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And drop your tired line about Perot costing Bush the election:
That's not what I said. I said what you said: the only contribution Perot made to the election was enabling one candidate (in this case Clinton) to win with a non-majority plurality.
Re:And this is an issue because?
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Can you point me to some speech transcripts, or explanatory memorandums he drafted, or anything concrete that backs up Kerry's flip-flopping?
Google it. You can't swing a dead cat in there without hitting a transcript of a Kerry speech. Pick any two in which he talks about Iraq. Odds are fair that his positions are not reconcilable.
Authorization for war: Kerry votes yea. Appropriation for war: Kerry votes nay. (Congressional Record) Last December: Iraq was the right thing to do. (AP, I think it was) Last February: Iraq was a mistake. (AP) Last June: I'd vote for it again. (Boston Globe) Last July: I voted for it before I voted against it. (Kerry's acceptance speech) Last week: Iraq was wrong. (Kerry's new-n-improved stump speech) Last winter: Iraq was a distraction from the war on terror. Yesterday: 1,000 American soldiers died fighting the war on terror.
And, yes, I believe that someone having positions and principles is not contrary to compromising and allowing half-measures, especially in a democracy.
It's one thing to have principles and then reach a compromise. It's another thing not to have any principles to start with and to flap in the breeze.
Kerry's stumped on several occasions about closing tax loopholes.
That's not what the phrase "tax reform" means. Tax reform means rewriting thousands of pages of the tax code with the goal of reducing compliance costs. (Compliance costs, incidentally, add 20 cents to every dollar of taxes paid, on average. If you don't incur any measurable compliance costs--you use the 1040EZ form, take the standard deduction, 10 minutes in and out--then somebody else is spending 40 cents on the dollar. It's an average, and it hits small business the hardest.)
Kerry wants to roll tax cuts back for the "rich" - those over $200,000.
It's not $200,000; it's $100,000. And this is the really critically important part: it's not the rich. It's got little to do with individuals at all. Individuals making more than $100,000 a year don't pay a very large fraction of the country's income tax revenue. Businesses do. And small businesses--S-corporations and sole proprietorships--are taxed using the same schedule that individuals use. So when you raise taxes on individuals making more than $100,000 a year, you're also raising money on sole proprietorships and S-corps.
Do I have to tell you that sole proprietorships and S-corps generate most of the revenues and employ most of the people in this country? Not a group you want to raise taxes on in a recovering economy.
Kerry wants to try and make the Social Security system work largely as-is
Not possible. The CBO says that by 2018, the Social Security system will be running a deficit. We won't be bringing in enough revenue in Social Security taxes to cover the benefits that we'll be paying out.
Without changing the rules, there are only three choices: raise the retirement age (Kerry says no, absolutely not), cut benefits (Kerry says no, absolutely not), or raise Social Security taxes. On that last one, Kerry remains strangely mute.
This issue is, for me, actually a draw.
Then you must not know about health savings accounts. They're new; they just started this year. We won't know exactly how they're doing until we get the 2004 tax returns in, but indications are that they're selling like hotcakes.
HSA's in a nutshell: right now you pay a monthly premium for a low-deductible health-insurance plan. Let's say that your deductible is $500 and your monthly premium is $1,000. (Some of that cost may be covered by your employer and therefore invisible to you. But that's about the right amount, more or less. Also it's a round number, which is good for an example.)
Your monthly check for $1,000 goes to the insurance company. That money is gone, spent, kaput. You'll never see it again. If you're lucky and you live out the year in perfect health, you'll have spent
Re:And this is an issue because?
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So do you, personally, make more than $100,000/year?
Not the issue. The issue is that sole proprietorships and S-corps are also taxes using the individual filling schedule. Most small businesses bring in considerably more than $100,000 a year in gross revenues. Small businesses are the engine that drive the economy: they generate most of the cash flow and they hire most of the employees. Put the clamps on small business and you're putting the clamps on the entire economy.
In case you didn't notice the USA now has the single biggest deficit it has ever had in its entire history.
That's wrong two ways. First, it's wrong in terms of raw adjusted dollars. Our deficit is projected to be $383.7 billion. That's only the fourth-highest since 1940. The 1943 deficit was $486.2 billion, for example. Highest in history.
Second, if you figure the deficit as a percentage of GDP, which is the way the CBO does it, the 2004 deficit is projected to be only the 17th largest in history.
