Bush doesn't give speeches TO military audiences. He gives speeches IN FRONT OF military personnel. And flags. And carefully-lit buildings. And aircraft carriers with big signs which, no, actually the sailors didn't really put up themselves as the WH claimed at first until they were caught lying.
It is about manipulation. Everything I just posted is about manipulation. It is about falsifying the truth, hiding the truth, and getting you to think a certain way when you are minus the truth.
Of all the things that piss me off about you guys here to whom I am speaking the thing that tops the list is how utterly complacent you are - how happy you seem to be - being manipulated in such a manner.
Bush speaks IN FRONT OF military audiences because his PR people want you to think a certain way.
He is NEVER allowed to present himself in front of normal everyday citizens who might ask him tough questions or yell something negative at him. So YOU will think a certain way about him.
It is fake. It's a big lie. And you guys gobble it up.
Why dont the anti-war,defeatist democrats give speeches in front of military audiences?
Why dont they have the balls to tell soldiers that have actually been in Iraq that we are losing?
Politicians alwats give speeches in front of sympathetic audiences.
There is nothing new about that.
Why are you making a big deal about it now?
Mortkat wrote:It has been my experience, Just Wonders, that Ratings change slowly. The news has to trickle down. Most people are not political junkies.
The ratings after the impending election in Iraq, the actual drawdown of some troops, the continuing lowering of gas prices, the appointment of Alito and the ongoing improvement in the Economy will all be felt by the mass of Americans by the end of January. That will be the time to look at the ratings.
Foxfyre was right to be skeptcial, though. Take a look at the numbers
behind the numbers.
It is C-BS, afterall
mysteryman wrote:Why dont the anti-war,defeatist democrats give speeches in front of military audiences?
Why dont they have the balls to tell soldiers that have actually been in Iraq that we are losing?
Politicians alwats give speeches in front of sympathetic audiences.
There is nothing new about that.
Why are you making a big deal about it now?
I like that idea
Won't see it in my lifetime, though.
I'd tell you what a couple of Marines I know said about Kerry when he visited Iraq, but I'd be banned for using "unsuitable" language
mysteryman wrote:Why dont the anti-war,defeatist democrats give speeches in front of military audiences?
Why dont they have the balls to tell soldiers that have actually been in Iraq that we are losing?
It is my understanding that Mr. Murtha, whom I guess you are referring to, does that quite frequently.
Thomas - This is the last few paragraphs of VDH's essay on "Our-Not-So-Wise Experts". As usual, he's quite elegant in letting us know that we should be respectful of our elders...listen quietly, and then ignore in the same way.
Quote:...We've seen some very strange things since this war started on September 11. But nothing is quite as odd as the past architects of failure weighing in on the dangers of "neoWilsonianism," "neoconservative ideologues," and veiled references to Israeli machinations, as the Bush administration finally sets right three decades these people's flawed policies and tries to promote a new Americanism based on our own universal values and aspirations.
If the American public has to hear another sermon from a Brent Scowcroft ?- "Sharon just has him [President Bush] wrapped around his little finger. I think the president is mesmerized" ?- or Madeline Albright ?- "Do you suppose that the Bush administration has Osama bin Laden hidden away somewhere and will bring him out before the election?" ?- about what we are now doing wrong in the Middle East, I think it will collectively heave.
The past ostracism of Arafat and the removal of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, followed by democratic engagement, will bring eventual stability to the Middle East and enhance the security of the United States. After the failures of all our present critics, this new policy of promoting American values is our last, best hope.
And the president will be rewarded long after he leaves office by the verdict of history for nobly sticking to it when few others, friend or foe, would.
Link
And, another essay from...Martin van Creveld, a professor of military history at the Hebrew University, author of "Transformation of War" (Free Press, 1991). He is the only non-American author on the U.S. Army's required reading list for officers.
