Newt Agrees With Dick; You Should Be Afraid.

To compare a multinational movement bent on destroying our country, which recently killed 3,000 people in one day, and would certainly kill many more if they could gain access to nerve gas, a plague, a nuclear bomb, etc. with the age old problems of famine, individual murder, etc. is a bad comparison. Your position is like saying that the US had nothing to fear from the enemy during World War 2. Furthermore, the Axis powers in WW2 had not much realistic chance of gaining access to WMD, whereas that is a possible scenario for the Islamic fanatics during the next few decades. To state that there is a scary problem is merely accurate.

okay brandon.

tell us how your obvious over arching fear that something bad could possibly happen to you on any possible day has made you safer or made your life better.

How accurate. This is, in fact, exactly my position. And not only mine.





Now there's someone who has the right idea. It is Fear that will do us in with terrorism, Brandon, not their attacks. Fear of said attacks. It causes quislings and pussies such as yourself to demand that we give up our freedoms and engage in illegal acts, rather than use sense and logic to defend ourselves. It is reactionary in the extreme.

Both you and Newt, in your appeals to Fear, are working for the terrorists. You are doing their job. Bravo.

Cycloptichorn

Nice. Fear mongering about fear mongering. An appeal to fear against an appeal to fear.

Should I have stuck with derision?

Fear mongering predicts results; I didn't really do that, but rather, described attitudes. Still, I see what you're getting at.

Cycloptichorn

Whether it has or it hasn't, fear is a rational response to danger, and it tends to motivate people to make preparations to eventually overcome the danger.

I don't think that Roosevelt intended to imply that the Axis powers posed no danger. To be in the presence of a significant danger and claim that there is no significant danger is merely incorrect. Al Qaeda and the Islamic extremist movemements actually are dangerous. Please, though, reference one or two of my posts in which I suggest that we "give up our freedoms and engage in illegal acts."

Brandon 9000. You may know that Cyclops works in Berkeley--the headquarters of the Communist Party in the United States. I am sure that he never fought for his country. He was probably allied with the bombthrowers sired by the scumbag Bill Ayres.

Everyone who served had fear. They overcame it. Only the cowards like Cyclops dodged the draft or went to Canada.

You have it correct, Brandon9000. The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

Brandon 9000 wrote_


To compare a multinational movement bent on destroying our country, which recently killed 3,000 people in one day, and would certainly kill many more if they could gain access to nerve gas, a plague, a nuclear bomb, etc. with the age old problems of famine, individual murder, etc. is a bad comparison. Your position is like saying that the US had nothing to fear from the enemy during World War 2. Furthermore, the Axis powers in WW2 had not much realistic chance of gaining access to WMD, whereas that is a possible scenario for the Islamic fanatics during the next few decades. To state that there is a scary problem is merely accurate.
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I'll bet Cyclops would soil his drawers if a North Korean Missle( God Forbid) were to hit California.

But, Brandon 9000, we are protected by the Jawboning of Barack Hussein Obama. To make a Biblical allusion. The "Jabowning of an Ass".

Even Hillary was worried about WMD's.

Note:

Merry Andrew wrote:

There's no need to try and scare the pants off the American public in the process. There's no need to use an attack on the American infrastructure as an excuse for going after a despicable dictator like Saddam Hussein on the laughably thin excuse that he was somehow involved in the 9/11 attacks and has WMDs that he plans to use against us. That was palpable horseshit from the begining. There's no need to perform actions for which we then have to invent rational explanations. I would have had a much higher opinion of President Bush if he'd simply said, "Look, this guy Saddam is a piece of ****; we have to get rid of him. My dad made a mistake not offing him when he had the chance after the first Gulf War. I'll rectify that." Plainly put in plain words. I would have respected that and said, "Good riddance to Saddam." I do not respect lying bullshit.
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Merry Andrew is correct. Especially about the laughably thin excuse that he was somehow involved in the 9/11 attacks and has WMD's that he plans to use against us. That was palpable horseshit from the beginning.

Merry Andrew is correct. The morons who believed that Saddam was a menace and that he had WMD's are just stupid.

