"Own little circle"? Two-thirds of Americans disagree with Bush. Anti-Bush "blue" states are uniformly better educated, smarter, richer, and contribute disproportionately more to the public treasury. A characterization of the typical Bush voter as having a double-digit IQ is strongly consistent with the observed data.
The recent thinning of the Bush camp as those who are better in touch with reality make haste to leave the sinking ship can't have done the intelligence profile of the GOP any.
As a Bush supporter, you, sir or madam, are in a big demographic with a lot of people who believe that we are descended from Adam and the Earth was created in or about 4004 BC.
(Oh, and I'm curious... who *are* these bright people who agree with President Bush? Bright, evil people don't count. Loud stupid evil people like Rush, Bill, Ann particularly don't count.)
Your reasoning appears to be "because there are various risks, we should ignore all of them."
However, the chances that the US has put application-specific backdoors into their program are quite large. The chances that your compiler has a backdoor deliberately designed to alter specific code for specific jet fighters is incredibly low; the chances your hardware is hacked that way is far far lower.
Bush has publicly admitted that he broke the wiretapping law. His claim is simply that the law doesn't apply to him.
Regarding lying to Congress, an impeachment will have to prove that. But I'd note that several documents of unquestioned verity have surfaced from England that would seem, if true, to prove the case beyond reasonable doubt.
Regarding election fraud, since the voting machine system is set up by the Republicans so that it is impossible to check for fraud, it is of course impossible to prove fraud without one of the alleged criminals breaking ranks, coming forward and testifying, so we might never know. (A reasonable man might wonder though why a system would be set up that way unless one intended to defraud it through and through).
1. I've asked the question, "What has Bush accomplished?" many times. The results have been illuminating. The number one comment by far is some variation on "He sure beat up those Liberals!" Yours is the second most common: "He got re-elected." The third one is "He appointed two Supreme Court justices."
You claim to read history. Tell me, which other President's most important contribution was to get re-elected? (Or do you really think that future children will read about this era and think, "Wow, Bush appointed two people to the Supreme Court?")
2. Your response to the Iraq war is illuminating. My point, that we've permanently crippled or killed *hundreds of thousands* of people and spent a trillion dollars -- a *trillion* dollars! -- is simply ignored.
By any objective measure, Iraq just gets worse and worse -- every month it gets a little more dangerous, less electric power, less food and water. This new government is composed of people who in their hearts hate Americans; they are executing a dozen people a day, some of whom may be terrorists
Do you know, people from all over the Arab world used to send their children to study in Baghdad because it was one of the only places where you could get an education without Islam? Now it's a bombed-out ruin with four hours of electricity a day.
3. Your comparison of Iraq to the post-Revolutionary America is simply breath-taking -- it's hard to find even one point of similarity between these two situations. I'd particularly commend to your attention that fact that after the Revolutionary War, there was no wave of Americans killing Americans. You might also want to note that in the American Revolution, the American people threw out an occupying force, whereas in the Iraq war, the country was invaded and occupied.
4. Finally, you appear to be claiming that Bush did nothing at all for Katrina and was completely correct to do so. I find it hard to believe, so let me quote: Bush should have been standing in the delta with a gigantic box fan keeping the hurricane from hitting Louisiana. Bush did what he could and DIDN'T circumvent the proceedures for natural disasters. He let the state ask for aid and did everything the way its supposed to be done. But since you already don't like him, you blame him for it.
This is an astonishing picture -- thousands die while the most powerful man in the world is completely helpless -- "it's just procedure, there's nothing I can do."
In fact, there are few things that the President is prevented from doing in a disaster. True, he cannot unilaterally announce a state of emergency or call an area a disaster area but there are a thousand things he can do.
Bush didn't even start to mobilize the armed forces until *24 hours after* the levee broke -- they didn't get there till *5 days later*. After the tsunami, they did it in *two* days in Indonesia, a "developing" country, and they didn't have two days notice to prepare (there were 10 people dead in Florida almost *two days* before the levee broke).
The Army Corps of Engineers do not need any state of emergency or whatever to be mobilized and have pretty sweeping powers in the event of a flood. FEMA is similar, I don't really know about DHS. (Of course, when FEMA was mobilized, they worked mainly to *prevent* help from coming, so that part was probably just as well.)
But beyond that... if the Governor refused to act, why didn't Bush call her up and *tell* her to act?
Like, he's the President, right? He can't legally *order* her to act, but he can damn well call her up and say, "Declare a state of emergency NOW" -- who could possibly refuse such a command (it would instantly be the end of your career)?
This isn't some stupid playacting exercise -- thousands of lives were lost. You said Bush "did what he could" -- name ONE thing.
We've known five years of loss and disaster. Nothing has gone right for America.
Bush was clearly warned numerous times about terrorism. His government is *on record* before 9/11 as saying that terrorism was not a significant problem. On August 5, 2001, there was a daily briefing telling Bush that Al Qaeda was determined to fly planes into buildings into lower Manhattan. Nothing was done. Nothing was done on 9/11 either -- Bush, and our whole "Defense" department failed to act in any way.
Bush never caught Bin Laden. Within six months, he'd given up, saying, "I don't know where Bin Laden is and I don't care." Bin Laden continued to kill, all over the world.
