You should try reading the Geneva Conventions sometime, because if you did you would know that they exclude various classes of people from their provisions. There is no work for the administration to do in that.
Then why did they do it?
You are talking nonsense.
No, you idiot, because I'm not the one who was trying to do that!
Uh yea did you try calling NY or DC on 9/11? I did.. my wife (then friend) was in NY with her mother was in NY and it took morethan 3 hours to get through.. For some reason or another a good number of people were using the phone.
Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't know that the Vice President, the Secretary of Defense, the National Security Advisor, the Joint Chiefs, and the entire staff of the Air Force and NORAD were on the steets of New York and couldn't be reached by phone. Silly me!
And two years after wanting to be VP (he was rather slighted when Gore picked Lieberman, and ten years after running (1992). There is not a senator who does not look in the mirror and see a president, heck I am sure he was already raising money..
Alright, there where the fuck was George W. when the embasies were bombed in Africa? Why was he sitting around, probably drunk, after the barracks were bombed in Lebanon instead of getting off his ass and taking charge of the situation?
I am constantly impressed by your ability to spew random, meaningless statements out of your butt in your never ending effort to sidetrack conversations. I salute you, sir troll.
Yea he was just one of the most important law makers
And just how is making law going to deal with the attack that's going down on your country right now?
who wants to be president.
...two years before he started running.
I mean its not Like John Kerry in on the seante foreign relations commitee is it? Why did he not spring up and start calling people?
Like I said before, how would thinking about foreign relations do anything to stop someone's attack? FR is something to work on to prevent future attacks, not provide the first line of real, physical defense for your country.
What action *within the scope of his power* did he take.
That's just it: there was no action within the scope of his power that would make any difference. And that's not using 20/20 hindsight, unlike the Bush apologists who insist it was okay for Bush to sit in a classroom for 7 minutes after the second plane crashed "because it wouldn't have made any difference in the end." Just what are you suggesting Kerry should have done? Call up the Senate and get a bill passed that would get fighter jets in the air?
Well lets see Im sure at a tim when assaniation was bloodly likely
Why was it "bloody likely"? Was Clinton afraid of an assasination attempt after the bombings of our embasies in Africa, the Oklahoma City Bombing or the first terrorist attack on the WTC? And if your enemy's weapon of joice seems to be jumbo jets, wouldn't you want to get the fuck out of the building you are currently in? Belive it or not, but that's what the Secret Service is for: extracting the president out of hostile situations on a moments notice.
In addition to this what could he have done in those moments?
There's that 20/20 hindsight again. Wether or not he could have made a difference in the end is irrelevant. Even if Bush didn't have the first clue what to do (which he obviously did not), that's what he has a Secretary of Defense for. Actually, he has a two time SOD in Rumsfield, and Cheney was SOD under Herbert Walker Bush. So its not like he didn't have anyone to call, and the fact that he did not is inexcusable. And no amount of neocon apologizing and spin doctoring will do a god damn thing to change that.
What could anyone have done (even John Kerry)? Bush was more than a thousand miles away from Washington, and more than two thousand miles away from NY.
There's this great invention called the telephone. You can even use them without wires now, they're called cellular phones.
Kerry lied about Cambodia, this i sknown fact. He lied on the floor of Congress, he lied in his biography by Brinkley.
Riiiight. Do you have proof that he lied, rather than being mistaken about something that happened 15 years earlier? Thought so. And since you are evidently a Republican, and Republicans just love to be consistent, you must hate those Swift Boat Veterans for Truth who've changed their stories from their own accounts over 30 years ago, and don't match Navy records?
Likewise, the Abu Gharaib incident, although serious, was badly distored and exploited for political purposes. It looks like it was a total of about 30 badly supervised, poorly trained soldiers abusing prisioners for mixed reasons, mainly over a period about a week following some troubling security incidents.
Excuse me? The administration advocates "stress and duress" treatment for prisoners, and sets its lawyers to work on finding ways to exempt these prisoners from the Geneva Convention and otherwise deny them basic human rights, and people are surprised that a scandal like this was going to happen?
That testimony has largely been discredited. A shocking number of the people he was quoting weren't who they said they were, and had not been where they said that they had been.
And that is Kerry's fault...how? And regaurdless as to wether or not some of those 100 people were lying or not, atrocities were commited by U.S. troops, sometimes aided and abetted by commading officers. Strike out all the liars and he could have made the exact same speech.
