Scrat wrote:Thomas - You are clearly a smart man who is well informed, but you have an annoying habit of stating the conclusions you draw from a series of events as the factual causes and effects.
The cheap shot at this point would be to contrast it with the objectivity of remarks you made yourself, such as
Quote:This jackoff has the gall to make sweeping generalizations clearly crafted to suggest to the ignorant masses that Bush actually had a role in causing 9/11, and you're tickled to death. No surprise there, what with you being your local watch captain for the Bush hate squad.
But instead, I'll argue that my theory about how Bush works has a better record of predicting the bulk of his actions than your theory of how Bush works. I wasn't on this board before the war on Iraq, so let me take Paul Krugman (my new avatar) as my proxy.
Ever since the 2000 election campaign, Krugman has said that Bush's tax cuts make no sense in terms of their stated goals. In fact, he observed that whatever the policy problem was, the solution would always be tax cuts for the rich. You might call this theory "hateful", but you can't deny that it predicts very well that the same policy that was designed to fend off Steve Forbes in the primaries then served as a policy against excessive budget surpluses (remember these?), then served as a short term stimulus policy in response to September 11, and now serves as a guarantee of long term growth.
Same thing for Iraq. Krugman was severely attacked as a Bush hater after he predicted, shortly after September 11, that Bush would use the event to ram through his pre-existing agenda of attacking Iraq, never mind that there was no evidence for a Saddam -- Al Queda connection. But hateful though he might have been, he turned out to be right. There was no such connection, there was no immediate thread from WMDs, but Bush went to war anyway.
So my response to you is not that liberals don't hate Bush -- I, for one, do. But when we make the "hateful" assumption that Bush will not solve problems but use them to ram through a pre-existing agenda, it leads us to consistently correct predictions on the big issues Meanwhile the benefit of the doubt consistently leads to wrong predictions. So what are we supposed to do about it?