We never found out who sent the anthrax. We never finished the war in Afghanistan.
At this moment, three-quarters of New Orleans is still in ruins. We all saw Bush do *nothing at all* over days for New Orleans.
If you believe the Iraq war is a success, I guess I'm simply sorry for you. We've killed tens of thousands of them; crippled hundreds of thousands; destroyed their infrastructure, power, water, roads; we've tortured quite a few innocent people to death.
Almost three years ago, Bush announced the end of the war. Three years later, more people are killed there every day. We've had four years of people telling us that we're winning the war, yet we appear not one bit closer to its end than we were three years ago.
I stand by my claim -- everything, absolutely everything that Bush has done since 2000, has been an unmitigated disaster for the country -- and I certainly include his re-election.
Feel free to refute this by *naming one thing that Bush has done that has been good for the country*.
If you're going tell me that a war that's killed thousands of Americans, crippled tens of thousands, pissed away a trillion dollars, and destroyed a country that never did us any harm -- for *no* apparent benefit to the United States -- was his great achievement... then, again, I'm sorry for you. The next few years will be very unpleasant for your little fantasy world.
The rest of the world doesn't understand why American conservatives aren't frightened about what's happening.
We're in the middle of two endless wars which have killed tens of thousands and crippled hundreds of thousands. Americans are dying every day in Iraq and Afghanistan. Doesn't that frighten you?
We've blown one trillion dollars on the war in Iraq. One trillion dollars -- do you have any idea how much that is? Think how much you could do with a million dollars. Now imagine getting a thousand times as much. You could give a million dollars to everyone you knew and still be staggeringly rich. Now imagine a thousand times more than that.
How are we going to *pay* for this trillion dollars? Most of these expenses haven't even hit us yet and come from decades of caring for the tens of thousands of young men and women that have been crippled by this pointless war. We've written a trillion dollars in bad checks -- doesn't that frighten you?
We have a President that has failed at every single thing he's done. We've gone from disaster to disaster, we lost the World Trade Center, we lost New Orleans, we lost Bin Laden, we are losing every day in Iraq. We watched over days while Katrina slowly destroyed New Orleans and, just like on 9/11, he did nothing, nothing at all -- but this time we could see him caught like a deer in the headlights. Perhaps New Orleans was beyond saving, but we'll never know because Bush didn't even try -- he didn't even pretend to try.
So we have a President who gathers disaster around him like flies to honey and then is incapable of acting competently.
And there are three more years of this to go.
To the "rest of the world" -- "liberals", "socialists", and pretty well every single non-American -- conservative America is like a bus driven at high speed by a madman, and we are terrified that it will take a lot of us out with it when it finally crashes and burns.
And we think the reason that the few of you aren't frightened is that you're also mad, and blind to boot.
DANGER WILL ROBINSON! serious logic error on the part of the parent!
"both have this absolutist, idealized view of the world" is *not at all the same thing* as "both [...] believed in the rightness of their causes".
Just because you, like everyone else, believe in the rightness of your specific cause doesn't mean you don't have a realistic, nuanced view of the world.
In your example, Churchill, for all his faults, was not in the same ballpark of absolutist idealism as the other three parties (Nazis, neo-cons, Al Qaeda). Even a cursory reading of his life shows a pragmatic, flexible thinker who would change his plans and opinions in an instant based on new information.
I do agree with the parent's point that we shouldn't just throw the word "illegal" around randomly meaning "things I don't like".
But let's look at specifics here. Bush ordered thousands of wiretappings against the Constitution in general, and the laws about wiretapping in particular. I think it's very reasonable to claim that those were illegal wiretaps -- Bush has admitted this but merely says that he is allowed to do illegal things.
By "illegal election", grandparent post could well be implying that there was massive voter fraud in either the 2000 or 2004 election. While this has not been proven, there is certainly enough evidence that this is so that such claims aren't obviously noise.
Finally, the war might be said to be illegal in two ways. First, according to the Constitution, it's the Congress's job to declare war. This was not in fact done and might render the war "illegal". This is probably literally true but in practice Congress appeared to be behind the war so it's probably not so important.
More important is that the President stood up and lied to Congress, the Senate and all of America. Lying to Congress is an impeachable offense -- in other words, President Bush could be tried for this offense. I'd think that this would make it "illegal".
So I do appreciate your point that you shouldn't use "illegal" as a synonym for bad -- but at the same time I think the original poster could justify his use of the word in all three cases.
The 9/11 commission was well-meaning -- however, they didn't even start working until a full year after the attack, and they were hampered by a minuscule budget (about a quarter of what they spent a couple of years before investigating a blowjob) and unreasonable time constraints.
I didn't write the parent post. But let me rephrase it as "Bush has never demonstrated the slightest sympathy towards the poor or victims of disaster. It could well be because he's been completely shielded from financial need and from the consequences of his blunders by his rich, influential family."
Strange, though: why would they bother to discontinue such a useful requirement? Are they expecting that there are actual PMM inventors who are being wrongfully denied patents because they can't produce a model? Do they have a lot of spare time and need to get more applications that they will have to study and then turn down?
Thanks for your thoughtful reply. However, I'm not entirely sure I agree with you.
