Cinnesthesia wrote:Ticomaya, I wasn't speaking directly to you, and my feathers aren't ruffled, I was just clarifying my opinions. And I wasn't "accusing" you; please don't take it personally. I only want to see George Bush taken out of office, for the good of all of us.
Does anyone REALLY believe Bush is protecting us from "the evildoers"? Did he do a good job preventing 9-11?
Fair enough. I didn't take it personally, but thanks for the clarification.
In response to your first question ... Yes.
In response to your second question ... I must respond with a question of my own: Do you think Bush should be voted out of office because the US was attacked on 9/11? (Related: Should Clinton have been voted out in 1996 because the WTC was bombed in 1993? And what blame does Clinton bear because he allowed the strike on the Khobar Towers in Saudia Arabia in 1996? Or because our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed in 1998? Or because the USS Cole was attacked in 2000?)
Everyone should be able to admit that mistakes were made pre-9/11. The question should be what should be the approach of the US in combating terrorism as we go forward. I do not believe the answer to that question is "we do what we were doing before: treat terrorism as a criminal act." That APPEARS* to be what Kerry will do. Under that approach, we stop at the border of every country that wants to support and harbor terrorists bent on attacking the US. Would you really feel safer under that scenario, where we sit back and wait to be attacked here at home, then respond by trying to find the attackers to arrest them? Or hope we are given permission by the UN to act to defend our country? We showed that weak response through the '90s, and I'm convinced the effect of Clinton's responses to the many acts of terrorism on US soil, combined with his weak response to the Mogadishu fiasco, only emboldened the terrorists who seek to destroy the US.
(*This, of course, is a moving target.
)
Now, under the Bush Doctrine, the terrorists understand we will seek them out, we will hunt them down to the holes they are hiding in. We have put every country in the world on notice that you better not harbor terrorists, and we have demonstrated a willingness to take action to protect the US interests.
You may feel safer giving the terrorists the freedom to operate at will in the world, and only respond to individual acts of terrorism, but I, for one, am comforted by the fact that the war on terrorism is taking place on the battlefields in Iraq, and not the streets of New York.
Quote:
Bush Failed to Stop al Qaeda During Clinton Years
(2004-04-11) -- A presidential briefing, dated August 6, 2001, and released by the White House yesterday, shows that in 1998 George W. Bush did nothing to respond to the threat of terror attacks from Usama bin Laden's al Qaeda network.
In fact, when correlated with last week's testimony before the 9/11 Commission by National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, it seems clear that the Bush administration had virtually no plan to act on top-secret intelligence gathered during the Clinton administration until after George W. Bush took office in 2001.
"The August 6 PDB (President's Daily Brief) clearly shows that the White House knew of potential al Qaeda threats within the United States in 1998," said an unnamed source from an unnamed, non-partisan Washington think tank, "and yet Texas Governor George W. Bush didn't do anything about these threats until after he became president."
A former senior official in the Clinton administration, who requested anonymity, said that former President Bill Clinton was "aghast at the lethargic response of Governor Bush to the clear and present danger al Qaeda posed to our homeland in the 1990s."
