 2006 because they are in denial: they simply cannot bring themselves to face the compelling evidence that in the United States today, the electoral process is rigged, thus the will of the people is irrelevant to the governance of the nation, and thus the United States has ceased to be a democracy.

Neither the 2004 Democratic Party candidate, John Kerry, nor the Party’s Chairman, Howard Dean, will publicly entertain the notion that the fix is in. The issue of electoral fraud is simply not on the agenda of the Democratic National Committee. Prominent progressives such as Vermont’s Bernie Sanders, Al Franken, Paul Begala, and Arianna Huffington insist that Bush won the election, “fair and square,” and that the “anomalies” in Florida and Ohio were not sufficient to have determined the outcome.

As for the media, actor and activist Peter Coyote reports that there is a lock-down order throughout the mainstream media that the issue of electoral integrity is simply not to be mentioned. Violation of the order can be a career-ender. And in fact, with the exception of Keith Olbermann, one is hard-pressed to identify anyone in the MSM who has mentioned the issue.

And so today, political discourse is captivated by the assumption that in 2004 George Bush won a majority of both the popular and the electoral votes, and thus, unlike 2000, is now the undisputably legitimate President of the United States. In addition, it is assumed without debate that the Republicans have legitimate control of the Congress. The “success” of the Republicans and the “failure” of the Democrats is now the frame within which all political discussion resides.

Suppose instead that in 2002 and 2004 every intended vote had been correctly counted, and as a result John Kerry was now the President, and the Democrats controlled the Senate and quite possibly the House as well. The pundits would now be writing about the resurgence of liberalism and the Democratic Party, and, at the same time, speculating as to the causes of the “failure” of The Right, and the public’s rejection of George Bush.

The evidence of massive election fraud in 2004 is compelling, and continues to accumulate, despite the media lock-down. Just last week, a group of university statisticians released a report which calculates at a million to one the probability that the discrepancy between the exit polls (indicating a Kerry victory) and the final results was due to random error.

Because I have discussed at length the evidence for fraud in the 2004 election, I will not repeat it here. But for those who wish to have yet another look at the evidence, see The Crisis Papers page, “Was Election 2004 a Fraud?” Suffice to say that as the evidence accumulates, the media remains mute and the public remains unconcerned.

Clear, contrary evidence that the election returns were accurate and the outcome legitimate is simply non-existent. This is because the election procedure was designed to not provide validation. The software source-codes were secret, there was no paper record, and there was no parallel validation procedure for the centralized compilation of voting totals. To the repeated plea for validation, all that the voting-machine technicians could say is “trust us” — “us” being partisan Republicans who built, coded, and operated the voting machines.

Aside from the now-familiar GOP retorts of “get over it!” and “don’t be paranoid,” the crux of the case of electoral legitimacy is “they wouldn’t dare rig the election,” or alternatively, “the Republicans have too much respect for our democracy to do such a thing.”

With much less provocation than this, the citizens of Ukraine and the Republic of Georgia demanded, and got, new elections, which reversed the outcomes of the corrupted elections.

As most CSI and Law and Order viewers are well aware, in their search for suspects, detectives look first of all for “means, motive and opportunity.”

The means for election fraud are so obvious and indisputable that even the Republicans will not dispute them. The means, of course, are the machines and secret software of the Diebold and ES&S corporations that recorded more than 30% of the votes cast, and 80% of the votes centrally compiled, in the 2004 Presidential election.

The lack of an independent paper record or any other mode of verification, the minuscule chance of discovery, and the accommodating silence of the media provides the opportunity.

There remains the question of motive.

Remember, first of all, that 2004 was not an ordinary Presidential re-election contest whereby, should the incumbent lose, he graciously concedes to the winner and then retires to play golf, give speeches at one-hundred grand a pop, or even do sufficient good deeds to eventually win a Nobel Peace Prize.

In this election, the stakes were much higher. The Republicans gathered and invested a half billion dollars in order to win, and they did so for good reason. In Bush’s first term, billions of dollars were transferred from the poor, the middle class, the federal treasury, and future generations, to the super-wealthy, with many billions more to come in a second Bush term. Many of Bush’s friends and benefactors, possibly including his Vice President, have engaged in massive graft and bribery — for example, hundreds of millions of dollars of Iraq reconstruction funds “lost” by Halliburton, and billions of dollars of California utility bills swindled by Enron. Still more crimes: Condi Rice’s perjury before the 9/11 commission, the “outing” of CIA agent Valerie Plame, Tom DeLay’s attempted bribery of Congressman Nick Smith. God only knows what else a Democratic Attorney General and Democratic Congressional investigations might uncover.

The Bush syndicate did not simply wish to stay in office. They plausibly had an even greater motive to stay out of the Federal slammer.

So it comes down to this: in the 2004 election, the Bush team and the Republican party had a treasure trove of means and opportunity dropped in their laps. They could, if they chose, key in any election result they wanted; for example, they could swing a Senate race by nine points or a Governor’s race by fifteen points (as it appears they did in Georgia, 2002). And, if the 2004 early exit polls were in fact accurate, in the Presidential race it now appears that they could drop the Democrat’s percentage by five points, and boost the Republican’s total by the same amount. Thanks to the secret codes and back-door access to the voting machines, and thanks in addition to the cooperation of the corporate media, they could do all this without fear of detection.

Mindful of the record of this Administration during the past four years, the enormous personal and financial consequences, as noted above, of an election defeat, and the likelihood of that defeat as indicated by the polls, can we really expect them to have said, in effect, “yes, we could steal this election without consequence, but it wouldn’t be right, so we choose to be honest?”

If you believe this, then I have a stack of Enron stock that I’d like to sell you.

Clearly, the Bush syndicate had abundant means, motive and opportunity to commit a crime against the state, in a word treason, and there is compelling evidence that they have done just that. Neither the enforced silence of the media nor the cowardly inaction of the Democrats mitigate this evidence by one iota.

The over-arching question, then, is “when will the public wake up to this silent coup d’etat?”

For the issue before us is no longer the protection of American democracy. It’s too late for that. The issue instead is the restoration of American democracy. And at the moment, that issue is very much in doubt.

Another posting from the tin-foil hat contingent.

No need to argue politics as long as the republicans control the voting machines.

Funny how republicans will never refute the facts of the stolen election but instead call names. I guess in their world statistical impossibilities are facts and everyone else is a “tinfoil hat” wearer.

The conspiracy theory here is that Bush won the election. There is more evidence for UFO’s than that Bush won the elction.

As I recall, it was the dummycrats that insisted that paper ballots be eliminated. This had something to do with dummycrats not being able to understand how to use the infamous “butterfly ballots” which were, of course, designed by a dummycrat.

I would suggest that all elections be done using paper ballots but that would involve using pencils, which can be sharp and could injure unwary dummycrats - and then they would insist on eliminating paper and then …

No one has a problem with electronic voting machines it is the fact that they don’t have a paper trail that is the problem.

Democrats: We need to make voting easier, lets use electronic touch screen machines with paper trails.

Republicans: Yes lets use electronic machines but we are firmly against their being a paper trail.

I have yet to hear a republican explain why their party members were so firmly against paper trails.

What did they have to lose by having a record of how people voted if they were not manipulating the votes?

I don’t know of any Republicans that refuse to have a paper trail but then I don’t have any idea of what this “paper trail” would consist of. What would the paper trail process be? What would be recorded? When would the record be made? What kind of paper would be used? Who has custody of the paper? What would be done with the paper?

t has been a long day for Clinton Curtis.

Curtis, who signed an affidavit which has been delivered to the House Judiciary Committee, has accused Congressman Tom Feeney (R-FL) of requesting the development of software which would allow vote totals to be tampered. Feeney, who now sits on Judiciary, was then the general counsel and lobbyist for Curtis'-then employer, Yang Enterprises, as well as a rising star of the Florida state congress.

His allegations have raised a deluge of questions. Why now? What is his agenda? What made him decide to come forward?

The 46-year-old fielded some of these questions Monday in an exclusive interview with RAW STORY.

Curtis says he first leveled charges to the CIA, the FBI and other agencies, none of whom seemed to take an interest, and in a book, published in September. None of these venues, he said, drew much concern. So when he heard of a $200,000 award being offered by the nonprofit group Justice through Music for proof of voting fraud, he bit.

"I contacted Justice through Music," Curtis says. But "I told him that I didn't want the reward because I didn't want to taint the equation."

A spokesman for Justice through Music confirmed the reward is still available.

Since then, he has found an outlet among those in the blogosphere, where his affidavit was first released on The Brad Blog. Two newspapers have begun the process of vetting his claims. The Floridian's appearance in Washington, and the delivery of his affidavit to Congress, may signal a deeper investigation in progress.

While he stresses that the development of a prototype of vote-rigging software does not of itself indicate fraud took place, he is certain that the intent of Rep. Feeney, who he charges commissioned the code, was to taint the election.

Curtis has been tangled in long-running disputes with Feeney that date back to his years as a state legislator. Feeney was cleared on an ethics violation charge after the Feeney-friendly ethics committee (Feeney was speaker of the Florida House) found no wrongdoing.

"He definitely had the intent to do it," Curtis says. "And he bragged about trying to adjust the vote in the previous [2002] election, not with the machines but the minority lists and things like that."

"They're willing to win," he says. "They're willing to play the game and win."

Curtis doesn't mince words in his opinion of Feeney: on his website, he calls him a "total piece of crap." When representing Yang Enterprises, Curtis' former employer, Feeney was the only dually registered lobbyist and state congressman, and he once promised to put Florida in the Bush column in 2000 even if it meant defying the courts.

For his part, Feeney has strenuously denied the wrongdoing of Curtis' previous charges. On this claim, however, he has remained decidedly mum. Two calls placed by RAW STORY Monday were not returned.

When asked why it took him so long to come forward with his story, Curtis stresses that even after hearing that there was intent to potentially use the program for ill ends, he knew it would never work, because the source code would have to be vetted before it was approved for Florida's voting machines.

That was, until it became clear that those providing the source code for voting machines would not provide access to their code. Despite the fact that federal officials called for access to the code, nothing was done.

In a way, he says he blames Democrats for not requiring a paper trail for Florida voters.

"I can't believe the Democrats were stupid enough to allow [this]," he says. "I can't imagine anyone going to a bank and not getting a receipt. But yet we have our voting machines that way. It strikes me as really odd that machines like that could even exist."

If the program were used, he says, its probably too late to ever detect.

"If you inspect the code, you will see it," he states. "Once the vote is flipped, you will not. Once it flips those, the other number is permanently gone. There's not receipt, there's no trace, there's no track."

"You could be watching the guy do it, and unless you watched his every move, you would never know," he adds.

What does he hope to get out of his claims?

"If the Democrats ever want to win again, they need to change," he says. "You've got to get rid of the machines and replace [them] with verifiable source code that only counts votes."

This way, he says, you can "get a standard, clean vote."

Knowing that another Florida investigator investigating his charges in Florida was found dead, in what was ruled a suicide but which he and others still have questions about doesn't deter him he says. Safety, he claims, is less important than the story he's trying to get out.

"Sometimes you just have to give that up," he says. "Some things are more important. The more the story gets out, and the more I say, the safer I am."

And adds, "Probably."

Posting whole articles is really annoying.

The fact that the exit polls were only wrong in places with electronic voting machines, and then only with those machines that had no paper trail (ie. receipt or record of some kind on paper) certainly seems like ground enough to me to at least warrant examination and explanation. That is not a conspiracy theory. It is a fact. It might simply have been a system glitch, but since there is no paper trail we can never know. Of course it does seem odd that the mistakes that were caught were 98% in favor of Bush rather than Kerry.

It amazes me that Republicans want to make this into a partisan issue. Are you so blinded by your party loyalties? Something screwy happened with the machines and if the situation were reversed and Kerry won, I’d be in favor of investigating it as well.

The fact that our electoral process may well have been tampered with seems like it should concern all Americans-at least those that don’t put party before country. I find it disgusting and traitorous that you would rather see a Republican administration in office illegally rather than the candidate that the people have chosen-whomever that might be.

As I have said before, there was no reason for REpublicans not to want a paper tally as well as an electronic one unless they were planning on doing something to the vote tally.

Bush beat statistically impossible odds in beating the exit polls. And exit polls were only inaccurate in states with these machines.

How can you explain that away? He might have won anyway-fine. All people like me want is an investigation. We spent 50 billion investigating whether Clinto lied about adultery, but we can’t investigate our own process being rigged.

Remember Republicans, you might agree with the Bush policies now, but what happens if they start getting even more rightwing and you find them intolerable? then your vote won’t count anymore than the rest of ours…

I’m a Republican and I want paper ballots!

Anyone in their right mind wants a paper trail for votes.

That is why I question why the Republicans decided to eliminate paper trails from e-voting machines.

I don’t think most republican officials were in on vote manipulation if it happened, they were simply voting the party line, but someone somewhere had a reason for wanting the votecount to be unverifiable.

My favored rationale for the exit poll failure is that Bush haters were so motivated that they were early to the polls and thus over-represented while Bush supporters waited until after work - or voted absentee like five voters at my house.

An evil idea is that the pollsters were Kerry supporters and hoped that early calls of Kerry winning would affect the results.

Here are some other thoughts:

Here's a guess. Perhaps most of them were conducted in cities, not small towns and rural areas, skewing the results toward Kerry. Urban voters are more likely to be Democrats, after all. This is just a guess, though. As far as I know, media outlets haven’t published their exit poll methodologies.

“Either there is a huge methodological flaw in the exit polling data, or there has been a transformative change in the nature of the electorate. The former is far more likely.”

http://www.nationalreview.com/thecorner/041102_corner-archive.asp#044639

Exit polls are so accurate that we use them in other countries to check for vote rigging.

Before 2000 the accuracy of exit polls was approaching zero ever since they started. They do not only conduct polls in cities, they are well aware of that bias and countless others. Lets not forget that these are polling companies that compete with one another. The more accurate they are the more business they get.

Furthermore the articl published this week shows that changing vote tallies would be insanely easy:

All it takes is the right access.

Get that, and an election worker could manipulate voting results in the computers that read paper ballots - without leaving any digital fingerprints.

That was the verdict after Leon County Elections Supervisor Ion Sancho invited a team of researchers to look for holes in election software.

The group wasn’t able to crack the Diebold system from outside the office. But, at the computer itself, they changed vote tallies, completely unrecorded.

Sancho said it illustrates the need for tight physical security, as well as a paper trail that can verify results, which the Legislature has rejected.

Black Box Voting, the non-profit that ran the test and published a report on the Internet, pointed to the findings as proof of an elections system clearly vulnerable to corruption.

But state officials in charge of overseeing elections pooh-poohed the test process and dismissed the group’s report.

Notice that the state legislature that does not want paper trails is Republican controlled.

Yet again, I ask what other reason could there possible be for this other than messing with the tally?

If everything is on the up and up, paper trails should be no problem. So why are Florida republicans dead set against them?

I am all for voter Id’s too by the way, as long as everyone knows they need one when they register to vote or in states like here it is made a PSA. I don’t want fraud on either side.

All I ask is that people admit that there is real evidence here that calls for an investigation. Dismissing it as a conspiracy theory is absurd. Maybe it was simply a machine error, but something odd is definitely going on with the e-voting machines.

Since I am more liberal than conservative and since most errors caught were for bush and since republicans are the ones who want no record of the vote, I tend to think that someones hands were in the cookie jar here. Not everyone has to beleive that, but I think anyone in their right mind should be for verifiable, standardized voting procedures that are as impartial as possible and allow as many people to vote as possible.

I still don’t see any explaination of what a “paper trail” is or how it would work. It sounds good but exactly what is it.

PS. The best paper trail is using paper ballots.

I am surprised that you can’t understand what a paper trail is, but I guess I need to explain it to you.

After you vote on a touch screen machine it would print out a receipt of who you voted for that could be kept and counted later if the results were questioned.

The current machines where the exit polls were wrong have no paper record, only electronic tallies. There is no way to check the vote count. Whatever the machine says, is the vote count.

Democrats wanted a paper trail. Republicans like those in Florida have blocked any paper evidence from the machines. Diebold makes ATM machines that have paper receipts so it is not a technology issue. Colorado has machines with paper trails. Their exit polls were correct.

I have no problem with paper ballots, but I don’t see how they are any more efficent than emachines with paper receipts.

The real issue here is: what is the republican motive behind voting against verifiable voting? And why were the exit polls inaccurate in only those places where these paperless machines were?

Its funny how the same polling companies had spot on results in states where vote counts could be checked, but in places where there was no way to check the vote tally all of a sudden their methods became so inaccurate as to make the results way outside the margin of error. This holds true whether the state/county/precinct went for kerry or bush.

Still think it is a tinfoil hat conspiracy?

“After you vote on a touch screen machine it would print out a receipt of who you voted for that could be kept and counted later if the results were questioned.”

The receipt is kept by me? What happens if I lose my receipt? Who’s going to count it later and how do they decide it needs to re-counted? What if not everyone brings their receipt in? How is the secret ballot maintained? Do I get another receipt for my original receipt?

Yup, that Feingold/McCain election funding disaster was sure an exellent example of the bipartisan bull shit that results from the evil party working with the stupid party to produce an evil stupid law!

More on the idiocy of McCain-Feingold:

Will McCain-Feingold Control Political Bloggers?

Faced with a mandate from a federal court to extend some aspects of campaign finance laws to include the Internet, the FEC finds itself in the awkward position of proposing rules it didn’t want to write in the first place.

http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.php/3509786

“The receipt is kept by me? What happens if I lose my receipt? Who’s going to count it later and how do they decide it needs to re-counted? What if not everyone brings their receipt in? How is the secret ballot maintained? Do I get another receipt for my original receipt?”

Are you kidding me man?

You’re not really this stupid, are you?

The receipt is kept by me?

-No, it would be kept the same way paper ballots are kept.

What happens if I lose my receipt? -N/A

Who’s going to count it later and how do they decide it needs to re-counted?

-I have no idea. Presumably the same way they do now. If the victory is within a certain margin of error. or they could just always count the receipts and see if they match the electronic tally

What if not everyone brings their receipt in?

-N/A How is the secret ballot maintained? same way as now

Do I get another receipt for my original receipt?

-n/a

I am not saying that e-voting is a good thing, but you have still not answered why republicans voted against such paper trails.

Nor have you answered why the states that had machines with no paper trails were the only ones that were outside the margin of error.

THE TRUTH ABOUT THE IRAQ QUAGMIRE

WE ARE BEING FLEECED FOR OUR TAX DOLLARS WHILE CREATING GENEREATIONS MORE OF TERRORISTS

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/8101422/site/newsweek/ Living and working in Iraq, it’s hard not to succumb to despair. At last count America has pumped at least $7 billion into reconstruction projects, with little to show for it but the hostility of ordinary Iraqis, who still have an 18 percent unemployment rate. Most of the cash goes to U.S. contractors who spend much of it on personal security. Basic services like electricity, water and sewers still aren’t up to prewar levels. Electricity is especially vital in a country where summer temperatures commonly reach 125 degrees Fahrenheit. Yet only 15 percent of Iraqis have reliable electrical service. In the capital, where it counts most, it’s only 4 percent.