Let's start with 9/11. The Bush government was on record before 9/11 as saying that terrorism was not a threat, despite many warnings. A month before 9/11, Bush was presented with his daily briefing, headlined, "Al Qaeda determined to strike in US," which claimed that Al Qaeda terrorists were intending to *fly planes into building in Lower Manhattan*. The government did absolutely nothing.
It's not clear that 9/11 could have been prevented. What's clear is that the government had enough information to try, and did not try.
On the day itself, the government also failed to react. NORAD did not scramble planes till far too late. The President initially did not react, then vanished for hours without a word. The country was in fear; our President hid.
And let's take a look at the aftermath? No serious attempt was made to catch Bin Laden. We destroyed Afghanistan, but when we had Bin Laden pinned down, we simply stopped advancing until he escaped. In March of the next year, Bush said, "I don't know where Bin Laden is, and I don't care," and the hunt for Bin Laden stopped, even though he has continued his terrorist activities.
Moreover, the Bush government tried as hard as possible to prevent any sort of investigation. Over a year passed before the investigation even started -- and then it was crippled by a minuscule budget (a quarter of that of the Monica Lewinski investigations) and the refusal of the government to co-operate. We never got a good explanation as to why the Bush government didn't act on the urgent intelligence it got, nor as to why planes were not scrambled immediately (as happens a dozen times a year, eg, Payne Stewart's plane). No changes were made to NORAD to prevent future slip-ups.
It's unclear that the Bush government could have prevented 9/11. It's clear that they didn't even try. It's certainly clear that they bungled their response on 9/11, and it's very clear that they bungled the aftermath.
Now let's look at Katrina. A similar pattern holds, where the government received specific, explicit warnings in the year before, in the months before, and very specific warnings in the week before. CNN was telling us that there was a good chance that New Orleans would go under almost a *week* before it happened. The government's response? Nothing; not even putting emergency workers on alert; not bringing pumping ships to New Orleans (both of which Clinton, not my favorite President by any means, did).
Once the hurricane hit and people started dying in Florida, the government's response was still nothing at all. It was only when the levees finally broke that the wheels started to slowly, slowly turn -- slow enough that it took days for help to *start* arriving (compare this to the response to the Indonesia tsunami, which occurred without warning in a "developing" country).
Worse, the Bush government had thrown out all the competent people at FEMA and put in their own patronage appointments. And they'd spent billions of dollars on the creation of DHS to give more patronage jobs to their croneys.
When the storm hit, to the shock of Americans, these organizations were completely ineffective in actually helping the victims. Instead, they set themselves up as a paramilitary organization and used weapons to *prevent help from reaching the people of New Orleans*.
Perhaps you've forgotten this but in literally dozens of cases, FEMA and DHS threatened professional rescue workers and companies bringing in supplies for free *with guns* and prevented them from entering the disaster zone -- while not actually helping the victims of the flood themselves.
And the aftermath? The clean-up was mainly given to the Vice-President's company KBR, a subsidiary of Haliburton, in a series of *no-bid contracts*. The result is that reconstruction was totally botched, literally hundreds of millions of dollars were simply pissed away on useless junk lik
But what it means is, if you have 5 barrels of oil in tar sands, you can only realize 1. If you were counting those other 4 barrels as reserve (as the long-ago parent article did), you're going get a nasty surprise....
Your argument: "All of this failure wasn't Bush's fault. The government isn't supposed to protect us, anyway."
And you didn't come up with *one thing* -- not *one* -- that Bush has done right.
Actually, it *is* the responsibility of the Federal government to try to protect its citizens. And we're paying an awful lot of tax money to things like DHS and FEMA for this privilege -- not to mention the "Defense" Department. (Since I earn some large multiple of what you do, this burden is disproportionately on me, not you. If you live in a Red state, then you are in fact getting the handouts from me.)
But who cares. Your claim is that, despite controlling Congress, the Senate, the Presidency, and the Supreme Court, George Bush and the Republicans are powerless to act and that none of the terrible disasters we've seen in the last five years were even remotely their fault.
You expect nothing whatsoever from your government except huge, huge expenditures of your tax money. Even though your President has total control over all branches of government, it's fine if everything's a complete failure with tens of thousands dead and a trillions dollars wasted, as long as he has someone else to blame.
I guess this means that I'm wasting my time talking to a nutjob. Enough said, back to my thrilling life!
The blind hatred you libbys have for Bush is just unreal. I bet you blame El Nino on Bush as well, don't ya?
i.e. "Even though a large number of things have gone wrong, and nothing has gone right, Bush has no responsibility for any of it."
Let's start with the war, shall we?
The record is very clear. Bush was obsessed with starting a war in Iraq. His initial impulse on 9/11 was to want to bomb Iraq. Relentlessly, Bush and his team stood in front of the world, warning us of imminent danger, weapons of mass destruction, a mushroom cloud. We now know that there was no evidence for any of this at all; that Bush was commited to that invasion before any of this "evidence" was manufactured.
Yet, once the invasion started, it became immediately obvious that there was *no plan at all* in mind. The troops were supposed to go in, win, be showered with roses, and be back in time for spring.
