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It's gwb's war and the buck stops there. Grow up!
oops, i forgot....it's gwb's war, so everything is gwb's fault
ROTFLMAO@U.....Wow, thanks for the reply. Cell phones causing brain tumors, shoot, you may be right.
Regarding DU, you certainly are entitled to your opinion but methinks you are 'dead' wrong on that. While I will take the risk of cell phone caused brain tumors I wouldn't do the same around DU, but then you probably think Chernobyl should be converted into a park.
Easy, you are wasting your time posting to zit. First off, he has discovered a new posting toy that would have even his 16 year old son rolling his eyes, again I'm sure, at his old man. Next, just like ROTFLMAO and rooster, they ignore most any question posed to them yet proclaim they are 'serious' individuals with all the answers and the roadmap to 'truth'.
Talk about clueless, they preach freedom and democracy yet would be quite content with a jacked election....as long as 'their' party won.
zit, like your VP, you are a class(less) act. Go Cheney yourself.
If you and your party are so concerned the Dems may try to steal this election 'too', why is it no Reps will speak out for ensuring electronic votes have a paper trail???
Your silence, again, will speak volumes.
Just kidding - I'm going to cast my vote for Bush. Hopefully, the dems won't try to steal this election too...
Sooo, eddie, what say you?? Do you believe DU is of no danger to anyone who comes in contact with it, that it is harmless and poses no health risk short term or long term??
Skip this zithead and your silly audio clips deflecting your inability to reason, these are serious thoughts for serious times and besides, the war is going great!!! Oh, shoot, excuuuuse me, the war is won, we are just winning the peace.
Backdraft
Peter Bergen.
How the war in Iraq has fueled Al Qaeda and ignited its dream of global jihad
PRESIDENT BUSH'S May 2003 announcement aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln that "major combat operations" had ended in Iraq has been replayed endlessly. What is less well remembered is just what the president claimed the United States had accomplished. "The battle of Iraq is one victory in a war on terror that began on September the llth, 2001," he declared. The defeat of Saddam Hussein, he told the American people, was "a crucial advance in the campaign against terror." In fact, the consensus now emerging among a wide range of intelligence and counterterrorism professionals is that the opposite is true: The invasion of Iraq not only failed to help the war on terrorism, but it represented a substantial setback.
In more than a dozen interviews, experts both within and outside the U.S. government laid out a stark analysis of how the war has hampered the campaign against Al Qaeda. Not only, they point out, did the war divert resources and attention away from Afghanistan, seriously damaging the prospects of capturing Al Qaeda leaders, but it has also opened a new front for terrorists in Iraq and created a new justification for attacking Westerners around the world. Perhaps most important, it has dramatically speeded up the process by which Al Qaeda the organization has morphed into a broad-based ideological movement-a shift, in effect, from bin Laden to bin Ladenism. "If Osama believed in Christmas, this is what he'd want under his Christmas tree," one senior intelligence official told me. Another counterterrorism official suggests that Iraq might begin to resemble "Afghanistan 1996," a reference to the year that bin Laden seized on Afghanistan, a chaotic failed state, as his new base of operations.
Even Kenneth Pollack, one of the nation's leading experts on Iraq, whose book The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq made the most authoritative case for overthrowing Saddam Hussein, says, "My instinct tells me that the Iraq war has hindered the war on terrorism. You had to deal with Al Qaeda first, not Saddam. We had not crippled the Al Qaeda organization when we embarked on the Iraq war."
The damage to U.S. interests is hard to overestimate. Rohan Gunaratna, a Sri Lankan academic who is regarded as one of the world's leading authorities on Al Qaeda, points out that "sadness and anger about Iraq, even among moderate Muslims, is being harnessed and exploited by terrorist and extremist groups worldwide to grow in strength, size, and influence." Similarly, Vincent Cannistraro, a former chief of counterterrorism at the CIA under presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush, says the Iraq war "accelerated terrorism" by "metastasizing" Al Qaeda. Today, Al Qaeda is more than the narrowly defined group that attacked the United States on September 11, 2001; it is a growing global movement that has been energized by the war in Iraq.
This turn of events is a dramatic shift from the mood in the months following the 9/11 attacks. When the United States went to war against the Taliban, it was understood by many in the global community, including many Arabs and Muslims, as a just war. The war in Iraq not only drained that reservoir of goodwill; it also dragged the United States into what many see as a conflict with the Muslim world, or ummah, in general. Samer Shehata, a professor of Arab politics at Georgetown University, says the Iraq war has convinced "many Muslims around the world, perhaps a majority, that the war on terrorism is in fact a war against Islam." Jason Burke, author of the authoritative 2003 book Al-Qaeda: Casting a Shadow of Terror, adds that the Iraq war "appears to be clear evidence to many that the perception of the militants is in fact accurate and that the ummah is engaged in a war of self-defense. This has theological implications-jihad is compulsory for all Muslims if the ummah is under attack."
This is not an arcane matter of Islamic jurisprudence, but a key reason why Americans are now dying in significant numbers in Iraq and an important factor behind the rise of a revitalized Al Qaeda movement. The Koran has two sets of justifications for holy war; one concerns a "defensive" jihad, when a Muslim land is under attack by nonMuslims, while the other countenances offensive attacks on infidels. Generally, Muslims consider the defensive justification for jihad to be the more legitimate. It was, for instance, a defensive jihad that clerics invoked against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan during the 1980s.