The most powerful army in human history can’t even protect a two-mile stretch of road. The Airport Highway connects both the international airport and Baghdad’s main American military base, Camp Victory, to the city center. At night U.S. troops secure the road for the use of dignitaries; they close it to traffic and shoot at any unauthorized vehicles. More troops and more helicopters could help make the whole country safer. Instead the Pentagon has been drawing down the number of helicopters. And America never deployed nearly enough soldiers. They couldn’t stop the orgy of looting that followed Saddam’s fall. Now their primary mission is self-defense at any cost—which only deepens Iraqis’ resentment.

The four-square-mile Green Zone, the one place in Baghdad where foreigners are reasonably safe, could be a showcase of American values and abilities. Instead the American enclave is a trash-strewn wasteland of Mad Max-style fortifications. The traffic lights don’t work because no one has bothered to fix them. The garbage rarely gets collected. Some of the worst ambassadors in U.S. history are the GIs at the Green Zone’s checkpoints. They’ve repeatedly punched Iraqi ministers, accidentally shot at visiting dignitaries and behave (even on good days) with all the courtesy of nightclub bouncers—to Americans and Iraqis alike. Not that U.S. soldiers in Iraq have much to smile about. They’re overworked, much ignored on the home front and widely despised in Iraq, with little to look forward to but the distant end of their tours—and in most cases, another tour soon to follow. Many are reservists who, when they get home, often face the wreckage of careers and family.

President Bush’s approach to North Korea and Iran has been the right one, but the United States will have to take the initiative sooner or later to deal directly with those nations rather than rely on surrogate negotiators, former President Bill Clinton told FOX News’ Greta Van Susteren.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,158713,00.html

“THE TRUTH ABOUT THE IRAQ QUAGMIRE”

So leaving Saddam in charge would have been the right thing to do? It certainly would have been better for the oil companies - Saddam would be pumping the place dry to pay for more palaces.

And don’t tell me we should have let the UN take care of things - not with how they’re doing in Sudan, the Ivory Coast or hoe they did in other parts of the world. The UN is worse than useless.

Desert Graves Yield Evidence to Try Hussein By CHRISTOPHER DREW and TRESHA MABILE Published: June 7, 2005 New York Times

The burial site - a series of deep trenches that held about 2,500 bodies, many of them women and children - is one of many mass graves that dot the country. But it was the first excavated by an American investigative team working with a special Iraqi tribunal to build cases against Mr. Hussein and others in his government.

A senior Iraqi court official has said the tribunal is planning to start the first trial of Mr. Hussein by late summer or early fall in a case that focuses on the killings of nearly 160 men from Dujail, a Shiite village north of Baghdad, after the former dictator survived an assassination attempt there.

But American legal advisers say the Hatra grave holds a key to what is likely to be one of the broadest charges against Mr. Hussein - that he is responsible for the killing of as many as 100,000 Iraqi Kurds in the late 1980’s, some in chemical-weapons attacks. They say those charges could be filed later this year, and Iraqi officials said last weekend that there could be up to 12 separate cases against Mr. Hussein and others. Each would require a separate trial, and multiple convictions could mean multiple death sentences for any defendant.

According to Gregory W. Kehoe, the American who set up the investigative team, what was found at Hatra shows how the Hussein leadership made a “business of killing people” - the scrape marks from the blade of the bulldozer that shoved victims into the trench, the point-blank shots to the backs of even the babies’ heads, the withered body of a 3- or 4-year-old boy, still clutching a red and white ball.

Mr. Nivala said investigators believe they will be able to show that Mr. Hussein was aware not only of the retribution in Dujail but also of the harsh actions against the Kurds and Shiites. He said the forensics team had recently begun excavating a third grave, believed to hold some of the 150,000 Shiites killed in 1991.

No one said we should have left Saddam in power.

The reason that the US went in without UN approval was because Saddam was an immediate threat BECAUSE HE HAD WMD’S!!!!!!

Which he didn’t

and Bush knew that Everytime anyone mentions Iraq the conservative responses is “MAss graves! Mass graves! SAddam was bad!”

Yes.

No liberal argues that Saddm was good.

However our reasons for going into Iraq were to get rid of WMD’s

Bush knew he didn’t have these. (Downing Street Memo and others proves this)

Yet he lied to the country.

He should be impeached.

If we are concerned with mass graves why aren’t we going into SAudi Arabia? China? Rwanda?

Because the reason we are in Iraq is so Bush and his corporate cronies could get money rom oil and reconstruction.

You have reapeated many times on this thread that Bush’s cronies would have made more if Saddam had been left in place. This makes absolutely no sense. They are not buying the oil over there right now. They pump it out of the ground and then sell it.

How could free oil be less profitable than oil that you have to pay Saddam for?

Your conservative beliefs have blinded you.

You place your party before your country, before natiional safety, before logic and science, and before the lives of American soldiers.

You make me sick.

I hope for the sake of your soul that you stop this insanity and start looking at facts that aren’t fed you by your republican talking heads.

Yoou don’t need to become a liberal.

Just think for yourself and don’t believe what the republican controlled media says.

Do you still deny that Bush lied about WMD’s? Is the whole world in conspiracy against him? Or might it be that you have been misled?

Are you so arrogant as to think that you know more than 50% of our country and the whole developed world?

There is a reason that the rest of the world hates us right now. It is because our governement is corrupt and waging an unethical war that was based on manufactured intelligence.

The rest o the world knows this, Americans are waking up to it, Bush will be impeached, and you will have egg all over your face.

The recruiting center is in University Square. Put your body where your rhetoric is and go do a tour. Don’t make namby pamby excuses about the “troops needing you here”. REcruitment is at an all time low and the military needs people now.

Go sign up and live your beliefs.

Otherwise you are just another spoiled jerk who sends poor kids off to die becasue he is too arrogant to change his beliefs.

One thing that REpublicans never talk about is that a good portion of those mass graves are from 1991.

Daddy Busg told the Shiites to rise up saying that the Us would support them.

We didn’t.

And Saddam butchered them.

Ther are of course also the mass graves that have resulted from our bombs.

Who is going on trial for those?

“However our reasons for going into Iraq were to get rid of WMD’s”

It was not all about the WMDs. That was only one of the reasons - of course since that is the only reason that was mistaken, that is the only reason to whine about. Even Bill Clinton has said he was sure that Saddma had WMDs. The French and Germans even believed that Saddam had WMDs. Saddam had used WMDs in the past. Bush may have been mistaken (along with most of the rest of the world) but he didn’t lie.

Why had we gone to war? In the months leading up to Operation Iraqi Freedom, President Bush repeatedly gave his reasons. Saddam Hussein, he said on Oct. 7, 2002, “has tried to dominate the Middle East, has invaded and brutally occupied a small neighbor, has struck other nations without warning, and holds an unrelenting hostility toward the United States.”

The president added: “Some al-Qaida leaders who fled Afghanistan went to Iraq. These include one very senior al-Qaida leader who received medical treatment in Baghdad this year …” He was talking about the now infamous Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who to this day commands suicide bombers and cuts throats for video releases.

The president had also made the case for taking action before the U.N. General Assembly on Sept. 12, 2002. “If we meet our responsibilities,” he said, “the people of Iraq can shake off their captivity. They can one day join a democratic Afghanistan and a democratic Palestine, inspiring reforms throughout the Muslim world. These nations can show by their example that honest government, and respect for women, and the great Islamic tradition of learning can triumph in the Middle East and beyond.”

Isn’t it odd that such clear and compelling justifications for the war and where it might lead have been largely forgotten in what passes for debate these days? Instead, the talking point we hear - over and over - is that the casus belli for the invasion was simply and exclusively Saddam’s possession of stocks of weapons of mass destruction. That is usually followed by the assertion that since no such caches of WMD have been found, the war was unjustified and, it is customary to add in an outraged tone, based on a bald-faced “lie.”

Which is itself a bald-faced lie - as the quotes above establish, as does the fact, noted by historian Victor Davis Hanson, that in the run-up to the invasion, the U.S. Senate “on its own cited 23 causes of action, well beyond the issue of weapons of mass destruction, and thus established bipartisan agreement on several grounds for removing Saddam.”

But it is true that Saddam’s possession of WMD stocks was something every major intelligence agency in the world believed. By contrast, many people - Democrats and Republicans alike - disagreed with Bush when he said he intended to “defend the world from a grave danger.” http://www.sacbee.com/24hour/opinions/story/2256347p-10420027c.html

Nope.

The war was sold to the maerican people as part of the war on terror.

Preventative invasion is never legitimate. Never.

If we are justified in invading Saddam as you assert, then the Japanese were justified in bombing pearl harbor. We were ramping up our arms production and talking about bombers that could bomb japan openly in our newspapers.

So according to your line of thought, Japan was justified in attacking us.

and Cuba would be justified in attacking the US as well.

It makes no sense. It is illegal and unethical.

The was was sold to the American people as Saddam posing a direct threat to us.

The intelligence was manufactured. Officials were fired that disagreed with bush.

The British governement knew this. That’s why the Downing street Memo says that the Bush Admin was fixing facts around policy.

A Course Set by Congress By Colbert I. King Saturday, March 8, 2003

Initially, this column was going to be a screed about the Bush administration’s confusing message on Iraq. How, the piece would start, does President George W. Bush expect to mobilize the country — let alone the world — behind him if he keeps coming up with new reasons for invading Iraq? First there’s “regime change.” Then the switch to disarmament. Now the goal is a democratic Iraq and more freedom-loving societies in the Middle East. What about Congress? the column would ask. Why is it hugging the sidelines as the administration sets out to rid the world of Saddam Hussein and his weapons of terror, and to remake the political map of the Persian Gulf?

That, however, is not what today’s offering is about. And for good reason. It would have missed the mark.

Believe it or not, the American call for “regime change” in Iraq didn’t start with George W. Bush. For that, we must return to the days of the 105th Congress, when Bill Clinton occupied the White House. Recall a piece of legislation dubbed the “Iraq Liberation Act of 1998” (Public Law 105-338). Not only did it call for Saddam Hussein’s ouster, it also spelled out the goal of replacing his regime with a democratic Iraq.

Here’s what the law says: “It should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq and to promote the emergence of a democratic government to replace that regime.”

You may think the Iraq Liberation Act was ramrodded down the throats of reluctant Democrats by a House and Senate dominated by conservative Republicans. Consider the final tally: The House passed the bill by a vote of 360 to 38, with 157 Democrats joining 202 Republicans and the House’s one independent to back the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime. The act, with bipartisan cosponsorship of two Democrats and six Republicans, also passed the Senate by unanimous consent. And Bill Clinton signed it into law on Oct. 31, 1998, declaring at the time that the evidence was overwhelming that freedom and the rule of law “will not happen under the current Iraq leadership.”

Yes, regime change has been articulated by the administration, world without end. Bush did it again during his televised news conference on Thursday night. But that policy, along with support for a defeated Iraq’s transition to democracy, was embraced years earlier by Bill Clinton and a bipartisan Congress.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&contentId=A59558-2003Mar7&notFound=true

Why is the Republican motto. “If we did something wrong let’s blame it on Clinton”?

Clinton was pro-business republican lite, and if he had invaded Iraq I would have said the same thing about him.

Only a republican, blinded by party ideology, would assume that pointing out that Clinton made similar allegations would somehow be a point worthy of note.

I don’t carea bout party politics. I care about ethics and law, I care about helping poor people and making usre corporations and the uber-rich pay their share of taxes. I just happen to side more with Dems than Reps right now.

I don’t give a fuck who ordered an illegal,unethical invasion. I still think its is wrong and it is.

Blinded by party politics and “party before country” is your motto.

We are not politicians, we should be looking out for our country no matter who is president.

I admit openly that I agree with some republican positions and ideas. You utterly refuse to admit that there is anything good about the liberal philosophy. You are a party ideologue who clings to your talking point sand is unable to think for yourself.

Its really quite pathetic.

I really like the paper ballot idea.

“If Congress can regulate this under the Commerce Clause, then it can regulate virtually anything, and the federal government is no longer one of limited and enumerated powers.”

http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110006792

Anyone who believes in the war in Iraq must also believe that Japan was justified in bombing Pearl Harbor.

You are traitors to our vets and murderers of innocent women and children not to mention US soldiers.

This is kind of thing that turns me against liberals.

• Eric Foner, radical-left history professor at Columbia University who, even as the bodies were being pulled out of a smoldering Ground Zero, wrote, “I’m not sure which is more frightening: the horror that engulfed New York City or the apocalyptic rhetoric emanating daily from the White House.” This is the same man who participated in a “teach-in” at Columbia to protest the Iraq war, during which a colleague exhorted students with, “The only true heroes are those who find ways to defeat the U.S. military,” and called for “a million Mogadishus.” The IFC website has posted Mr. Foner’s statement warning that future discussions should not be “overwhelmed” by the IFC’s location at the World Trade Center site itself.
• George Soros, billionaire founder of Open Society Institute, the nonprofit foundation that helps fund Human Rights First and is an early contributor to the IFC. Mr. Soros has stated that the pictures of Abu Ghraib “hit us the same way as the terrorist attack itself.”

http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110006791

This is the kind of thing that turns me off about Republicans:

• Republican anti-abortion activist Howard Scott Heldreth is a convicted child rapist in Florida.

  • Republican County Commissioner David Swartz pleaded guilty to molesting two girls under the age of 11 and was sentenced to 8 years in prison.

  • Republican judge Mark Pazuhanich pleaded no contest to fondling a 10-year old girl and was sentenced to 10 years probation.

  • Republican anti-abortion activist Nicholas Morency pleaded guilty to possessing child pornography on his computer and offering a bounty to anybody who murders an abortion doctor.

  • Republican legislator Edison Misla Aldarondo was sentenced to 10 years in prison for raping his daughter between the ages of 9 and 17.

  • Republican Mayor Philip Giordano is serving a 37-year sentence in federal prison for sexually abusing 8- and 10-year old girls.

  • Republican campaign consultant Tom Shortridge was sentenced to three years probation for taking nude photographs of a 15-year old girl.

  • Republican racist pedophile and United States Senator Strom Thurmond had sex with a 15-year old black girl which produced a child.

  • Republican pastor Mike Hintz, whom George W. Bush commended during the 2004 presidential campaign, surrendered to police after admitting to a sexual affair with a female juvenile.

  • Republican legislator Peter Dibble pleaded no contest to having an inappropriate relationship with a 13-year-old girl.

  • Republican activist Lawrence E. King, Jr. organized child sex parties at the White House during the 1980s.

  • Republican lobbyist Craig J. Spence organized child sex parties at the White House during the 1980s.

  • Republican Congressman Donald “Buz” Lukens was found guilty of having sex with a female minor and sentenced to one month in jail.

  • Republican fundraiser Richard A. Delgaudio was found guilty of child porn charges and paying two teenage girls to pose for sexual photos.

  • Republican activist Mark A. Grethen convicted on six counts of sex crimes involving children.

  • Republican activist Randal David Ankeney pleaded guilty to attempted sexual assault on a child.

  • Republican Congressman Dan Crane had sex with a female minor working as a congressional page.

  • Republican activist and Christian Coalition leader Beverly Russell admitted to an incestuous relationship with his step daughter.

  • Republican governor Arnold Schwarzenegger allegedly had sex with a 16 year old girl when he was 28.

  • Republican congressman and anti-gay activist Robert Bauman was charged with having sex with a 16-year-old boy he picked up at a gay bar.

  • Republican Committee Chairman Jeffrey Patti was arrested for distributing a video clip of a 5-year-old girl being raped.

  • Republican activist Marty Glickman (a.k.a. “Republican Marty”), was taken into custody by Florida police on four counts of unlawful sexual activity with an underage girl and one count of delivering the drug LSD.

  • Republican legislative aide Howard L. Brooks was charged with molesting a 12-year old boy and possession of child pornography.

  • Republican Senate candidate John Hathaway was accused of having sex with his 12-year old baby sitter and withdrew his candidacy after the allegations were reported in the media.

  • Republican preacher Stephen White, who demanded a return to traditional values, was sentenced to jail after offering $20 to a 14-year-old boy for permission to perform oral sex on him.

  • Republican talk show host Jon Matthews pleaded guilty to exposing his genitals to an 11 year old girl.

  • Republican anti-gay activist Earl “Butch” Kimmerling was sentenced to 40 years in prison for molesting an 8-year old girl after he attempted to stop a gay couple from adopting her.

  • Republican Party leader Paul Ingram pleaded guilty to six counts of raping his daughters and served 14 years in federal prison.

  • Republican election board official Kevin Coan was sentenced to two years probation for soliciting sex over the internet from a 14-year old girl.

  • Republican politician Andrew Buhr was charged with two counts of first degree sodomy with a 13-year old boy.

  • Republican politician Keith Westmoreland was arrested on seven felony counts of lewd and lascivious exhibition to girls under the age of 16 (i.e. exposing himself to children).

  • Republican anti-abortion activist John Allen Burt was charged with sexual misconduct involving a 15-year old girl.

  • Republican County Councilman Keola Childs pleaded guilty to molesting a male child.

  • Republican activist John Butler was charged with criminal sexual assault on a teenage girl.

  • Republican candidate Richard Gardner admitted to molesting his two daughters.

  • Republican Councilman and former Marine Jack W. Gardner was convicted of molesting a 13-year old girl.

  • Republican County Commissioner Merrill Robert Barter pleaded guilty to unlawful sexual contact and assault on a teenage boy.

  • Republican City Councilman Fred C. Smeltzer, Jr. pleaded no contest to raping a 15 year-old girl and served 6-months in prison.

  • Republican activist Parker J. Bena pleaded guilty to possession of child pornography on his home computer and was sentenced to 30 months in federal prison and fined $18,000.

  • Republican parole board officer and former Colorado state representative, Larry Jack Schwarz, was fired after child pornography was found in his possession.

  • Republican strategist and Citadel Military College graduate Robin Vanderwall was convicted in Virginia on five counts of soliciting sex from boys and girls over the internet.

  • Republican city councilman Mark Harris, who is described as a “good military man” and “church goer,” was convicted of repeatedly having sex with an 11-year-old girl and sentenced to 12 years in prison.

  • Republican businessman Jon Grunseth withdrew his candidacy for Minnesota governor after allegations surfaced that he went swimming in the nude with four underage girls, including his daughter.

  • Republican director of the “Young Republican Federation” Nicholas Elizondo molested his 6-year old daughter and was sentenced to six years in prison.

