What is pathetic is the left's assault on Bush's record in the war on terror. The weasely American left are utilizing a fascinating tactic in this coordinated attack in that they are attacking Bush's strength and pathetically trying to turn it into a weakness. What, subordinating our national defense to the toothless, corrupt UN and treating terrorism as a LE problem is a better solution. If you believe that, there is no hope for you. We had eight years of that and look what it got us.....death. Kerry wants to repeat eight years of dawdling when it comes to terrorism and we can ill-afford another weak-in-the-knees, non-leader, naive, brain-dead liberal idealist in the Oval Office while we are fighting (and winning despite your pathetic bleatings to the contrary) the war on terror. Face it guys, the desperation from your side is just humorous. I've gotten quite a hearty laugh out of your side's last-ditch grasping for straws. Clarke is just another sad attempt to paint Bush as a liar and boob. It didn't work with Paul O' Neil despite all the posts that basically said "we've got him now." And it won't work this time. So give your carpal tunnel syndrome a rest before hurt myself laughing.
God, it has gotten so bad that you can't even come up with a fresh defense. You are arguing from an utterly indefenisible position. Even your hyperbole lacks its normal angry populist flair, you just seem to be going through the motions. Let me see: Registered Republican, employee of Reagan, Bush I, and George W. Bush. This is the "left"? Must be the "new left" or something.... The bottom line is that the Bush Administration's own top terrorism guy has denounced the Bush Administration's handling of the war on terror the cornerstone of his re-election strategy. And there is not a damn thing you can do about it to change that reality. If you think it's not having any effect, I suggest you check the latest polls.
The election is months away and that is all you guys have? A fired guy who wouldn't know his ass from a hole in the ground. I'm not worried. He has an ax to grind and book to sell. In a few weeks, this will be old news because....it is non-news based on lies and falsehoods by a disgruntled employee seeking to get back at his former employer. I'm not saying that he is a leftist, but that his book and comments are being used by the leftist attack brigades.
This administration IS pathetic They just released Clarke's resignation letter, using it against him to prove that he had no problem with Bush.
lmfao! "and-and-and he STOLE paper clips! We can prove there was a 2% greater usage of paper clips while he was here!... and-and-and he put hazelnut syrup in his coffee! ... at least once he did. What kind of sissy terror czar puts hazelnut syrup in his coffee!"
Did Clinton do enough to fight terrorism? Probably not but he's not in office now so GW Bushes record is the issue. 9/11 occurred well into the GW Bush Admin. During that time instead of taking a hard line on Al Qaeda they dawdled on getting a big tax cut passed, putting together a horrible stem cell policy that angered everyone and apologizing to the PRC to get a plane and some crewman back. I didn't like Clinton but he did launch a cruise missile attack shortly after the embassy bombings. He might've done more but congressional Rebubs, were threatening to rewrite the war powers act to prevent the Pres. to deploy the military. The Cole happened near the end of his term and the GW Bush Admin. certainly had the opportunity to respond early when they took office but chose not to. More Americans have died in acts of terrorism under than any Admin since the Civil War. And they are still dying. True this is partly because GW Bush has put American troops out there as bait for terrorists in Iraq but the point still stands. This admin's efforts to fight terrorism have been misguided by paranoia about Iraq. We've failed to catch the leadership of Al Qaeda and we know for a fact that we have failed to deter at least three major acts of terrorism around the World related to Al Qaeda. We pulled key personnel from the hunt for Bin Ladin to go and hunt WMD and Al Qaeda ties in Iraq which have produced neither. That is the record of this Administration and that is what is up for consideration this year.
