Lisa: This biography of Bart came out awfully quickly. It's not even about him! Bart: Sure it is! Look at the cover. Lisa: But inside it's mostly about Ross Perot, and the last two chapters are excerpts from the Oliver North trial. Homer: Ah, Oliver North. He was just poured into that uniform.
Ollie doesn't cut lefties too much slack! But as a military type, I would feel down right comfortable with him covering my ass..as opposed to our former c in c, who would be leaving town for Canada or England, on the next thing smokin.. to save his.
Some folks need to make up their minds-- Was the war in Iraq a major victory do to our overwhelming military might? *OR* Have we fallen into a quagmire because our military was somehow not given enough funding to be properly prepaired and maintained? War going bad must be those darn hippy beatnik liberals.
But you support Bush, right? I have no problem with people who feel that serving your country when called is a criteria for the Presidency...I might even be among them. I have no problem with people who say that it's a plus but not a pre-requisite...but when people say it matters for people they don't support, but turn a blind eye for people they do, I have a problem with that. Either it matters or it doesn't, and all the photo ops in the world aren't going to alter George W. Bush's record on this issue... His father, no problem.
Geo W Bush is a leader of men..Clinton a brilliant politician..Geo W respects the presidency and the military, and the people he commands know it. Clinton respected niether and the people he commanded knew it.
O-kay...let's go back to the first point for a sec.... "Geo W Bush is a leader of men" What on earth makes you think this? He leads because he has the job...I liked him better than Gore because he was more of a leader, partly, but that's like being taller than DeVito...doesn't make you a giant. I have seen nothing during his tenure to suggest that George Bush is an innate leader. Do you really think this? I'll give you the Clinton is a brilliant politician, sadly. "Geo W respects the presidency and the military..." Have you been paying attention lately? But, to sum up, you are using subjective criteria you happen to believe in to do exactly what I said...Say that military service counts when it's against someone you dislike, but is irrelevent when it's about someone you like. This is the kind of partisan crap that drives me nuts.
IMO leadership is a quality that loses something when criteria is applied to it..its a natural thing, Geo. W has it. Its like trying to describe the Grand Canyon or a river rushing down a Colorado mountain..you know it when you see it ..and feel it, but its impossible to describe. As far as current events.. a little too political, time will tell. Service to ones country ? Geo Ws reserve duty stands far above Clintons leaving the country.
What about a C in C who during Viet Nam signed up for the national guard.(I don't see any harm in that) But then didn't show up for almost a year of the duty he signed up for? Also going to Oxford isn't exactly running away to England. Instead it's one of the best educations you can get in the world.
B-Bob: We have need of your shovel pic. This is equivocation at its sloppiest and most dullardly. You just feel it in your gut, right? You have faith? You just know in your heart that Clinton was a jerk and Bush is a natural leader. No elected or appointed Republican -- no Republican of any stature at all -- would still talk about Clinton's 'draft dodging' because they KNOW that Bush looks far, far worse on this front. Clinton, who by the way was NOT born with a silver spoon in his mouth, got his deferment because he was going to school and had excelled in school. Bush, on the other hand, got his sweetheart gig cause his dad was rich and powerful. And he STILL reneged on it and shamed his country and its military with his flaunting of even the tiny, safe as hell, sissy responsibility of protecting Texas against the Viet Cong. He didn't even show up consistently for his spoiled, rich boy's scam appointment. Yeah, he respects the military. As long as it's other peoples' kids risking their lives. Clinton at least had the guts to say he opposed Nam instead of taking a rich boy's gig and reneging on even that easy ass out. I don't like either of them, but you're the last living rightie who thinks Bush wins this one. Keep digging. You look hilarious doing it.
He respects the presidency by using the Constitution as toilet paper and he respects the military by cutting their pay, cutting their health insurance benefits and putting them in harms way over debatable intelligence. Get a grip.
"Now, son, slow down there a second. Maybe you should tell us what your definition of is is exactly?"
From Frances Fitzgerald's book about Star Wars, "Way Out There in the Blue" "From 1983 to 1987 the Strategic Defense Initiative alarmed Soviet leaders because it threatened to reverse what they saw as the trend toward strategic stability and stable costs. Nonetheless, they did not respond to it by creating their own SDI program. That is, they continued their existing research programs on lasers and other advanced technologies, plus their existing design-work on space weaponry, but they did not mount an effort to test or develop SDI-type weapons. In addition they studied counter-measures to space-based weaponry, but since the SDIO never designed a plausible system, they had nothing specific to study, and their military spending was not affected. Between 1985 and 1987 Gorbachev spent a great deal of effort trying to convince the Reagan administration to restrain the program, presumably because he thought his own military-industrial complex would eventually force him to adopt a program of some sort to counter SDI, but by the end of 1987 the Soviet leadership no longer regarded SDI as a threat. Then, too, the Soviets did not respond to the Reagan administration's military buildup. As CIA analysts discovered in 1983, Soviet military spending had leveled off in 1975 to a growth rate of 1.3 percent [per year], with spending for weapons procurements virtually flat. It remained that way for a decade. According to later CIA estimates, Soviet military spending rose in 1985 as a result of decisions taken earlier, and grew at a rate of 4.3 percent per year through 1987. Spending for procurements of offensive strategic weapons, however, increased by only 1.4 percent a year in that period. In 1988 Gorbachev began a round of budget cuts, bringing the defense budget back down to its 1980 level. In other words, while the U.S. military budget was growing at an average of 8 percent per year, the Soviets did not attempt to keep up, and their military spending did not rise even as might have been expected given the war they were fighting in Afghanistan....At the beginning of Reagan's first term, some conservative enthusiasts in the administration might have believed that the U.S. could spend the Soviets under the table in an all-out strategic arms race. But the Joint Chiefs of Staff never thought this, nor did the CIA, for the simple reason that Soviet spending on strategic weapons was a very small fraction of the overall Soviet military budget. According to one MIT expert, Soviet spending for the procurement, operations, and maintenance of its strategic offensive forces amounted to only 8 percent of its entire defense budget. In other words, had Gorbachev achieved the 50 percent reductions he was seeking at Reykjavik, he would not have made savings of any significance in terms of the Soviet economy. What happened during the 1980s was that the Soviet economy continued to deteriorate as it had during the 1970s. The economic decline, of course, resulted from the failures of the system created by Lenin and Stalin--not from any effort on the part of the Reagan administration. Without Gorbachev, however, the Soviet Union might have survived for many more years, for the system, thought on the decline, was nowhere near collapse. It was Gorbachev's efforts to reverse the decline and to modernize his country that knocked the props out from under the system. The revolution was in essence a series of decisions made by one man, and it came as a surprise precisely because it did not follow from a systemic breakdown."