  • Republican benefactor of conservative Christian groups, Richard A. Dasen Sr., was charged with rape for allegedly paying a 15-year old girl for sex. Dasen, 62, who is married with grown children and several grandchildren, has allegedly told police that over the past decade he paid more than $1 million to have sex with a large number of young women.

http://www.armchairsubversive.com/

Back on topic:

1. A U.S. representative from Georgia declares that allowing this type of marriage “necessarily involves the degradation" of conventional marriage, an institution that "deserves admiration rather than execration.”

2. This type of legal marriage must be forbidden, says the Republican senator from Wisconsin, “simply because natural instinct revolts at it as wrong.”

3. “The next step will be the demand for a law allowing them, without restraint, to have free and unrestrained social intercourse with your unmarried sons and daughters,” warns a Kentucky congressman. “It is bound to come to that! There is no disguising the fact. And the sooner the alarm is given and the people take heed, the better it will be for our civilization.”

4. “When people (like this) marry, they cannot possibly have any progeny,” writes an appeals judge in a Missouri case. “And such a fact sufficiently justifies those laws which forbid their marriages.”

5. These types of marriages are “abominable,” according to Virginia law. If allowed, they would “pollute” America.

6. In denying the appeal of this type of couple that had tried unsuccessfully to marry, a Georgia court wrote that such unions are “not only unnatural, but always productive of deplorable results,” such as increased effeminate behavior in the population. “They are productive of evil, and evil only, without any corresponding good in accordance with the God of nature.”

7. Attorneys for the state of Tennessee argue that such unions should be illegal because they are “distasteful to our people and unfit to produce the human race.” The state Supreme Court agrees, declaring these types of marriages would be “a calamity full of the saddest and gloomiest portent to the generations that are to come after us.”

8. Lawyers for California insist that a ban on this type of marriage is necessary to prevent “traditional marriage from being contaminated by the recognition of relationships that are physically and mentally inferior,” and entered into by “the dregs of society.”

9. “The law concerning marriages is to be construed and understood in relation to those persons only to whom that law relates,” thunders a Virginia judge in response to a challenge to that state's non-recognition of these types of unions. “And not,” he continued, “to a class of persons clearly not within the idea of the legislature when contemplating the subject of marriage.”

Gay marriage? No, actually the quotes date from 1823 to 1964 and refer to interracial marriage. 15 states still criminalized black-white marriage until the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously overturned those laws in the appropriately named 1967 case, Loving vs. Virginia.

WOW, do only Republicans do those nasty sex crimes? Or are these the ONLY Republicans out of the tens of thousands of convicted sex criminals? Don’t most convicted sex criminal sex felons vote Democrat? Did you know that Hitler was a vegetarian?

THE WORDS OF A TRAITOR “The only true heroes are those who find ways to defeat the U.S. military,” and called for “a million Mogadishus.”

Pedophilia is endemic in the republican party and they project their desires onto gays. I challenge you to find a similar list of Democrat officials charged with pedohilia.

Bush and the neocon crowd are fascists.

www.ericblumrich.com/14.html

Eventually, they will be tried for war crimes and their supporters will go down in infamy like the Nazi sympathizers in Germany.

Our children will hang their heads in shame that we allowed such heinous acts to be committed on our watch.

“I challenge you to find a similar list of Democrat officials charged with pedohilia.”

That just wouldn’t be news - too much of a dog-bites-man type story. It’s only news when a Republican gets caught because it’s so unexpected.

After all, don’t all the members of NAMBLA vote democrat?

Maybe someone with time on their hands can do an analysis cross referencing the sex-offender records with voter registrations and give us the facts.

We need more conservatives on the Supreme Court! Justice Clarence Thomas is my hero!

Writing for the 6-3 majority in Gonzales vs. Raich, the 85-year-old liberal Justice John Paul Stevens solemnly counseled patients suffering chronic pain to turn to “the democratic process” for comfort. “The voices of voters,” he mused, may “one day be heard in the halls of Congress” on behalf of legalizing medical marijuana.

Yet, as Justice Sandra Day O’Connor noted in her dissent, the government “has not overcome empirical doubt that the number of Californians engaged in personal cultivation, possession, and use of medical marijuana, or the amount of marijuana they produce, is enough to threaten the federal regime.” As important, she wrote, it’s not even clear that medical marijuana is commerce as we normally understand the term.

In a concurring dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas argues flatly that “if Congress can regulate [medical marijuana] under the commerce clause, then it can regulate virtually anything — and the federal government is no longer one of limited and enumerated powers.”

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-gillespie7jun07,0,5911404,print.story?coll=la-news-comment-opinions

Mugabe MUST BE A REPUBLICAN?

But as the campaign, directed at as many as 1.5 million members of Zimbabwe’s vast underclass, spreads beyond Harare, it is quickly evolving into a sweeping recasting of society, a forced uprooting of the very poorest city dwellers, who have become President Robert G. Mugabe’s most hardened opponents.

By scattering them to rural areas, Mr. Mugabe, re-elected to another five-year term in 2002, seems intent on dispersing the biggest threat to his 25-year autocratic rule as poverty and unemployment approach record levels and mass hunger and the potential for unrest loom.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/11/international/africa/11zimbabwe.html?hp&ex=1118462400

I have to assume that these perverts were Democrats, since there is no mention that they were Republicans - as an AP reporter surely would have written if that was the case.

Church Sex Case Stuns Louisiana Town By ALAN SAYRE Associated Press Writer

PONCHATOULA, La. (AP)

Last month, the suspicions played out in a way that almost no one in this southeastern Louisiana town of 5,000 could have imagined: Nine people, including the pastor, his wife and a sheriff’s deputy were accused of engaging in cult-like sexual activity with children and animals inside the hall of worship. Eight now face child rape charges that could bring the death penalty.

http://wireservice.wired.com/wired/story.asp?section=Breaking&storyId=1047241&tw=wnwirestory

You are stupid.

There is a difference between Republican ctizen and Republican officials.

The posted list is about REpublican officials.

Pedophilia is ramapnt in the REpublican party because REpublicans prey on those that are weaker then them.

They hate gays because they want to displace their own pedophiliac urges onto another group.

Republicans kill maim and bomb babies while calling for respect for life.

They molest them while proclaiming their moral values.

They steal taxpayers money and give it to the rich while calling for less government.

They are a blight on the face of our democracy and are attempting to destroy it with their fascist police state.

Think a paper trail will solve this problem?

The East St. Louis Democratic Voter Fraud Case continued today with the former Deputy East St. Louis Police Chief Rudy McIntosh taking the stand. Today the jurors heard tapes recorded by Rudy McIntosh where democrats discussed the amount they were planning on paying for votes in the November 2nd election.

http://gatewaypundit.blogspot.com/2005/06/damning-tapes-in-esl-voter-fraud-trial.html

So giving someone cigarettes in return for a vote is wrong. I agree with that. Those people should be tried and if found guilty convicted.

What’s the problem?

I never said that ALL Democrats were honest and perfect. That is only something someone like you who puts party before country and common sense would think.

Everyone knows politics is rife with corruption.

The solution to corruption is to clean it up, not point fingers saying well maybe Republicans stole votes but look these minor Democrat figures in St. Louis may have given some poor people cigarettes.

What the hell is wrong with you?

CAn you smell that?

It’s the smell of impending impeachment and war crimes trials…

Bush Lied — People Died! Larry A. Jones June 08, 2005

Bush lied — people died.

There, I’ve said it.

Bush lied — people died.

There, I’ve said it again.

It’s no longer a debatable issue. The ‘Downing Street Memo’ proves the “fix” was in. Bush had plans to invade Iraq long before 9-11, all he needed was an excuse. So he ‘fixed the facts.’

Yet, in spite of the fact that we now know that there were no weapons of mass destruction, that Saddam and Bin Laden had no real connection, that Saddam never was, and never could be, any real threat to the U.S., the facts were tweaked to suit the rhetoric and so,

Bush lied — people died.

The media is pretending this smoking gun is just another gripe. But this revelations does not originate from some disgruntled former employee, it’s an official document from the office of the Prime Minister of Great Britain. And it has not been discredited or denied by either the White House or Downing Street.

Congress has asked for clarification from the White House weeks ago, but has received no response. And no one is asking anymore. Why? Kerry was going to bring the issue before the Senate but has since wimped out. Why?

Bush lied — people died — and the media and Congress were obviously complicit and still are. The only explanation for their unwillingness to act is that they were in on it from the beginning. Otherwise, why is not the media demanding Bush’s impeachment for perpetrating this fraud on the American people? Why is not Congress beginning impeachment proceedings for this unwarranted, unConstitutional and unjustified war built on the lies and deception of the White House warmongers?

Bush can no longer blame “bad intelligence” from the CIA. The intelligence was correct — there was no threat. But once tweaked and rewritten and bolstered up by rumors and innuendo —‘fixed,’ as the memo states, Congress bought it, hook, line and sinker. It wasn’t true. It wasn’t bad intel. It was an outright lie.

As Huxley once said: “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad as hell.”

But where’s the anger from Congress? Where’s the outrage from the media?

Only conspirators remain silent in the face of such compelling evidence.

Bush lied — people died.

Unfortunately, it’s just that simple.

“Bush lied — people died.”

The big lie is alive and well in liberal redherringville. Ignore ALL the other reasons for removing Saddam. Ignore the fact that 99.999 percent of the world was sure that Saddam had WMD. Ignore that fact that Saddam had used WMD in the past.

“There, I’ve said it again.”

Say it often enough and it becomes true? It wouldn’t be the first time that liberals use the fascist playbook.

German filmmaker Fritz Kippler, one of Goebbels’ most effective propagandists, once said that two steps were necessary to promote a Big Lie so the majority of the people in a nation would believe it. The first was to reduce an issue to a simple black-and-white choice that “even the most feebleminded could understand.” The second was to repeat the oversimplification over and over. If these two steps were followed, people would always come to believe the Big Lie.

I can’t wait for Bush to appoint more conservatives to the Supreme Court! We need more like Justice Thomas!

The Supreme Court’s liberal bloc—Stevens, Ginsburg, Souter and Breyer—ensured Monday with the support of Justices Kennedy and Scalia that people sick from cancer treatment will have to think first about a house call from the federal drug police before using marijuana to relieve their symptoms. Even the Court’s language was unfeeling: “The case comes down to the claim that a locally cultivated product that is used domestically rather than sold on the open market is not subject to federal regulation. Given the … undisputed magnitude of the commercial market for marijuana, Wickard and its progeny foreclose that claim.”

Liberalism to cancer patients: Drop dead.

Meanwhile, dissents on behalf of medical marijuana were written by Sandra Day O’Connor, a cancer survivor, and Clarence Thomas, whose nomination was fought by recreational pot users.

In his dissent, Justice Thomas, liberalism’s archfiend, noted: “The majority prevents states like California from devising drug policies that they have concluded provide much-needed respite to the seriously ill.”

http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/dhenninger/?id=110006804

As dissenting Justice Clarence Thomas warned, "If the majority is to be taken seriously, the federal government may now regulate quilting bees, clothes drives and potluck suppers throughout the 50 states."

THAT WOULD BE THE MOSTLY LIBERAL MAJORITY!

Even uber-liberal Kinsey of the LAT sees the irrelevance of Downing Street Memo to teh “bus lies” Big Lie meme:

So cheers for the Downing Street Memo. But what does it say? It’s a report on a meeting of British Prime Minister Tony Blair and some aides on July 23, 2002. The key passage summarizes “recent talks in Washington” by the head of British foreign intelligence (identified, John le Carre-style, as “C”). C reported that “military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy…. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.”

C’s focus on the dog that didn’t bark — the lack of discussion about the aftermath of war — was smart and prescient. But even on its face, the memo is not proof that Bush had decided on war. It states that war is “now seen as inevitable” by “Washington.” That is, people other than Bush had concluded, based on observation, that he was determined to go to war. There is no claim of even fourth-hand knowledge that he had actually declared this intention. Even if “Washington” meant administration decision-makers, rather than the usual freelance chatterboxes, C was only saying that these people believed that war was how events would play out.

Of course, if “intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy,” rather than vice versa, that is pretty good evidence of Bush’s intentions, as well as a scandal in its own right. And we know now that this was true. Fixing intelligence and facts to fit a desired policy is the Bush II governing style, especially concerning the Iraq war. But C offered no specifics, or none that made it into the memo. Nor does the memo assert that actual decision-makers told him they were fixing the facts. Although the prose is not exactly crystalline, it seems to be saying only that “Washington” had reached that conclusion.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/sunday/commentary/la-oe-kinsley12jun12,0,7389890.column?coll=la-sunday-commentary

QUAGMIRE ACCOMPLISHED!!

Time to start negotiating after force fails just like Reagan during the Cold war. When will Republicans learn that you can’t muscle other people into agreeing with your political vision. That you can’t bomb and kill people into beleiveing in your version of freedom.

Military action won’t end insurgency, growing number of U.S. officers believe

BY TOM LASSETER

Knight Ridder Newspapers

BAGHDAD, Iraq - (KRT) - A growing number of senior American military officers in Iraq have concluded that there is no long-term military solution to an insurgency that has killed thousands of Iraqis and more than 1,300 U.S. troops during the past two years.

Instead, officers say, the only way to end the guerilla war is through Iraqi politics - an arena that so far has been crippled by divisions between Shiite Muslims, whose coalition dominated the January elections, and Sunni Muslims, who are a minority in Iraq but form the base of support for the insurgency.

“I think the more accurate way to approach this right now is to concede that … this insurgency is not going to be settled, the terrorists and the terrorism in Iraq is not going to be settled, through military options or military operations,” Brig. Gen. Donald Alston, the chief U.S. military spokesman in Iraq, said last week, in a comment that echoes what other senior officers say. “It’s going to be settled in the political process.”

http://www.kansas.com/mld/kansas/news/world/11879261.htm

Hmmm…

So I suppose that no amount of evidence will ever convince you that Bush wanted to go to War short of him coming out and saying it?

How about increased bombings?

The memo that was leaked today?

Bush will go down and will be impeached and tried for war crimes

On another note… QUAGMIRE ACCOMPLISHED Time for Bush to start negotiating like Reagan did with the USSR after he finally figured out that force wouldn’t work.

http://www.kansas.com/mld/kansas/news/world/11879261.htm

Military action won’t end insurgency, growing number of U.S. officers believe

BY TOM LASSETER

Knight Ridder Newspapers

BAGHDAD, Iraq - (KRT) - A growing number of senior American military officers in Iraq have concluded that there is no long-term military solution to an insurgency that has killed thousands of Iraqis and more than 1,300 U.S. troops during the past two years.

Instead, officers say, the only way to end the guerilla war is through Iraqi politics - an arena that so far has been crippled by divisions between Shiite Muslims, whose coalition dominated the January elections, and Sunni Muslims, who are a minority in Iraq but form the base of support for the insurgency.

“I think the more accurate way to approach this right now is to concede that … this insurgency is not going to be settled, the terrorists and the terrorism in Iraq is not going to be settled, through military options or military operations,” Brig. Gen. Donald Alston, the chief U.S. military spokesman in Iraq, said last week, in a comment that echoes what other senior officers say. “It’s going to be settled in the political process.”

http://news.yahoo.com/s/thenation/20050611/cm_thenation/33324/nc:742

I taped a television program on Friday, and the subject turned to the Downing Street memo—that now-famous memo that recorded a July 23, 2002, meeting between Prime Minister Tony Blair and his chief aides in which Blair was told by the head of England’s CIA that the Bush administration had already decided to go to war and that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” Right away, the two conservatives on the panel—columnist Linda Chavez and radio host Michael Graham—issued a joint defense: the memo was nothing new, this had all been reported before (including at the time), even Bill Clinton supported regime change in Iraq, and a variety of reports have concluded that the WMD intelligence, while wrong, was not intentionally rigged. They really hammered that last point.

Much of this was wrong or misleading. Clinton may have supported the notion of regime change in Iraq; he did not back the particular war Bush launched. And while two reports—one produced by Senate Republicans; the other written by a panel appointed by Bush—reported no evidence of intelligence-tampering had been found, there were numerous media reports in which intelligence analysts claimed (yes, anonymously) that pressure was applied. Moreover, Democrats on the Senate intelligence panel did not agree with that committee’s nothing-there finding on this matter. In other words, it’s not a closed case.

But this discussion made me realize that perhaps those Bush critics waving the DSM around as gotcha evidence have placed too much emphasis on the “fixed” sentence. I suppose one could read it to mean that Richard Dearlove (aka C), the head of the British MI6, was telling Blair that the Bushies were “gearing” intelligence and facts toward their desire for war. Or perhaps he was indicating that they were building a case for war with whatever facts and intelligence they could find. All of these possibilities come across as somewhat dodgy. But maybe C did not mean “fixed” as in “rigged.”

There might be some wiggle room here for the Bushies. But the true impact of the DSM—which Chavez and Graham danced around—is that it shows that Bush was not being straight with the American public. At that point in time—the summer of 2002- Bush and his advisers were claiming that Bush had not yet decided to go to war, that he saw it as a last option, that he would try other alternatives—even diplomacy!—first. The obvious goal was to persuade the public that he was a reasonable fellow who would not rush to such a momentous decision. Yet the DSM, as many readers of this blog already know, discloses that C came back from Washington with quite a different impression:

C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime’s record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.

Let’s compare C’s insider’s view with the view given to the rest of us. On August 8, 2002, the Chicago Tribune ran a front page piece that read:

While portraying Iraq as a serious threat to American security, President Bush and his top advisers made a concerted effort Wednesday to reassure European and Arab allies that the administration would weigh its options and their concerns before trying to oust Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

“I promise you that I will be patient and deliberate, that we will continue to consult with Congress and, of course, we’ll consult with our friends and allies,” Bush said in a speech in Madison, Miss.

“I will explore all options and all tools at my disposal: diplomacy, international pressure, perhaps the military,” he said.

The president’s comments, as well as those made by Vice President Dick Cheney and others, marked a distinct shift in tone. Administration officials have spoken repeatedly and strongly about the evils of Hussein’s regime and insist they would take whatever action against him they deem necessary, unilaterally if need be. However, Wednesday’s comments seemed designed to calm foreign leaders who are sharply questioning Bush’s call for a “regime change” in Iraq, which most have interpreted to mean a military invasion.

“The president has not made a decision at this point to go to war,” Cheney said in a speech in San Francisco. “We’re looking at all of our options. It would be irresponsible for us not to do that.”

C says he consultations in Washington indicated Bush wanted war. Yet Bush told the public otherwise. Not news? Only if you think a president misleading Americans about his desire for war is not worthy of attention.

All the focus on the “fixed” issue might be a distraction. This memo is evidence—more evidence, I should say—that Bush was committed to war from the start and said whatever needed saying (truth be damned) to sway the citizenry.

