damn it, major!!! don't draw me in to a clinton impeachment discussion again!!! perjury and adultery are two entirely separate things...one is punishable criminally...one is not.
I am laughing my ass of at this thread. One lunatic lib says that Bush and the Republicans were part of the 9-11 attacks, and the other libs COME RUSHING TO HIS DEFENSE (except for Major, the resident sensible Lefty). This is classic.
that kind of concerns me too...i mean, the only thing i've heard someone say is that he was "misguided"...glynch posted that. misguided probably isn't as strong a word as i'd use...but nevertheless, at least it gets to the point. john..if you post a thread about how clinton ultimately killed everyone he knew...and other crap like that...i will not hesitate to call you an idiot.
damn it, major!!! don't draw me in to a clinton impeachment discussion again!!! perjury and adultery are two entirely separate things...one is punishable criminally...one is not. Sorry . I didn't mean to get into an argument about whether it was perjury and all that crap. Just an example of how public scrutiny can result in improvements.
You're being overly defensive. There's a strong precedent for having independent commissions investigate government affairs. When Kennedy was shot, we had the Warren Commission, when the space shuttle explodes, we had a commission, when we had the Iran contra affair, we had the Tower commission. When our government suffers catastrophic failures (regardless of how difficult it would have been to stop, this represented a failure of one of governments most basic functions, to provide national security), we do the prudent thing, we investigate the failures w/outsiders who don't have the same stake as do the insiders. I don't think you can argue with that logic as unsound. Do these investigations make it a hundred percent certain that nothing bad will ever happen again? no. But have they been nothing but useless partisan witchhunts? No. The closest thing to that was the Starr investigation, which wasn't the same as it was not in response to any national disaster caused by governmenal failure, unless you count a bad land deal in Arkansas as one. Now, you imagine that it will be a partisan investigation, well I suppose its possible, but I think the reason why you may have that perception is the relentless politicization of the national security issue by the Republicans, from selling photos of the president on AF1 on 9-11, to the president AWOL's Top gun impersonation, to the 2004 RNC, which kicks off at Ground zero, they've milked 9-11 for political capital as much as they can. However, the independent commission isn't run by Terry McAuliffe or Howard Dean, or Ken Starr, thank god. You're tilting at windmills.
Sam -- I'm already hearing rhetoric, though. That's where my concern is. I'm already hearing the partisan rhetoric attempting to lay blame on the President's doorstep for freaking 9/11. This isn't just the Warren Commission. The Warren Commission didn't start by laying blame on LBJ's door for the the murder of JFK. The Warren Commission aimed at finding who the killer was...WE KNOW WHO THE KILLERS WERE IN THIS CASE! There is no mystery here about what happened.
Rhetoric from whom? GreenVegan76? As far as I know, he's not on the commission. Their object is to figure out where the government failed and how we can make it better. You can call it "blame" all you want, but if we end up making it better, then isn't it worth it? As for your other point, first, we know who pulled the trigger, but if you think all the conspirators, foreign and domestic, are known and their (Saudi) backers, then you have more information than I do. But I digress, again you're approaching it the wrong way. It's not a trial. The commission is not a prosecutor. That's not the way these things work. It's about identifying a problem, like defective O-rings on shuttle boosters, and fixing it.
I agree with this reading. However, if someone was to ascribe to such a conspiracy theory, then they would have to say that someone other than Bush was behind the attack - because Bush did a 180 on foreign policy after 911, meaning that it changed him. That much is pretty well known and documented by the left and the right. So, someone in our government set up/allowed the attacks to occur to change Bush's (and the American people's) mind about going to war...leading to the death of almost 4,000 lives, mostly American? I am often cynical about human nature, but damn that is horrible. Hitler and Stalin combined would not be so evil. At least most of the peope they had killed were "enemies".