Thou Shalt Not Get They News By Reading Headlines Alone. Okay?
Deficit spending is like using a credit card
No. Credit cards are based on compounding interest over time. The national debt is nothing at all like that. About half of the national debt is what they call intragovernmental debt, which is not interest-bearing at all. The rest is in the form of Treasury bonds which do not compound; they're based on simple interest.
Deficit spending is like taking out a bond, or selling stock in your company. Or, if you prefer, like taking out a mortgage or other bank loan.
I think a more accurate term is "corporatization".
Huh? I don't even know what that means. It's not in my dictionary.
Considering the fantastic record the stock market has given lately (Worldcom, Enron, Haliburton, Disney, etc) I'd rather that my social security money stayed *far* away from it.
The stock market posts an average annual rate of return of 10%. That's very good.
Additionally, due to the various brokerage fees any corporatization of social security amounts to nothing more or less than a huge giveaway to the brokers.
Um. There are no brokerage fees associated with index funds or market accounts. You're kinda just talking out of your ass here, right?
how *dare* Mr. Kerry suggest that the working poor should get health care.
Okay, that's you. Here's another quote.
Deficit spending is like using a credit card, you get instant gratification, then pay through the nose later on.
That's you too. Think on these two things.
Kerry's health-care plan will, if passed, cost the government $900 billion over 10 years. Kerry's tax increases, on the other hand, will raise only $860 billion over ten years. Which means that we can't come anywhere close to affording Kerry's plan, even if we slam the brakes on the recovering economy to finance it. And by the way, that's just his health-care plan. That's not figuring in any of the rest of his legislative agenda, which adds up to an additional $800 billion over 10 years.
That's not the kind of deficit spending you can grow your way out of. That's completely off-the-charts crazy.
You want poor people to have taxpayer-funded health insurance? You figure out how to pay for it.
completely unlike the situation today where our HMO's tell us what doctors we can see
You have a lousy health-care plan. Call your insurance agent. Get a better one.
Less sarcastically, are you aware of the fact that here in the US we spend around $4,500 per capita on health care. In Canada they spend around $2,500 per capita.
You didn't see the big "the sky is falling" article in the Post over the weekend about the Canadian health-care crisis? They're shutting down entire hospitals, for chrissakes. Don't use Canada as a counter-example.
The USA has the absolu
Re:And this is an issue because?
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but the riders for fat pork projects made him vote no.
Well, first, no, that's not the case. This wasn't an omnibus bill. It was a specific appropriation.
And second, so what? I really don't care what rider you want to attach, I'm not going to vote against a bill that buys tank fuel and ammunition for boys in a war zone.
Also, I noticed you only talk against Kerry, and not one comment about Bush
It's too bad that the US electoral system casts out people who stand by their convictions.
It's too bad that you never took a government or a political science class. Or cracked a book, evidently. Or know thing one about American governance or politics.
Please recognize the limits of your knowledge. You don't hear me telling you who to elect as your next grand high moose herder, or whatthefuckever.
Yes. And that realization is, "Ralph Nader is a fucking loon. I feel much better about voting for my party of choice now."
Re:There's a reason for two parties -
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Thank you! I'm glad somebody gets it.
The problem we face, more than anything, is that either lifespans are too short or public schools can't teach history. Like everything else, partisanship is on the end of a pendulm. Except this pendulum's period is measured in decades.
The two-party system, for all its flaws, is demonstrably superior to any other system of representative government yet devised.
Re:Remember this past Democratic Primary?
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Not an important point. I only bring it up because you were off by twenty-four million people. Which is, you know, huge. That's more than the population of Australia. You were off by a whole continent.
Anyway, it's just a point of trivia.
Re:And this is an issue because?
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And look what you got stuck with. Sheesh.
Re:And this is an issue because?
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You need 50% of the populace who bothers to vote
President Clinton won the '92 race with 43% of the votes.
Perot could have won an election. He was very close to doing so.
On what planet? The only thing Perot did was enable President Clinton to win the race with only 43% of the vote.
Re:And this is an issue because?