To the extent that Sunni Muslims-the vast majority of Muslims-have a Vatican, it is Al Azhar University in Cairo, the pre-eminent center of Muslim thought. Before the Iraq war, Al Azhar released a fatwa, a ruling on Islamic law, to the effect that if "crusader" forces attacked Iraq, it was an obligation for every Muslim to fight back. The clerics of Al Azhar were not alone in this view. The prominent Lebanese Shiite scholar Sheikh Fadlullah also called on Muslims to fight American forces in Iraq. In contrast, after 9/11, Sheikh Fadlullah had issued a fatwa condemning the attacks, as did the chief cleric of Al Azhar. Throughout the Muslim world, leading clerics who condemned what happened on 9/11 have given their blessing to fighting against the occupation of Iraqand as demonstrated by the attacks in Madrid in March, jihadists are prepared to take that fight to the invaders' home turf.
Harry "Skip" Brandon, a former senior counterterrorism official at the FBI, says the Iraq war "serves as a real rallying point, not only for the region, but also in Asia. We've seen very solid examples of them using the Iraq war for recruiting. I have seen it personally in Malaysia. The Iraq war is a public relations bonanza for Al Qaeda and a public relations disaster for us the longer it goes on." Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak's prediction that the occupation of Iraq would create "a hundred bin Ladens" is beginning to look prescient. We may soon find ourselves facing something akin to a global intifada.
PERHAPS THE MOST emblematic failure of the war on terrorism has been the continued ability of Al Qaeda's top leaders, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, to set the agenda for a string of terrorist attacks around the world. A bin Laden call for attacks against Western economic interests in October 2002 was followed by bombings of a French oil tanker and a Bali disco catering to Western tourists. In September 2003, Zawahiri denounced Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf for supporting the U.S. campaign against Al Qaeda; Musharraf narrowly survived two assassination attempts over the months that followed. And after bin Laden called for retaliation against' countries that were part of the coalition in Iraq in late 2003, terrorists attacked an Italian police barracks in Iraq, a British consulate in Turkey, and commuter trains in Madrid. According to a May report by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, Al Qaeda is now "fully reconstituted," with a "new and effective modus operandi," a presence in as many as 90 countries, and "over 18,000 potential terrorists still at large."
Yet despite Al Qaeda's undiminished global influence, the United States has pulled vital resources away from the hunt for bin Laden and Zawahiri. Soon after the fall of the Taliban, substantial numbers of Arabic speakers at the CIA and the National security Agency were directed to focus on Iraq rather than the hunt for Al Qaeda. "By January 2002, serious planning began for the invasion of Iraq," notes Cannistraro, the former CIA counterterrorism chief, "and that meant drawing down Arabic language resources from CIA and electronic intelligence gathering." In addition, says Richard Clarke, who headed counterterrorism efforts under both presidents Clinton and George W. Bush, unmanned Predator spy planes were deployed away from Afghanistan to Iraq in March 2003, and satellites surveying the Afghan-Pakistani border were diverted to the Gulf region.
Special Operations soldiers with critical skills-including Arabic language trainingwere perhaps the U.S. military's key asset in the effort to capture Al Qaeda leaders. But according to Larry Johnson, who used to work on counterterrorism issues at the CIA and State Department and who now advises the U.S. military on terrorism, those forces were pulled out of Afghanistan in the spring of 2002 to look for Scud missiles in western Iraq. It was only following the capture of Saddam Hussein, last December, that those troops were directed back to searching for Al Qaeda, leaving the pursuit of Al Qaeda's leaders significantly impaired for a year and a half.
Today, the hunt for Al Qaeda and Taliban in Afghanistan is largely a waiting game. Last summer, when I went out with a platoon from the 82nd Airborne on a mission into the badlands along the Afghan border to look for Al Qaeda and other "anti-coalition" forces, I found that the three-day mission did little more than chase shadows. Sergeant Joe Frost, a demolitions expert in his mid-30s, summed it up by noting that U.S. troops often found themselves attacked after sundown but could rarely find their assailants: "They're like shoot and run. We've seen one Al Qaeda person in the last six months." And therein lies the crux of the problem: The United States did not effectively crush Al Qaeda forces in Afghanistan during the war and its aftermath, which meant that those forces were able to slip away into the border region, where they can hide and organize attacks both inside Afghanistan and around the world.
Today, only 20,000 U.S. troops are stationed in Afghanistan, a country the size of Texas and nearly 50 percent larger than Iraq, where 140,000 U.S. troops haven't been enough to create stability. Kathy Gannon, who has covered Afghanistan for the past 16 years for the Associated Press, says that the security situation is "as bad as it's ever been"-and that includes the years during and before the Taliban reign. The power of regional warlords has surged, challenging Hamid Karzai's central government and creating space for the Taliban to quietly emerge from the shadows. Taliban leader Mullah Omar and military commander Jalaluddin Haqqani both remain at large, as does Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a Pashtun warlord whose forces are regularly engaging U.S. soldiers. Meanwhile, Afghanistan has become the world's largest source of opium, the raw material for heroin. The country is now one of the world's leading narco-states, and money from the $2.3 billion drug trade is reportedly making its way into Al Qaeda's coffers. According to Barnett Rubin, a senior fellow at New York University and an authority on the region, Afghanistan is "obviously in danger of reverting to a failed state."
BUT THE ADMINISTRATION'S focus on the war in Iraq has not only caused it to shortchange the hunt for Al Qaeda in Afghanistan-it has also undermined the war on terrorism around the world. A poll taken by the Pew Global Attitudes Project in March 2004 found that bin Laden is viewed favorably by large parts of the population in Pakistan (65 percent), Jordan (55 percent), and Morocco (45 percent), all countries that are key allies in the war on terrorism. These results echo those of a Pew survey taken shortly after the invasion of Iraq in which Indonesians, Jordanians, Turks, and Moroccans all expressed more "confidence" m bin Laden than in President Bush. During the buildup to the war, the polling company Zogby International found that favorable views of the United States had declined from 34 to 10 percent in Jordan, 38 to 9 percent m Morocco, and 12 to 3 percent in Saudi Arabia. Of course, admiration for bin Laden and dislike for the United States do not necessarily translate into a desire to attack Westerners. But the war against bin Laden is in large part a war of ideas-and on that front, the war in Iraq has damaged the United States' cause and broadened the pool of Al Qaeda recruits.