No, Kerry intends to say to the Europeans, "We are very sorry for not doing what you wanted."
Uh huh, and when it comes to Iraq, who was right? Bush, for saying that Saddam had such stockpiles of WMD's that he was an imminent threat that needed to be taken out right now, or Europeans who wanted to wait for more weapons inspections?
Ever heard of places like Germany or Japan you fscking retard?
Well, Germany was a democracy before World War II. Hitler was an elected official. So democracy was nothing new to them. Obviously Japan was not, but neither Germany nor Japan were tribal as fook before during or after the war. Iraq is.
Iraq is more likely to decend into a civil war like Yugoslavia did or end up like one of the African clusterfuck countries, as opposed to being a success story like postwar Japan or Germany.
Allawi is the "INTERIM" prime minister. That means he is a selected official, not an elected one, and that makes a whole lot of difference, in the deference associated with that post.
Okay, you go explain to the insurgents that are chopping off foreigners heads that Allawi is "only" an interm PM. I'm sure they'll wonder how they could have missed the obvious difference, start smoking pot and become peaceful hippies.
One of the few ways almost guaranteed to make you rich these days is to write a book criticizing the Bush Administration. I guess the organs of oppression must be on dialysis, huh?
Sean Hannity. Ann Coulter. Talk radio. The innumerable books/radio shows/documentaries going after Clinton.
The worst thing about you necons is your GIANT HYPOCRACY.
George Soros, Barbara Striesand, and Tereza Heinz Kerry
When? And how many of those people are in powerful government positions?
I've never seen the administration call anyone un-American, disloyal, or unpatriotic.
Then you haven't been paying attention. Just last night Bush claimed that Kerry's critisims of the war were bad for troop and Iraqi moral. When Bill Maher pointed out that, contrary to what the administration was saying, if you fly a plane into a building because of your beliefs, that's not cowardice, cowardice is when you shoot cruise missles at far away targets with no risk to yourself, the White House press secretary said something like "this isn't the time for comments like that, there never are". Or how about Bush's "there should be limits to freedom". Not to mention the fact that if you bring up the fact that our foriegn policy is the reason why terrorists hate us, you'll be put in the "blame America first crowd".
Innumberable studies have shown that children are much better off with both parents in their lives. And if you have to pick one parent or the other, children are better off with the father rather than the mother. Want to know what's the number one way to reduce child drug abuse, crime, and teen pregnancy? Have a father in the child's life.
Furthermore, wtf should the father have to work his ass off to pay for children that he has limited access to? Not to mention what a godforsaken mess the child support system is.
What they are trying to do is change the foundation of society
"Foundation of society" my ass. Throughout history a large percentage of marriages were not made from love or the desire to have a family, but arranged for political or economic gain. And while you don't see many arranged marriages in the West anymore, you can't tell me with a straight face that a Britney-Spears-36-hour-Hollywood-marriage is more respectful of this "sacred institution" than two homosexuals who love eachother and want to spend the rest of their lives together.
It *very* telling that all this "protection of marriage" crap starts and stops with homosexuals. And homophobes should realize that gays and lesbians want to embrace marriage, not destroy it.
Your analogy would only be appropriate if gays were demanding to be Southern Babtist ministers or take leadership positions in Jerry Falwel's Moral Majority. They aren't, so what you just said was a whole load of bullshit.
Another standard I think passes the "common sense, gut feeling" test is this: Once an egg has been fertilized and a new entity with its own DNA has come into being, that entity is a human being.
A single cell organism is a human being? That's as ludicrous as saying that a baby 5 minutes from delivery can't be considered a baby. Obviously there's a grey area, but a single cell organism does not a human being make.
But those two states don't come remotely close to have a majority of the population - yes it would come down to NY and CA, but also other high population states like Texas and Florida. Sort of how it is right now.
Actually, more so than states, they'd go for the largest media markets, which would mean the eastern seaboard, the southwest, and everyone else would be forgotten.
Heh, actually I'm not surprised that you haven't heard of it, as Americans, like most people, vastly overstate their own importance. "Shot heard round the world", and all that rot, as if colonies and conquered states haven't been rising up against the empires that rule them as long as there have been empires.
...and running tough campaigns against fellow Democrats, but run around like headless chickens when facing Republicans. This election shouldn't be remotely close...we should be talking about the inevitable Kerry landslide and how lucky Bush will be to carry Idaho and a couple Bible Belt states. Instead this election will be just as close as the last one, or Kerry will fuck it up Dukakis-style and Bush will win handily.