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both wanted to Invade IRAQ
It's not an acronym. It's just Iraq. But aside from that, you're mistaken. Senator Kerry did not want to invade Iraq. Well, no, that's not really true. First he did, when it was time to vote on the authorization. Then he didn't when it was time to vote on the funding. Then he did when he started running for president in 2003. Then he didn't when Howard Dean came along and started sucking away all the radical anti-war voters. Then he did when he realized that radical anti-war voters didn't add up to 50% of the electorate.
This week he says he didn't. So yeah, you're mistaken.
both want to reform tax
Um. No. Sen. Kerry is opposed to tax reform. He wants to raise taxes. Maybe that's where you got mixed up.
But the thing is, you left out important stuff. President Bush wants to give parents school tuition vouchers. Sen. Kerry doesn't. President Bush wants to make the tax cuts permanent; Sen. Kerry wants to roll them back. Sen. Kerry wants to keep Social Security as it is; President Bush wants to introduce privatization initiatives. Sen. Kerry wants to make health insurance a federal entitlement; President Bush wants to cut health care and health insurance costs instead.
There are important differences. These are just a few. Read the platforms.
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When's the last time any candidate actually tried to show some meat instead of dodging questions?
Edmund Burke once said, "Your representative owes you, not just his industry only, but his judgement; and he betrays instead of serves you if he sacrifices it to your opinion."
Thing is, electors are not representatives. They are not elected. Their only purpose in the system is to carry news of the way their state (or district, in those states that do it that way) voted in the popular election.
He's not "standing up for what he believes in." He's suborning his role in the system to try to assert more power than he is constitutionally granted.
Actually, members of both camps who are familiar with the law will call him "faithless."
This happens every four years. Somebody who's unfamiliar with election law and history comes along and says, "I ain't votin' fer that one no matter what my constichency say." And then he gets yanked according to the "faithless elector" law and makes a big squawk for about 20 minutes. Then everybody forgets for four years.
The conclusion was that even though there was communication and contact, nothing came of it and nothing was likely to come of it given their opposing ideologies.
That's not an accurate summary of the 9/11 Commission's report. Go read it again.
So where's the proof that any of these other organizations were plotting with Saddam against the US?
None of them were.
Look, you seem to be missing the key idea here. Terrorism is bad. Okay? Let's start with the simple stuff, the stuff that no sane human being could argue with. Terrorism is bad.
On 9/11, we went from "terrorism is bad" to "terrorism must be stopped." The use of terrorism, both as a tactic and as a strategy, must be ended. Because terrorism is one of those things that has a way of getting completely out of control really fast. We went from 9/10, thinking that terrorism was bad but not really that bad, to 9/11, watching thousands die on television. With nothing in between. So terrorism itself must be stopped.
Every so often, history conspires in such a way as to put an unreasonable burden on a generation. My great-grandparent's generation had to fight the civil war. The Union was tested, slavery was ended. My father's generation fought the Nazis and the Japanese Empire. Fascism was defeated. My generation "fought" the Cold War. Communism was defeated.
Now our kid's generation has to fight terrorism. We didn't choose it, but we're not going to shrink from it either.
Now, in that light, would you like to look back over your statement about how Abu Nidal wasn't a threat to the US and apologize for being the world's biggest dumbass?
There were lots of good reasons to go after Saddam, but those aren't the reasons that Bush used to persuade the world that war was necessary.
LOL. What planet are you living on? The Bush administration didn't try to persuade anybody of anything. They put the facts out there and said, "This is why."
The fact that you're either too much of an idiot or too unwilling to pay attention to understand doesn't come into it.
You make it sound like you were deceived, like you were tricked into giving your consent. You were not asked. Got it?
But hey - Halliburton got billions of dollars out of the deal, so i guess it's not all bad, right?
Check the financial statement that just came out last week. Turns out they lost money on the deal. But don't let that get in the way of your conspiracy theory, okay?
He and the rest of his administration routinely lies or states incorrect information
You don't have a single example of a lie on the part of the administration. You know it, I know it, and everybody else here knows it. So just take a step back and cool it, okay?
Christ, you're an idiot. I'm completely floored by the depth of your idiocy. You're not a garden-variety idiot. You're a hard-core, no-kiddin', professional idiot.
No 'collaborative relationship' between Iraq and [al Qaeda]
You left out the rest of the conclusion. There was communication and contact between Iraq and al-Qaida. The reason we went into Iraq when we did was to prevent the emergence of collaboration.
I offered a citation - proof to back up my claims.
Which you apparently did not read.