From Reuters... ________________ ... Earlier, a commission report said the Bush administration had agreed on a plan one day before the attacks to combat bin Laden, which moved only gradually from diplomatic pressure to military action. The report presented at the outset of the commission's hearings is likely to raise more questions about Bush's election campaign assertion that he has done everything he could to protect the American people. A commission staff report said a meeting of Bush administration officials on Sept. 10, 2001, agreed on a strategy that called first for dispatching an envoy to give the Taliban an opportunity to expel bin Laden and al Qaeda from Afghanistan. If that failed, pressure would be applied on the Taliban through diplomacy and then by encouraging anti-Taliban Afghans to attack al Qaeda bases as part of a covert program, the commission's staff report said. In the last resort, the report said, the United States would seek to overthrow the Taliban regime through more direct action." http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=4635209§ion=news
As was mentioned earlier, Clarke gave the White House the manuscript of his book three months ago. He shouldn't have. They have used that time to prepare the smear campaign that we are seeing now, which will no doubt continue as long as they think is necessary to "discredit" him. It's all orchestrated. Everyone has their lines in advance. Why? Because this man is so damned credible and his knowledge of the Administration's actions leading up to, and after 9/11 is damning enough that they feel the need to have the Vice President tell bald-faced lies on Rush Limbaugh, among other things. This Administration is decending into territory not reached since the Nixon Administration. At least Watergate was about a "third rate break-in". This is about why we went to war. Disgusting. basso and bama's reaction? Sadly predictable. I really miss some of our old right-wing conservatives that scurried off with their tail between their legs. At least they provided some variety. I think some of you should back off on calling them liars, however. They can't help what they do, apparently, and it gives them excuses for "rightous indignation"... a welcome retreat for them from trying to defend their guy. Besides, it ain't polite.
I think you're giving them more credit than they deserve... I've been surprised at how disjointed--even contradictory-- the initial attacks were. Everyone except the guy who got caught telling fibs on 60 Minutes has been in front of some camera doing there damndest to discredit Clarke, but it looks as if it's up to the individual to make the case... for instance, was Clarke in a position to fail in the prevention of 9-11 or was he "out of the loop?" To me, the desperation is palpable. Clarke has inflicted damage and they are scrambling. It also speaks to the organization of the WH and the campaign... if they had 3 months or more to prepare for this, it seems they would have done a better job...
I think we should take a minute to salute the conservative pro war folk that don't visit the forums much anymore. Treeman often did research and was willing to debate point for point with folks. It seemed that in the days prior to the war, or in the early days of the war the board was pretty evenly divided. Now, the pro-war crowd is in the minority. I have to respect Basso for sticking to his guns even when his positions which he gets from the right are often shown to be false. The same can be said of Giddyup, though fictitious e-mails aren't really great material to support his side. I know that if every article or quote from a politician I used supporting a position I held was shown to be false, a victim of sever spin, exaggeration etc., it would be hard for me to keep at it. I know people try to blame Basso for not answering their questions or responding to certain arguments that have been put forward, but with this administration, he is trying to plug every hole in the dike almost singlehandedly. What Basso needs is more war supporters and concervatives to take up the cause. Anyway I would like to think that the lack of response on the pro-war/conservative side of issues is because people are changing their thinking, but somehow I doubt that's really the case. For those that do keep on fighting that fight, you guys have my respect.