Kerry isn't a flip flopper, but he never gets out of Rhetoric Mode and never commits to anything. WTF do they have Edwards running around rural Ohio when he should be on the news networks 12 hours a day eviscerating the Bush administration is beyond me. He was a fucking trial lawyer for gods sakes, it should be trivial for him to put together a case against the Bush administration that was so tight that not even Rush Limbagh could find fault with it.
Even "red states" should be easy pickings for Kerry and Edwards, all they have to do is crush Bush's image as a real, traditional conservative. How about a return to fiscal responsiblity, a government that protects us without infringing on our rights, getting rid of unfunded mandates, and most obviously, not getting us into a massive, costly war that's not in our national interests.
WTF doesn't Kerry have an economic plan? WTF, for example, doesn't he propose a two year plan consisting of:
$100 billion for infrastructure - would generate tens of thousands of jobs
Expand Americore - more jobs and more people going to college
Common now. Remember how Russert sneered at Dean for not knowing exactly how many troops are in the U.S. military? Remember how he moved right on to the next question when he asked Bush a similar question in 2000?
And besides, this is irrelevant to the poster's point, as Bush only does interviews with pre-approved questions. The Ireland interview was like that too - it just never occured to Bush's handlers that the interviewer would actually challenge Bush on his prepared answers.
But, yes, Virginia, they even ask, gasp! conservatives hard questions!
No, they don't. Unless its some neocon position that's against traditional conservative dogma, like Bush giving drivers licenses to illegal immigrants. Fox's idea of a balanced debate is a right wing position put up against a so-far-to-the-right-they've-fallen-off-the-deep-en d position.
He nor his campaign have ever once mentioned pulling out of Iraq.
No, as he realizes that the "you break it you buy it" principle applies to Iraq. What he does want to do is increase international participation in Iraq, which Bush hasn't been able to do thanks to his "my way or the highway" approach.
Things are completely different here, however, and attempting to adopt Europe's solution to attack arbitrary American problems is short-sighted idiocy. Higher (3x) fuel taxes will only put an even larger burden on the rural/suburban poor than already exists.
Great, so get a fuel efficient car. If you buy a 6,000 lbs SUV, that's basically free anyway if you can use all the deductions, the least you can do is take it up the ass on gas prices.
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You should try reading the Geneva Conventions sometime, because if you did you would know that they exclude various classes of people from their provisions. There is no work for the administration to do in that.
Then why did they do it?
You are talking nonsense.
No, you idiot, because I'm not the one who was trying to do that!
Uh yea did you try calling NY or DC on 9/11? I did.. my wife (then friend) was in NY with her mother was in NY and it took morethan 3 hours to get through.. For some reason or another a good number of people were using the phone.
Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't know that the Vice President, the Secretary of Defense, the National Security Advisor, the Joint Chiefs, and the entire staff of the Air Force and NORAD were on the steets of New York and couldn't be reached by phone. Silly me!
And two years after wanting to be VP (he was rather slighted when Gore picked Lieberman, and ten years after running (1992). There is not a senator who does not look in the mirror and see a president, heck I am sure he was already raising money..
Alright, there where the fuck was George W. when the embasies were bombed in Africa? Why was he sitting around, probably drunk, after the barracks were bombed in Lebanon instead of getting off his ass and taking charge of the situation?
I am constantly impressed by your ability to spew random, meaningless statements out of your butt in your never ending effort to sidetrack conversations. I salute you, sir troll.
Yea he was just one of the most important law makers
And just how is making law going to deal with the attack that's going down on your country right now?
who wants to be president.
...two years before he started running.
I mean its not Like John Kerry in on the seante foreign relations commitee is it? Why did he not spring up and start calling people?
Like I said before, how would thinking about foreign relations do anything to stop someone's attack? FR is something to work on to prevent future attacks, not provide the first line of real, physical defense for your country.
What action *within the scope of his power* did he take.
That's just it: there was no action within the scope of his power that would make any difference. And that's not using 20/20 hindsight, unlike the Bush apologists who insist it was okay for Bush to sit in a classroom for 7 minutes after the second plane crashed "because it wouldn't have made any difference in the end." Just what are you suggesting Kerry should have done? Call up the Senate and get a bill passed that would get fighter jets in the air?