Besides, even if Iraq had never heard of al-Qaida, there's still the little matter of the Abu Nidal Organization, or Jund al Islam, of HAMAS, and so on and so on and so on.
Your argument seems to be "But Saddam never actually participated in an attack carried out by these particular terrorists." Which should make you so deeply ashamed that you crawl under your bed and never, ever come out.
Please don't make me give you the whole history lesson. Please let me get away with simply pointing out that al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden are not synonyms. Al-Qaida is a loose, global organization of terrorists. Osama bin Laden was a high-ranking member of al-Qaida (some say one of its founders, others say he came along later). Osama bin Laden was never, to the best of our knowledge, in Iraq. Members of al-Qaida, however, set up shop there in 2001 with the consent and assistance of the Iraqi military intelligence ministry and Saddam himself.
Please don't try and argue that a Saddam-al Qaeda connection is not the same as a Saddam-Osama connection.
I'm not trying to argue it. I'm pointing it out as a fact, one that you should have known already.
It only makes you guys look stupid.
There's no doubt in my mind that I look like a fool for bothering to refute your unbelievably idiotic spasms, but what can I say? I have a soft spot for morons.
Are you trying to make with the funny? The people behind Disinfopedia have never made any secret of their political agenda. Compare their articles on George W. Bush and John Kerry and tell me again how they're not biased.
They had an incorrect story and they retracted it.
No, they ran an incorrect story and they refused to retract it.
Let me 'splain how the AP works. They run stories over the wire then periodically update them. These updates are called "writethrus." If there are additional details to add to a story, they issue a new writethru. If there's a CORRECTION, they run a retraction.
In this case, the AP ran a new writethru with the offending lie elided. They DID NOT run a retraction.
The Washington bureau's phone banks and fax lines got swamped for more than 24 hours. It was only then that they issued a retraction. By that time the story had already been printed in newspapers all over the world. It was too late.
This isn't spin. It's a huge fucking story. You're just ignoring it.
Slashdot Mirror
And drop your tired line about Perot costing Bush the election:
That's not what I said. I said what you said: the only contribution Perot made to the election was enabling one candidate (in this case Clinton) to win with a non-majority plurality.
Can you point me to some speech transcripts, or explanatory memorandums he drafted, or anything concrete that backs up Kerry's flip-flopping?
Google it. You can't swing a dead cat in there without hitting a transcript of a Kerry speech. Pick any two in which he talks about Iraq. Odds are fair that his positions are not reconcilable.
Authorization for war: Kerry votes yea. Appropriation for war: Kerry votes nay. (Congressional Record) Last December: Iraq was the right thing to do. (AP, I think it was) Last February: Iraq was a mistake. (AP) Last June: I'd vote for it again. (Boston Globe) Last July: I voted for it before I voted against it. (Kerry's acceptance speech) Last week: Iraq was wrong. (Kerry's new-n-improved stump speech) Last winter: Iraq was a distraction from the war on terror. Yesterday: 1,000 American soldiers died fighting the war on terror.
And, yes, I believe that someone having positions and principles is not contrary to compromising and allowing half-measures, especially in a democracy.
It's one thing to have principles and then reach a compromise. It's another thing not to have any principles to start with and to flap in the breeze.
Kerry's stumped on several occasions about closing tax loopholes.
That's not what the phrase "tax reform" means. Tax reform means rewriting thousands of pages of the tax code with the goal of reducing compliance costs. (Compliance costs, incidentally, add 20 cents to every dollar of taxes paid, on average. If you don't incur any measurable compliance costs--you use the 1040EZ form, take the standard deduction, 10 minutes in and out--then somebody else is spending 40 cents on the dollar. It's an average, and it hits small business the hardest.)
Kerry wants to roll tax cuts back for the "rich" - those over $200,000.
It's not $200,000; it's $100,000. And this is the really critically important part: it's not the rich. It's got little to do with individuals at all. Individuals making more than $100,000 a year don't pay a very large fraction of the country's income tax revenue. Businesses do. And small businesses--S-corporations and sole proprietorships--are taxed using the same schedule that individuals use. So when you raise taxes on individuals making more than $100,000 a year, you're also raising money on sole proprietorships and S-corps.
Do I have to tell you that sole proprietorships and S-corps generate most of the revenues and employ most of the people in this country? Not a group you want to raise taxes on in a recovering economy.