Nowhere is this shift more visible than on the Internet-a significant fact in itself, since Internet chatter reflects the opinions of a relatively educated, elite segment of the Muslim world. To the extent that Al Qaeda-"the base" in Arabic-has a new base, it is, to a surprising degree, on the web. According to a U.S. government contractor who specializes in analyzing jihadist chat rooms and websites, web traffic was "tremendously energized" in the period before the Iraq war. "When it was clear that the war was about to occur, there was more participation, more rhetoric, more anger," the contractor says. "The war in Afghanistan provoked some anger, but not as much as the Iraq war." And while such chatter often amounts to mere venting, online discussions can also generate a road map for terrorist acts. Veteran Middle East reporter Paul Eedle, who closely monitors Arabic language websites, points to a document posted on an Al Qaeda site in December 2003 "reflecting the thinking of senior Al Qaeda leaders" that discussed how best to break up the coalition in Iraq. The document noted that countries like the United Kingdom were unlikely to withdraw from Iraq, while Spain was the weakest link in the coalition. Three months later, 191 Spaniards lost their lives in a bombing timed to coincide with Spain's election, and Spain subsequently withdrew its troops from Iraq.
Another shift in Internet traffic came this spring, when visits to websites with information about Iraq-such as Al Jazeera's home page-skyrocketed during the standoff in Fallujah and the prison abuse scandal. "Iraq has become transformed beyond a cause that energized just the jihadists," Eedle says. "It has caused outrage at every middle-class dinner table in the Middle East."
SADDAM HUSSEIN'S IRAQ-despite the administration's arguments to the contrary-was hardly a haven for Al Qaeda. But now, Iraq has become what some experts call a "supermagnet" for jihadists. "We've created the World Series of terrorism," a senior government counterterrorism official told me.
Judith Yaphe, who was the CIA'S senior analyst on Iraq during the first Gulf War, says Iraq is "open to terrorism in a way that it was not before. The lack of central authority makes it more amenable to terrorists." Iraq is convenient for Arab militants, who can blend into its society in a way they did not in Bosnia, Chechnya, or Afghanistan. Dr. Saad al-Fagih, a leading Saudi dissident, says that hundreds of Saudis have gone to fight in Iraq; one source of his, he says, compares Iraq to "Peshawar during the 1980s," a reference to the Pakistani city that attracted Muslims from around the world seeking to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan.
Given that large numbers of U.S. forces are likely to be in Iraq for years, it is clear that the country will remain an important theater of operations for Al Qaeda and its affiliates. The irony of this development hardly needs to be stated. A key reason the Bush administration was able to sell the Iraq war to the American people was the widely held belief that Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's regime had entered into an unholy alliance and were jointly responsible for the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon-something 2 out of 3 Americans believed, according to a Pew poll released in October 2002. To date, the largest criminal investigation in history has turned up no evidence of Iraq's involvement in 9/11; nor have the occupation of Iraq and the efforts of the entire U.S. intelligence apparatus uncovered any such link. Yet Al Qaeda-like groups, both homegrown and foreign, have now become well established in Iraq. "Prior to 2003 and our invasion, Iraq rarely figured on the international terrorism charts," notes Larry Johnson, the military adviser. "Now Iraq has had the third-largest number of terrorist fatalities after Israel and India."
Some U.S. officials have argued that this development may have an upside: In July 2003, General Ricardo Sanchez offered what has been dubbed the "flypaper" theory, explaining that Iraq "is what I would call a terrorist magnet.... And this will prevent the American people from having to go through attacks back in the United States." But this is an absurd ex post facto rationalization: Before the war, the Bush administration would hardly have made the case that we were going to occupy Iraq so that our men and women in uniform would attract terrorists eager to kill them.
Nor has the Iraqi "flypaper" served to stop jihadists from attacking elsewhere. Over the past year, more than 100 people have died in attacks against Western and Jewish targets in Turkey and Morocco; car bombs in Saudi Arabia have killed scores more; a suicide attacker in August 2003 bombed a Marriott hotel in Indonesia, killing 12; and the train bombs in Madrid left 191 people dead. And these numbers do not take into account the thousands of people who have been killed in the past year in insurgencies in places such as Kashmir, Chechnya, Uzbekistan, Thailand, the Philippines, and Indonesia-all conflicts in which the broader Al Qaeda movement plays a significant role.
Which brings us to an important question: What is Al Qaeda? The network is perhaps best understood as a set of concentric rings, growing more ill defined as they spread outward. At the core is Al Qaeda the organization, which bin Laden and a dozen or so close associates formed in 1989, and which eventually expanded to 200 to 300 core members who have sworn an oath of allegiance to bin Laden, their emir, or prince. It was Al Qaeda the organization that attacked the United States on September 11, 2001.
The second concentric ring consists of perhaps several thousand men who have trained in Al Qaeda's Afghan camps in bomb making, assassination, and the manufacture of poisons. Beyond that ring are as many as 120,000 who received some land of basic military training in Afghanistan over the past decade. An undetermined number of those fighters are now sharpening their skills as insurgents from Kashmir to Algeria.