Quote:Costly Withdrawal Is the Price To Be Paid for a Foolish War
By Martin van Creveld
November 25, 2005
The number of American casualties in Iraq is now well more than 2,000, and there is no end in sight. Some two-thirds of Americans, according to the polls, believe the war to have been a mistake. And congressional elections are just around the corner.
What had to come, has come. The question is no longer if American forces will be withdrawn, but how soon ?- and at what cost. In this respect, as in so many others, the obvious parallel to Iraq is Vietnam.
Confronted by a demoralized army on the battlefield and by growing opposition at home, in 1969 the Nixon administration started withdrawing most of its troops in order to facilitate what it called the "Vietnamization" of the country. The rest of America's forces were pulled out after Secretary of State Henry Kissinger negotiated a "peace settlement" with Hanoi. As the troops withdrew, they left most of their equipment to the Army of the Republic of South Vietnam ?- which just two years later, after the fall of Saigon, lost all of it to the communists.
Clearly this is not a pleasant model to follow, but no other alternative appears in sight.
Whereas North Vietnam at least had a government with which it was possible to arrange a cease-fire, in Iraq the opponent consists of shadowy groups of terrorists with no central organization or command authority. And whereas in the early 1970s equipment was still relatively plentiful, today's armed forces are the products of a technology-driven revolution in military affairs. Whether that revolution has contributed to anything besides America's national debt is open to debate. What is beyond question, though, is that the new weapons are so few and so expensive that even the world's largest and richest power can afford only to field a relative handful of them.
Therefore, simply abandoning equipment or handing it over to the Iraqis, as was done in Vietnam, is simply not an option. And even if it were, the new Iraqi army is by all accounts much weaker, less skilled, less cohesive and less loyal to its government than even the South Vietnamese army was. For all intents and purposes, Washington might just as well hand over its weapons directly to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
Clearly, then, the thing to do is to forget about face-saving and conduct a classic withdrawal.
Handing over their bases or demolishing them if necessary, American forces will have to fall back on Baghdad. From Baghdad they will have to make their way to the southern port city of Basra, and from there back to Kuwait, where the whole misguided adventure began. When Prime Minister Ehud Barak pulled Israel out of Lebanon in 2000, the military was able to carry out the operation in a single night without incurring any casualties. That, however, is not how things will happen in Iraq.
Not only are American forces perhaps 30 times larger, but so is the country they have to traverse. A withdrawal probably will require several months and incur a sizable number of casualties. As the pullout proceeds, Iraq almost certainly will sink into an all-out civil war from which it will take the country a long time to emerge ?- if, indeed, it can do so at all. All this is inevitable and will take place whether George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice like it or not.
Having been thoroughly devastated by two wars with the United States and a decade of economic sanctions, decades will pass before Iraq can endanger its neighbors again. Yet a complete American withdrawal is not an option; the region, with its vast oil reserves, is simply too important for that. A continued military presence, made up of air, sea and a moderate number of ground forces, will be needed.
First and foremost, such a presence will be needed to counter Iran, which for two decades now has seen the United States as "the Great Satan." Tehran is certain to emerge as the biggest winner from the war ?- a winner that in the not too distant future is likely to add nuclear warheads to the missiles it already has. In the past, Tehran has often threatened the Gulf States. Now that Iraq is gone, it is hard to see how anybody except the United States can keep the Gulf States, and their oil, out of the mullahs' clutches.
A continued American military presence will be needed also, because a divided, chaotic, government-less Iraq is very likely to become a hornets' nest. From it, a hundred mini-Zarqawis will spread all over the Middle East, conducting acts of sabotage and seeking to overthrow governments in Allah's name.
The Gulf States apart, the most vulnerable country is Jordan, as evidenced by the recent attacks in Amman. However, Turkey, Egypt and, to a lesser extent, Israel are also likely to feel the impact. Some of these countries, Jordan in particular, are going to require American assistance.
Maintaining an American security presence in the region, not to mention withdrawing forces from Iraq, will involve many complicated problems, military as well as political. Such an endeavor, one would hope, will be handled by a team different from ?- and more competent than ?- the one presently in charge of the White House and Pentagon.