Kerry wants to try and make the Social Security system work largely as-is
Not possible. The CBO says that by 2018, the Social Security system will be running a deficit. We won't be bringing in enough revenue in Social Security taxes to cover the benefits that we'll be paying out.
Without changing the rules, there are only three choices: raise the retirement age (Kerry says no, absolutely not), cut benefits (Kerry says no, absolutely not), or raise Social Security taxes. On that last one, Kerry remains strangely mute.
This issue is, for me, actually a draw.
Then you must not know about health savings accounts. They're new; they just started this year. We won't know exactly how they're doing until we get the 2004 tax returns in, but indications are that they're selling like hotcakes.
HSA's in a nutshell: right now you pay a monthly premium for a low-deductible health-insurance plan. Let's say that your deductible is $500 and your monthly premium is $1,000. (Some of that cost may be covered by your employer and therefore invisible to you. But that's about the right amount, more or less. Also it's a round number, which is good for an example.)
Your monthly check for $1,000 goes to the insurance company. That money is gone, spent, kaput. You'll never see it again. If you're lucky and you live out the year in perfect health, you'll have spent
So do you, personally, make more than $100,000/year?
Not the issue. The issue is that sole proprietorships and S-corps are also taxes using the individual filling schedule. Most small businesses bring in considerably more than $100,000 a year in gross revenues. Small businesses are the engine that drive the economy: they generate most of the cash flow and they hire most of the employees. Put the clamps on small business and you're putting the clamps on the entire economy.
In case you didn't notice the USA now has the single biggest deficit it has ever had in its entire history.
That's wrong two ways. First, it's wrong in terms of raw adjusted dollars. Our deficit is projected to be $383.7 billion. That's only the fourth-highest since 1940. The 1943 deficit was $486.2 billion, for example. Highest in history.
Second, if you figure the deficit as a percentage of GDP, which is the way the CBO does it, the 2004 deficit is projected to be only the 17th largest in history.
Thou Shalt Not Get They News By Reading Headlines Alone. Okay?
Deficit spending is like using a credit card
No. Credit cards are based on compounding interest over time. The national debt is nothing at all like that. About half of the national debt is what they call intragovernmental debt, which is not interest-bearing at all. The rest is in the form of Treasury bonds which do not compound; they're based on simple interest.
Deficit spending is like taking out a bond, or selling stock in your company. Or, if you prefer, like taking out a mortgage or other bank loan.
I think a more accurate term is "corporatization".
Huh? I don't even know what that means. It's not in my dictionary.
Considering the fantastic record the stock market has given lately (Worldcom, Enron, Haliburton, Disney, etc) I'd rather that my social security money stayed *far* away from it.
The stock market posts an average annual rate of return of 10%. That's very good.
Additionally, due to the various brokerage fees any corporatization of social security amounts to nothing more or less than a huge giveaway to the brokers.
Um. There are no brokerage fees associated with index funds or market accounts. You're kinda just talking out of your ass here, right?
how *dare* Mr. Kerry suggest that the working poor should get health care.
Okay, that's you. Here's another quote.
Deficit spending is like using a credit card, you get instant gratification, then pay through the nose later on.
That's you too. Think on these two things.
Kerry's health-care plan will, if passed, cost the government $900 billion over 10 years. Kerry's tax increases, on the other hand, will raise only $860 billion over ten years. Which means that we can't come anywhere close to affording Kerry's plan, even if we slam the brakes on the recovering economy to finance it. And by the way, that's just his health-care plan. That's not figuring in any of the rest of his legislative agenda, which adds up to an additional $800 billion over 10 years.
That's not the kind of deficit spending you can grow your way out of. That's completely off-the-charts crazy.
You want poor people to have taxpayer-funded health insurance? You figure out how to pay for it.
completely unlike the situation today where our HMO's tell us what doctors we can see
You have a lousy health-care plan. Call your insurance agent. Get a better one.
Less sarcastically, are you aware of the fact that here in the US we spend around $4,500 per capita on health care. In Canada they spend around $2,500 per capita.
You didn't see the big "the sky is falling" article in the Post over the weekend about the Canadian health-care crisis? They're shutting down entire hospitals, for chrissakes. Don't use Canada as a counter-example.
The USA has the absolu
but the riders for fat pork projects made him vote no.