This was Bush's war, Bush's obsession. One trillion dollars wasted, thousands of American lives, tens of thousands of Iraq lives and Iraq turned into a wasteland
Let's look at Katrina, shall we? There were very specific, clear warnings about this years before, the year before, the month before, the week before and a few days before.
None of these warnings were heeded. Nothing was done. Nothing.
Bush has spent billions of our money on "Homeland Security" to "protect" us -- but when the hurricane came, DHS and FEMA not only did nothing to help, they actually used *threats of force* to keep supplies and professional help from reaching the threatened city.
Perhaps New Orleans could not have been saved no matter how hard we tried. But Bush didn't even *try*. He didn't even *pretend* to try. He sat there like a deer in the headlights for days and did nothing at all and we lost New Orleans.
Bush's record is one of complete failure from beginning to end. It is hard to name anything that has gone well (feel free to try).
If the best defence you can come up with is "Bush is responsible for nothing that has happened in the last five years," then I'm sorry for you.
You have an excellent point -- it's a little hard to compare one to the other but let me amend my statement to say, "George Bush is the worst President in a century" which I think is pretty defensible.
Let's see, we have two major terrorist attacks on the United States, where neither Bin Laden nor the anonymous anthrax mailer were ever caught. We have the completely failure of our intelligence and defense forces on 9/11 with no explanation and no plan to fix. We have a trillion -- a *trillion* dollars, do you have the slightest idea how much that is? -- pissed away in a war in a country most Americans couldn't identify on a map, for *nothing*.
We have double-digit increases in the military's main budget every year *on top of* this crazy war; and as a result we have cutbacks in all the services that might make life worthwhile if you weren't crazy rich.
We all watched over *days* while the government sat there and did nothing and we lost New Orleans. George Bush lost New Orleans. He didn't even *pretend to try* to save it. He didn't act concerned, he didn't do anything, and the city was destroyed.
But the worst part is all the dead. There are the thousands of American dead in the ruins of the World Trade Center, the thousands dead in the rubble of New Orleans, the thousands of young American men and women finding miserable and painful deaths in Iraq for nothing (not to mention the tens of thousands of young people returning multilated and crippled) -- and there are the tens of thousands of Iraqis and Afghanis killed by Americans, very many of whom were women, children, or simply people who were trying to mind their own business when an American bomb went off in their vicinity.
You think Mr. Bush is doing a fine job, do you?
On the contrary, even if Bush were impeached this very moment, based on the results of the first five years he'd still be by far the worst President the United States ever had.
Your reference does in fact claim that population *is* growing exponentially, with an exponential growth rate of r=1.2% growth per annum. Perhaps you intended to mention a different article?
Note the section "Looking Ahead" that reads very much like what I wrote (exponential growth cannot continue indefinitely due to resource constraints). As the article you cite points out, it isn't clear that we haven't already exceeded the carrying capacity of the planet.
Had you read what I wrote, you'd notice that I was careful to mention off-world resources as a possible solution. I'd love to believe that this is a possibility but the investment required for this to happen would be astonishingly huge and it's extremely unclear that we have the resources, or the will, to pull it off.
Certainly, if we devoted all our resources to it right now, it'd be 20 years or perhaps a lot more before we saw the first ounce of extraterrestial steel or plastic. Certainly space technology would have to make far more progress in those 20 years than it has in the last 40 before we can start mining asteroids and the like. Expecting off-world resources to save us is a lot like expecting a lottery ticket to rescue you from bankruptcy.
"In that case stop driving a car, stop using the phone, stop using the internet, stop watching tv, stop using electricity, stop using heat, hell pretty much stop using just about everything you have.
"By the/. definition, every company is a greedy bastard."
What poor reasoning. "Because no company is perfect, it's pointless to criticize any of them." This is particularly stupid in this situation, where we do all have a perfectly good mechanism to bypass the record companies for the most part (p2p or just ripping your friend's CDs).
We cannot indefinitely maintain an exponentially growing population on a finite supply of resources. Unless we go off earth for resources, or restrict our consumption and our population, we *will* eventually run out -- even if we do figure out ways to get true renewable energy (solar power satellites?)
The fact that initial predictions put this crisis far too early does not mean that there's a way around it -- or if you have some solution, please let us hear it.
...because it costs a lot of energy to extract the oil from the sand. Right now, the whole procedure is only about 20% efficient which means for every barrel of oil we extract, we are essentially throwing away 4 others...
You might have more luck converting them to your belief system if the "solution" to the problem isn't always a call for more authoritarian government instrusions into our lives.
I fail to see where even one of the posters above you has called for more government?
Many solutions proposed involve less government, in fact. A popular idea would be to cut half of the "Defense" budget (easy to do if you stopped engaging in pointless, profitless foreign wars), eliminate subsidies on gasoline and its superstructure, and use half the money saved to come up with new energy systems.
Unfortunately, we have today the biggest, most expensive and most authoritarian US government ever. The size of the government has grown over 10% each year, for five years; the trade deficit has been the greatest ever, for four years; the budget deficit has been the largest ever, for five years; by the end of 2008 the current "Administration" will easily have spent more deficit money than all other US Administrations put together since the founding of the United States.
And as little as possible of this money was spent on trying to deal with this problem of global warming that might blight the lives of our grandchildren and kill our great-grandchildren.