More on the contradictory nature of the WH defense... _______________ DAILY EXPRESS Logic Jam by Ryan Lizza Only at TNR Online Post date: 03.23.04 Previous critics of the Bush administration have proved to be easy targets for the White House. The Bushies effortlessly dismissed Paul O'Neill with a wave of the hand. "We're not in the business of doing book reviews. I don't get in the business of selling or promoting or critiquing books," White House press secretary Scott McClellan told reporters upon publication of Ron Suskind's account of O'Neill's tenure as Treasury secretary. This worked partly because the media was predisposed to believe that O'Neill was a bit quirky and unreliable--and partly because his accusations about the Bush administration's obsession with Iraq were outside his area of expertise. Rand Beers and Joe Wilson, two other national security whistle-blowers, did some damage to the White House. But by subsequently embracing John Kerry, they made it easy for the administration to paint them as partisan opportunists. Former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke is proving to be a tougher opponent. He's served presidents from both parties. He says he won't work in a Kerry administration. His foreign policy views in the 1980s and 1990s placed him in the camp of Republican hardliners. He writes warmly of his relationship with Richard Perle. And most of his attacks on Bush are from the right, not the left. He is undoubtedly the toughest critic whose credibility the White House has ever had to undermine; he represents a potent cocktail of nonpartisanship, expertise, and withering criticism aimed at Bush's greatest electoral strength. For the last 48 hours, administration officials have done their best to chip away at Clarke and his case against the president. They've adopted several different tacks--none of which is particularly honest, and many of which are mutually contradictory. Their initial approach, now discarded, was to argue that Bush actually embraced Clarke--a holdover from the Clinton administration--in 2001, thus demonstrating that the administration was serious about Al Qaeda before September 11. On "60 Minutes" last weekend, Condoleezza Rice's deputy, Steve Hadley, made this case: Dick is very dedicated, very knowledgeable about this issue. When the President came into office, one of the decisions we made was to keep Mr. Clarke and his counter-terrorism group intact, bring them into the new administration--a really unprecedented decision, very unusual when there has been a transition that involves a change of party. We did that because we knew al Qaeda was a priority, that there was a risk that we would be attacked and we wanted an experienced team to try and identify the risk, take actions to disrupt the terrorists--and if an event, an attack were to succeed, to be an experienced crisis management team to support the president. This approach seemed to overcome the central paradox in any Bush strategy to destroy Clarke: How can you defend yourself from charges that you didn't take terrorism seriously before 9/11 while simultaneously attacking the credibility of the person you put in charge of terrorism before 9/11? Hadley's answer was to point out that Clarke's appointment proved the Bush administration was serious. But on Monday, once the Bushies had taken a closer look at how devastating Clarke's account was, Hadley's soft approach was abandoned. The new method for overcoming the inconvenient fact that Bush put Clarke in charge of terrorism was to simply write Clarke out of the history of the Bush administration altogether. Instead of Bush's terrorism adviser, Clarke became a weak Clintonite who did little to halt Al Qaeda's rise during the 1990s. If there was one consistent theme to yesterday's attack, this was it. The most intellectually dishonest performance was Dick Cheney's emergency interview on Rush Limbaugh's radio show. Limbaugh wondered how in the world Bush could have made this guy Clarke head of counterterrorism. "Well, I wasn't directly involved in that decision," Cheney said. "He was moved out of the counterterrorism business over to the cybersecurity side of things. That is, he was given the new assignment at some point there. I don't recall the exact time frame." Who could be expected to keep track of such minor details as how long Clarke was kept as counterterrorism czar? Maybe some scenes from Clarke's book would jog the vice president's memory. Clarke was the guy standing in Cheney's office on the morning of 9/11 with Rice in the minutes after the first attack. He's the guy that Condi turned to and asked, "Okay, Dick, you're the crisis manager, what do you recommend?" Later in the day he was also the guy standing in between Rice and Cheney in the White House Situation Room. He was the one whose shoulder Cheney placed his hand on when he asked, "Are you getting everything you need, everybody doing what you want?" Cheney might also remember Clarke as the guy who asked Cheney to request authorization from Bush to shoot down any hijacked airplanes. He may also recall him as the man who briefed Bush when the president finally arrived back at the White House. In other words, Cheney neglected to inform Limbaugh's audience that Clarke didn't move to cyberterrorism until a month after 9/11. Clarke's nine-month tenure as the man in charge of