As Merry Andrew said: "I do not respect lying bullshit"--exactly--moreover, no one should respect anyone who is a lying bullshitter.

Note:


The consensus on which Bush relied was not born in his own administration. In fact, it was first fully formed in the Clinton administration. Here is Clinton himself, speaking in 1998:


If Saddam rejects peace and we have to use force, our purpose is clear. We want to seriously diminish the threat posed by Iraq’s weapons-of-mass-destruction program.

Here is his Secretary of State Madeline Albright, also speaking in 1998:


Iraq is a long way from [the USA], but what happens there matters a great deal here. For the risk that the leaders of a rogue state will use nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons against us or our allies is the greatest security threat we face.

Here is Sandy Berger, Clinton’s National Security Adviser, who chimed in at the same time with this flat-out assertion about Saddam:


He will use those weapons of mass destruction again, as he has ten times since 1983.

Finally, Clinton’s Secretary of Defense, William Cohen, was so sure Saddam had stockpiles of WMD that he remained “absolutely convinced” of it even after our failure to find them in the wake of the invasion in March 2003.

Nor did leading Democrats in Congress entertain any doubts on this score. A few months after Clinton and his people made the statements I have just quoted, a group of Democratic Senators, including such liberals as Carl Levin, Tom Daschle, and John Kerry, urged the President


to take necessary actions (including, if appropriate, air and missile strikes on suspect Iraqi sites) to respond effectively to the threat posed by Iraq’s refusal to end its weapons-of-mass-destruction programs.

Nancy Pelosi, the future leader of the Democrats in the House, and then a member of the House Intelligence Committee, added her voice to the chorus:


Saddam Hussein has been engaged in the development of weapons-of-mass-destruction technology, which is a threat to countries in the region, and he has made a mockery of the weapons inspection process.

This Democratic drumbeat continued and even intensified when Bush succeeded Clinton in 2001, and it featured many who would later pretend to have been deceived by the Bush White House. In a letter to the new President, a number of Senators led by Bob Graham declared:


There is no doubt that . . . Saddam Hussein has invigorated his weapons programs. Reports indicate that biological, chemical, and nuclear programs continue apace and may be back to pre-Gulf war status. In addition, Saddam continues to redefine delivery systems and is doubtless using the cover of a licit missile program to develop longer-range missiles that will threaten the United States and our allies.

Senator Carl Levin also reaffirmed for Bush’s benefit what he had told Clinton some years earlier:


Saddam Hussein is a tyrant and a threat to the peace and stability of the region. He has ignored the mandate of the United Nations, and is building weapons of mass destruction and the means of delivering them.

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton agreed, speaking in October 2002:


In the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical- and biological-weapons stock, his missile-delivery capability, and his nuclear program. He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including al-Qaeda members.

Senator Jay Rockefeller, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, agreed as well:


There is unmistakable evidence that Saddam Hussein is working aggressively to develop nuclear weapons and will likely have nuclear weapons within the next five years. . . . We also should remember we have always underestimated the progress Saddam has made in development of weapons of mass destruction.

Even more striking were the sentiments of Bush’s opponents in his two campaigns for the presidency. Thus Al Gore in September 2002:


We know that [Saddam] has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country.

And here is Gore again, in that same year:


Iraq’s search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to deter, and we should assume that it will continue for as long as Saddam is in power.

Now to John Kerry, also speaking in 2002:


I will be voting to give the President of the United States the authority to use force"if necessary"to disarm Saddam Hussein because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a real and grave threat to our security.


Perhaps most startling of all, given the rhetoric that they would later employ against Bush after the invasion of Iraq, are statements made by Senators Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd, also in 2002:


Kennedy: We have known for many years that Saddam Hussein is seeking and developing weapons of mass destruction.

Byrd: The last UN weapons inspectors left Iraq in October of 1998. We are confident that Saddam Hussein retains some stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, and that he has since embarked on a crash course to build up his chemical- and biological-warfare capabilities. Intelligence reports indicate that he is seeking nuclear weapons.
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Lying Bullshitters???