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"Own little circle"? Two-thirds of Americans disagree with Bush. Anti-Bush "blue" states are uniformly better educated, smarter, richer, and contribute disproportionately more to the public treasury. A characterization of the typical Bush voter as having a double-digit IQ is strongly consistent with the observed data.
The recent thinning of the Bush camp as those who are better in touch with reality make haste to leave the sinking ship can't have done the intelligence profile of the GOP any.
As a Bush supporter, you, sir or madam, are in a big demographic with a lot of people who believe that we are descended from Adam and the Earth was created in or about 4004 BC.
(Oh, and I'm curious... who *are* these bright people who agree with President Bush? Bright, evil people don't count. Loud stupid evil people like Rush, Bill, Ann particularly don't count.)
Your reasoning appears to be "because there are various risks, we should ignore all of them."
However, the chances that the US has put application-specific backdoors into their program are quite large. The chances that your compiler has a backdoor deliberately designed to alter specific code for specific jet fighters is incredibly low; the chances your hardware is hacked that way is far far lower.
Bush has publicly admitted that he broke the wiretapping law. His claim is simply that the law doesn't apply to him.
Regarding lying to Congress, an impeachment will have to prove that. But I'd note that several documents of unquestioned verity have surfaced from England that would seem, if true, to prove the case beyond reasonable doubt.
Regarding election fraud, since the voting machine system is set up by the Republicans so that it is impossible to check for fraud, it is of course impossible to prove fraud without one of the alleged criminals breaking ranks, coming forward and testifying, so we might never know. (A reasonable man might wonder though why a system would be set up that way unless one intended to defraud it through and through).
A few more comments.
1. I've asked the question, "What has Bush accomplished?" many times. The results have been illuminating. The number one comment by far is some variation on "He sure beat up those Liberals!" Yours is the second most common: "He got re-elected." The third one is "He appointed two Supreme Court justices."
You claim to read history. Tell me, which other President's most important contribution was to get re-elected? (Or do you really think that future children will read about this era and think, "Wow, Bush appointed two people to the Supreme Court?")
2. Your response to the Iraq war is illuminating. My point, that we've permanently crippled or killed *hundreds of thousands* of people and spent a trillion dollars -- a *trillion* dollars! -- is simply ignored.
By any objective measure, Iraq just gets worse and worse -- every month it gets a little more dangerous, less electric power, less food and water. This new government is composed of people who in their hearts hate Americans; they are executing a dozen people a day, some of whom may be terrorists
Do you know, people from all over the Arab world used to send their children to study in Baghdad because it was one of the only places where you could get an education without Islam? Now it's a bombed-out ruin with four hours of electricity a day.
3. Your comparison of Iraq to the post-Revolutionary America is simply breath-taking -- it's hard to find even one point of similarity between these two situations. I'd particularly commend to your attention that fact that after the Revolutionary War, there was no wave of Americans killing Americans. You might also want to note that in the American Revolution, the American people threw out an occupying force, whereas in the Iraq war, the country was invaded and occupied.
4. Finally, you appear to be claiming that Bush did nothing at all for Katrina and was completely correct to do so. I find it hard to believe, so let me quote: Bush should have been standing in the delta with a gigantic box fan keeping the hurricane from hitting Louisiana. Bush did what he could and DIDN'T circumvent the proceedures for natural disasters. He let the state ask for aid and did everything the way its supposed to be done. But since you already don't like him, you blame him for it.
This is an astonishing picture -- thousands die while the most powerful man in the world is completely helpless -- "it's just procedure, there's nothing I can do."
In fact, there are few things that the President is prevented from doing in a disaster. True, he cannot unilaterally announce a state of emergency or call an area a disaster area but there are a thousand things he can do.
Bush didn't even start to mobilize the armed forces until *24 hours after* the levee broke -- they didn't get there till *5 days later*. After the tsunami, they did it in *two* days in Indonesia, a "developing" country, and they didn't have two days notice to prepare (there were 10 people dead in Florida almost *two days* before the levee broke).
The Army Corps of Engineers do not need any state of emergency or whatever to be mobilized and have pretty sweeping powers in the event of a flood. FEMA is similar, I don't really know about DHS. (Of course, when FEMA was mobilized, they worked mainly to *prevent* help from coming, so that part was probably just as well.)
But beyond that... if the Governor refused to act, why didn't Bush call her up and *tell* her to act?
Like, he's the President, right? He can't legally *order* her to act, but he can damn well call her up and say, "Declare a state of emergency NOW" -- who could possibly refuse such a command (it would instantly be the end of your career)?
This isn't some stupid playacting exercise -- thousands of lives were lost. You said Bush "did what he could" -- name ONE thing.
I'm very curious as to how you would accomplish such a thing without using Javascript? (Hint -- doing it with a Java Applet would be Very Hard(tm).)
I stand by my comments.
We've known five years of loss and disaster. Nothing has gone right for America.
Bush was clearly warned numerous times about terrorism. His government is *on record* before 9/11 as saying that terrorism was not a significant problem. On August 5, 2001, there was a daily briefing telling Bush that Al Qaeda was determined to fly planes into buildings into lower Manhattan. Nothing was done. Nothing was done on 9/11 either -- Bush, and our whole "Defense" department failed to act in any way.