Which brings me to another point. The memo, as its devotees know, also reported that Foreign Secretary Jack Straw at this meeting said that it

seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran. We should work up a plan for an ultimatum to Saddam to allow back in the UN weapons inspectors. This would also help with the legal justification for the use of force.

A “thin” WMD case for war? So Bush had not even convinced Jack Straw. Isn’t it news that the foreign minister of the Bush’s number-one ally believed that Bush’s prime rationale for the invasion of Iraq was “thin”? (The U.K.’s attorney general at this meeting also raised questions about the legal basis of an invasion of Iraq.)

This steers us to a key matter. Conservatives like Chavez and Graham now like to hide behind the CIA, blaming bad intelligence for the missing WMDs. Bush didn’t screw up, they argue, he merely relied on inadequate intelligence. But the Straw section of the Downing Street memo kills that argument. Straw presumably had access to the best intelligence on the topic, and still he wasn’t sold. The bottom-line: even the bad intelligence led to a “thin” case. The problem was not merely the crappy intelligence; it was how Bush used the bad intelligence and stretched it beyond its limits to ease the way to war.

Put aside the question of “fixed” intelligence. The DSM demonstrates that Bush was dishonest with the public about his intentions and that the intelligence he did have in hand—fixed or not, faulty or not—did not support the case for war. I can understand why conservative cheerleaders of the war don’t want such matters being discussed. But to call the Downing Street memo an item of no importance is to descend into the land of total spin.

Speaking of which, if you haven’t read The Washington Post’s front-page piece on the problems within the Iraqi security forces, do so. It captures the dilemmas of the Iraq mess in a depressing nutshell. It also is further proof of the rising credibility gap. The Bush administration keeps talking about the progress being made in Iraq. The reports from ground-level—such as this piece—blast apart such rhetoric. In a similar vein, Senator Joe Biden, who was recently in Iraq, reports that there are 107 Iraqi battalions that have been trained and placed in uniform but only three are operational. At this rate, Jeb P. Bush (or Chelsea Clinton) will be president when the Iraqi army can take on the insurgency.

Here are the opening paragraphs of the Post piece—written and reported well by Anthony Shadid and Steve Fainaru. Note the difference between what the on-the-ground solider says and how the general spins. Do you think we will ever see anyone in charge acknowledge reality in Iraq?

BAIJI, Iraq — An hour before dawn, the sky still clouded by a dust storm, the soldiers of the Iraqi army’s Charlie Company began their mission with a ballad to ousted president Saddam Hussein. “We have lived in humiliation since you left,” one sang in Arabic, out of earshot of his U.S. counterparts. “We had hoped to spend our life with you.”

But the Iraqi soldiers had no clue where they were going. They shrugged their shoulders when asked what they would do. The U.S. military had billed the mission as pivotal in the Iraqis’ progress as a fighting force but had kept the destination and objectives secret out of fear the Iraqis would leak the information to insurgents.

“We can’t tell these guys about a lot of this stuff, because we’re not really sure who’s good and who isn’t,” said Rick McGovern, a tough-talking 37-year-old platoon sergeant from Hershey, Pa., who heads the military training for Charlie Company.

The reconstruction of Iraq’s security forces is the prerequisite for an American withdrawal from Iraq. But as the Bush administration extols the continuing progress of the new Iraqi army, the project in Baiji, a desolate oil town at a strategic crossroads in northern Iraq, demonstrates the immense challenges of building an army from scratch in the middle of a bloody insurgency.

Charlie Company disintegrated once after its commander was killed by a car bomb in December. And members of the unit were threatening to quit en masse this week over complaints that ranged from dismal living conditions to insurgent threats. Across a vast cultural divide, language is just one impediment. Young Iraqi soldiers, ill-equipped and drawn from a disenchanted Sunni Arab minority, say they are not even sure what they are fighting for. They complain bitterly that their American mentors don’t respect them.

In fact, the Americans don’t: Frustrated U.S. soldiers question the Iraqis’ courage, discipline and dedication and wonder whether they will ever be able to fight on their own, much less reach the U.S. military’s goal of operating independently by the fall.

“I know the party line. You know, the Department of Defense, the U.S. Army, five-star generals, four-star generals, President Bush, Donald Rumsfeld: The Iraqis will be ready in whatever time period,” said 1st Lt. Kenrick Cato, 34, of Long Island, N.Y., the executive officer of McGovern’s company, who sold his share in a database firm to join the military full time after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. “But from the ground, I can say with certainty they won’t be ready before I leave. And I know I’ll be back in Iraq, probably in three or four years. And I don’t think they’ll be ready then.”

“We don’t want to take responsibility; we don’t want it,” said Amar Mana, 27, an Iraqi private whose forehead was grazed by a bullet during an insurgent attack in November. “Here, no way. The way the situation is, we wouldn’t be ready to take responsibility for a thousand years.”

Maj. Gen. Joseph J. Taluto, commander of the 42nd Infantry Division, which oversees an area of north-central Iraq that includes Baiji and is the size of West Virginia, called the Iraqi forces “improved and improving.” He acknowledged that the Iraqis suffered from a lack of equipment and manpower but predicted that, at least in his area of operation, the U.S. military would meet its goal of having battalion-level units operating independently by the fall.

I can tell you, making assessments, I think we’re on target,” he said in an interview.

On target for what? Make sure you read the full article.

Oh and look! There is another memo that was leaked today that support the DSM.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1650822,00.html

The Sunday Times - Britain

June 12, 2005

Ministers were told of need for Gulf war 'excuse' Michael Smith MINISTERS were warned in July 2002 that Britain was committed to taking part in an American-led invasion of Iraq and they had no choice but to find a way of making it legal.

The warning, in a leaked Cabinet Office briefing paper, said Tony Blair had already agreed to back military action to get rid of Saddam Hussein at a summit at the Texas ranch of President George W Bush three months earlier.

The briefing paper, for participants at a meeting of Blair's inner circle on July 23, 2002, said that since regime change was illegal it was "necessary to create the conditions" which would make it legal.

This was required because, even if ministers decided Britain should not take part in an invasion, the American military would be using British bases. This would automatically make Britain complicit in any illegal US action.

"US plans assume, as a minimum, the use of British bases in Cyprus and Diego Garcia," the briefing paper warned. This meant that issues of legality "would arise virtually whatever option ministers choose with regard to UK participation".

The paper was circulated to those present at the meeting, among whom were Blair, Geoff Hoon, then defence secretary, Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, and Sir Richard Dearlove, then chief of MI6. The full minutes of the meeting were published last month in The Sunday Times.

The document said the only way the allies could justify military action was to place Saddam Hussein in a position where he ignored or rejected a United Nations ultimatum ordering him to co-operate with the weapons inspectors. But it warned this would be difficult.

"It is just possible that an ultimatum could be cast in terms which Saddam would reject," the document says. But if he accepted it and did not attack the allies, they would be "most unlikely" to obtain the legal justification they needed.

The suggestions that the allies use the UN to justify war contradicts claims by Blair and Bush, repeated during their Washington summit last week, that they turned to the UN in order to avoid having to go to war. The attack on Iraq finally began in March 2003.

The briefing paper is certain to add to the pressure, particularly on the American president, because of the damaging revelation that Bush and Blair agreed on regime change in April 2002 and then looked for a way to justify it.

There has been a growing storm of protest in America, created by last month's publication of the minutes in The Sunday Times. A host of citizens, including many internet bloggers, have demanded to know why the Downing Street memo (often shortened to "the DSM" on websites) has been largely ignored by the US mainstream media.

http://www.medical4order.com/arthritisandcelebrex/ follow massivepitchedslides

“So I suppose that no amount of evidence will ever convince you that Bush wanted to go to War short of him coming out and saying it?”

I have every belief that Bush wanted to go to war. What person with any compassion whatsoever wouldn’t want to oust Saddam? Then there’s that deal where Saddam tried to have GB senior assainated, just to give it a little more personal touch. It sure wasn’t “all about the oil” - Saddam would be pumping the place dry to buy more palaces and arms.

I still don’t see the problem - unless you believe in appeasement.

Maybe you think that the UN should have been left to solve the problem? They sure did/are doing a great job in the Balkans, Rwanda, Ivory Coast, Sudan, Zimbabwe, etc, etc

“I still don’t see the problem - unless you believe in appeasement.”

It has nothing to do with appeasement.

I have noticed that you repeat your Republican talking points incessantly. As I have pointed out before there is no way oil companies would have made more money with Saddam in power becasue they would have had to buy the oil. Right now they are pumping it out of there unmetered and stealing billions from the US taxpayers. The oil money was supposed to cover reconstruction costs instead it is going straight into oil company pockets.

The real issue here is that we invaded a sovereign country with no legitimate reason. This is exactly what the Japanese did with Pearl Harbor, except we HAD made threats toward them and were planning to attack.

So either you think A) The Us can do whatever it wants to whomever it wants whenever it wants because might makes right or B) that invading other countries because you dislike their governement or suspect they ar ea threat to you is justified. Therefore, you also think that Pearl Harbor was a justified action.

Appeasement has to do with a nation threatening you and you bargaining with them. Iraq was never a threat to us.

You also seem to have no problem with Bush blatantly lying to the American people since as you admitted “he wanted to go to war”. That is not what he told us however, therefore he lied and misled us into war and should be impeached and tried for treason. I am glad you agree with me.

THE NEW REPUBLICAN MOTTO:

WE POLICE THE WORLD AND ENGAGE IS NATION DISASSEMBLING.

The larger issue here is that Bush has shown other countries that the US is essentially impotent militarily. We can’t even control an insurgency of car bombs. We lost all our soft power in the world.

Furthermore, countries that feel threatened by us now realize that the only way to prevent us from invading them at our whim is to develop nuclear weapons.

Thus Bush has made the world a more dangerous place by creating a situation in which unstable countries like NK and Iran now will have nuclear capabilities.

By the way, recruiting is way down. Why don’t you go sign up to fight over in Iraq? You can’t use your excuse of the military not needing you anymore. Or are you only willing to support the war when other people are getting killed and maimed?

The loss in Viet Nam showed it is much more important to fight on the homefront than “go sign up to fight over in Iraq?”, we’ll only lose if the defeatist fifth column wins out.

In a word, the memo is extremely interesting, but tells us nothing new about pre-war intelligence on Iraq, and is anything but a bombshell.

May 06, 2005 A Gun that Doesn’t Smoke

Maybe I just missed it, but I haven’t seen a lot of comment on the top secret British memo that was leaked just before this week’s election. It apparently was written by Matthew Rycroft, and summarizes a meeting of Tony Blair and some of his top advisers on July 23, 2002. The memo is intensely interesting, so I am going to reproduce it in its entirety:

IRAQ: PRIME MINISTER'S MEETING, 23 JULY

Copy addressees and you met the Prime Minister on 23 July to discuss Iraq.

This record is extremely sensitive. No further copies should be made. It should be shown only to those with a genuine need to know its contents.

John Scarlett summarised the intelligence and latest JIC assessment. Saddam's regime was tough and based on extreme fear. The only way to overthrow it was likely to be by massive military action. Saddam was worried and expected an attack, probably by air and land, but he was not convinced that it would be immediate or overwhelming. His regime expected their neighbours to line up with the US. Saddam knew that regular army morale was poor. Real support for Saddam among the public was probably narrowly based.

C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.

CDS said that military planners would brief CENTCOM on 1-2 August, Rumsfeld on 3 August and Bush on 4 August.

The two broad US options were:

(a) Generated Start. A slow build-up of 250,000 US troops, a short (72 hour) air campaign, then a move up to Baghdad from the south. Lead time of 90 days (30 days preparation plus 60 days deployment to Kuwait).

(b) Running Start. Use forces already in theatre (3 x 6,000), continuous air campaign, initiated by an Iraqi casus belli. Total lead time of 60 days with the air campaign beginning even earlier. A hazardous option.

The US saw the UK (and Kuwait) as essential, with basing in Diego Garcia and Cyprus critical for either option. Turkey and other Gulf states were also important, but less vital. The three main options for UK involvement were:

(i) Basing in Diego Garcia and Cyprus, plus three SF squadrons.

(ii) As above, with maritime and air assets in addition.

(iii) As above, plus a land contribution of up to 40,000, perhaps with a discrete role in Northern Iraq entering from Turkey, tying down two Iraqi divisions.

The Defence Secretary said that the US had already begun "spikes of activity" to put pressure on the regime. No decisions had been taken, but he thought the most likely timing in US minds for military action to begin was January, with the timeline beginning 30 days before the US Congressional elections.

The Foreign Secretary said he would discuss this with Colin Powell this week. It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran. We should work up a plan for an ultimatum to Saddam to allow back in the UN weapons inspectors. This would also help with the legal justification for the use of force.

The Attorney-General said that the desire for regime change was not a legal base for military action. There were three possible legal bases: self-defence, humanitarian intervention, or UNSC authorisation. The first and second could not be the base in this case. Relying on UNSCR 1205 of three years ago would be difficult. The situation might of course change.

The Prime Minister said that it would make a big difference politically and legally if Saddam refused to allow in the UN inspectors. Regime change and WMD were linked in the sense that it was the regime that was producing the WMD. There were different strategies for dealing with Libya and Iran. If the political context were right, people would support regime change. The two key issues were whether the military plan worked and whether we had the political strategy to give the military plan the space to work.

On the first, CDS said that we did not know yet if the US battleplan was workable. The military were continuing to ask lots of questions.

For instance, what were the consequences, if Saddam used WMD on day one, or if Baghdad did not collapse and urban warfighting began? You said that Saddam could also use his WMD on Kuwait. Or on Israel, added the Defence Secretary.

The Foreign Secretary thought the US would not go ahead with a military plan unless convinced that it was a winning strategy. On this, US and UK interests converged. But on the political strategy, there could be US/UK differences. Despite US resistance, we should explore discreetly the ultimatum. Saddam would continue to play hard-ball with the UN.

John Scarlett assessed that Saddam would allow the inspectors back in only when he thought the threat of military action was real.

The Defence Secretary said that if the Prime Minister wanted UK military involvement, he would need to decide this early. He cautioned that many in the US did not think it worth going down the ultimatum route. It would be important for the Prime Minister to set out the political context to Bush.

Conclusions:

(a) We should work on the assumption that the UK would take part in any military action. But we needed a fuller picture of US planning before we could take any firm decisions. CDS should tell the US military that we were considering a range of options.

(b) The Prime Minister would revert on the question of whether funds could be spent in preparation for this operation.

(c) CDS would send the Prime Minister full details of the proposed military campaign and possible UK contributions by the end of the week.

(d) The Foreign Secretary would send the Prime Minister the background on the UN inspectors, and discreetly work up the ultimatum to Saddam.

He would also send the Prime Minister advice on the positions of countries in the region especially Turkey, and of the key EU member states.

(e) John Scarlett would send the Prime Minister a full intelligence update.

(f) We must not ignore the legal issues: the Attorney-General would consider legal advice with FCO/MOD legal advisers.

(I have written separately to commission this follow-up work.)

MATTHEW RYCROFT

Left-wing professor Juan Cole is one who has tried to use this memo to feed the BUSH LIED! theme. Cole’s discussion of the memo is, to put it politely, overheated:

Any "debate" was meaningless if the president had already decided. And he wasn't waiting to make his decision in the light of the intelligence. He was going to tell the intelligence professionals to what conclusion they had to come. "But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."

Cole focuses on what is, obviously, a striking sentence. It isn’t clear, however, what it was intended to mean. Cole’s implication, and the constant implication of the BUSH LIED! lefties, is that the administration really knew that Saddam didn’t have any WMDs, but fixed the intelligence to make it appear that he did. But we know that isn’t true. The consensus estimate of the U.S. intelligence community has been made public, and it clearly says that, with a high degree of confidence, Iraq possesses chemical and biological weapons. The Senate Intelligence Committee’s report has confirmed that this is what the intelligence community believed and reported to the President, and that there is no evidence that the administration improperly influenced the gathering or reporting of intelligence (“The Committee did not find any evidence that Administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction capabilities.”)

And, whatever the British note-taker meant by the sentence quoted by Cole, he obviously didn’t mean that there was any doubt on the part of British intelligence or Blair’s government that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. On the contrary, the notes specifically refer to Iraq’s WMDs, in sections not quoted by Cole:

The Prime Minister said that it would make a big difference politically and legally if Saddam refused to allow in the UN inspectors. Regime change and WMD were linked in the sense that it was the regime that was producing the WMD...

On the first, CDS said that we did not know yet if the US battleplan was workable. The military were continuing to ask lots of questions.

For instance, what were the consequences, if Saddam used WMD on day one, or if Baghdad did not collapse and urban warfighting began? You said that Saddam could also use his WMD on Kuwait. Or on Israel, added the Defence Secretary.

Cole waxes even more hysterical on the issue of the Iraq war’s legality:

Goldsmith was as nervous as a cat in a roomful of rocking chairs: "The Attorney-General said that the desire for regime change was not a legal base for military action. There were three possible legal bases: self-defence, humanitarian intervention, or UNSC authorisation. The first and second could not be the base in this case. Relying on UNSCR 1205 of three years ago would be difficult. The situation might of course change."

The driness of the wit is unbearable. "The desire for regime change was not a legal base for military action"! Naked aggression is illegal, he could have said.

The Attorney General of the United Kingdom thought the reports Dearlove and Straw were bringing back from Washington reeked of an illegal war. People who plan out illegal wars are war criminals. He knew this. He was stuck, however. They were all stuck.

Professor Cole forgets an important bit of history here. Subsequent to this July meeting, the United States and Great Britain did go back to the U.N. for a new resolution, UNSCR 1441, which was adopted on November 8, 2002. When Iraq subsequently failed to comply with Resolution 1441, a new ground for military action existed. Thus, the Attorney General’s concern about relying on a three-year-old resolution was satisfied; in the Attorney General’s words, the situation changed. Consequently, when he wrote his official opinion shortly before the war began, he concluded that the war’s legality was a “reasonably arguable case” that could be “reasonably maintained.”

Is that a ringing endorsement? Of course not. But in our view, and that of most supporters of the war, a preemptive strike against a recidivist regime like Saddam’s is clearly justified where there is reasonable apprehension of danger to our security. And, while it would be nice to have such a strike blessed by the U.N.’s Security Council, where members of the Security Council have been bribed and have promised to veto any resolution authorizing war, it is absurd to argue that such veto power means it is illegal to act in our own defense. Attorney General Goldsmith applied a narrower standard; but it is hardly a shock to learn that the Bush administration’s view of what was necessary to legitimize the Iraq war was different from his or from Kofi Annan’s.

In short, this British memo, while it does provide a fascinating glimpse into high-level decision making in Blair’s government, is far from being a “smoking gun,” as Cole calls it. It adds nothing to our knowledge of the important issues surrounding the Iraq war.

http://powerlineblog.com/archives/010382.php#010382

“The loss in Viet Nam showed it is much more important to fight on the homefront than “go sign up to fight over in Iraq?”, we’ll only lose if the defeatist fifth column wins out.”