Well, first, no, that's not the case. This wasn't an omnibus bill. It was a specific appropriation.
And second, so what? I really don't care what rider you want to attach, I'm not going to vote against a bill that buys tank fuel and ammunition for boys in a war zone.
Also, I noticed you only talk against Kerry, and not one comment about Bush
Read again, putz.
It's too bad that the US electoral system casts out people who stand by their convictions.
It's too bad that you never took a government or a political science class. Or cracked a book, evidently. Or know thing one about American governance or politics.
Please recognize the limits of your knowledge. You don't hear me telling you who to elect as your next grand high moose herder, or whatthefuckever.
Yes. And that realization is, "Ralph Nader is a fucking loon. I feel much better about voting for my party of choice now."
Thank you! I'm glad somebody gets it.
The problem we face, more than anything, is that either lifespans are too short or public schools can't teach history. Like everything else, partisanship is on the end of a pendulm. Except this pendulum's period is measured in decades.
The two-party system, for all its flaws, is demonstrably superior to any other system of representative government yet devised.
I'm sorry, but in a country of 270 million people
294,221,787
Not an important point. I only bring it up because you were off by twenty-four million people. Which is, you know, huge. That's more than the population of Australia. You were off by a whole continent.
Anyway, it's just a point of trivia.
And look what you got stuck with. Sheesh.
You need 50% of the populace who bothers to vote
President Clinton won the '92 race with 43% of the votes.
Perot could have won an election. He was very close to doing so.
On what planet? The only thing Perot did was enable President Clinton to win the race with only 43% of the vote.
both wanted to Invade IRAQ
It's not an acronym. It's just Iraq. But aside from that, you're mistaken. Senator Kerry did not want to invade Iraq. Well, no, that's not really true. First he did, when it was time to vote on the authorization. Then he didn't when it was time to vote on the funding. Then he did when he started running for president in 2003. Then he didn't when Howard Dean came along and started sucking away all the radical anti-war voters. Then he did when he realized that radical anti-war voters didn't add up to 50% of the electorate.
This week he says he didn't. So yeah, you're mistaken.
both want to reform tax
Um. No. Sen. Kerry is opposed to tax reform. He wants to raise taxes. Maybe that's where you got mixed up.
But the thing is, you left out important stuff. President Bush wants to give parents school tuition vouchers. Sen. Kerry doesn't. President Bush wants to make the tax cuts permanent; Sen. Kerry wants to roll them back. Sen. Kerry wants to keep Social Security as it is; President Bush wants to introduce privatization initiatives. Sen. Kerry wants to make health insurance a federal entitlement; President Bush wants to cut health care and health insurance costs instead.
There are important differences. These are just a few. Read the platforms.
When's the last time any candidate actually tried to show some meat instead of dodging questions?
Last time around.
Because at least one of the candidates has a full-time job.
No, he's not.
Edmund Burke once said, "Your representative owes you, not just his industry only, but his judgement; and he betrays instead of serves you if he sacrifices it to your opinion."
Thing is, electors are not representatives. They are not elected. Their only purpose in the system is to carry news of the way their state (or district, in those states that do it that way) voted in the popular election.
He's not "standing up for what he believes in." He's suborning his role in the system to try to assert more power than he is constitutionally granted.
Actually, members of both camps who are familiar with the law will call him "faithless."
This happens every four years. Somebody who's unfamiliar with election law and history comes along and says, "I ain't votin' fer that one no matter what my constichency say." And then he gets yanked according to the "faithless elector" law and makes a big squawk for about 20 minutes. Then everybody forgets for four years.
The conclusion was that even though there was communication and contact, nothing came of it and nothing was likely to come of it given their opposing ideologies.
That's not an accurate summary of the 9/11 Commission's report. Go read it again.
So where's the proof that any of these other organizations were plotting with Saddam against the US?
None of them were.
Look, you seem to be missing the key idea here. Terrorism is bad. Okay? Let's start with the simple stuff, the stuff that no sane human being could argue with. Terrorism is bad.
On 9/11, we went from "terrorism is bad" to "terrorism must be stopped." The use of terrorism, both as a tactic and as a strategy, must be ended. Because terrorism is one of those things that has a way of getting completely out of control really fast. We went from 9/10, thinking that terrorism was bad but not really that bad, to 9/11, watching thousands die on television. With nothing in between. So terrorism itself must be stopped.