The Madrid attacks in March are emblematic of what is emerging as the fourth and perhaps most ambiguous-and potentially most dangerous-ring in the Al Qaeda galaxy. The attacks were carried out by a group of Moroccans with few links to Al Qaeda the organization. Some of the conspirators did try to establish direct contact with the inner core of Al Qaeda, but that effort seems to have been unsuccessful, and they carried out the attacks under their own steam. These attacks may well represent the future of "Al Qaeda" operations, most of which will be executed by local jihadists who have little or no direct connection to bin Laden's group. This is a worrisome development, because it suggests that Al Qaeda has successfully transformed itself from an organization into a mass movement with a nearly unlimited pool of potential operatives.
Even administration officials now seem to acknowledge that the war has not lessened the likelihood of attacks inside the United States. As CIA Director George Tenet testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee in February, Al Qaeda detainees "consistently talk about the importance the group still attaches to striking the main enemy, the United States.... Even catastrophic attacks on the scale of September 11 remain within Al Qaeda's reach." Senior counterterrorism officials are especially concerned about possible attacks timed to the Republican convention in New York and about attacks aimed to disrupt the November election.
If the Al Qaeda leadership had been wiped out in Afghanistan during the winter of 2001, President Bush might have gone down in history as one of the more adroit wartime presidents. Instead, Al Qaeda's leaders and many of its foot soldiers went on to fight another day. Making matters worse, the president volunteered the nation for a counterproductive war in Iraq that has cost us dearly in blood and treasure. Few mourn the defeat of Saddam, a tyrant who will surely join Stalin, Pol Pot, and Hitler in some especially unpleasant corner of hell. However, the war against Saddam wasn't conducted under the banner of liberating the Iraqi people, but rather under the banner of winning the war on terrorism. And by that standard, it has been a grotesque failure.
What we have done in Iraq is what bin Laden could not have hoped for m his wildest dreams: We invaded an oil-rich Muslim nation in the heart of the Middle East, the very type of imperial adventure that bin Laden has long predicted was the United States' long-term goal in the region. We deposed the secular socialist Saddam, whom bin Laden has long despised, ignited Sunni and Shia fundamentalist fervor in Iraq, and have now provoked a "defensive" jihad that has galvanized jihad-minded Muslims around the world. It's hard to imagine a set of policies better designed to sabotage the war on terrorism.
http://www.peterbergen.com/
with serious, thoughtOUT decisions based on unbiased facts and an end game.
Your cute verbal soundbites are so serious...
Yes, thankfully, the firefighter was there at ground zero!!!
but thankfully, the right man for the right time is where he needs to be
By Michael Isikoff
Investigative Correspondent
Newsweek
Citing a recently discovered December 2001 memo buried in the files of the National Security Agency, the commission report states that Iranian border inspectors were instructed not to place stamps in the passports of Al Qaeda fighters from Saudi Arabia who were traveling from bin Laden’s camps through Iran, according to U.S. officials and commission sources familiar with the report.
The commission report does not address which Al Qaeda members specifically benefited from the clean passport policy. It also emphasizes that the panel has found no evidence suggesting that Iranian government officials had advance knowledge of bin Laden’s plans to attack the World Trade Towers and Pentagon on the morning of September 11, 2001.
But, citing the NSA memo, the report discloses for the first time that eight to ten of the so-called “muscle hijackers” on September 11 are believed to have traveled through Iran between October 2000 and February 2001—the same period of time that Iranian border guards were facilitating the movement of extremist jihadis entering and exiting the Afghan training camps.
Those same hijackers, most of whom probably had no knowledge of the September 11 mission themselves, began entering the United States in April 2001 with no stamps on their passports indicating their recent travel to Afghanistan and Iran-red flags that might have prompted heightened scrutiny from U.S. border inspectors.
The new discovery about Iran’s assistance to Al Qaeda is among the most surprising new findings contained in a mammoth, 500 page report on the September 11 attacks that is due to be released by the commission next Thursday. Officials familiar with the findings say it provides far stronger evidence of the Iranian government links to bin Laden’s organization than was found of connections between Saddam Hussein’s regime and Al Qaeda—a major bone of contention between the 9/11 panel and members of the Bush administration.
Former White House counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke said the 9/11 report confirms a judgment that U.S. counterterrorism officials had reached soon after the attacks. At the time, the Bush administration was seeking evidence pointing to Iraqi involvement in the attacks. “See if Saddam did this,” Bush instructed Clarke on the evening of Sept. 12, 2001, according to Clarke’s book, “Against All Enemies.” “See if he’s linked in any way.”
In fact, Clarke said, while there was no evidence of Iraqi complicity, "there were lots of reasons to believe that [Al Qaeda] was being facilitated by elements of the Iranian security services. We told the president that specifically. The best evidence we had of state support [for Al Qaeda] was Iran."
Bush did identify Iran, along with Iraq and North Korea, as part of the "axis of evil" in his January 2002 State of the Union speech. Iran had also long been identified by the State Department as a state sponsor of terrorism because of its close relationship with Hizbullah, a Shiite Muslim terror group with a major presence in Lebanon. But the president chose not to threaten military action against the Iranian regime, like he did with Iraq, in part because of a concern about possibly alienating "democratic forces’ within the country who might be in a position to modify Iranian behavior, according to Clarke.
Bush administration officials emphasized today that the 9/11 report also included contradictory information that undercut the idea of a strong relationship between Iran and Al Qaeda-and even cast some doubt on the conclusion that the Iranians were providing special favors for bin Laden’s organization.