Bush never caught Bin Laden. Within six months, he'd given up, saying, "I don't know where Bin Laden is and I don't care." Bin Laden continued to kill, all over the world.
We never found out who sent the anthrax. We never finished the war in Afghanistan.
At this moment, three-quarters of New Orleans is still in ruins. We all saw Bush do *nothing at all* over days for New Orleans.
If you believe the Iraq war is a success, I guess I'm simply sorry for you. We've killed tens of thousands of them; crippled hundreds of thousands; destroyed their infrastructure, power, water, roads; we've tortured quite a few innocent people to death.
Almost three years ago, Bush announced the end of the war. Three years later, more people are killed there every day. We've had four years of people telling us that we're winning the war, yet we appear not one bit closer to its end than we were three years ago.
I stand by my claim -- everything, absolutely everything that Bush has done since 2000, has been an unmitigated disaster for the country -- and I certainly include his re-election.
Feel free to refute this by *naming one thing that Bush has done that has been good for the country*.
If you're going tell me that a war that's killed thousands of Americans, crippled tens of thousands, pissed away a trillion dollars, and destroyed a country that never did us any harm -- for *no* apparent benefit to the United States -- was his great achievement... then, again, I'm sorry for you. The next few years will be very unpleasant for your little fantasy world.
You are quite right about the fear.
The rest of the world doesn't understand why American conservatives aren't frightened about what's happening.
We're in the middle of two endless wars which have killed tens of thousands and crippled hundreds of thousands. Americans are dying every day in Iraq and Afghanistan. Doesn't that frighten you?
We've blown one trillion dollars on the war in Iraq. One trillion dollars -- do you have any idea how much that is? Think how much you could do with a million dollars. Now imagine getting a thousand times as much. You could give a million dollars to everyone you knew and still be staggeringly rich. Now imagine a thousand times more than that.
How are we going to *pay* for this trillion dollars? Most of these expenses haven't even hit us yet and come from decades of caring for the tens of thousands of young men and women that have been crippled by this pointless war. We've written a trillion dollars in bad checks -- doesn't that frighten you?
We have a President that has failed at every single thing he's done. We've gone from disaster to disaster, we lost the World Trade Center, we lost New Orleans, we lost Bin Laden, we are losing every day in Iraq. We watched over days while Katrina slowly destroyed New Orleans and, just like on 9/11, he did nothing, nothing at all -- but this time we could see him caught like a deer in the headlights. Perhaps New Orleans was beyond saving, but we'll never know because Bush didn't even try -- he didn't even pretend to try.
So we have a President who gathers disaster around him like flies to honey and then is incapable of acting competently.
And there are three more years of this to go.
To the "rest of the world" -- "liberals", "socialists", and pretty well every single non-American -- conservative America is like a bus driven at high speed by a madman, and we are terrified that it will take a lot of us out with it when it finally crashes and burns.
And we think the reason that the few of you aren't frightened is that you're also mad, and blind to boot.
DANGER WILL ROBINSON! serious logic error on the part of the parent!
"both have this absolutist, idealized view of the world" is *not at all the same thing* as "both [...] believed in the rightness of their causes".
Just because you, like everyone else, believe in the rightness of your specific cause doesn't mean you don't have a realistic, nuanced view of the world.
In your example, Churchill, for all his faults, was not in the same ballpark of absolutist idealism as the other three parties (Nazis, neo-cons, Al Qaeda). Even a cursory reading of his life shows a pragmatic, flexible thinker who would change his plans and opinions in an instant based on new information.
I do agree with the parent's point that we shouldn't just throw the word "illegal" around randomly meaning "things I don't like".
But let's look at specifics here. Bush ordered thousands of wiretappings against the Constitution in general, and the laws about wiretapping in particular. I think it's very reasonable to claim that those were illegal wiretaps -- Bush has admitted this but merely says that he is allowed to do illegal things.
By "illegal election", grandparent post could well be implying that there was massive voter fraud in either the 2000 or 2004 election. While this has not been proven, there is certainly enough evidence that this is so that such claims aren't obviously noise.
Finally, the war might be said to be illegal in two ways. First, according to the Constitution, it's the Congress's job to declare war. This was not in fact done and might render the war "illegal". This is probably literally true but in practice Congress appeared to be behind the war so it's probably not so important.
More important is that the President stood up and lied to Congress, the Senate and all of America. Lying to Congress is an impeachable offense -- in other words, President Bush could be tried for this offense. I'd think that this would make it "illegal".
So I do appreciate your point that you shouldn't use "illegal" as a synonym for bad -- but at the same time I think the original poster could justify his use of the word in all three cases.
The 9/11 commission was well-meaning -- however, they didn't even start working until a full year after the attack, and they were hampered by a minuscule budget (about a quarter of what they spent a couple of years before investigating a blowjob) and unreasonable time constraints.
I didn't write the parent post. But let me rephrase it as "Bush has never demonstrated the slightest sympathy towards the poor or victims of disaster. It could well be because he's been completely shielded from financial need and from the consequences of his blunders by his rich, influential family."
Does this make it clearer to you?
Oops, good catch! /me adjusts model of real-world.