For misleading the American people, and launching the most foolish war since Emperor Augustus in 9 B.C sent his legions into Germany and lost them, Bush deserves to be impeached and, once he has been removed from office, put on trial along with the rest of the president's men. If convicted, they'll have plenty of time to mull over their sins.
link
mysteryman wrote:FreeDuck wrote:When was the last time Bush gave a speech to a non-military audience, anyone know? Just curious.
When was the last time an anti-war democrat gave a speech to a military crowd?
When an anti-war democrat is president, I will give a ****.
BBB
mysteryman wrote:FreeDuck wrote:When was the last time Bush gave a speech to a non-military audience, anyone know? Just curious.
When was the last time an anti-war democrat gave a speech to a military crowd?
Well, for starters, John Kerry's speech before the Veterans of Foreign Wars 8/16/04.
BBB
blatham wrote:It is about manipulation. Everything I just posted is about manipulation. It is about falsifying the truth, hiding the truth, and getting you to think a certain way when you are minus the truth.
Of all the things that piss me off about you guys here to whom I am speaking the thing that tops the list is how utterly complacent you are - how happy you seem to be - being manipulated in such a manner.
Mr. b. - are you including the hawkish liberals in that "you guys" scenario?
You know, "those guys" that were the split-ticket voters who gave Bush at least 1 million, perhaps 2 million, of his 3 million-vote victory margin last November. Dismiss them, sir, at your peril.
December 1, 2005
Editorial
Plan: We Win
We've seen it before: an embattled president so swathed in his inner circle that he completely loses touch with the public and wanders around among small knots of people who agree with him. There was Lyndon Johnson in the 1960's, Richard Nixon in the 1970's, and George H. W. Bush in the 1990's. Now it's his son's turn.
It has been obvious for months that Americans don't believe the war is going just fine, and they needed to hear that President Bush gets that. They wanted to see that he had learned from his mistakes and adjusted his course, and that he had a measurable and realistic plan for making Iraq safe enough to withdraw United States troops. Americans didn't need to be convinced of Mr. Bush's commitment to his idealized version of the war. They needed to be reassured that he recognized the reality of the war.
Instead, Mr. Bush traveled 32 miles from the White House to the Naval Academy and spoke to yet another of the well-behaved, uniformed audiences that have screened him from the rest of America lately. If you do not happen to be a midshipman, you'd have to have been watching cable news at midmorning on a weekday to catch him.
The address was accompanied by a voluminous handout entitled "National Strategy for Victory in Iraq," which the White House grandly calls the newly declassified version of the plan that has been driving the war. If there was something secret about that plan, we can't figure out what it was. The document, and Mr. Bush's speech, were almost entirely a rehash of the same tired argument that everything's going just fine. Mr. Bush also offered the usual false choice between sticking to his policy and beating a hasty and cowardly retreat.
On the critical question of the progress of the Iraqi military, the president was particularly optimistic, and misleading. He said, for instance, that Iraqi security forces control major areas, including the northern and southern provinces and cities like Najaf. That's true if you believe a nation can be built out of a change of clothing: these forces are based on party and sectarian militias that have controlled many of these same areas since the fall of Saddam Hussein but now wear Iraqi Army uniforms. In other regions, the most powerful Iraqi security forces are rogue militias that refuse to disarm and have on occasion turned their guns against American troops, like Moktada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army.
Mr. Bush's vision of the next big step is equally troubling: training Iraqi forces well enough to free American forces for more of the bloody and ineffective search-and-destroy sweeps that accomplish little beyond alienating the populace.
What Americans wanted to hear was a genuine counterinsurgency plan, perhaps like one proposed by Andrew F. Krepinevich Jr., a leading writer on military strategy: find the most secure areas with capable Iraqi forces. Embed American trainers with those forces and make the region safe enough to spend money on reconstruction, thus making friends and draining the insurgency. Then slowly expand those zones and withdraw American forces.