counterterrorism in the Bush administration is being thrown down a memory hole. "So the only thing I can say about Dick Clarke," Cheney continued on Limbaugh's show, "is he was here throughout those eight years going back to 1993, and the first attack on the World Trade Center in '98 when the embassies were hit in east Africa, in 2000 when the USS Cole was hit, and the question that ought to be asked is, what were they doing in those days when he was in charge of counterterrorism efforts?" Rice echoed the memory-hole strategy yesterday, noting on Fox News, "Dick Clarke was counterterrorism czar for a long time with a lot of attacks on the United States. What he was doing was--what they were doing apparently was not working. We wanted to do something different." She didn't get a chance to explain how this statement comports with Hadley's insistence that "one of the decisions we made was to keep Mr. Clarke and his counter-terrorism group intact" because "we wanted an experienced team to try and identify the risk, take actions to disrupt the terrorists." So there's a significant problem with the memory-hole strategy: It requires everyone to suspend their knowledge of one of the most elementary facts of this story. Perhaps recognizing this, the White House has trotted out a few supplementary lines of attack. One is to portray Clarke as fetishizing meetings. A pillar of Clarke's evidence for the administration's lack of attention to terrorism before 9/11 is that there was never a meeting of Bush's senior national security advisers to discuss the issue. There were principals meetings about Iraq, the ABM treaty, and Kyoto, but not Al Qaeda. During the late summer of 2001, when intelligence chatter about an attack peaked, Clarke urgently pressed for a cabinet-level meeting, but Rice rejected his request. Now the White House is claiming that Clarke was just obsessed with meetings, and preferred process to action. "To somehow suggest that the attack on 9/11 could have been prevented by a series of meetings--I have to tell you that during the period of time we were at battle stations," Rice said yesterday. McClellan added, "He's been out there talking about whether or not he was participating in certain meetings. So it appears to be more about the process than the actual actions we have taken." Obviously, the topics the administration chooses to hold high-level meetings on suggest a great deal about its priorities, but Clarke's main point goes beyond that. In his book he argues that cabinet-level meetings during the dangerous period of late summer 2001 actually could have been instrumental in shaking information out of the bureaucracies. During the Clinton administration, Clarke insists such meetings drilled into cabinet secretaries the urgency of the threat and pushed officials to uncover clues that thwarted attacks. The other problem with the White House's dismissal of Clarke's alleged meeting fetish is that it contradicts one of the Bushies' other attacks on him. Maybe those cabinet-level meetings on Al Qaeda weren't important, but McClellan suggests that Rice's staff meetings were essential. "Dr. Rice, early on in the administration," McClellan said yesterday, "started holding daily briefings with the senior directors of the National Security Council, of which he was one. But he refused to attend those meetings, and he was later asked to attend those meetings and he continued to refuse to attend those meetings." Apparently, some meetings are more important than others. When White House officials yesterday weren't ignoring the fact that Clarke worked for Bush or complaining about his attendance record at staff meetings, their final major argument was that his approach to terrorism was more timid than the new administration's. "We didn't feel it was sufficient to simply roll back Al Qaeda; we pursued a policy to eliminate Al Qaeda," McClellan told reporters. This is an odd statement since Clarke for several years had been calling unambiguously for the complete destruction of bin Laden's organization. In fact, it was Clarke himself who was tasked with writing the new administration plan to deal with Al Qaeda. He pulled out his plan from the Clinton years, and presented it at a deputies meeting. It was the Bushies who flinched at the plan's aggressiveness. Several deputies thought the goal to "eliminate al Qaeda" went too far. They wanted the document to say "significantly erode al Qaeda." Clarke won but it hardly mattered. September 11 happened before Bush ever signed the plan. Why are the administration's attacks such a bundle of confusion? Probably because this White House has never been confronted with such a credible and nonpartisan critic on the issue of terrorism. Polls over the last six months show an erosion of the public's confidence in one of the pillars of Bush's strength: his credibility. But that has not translated into a weakening of Bush's second greatest asset--voters' belief that he would confront terrorism better than John Kerry--and the administration wants to keep it that way. Of course, not everything Richard Clarke writes is necessarily the Gospel truth, and the press may quickly lose interest in his criticisms. But for the first time since 9/11, Bush's greatest accomplishments have been credibly recast as his greatest failures. No wonder the White House response seems so desperate.