Spoken like a true coward. Go ask the military recruiter if that is true or ask the guys who are getting their tours extended through stop-loss because there are not enough troops.

You are a coward and a hypocrite.

You support sending other people to die when you are unwilling to go yourself.

Your conservative talking points are just cover for your selfish cowardice. You should be forced to go over there and fight the war that you think is so justified.

And now for a memo that actually has news:

DESPITE his denials, UN chief Kofi Annan was apparently told of efforts by his son’s employer to win an oil-for-food contract with Iraq in 1998, according to a memo written by an executive of the company, The New York Times has reported.

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,15616795-23109,00.html

I’ve got your number now “Party before country” pathetic little chickenhawk.

I see the Senate has finally apologised for all the Democratic filibusters against anti-lynching bills. Now days they just filibuster President Bush’s appointees.

“For decades, presidents asked Congress to outlaw lynching, and nearly 200 anti-lynching bills were introduced. On three occasions, the House passed anti-lynching legislation, the last time in 1940. And on all three occasions, the Senate, captured by southern filibusterers, talked the anti-lynching bills to death. With the Senate standing by, more than 4,700 people, mostly African Americans, were lynched between 1882 and 1968.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/13/AR2005061301562.html

What ever happened to the “Scoop Jackson” wing of the Democrat party?

It’s pretty pathetic when the angriest man at the Republican convention was a Democrat, representing the fading vestige of that grand tradition of domestic policy liberal and foreign policy hawk. That loss is what will make the Democrats a minority party for decades to come.

Go enlist you pathetic little coward.

It’s the natterings of pathetic little isolationist pacifists like you that led to the current situation. Bin Laden thought a good smack like 9-11 would send us home with our tails between our legs - just like CLinton after Black Hawk Down. Home to wait for the arrival of the conquering jihadists of the new caliphate.

Maybe you should move to France? You sound like a surrender monkey. Do you eat a lot of cheese?

All empty rhetoric. France? Give me a fucking break. Standing up to a governement that sends people to die for their own profit hardly makes the 57% of the country that now beleives that “surrender monkeys”. It means we realize that Bush is a crook and a liar and are waiting for the obstructionist Republicans to allow his impeachment or 2006 whichchever comes first.

You are a complete coward. I would never support a war that I wouldn’t be willing to fight in, yet you are fine with sending others to die for your ideology when you are unwilling to go yourself.

You are a spineless coward and should be forced to go take care of the thousands of US troops that are lying wounded missing legs and arms and eyes. You sick fucker. You pathetic little coward.

Even conservatives who don’t put their party before their country and common sense are seeing the truth:

Disassemble dissembling Iraq policy Tuesday, June 14, 2005

I realize that it is my role as a conservative to assert that George W. Bush is not a dimwit. Unfortunately, he keeps offering evidence to the contrary.

For example, there was that recent press conference in which the president made an allusion to “people that had been in some instance trained to disassemble — that means not to tell the truth.”

“Disassemble” means what any 10-year-old would believe it to mean — to take apart. The word Bush was looking for is “dissemble” — “to hide under a false semblance or seeming.” Advertisement

It was bad enough that the president of the United States could get this wrong. Worse was that in doing so he adopted the same professorial air that Dan Quayle employed in 1992 when, on a vice presidential visit to a school, he famously instructed a Trenton lad on how to misspell “potato.”

One expects more of those in the No. 1 and No. 2 positions of authority in the greatest nation on Earth. But in Bush’s case, at least, we can’t say he didn’t warn us. During his first run for president, he admitted that he knew little about foreign policy. But he assured us of one thing. Unlike those devious Democrats, he would not use the military for nation building.

“I would be very careful about using our troops as nation builders,” Bush said in 2000. “I believe the role of the military is to fight and win a war and, therefore, prevent war from happening in the first place.”

Bush also promised that before he got into any war he would assess “whether or not there was an exit strategy.”

I suspect those words, which amounted to the Bush foreign policy in its entirety, came not from the candidate but from his advisers, who knew what sort of foreign policy plays in the red states. Unfortunately for Bush, they were right. Over the weekend, a key red- state Republican said it’s time to start thinking about that long-overdue exit strategy. Rep. Walter Jones, a Republican from North Carolina, said he intends to introduce legislation this week calling for a clear-cut deadline for getting out of Iraq. “I feel that we need to make a decision as to what the goals will be that when we achieve those goals, we could declare victory,” Jones said on the ABC-TV program “This Week.”

Jones also took a shot at the “neoconservatives” who managed to convince Bush that it was good idea to try to remake the Mideast in our image. These characters have been dissembling like mad ever since their vision for Iraq began falling apart. But their dissembling was further disassembled last month with the release of a British government memo that revealed that long before the invasion the British government had doubts about the neocons’ planning for the aftermath.

“A post-war occupation of Iraq could lead to a protracted and costly nation-building exercise,” the formerly secret July 2002 report said. “As already made clear, the U.S. military plans are virtually silent on this point.”

A Washington Post report on the memo added a remark from Paul Wolfowitz, then the deputy defense secretary and one of the leading neocons behind the Iraq debacle. Speaking to a House subcommittee on the eve of the invasion, Wolfowitz noted that it was costing the United States about $3 billion a year to contain Saddam Hussein.

“I can’t imagine anyone here wanting to spend another $30 billion to be there for another 12 years,” Wolfowitz said. So far, the Bush administration has spent about seven times that amount, $208 billion, in a mere two years.

In the immediate aftermath of the invasion, the Bush people made it clear that they had no idea of the difficulties of occupying a fractious country the size of California. The first head of the U.S. occupation in Iraq, retired Gen. Jay Garner, figured the postwar mess would be sorted out quickly. “I’m giving myself more than three months — if it takes more than three months,” Garner said in an interview with the BBC just after the fall of Baghdad.

Bush administration officials confidently predicted that American troops would be leaving the country soon and certainly by 2005. What they didn’t predict was the obvious — that in a democratic Iraq the Shi’a majority would dominate. They spent most of the past two years trying to forestall the inevitable rise to power of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, which won the January elections anyway.

So after expending more than $200 billion and 1,700 lives, the administration has ended up with what it could have had in 2003 — or 1991 for that matter. If the goal of American policy in Iraq was to replace Saddam Hussein with a Shi’a government, the first President Bush could have accomplished that quite easily after the first Gulf War. That didn’t happen because George H.W. Bush was a little too smart for his own good. The same cannot be said of his son — at least not without dissembling.

Paul Mulshine is a Star-Ledger columnist. He may be reached at [email protected]

The "chicken hawk" epithet is usually employed as an ad hominem attack in substitute for serious debate. Moreover, as has been endlessly pointed out, some of our most effective wartime Presidents (Lincoln and F.D.R.) had no or minimal experience.

The ‘chicken hawk?” R. Emmett Tyrrell WASHINGTON, D.C. — As the debate over the fate of Saddam Hussein moves from a simmer to a boil, perhaps you have noticed that the Scrupling Few are again employing the term “chicken hawk.” The Scrupling Few are those who at once are negative toward war with Saddam and also positive — at least vaguely positive.

This is not to say they are positive for war exactly, but for good things to come from Washington, despite the evil Republicans. In describing the Scrupling Few, one cannot be much more concrete. They worry, they pontificate, they Scruple.

That is about it. Save for one other thing: They apply the term chicken hawk to those who favor war but have not actually experienced war. Then they Scruple about having done so. It is fair to say that the Scrupling Few are on both sides of the issue of war with Iraq. They are also on both sides of the legitimacy of the term chicken hawk. Some would call them poseurs — the less mature would call them chickens.

New York Times columnist Bill Keller employed the term chicken hawk the other day in a typically mealy-mouthed column whose vaporous point was that the Scruples of Sen. John Kerry about attacking Baghdad must be taken very seriously because of his Vietnam War record. On the other hand, “the current White House warriors” should be taken less seriously because they are not actually warriors — neither George W. Bush nor Dick Cheney served in Vietnam.

On yet another hand, Keller does not mean to say that lack of a war record disqualifies a statesman from advocating war. And on his third hand, Keller displays Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, two chicken hawks whose military decisions he presumably admires. (Incidentally, Keller must know that chicken hawk Reagan served in the military. He is merely Scrupling again.) And on the fourth hand, Keller does not approve of the term chicken hawk, though he does not disapprove — regular readers of Keller’s New York Times column must be devotees of magic acts.

Continuing his balmy sleight of hand with the term chicken hawk, Keller raises the key question: “Does that mean that those of us who avoided combat, including the current White House warriors (and your astigmatic columnist (self-effacing humor, that!)), are less worthy of trust on the subject of war?” Well, as you can imagine, Keller believes himself abundantly worthy of our trust, despite his admission to having “avoided” combat. He is, however, less confident of investing trust in the president and vice president. Now is it fair or even accurate for Keller to accuse them of avoiding combat? Strictly speaking, he is saying that they “shunned” combat. Has Keller any evidence?

Perhaps it is at this point appropriate to interrupt Keller’s magic act and puncture another of the liberals’ many myths about the Vietnam War. Keller and his confreres would have us believe that any member of the Vietnam generation (roughly, those men of draft-age between 1964 and 1975) who did not serve in the military “avoided” the military. That would make the Vietnam generation the largest cohort of draft dodgers in American history. It would also make Bill Clinton just one of the guys — though his now well-documented efforts in the 1960s to avoid his physical and dupe his draft board were highly unusual and shameful.

Only about 8 percent of the Vietnam generation ever went to Southeast Asia, most to Vietnam. Only about 25 percent ever served in any branch of the military, overseas or stateside. Today, the liberals solemnly praise the Vietnamese veterans, but during the late 1960s and early 1970s, they often reviled them as war criminals. Jane Fonda went so far as to call our POWs “hypocrites and liars,” for claiming torture at the hands of the North Vietnamese. Thus some 75 percent of the Vietnam generation never wore a uniform. They were not supposed to. The military had no need of them. If it had needed them, standards would have been lowered and exemptions tightened. The vast majority of the Vietnam generation’s draft records were perfectly legal and honorable.

Finally, Keller’s dismissal of President George W. Bush’s military service is as misleading as his dismissal of President Reagan’s. When the other 75 percent of his generation was following its civilian pursuits, the future president was flying F-107s in the Air National Guard. Is this combat avoidance? Tell that to the tens of thousands of National Guard troops serving abroad in the war on terror.

Bootlegging a person’s military record into his presentation of whether or not to fight a war is another example of the genetic fallacy. The validity of an idea depends on the coherence of the evidence adduced not on whether we like or admire those advancing the idea. If the Scrupling Few come up with a compelling argument for allowing Saddam Hussein to remain in power, I shall be on their side. But to Scruple is not to convince.

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/emmetttyrrell/et20020912.shtml

ROLLIN’ ON THE RIVERS

By MACKUBIN T. OWENS

MAY was a costly month in Iraq: 700 Iraqis and some 80 Americans died, making it one of the bloodiest months of the war. While bombings in Baghdad decreased over the last two weeks as the result of a major sweep by some 40,000 Iraqi soldiers and policemen, backed up by 10,000 troops (Operation Lightning/Operation Thunder), insurgent attacks against Iraqi civilians and police have resumed.

The continuing attacks have generated the usual sort of stories in the U.S. press: America is mired in a Vietnam-style quagmire. Thus a recent Boston Globe report began by claiming: “Military operations in Iraq have not succeeded in weakening the insurgency.”

But the Globe is wrong. Coalition operations in Iraq have killed hundreds of insurgents and led to the capture of many hundreds more, including two dozen of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s top lieutenants. Intelligence from captured insurgents, as well as from Zarqawi’s computer, has had a cascading effect, permitting the Coalition to maintain pressure on the insurgency.

Vice President Dick Cheney’s recent claim that the insurgency was in its “last throes,” however, was clearly an overstatement. But while the outcome in Iraq is far from certain — and even a favorable one won’t come overnight — evidence suggests the United States and the new Iraqi government are on the right track to ultimate success. To understand why, it is necessary to grasp the essentials of the current U.S. strategy in Iraq and how it seems to be playing out.

The Globe’s problem, one shared by most of the American press, is the tendency to see events in Iraq as isolated. They fail to see the overall campaign: a series of coordinated events — movements, battles and supporting operations — designed to achieve strategic or operational objectives within a military theater.

No force, conventional or guerrilla, can continue to fight if it is deprived of sanctuary and logistics support. Accordingly, the central goal of the U.S. strategy in Iraq is to destroy the insurgency by depriving it of its base in the Sunni Triangle and its “ratlines” — the infiltration routes that run from the Syrian border into the heart of Iraq.

One ratline follows the Euphrates River corridor — running from Syria to Husayba on the Syrian border and then through Qaim, Rawa, Haditha, Asad, Hit and Fallujah to Baghdad. The other follows the course of the Tigris — from the north through Mosul-Tel Afar to Tikrit and on to Baghdad. These two “river corridors” constitute the main spatial elements of a campaign to implement U.S. strategy.

This campaign began last November with the takedown of Fallujah.

Wresting Fallujah from the rebels was critically important: Control of the town had given them the infrastructure — human and physical — necessary to maintain a high tempo of attacks against the Iraqi government and coalition forces.

In and of itself, the loss of Fallujah didn’t cause the insurgency to collapse, but it did deprive the rebels of an indispensable sanctuary. Absent such a sanctuary, large terrorist networks cannot easily survive, being reduced to small, hunted bands.

With Fallujah captured, the Coalition continued a high tempo of offensive operations. After losing the city, Zarqawi apparently tried to reconstitute the insurgency in Mosul, but was unable to do so because of continued U.S. pressure. In Mosul as in Fallujah, Coalition forces killed and captured insurgents — forcing Zarqawi to move west into Al Anbar province. In March, an Iraqi special operations unit captured an insurgent camp near Lake Tharthar on the border of Anbar and Salaheddin provinces. Such operations forced him back to positions along the Syrian border.

Next came the rivers campaign — to destroy the insurgent infrastructure west and northwest of Fallujah, and so shut down those “ratlines” — which continues apace.

May saw four operations within that campaign:

• The first, Operation Matador, was a week-long Marine action centered on Qaim, near the Syrian border. Matador sought to kill and capture followers of Zarqawi known to be located there and to interdict the smuggling routes they used to move downriver to Baghdad. Some 125 insurgents died in the fighting.

• Next came Operation New Market, another Marine operation, in the Haditha area southeast of Qaim. Here, a major highway from Syria crosses the Euphrates and then branches north toward Mosul and southeast toward Fallujah and Baghdad. While the insurgents did not stand and fight as they had in Qaim, the operation still netted substantial intelligence.

• The third was a joint U.S.-Iraqi operation in the Mosul-Tel Afar region that contains the Tigris River ratline.

• The fourth operation of this campaign was the aforementioned Lightning/Thunder in Baghdad itself, which led to the capture of a former general in Saddam’s intelligence service, who (according to the U.S. military) led “the military wings of several terror cells” operating in west Baghdad. Hundreds of other insurgents were captured as well.

The rapid tempo of Coalition operations will likely continue. Indeed, as U.S. and Iraqi forces shut down these ratlines, the insurgency will likely fall back on its “strategic rear” in Syria. Thus, “hot pursuit” into Syria may soon become an issue.

The U.S. strategy in Iraq is limited by a number of factors: the U.S. forces available, Iraqi politics and the time it is taking to create a competent Iraqi military. But the ongoing river campaign indicates that America has chosen to go on the offensive, taking advantage of the success in Fallujah to deny the insurgents respite. The high operational tempo is intended to rapidly degrade the rebels’ lines of communication at both ends of the two river corridors, while killing and capturing as many of the enemy as possible.

But while military operations have weakened the insurgency, military means alone cannot defeat an insurgency. That is why it is necessary to bring the Sunnis into the government. Recent evidence suggests that the steps so far have already begun to drive a wedge between the Sunni and the foreign jihadis who have come to fight for Zarqawi.

Indeed, one of the reasons U.S. forces have been able to go on the offensive — despite the fact that U.S. troop strength is actually lower than it was earlier this year — is an improvement in actionable intelligence. Some of this is coming from captured insurgents. But much of it is coming from Sunnis who realize that their best chance for a future requires them to choose the new Iraqi government and reject the jihadis.

If current trends can be sustained, Zarqawi and his jihadi murderers will soon run out of time and space.

Mackubin Thomas Owens is a professor of national security affairs at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I.

You are a chickenhawk. You could enlist and refuse to do so but are more than willing to send other people to die for your ideology.

Please tell us why you are not enlisting? and don’t tell us it is because the military doesn’t need you, because they obviously do when they are calling up crippled 52 year olds.

Bush is guilty of high crimes and will be impeached. It is only a matter of time.

Not all Americans are as blinded by party loyalty as you are. They know that Bush is a liar and a crook and by supporting him you are a dupe and a traitor to your country.

An oldie but a goodie on the chickenhawk carard.

“Armchair General” The ugly idea that non-soldiers have less right to argue for war. By Christopher Hitchens Posted Monday, Nov. 11, 2002, at 2:04 PM PT

Continuing with the hidden vernaculars of “regime change” and hoping to build toward a Bierce-like series (last week the Straussian language of revolution from above and next week “terrorism”), one must pause simply to expel one term, to retire it, discredit it, and make its further employment an embarrassment to those who use it. The word is “armchair.”

You’ve heard it all right. The concept embodied in the contemptuous usage is this: someone who wants intervention in, say, Iraq ought to be prepared to go and fight there. An occasional corollary is that those who have actually seen war are not so keen to urge it.

The first thing to notice about this propaganda is how archaic it is. The whole point of the present phase of conflict is that we are faced with tactics that are directed primarily at civilians. Thus, while I was traveling last year in Pakistan, on the Afghan border and in Kashmir, and this year in the gulf, my wife was fighting her way across D.C., with the Pentagon in flames, to try and collect our daughter from a suddenly closed school, was attempting to deal with anthrax in our mailbox, was reading up on the pros and cons of smallpox vaccinations, and was coping with the consequences of a Muslim copycat loony who’d tried his hand as a suburban sniper. Should things ever become any hotter, it would be far safer to be in uniform in Doha, Qatar, or Kandahar, Afghanistan, than to be in an open homeland city. It is amazing that this essential element of the crisis should have taken so long to sink into certain skulls.

My wife is not of military age, and there is little chance of a draft for mothers. Are her views on Iraq therefore disqualified from utterance? And what about older comrades who can no longer shoulder a gun? What about friends of mine who are physically disabled? Should their expertise—often considerable—be set aside because they can’t ram it home with a bayonet?

