House Minority Leader Blasts Bush; GOP Fires Back

Regarding what Pelosi said and whether its appropriate for a Congressperson to say it, Blatham had this one in another thread:

Quote:

GOP Sen. Chuck Hagel: "I think you've got a president who is not schooled, educated, experienced in foreign policy in any way, versus his father."

Is it different if a Republican Senator says it?

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Nope.

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Kuvasz writes:

Quote:

How interesting the mind of right wingers. It's plain blather to snark about and deny that you don't associate liberals with terrorists, you do.

How interesting is this marvelous clairvoyance that allows left wingers to look into the hearts and souls of right wingers to see the evil motives and intent there and to look into the heart of terrorists and see excusable nobility?

It is my policy to go pretty much by what people say rather than what I wish they had said so that I have excuse to criticize and/or condemn.

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Foxfyre wrote:

Kuvasz writes:

Quote:
How interesting the mind of right wingers. It's plain blather to snark about and deny that you don't associate liberals with terrorists, you do.

How interesting is this marvelous clairvoyance that allows left wingers to look into the hearts and souls of right wingers to see the evil motives and intent there and to look into the heart of terrorists and see excusable nobility?

there you go again. you are not content merely with putting words in my mouth, but also do so as alleging support of a group of terrorists whose actions i did not in any way sanction, nor posted anything as to support of their cause.

yes, indeed, lies and slander are the breakfast you types devour.

yes, indeed, typical of right wingers who sodomize the truth.

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Hold on, I am a right-winger and I ain't sodomized nothing!!

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McGentrix wrote:

Hold on, I am a right-winger and I ain't sodomized nothing!!

well, i will meet you half way with those remarks, and we concur at the least, you are right winger.

but as to you few, you happy few, you small band of clean brothers on the right; you should be ashamed of yourselves for thus sleeping with sodomites of the truth.

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I will never sleep with Micheal Moore. There is not enough money or booze in the world that could make me. So, I guess you're wrong in your assumption of guilt there Kuvasz.

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The simple truth is: Bush has made terrorism much more difficult for its' perpetrators. Most Americans agreed with what he did, when he did it.

Time has passed, and some feelings have changed, due to the proferred casus belli. Partisan detractors, and some others have made this a significant source of overwhelming criticism; some fair game, and some viscious and personal.

But, there should be no doubt that the Democrats pummelling Bush are, purposefully OR NOT, helping terrorists achieve their goals. They mistakenly believed that the US would cower in the face of dead Americans. One reason they believed this was our country's response during VietNam, and more recently our country's retreat from Somalia, when Clinton packed up and went home after our boys were murdered in their streets. It was said that America can't tolerate deaths, and Bin Laden thought his one strike would bring our country to its' knees.

You don't have to make a moral judgement about VietNam, Bush or Somalia to recognise what plays into the hands of terrorists, or those wanting to take a stab at America.

I don't think anyone here would say that the terrorists don't want Bush removed from office, and would be heartened at the installment of a Democrat. For obvious reasons, Dems have this in common with terrorists. It doesn't follow that they are of the same mind, at all. Just have the same goal. (Villify Bush, and get rid of him.)

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Kuvasz states that the terrorists attacked the United States, not the president. (Could we assume he thinks that if they attacked the president, it would have been okay?)
Other than that observation of the terrorists, it would seem that all the criticism is directed toward the president and/or right wingers and that criticism includes numerous uncomplimentary comparisons and adjectives. No such uncomplimentary comparisons and/or adjectives are applied to the terrorists however.

Based on this observation alone, it would seem that the president and/or right wingers bothers him a lot more than the terrorists do. But I am criticized for suggesting that some left wingers often seem to have more understanding and tolerance for the terrorists than they do for the president and/or his administration.

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Foxfyre wrote:

Kuvasz states that the terrorists attacked the United States, not the president. (Could we assume he thinks that if they attacked the president, it would have been okay?)
Other than that observation of the terrorists, it would seem that all the criticism is directed toward the president and/or right wingers and that criticism includes numerous uncomplimentary comparisons and adjectives. No such uncomplimentary comparisons and/or adjectives are applied to the terrorists however.