Same. I really am curious about what treeman and sinohero in particular are thinking about all this right now. And even the incredible, disappearing Trader Poof's been gone an unusually long time. (And I don't know whether to laugh or cry. I don't know whether to live or die, but it cuts like a knife... She's out of my life...) Not that he ever made an attempt at intelligent discourse, which treeman at least tried to do. Is there any chance, by the way, that you guys could ease up on the baaaaamaslammer quotes? Kind of kills the ignore function. My favorite WH response to all this was Condi Rice yesterday, implying that Clarke deserved criticism for each terrorist act that occurred on his watch. Um, 9/11 anyone?
Here's an excerpt from Clarke's book. WTF is Lynne Cheney doing in the EOC? ________________ In the Presidential Emergency Operations Center the cast was decidedly more political. In addition to the Vice President and Condi Rice, there was the Vice President's wife, Lynne; his political advisor Mary Matalin; his security advisor, Scooter Libby; the Deputy White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten; and White House communications director Karen Hughes. The monitors were simultaneously blaring the coverage from five networks. On one screen, I could see the Situation Room. I grabbed Mike Fenzel. "How's it going over here?" I asked. "It's fine, Major Fenzel whispered, "but I can't hear the crisis conference because Mrs Cheney keeps turning down the volume so she can hear CNN...and the Vice President keeps hanging up the line to you." Mrs Cheney was more than just a family member who had to be protected. Like her husband, she was a right wing ideologue and she was offering her advice and opinions in the bunker.
As for the other conservatives here, it's kind of hard to have a discussion when you get gang-tackled by the lefty mafia that holds sway here. I know you people hate Bush. I know you're going to whine for the next four years under Bush. So what's the point? I've had it up to here with the fact that the D & D is nothing more than a forum for whiney whores like BJ and others of his ilk to gripe and spread their little leftist conspiracy theories. You guys are going down like Chinatown and I'm loving it. Basso, I know you think you're fighting the good fight, but it is useless to combat these know-nothings and ne'erdo wells who inhabit this joint. If you guys weren't such a-holes like BJ, the right wing minority here wouldn't have disappeared. So continue to spread your lies and parrot the spin of the leftist talking heads. Clutch, may I suggest you rename this the "Liberal Talking Points" forum. It is quite appropriate as the debate has ceased. It is now simply preaching to the Leftist choir and frankly, I've got bigger fish to fry.
Conspiracy theories? Aren't you the one who claimed that a jornalist went back and changed what he quoted in order to cover Kerry's ass? I will just add that the issue doesn't really hurt Kerry anyway. I understand it's hard to argue, but we aren't the ones lying here. The problem is that the administration are the ones lying and spinning etc. Some pro-war people then post the articles containing the spin. Other folk investigate a little bit, and post counter articles which show the spin and lies for the spin and lies they are. So it's tough for you to argue your side, when the administration doesn't give you a leg to stand on. That's part of why I have a strange admiration for Basso. He keeps finding this stuff and posting it, and not accepting the facts when they are brought out by the other side. I'm sure he gets discouraged, but he doesn't show it.
I think its telling that the right wingers disappearance seems to correlate almost exactly with President Bush' declining poll numbers, and with the increasing number of scandals that (no WMD's, al Qaeda's resurgence, the chaos/casualties in Iraq, Clarke, O'Neal, the Plame affair) have started to rock the administration. The triumphant chest beating righties were everywhere when statues started getting pulled down, yet they're nowhere when myths start getting dispelled. Where's treeman, he guaranteed us that the WMD's would be found; "It's only a matter of time" he said, over and over, he never turned up after that, just like they did. Same with Johnheath.
That's not a conspiracy theory. The journalist in question dutifully wrote down the quote (he was a witness to it) and later embarassed himself a few days later by claiming that he didn't say "foreign." It's not a conspiracy, but a leftist (I am a journalist and unfortunately, most of us are lefties) leaning reporter decided he'd help Kerry out. Why embarass yourself by reversing if he really did say foreign? And need I add about the incident where a camera crew gave Kerry a second take during an interview? Do you think for a minute that they would have done that for a Republican? I just sense a serious inequity here.