There are some further unexamined implications of this stupid tactic. It is said, for example, that someone like former Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey has more right to pronounce on a war than someone who avoided service in Vietnam. Well, last year Kerrey was compelled to admit that he had led a calamitous expedition into a Vietnamese village and had been responsible for the slaughter of several children and elderly people. (He chose to be somewhat shady about whether this responsibility was direct or indirect.) Do I turn to such a man for advice on how to deal with Saddam Hussein? The connection is not self-evident, more especially since, as far as I am aware, Kerrey knows no more about Iraq than I know about how to construct a chess-playing computer.

One hopes that the next implication is inadvertent, but the clear suggestion is that there ought not to be civilian control of the military. What—have callow noncombatants giving brisk orders to grizzled soldiers? How could Lincoln have fired the slavery-loving Gen. George B. McClellan, or Truman dismissed the glorious Douglas MacArthur? During the defense of Washington, Lincoln became the first and last president to hear shots fired in anger. Donald Rumsfeld was at his desk in the Pentagon when the plane hit, but probably is no better and no worse a defense secretary for that.

A related term is “chicken-hawk.” It is freely used to defame intellectual militants who favor an interventionist strategy. Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska made use of the implication recently, when he invited Richard Perle to be first into Baghdad. Someone ought to point out that the term “chicken-hawk” originated as a particularly nasty term for a pederast or child molester: It has evidently not quite lost its association with sissyhood. It’s a smear, in other words, and it is a silly smear for the reasons given above, to which could be added the following: The United States now has an all-volunteer Army, made up of people who receive fairly good pay and many health and educational benefits. They signed up to a bargain when they joined, and the terms of the bargain are obedience to the decisions of a civilian president and Congress. Who would have this any other way? If the entire military brass and rank-and-file opposed a war with Saddam, they would be as obliged to keep their opinions to themselves as they would if they favored nuking Basra. Colin Powell hugely exceeded his authority as chairman of the Joint Chiefs when he wrote articles against the military rescue of Bosnia; he would have been just as open to criticism if he had called for invading Serbia. This is a wall of separation that must not be breached, for the sake of the Constitution. (Mind you, I have the impression that if the “armchair” arguers got their way and asked only war veterans what to do about Saddam Hussein, there would have been a rather abrupt “regime change” in Iraq long before now.)

When a man thinks that any stick will do, said Chesterton, he is likely to pick up a boomerang. Shall we inquire into the “armchair” or otherwise sedentary lives of those who sympathized with Milosevic, or who published euphemisms about al-Qaida, or who went on fatuous hospitality trips to Baghdad and ended up echoing Baathist propaganda? You can be sure that they would yell about “the politics of personal destruction” or perhaps “McCarthyism” if such an imputation was made. Well, then, let them beware of licensing such a cheap form of ad hominem argument. Just as some of the greatest anti-war writers and poets were courageous soldiers, some of the best minds of World War II were civilian strategists and code-breakers, and some of the finest Resistance fighters were intellectuals who picked up weapons. There is no certain way of enforcing these distinctions morally, until the test actually comes. But now civilians are in the front line as never before, and we shall be needing a more rigorous terminology to reflect that dramatic fact.

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His most recent book is Thomas Jefferson: Author of America.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2073772/

PICKETERS NEEDED!!!

URGENT!!!

TERRORISTS PLAN TO MEET ON OUR CAMPUS NEXT WEEK!!!

SEE http://www.endtheoccupation.org/article.php?id=1100

Draft Agenda

Friday, June 24 Grainger Hall of Business Administration, University of Wisconsin 975 University Avenue

7:00-8:30PM Beyond Chutzpah: The Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History

Dr. Norman Finkelstein, Professor of Political Theory at DePaul University, and author of Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict, will present a keynote address that is free and open to the public.

Saturday, June 25 Grainger Hall of Business Administration, University of Wisconsin 975 University Avenue

8:30-9:30AM Registration and breakfast

9:30-10:15AM Welcome/Ice-Breakers and About the US Campaign

Members of the Madison-Rafah Sister City Project will welcome conference participants to Madison and review conference logistics with attendees. Kymberlie Quong Charles, US Campaign Membership Outreach Coordinator, will introduce the US Campaign, its goals, membership criteria, organizing strategy, taskforces, days of action, etc.

10:30AM-12:00PM Skills-Building Workshop Session #1

Workshops will be practical, hands-on, skills-building sessions that will increase the effectiveness of conference attendees' activism. Conference attendees will choose three out of four workshops. For the media and grassroots advocacy workshops, conference attendees will be encouraged to plug into national taskforces facilitated by the US Campaign. Scheduled workshop facilitators are:

Divestment: Mohammed Abed, al-Awda Wisconsin, Mark Evenson & Nancy Turner, Faculty, UW-Platteville, and The Association of University of Wisconsin Professionals Sister City Projects: Jennifer Loewenstein, George Arida, Jim Goronson, Kathy Walsh, Madison-Rafah Sister City Project Grassroots Advocacy: Josh Ruebner, US Campaign Legislative Task Force Media: Rima Mutreja, Palestine Media Watch/US Campaign Media Task Force

12:00PM-1:30PM Lunch & informal caucuses/affinity groups

NOTE: Lunch is not being provided at the conference. Conference attendees will be directed to low-cost food options near campus.

Conference attendees will organize themselves into informal caucuses/affinity groups in order to network and strategize by common interest. Examples could be by religious, ethnic, racial, professional, or geographic identity.

1:30PM-3:00PM Skills-Building Workshop Session #2

3:00PM-3:30PM Break

3:30PM-5:00PM Skills-Building Workshop Session #3

5:00PM-5:30PM Conclusions & Evaluations

Conference organizers will facilitate a discussion on lessons learned from the conference and encourage people and groups to plug into the work of the US Campaign. Conference attendees who are willing to circulate their contact information can do so and will be encouraged to fill out conference evaluation forms before leaving.

The Crossing, 1127 University Ave.

5:30PM-7:30PM Social Hour/Dinner

The conference will move across campus to The Crossing, a campus religious center, for a social hour and Middle Eastern dinner. Both conference attendees and the general public are invited to the dinner, which will cost $10.

7:30PM-9:00PM Rebuilding Homes, Rebuilding Hopes in Gaza

Cindy and Craig Corrie, the parents of Rachel Corrie, a US peace activist who was killed by the Israeli army in the Gaza Strip, and Khaled and Samah Nasrallah, family members who lived in the house that Rachel tried to prevent from being demolished when she was killed, will present the story that links their families together. The panelists will be introduced by Joe Carr, a member of Christian Peacemaker Teams, who will also peform a spoken word tribute to Rachel Corrie. The panelists will speak about their involvement with the Rebuilding Homes Alliance and there will be a fundraiser for the US Campaign and the Madison-Rafah Sister City Project. The event is free and open to the public.

Sunday, June 26 The Crossing, 1127 University Ave.

9:00AM-9:30 AM Breakfast

9:30-12:00PM Strategizing Session

Conference attendees will group themselves by geography (local, regional, state-wide) in order to strategize and develop a plan of action for their area in an informal setting. Strategizing sessions will be facilitated by conference organizers to encourage the formation of new groups where none exist, to strengthen existing groups, and to create local, regional, and state-wide coalitions that are plugged into the work and organizing strategy of the US Campaign.

I see lots of excuses for why you are afraid to go and risk your life in Iraq.

If you truly beleive the war is justified and that we are preventing terrorism which is serious threat to our neational security, you would go enlist.

Any reasonable person can see that you are a coward and a hypocrite.

Please tell us YOUR reasons for not joining up, not some more articles by conservatives who are also cowardly hypocrites.

I’m too old. Hitchens is too.

“I’m too old. Hitchens is too.”

That doesn’t mean you can’t do anything. You could work a non-combat role, like the supply line. If you have any specialized analytical skills, you could work for military intelligence. If you speak any foreign languages, you could be a translator. There are a million other things you could do, too.

So why don’t you get up off your lazy ass and actually do something for the war effort, if you believe in it so much, instead of letting America’s poor and minorities do all the dying and sacrificing for you?

http://small.business-web-site.net/questinos/ hopelessness gloomymartyeredscouring

“instead of letting America’s poor and minorities do all the dying and sacrificing for you?”

You’re probably one of the assholes that laughed at the death of Pat Tillman and called him a fool for giving up millions to fight the USA’s enemies.

You are, aren’t you?

“You’re probably one of the assholes that laughed at the death of Pat Tillman and called him a fool for giving up millions to fight the USA’s enemies.

You are, aren’t you?”

No, I’m not, and your comment indicates that you completely missed the point.

I applauded Tillman’s decision to join the army because he had the guts to stand up for what he believed and defend his country. I didn’t call him a fool for giving up millions to fight our enemies — I called him a hero.

You, however, sit on your ever-expanding ass and do nothing to help your country, while America’s poor and minorities do all the work.

And before you start accusing me of doing the same, I served in the first war in Iraq and volunteered to serve again after 9/11, but the army wouldn’t send me into combat because of injuries I suffered in 1991. Now I’m studying languages so that I will be able to serve my country translating intercepted conversations and documents.

Maybe you should get your head removed from your colossal ass, clean the shit out of your ears, and pay attention to what other people have to say before you start making ridiculous accusations, you bovine moron.

Maybe Dummycrat shit like this is adversely affecting recruitment?

“Every member of the military and their families and every voter who admires the military should be watching very closely as the Democratic Party and MSM say and do nothing about Dick Durbin’s smear. You can’t be a supporter of the military and allow the #2 Democrat in the Senate to put the Nazi/Stalin/Pol Pot brand on the troops, which is exactly what Durbin did.”

http://hughhewitt.com/#postid1718

Yeah the Democrats are hurting the war effort. That’s it.

It has absolutely nothing to do with the Bush administration mishandling a war that we were lied into in the first place.

Republican talking points: Blame Bill Clinton/Democrats despite the fact that Republicans control all branches of government.The buck stops anywhere but here is the new sign on Bush’s desk!

Republican motto : Party before country!

You are not too old. They would take you. Why don’t you meet me in University Square Monday at 3pm and we will go find out whether you are too old?

Oh wait you won’t. Because you are a coward who sends other people to die for you.

What a pathetic excuse for an American. He wants to send other people to die but is unwilling to go himself.

Figures though since his idol is Monkey boy whos skipped out on Vietnam and then set his attack dogs on too war heroes, whatever you think of their politics, Kerry and cleland.

The neo-con slime machine did the same thing to their own party with McCain, who though I don’t like his politics, I must admit is a brave man.

These neocons and their followers are despicable criminals. I am glad the American people are waking up to this and I can’t wait to see Shrub in a jail cell.

Want to send your support to a soldier in harm’s way, but have no idea of what to send, who to send it to, or how to send it?

http://anysoldier.com/index.cfm

Throughout the last campaign season, senior Democrats had a standard line in their speeches, usually delivered with righteous anger, about how “nobody has a right to question my patriotism!” Given that nobody was questioning their patriotism, it seemed an odd thing to harp on about. But, aware of their touchiness on the subject, I hasten to add that in what follows I am not questioning Dick Durbin’s patriotism, at least not for the first couple of paragraphs. Instead, I’ll begin by questioning his sanity… .

Every third-rate hack on every European newspaper can do the Americans-are-Nazis schtick. Amnesty International has already declared Guantanamo the “gulag of our times.” But I do believe the senator is the first to compare the U.S. armed forces with the blood-drenched thugs of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge. Way to go, senator!

This isn’t a Republican vs Democrat thing; it’s about senior Democrats who are so over-invested in their hatred of a passing administration that they’ve signed on to the nuttiest slurs of the lunatic fringe. It would be heartening to think that Durbin will himself now be subjected to some serious torture. Not real torture, of course; I don’t mean using Pol Pot techniques and playing the Celine Dion Christmas album really loud to him. But he should at least be made a little uncomfortable over what he’s done — in a time of war, make an inflammatory libel against his country’s military that has no value whatsoever except to America’s enemies. Shame on him, and shame on those fellow senators and Democrats who by their refusal to condemn him endorse his slander.

http://www.suntimes.com/output/steyn/cst-edt-steyn19.html

I truly feel sorry for our soldiers who were put in the field to die so Bush could look better than his father. It is really sad what sociopaths these people are.

I would never send somone to die in a war that I was unwilling to fight myself. It really sickens me that I have friends and classmates over there because Americans are too stupid to care about the world or pick up a newspaper and just believe whatever comes out of Rush Limbaugh’s mouth.

Meanwhile our own generals have declared this war unwinnable, but Bush is too stubborn and stupid to admit he was wrong so our soldiers just keep getting killed. Goddamn it it makes me furious. He would rather see soldiers die than admit he made a mistake. He is truly a pathetic excuse for a human and will burn in hell if there is one.

And then conservatives like this fucker above say that the army doesn’t need them. That they need their support “at home” .What a pathetic cowardly piece of crap excuse that is. You just want to sit around at your job earning cash for another SUV while other people die for your uneducated biases about what will make the world safer.

You are the true evil in this country. I wish you would go over to Iraq and let one of my friends who is married with a 9 month old daughter come home so he could support his family again.

Goddamn I hate you.

Will the DSM turn out to be more “fake but accurate” BS?

The media and the Leftists have had a field day with the Downing Street memos that they claim imply that the Bush administration lied about the intelligence on WMD in order to justify the attack on Iraq. Despite the fact that none of the memos actually say that, none of them quote any officials or any documents, and that the text of the memos show that the British government worried about the deployment of WMD by Saddam against Coalition troops, Kuwait and/or Israel, the meme continues to survive.

Until tonight, however, no one questioned the authenticity of the documents provided by the Times of London. That has now changed, as Times reporter Michael Smith admitted that the memos he used are not originals, but retyped copies (via LGF and CQ reader Sapper):

The eight memos — all labeled “secret” or “confidential” — were first obtained by British reporter Michael Smith, who has written about them in The Daily Telegraph and The Sunday Times.

Smith told AP he protected the identity of the source he had obtained the documents from by typing copies of them on plain paper and destroying the originals.

The AP obtained copies of six of the memos (the other two have circulated widely). A senior British official who reviewed the copies said their content appeared authentic. He spoke on condition of anonymity because of the secret nature of the material.

Readers of this site should recall this set of circumstances from last year. The Killian memos at the center of CBS’ 60 Minutes Wednesday report on George Bush’ National Guard service supposedly went through the same laundry service as the Downing Street Memos. Bill Burkett, once he’d been outed as the source of the now-disgraced Killian memos, claimed that a woman named Lucy Ramirez provided them to him — but that he made copies and burned the originals to protect her identity or that of her source.

http://www.captainsquartersblog.com/mt/archives/004746.php

So when Durbin says something about our killing detainess in our detainment camps to be reminiscent of Nazi or Stalin camps that is terrible and Dems are traitors, but when Rick Santorum (R-PA) says something about Democrats being like Nazis that is completely okay?

Republican motto: Party before country. Hypocrisy for all!

“Will the DSM turn out to be more “fake but accurate” BS?”

Nothing fake about the DSM, you are quoting from a conservative blog.

The writers of that blog are like you, they refuse to acknowledge any mistakes that their party might have made and are just blind brainwashed sheep.

BAA! BAAA! Republicans are always right ! Baaa!

Obviously the Dems are the only ones guilty of using Nazi rhetoric…

GOP has used Nazi, Hitler references on stem cells, abortion, taxes and the environment

An array of senior Republican officials and activists—including the Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign—have invoked Hitler or Nazi references, raising questions of hypocrisy for recent attacks on Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) for referencing "Nazi" tactics at Guantanamo Bay, RAW STORY has found.

Republicans criticized a speech that Durbin made recently in the Senate citing mistreatment of prisoners at Guantanamo, calling on the Illinois senator to apologize. Durbin read from an FBI email which complained about "torture techniques" used at the facilities, saying “you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags or some mad regime — Pol Pot or others — that had no concern for human beings.”

Advertisement: Story continues below Durbin's remarks were quickly snapped up by conservatives and the media.

But senior Republicans—including Chairman of the Republican National Committee Ken Mehlman—have not apologized, and have in fact defended, comparisons of Democrats to Nazis in the past.

Last June, then-Bush campaign manager Mehlman defended an ad that contained footage of Adolf Hitler interspersed with images of Democratic leaders Al Gore, Dick Gephart and John Kerry. The campaign defended the images, saying they were taken from a video on MoveOn.org.

Mehlman said it was used “to show the depths to which these Kerry supporters will sink to win.” The video was later removed.

Mehlman is not alone. A raft of Republicans in Congress have invoked Hitler and Nazism on issues from stem cell research, to abortion, to taxes and the environment.

White House confidante Grover Norquist, known for his blistering attacks on U.S. taxes, likened the estate tax to the "morality of the Holocaust" in October 2003.

“The argument that some who play to the politics of hate and envy and class division will say is, ‘Well, that’s only 2 percent — or, as people get richer, 5 percent, in the near future — of Americans likely to have to pay [the estate tax]," he told NPR. "I mean, that’s the morality of the Holocaust: ‘Oh, it’s only a small percentage. It’s not you; it’s somebody else.'"

After being criticized for his remarks, Norquist expanded them in 2004 to include Democrats.

“The Nazis were for gun control, the Nazis were for high marginal tax rates…. Do you want to talk about who’s closer politically to national socialism, the Right or the Left?” he told the Jewish newspaper The Forward. He also “told the Forward that he would not hesitate to use Holocaust comparisons in the future.”

A Republican senator invoked Nazism when criticizing stem cell research last year.

“We certainly have all seen the rejections of Nazi Germany’s abuses of science," Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) declared regarding his opposition to stem cell research last October. "As a society and a nation, there ought to be some limit on what we can allow or should allow.”

In response to a ruling on abortion last September, Congressman Steve King said following law on reproductive rights equivalent to a Nazi guard saying he was following orders.

"That, Mr. Speaker, is a 'modern-day' equivalent of the Nazi prison guard saying ‘I was just following orders,'" he said on the House floor Sept. 8, 2004. "It was all legal in Nazi Germany at the time."

Another senator even compared the Kyoto climate treaty to Nazism, repeating a quotation from a Russian official.

Sen. James Inhofe said Oct. 11, 2004 that Kyoto “would deal a powerful blow on the whole humanity similar to the one humanity experienced when Nazism and communism flourished.”

The Oklahoma Republican added, “The world has certainly turned on its head that we Americans must look to Russians for speaking out strongly against irrational authoritarian ideologies.”

Sen. Tom Cole (R-OK) dragged out Hitler to hit Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry.

“Cole Claims a Vote Against Bush Is a Vote For Hitler,” KTOK radio in Oklahoma blared last year.

“Republican Congressman Tom Cole claims a vote against the 're-election' of President Bush is like supporting Adolph Hitler during World War Two," the station reported. "It’s what he said recently before a meeting of Canadian County Republicans.”

Cole later codified his statement, saying through a spokesperson: “What do you think Hitler would have thought if Roosevelt would’ve lost the election in 1944?"