In interviews with U.S. interrogators, two high-level Al Qaeda detainees—September 11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Ramzi bin al-Shibh—confirmed that some of the 9/11 hijackers had transited through Iran on their way to and from the Afghan training camps, the report says, according to knowledgable sources. But the two Al Qaeda captives insisted the hijackers did so mainly to take advantage of a general Iranian practice of not stamping "Saudi passports"—indicating that the Iranian policy may have been cast more broadly than just Al Qaeda members.
One White House official called the report “confusing” on this point. However, another U.S. official said the general understanding of the U.S. intelligence community is that Iran was specifically seeking to assist “extremist jihadi” or “Afghan Arabs” traveling to and from the Afghan camps.
Another major captured Al Qaeda operative, Tawfiq bin Attash, also known as "Khallad," is cited in the report as telling interrogators that Iranian security services had reached out to bin Laden after the bombing of the USS Cole in October 2000 and proposed a strengthening of their relationship. But bin Laden, according to the 9/11 report, rejected the overture for fear of alienating his Sunni Muslim base in Saudi Arabia.
The new evidence about Iran cited in the 9/11 report builds on findings contained in an interim staff report which challenged the long-held idea among many U.S. intelligence analysts that bin Laden’s Sunni Muslim populated terrorist group would shy away from collaboration with Shiite Muslim terror groups like Hizbullah that are associated with Iran.
In fact, the interim report found that in the mid-1990’s, “Bin Laden’s representatives and Iranian officials had discussed putting aside Shia-Sunni divisions to cooperate against the common enemy. A small group of al Qaeda operatives subsequently traveled to Iran and Hizbullah camps in Lebanon for training in explosives, intelligence and security. Bin Laden reportedly showed particular interest in Hizbullah’s truck bombing tactics in Lebanon in 1983 that had killed 241 U.S. Marines.”
Perhaps most surprisingly, the panel found what it called “strong but indirect” evidence that bin Laden’s organization played a role in the 1996 bombing of a U.S. Air Force housing complex at Khobar Towers in Dharan, Saudi Arabia, an attack that killed 19 Americans injured 372 others. That attack had been previously blamed by U.S. officials on a Saudi Shia Hizbullah group that was receiving direct assistance from Iran.
But the 9/11 panel noted that there were reports in the months before the attack that bin Laden was seeking to facilitate a shipment of explosives to Saudi Arabia. On the day of the attack, the interim staff report said, “Bin Laden was congratulated by other members of the Islamic Army.”
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5454606/site/newsweek/
Jesus and Jihad
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: July 17, 2004
If the latest in the "Left Behind" series of evangelical thrillers is to be believed, Jesus will return to Earth, gather non-Christians to his left and toss them into everlasting fire:
"Jesus merely raised one hand a few inches and a yawning chasm opened in the earth, stretching far and wide enough to swallow all of them. They tumbled in, howling and screeching, but their wailing was soon quashed and all was silent when the earth closed itself again."
These are the best-selling novels for adults in the United States, and they have sold more than 60 million copies worldwide. The latest is "Glorious Appearing," which has Jesus returning to Earth to wipe all non-Christians from the planet. It's disconcerting to find ethnic cleansing celebrated as the height of piety.
If a Muslim were to write an Islamic version of "Glorious Appearing" and publish it in Saudi Arabia, jubilantly describing a massacre of millions of non-Muslims by God, we would have a fit. We have quite properly linked the fundamentalist religious tracts of Islam with the intolerance they nurture, and it's time to remove the motes from our own eyes.
In "Glorious Appearing," Jesus merely speaks and the bodies of the enemy are ripped open. Christians have to drive carefully to avoid "hitting splayed and filleted bodies of men and women and horses."
"The riders not thrown," the novel continues, "leaped from their horses and tried to control them with the reins, but even as they struggled, their own flesh dissolved, their eyes melted and their tongues disintegrated. . . . Seconds later the same plague afflicted the horses, their flesh and eyes and tongues melting away, leaving grotesque skeletons standing, before they, too, rattled to the pavement."
One might have thought that Jesus would be more of an animal lover.
These scenes also raise an eschatological problem: Could devout fundamentalists really enjoy paradise as their friends, relatives and neighbors were heaved into hell?
As my Times colleague David Kirkpatrick noted in an article, this portrayal of a bloody Second Coming reflects a shift in American portrayals of Jesus, from a gentle Mister Rogers figure to a martial messiah presiding over a sea of blood. Militant Christianity rises to confront Militant Islam.
This matters in the real world, in the same way that fundamentalist Islamic tracts in Saudi Arabia do. Each form of fundamentalism creates a stark moral division between decent, pious types like oneself — and infidels headed for hell.
No, I don't think the readers of "Glorious Appearing" will ram planes into buildings. But we did imprison thousands of Muslims here and abroad after 9/11, and ordinary Americans joined in the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in part because of a lack of empathy for the prisoners. It's harder to feel empathy for such people if we regard them as infidels and expect Jesus to dissolve their tongues and eyes any day now.
I had reservations about writing this column because I don't want to mock anyone's religious beliefs, and millions of Americans think "Glorious Appearing" describes God's will. Yet ultimately I think it's a mistake to treat religion as a taboo, either in this country or in Saudi Arabia.
I often write about religion precisely because faith has a vast impact on society. Since I've praised the work that evangelicals do in the third world (Christian aid groups are being particularly helpful in Sudan, at a time when most of the world has done nothing about the genocide there), I also feel a responsibility to protest intolerance at home.
Should we really give intolerance a pass if it is rooted in religious faith?
Many American Christians once read the Bible to mean that African-Americans were cursed as descendants of Noah's son Ham, and were intended by God to be enslaved. In the 19th century, millions of Americans sincerely accepted this Biblical justification for slavery as God's word — but surely it would have been wrong to defer to such racist nonsense simply because speaking out could have been perceived as denigrating some people's religious faith.