Well lets see Im sure at a tim when assaniation was bloodly likely
Why was it "bloody likely"? Was Clinton afraid of an assasination attempt after the bombings of our embasies in Africa, the Oklahoma City Bombing or the first terrorist attack on the WTC? And if your enemy's weapon of joice seems to be jumbo jets, wouldn't you want to get the fuck out of the building you are currently in? Belive it or not, but that's what the Secret Service is for: extracting the president out of hostile situations on a moments notice.
In addition to this what could he have done in those moments?
There's that 20/20 hindsight again. Wether or not he could have made a difference in the end is irrelevant. Even if Bush didn't have the first clue what to do (which he obviously did not), that's what he has a Secretary of Defense for. Actually, he has a two time SOD in Rumsfield, and Cheney was SOD under Herbert Walker Bush. So its not like he didn't have anyone to call, and the fact that he did not is inexcusable. And no amount of neocon apologizing and spin doctoring will do a god damn thing to change that.
What could anyone have done (even John Kerry)? Bush was more than a thousand miles away from Washington, and more than two thousand miles away from NY.
There's this great invention called the telephone. You can even use them without wires now, they're called cellular phones.
You're kidding, right?
What if your principled refusal to follow an order makes it very likely that you, and your friends, will all be killed?
Kerry lied about Cambodia, this i sknown fact. He lied on the floor of Congress, he lied in his biography by Brinkley.
Riiiight. Do you have proof that he lied, rather than being mistaken about something that happened 15 years earlier? Thought so. And since you are evidently a Republican, and Republicans just love to be consistent, you must hate those Swift Boat Veterans for Truth who've changed their stories from their own accounts over 30 years ago, and don't match Navy records?
Likewise, the Abu Gharaib incident, although serious, was badly distored and exploited for political purposes. It looks like it was a total of about 30 badly supervised, poorly trained soldiers abusing prisioners for mixed reasons, mainly over a period about a week following some troubling security incidents.
Excuse me? The administration advocates "stress and duress" treatment for prisoners, and sets its lawyers to work on finding ways to exempt these prisoners from the Geneva Convention and otherwise deny them basic human rights, and people are surprised that a scandal like this was going to happen?
That testimony has largely been discredited. A shocking number of the people he was quoting weren't who they said they were, and had not been where they said that they had been.
And that is Kerry's fault...how? And regaurdless as to wether or not some of those 100 people were lying or not, atrocities were commited by U.S. troops, sometimes aided and abetted by commading officers. Strike out all the liars and he could have made the exact same speech.
No, Kerry intends to say to the Europeans, "We are very sorry for not doing what you wanted."
Uh huh, and when it comes to Iraq, who was right? Bush, for saying that Saddam had such stockpiles of WMD's that he was an imminent threat that needed to be taken out right now, or Europeans who wanted to wait for more weapons inspections?
Ever heard of places like Germany or Japan you fscking retard?
Well, Germany was a democracy before World War II. Hitler was an elected official. So democracy was nothing new to them. Obviously Japan was not, but neither Germany nor Japan were tribal as fook before during or after the war. Iraq is.
Iraq is more likely to decend into a civil war like Yugoslavia did or end up like one of the African clusterfuck countries, as opposed to being a success story like postwar Japan or Germany.
Allawi is the "INTERIM" prime minister. That means he is a selected official, not an elected one, and that makes a whole lot of difference, in the deference associated with that post.
Okay, you go explain to the insurgents that are chopping off foreigners heads that Allawi is "only" an interm PM. I'm sure they'll wonder how they could have missed the obvious difference, start smoking pot and become peaceful hippies.
One of the few ways almost guaranteed to make you rich these days is to write a book criticizing the Bush Administration. I guess the organs of oppression must be on dialysis, huh?
Sean Hannity. Ann Coulter. Talk radio. The innumerable books/radio shows/documentaries going after Clinton.
The worst thing about you necons is your GIANT HYPOCRACY.
George Soros, Barbara Striesand, and Tereza Heinz Kerry
When? And how many of those people are in powerful government positions?
I've never seen the administration call anyone un-American, disloyal, or unpatriotic.
Then you haven't been paying attention. Just last night Bush claimed that Kerry's critisims of the war were bad for troop and Iraqi moral. When Bill Maher pointed out that, contrary to what the administration was saying, if you fly a plane into a building because of your beliefs, that's not cowardice, cowardice is when you shoot cruise missles at far away targets with no risk to yourself, the White House press secretary said something like "this isn't the time for comments like that, there never are". Or how about Bush's "there should be limits to freedom". Not to mention the fact that if you bring up the fact that our foriegn policy is the reason why terrorists hate us, you'll be put in the "blame America first crowd".