Others, too, have likened Democratic policy to Nazism. Sen. Phil Gramm (R-TX) compared a Democratic tax plan to Nazi law in 2002.

“Now, forgive me, but that is right out of Nazi Germany," Gramm said. "I don’t understand … why all of a sudden we are passing laws that sound as if they are right out of Nazi Germany.”

And just last month, Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) compared Democrats with Adolf Hitler during the filibuster battle.

“Imagine, the rule that this is the way we confirm judges has been in place for 214 years, broken by the other side 2 years ago, and the audacity of some Members to stand up and say, How dare you break this rule, it is the equivalent of Adolf Hitler in 1942 saying: I’m in Paris, how dare you invade me, how dare you bomb my city. It’s mine,” Santorum said May 19. “This is no more the rule of the Senate than it was the rule of the Senate before not to filibuster.”

“Advertisement: Story continues below”

Not that I disagree with anything you posted, but if you’re going to copy from dailykos, don’t you think you should edit out the ads?

Durban sure is an asshat. How does he end up as the Number Two Democrat in the US Senate?

Judging from the way he's dug himself in, Dick Durbin, the Number Two Democrat in the US Senate, genuinely believes Gitmo is analogous to Belsen, the gulags and the killing fields. But he crossed a line, from anti-Bush to anti-American, and most Americans have no interest in following him down that path.You can't claim (as Democrats do, incessantly) to "support our troops" and then dump them in the same category as the Nazis and the Khmer Rouge. In the hermetically sealed echo chamber between the Dem leadership, the mainstream US media, Hollywood, Ivy League "intellectuals" and European sophisticates, the gulag cracks are utterly unexceptional. But, for a political party that keeps losing elections because it has less and less appeal outside a few coastal enclaves, Durbin's remarks are devastating. The Democrats flopped in 2002 and 2004 because they were seen as incoherent on national security issues. Explicitly branding themselves as the "terrorists' rights" party is unlikely to improve their chances for 2006.

http://daily.nysun.com/Repository/getmailfiles.asp?Style=OliveXLib:ArticleToMail&Type=text/html&Path=NYS/2005/06/20&ID=Ar00800

Here are some other anti-war nutjobs, go ahead and hook up with them. They don’t like Bush either!

They were doing a lot of laughing. The old man had about four signs (including “Thank God for 9/11”, “Thank God for IEDs”, “Fag Troops” and “U.S.A. Sin = 9/11”) that he held up in turn; the “son” had an “America is Doomed” sign, and the wife? daughter? had “God Hates Fags” and “Fags Doom Nations”.

http://bubbleheads.blogspot.com/2005/06/friend-of-my-enemy.html

And instead of giving the enemy a propaganda coup by comparing American treatment of prisoners with some of the most murderous regimes in history, Durbin’s partisanship would have him striking a much more patriotic tune, as he did in 1998 when defending the Clinton administration’s decision to bomb Iraq:

"I call on those who question the motives of the president and his national security advisors to join with the rest of America in presenting a united front to our enemies abroad."

What a shame that to Dick Durbin the idea of presenting a united front to our enemies abroad only applies when a Democrat is in the Oval Office.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/Commentary/blog617050930.html

Various frothing posters to various frothing blogs: of corse he was innocent the whole thing was set up by rove to make a distracton for Chimpy McBushitler so no one would pay attention to Iraq and it worked!!!! Expect now some other star to get busted on bogus charges — watch your back sean penn, they’ll probably have you busted at customs for bringing back iraninan weed (which is awesome) so you cant tell the truth about CIA dirty trix to topple theyre governement. I’m no fan of the Iranian guv but they have to be better than our Texas Nazi Jesusland Diebold One-nation-under-Enron theocracy. I mean at least they had elections!!!!! Anyway we love you Michael and as soon as I saw Faux News was covering the trial I knew you were innocent.

http://www.newhousenews.com/archive/lileks061505.html

“So when Durbin says something about our killing detainess in our detainment camps to be reminiscent of Nazi or Stalin camps that is terrible…”

I know that size shouldn’t matter, but there is the fact that the numbers are different by orders of magitude, like exponetially different. And then there is that matter of innocent civilians vs. murdering thugs.

“obscene and unbalanced” seems to be about right.

I just spent two weeks in Northern Europe and Russia, where the only major news from the U.S. was Michael Jackson's trial and Dick Durbin's comparison of our troops in Guantanamo with death camp guards in Nazi Germany and the Communist Gulag.

Now, the Europeans know a thing or two about the Nazis and the Gulag (search). All told, tens of millions of Europeans and Russians were slaughtered in Nazi and Soviet death camps. In fact, you don't have to dig too deep to find a collective guilt in Europe about not doing more to stop the Holocaust.

To bring up the 550 prisoners of Guantanamo in the context of regimes that practiced the wholesale murder of millions may seem obscene and unbalanced. But it does help let Europeans off the hook, which may be why they gave the story about as much space as they gave to Michael Jackson.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,160132,00.html

Subject: Was it worth it?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/ 2005/06/17/AR2005061701217_pf.html

Whether This War Was Worth It In Analyzing Iraq, Consider the Effects of Having Done Nothing

By Robert Kagan Post Sunday, June 19, 2005; B07

Serious scholars still debate whether the Civil War was necessary, never mind the more obvious “wars of choice” such as World War I, the War of 1812, the Spanish-American War, the Korean War, wars in Vietnam and Kosovo, and the Persian Gulf War. To a certain brand of American isolationist, even World War II was unnecessary and counterproductive. So there is nothing remarkable about polls showing Americans wondering whether the recent Iraq war was “worth it.” It is a great American myth, voiced by John Kerry last year, that the nation goes to war only when there is no question about the necessity of going to war. There’s always a question. Even if the Iraqi insurgency disappeared tomorrow, George Ibrahim al Washington became president of Iraq and every liter of Saddam Hussein’s onetime stockpile of chemical and biological weapons suddenly appeared in the desert, historians would still spend the next century debating whether the war was “worth it.”

Wars remain subjects of debate not just because their “necessity” is in doubt but also because their results are mixed.

One problem is that we always know what did happen as a result of war, but we never know what didn’t happen.

To assess whether the Iraq war was worth it requires seriously posing the question: What would have happened if the Bush administration had not gone to war in March 2003? That is a missing but essential piece of the current very legitimate debate. We all know what has gone wrong since the Iraq war began, but it is not as if, in the absence of a war, everything would have gone right. The most sensible argument for the invasion was not that Hussein was about to strike the United States or anyone else with a nuclear bomb. It was that containment could not be preserved indefinitely, that Hussein was repeatedly defying the international community and that his defiance appeared to both the Clinton and Bush administrations to be gradually succeeding. He was driving a wedge between the United States and Britain, on one side, which wanted to maintain sanctions and containment, and France, Russia, and China, on the other, which wanted to drop sanctions and normalize relations with him. The main concern of senior officials in both administrations was that, in the words of then-national security adviser Samuel “Sandy” Berger, containment was not “sustainable over the long run.”

It is entirely possible, in short, that if the Bush administration had not gone to war in 2003, the United States might have faced a more dangerous and daring Saddam Hussein later on and felt compelled to act.

Robert Kagan, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, writes a monthly column for The Post.

Lot of interesting reading here about the Iraq situation:

http://www.opinionatedbastard.com/archives/000424.html

Heres a small sample:

Is this war about WMD? To some extent, but Saddam had enough money floating around in cash ($1B recovered during the invasion) to cause a lot of problems even without WMD. Imagine, if you will, if he donated $100M to an American neo-Nazi group? I think the Bush administration just siezed on this because they thought their intelligence was better then it was. In fact, only 3 people knew that Iraq didn’t have WMD: Saddam and two of his generals. The rest of the Iraqi generals thought he did, and didn’t find out he was lying until after the invasion.

Is this war about liberating Iraq? To some extent. Bush2 has declared a sea change in US foreign policy in that the US will now actively push for democracy in countries. This was probably inevitable given the end of the Cold War, and the general belief of most Americans that democracy isn’t just for white people, but it took Bush2 to state it. More importantly, Bush2 has actually followed through with this in about 75% of the cases.

So the war is really about all of these things, but it took the decisions of many Presidents (Wilson, Carter, Reagan, Bush1, Clinton, Bush2) to get us there. Given the decisions of the first 5, it was inevitable I think that the sixth President on the list would have had to do "something" about Iraq, whether his name had been Bush or Gore. And the "no-fly" zones were like juggling a loaded gun: at some point you’ll drop it and you’ll get shot.

So while I don’t think the US has been blameless in this whole process, there is plenty of blame to go around: The Saudis, French, Germans, British all played a much larger role then the US in the early years. You can’t blame it all on Bush2 either, the other Presidents had much bigger roles.

Blame it all on Tom “My Name is Satan” DeLay.

In Ohio Vote, Woes, Yes, Fraud, No

By JAMES DAO Published: June 23, 2005

WASHINGTON, June 22 - A five-month study for the Democratic National Committee found that more than one in four Ohio voters experienced problems at the polls last fall, , but the study did not find evidence of widespread election fraud that might have contributed to President Bush’s narrow victory there.

The detailed report, released Wednesday, said that disproportionately high numbers of blacks and young people had complained about long lines, intimidation and malfunctioning machines. But Democratic officials said they could not conclude that Mr. Bush’s Democratic challenger, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, would have won in Ohio even if voting had gone smoothly.

“The purpose of this study was not to challenge the results of the election,” Howard Dean, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, told reporters at the party’s headquarters in Washington.

But Dr. Dean said the volume of problems reported by blacks and young people suggested that Republicans had tried to suppress the vote in heavily Democratic districts. The report called on state legislatures to enact rules that would improve voting; for example, by issuing clear standards for allocating voting machines, replacing punch-card and other voting machines with so-called precinct-tabulated optical scan systems and adopting more lenient standards for absentee voting.

“This is bad for America,” Dr. Dean said. “We need to repair and restructure the way we conduct elections in America.”

Ken Mehlman, chairman of the Republican National Committee, called the report “pure political fiction,” asserting that Democratic groups did more to subvert voting last year by submitting false voter registrations in Ohio.

“Republicans will continue to register and inspire new voters, make it easier for everyone to vote at the polls and protect everyone’s franchise from being canceled out by illegal or fraudulent registration,” Mr. Mehlman said in a statement.

The Democratic investigation was conducted by pollsters, political scientists and voting-machine experts led by Donna L. Brazile, head of the party’s Voting Rights Institute. It was based on a survey of 1,201 randomly selected Ohioans and a precinct-by-precinct analysis of registration data, turnout and results.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/23/politics/23voting.html

I UNDERSTAND EVERYTHING NOW.

yOU ARE NOT A CHICKENHAWK BUT A MEMBER OF OPERATION YELLOW ELEPHANT.

http://patriotboy.blogspot.com/20050619patriotboyarchive.html#111924907437313848

A COWARD EITHER WAY

who ever said gays are equal

http://vioxx.medical4order.com/3e3skg/ they deflatedfifthgrumps

“who ever said gays are equal”

your mom

You idiot! It’s all about division of labor. Some have to pay taxes to buy the bullets, others get paid to shoot them.

http://vioxx.medical4order.com/3e3skg/ they deflatedfifthgrumps

“You idiot! It’s all about division of labor. Some have to pay taxes to buy the bullets, others get paid to shoot them.”

You idiot! If that’s the case, then why do soldiers have to pay taxes? Shouldn’t their incomes be tax free?

How anyone can support the Bush administration is beyond me. Either you have your head up your ass or you are truly just a horrible human who thinks that Americans should be lied to, cheated, and fleeced of their tax dollars. In the case of the former you are just stupid or ignorant. In the case of the latter, you should be tried for treason along with the rest of Leo Strauss’s followers in the current administration.

I do wish that Bush and the Republican party was not so involved with the Christian fundies, but then very few Christians (or Jews for that matter) call for the death of atheists, apostates or blasphemers as do even the “moderate” Moslems.

Makes me sick but there it is. I guess I like the fundie Christians better than the fundie Moslems - the Christians don’t cut off your head if you don’t see things their way. You know that once you become a Moslem you can never leave - it’s the death penalty to change to another religion or renounce religion entirely. And there’s no free speech, blasphemy gets the death penalty.

As an atheist apostate who blasphemes, it’s a very easy choice for me when picking a side to be on in the war against the Islamic fascist terrorists.

I’d rather that the terrorists be lured to Iraq and dealt with by trained US troops than see them dispersed around the world working to bring about the new Caliphate.

As for treason, those cheering on the murdering thugs who are killing US troops are the traitors. These thugs, many from SA or Syria, are NOT the same as the Minutemen!

With all the buk here I think it’s time for something from the “The Opinionated Bastard” (tm)

Debunking Iraq Myths

Newly inspired by the various liberals who have been commenting on my blog lately, and my recent labeling as a "moderate" by that political test, I’ve decided to debunk some Iraq Myths by both the right and the left. For those of you who’ve been reading blogs for awhile, you might find my take on the history leading up to the Iraq war interesting.

If you’re new to blogs, this will cover many of the standard issues that have been discussed to death in the blogosphere. This is actually a blatant attempt by me to add a little more nuance to the comments section: I’m getting sick of arguing with all the people who have been fed distortions by the mainstream media about the Iraq war. I’m hoping that with some more context, perhaps we can all come to a more reasonable level of discussion.

It’s long, so you’ll have to follow the link below.

http://www.opinionatedbastard.com/archives/000424.html

Evan Sayet is doing a great job of showing up the follies and inconsistencies in Leftism. His analyses of Leftist thinking are in many ways spot-on. And I encourage people to have a read of his blog right now. You will note that he freely admits, however, that some things about “liberals” are just incomprehensible to him. He is not alone in that. Leftists are incomprehensible to a lot of people. And the reason they are incomprehensible is that we treat Leftists with more courtesy than they deserve. We take seriously statements they make that are not at all serious. We assume that Leftism is a set of ideas or even a philosophy when it is neither of those things. Leftism is a posture, not a set of ideas. And as such it can only be understood psychologically rather than logically. The Leftist is not at all bothered by his inconsistencies or failures to recognize reality. So to discover inconsistencies and unreality in his utterances is both easy and irrelevant. A Leftist utterance is not aimed at any sort of serious explanation of the world at all. It is aimed simply at making the Leftist feel good — and hopefully of persuading others that he is a good guy too.

So the Leftist can quite cheerfully say that there are no genetic influences on human behaviour when discussing IQ and then go on immediately to say that homosexuality is genetically inherited (“the gay gene”). To conservatives that sounds like inconsistency and it is certainly logically inconsistent. But the Leftist isn’t really bothered about logic. What he says is psychologically consistent. In both cases he is casting himself in the heroic role of the defender of the underdog.

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com/20050619dissectleftarchive.html#111921805658216145

I do wish that Bush and the Republican party was not so involved with the Christian fundies, but then very few Christians (or Jews for that matter) call for the death of atheists, apostates or blasphemers as do even the “moderate” Moslems.

Makes me sick but there it is. I guess I like the fundie Christians better than the fundie Moslems - the Christians don’t cut off your head if you don’t see things their way. You know that once you become a Moslem you can never leave - it’s the death penalty to change to another religion or renounce religion entirely. And there’s no free speech, blasphemy gets the death penalty.”

So in other words, today’s Muslims are identical to the Christians of 150 years ago? That would suggest that the war on terrorism can only be won if Islamic theocracies are converted to secular democracies, much as 19th century Christian theocracies were forced to do.

Of course, if you read orthodox Christian doctrine, they’re not any different from the Muslims. For example, the Catholics still have the Inquisition, albeit under a different name.

Where did that yellow elephant go?

Do you think he is:

a) signing up to fight in Iraq since he feels compelled because it was completely justified and posed a severe threat to the US

b) using the spare hours of daylight going door to door to support the troops by trying to prevent Republicans from cutting Veteran’s benefits further than they already have

c) sitting on his ass quoting from right wing blogs while sitting comfortable at home making money while other people die because he refuses to admit that King George could ever be mistaken?

d) Getting a lobotomy so that we would all be better off.

“the Christians of 150 years ago?”

Wasn’t that back in the day when Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans were fighting a war against the Democrats in the South to preserve the Union and free the slaves? Was that the 150 years ago you were talking about?

Even then, I don’t think the Christians were cutting off the head of any atheist apostate who blasphemed.

“if you read orthodox Christian doctrine, they’re not any different from the Muslims.”

I don’t really have a god in that fight, but that’s just a ridiculous statement, at least in terms of current day results. There is the troubles in Northern Ireland but that place is a vacation-land compared to the Middle East, even if you just consider Sunni/Shite violence.

“Even then, I don’t think the Christians were cutting off the head of any atheist apostate who blasphemed.”

Written like someone who’s never studied European history.

http://american.mortgagerates4all.com/commercialmortgagebroker/ mouth maliciousnodwoman

“Wasn’t that back in the day when Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans were fighting a war against the Democrats in the South to preserve the Union and free the slaves? Was that the 150 years ago you were talking about?”

Yes, and you would have been a Democrat back then.

ASusual republicans have no grasp of history or the truth if it wasn’t handed over to them by Rush or Sean Hannity.

Republicans a the northern party only, deocrats were a national party. There was a split between Norther DEms and Souther Dems.

The people that were fighting to preserve slavery in the South are the same faction that support Bush: ignorant, Southern rascists.

That’s how your party stays in power. By playing on the ignorance of the uneducated, by misleading, and lying.

Must make you proud to be a Republican! What a noble tradition Reagan and Bush have soiled.

From freeing slaves to torturing people to death.

Smell the liberty!

“ignorant, Southern rascists.”

Well Democrat Robert Byrd, the senior senator from West Virginia and former Kleagle of the KKK doesn’t support Bush.

“Well Democrat Robert Byrd, the senior senator from West Virginia and former Kleagle of the KKK doesn’t support Bush.”

No, but Trent Lott, who believes the world would have been better off had a segregationist been president and refused to sign on to a bill condemning lynching, does support Bush. In fact, the only senators who didn’t support the anti-lynching bill all support Bush.

You mean the apology for all the Democrats who filibustered anti-lynching bills for a hundred years? Maybe he thinks that just Democrats should apologize, but I agree that all the Senators should support the Democrats in condemning those Democrats who filibustered anti-lynching bills.

More evidence that we will only lose the Iraq war at home, not at the front.

The Iraq Panic Zarqawi’s bombs hit their target in Washington.

Monday, June 27, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

“It’s like they’re just making it up as they go along. The reality is that we’re losing in Iraq.”—Senator Chuck Hagel (R., Neb.), June 27, 2005, U.S. News & World Report.

“And we are now in a seemingly intractable quagmire. Our troops are dying and there really is no end in sight.”—Senator Ted Kennedy (D., Mass.), June 23, 2005, Armed Services Committee hearing.