Every so often, history conspires in such a way as to put an unreasonable burden on a generation. My great-grandparent's generation had to fight the civil war. The Union was tested, slavery was ended. My father's generation fought the Nazis and the Japanese Empire. Fascism was defeated. My generation "fought" the Cold War. Communism was defeated.
Now our kid's generation has to fight terrorism. We didn't choose it, but we're not going to shrink from it either.
Now, in that light, would you like to look back over your statement about how Abu Nidal wasn't a threat to the US and apologize for being the world's biggest dumbass?
There were lots of good reasons to go after Saddam, but those aren't the reasons that Bush used to persuade the world that war was necessary.
LOL. What planet are you living on? The Bush administration didn't try to persuade anybody of anything. They put the facts out there and said, "This is why."
The fact that you're either too much of an idiot or too unwilling to pay attention to understand doesn't come into it.
You make it sound like you were deceived, like you were tricked into giving your consent. You were not asked. Got it?
But hey - Halliburton got billions of dollars out of the deal, so i guess it's not all bad, right?
Check the financial statement that just came out last week. Turns out they lost money on the deal. But don't let that get in the way of your conspiracy theory, okay?
He and the rest of his administration routinely lies or states incorrect information
You don't have a single example of a lie on the part of the administration. You know it, I know it, and everybody else here knows it. So just take a step back and cool it, okay?
Christ, you're an idiot. I'm completely floored by the depth of your idiocy. You're not a garden-variety idiot. You're a hard-core, no-kiddin', professional idiot.
No 'collaborative relationship' between Iraq and [al Qaeda]
You left out the rest of the conclusion. There was communication and contact between Iraq and al-Qaida. The reason we went into Iraq when we did was to prevent the emergence of collaboration.
I offered a citation - proof to back up my claims.
Which you apparently did not read.
Besides, even if Iraq had never heard of al-Qaida, there's still the little matter of the Abu Nidal Organization, or Jund al Islam, of HAMAS, and so on and so on and so on.
Your argument seems to be "But Saddam never actually participated in an attack carried out by these particular terrorists." Which should make you so deeply ashamed that you crawl under your bed and never, ever come out.
"We know he's got ties with al Qaeda."
Please don't make me give you the whole history lesson. Please let me get away with simply pointing out that al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden are not synonyms. Al-Qaida is a loose, global organization of terrorists. Osama bin Laden was a high-ranking member of al-Qaida (some say one of its founders, others say he came along later). Osama bin Laden was never, to the best of our knowledge, in Iraq. Members of al-Qaida, however, set up shop there in 2001 with the consent and assistance of the Iraqi military intelligence ministry and Saddam himself.
Please don't try and argue that a Saddam-al Qaeda connection is not the same as a Saddam-Osama connection.
I'm not trying to argue it. I'm pointing it out as a fact, one that you should have known already.
It only makes you guys look stupid.
There's no doubt in my mind that I look like a fool for bothering to refute your unbelievably idiotic spasms, but what can I say? I have a soft spot for morons.
Wow. Time warp. How'd this comment from early 2002 end up in this thread?
Nice one. You embarrassed yourself and tried to distract folks from the fact by making fun of the person who pointed it out.
Good job.
Are you trying to make with the funny? The people behind Disinfopedia have never made any secret of their political agenda. Compare their articles on George W. Bush and John Kerry and tell me again how they're not biased.
"Bush's audience of thousands in West Allis, Wis., booed. Bush did nothing to stop them."
More rhetorical chaff. You're really, really bad at this.
Everything you said was wrong, every single word.
You're a radical leftist and you're trying to hide that agenda by saying "Show me even one mistake!" You're not fooling anybody.
Grow the hell up.
They had an incorrect story and they retracted it.
No, they ran an incorrect story and they refused to retract it.
Let me 'splain how the AP works. They run stories over the wire then periodically update them. These updates are called "writethrus." If there are additional details to add to a story, they issue a new writethru. If there's a CORRECTION, they run a retraction.
In this case, the AP ran a new writethru with the offending lie elided. They DID NOT run a retraction.
The Washington bureau's phone banks and fax lines got swamped for more than 24 hours. It was only then that they issued a retraction. By that time the story had already been printed in newspapers all over the world. It was too late.
This isn't spin. It's a huge fucking story. You're just ignoring it.