People have the right to believe in a racist God, or a God who throws millions of nonevangelicals into hell. I don't think we should ban books that say that. But we should be embarrassed when our best-selling books gleefully celebrate religious intolerance and violence against infidels.
That's not what America stands for, and I doubt that it's what God stands for.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/17/opinion/17KRIS.html?n=Top%2fOpinion%2fEditorials%20and%20Op%2dEd%2...
Good read, zit, but once again you take a thought and end up in the twilight zone. So, if we have al queda living in florida (and other parts of the U.S.)and by extension they are in iraq....then, by jove, the war in iraq is necessary and therefore justified. Last time I saw a map on TV of countries likely having al queda residing within, it covered a good part of the globe, but, I guess by inference we should invade all these countries too. Your war on many fronts.
Are they still living amongst us? Of course they are. But here is a novel thought: Maybe, just maybe, we would have been and would be better off, if we had taken those hundreds of billions of dollars being spent, tens of thousands of lives being wasted in some forsaken desert and put them to better use making our country, and by extension the world more secure. Maybe, if we had united (remember that campaign slogan??) other countries in a cause they could embrace we would all be better off in the long run.
But, hey, you got your war and sadly we are going it virtually alone...and this is not a drill! However, it does seem to me you have argued here over and over we are now safer for invading iraq.
What, no reply from zithead??? Guess that puts THAT to bed.
Bush's Top Aides Exposed an Undercover CIA Agent To Silence Critics
What's another billion between friends??
the billion we wrote off last year didn't get it done . .
F6, do ya think this half billion is enough to buy us bin Laden???
U.S. writes off nearly half billion dollars in Pakistani debt
THE CONFLICT IN IRAQ
Flaws Cited in Powell's U.N. Speech on Iraq
State Department analysts saw errors in early drafts, prompting revisions, report says.
By Greg Miller, Times Staff Writer
WASHINGTON — Days before Secretary of State Colin L. Powell was to present the case for war with Iraq to the United Nations, State Department analysts found dozens of factual problems in drafts of his speech, according to new documents contained in the Senate report on intelligence failures released last week.
Two memos included with the Senate report listed objections that State Department experts lodged as they reviewed successive drafts of the Powell speech. Although many of the claims considered inflated or unsupported were removed through painstaking debate by Powell and intelligence officials, the speech he ultimately presented contained material that was in dispute among State Department experts.
Powell's Feb. 5, 2003, speech to the U.N. Security Council was crafted by the CIA at the behest of the White House. Intended to be the Bush administration's most compelling case by one of its most credible spokesmen that a confrontation with Saddam Hussein was necessary, the speech has become a central moment in the lead-up to war.
The speech also has become a point of reference in the failure of U.S. intelligence. Although Powell has said he struggled to ensure that all of his arguments were sound and backed by intelligence from several sources, it nonetheless became a key example of how the administration advanced false claims to justify war.
Powell has expressed disappointment that, after working to remove dubious claims, the intelligence backing the remaining points of his U.N. speech has turned out to be flawed.
"It turned out that the sourcing was inaccurate and wrong, and in some cases deliberately misleading, and for that I am disappointed and I regret it," Powell said in May. A State Department spokesman said late Wednesday, however, that the United States made the right decision "to go into Iraq, and the world today is safer because we did."
Offering the first detailed look at claims that were stripped from the case for war advanced by Powell, a Jan. 31, 2003, memo cataloged 38 claims to which State Department analysts objected. In response, 28 were either removed from the draft or altered, according to the Senate report, which was released Friday and included scathing criticism of the CIA and other U.S. intelligence services.
The analysts, describing many of the claims as "weak" and assigning grades to arguments on a 5-star scale, warned Powell against making an array of allegations they deemed implausible. They also warned against including Iraqi communications intercepts they deemed ambiguous and against speculating that terrorists might "come through Baghdad and pick-up biological weapons" as if they were stocked on store shelves.
The documents underscore the extent to which administration and intelligence officials were culling a vast collection of thinly sourced claims as they sought to assemble the case for war. But the origin and full scope of some errors remain unclear because Senate investigators were denied access to a number of relevant documents, according to aides involved in the probe.
The CIA rejected requests for initial versions of what became the Powell presentation on the grounds that they were internal working documents and not finished products. And the Republican-controlled committee did not seek access to a 40-plus-page document that was prepared by Vice President Dick Cheney's office and submitted to State Department speechwriters detailing the case the administration wanted Powell to make.
According to the Senate report, the idea for the speech originated in December 2002, when the National Security Council instructed the CIA to prepare a public response to Iraq's widely criticized 12,000-page declaration claiming that it had no banned weapons. It wasn't until late January 2003 that intelligence officials learned their work would form the basis for a speech Powell would give to the United Nations.
Powell and several of his aides then spent several days at CIA headquarters working on drafts of the speech, in what participants have described as sessions marked by heated arguments over what to include.
When Powell appeared before the U.N., he made a series of sweeping assertions that have crumbled under postwar scrutiny — including claims that Iraq had chemical weapons stockpiles, was pursuing nuclear weapons and that "there can be no doubt that Saddam Hussein has biological weapons and the capability to rapidly produce more, many more."
But the documents in the Senate report show that earlier drafts of the speech contained dozens of additional, disputed claims; they provide the most detailed glimpse to date into the last-minute scramble to strike those claims from the text.
Several of the dubious statements in the early drafts had to do with alleged Iraqi efforts to thwart weapons inspections that had been restarted by the U.N.