Clinton'
Albright
Cohen
Berger
Levin
Daschle
Kerry
Pelosi
Hillary Clinton
Jay Rockefeller
Al Gore
Ted Kennedy
Byrd.

Yes, read what they said about Saddam and WMD's.

Bullshitters all!!!

I think Obama is probably much smarter than these guys. I'm sure he understands on some level that there really is a significant danger that we should be vigilant against.

Brandon 9000 wrote:

I think Obama is probably much smarter than these guys. I'm sure he understands on some level that there really is a significant danger that we should be vigilant against.
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Yes, he is bright--but not that bright. You know, of course, that he is an affirmative action baby. He had a chance to make millions in a big law firm but he passed up the chance. I think he knew that if he was really tested without any weight being given to his race, he might not have made it.

Of course, he understands ON SOME LEVEL that there is really a significant danger. But that understanding is engulfed by his Socialistic leanings, his drive, AT ANY COST, to maintain power and the fact that he never came to terms with his blackness and harbors enormous negative feelings because of it.

If you read his autobiographies, the last fact stands out starkly.

As another poster, FinnD' Abuzz indicated on another thread, If there is another attack on the US, Obama is toast.

No one really believes that North Korea is not selling Nuclear technology and devices to the fanatic scums of Al Quada.

so... it hasn't done anything for you.

i don't believe you have to be fearful to be prepared. in fact, i'd argue that fear causes nervousness which in turn causes bungling and mis-steps. none of this is to say that the emotion of fear is unnatural to all animals. but, the intellect to overcome that fear is what makes us human.

i prefer to be a human.

congratulation, genoves, you've reached a new height in silliness.

You say of Obama,"You know, of course, that he is an affirmative action baby. He had a chance to make millions in a big law firm but he passed up the chance."

Right. He set his aims on achieving a boring, dead-end, low prestige jobwith no competition ffor the position, that he could actually obtain, like, um, well, like the presidency of the United States. Hell, anybody can get to be president. There are thousands of presidents for every Wall Street lawyer, right, genoves. Dumb.

Not at all.

Doesn't look very high from where you're standing, does it?

Yeah, OE, I mean Obama could be doing something really high-achiever like huckstering water treatment units instead of being president.

genoves, what you seem unable to grasp is the fact that after 9/11 the bush administration ordered new intelligence done on the Iraq question and in those intelligence contained some (quite a few) dissenting views of the danger we faced from Iraq and Saddam Hussein. However, the Bush administration cherry picked their intelligence to fit their agenda to invade Iraq and get rid of Saddam Hussein, for whatever reason they were bound to do it and they did it. Simple as that. The invasion of Iraq took our energy and resources of the eye of the true threat of AQ still sitting pretty in the caves on the borders of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Still yet today, there has been escalating violence because the Taliban and AQ has regrouped while we have been bogged down in Iraq. These are simply facts your side has to live or deny as your pleasure suits you. But for Cheney and his ilk to talk about being afraid...after all the blunders they have made and the lies they told (or misleading statements) just begs the credibility of both them and all the people giving them the time of day on the airwaves.

revel- I could never rebut all of the incredibly intelligent people listed below. I am sure many of them, especially Bill Clinton, had diverse sources to tap to find the truth.
I am astonished that the"dumb" Bush was so shrewd that he was able to persuade the intelligence services of many countries to agree with what you call a "cherry picked" assessment.

Note: On Intelligence sources-

where their collective views were summarized, one of the conclusions offered with “high confidence” was that


Iraq is continuing, and in some areas expanding its chemical, biological, nuclear, and missile programs contrary to UN resolutions.

The intelligence agencies of Britain, Germany, Russia, China, Israel, and"yes"France all agreed with this judgment. And even Hans Blix"who headed the UN team of inspectors trying to determine whether Saddam had complied with the demands of the Security Council that he get rid of the weapons of mass destruction he was known to have had in the past"lent further credibility to the case in a report he issued only a few months before the invasion:


The discovery of a number of 122-mm chemical rocket warheads in a bunker at a storage depot 170 km southwest of Baghdad was much publicized. This was a relatively new bunker, and therefore the rockets must have been moved there in the past few years, at a time when Iraq should not have had such munitions. . . . They could also be the tip of a submerged iceberg. The discovery of a few rockets does not resolve but rather points to the issue of several thousands of chemical rockets that are unaccounted for.