Based on this observation alone, it would seem that the president and/or right wingers bothers him a lot more than the terrorists do. But I am criticized for suggesting that some left wingers often seem to have more understanding and tolerance for the terrorists than they do for the president and/or his administration.

see, this is how you right wingers spin it.

Quote:

some left wingers often seem to have more understanding and tolerance for the terrorists than they do for the president and/or his administration

without a hint of documentation of your acertion. (you're getting tips from tarantulas again, i see)

no one here hurrahed terrorists or their actions.

Quote:

(Could we assume he thinks that if they attacked the president, it would have been okay?)

no foxy, you can assume many things, but remarks that pelosi being within her rights to criticize bush somehow confirs sanction for the terrorists to attack anyone is not one of them.

it was not i who mentioned first terrorists and liberals in the same breath, you did. and you tied them as kindred spirits in their opposition to bush. but actually, as i posted earlier, the terrorists would rather deal with a foe as incompetent as Bush than a more competent one like Kerry.

Why? because at least Kerry knows how to fight terrorism, and Bush doesn't.

by my stating a fact, that bush is an incompetent boob in the war on terra' you allude that those remarks abet the terrorists. on the contrary, they allude to what bush is doing wrong, not what the terrorists are doing right to further their cause.

you turn your weak syllogism on its head and prove further that it is you who equate anyone who is critical of bush's war on terra' to be in league with terrorists.

it is that mutated syllogism that is an anathema to the truth, and it is an indefensible defense in defending the incompetent.

bottom line.. bush has produced more terrorists by going to iraq than if we had not.

that's the point. bush is telling us that the best way to fight terrorism is to breed more terrorists.

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The best that can be said about Bush is that his Neanderthal poltics are once again showing us how not to fight terrorism as well as communism. Will they never learn. Read today that the neoconservatists are giving a bad name to the conservatists - the true Republicans are coming out of the wood pile finally. It may turn into a rout........

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Sofia wrote:

The simple truth is: Bush has made terrorism much more difficult for its' perpetrators.

I strongly disagree.

9/11 was quite a stunt for terrorists of (even) bin Laden's kind to pull off. It was, as Craven pointed out, an anomaly: they hadnt succeeded in anything remotely similar before, and haven't been able to do anything remotely similar since (even "Madrid" pales in comparison). 9/11, in short, was an extremely tough act to accomplish.

One of the reasons they did it, anyway, was because there weren't all that many other options to fight the holy war against America around at the time. There's only so many warships you can try to bomb.

Today, however, the terrorists' job has become infinitely easier. They don't have to hijack a plane to NYC - the Americans have come to their turf! Moreover, they've come as invaders of a nation that, even though the invasion freed them from horrid tyranny, was so sceptical of American intentions that even a few months ago already, some 40% of the Iraqis thought the invasion had been wrong and had, in fact, been a "humiliation".

They've come with such badly devised and ill-prepared strategies and such a degree of ideological hubris that they've come dangerously close to acting like abusive oppressors themselves - close enough, often enough, for Iraqis to now have overwhelmingly lost their trust in them. (Yes, that's from polls).

In short: thanks to Bush's ill-advised adventure, the Americans have manoevred themselves into a risky territory, surrounded by a hostile population, in a country whose post-Saddam porous borders allow for an unencumbered import of arms and fighters - hell, for any aspiring successor to bin Laden, its like shooting ducks!

(Note that these risks were integrally warned against by war opponents, beforehand.)

And it's not just Iraq, either.

I would bet my bottom dollar that the Islamist recruitment teams have found it a lot easier to attract new fighters now that Bush has turned the world, in much of the Arab street's eyes, into a single-dimensional battle between West and East. "With us or against us" - the more one side intones it, the easier the other can, too. They strengthen each other. No big mystery - you can see it around you in your newly polarized America. Nothing like a True Enemy to rally the troops and bolster the base.