The polls show the American people are growing pessimistic about Iraq, and no wonder. They are being rallied against the cause by such statesmen as the two above. Six months after they repudiated the insurgency in a historic election, free Iraqis are continuing to make slow but steady political and military gains. Where the terrorists are gaining ground is in Washington, D.C.

So why the Washington panic? A large part of it is political. As Democrats see support for the war falling in the polls, the most cynical smell an opening for election gains in 2006. The Republican Hagels, who voted for the war only reluctantly, see another opening to assail the “neo-cons” and get Donald Rumsfeld fired. Still others are merely looking for political cover. Rather than fret (for the TV cameras) about “the “public going south” on the war, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham could do more for the cause by trying to educate Americans and rally their support.

It isn’t as if the critics are offering any better strategy for victory. At last week’s Senate hearing, Carl Levin’s (D., Mich.) brainstorm was that the U.S. set a withdrawal schedule if Iraqis miss their deadline in writing a constitution. But U.S. officials have all stressed to Iraqis how important that deadline is. Mr. Biden delivered a lecture last week that boiled down to letting France train 1,500 Iraqi “gendarmes” and pressing for 5,000 NATO troops to patrol the Syrian border. Both are fine with us, assuming Mr. Biden gets to negotiate with the French, but neither is going to turn the tide of war.

The proposal to fix a date certain for U.S. withdrawal is especially destructive, inviting the terrorists to wait us out and Iraqi ethnic groups to start arming themselves. The only important idea we’ve heard from Congress is John McCain’s suggestion that if Damascus keeps abetting the insurgency, the U.S. is under no obligation to honor Syria’s territorial integrity when pursuing terrorists seeking sanctuary in that country.

President Bush plans to speak about Iraq tomorrow, and we hope he points out that this Beltway panic is hurting the war effort. General John Abizaid of the U.S. Central Command stressed this point last week. Troop morale, he said, has never been better. But “when I look back here at what I see is happening in Washington, within the Beltway, I’ve never seen the lack of confidence greater.” He added that, “When my soldiers say to me and ask me the question whether or not they’ve got support from the American people or not, that worries me. And they’re starting to do that.” Mr. Bush will no doubt remind Americans of the stakes in Iraq, but he also needs to point out that defeatism can be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

What! Me worry?

Super Volcano Will Challenge Civilization, Geologists Warn

Explosions of this magnitude “happen about every 600,000 years at Yellowstone,” says Chuck Wicks of the U.S. Geological Survey, who has studied the possibilities in separate work. “And it’s been about 620,000 years since the last super explosive eruption there.” http://www.livescience.com/forcesofnature/050308supervolcano.html

What! Me worry?

Super Volcano Will Challenge Civilization, Geologists Warn

Explosions of this magnitude “happen about every 600,000 years at Yellowstone,” says Chuck Wicks of the U.S. Geological Survey, who has studied the possibilities in separate work. “And it’s been about 620,000 years since the last super explosive eruption there.” http://www.livescience.com/forcesofnature/050308supervolcano.html

Why can’t the Democrats put up somebody like this for President?
http://www.sacbee.com/24hour/opinions/story/2425447p-10719539c.html

“The people in the streets of Beirut knew that no second Hama is possible; they knew that the rulers were under the gaze of American power, and knew that Bush would not permit a massive crackdown by the men in Damascus.”

The weight of American power, historically on the side of the dominant order, now drives this new quest among the Arabs. For decades, the intellectual classes in the Arab world bemoaned the indifference of American power to the cause of their liberty. Now a conservative American president had come bearing the gift of Wilsonian redemption.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110006721

This is why we need more justices like Clarence Thomas:

LIBERAL LAND GRAB

The stereotype is that conservatives are heartless and in the tank to big business — while liberals are the ones who stand up for the little guy. So how come the liberal Supreme Court justices just sold a bunch of New London, Conn., homeowners up the Thames River?

In Kelo et al. v. City of New London et al., the court ruled 5-4 that local governments may use the power of eminent domain to confiscate private homes and turn the land over to private developers for private projects — like sports stadiums and shopping malls.

The New London project will tear down a decent residential neighborhood for office space, a conference hotel and up-market residences. The development would accompany a nearby $350 million research center built by Pfizer.

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=106&e=4&u=/nypost/20050626/cm_nypost/liberallandgrab

Liberal Supremes SUCK!

In a sharply worded dissent, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor said the majority’s interpretation of “public use” was so broad that “the specter of condemnation hangs over all property. Nothing is to prevent the state from replacing any Motel 6 with a Ritz-Carlton, any home with a shopping mall, or any farm with a factory.”

Joining Stevens in the majority were Justices Anthony M. Kennedy, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer. Dissenting with O’Connor were Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.

“This is why we need more justices like Clarence Thomas”

Thomas may have been right in this case, but his confirmation as a Supreme Court justice was one of the most shameful moments in the history of the US Senate. The man is scum who had a history of sexually harassing his employees. Why is it that you so-called “moral” Republicans can’t get it through your thick skulls that sexual harassment is immoral?

I don’t think Thomas was ever accused of rape, like your St. Billy Boy.

Not for nothing did Andrew Sullivan famously warn on Sept. 16 that “the decadent Left in its enclaves on the coasts … may well mount what amounts to a fifth column.”

I see that there are members of that fifth column in the midwest as well.

The Defeatist Caucus Some on Capitol Hill seem to yearn for a repeat of Vietnam.

BY BRENDAN MINITER Tuesday, June 28, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

At a press conference with the new Iraqi prime minister last week, a reporter noted slipping public opinion of the war and asked President Bush if his administration is now stuck in the mud. Mr. Bush responded with a joke, saying the reporter might even call it a “quagmire.” The reference is to Vietnam, of course, and some in the press corps these days hardly seem able to hide their glee that Mr. Bush’s war appears to be faltering. Tonight the president will strike back with a live, prime-time speech aimed at rallying public support.

We can hope that he will mention Vietnam because that metaphor is getting hard to escape. Not because the U.S. is embroiled in a far off, unwinnable war that is somehow compromising the nation’s moral character—although convincing us of that is clearly the goal of the critics who never tire of using Abu Ghraib, Gitmo and the Patriot Act to claim the administration is tossing civil rights to the wind. Those were the conclusions drawn by the antiwar left in the late 1960s and early ’70s and ended up being apt as the pressure caused the U.S. to retreat and betray our allies in Vietnam. This was the case even as on the ground, particularly after the Tet offensive in 1968, the communist forces were decimated by the American military. Rather the Vietnam metaphor is apt today because the U.S. is in a war it can win and is winning, if only those inside the Beltway would stop preferring defeat to victory and disgrace to honor.

As in Vietnam, the stakes in Iraq today are much larger than simply allowing millions of people in one country to descend into chaos and oppression. We fought it out for a decade in the jungles of Southeast Asia, losing more than 50,000 American lives, because we knew that handing communist insurgents one country made it more likely that they would soon grow hungry for another. Do we think it is now any different with Islamic insurgents just because there is no longer a Soviet Union out there ready to back them? If the U.S. walks away from this war and leaves it to Europe to hold back Islamic extremists, we might as well just accept right now that the terrorists will topple more of our skyscrapers—or worse. In the end, South Vietnam was abandoned and conquered, and it descended into poverty and oppression. Some, not content to their fate in the re-education camps, took to the high seas, and many ended up in the U.S. But the oppression hasn’t ended for those left behind. Dissidents, Buddhist monks and others are routinely pulled off the streets and out of their homes and tossed into prison. Some of the continuing human rights abuses were chronicled last week in congressional hearings.

If this was it, then maybe we could accept a defeat once in a while. But walking away from the overarching moral struggle proved disastrous across the world. After Congress shut off funding to the Republic of Vietnam, U.S. influence receded in the face of communist insurgency, and South Vietnam quickly fell in 1975. The emboldened Soviets were then free to press their interests in Africa, South America and, yes, the Middle East. The shah of Iran fell just a few years after Saigon. Radical Islamic terrorism got a big push from the Soviets.

This history is worth running through because some of those who led the effort to shut off funds to South Vietnam are in Congress today and are among the critics of the war in Iraq. It’s not that Massachusetts’s Sens. Ted Kennedy and John Kerry learned nothing from the defeat in Vietnam. It seems that they learned all the wrong lessons and still have no problem with watching the U.S. lose an eminently winnable and moral war.

The history of the Vietnam War could repeat itself in Iraq if the Beltway class decides to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Yet we are winning the global war on terror by the only measure of success that matters: Terrorists have not successfully pulled off another attack on American soil since Sept. 11, 2001. We are also succeeding in Iraq and at pressuring much of the Middle East to move toward accepting the antidote to the hate-filled ideology that spawns terrorists: democracy and freedom.

Partly our success can be seen by what’s not happening in Iraq today. There are no more mass graves being filled. Nor is there a cruel dictator sitting atop one of the world’s largest armies and wondering how best to acquire the weapons of mass destruction that might throw back Western forces. We also don’t have to worry about Saddam Hussein handing off such weapons to terrorists from his prison cell. With Saddam out of power, an elected provisional government is now working on the nation’s constitution. There will be more elections in the near future, including a referendum on the constitution.

On the military side of the war, U.S. forces have lost fewer than 2,000 people in more than two years of fighting in Iraq—an outcome that would have been dismissed as utopian before the invasion. Meanwhile our forces are armoring up and developing tactics and weapons to defeat insurgents. Even as the enemy is still pulling off deadly attacks, insurgents are finding Iraqi recruits harder to come by. Many of the “insurgents” aren’t Iraqi at all but are terrorists from foreign countries. This is a welcome development—jihadis who head for Baghdad aren’t heading to Brooklyn. It can also only go on for so long, especially now as the Iraqi Security Forces are growing in number and in their ability to lead counterinsurgency operations. It’s telling that recruits to the ISF and tips on what the insurgents are up to are on the rise—both of which are used by the U.S. military to measure Iraqi resolve.

It took eight years of determined effort for Ronald Reagan to reverse the course of history by backing freedom fighters across the globe, building up our military capabilities and finding other ways to put the screws to the Soviets. During those years he was also roundly criticized for confronting the ideologues of oppression and, in the process, risking alienating our European allies. But shortly after President Reagan left office the evil empire collapsed in a heap. We had our holiday from history in the 1970s and again, under President Clinton, in the 1990s, with disastrous results each time. Now we’ve got the wind at our back and a president willing to confront the ideologues of hate by backing those seeking their own freedom around the world. We don’t have to lose this war. But we could, if the nation loses confidence in fighting it.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/bminiter/?id=110006879

The Defeatist Caucus Some on Capitol Hill seem to yearn for a repeat of Vietnam.

BY BRENDAN MINITER Tuesday, June 28, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

At a press conference with the new Iraqi prime minister last week, a reporter noted slipping public opinion of the war and asked President Bush if his administration is now stuck in the mud. Mr. Bush responded with a joke, saying the reporter might even call it a “quagmire.” The reference is to Vietnam, of course, and some in the press corps these days hardly seem able to hide their glee that Mr. Bush’s war appears to be faltering. Tonight the president will strike back with a live, prime-time speech aimed at rallying public support.

We can hope that he will mention Vietnam because that metaphor is getting hard to escape. Not because the U.S. is embroiled in a far off, unwinnable war that is somehow compromising the nation’s moral character—although convincing us of that is clearly the goal of the critics who never tire of using Abu Ghraib, Gitmo and the Patriot Act to claim the administration is tossing civil rights to the wind. Those were the conclusions drawn by the antiwar left in the late 1960s and early ’70s and ended up being apt as the pressure caused the U.S. to retreat and betray our allies in Vietnam. This was the case even as on the ground, particularly after the Tet offensive in 1968, the communist forces were decimated by the American military. Rather the Vietnam metaphor is apt today because the U.S. is in a war it can win and is winning, if only those inside the Beltway would stop preferring defeat to victory and disgrace to honor.

As in Vietnam, the stakes in Iraq today are much larger than simply allowing millions of people in one country to descend into chaos and oppression. We fought it out for a decade in the jungles of Southeast Asia, losing more than 50,000 American lives, because we knew that handing communist insurgents one country made it more likely that they would soon grow hungry for another. Do we think it is now any different with Islamic insurgents just because there is no longer a Soviet Union out there ready to back them? If the U.S. walks away from this war and leaves it to Europe to hold back Islamic extremists, we might as well just accept right now that the terrorists will topple more of our skyscrapers—or worse. In the end, South Vietnam was abandoned and conquered, and it descended into poverty and oppression. Some, not content to their fate in the re-education camps, took to the high seas, and many ended up in the U.S. But the oppression hasn’t ended for those left behind. Dissidents, Buddhist monks and others are routinely pulled off the streets and out of their homes and tossed into prison. Some of the continuing human rights abuses were chronicled last week in congressional hearings.

If this was it, then maybe we could accept a defeat once in a while. But walking away from the overarching moral struggle proved disastrous across the world. After Congress shut off funding to the Republic of Vietnam, U.S. influence receded in the face of communist insurgency, and South Vietnam quickly fell in 1975. The emboldened Soviets were then free to press their interests in Africa, South America and, yes, the Middle East. The shah of Iran fell just a few years after Saigon. Radical Islamic terrorism got a big push from the Soviets.

This history is worth running through because some of those who led the effort to shut off funds to South Vietnam are in Congress today and are among the critics of the war in Iraq. It’s not that Massachusetts’s Sens. Ted Kennedy and John Kerry learned nothing from the defeat in Vietnam. It seems that they learned all the wrong lessons and still have no problem with watching the U.S. lose an eminently winnable and moral war.

The history of the Vietnam War could repeat itself in Iraq if the Beltway class decides to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Yet we are winning the global war on terror by the only measure of success that matters: Terrorists have not successfully pulled off another attack on American soil since Sept. 11, 2001. We are also succeeding in Iraq and at pressuring much of the Middle East to move toward accepting the antidote to the hate-filled ideology that spawns terrorists: democracy and freedom.

Partly our success can be seen by what’s not happening in Iraq today. There are no more mass graves being filled. Nor is there a cruel dictator sitting atop one of the world’s largest armies and wondering how best to acquire the weapons of mass destruction that might throw back Western forces. We also don’t have to worry about Saddam Hussein handing off such weapons to terrorists from his prison cell. With Saddam out of power, an elected provisional government is now working on the nation’s constitution. There will be more elections in the near future, including a referendum on the constitution.

On the military side of the war, U.S. forces have lost fewer than 2,000 people in more than two years of fighting in Iraq—an outcome that would have been dismissed as utopian before the invasion. Meanwhile our forces are armoring up and developing tactics and weapons to defeat insurgents. Even as the enemy is still pulling off deadly attacks, insurgents are finding Iraqi recruits harder to come by. Many of the “insurgents” aren’t Iraqi at all but are terrorists from foreign countries. This is a welcome development—jihadis who head for Baghdad aren’t heading to Brooklyn. It can also only go on for so long, especially now as the Iraqi Security Forces are growing in number and in their ability to lead counterinsurgency operations. It’s telling that recruits to the ISF and tips on what the insurgents are up to are on the rise—both of which are used by the U.S. military to measure Iraqi resolve.

It took eight years of determined effort for Ronald Reagan to reverse the course of history by backing freedom fighters across the globe, building up our military capabilities and finding other ways to put the screws to the Soviets. During those years he was also roundly criticized for confronting the ideologues of oppression and, in the process, risking alienating our European allies. But shortly after President Reagan left office the evil empire collapsed in a heap. We had our holiday from history in the 1970s and again, under President Clinton, in the 1990s, with disastrous results each time. Now we’ve got the wind at our back and a president willing to confront the ideologues of hate by backing those seeking their own freedom around the world. We don’t have to lose this war. But we could, if the nation loses confidence in fighting it.

“I don’t think Thomas was ever accused of rape, like your St. Billy Boy.”

Listen, shit-for-brains, I didn’t like Clinton either. I applauded when he was impeached. But just because Clinton was scum doesn’t excuse Thomas for sexually harassing his employees. They both belong behind bars, and if you’re so blinded by partisan hatred that you can’t see that, you disgust me just as much.

“It took eight years of determined effort for Ronald Reagan to reverse the course of history by backing freedom fighters across the globe, building up our military capabilities and finding other ways to put the screws to the Soviets.”

And during those years, he armed Saddam Hussein (to fight Iran) and Osama bin Laden (to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan). Way to make the world safer, dumbass!

Reagan is the main reason yer not still doing “duck-and-cover” nuke war drills ya shithead!

“Reagan is the main reason yer not still doing “duck-and-cover” nuke war drills ya shithead!”

Reagan was already suffering from Alzheimers when he was president. If you want to give credit to anyone from that administration, give it to Bush I.

Besides, your unholy hero Nixon was the biggest champion ever for “duck-and-cover” drill, buttwipe.

Don’t “Son” Me End this silly talk about sacrificing children. By Christopher Hitchens Posted Tuesday, June 28, 2005, at 8:27 AM PT

Oh, Jesus, another barrage of emotional tripe about sons. From every quarter, one hears that the willingness to donate a male child is the only test of integrity. It’s as if some primitive Spartan or Roman ritual had been reconstituted, though this time without the patriotism or the physical bravery. Worse, it has a gruesome echo of the human sacrifice that underpins Christian fundamentalism.

Should Saddam Hussein have been allowed to add the wealth of Kuwait to his slave state at a time when he most certainly did possess a WMD program? Quite a good question for debate. But the debate comes to an end when one participant says that the other is disqualified because of a refusal of son-donation.

This expert delivers himself of the opinion that, “If this is such a great cause, let us see one of the Bush daughters in uniform.” Let me do a brief thought experiment here. Do I know a single anti-war person who would be more persuaded if one of the Bush girls joined up? Do you? Can you imagine what would be said about such a cheap emotional stunt?

Much more important than this, however, is the implied assault on civilian control of the military. In this republic, elected civilians give crisp orders to soldiers and expect these orders to be obeyed. No back chat can even be imagined, let alone allowed. Do liberals really want the Joint Chiefs to say: “Mr. President, I’ll respect that order when you have a son or daughter in uniform”? It was a great day when President Lincoln fired Gen. George B. McClellan.* It was a great day when President Truman fired Gen. Douglas MacArthur. No presidential brat needed to be on the front line for this point to be understood.

http://slate.msn.com/id/2121674/#back

Seach this thread for Reagan - maybe you’ll learn something, like this:

Friday, June 11, 2004

Lech Walesa, winner of the 1983 Nobel Peace Prize, was president of Poland from 1990 to 1995 GDANSK, Poland— Lech Walesa, winner of the 1983 Nobel Peace Prize, was president of Poland from 1990 to 1995. He shared his thoughts today about Ronald Reagan,

When talking about Ronald Reagan, I have to be personal. We in Poland took him so personally. Why? Because we owe him our liberty. This can’t be said often enough by people who lived under oppression for half a century, until communism fell in 1989.