Strange, though: why would they bother to discontinue such a useful requirement? Are they expecting that there are actual PMM inventors who are being wrongfully denied patents because they can't produce a model? Do they have a lot of spare time and need to get more applications that they will have to study and then turn down?
Actually, your PMM model only has to work in their office for one year. A real PMM could do that standing on its head.
Gee, even the White House thinks they did a lousy job...
Thanks for your thoughtful reply. However, I'm not entirely sure I agree with you.
Let's start with 9/11. The Bush government was on record before 9/11 as saying that terrorism was not a threat, despite many warnings. A month before 9/11, Bush was presented with his daily briefing, headlined, "Al Qaeda determined to strike in US," which claimed that Al Qaeda terrorists were intending to *fly planes into building in Lower Manhattan*. The government did absolutely nothing.
It's not clear that 9/11 could have been prevented. What's clear is that the government had enough information to try, and did not try.
On the day itself, the government also failed to react. NORAD did not scramble planes till far too late. The President initially did not react, then vanished for hours without a word. The country was in fear; our President hid.
And let's take a look at the aftermath? No serious attempt was made to catch Bin Laden. We destroyed Afghanistan, but when we had Bin Laden pinned down, we simply stopped advancing until he escaped. In March of the next year, Bush said, "I don't know where Bin Laden is, and I don't care," and the hunt for Bin Laden stopped, even though he has continued his terrorist activities.
Moreover, the Bush government tried as hard as possible to prevent any sort of investigation. Over a year passed before the investigation even started -- and then it was crippled by a minuscule budget (a quarter of that of the Monica Lewinski investigations) and the refusal of the government to co-operate. We never got a good explanation as to why the Bush government didn't act on the urgent intelligence it got, nor as to why planes were not scrambled immediately (as happens a dozen times a year, eg, Payne Stewart's plane). No changes were made to NORAD to prevent future slip-ups.
It's unclear that the Bush government could have prevented 9/11. It's clear that they didn't even try. It's certainly clear that they bungled their response on 9/11, and it's very clear that they bungled the aftermath.
Now let's look at Katrina. A similar pattern holds, where the government received specific, explicit warnings in the year before, in the months before, and very specific warnings in the week before. CNN was telling us that there was a good chance that New Orleans would go under almost a *week* before it happened. The government's response? Nothing; not even putting emergency workers on alert; not bringing pumping ships to New Orleans (both of which Clinton, not my favorite President by any means, did).
Once the hurricane hit and people started dying in Florida, the government's response was still nothing at all. It was only when the levees finally broke that the wheels started to slowly, slowly turn -- slow enough that it took days for help to *start* arriving (compare this to the response to the Indonesia tsunami, which occurred without warning in a "developing" country).
Worse, the Bush government had thrown out all the competent people at FEMA and put in their own patronage appointments. And they'd spent billions of dollars on the creation of DHS to give more patronage jobs to their croneys.
When the storm hit, to the shock of Americans, these organizations were completely ineffective in actually helping the victims. Instead, they set themselves up as a paramilitary organization and used weapons to *prevent help from reaching the people of New Orleans*.
Perhaps you've forgotten this but in literally dozens of cases, FEMA and DHS threatened professional rescue workers and companies bringing in supplies for free *with guns* and prevented them from entering the disaster zone -- while not actually helping the victims of the flood themselves.
And the aftermath? The clean-up was mainly given to the Vice-President's company KBR, a subsidiary of Haliburton, in a series of *no-bid contracts*. The result is that reconstruction was totally botched, literally hundreds of millions of dollars were simply pissed away on useless junk lik
But what it means is, if you have 5 barrels of oil in tar sands, you can only realize 1. If you were counting those other 4 barrels as reserve (as the long-ago parent article did), you're going get a nasty surprise....
Your argument: "All of this failure wasn't Bush's fault. The government isn't supposed to protect us, anyway."
And you didn't come up with *one thing* -- not *one* -- that Bush has done right.
Actually, it *is* the responsibility of the Federal government to try to protect its citizens. And we're paying an awful lot of tax money to things like DHS and FEMA for this privilege -- not to mention the "Defense" Department. (Since I earn some large multiple of what you do, this burden is disproportionately on me, not you. If you live in a Red state, then you are in fact getting the handouts from me.)
But who cares. Your claim is that, despite controlling Congress, the Senate, the Presidency, and the Supreme Court, George Bush and the Republicans are powerless to act and that none of the terrible disasters we've seen in the last five years were even remotely their fault.
You expect nothing whatsoever from your government except huge, huge expenditures of your tax money. Even though your President has total control over all branches of government, it's fine if everything's a complete failure with tens of thousands dead and a trillions dollars wasted, as long as he has someone else to blame.
I guess this means that I'm wasting my time talking to a nutjob. Enough said, back to my thrilling life!
Let's start with the war, shall we?
The record is very clear. Bush was obsessed with starting a war in Iraq. His initial impulse on 9/11 was to want to bomb Iraq. Relentlessly, Bush and his team stood in front of the world, warning us of imminent danger, weapons of mass destruction, a mushroom cloud. We now know that there was no evidence for any of this at all; that Bush was commited to that invasion before any of this "evidence" was manufactured.
Yet, once the invasion started, it became immediately obvious that there was *no plan at all* in mind. The troops were supposed to go in, win, be showered with roses, and be back in time for spring.