Blix now claims that he was only being “cautious” here, but if, as he now also adds, the Bush administration “misled itself” in interpreting the evidence before it, he at the very least lent it a helping hand.

But what did the leaders in the Democratic Party say about the dangers from Saddam and his WMD's?

Revel--Here is what the Democrats said about Saddam, and WMD's

But the consensus on which Bush relied was not born in his own administration. In fact, it was first fully formed in the Clinton administration. Here is Clinton himself, speaking in 1998:


If Saddam rejects peace and we have to use force, our purpose is clear. We want to seriously diminish the threat posed by Iraq’s weapons-of-mass-destruction program.

Here is his Secretary of State Madeline Albright, also speaking in 1998:


Iraq is a long way from [the USA], but what happens there matters a great deal here. For the risk that the leaders of a rogue state will use nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons against us or our allies is the greatest security threat we face.

Here is Sandy Berger, Clinton’s National Security Adviser, who chimed in at the same time with this flat-out assertion about Saddam:


He will use those weapons of mass destruction again, as he has ten times since 1983.

Finally, Clinton’s Secretary of Defense, William Cohen, was so sure Saddam had stockpiles of WMD that he remained “absolutely convinced” of it even after our failure to find them in the wake of the invasion in March 2003.

Nor did leading Democrats in Congress entertain any doubts on this score. A few months after Clinton and his people made the statements I have just quoted, a group of Democratic Senators, including such liberals as Carl Levin, Tom Daschle, and John Kerry, urged the President


to take necessary actions (including, if appropriate, air and missile strikes on suspect Iraqi sites) to respond effectively to the threat posed by Iraq’s refusal to end its weapons-of-mass-destruction programs.

Nancy Pelosi, the future leader of the Democrats in the House, and then a member of the House Intelligence Committee, added her voice to the chorus:


Saddam Hussein has been engaged in the development of weapons-of-mass-destruction technology, which is a threat to countries in the region, and he has made a mockery of the weapons inspection process.

This Democratic drumbeat continued and even intensified when Bush succeeded Clinton in 2001, and it featured many who would later pretend to have been deceived by the Bush White House. In a letter to the new President, a number of Senators led by Bob Graham declared:


There is no doubt that . . . Saddam Hussein has invigorated his weapons programs. Reports indicate that biological, chemical, and nuclear programs continue apace and may be back to pre-Gulf war status. In addition, Saddam continues to redefine delivery systems and is doubtless using the cover of a licit missile program to develop longer-range missiles that will threaten the United States and our allies.

Senator Carl Levin also reaffirmed for Bush’s benefit what he had told Clinton some years earlier:


Saddam Hussein is a tyrant and a threat to the peace and stability of the region. He has ignored the mandate of the United Nations, and is building weapons of mass destruction and the means of delivering them.

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton agreed, speaking in October 2002:


In the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical- and biological-weapons stock, his missile-delivery capability, and his nuclear program. He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including al-Qaeda members.

Senator Jay Rockefeller, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, agreed as well:


There is unmistakable evidence that Saddam Hussein is working aggressively to develop nuclear weapons and will likely have nuclear weapons within the next five years. . . . We also should remember we have always underestimated the progress Saddam has made in development of weapons of mass destruction.

Even more striking were the sentiments of Bush’s opponents in his two campaigns for the presidency. Thus Al Gore in September 2002:


We know that [Saddam] has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country.

And here is Gore again, in that same year:


Iraq’s search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to deter, and we should assume that it will continue for as long as Saddam is in power.

Now to John Kerry, also speaking in 2002:


I will be voting to give the President of the United States the authority to use force"if necessary"to disarm Saddam Hussein because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a real and grave threat to our security.


Perhaps most startling of all, given the rhetoric that they would later employ against Bush after the invasion of Iraq, are statements made by Senators Ted Kennedy and Robert Byrd, also in 2002:


Kennedy: We have known for many years that Saddam Hussein is seeking and developing weapons of mass destruction.