With Bush as the widely loathed "antichrist" to rally ever new troops against, I'd bet the muslim extremists are having a field day recruiting campaigners, fighters and donors, compared to what their shrill rallying calls were achieving when there was still an inoffensive centrist in the White House. Mind you, the real fanatics were just as fanatic back then - but boy, won't Bush's thunderous speeches have increased the reservoir of sympathisers beyond the hard core, like no Al-Qaeda TV commercial could have done!

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Bottom dollars aside, there's the string of post-9/11 terrorist attacks around the world to prove the point. Casablanca, Bali, Riyad, Madrid, once again Saudi-Arabia - each of them spectacular, some of them spectacularly deathly. They don't hint at a world in which "terrorism [has become] much more difficult for its' perpetrators".

They hint, to me, at a world in which Islamist scare-mongerers have the win in their backs - actually having a valid scare to monger against residing in the White House must do their cause no end of good.

sofia wrote:

I don't think anyone here would say that the terrorists don't want Bush removed from office, and would be heartened at the installment of a Democrat.

People here have said that the terrorists most likely do not want Bush removed from power, and argued why. I agree with them, in direct consequence of the above.

I think Bush has been a godsend for the Islamist agit-prop. A clear enemy to fight against - a Stalin to their Hitler, so to say. You know that Hitler met the willing ears of the scared centrist German bourgeoisie, which was more afraid of the red devil from far away than of their own homegrown radical. The Islamists now find a similar reaction among significant numbers of their countries' scared centrists.

On top of that, the Bush administration has the mindboggling tendency to botch up any remotely feasible humanitarian element to their invasion-for-democracy by its sheer incompetence. Iraqi hearts could have been won - but not the way the Americans have gone about it.

Basically, they fucked up, from day one. Not a semblance of democracy is in place, and not planned to be until 2005. The banner figure of their appointees has been a universally loathed swindler, Chalabi. From when they rushed to defend the Oil Ministry and left the country's archeological and historical legacy up for looting, the occupiers have signalled to the Iraqis that strategic interests will always trump the invasion's supposed humanitarian goal.

And now we know that for months already, Americans and British soldiers have been rounding up suspects, sometimes on spurious grounds, who ended up tortured and mistreated in Abu G. and other prisons. Under supervision, its now alleged, of General Sanchez himself. That this could go on for so long is perhaps no wonder, since the Iraqi government apparently has had no right to question or research situations in these prisons itself - hell, since even Iraqi doctors who saw the tortured-looking corpses coming in apparently had no authority to do post-mortems of their own. It is almost as if the Coalition did its best to deliver ever new shreds of credence to Islamist hate-mongerers worldwide.

Militants tend to be nihilistic. Compromise is a dirty word; theirs is the scorched-earth strategy. The worse objective conditions become, the communists used to say, the sooner our revolution will come - they, too, preferred a rabid conservative in power over any social-democrat. That's your case in a nutshell. A fiercely ideological, yet incurably incompetent enemy - what more could a fanatic revolutionary wish for?

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I should have said Bush has made terrorism more difficult *in America*. We have several thwarted attacks, but no successes here since 911.

If you say Bush is a good poster boy for recruitment, I can assuredly see where you get that, and agree with a lot of what you said. My point is that he took decisive action, which makes his own bailiwick safer from terrorist attack. He did sponser a network of intel sharing with other countries, which I wish had been completely successful.

Bin Laden and Co didn't seem to need a poster boy for 911--and if taking the fight to them makes them mad--they can get mad. They are the main ones we are fighting now--and as I've said before, it is much better to fight them in Iraq than New York.

I really hate those sons of bitches.

(devolved into emotional rant and retreads...look away)

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Sofia wrote:

Bin Laden and Co didn't seem to need a poster boy for 911

True. Like I said, "the real fanatics were just as fanatic back then". I'm worried about those beyond that, who used to be indifferent to the militants and are now more likely to be sympathetic - and those who used to be mildly sympathetic to America and now have retreated into indifference. Not the way to win a war.