Americans have been clamoring for believable goals in Iraq, but Mr. Bush stuck to his notion of staying until "total victory." His strategy document defines that as an Iraq that "has defeated the terrorists and neutralized the insurgency"; is "peaceful, united, stable, democratic and secure"; and is a partner in the war on terror, an integral part of the international community, and "an engine for regional economic growth and proving the fruits of democratic governance to the region."
That may be the most grandiose set of ambitions for the region since the vision of Nebuchadnezzar's son Belshazzar, who saw the hand writing on the wall. Mr. Bush hates comparisons between Vietnam and Iraq. But after watching the president, we couldn't resist reading Richard Nixon's 1969 Vietnamization speech. Substitute the Iraqi constitutional process for the Paris peace talks, and Mr. Bush's ideas about the Iraqi Army are not much different from Nixon's plans - except Nixon admitted the war was going very badly (which was easier for him to do because he didn't start it), and he was very clear about the risks and huge sacrifices ahead.
A president who seems less in touch with reality than Richard Nixon needs to get out more.
* Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
I doubt very much Bush's pretty pictures about Iraq is being bought.
Insurgent 'attack' on Iraqi city
Insurgents attacked US bases and government offices in Ramadi, in central Iraq, and then dispersed throughout the city, reports say.
Heavily-armed insurgents fired mortars and rockets at the buildings and then occupied several main streets, residents told news agencies.
Ramadi has been a rebel stronghold for many months.
But the US military played down the scale of the attack, saying it had resulted in no damage or casualties.
US Marines spokesman Captain Jeffrey Pool told the AFP news agency the militants had simply fired a rocket propelled grenade at a joint US-Iraqi observation post at 0930 (0630 GMT).
"As of 1400 (1100 GMT), there were no signs of any significant insurgent activity anywhere in the city."
Captain Pool accused the militants of exaggerating the scale of the attack.
"This is clearly a sign of how desperate insurgents have become," he said.
Leaflets
Residents told the Reuters news agency earlier that hundreds of heavily armed men in masks had for a time patrolled the main streets of the city and set up checkpoints.
Leaflets distributed by the men declared that al-Qaeda in Iraq, the group run by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was now in control of the city.
"Its followers will burn the Americans and will drive them back to their homes by force. Iraq will be a graveyard for the Americans and its allies," one leaflet declared.
Residents said there was no noticeable presence of US or Iraqi forces in the city after the attacks.
The attack came as 2000 US Marines and 500 Iraqi soldiers launched an offensive against insurgents in Hit, east of the River Euphrates, not far from Ramadi.
The US military said the town was "suspected to be an al-Qaeda in Iraq safe area and base of operations for the manufacture of vehicle car bombs."
Story from BBC NEWS:
October's estimate of 3.8% third-quarter GDP growth was revised upward yesterday to 4.3%
<Contentedly entrenched in the "spam-free" zone>
Heh.
JustWonders wrote:October's estimate of 3.8% third-quarter GDP growth was revised upward yesterday to 4.3%
<Contentedly entrenched in the "spam-free" zone>
Heh.
and the DOW dropped like 80 points, interesting?
It's up 105.59 at this moment
Looking for it to break 11,000 soon
yes really, it's a clear indication that the economy is ----- well it's a clear indication that the economy is something I'm sure.
dys, Your skepticism is well established; most government stats and how the market reacts are oxymorons. If there were any semblance between the two, investing in the stock market would not be a gamble. Many have lost their life savings trying to play the market. It can't be done - for most investors. The only tried and true method is to diversify your investments for the long-term.
JustWonders wrote:dyslexia wrote:yes really, it's a clear indication that the economy is ----- well it's a clear indication that the economy is something I'm sure.
Giant and successful?
JG I can only assume you don't follow the stock market. the past 52 weeks has seen the DOW from a low of 9,961 to a high of 11,027 and today at the moment it is at 10,921.
Grand and successful?