(Mod:+5, neocon smackdown)
Innumberable studies have shown that children are much better off with both parents in their lives. And if you have to pick one parent or the other, children are better off with the father rather than the mother. Want to know what's the number one way to reduce child drug abuse, crime, and teen pregnancy? Have a father in the child's life.
Furthermore, wtf should the father have to work his ass off to pay for children that he has limited access to? Not to mention what a godforsaken mess the child support system is.
What they are trying to do is change the foundation of society
"Foundation of society" my ass. Throughout history a large percentage of marriages were not made from love or the desire to have a family, but arranged for political or economic gain. And while you don't see many arranged marriages in the West anymore, you can't tell me with a straight face that a Britney-Spears-36-hour-Hollywood-marriage is more respectful of this "sacred institution" than two homosexuals who love eachother and want to spend the rest of their lives together.
It *very* telling that all this "protection of marriage" crap starts and stops with homosexuals. And homophobes should realize that gays and lesbians want to embrace marriage, not destroy it.
Your analogy would only be appropriate if gays were demanding to be Southern Babtist ministers or take leadership positions in Jerry Falwel's Moral Majority. They aren't, so what you just said was a whole load of bullshit.
Another standard I think passes the "common sense, gut feeling" test is this: Once an egg has been fertilized and a new entity with its own DNA has come into being, that entity is a human being.
A single cell organism is a human being? That's as ludicrous as saying that a baby 5 minutes from delivery can't be considered a baby. Obviously there's a grey area, but a single cell organism does not a human being make.
But those two states don't come remotely close to have a majority of the population - yes it would come down to NY and CA, but also other high population states like Texas and Florida. Sort of how it is right now.
Actually, more so than states, they'd go for the largest media markets, which would mean the eastern seaboard, the southwest, and everyone else would be forgotten.
Heh, actually I'm not surprised that you haven't heard of it, as Americans, like most people, vastly overstate their own importance. "Shot heard round the world", and all that rot, as if colonies and conquered states haven't been rising up against the empires that rule them as long as there have been empires.
Kerry isn't a flip flopper, but he never gets out of Rhetoric Mode and never commits to anything. WTF do they have Edwards running around rural Ohio when he should be on the news networks 12 hours a day eviscerating the Bush administration is beyond me. He was a fucking trial lawyer for gods sakes, it should be trivial for him to put together a case against the Bush administration that was so tight that not even Rush Limbagh could find fault with it.
Even "red states" should be easy pickings for Kerry and Edwards, all they have to do is crush Bush's image as a real, traditional conservative. How about a return to fiscal responsiblity, a government that protects us without infringing on our rights, getting rid of unfunded mandates, and most obviously, not getting us into a massive, costly war that's not in our national interests.
WTF doesn't Kerry have an economic plan? WTF, for example, doesn't he propose a two year plan consisting of:
Common now. Remember how Russert sneered at Dean for not knowing exactly how many troops are in the U.S. military? Remember how he moved right on to the next question when he asked Bush a similar question in 2000?
And besides, this is irrelevant to the poster's point, as Bush only does interviews with pre-approved questions. The Ireland interview was like that too - it just never occured to Bush's handlers that the interviewer would actually challenge Bush on his prepared answers.
But, yes, Virginia, they even ask, gasp! conservatives hard questions!
n d position.
No, they don't. Unless its some neocon position that's against traditional conservative dogma, like Bush giving drivers licenses to illegal immigrants. Fox's idea of a balanced debate is a right wing position put up against a so-far-to-the-right-they've-fallen-off-the-deep-e
He nor his campaign have ever once mentioned pulling out of Iraq.
No, as he realizes that the "you break it you buy it" principle applies to Iraq. What he does want to do is increase international participation in Iraq, which Bush hasn't been able to do thanks to his "my way or the highway" approach.
Things are completely different here, however, and attempting to adopt Europe's solution to attack arbitrary American problems is short-sighted idiocy. Higher (3x) fuel taxes will only put an even larger burden on the rural/suburban poor than already exists.
Great, so get a fuel efficient car. If you buy a 6,000 lbs SUV, that's basically free anyway if you can use all the deductions, the least you can do is take it up the ass on gas prices.
Hello, Boston Tea Party? Where did you get your education, some crappy American school? :)