Simple management lesson about ++'s and --'s, know that one? The ++'s are with you, anyway, and the --'s are against you, no matter what you do, nothing to do but thwart them. But you gotta keep those +'s aboard, persuade the +/-'s, and neutralise the -'s. Bush achieved the very opposite. By choosing to try to bully, rather than tempt the +s and +/-'s aboard (France, Germany, the developing countries in the Security Council), he made them feel like just turning their back - "well, if thats how you wanna do it, you can clean up the mess afer you by yourself as well". And by trying to sell the world this image of the Great American Civilisational Mission - the hubris and lack of cultural sensitivity with which the mission of democratisation was brought to the Muslim/Arab world - he turned a lot of the +/-s there into antaganostic -'s. Not to mention bringing those who were already antagonistic (the -'s) to all but join local Al-Qaeda groups.

I dont mind a clampdown on the actual extremists of Al-Qaeda (the --'s). But phrasing the whole fight in binary, "with us or against us" terms, strongarming parties into unconditionally choosing sides like it was a cultural war - cause thats sure how it got across - was a bad idea. The whole rhetorical thing about America being naturally destined to lead the way to civilisation - the shining beacon of hope that would instantly be welcomed with open arms by Iraqis and freedom-loving Muslims around the world - it was a great way to rally those ++s at home in the US behind the cause of war. Thats how you like to see yourselves. But it was in utter denial of the realities of how America is actually viewed abroad, the scepticism, the distrust.

Just rolling over those sensitivities and reservations with great bravado, all the while demanding to be simply trusted at its word, not questioned, not criticized, let alone in any way tied to any Iraqi or international oversight over its mission in Iraq - the Bush mission was bound to turn off potential allies - and turn those who might have been persuaded to step aside while we went after bin Laden and his top men personally, into fighters against us, when it turned out you had set your sights a whole lot wider than all that.

Sofia wrote:

They are the main ones we are fighting now--and as I've said before, it is much better to fight them in Iraq than New York.

Still, some, what?, 750 Americans have died so far in Iraq - not counting the thousands of Iraqis, of course. If America had not gone to war, but a new attack on NYC had cost 750 lives, would you have praised the President for effectively combating the costs of terrorism?

If you hadnt gone to Iraq, Al-Qaeda might have targeted all its plans at another attack on the US, true. But the US woulda been able to invest the costs now poured into Iraq purely into fighting Al-Qaeda and protecting the US. Plus, Al-Qaeda wouldnt have gained such a lovely new (chaotic, angry) feeding and recruitment ground and "operation theatre" - a new Afghanistan, so to say.

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Sofia wrote:

They are the main ones we are fighting now--and as I've said before, it is much better to fight them in Iraq than New York.

Thank goodness that Iraqis are muslims and a-rabs and subhuman and all that and therefore deserve it and all that - they don't get a say in all this thing cause they just don't know whats for the best :sad:

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I am surprised you didn't also called them facists or nazi's.

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No, those are the neoconservatists - nothing neo about the Iraqis, yet.....

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nimh wrote:

With Bush as the widely loathed "antichrist" to rally ever new troops against, I'd bet the muslim extremists are having a field day recruiting campaigners, fighters and donors, compared to what their shrill rallying calls were achieving when there was still an inoffensive centrist in the White House.

Betting aside, this is what the new IISS Strategic Survey has to say about it:

Quote:

Overall, risks of terrorism to Westerners and Western assets in Arab countries appeared to increase after the Iraq war began [..] the Iraq intervention was always likely in the short term to enhance jihadist recruitment and intensify al-Qaeda's motivation to encourage and assist terrorist operations. The May 2003 attacks in Saudi Arabia and Morocco, the gathering of foreign jihadists in Iraq, and the November 2003 attacks in Saudi Arabia and Turkey confirmed this expectation.The Madrid bombings in March 2004 reinforced the perception that al-Qaeda had fully reconstituted, set its sights firmly on the US and its closest Western allies in Europe and established a new and effective modus operandi that increasingly exploited local affiliates.

More in this thread

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Is it patriotic to criticize?

"The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the Nation as a whole. Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile. To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or any one else. But it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about him than about any one else."

Theodore Roosevelt, "Roosevelt in the Kansas City Star", May 7, 1918

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House Minority Leader Blasts Bush; GOP Fires Back

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