One allegation was that Iraq was trying to keep incriminating weapons files from falling into the hands of inspectors by having operatives carry the sensitive documents around in cars. The State Department reviewers called the claim "highly questionable" and warned that it would invite scorn from critics and U.N. inspection officials.
Another claim was that Iraq was having members of its intelligence services pose as weapons scientists to dupe U.N. inspectors. But the State Department noted that such a ruse was "not credible" because of the level of sophistication it would require.
"Interviews typically involve such topics as nuclear physics, microbiology, rocket science and the like," the State Department reviewers wrote, indicating that even a well-rehearsed intelligence operative would be hard-pressed to pull off such a charade.
In their critique, State Department analysts repeatedly warned that Powell was being put in the position of drawing the most sinister conclusions from satellite images, communications intercepts and human intelligence reports that had alternative, less-incriminating explanations.
In one section that remained in the speech, Powell showed aerial images of a supposed decontamination vehicle circling a suspected chemical weapons site.
"We caution," State Department analysts wrote, "that Iraq has given … what may be a plausible account for this activity — that this was an exercise involving the movement of conventional explosives."
The presence of a water truck "is common in such an event," they concluded.
The experts labeled as "weak" a claim that a photograph of an Iraqi with "marks on his arm" was evidence that Baghdad was conducting biological experiments on humans. The language was struck from the speech, although Powell told the Security Council that Iraq had been conducting such experiments since the 1980s.
State Department analysts also made it clear that they disagreed with CIA and other analysts on the allegation that aluminum tubes imported by Iraq were for use in a nuclear weapons program. "We will work with our [intelligence community] colleagues to fix some of the more egregious errors in the tubes discussion," the memo said.
In the speech, Powell acknowledged disagreement among analysts on the tubes, but included the claim. The Senate report concluded last week that the tubes were for conventional rockets.
In a section on nuclear weapons, the analysts argued against using a communications intercept they described as "taken out of context" and "highly misleading." There is no more information on what was in the intercept, but Powell in his speech referred to intercepted communications that he said showed that "Iraq front companies sought to buy machines that can be used to balance gas centrifuge rotors."
Aside from the two memos, the Senate report refers to other language that was deleted from drafts of Powell's speech, although it is not clear who urged the items to be struck.
In one case, Powell was to say that the aluminum tubes were so unsuitable for use in conventional rockets that if he were to roll one on a table, "the mere pressure of my hand would deform it." Department of Energy engineers said that statement was incorrect.
For all their skepticism, State Department analysts did not challenge some of the fundamental allegations in the Powell speech that have since been proved unfounded. Chief among them is the claim that Iraq had mobile biological weapons laboratories, an accusation based largely on information from an Iraqi defector code-named "Curveball."
What the State Department didn't know at the time was that a CIA representative who had met with Curveball found him to have a drinking problem and to be highly unreliable. The CIA representative's red flags were not relayed to Powell until recently, a State Department official said, when then-CIA Director George J. Tenet contacted Powell to tell him that problems with Curveball would be detailed in the Senate report.
(Note:my bolds for you, zit)
http://www.latimes.com/news/yahoo/la-na-powell15jul15,1,6485808.story
Bush's Not-So-Big Tent
By BOB HERBERT
Published: July 16, 2004
Just as George W. Bush is on track to be the first president since Herbert Hoover to preside over a net loss of jobs, he is now the first president since Hoover to fail to meet with the N.A.A.C.P. during his entire term in office.
Mr. Bush and the leadership of the nation's oldest and largest civil rights organization get along about as well as the Hatfields and the McCoys. The president was invited to the group's convention in Philadelphia this week, but he declined.
That Mr. Bush thumbed his nose at N.A.A.C.P. officials is not the significant part of this story. The Julian Bonds and Kweisi Mfumes of the world can take care of themselves at least as well as Mr. Bush in the legalized gang fight called politics.
What is troubling is Mr. Bush's relationship with black Americans in general. He's very good at using blacks as political props. And the props are too often part of an exceedingly cynical production.
Four years ago, on the first night of the Republican convention, a parade of blacks was hauled before the television cameras (and the nearly all-white audience in the convention hall) to sing, to dance, to preach and to praise a party that has been relentlessly hostile to the interests of blacks for half a century.
I wrote at the time that "you couldn't tell whether you were at the Republican National Convention or the Motown Review."
That exercise in modern-day minstrelsy was supposed to show that Mr. Bush was a new kind of Republican, a big-tent guy who would welcome a more diverse crowd into the G.O.P. That was fiction. It wasn't long before black voters would find themselves mugged in Florida, and soon after that Mr. Bush was steering the presidency into a hard-right turn.
Among the most important props of that 2000 campaign were black children. Mr. Bush could be seen hugging them at endless photo-ops. He said a Bush administration would do great things for them. He promised to transform public education in America. He hijacked the trademarked slogan of the Children's Defense Fund, "Leave No Child Behind," and refashioned it for his own purposes. He pasted the new version, "No Child Left Behind," onto one of the signature initiatives of his presidency, a supposedly historic education reform act.
The only problem is that, to date, the act has been underfunded by $26 billion. A lot of those kids the president hugged have been left behind.
And why not? They can't do much for him. Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" captured a telling presidential witticism. Mr. Bush, appearing before a well-heeled gathering in New York, says: "This is an impressive crowd: the haves, and the have-mores. Some people call you the elite. I call you my base."
It wasn't really his base. But the comment spoke volumes.
Mr. Bush said he was a different kind of Republican, but what black voters see are tax cuts for the very wealthy and underfunded public schools. What they see is an economy that sizzles for the haves and the have-mores, but a harrowing employment crisis for struggling blacks, especially black men. (When the Community Service Society looked at the proportion of the working-age population with jobs in New York City it found that nearly half of all black men between the ages of 16 and 64 were not working last year. That's a Depression-era statistic.)