It's not a conspiracy because you believe it to be true. I won't pass judgement whether it is or not, but because that's your take on how events went down, doesn't make it the way it really happened. Things that you call a conspiracy theory posed by liberals on this board, or even moderates, are believed to be true by them. Many of these theories at least have articles to back them up. Is there an article claiming that this journalist violated his journalistic ethics over such an unimportant issue to cover for Kerry? Or do we just have to take your far removed outsiders take on what happened?
As far as being ganged up on, cry me a river. Let me know after someone wishes you dead for posting a lead news story, then I'll sympathize... As far as dissapearing acts, I would say that it would be hard to show up here with any semblance of dignity after having made proclamation after proclamation, insult after insult pre and early in the war and seen them one by one be proven for the complete crap they were, but then you have those in here who simply act like nothing untoward ever happened, and even one prescious soul who blames the left for forcing the Bush administration to use intel it knew to be false... Johnheath would probably be here were it not for the fact that he smuggly proclaimed that if the left-leaning conspiracy theorists wild wet dreams came true ( I am paraphrasing him here) and we hadn't found any WMDs by the end of 2003, he'd admit that the war was wrong. Haven't heard from him since early December, if memeory serves... Treeman made so many particular predictions and condemnations of criticism that I am sure he knows that a return would be met with having to face posts of his, and their inherent insulting/superior nature. Sino is in the same boat. Hayes appears every now and then, and as I people have some respect for him, we have yet to actually throw any of his old posts ( like, say, on how Iraq was about nuclear proliferation, which we were, it was claimed, doing a bang up job preventing) back in his face. But the argument has evolved in here so much that those who pre-war were shouting us down, telling us that ivory tower type of moralization about invading other countires has no place when we're facing amushroom cloud over NYC at any moment are now claiming that it was always about Saddam being a bad guy. Those who told us that we were traitors for doubting the sketchy nature of our intel and the flaw in rellying on intel to go to war now roll their eyes at our continuation to point out the administration's culpability in the lead up to the war by telling us that this is the nature of intelligence. Those who told us we were Saddam lovers for countering the administration's claim that we would be greeted with open arms as liberators are now telling us that we can't realistically criticize the war for another 5 or 10 years,because until then we won;t know if the reverse Domino Principle would have played out. Those who came in here and crowed at us doubters after Bush's speeches, at how he was pointing out all these facts which showed us to be in error about 9-11/Iraq connections and WMDs now try to say his speeches didn't really mean all that much, and berate us for concentrating on X number of words, and missing the bigger picture. Those who repeatedly scoffed at us for not trusting our intelligence gathering services, saying we were idiots for trusting Saddam over the CIA now dismiss the CIA's take on whether or not Saddam was a threat to us, and sidestep the fact that we now know that that's what the CIA was telling Bush while Bush was telling us the intelligence said Saddam was a threat. There are some who have remained, in their way, consistent. While DD, for example, was obviously wrong about several of his 9-11, nuke, and WMD statemtns, his underlying theme, that we should do what we want, when we want, where we want, even if it's someone else's country and to hell with everyone who disagrees has remained consistent. Those who ignored, marginalized, or attacked the character of all the intel and diplomatic officials who pre-war were claiming that we had no proof, were using selective intel, and were scrwwing up royally are the same ones who now say " Well, nobody knoew pre-war...we used the info at hand...no harm, no foul.." and still marginalizing, attacking the character of the source and mostly ignoring the facts and statemtns which day by day continue to prove the anti-war position going back to before the war started. But what you mostly get now is those who lump all the evidence, facts, statements and revalations into one big Bush hating pile of vitriol, and conveniently dismiss it all without even bothering to have to address it, beyond at most a line or two of rhetoric which usually doesn't even approach the issue at hand. We have people who say no one but the administration itself is objective about the actions of the administration, peoiple who call intel experts who served under more Republicans that Democrats and rose to the highest standing in their field partisan know-nothings for speaking out against the administration. It really boggles the mind. I honestly, truthfully can't conceive of an eventuality that could possibly occur that would persuade thses people that their position is untenable.