Byrd: The last UN weapons inspectors left Iraq in October of 1998. We are confident that Saddam Hussein retains some stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, and that he has since embarked on a crash course to build up his chemical- and biological-warfare capabilities. Intelligence reports indicate that he is seeking nuclear weapons. 2

Liberal politicians like these were seconded by the mainstream media, in whose columns a very different tune would later be sung. For example, throughout the last two years of the Clinton administration, editorials in the New York Timesrepeatedly insisted that


without further outside intervention, Iraq should be able to rebuild weapons and missile plants within a year [and] future military attacks may be required to diminish the arsenal again.

The Timeswas also skeptical of negotiations, pointing out that it was


hard to negotiate with a tyrant who has no intention of honoring his commitments and who sees nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons as his country’s salvation.

So, too, the Washington Post, which greeted the inauguration of George W. Bush in January 2001 with the admonition that


[o]f all the booby traps left behind by the Clinton administration, none is more dangerous"or more urgent"than the situation in Iraq. Over the last year, Mr. Clinton and his team quietly avoided dealing with, or calling attention to, the almost complete unraveling of a decade’s efforts to isolate the regime of Saddam Hussein and prevent it from rebuilding its weapons of mass destruction. That leaves President Bush to confront a dismaying panorama in the Persian Gulf [where] intelligence photos . . . show the reconstruction of factories long suspected of producing chemical and biological weapons. 3


All this should surely suffice to prove far beyond any even unreasonable doubt that Bush was telling what he believed to be the truth about Saddam’s stockpile of WMD. It also disposes of the fallback charge that Bush lied by exaggerating or hyping the intelligence presented to him. Why on earth would he have done so when the intelligence itself was so compelling that it convinced everyone who had direct access to it, and when hardly anyone in the world believed that Saddam had, as he claimed, complied with the sixteen resolutions of the Security Council demanding that he get rid of his weapons of mass destruction?

Another fallback charge is that Bush, operating mainly through Cheney, somehow forced the CIA into telling him what he wanted to hear. Yet in its report of 2004, the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee, while criticizing the CIA for relying on what in hindsight looked like weak or faulty intelligence, stated that it


did not find any evidence that administration officials attempted to coerce, influence, or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq’s weapons-of-mass-destruction capabilities.

The March 2005 report of the equally bipartisan Robb-Silberman commission, which investigated intelligence failures on Iraq, reached the same conclusion, finding


no evidence of political pressure to influence the intelligence community’s pre-war assessments of Iraq’s weapons programs. . . . [A]nalysts universally asserted that in no instance did political pressure cause them to skew or alter any of their analytical judgments.

Still, even many who believed that Saddam did possess WMD, and was ruthless enough to use them, accused Bush of telling a different sort of lie by characterizing the risk as “imminent.” But this, too, is false: Bush consistently rejectedimminence as a justification for war. 4 Thus, in the State of the Union address he delivered only three months after 9/11, Bush declared that he would “not wait on events while dangers gather” and that he would “not stand by, as peril draws closer and closer.” Then, in a speech at West Point six months later, he reiterated the same point: “If we wait for threats to materialize, we will have waited too long.” And as if that were not clear enough, he went out of his way in his State of the Union address in 2003 (that is, three months before the invasion), to bring up the word “imminent” itself precisely in order to repudiate it:


Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations would come too late. Trusting in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein is not a strategy, and it is not an option.

What of the related charge that it was still another “lie” to suggest, as Bush and his people did, that a connection could be traced between Saddam Hussein and the al-Qaeda terrorists who had attacked us on 9/11? This charge was also rejected by the Senate Intelligence Committee. Contrary to how its findings were summarized in the mainstream media, the committee’s report explicitly concluded that al Qaeda did in fact have a cooperative, if informal, relationship with Iraqi agents working under Saddam. The report of the bipartisan 9/11 commission came to the same conclusion, as did a comparably independent British investigation conducted by Lord Butler, which pointed to “meetings . . . between senior Iraqi representatives and senior al-Qaeda operatives.