This was Bush's war, Bush's obsession. One trillion dollars wasted, thousands of American lives, tens of thousands of Iraq lives and Iraq turned into a wasteland
Let's look at Katrina, shall we? There were very specific, clear warnings about this years before, the year before, the month before, the week before and a few days before.
None of these warnings were heeded. Nothing was done. Nothing.
Bush has spent billions of our money on "Homeland Security" to "protect" us -- but when the hurricane came, DHS and FEMA not only did nothing to help, they actually used *threats of force* to keep supplies and professional help from reaching the threatened city.
Perhaps New Orleans could not have been saved no matter how hard we tried. But Bush didn't even *try*. He didn't even *pretend* to try. He sat there like a deer in the headlights for days and did nothing at all and we lost New Orleans.
Bush's record is one of complete failure from beginning to end. It is hard to name anything that has gone well (feel free to try).
If the best defence you can come up with is "Bush is responsible for nothing that has happened in the last five years," then I'm sorry for you.
You have an excellent point -- it's a little hard to compare one to the other but let me amend my statement to say, "George Bush is the worst President in a century" which I think is pretty defensible.
I think Mr Bush is doing a fine job.
Let's see, we have two major terrorist attacks on the United States, where neither Bin Laden nor the anonymous anthrax mailer were ever caught. We have the completely failure of our intelligence and defense forces on 9/11 with no explanation and no plan to fix. We have a trillion -- a *trillion* dollars, do you have the slightest idea how much that is? -- pissed away in a war in a country most Americans couldn't identify on a map, for *nothing*.
We have double-digit increases in the military's main budget every year *on top of* this crazy war; and as a result we have cutbacks in all the services that might make life worthwhile if you weren't crazy rich.
We all watched over *days* while the government sat there and did nothing and we lost New Orleans. George Bush lost New Orleans. He didn't even *pretend to try* to save it. He didn't act concerned, he didn't do anything, and the city was destroyed.
But the worst part is all the dead. There are the thousands of American dead in the ruins of the World Trade Center, the thousands dead in the rubble of New Orleans, the thousands of young American men and women finding miserable and painful deaths in Iraq for nothing (not to mention the tens of thousands of young people returning multilated and crippled) -- and there are the tens of thousands of Iraqis and Afghanis killed by Americans, very many of whom were women, children, or simply people who were trying to mind their own business when an American bomb went off in their vicinity.
You think Mr. Bush is doing a fine job, do you?
On the contrary, even if Bush were impeached this very moment, based on the results of the first five years he'd still be by far the worst President the United States ever had.
Your reference does in fact claim that population *is* growing exponentially, with an exponential growth rate of r=1.2% growth per annum. Perhaps you intended to mention a different article?
Note the section "Looking Ahead" that reads very much like what I wrote (exponential growth cannot continue indefinitely due to resource constraints). As the article you cite points out, it isn't clear that we haven't already exceeded the carrying capacity of the planet.
Had you read what I wrote, you'd notice that I was careful to mention off-world resources as a possible solution. I'd love to believe that this is a possibility but the investment required for this to happen would be astonishingly huge and it's extremely unclear that we have the resources, or the will, to pull it off.
Certainly, if we devoted all our resources to it right now, it'd be 20 years or perhaps a lot more before we saw the first ounce of extraterrestial steel or plastic. Certainly space technology would have to make far more progress in those 20 years than it has in the last 40 before we can start mining asteroids and the like. Expecting off-world resources to save us is a lot like expecting a lottery ticket to rescue you from bankruptcy.
"In that case stop driving a car, stop using the phone, stop using the internet, stop watching tv, stop using electricity, stop using heat, hell pretty much stop using just about everything you have.
/. definition, every company is a greedy bastard."
"By the
What poor reasoning. "Because no company is perfect, it's pointless to criticize any of them." This is particularly stupid in this situation, where we do all have a perfectly good mechanism to bypass the record companies for the most part (p2p or just ripping your friend's CDs).
I've read all of these.
We cannot indefinitely maintain an exponentially growing population on a finite supply of resources. Unless we go off earth for resources, or restrict our consumption and our population, we *will* eventually run out -- even if we do figure out ways to get true renewable energy (solar power satellites?)
The fact that initial predictions put this crisis far too early does not mean that there's a way around it -- or if you have some solution, please let us hear it.
...because it costs a lot of energy to extract the oil from the sand. Right now, the whole procedure is only about 20% efficient which means for every barrel of oil we extract, we are essentially throwing away 4 others...
Many solutions proposed involve less government, in fact. A popular idea would be to cut half of the "Defense" budget (easy to do if you stopped engaging in pointless, profitless foreign wars), eliminate subsidies on gasoline and its superstructure, and use half the money saved to come up with new energy systems.
Unfortunately, we have today the biggest, most expensive and most authoritarian US government ever. The size of the government has grown over 10% each year, for five years; the trade deficit has been the greatest ever, for four years; the budget deficit has been the largest ever, for five years; by the end of 2008 the current "Administration" will easily have spent more deficit money than all other US Administrations put together since the founding of the United States.
And as little as possible of this money was spent on trying to deal with this problem of global warming that might blight the lives of our grandchildren and kill our great-grandchildren.