In Florida, where the president's brother is governor, and Texas, where the president once was the governor, state officials have been pulling the plug on health coverage for low-income children. The president could use his considerable clout to put a stop to that sort of thing, but he hasn't.
And now we know that Florida was gearing up for a reprise of the election shenanigans of 2000. It took a court order to get the state to release a list of 48,000 suspected felons that was to be used to purge people from the voting rolls. It turned out that the list contained thousands of names of black people, who tend to vote Democratic, and hardly any names of Hispanics, who in Florida tend to vote Republican.
Once their "mistake" was caught, the officials scrapped the list.
Mr. Bush plans to address the Urban League convention in Detroit next week. That would be an excellent time for him to explain to an understandably skeptical audience why he campaigned one way — as a big-tent compassionate conservative — and governed another.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/16/opinion/16HERB.html?n=Top%2fOpinion%2fEditorials%20and%20Op%2dEd%2...
For a person of higher education, you need to improve your language skills.
If because I chose a path of higher education and attempt to apply it by continually challenging myself (unlike many of the illiterates here).
I say guilty as charged.
It's sad that you, who are so fucked by Bush and his cronies, you whose life is so hopeless, that you are the biggest supporter of that little bitch and his puppetmasters. There's nothing more pathetic than a willing slave, and that's what your are :>.
Ok, zit, so the great, unbiased Robert Novak (trying to salvage his own slimy reputation) writes a piece and you promptly bold the parts you consider of such importance, so lets look at them.
Wilson contradictions leave Democrat senators speechless
Great headline!!!
They neither agreed to a conclusion that former diplomat Joseph Wilson was suggested for a mission to Niger by his CIA employee wife nor defended his statements to the contrary.
I couldn't care less who recommended Wilson and who selected Wilson for the job. As usual, no one in authority will take responsibility and if 'they' were so worried about his loyalty 'they' should have procured someone with the 'right' qualities.
Now, for committee Democrats, it is as though the Niger question and Joe Wilson have vanished from the Earth.
Oh really. Being we got 140,000 troops in Iraq over Saddams supposed overtures to procure uranium, I think not.
The unanimously approved report said, 'interviews and documents provided to the Committee indicate that his wife, a CPD (CIA counterproliferation division) employee, suggested his name for the trip.' That's what I reported, and what Wilson flatly denied and still does.
What slimeball Novak reported was the outing of a CIA agent. Period. If Plame suggested her husband for the job and anyone had reservations 'they' should have found someone else.
That report 'did not refute the possibility that Iraq had approached Niger to purchase uranium.'
In fact, your earlier post
http://www.investorshub.com/boards/read_msg.asp?message_id=3565308
stated:
The report Friday said that whether Iraq sought to buy lightly enriched "yellowcake" uranium from Niger is one of the few bits of prewar intelligence that remains an open question.
Remains an open question. Well, shoot, guess that puts those 16 words to bed and is all the reason we needed to bring democracy to Iraq while we stomp on ours.
As Novak wrote and you bolded:
the intelligence community agreed that 'Iraq was attempting to procure uranium from Africa.'
So, lemme see here. Saddam sends out some feelers (that sounds very plausible) about procuring uranium (as did supposedly a bunch of other countries you bolded and underlined) and bingo, he is an immediate threat to the U.S. and we gotta invade right now. Boy, sure glad Bush is at the helm to keep us safe.
'Time and again, Joe Wilson told anyone who would listen that the president had lied to the American people, that the vice president had lied, and that he had 'debunked' the claim that Iraq was seeking uranium from Africa. . . . [N]ot only did he NOT 'debunk' the claim, he actually gave some intelligence analysts even more reason to believe that it may be true.'
So he gave intelligence analysts even more reason to believe that it may be true. Oh please, Novak reaches any further he'll fall in the pool. Ya'll keep grasping at straws and parsing what is is, for it is obvious ya'll can't see the forest for the trees.
By the way, how is winning the peace coming or did you not get this far??? Glad to see you post and post and post your right wing bias while ignoring questions posed to you. It's so.....you.
Zithead, since you seem confused, let me break it down for you.
gee, wonder why clinton is telling kerry this?.........
To use Clinton's own words, Mr Kerry could win by "quite a nice margin". Capeche??
As for gwb being undercut, he has no one to blame but himself. You call Clinton an idiot, but a person who discards or disdains the advice of a father who just happened to be a president that faced many of the same issues against the same potential foe...can only be called an idiot.
And to assert Clinton put America at risk 'while doing absolutely nothing about terrorism' while this president has us bogged down in a foreign country fighting a war (yes, that is right, zithead, no matter that YOU have declared the war won, THEY say the war is far from over) that is totally unrelated to Al Queda. The mere fact of doing something does not translate to making it right.
Thanks for the feel good story, zithead. Sadly, under this administration we have far too few such stories but since you recently mentioned the village idiot, here is a feel good story about a truly intelligent person who achieved the American dream without Daddy's help.
I'm sure you look forward to W's book.....lol, or is that the one he was reading on 9/11??
Hey, I like the book
By Molly Ivins
Creators Syndicate
I like Bill Clinton's book. I feel as though I should immediately apologize for saying that. I mean, it's gotten a bunch of bad reviews -- all sorts of superior people have dissed it and pointed out that he shouldn't have said this or he should have said that.
Let me get my claim to intellectual superiority in here right away: I was prepared to dislike the book. I was prepared to find it self-serving, inadequate, insufficiently groveling and all that other good stuff.
Actually, I think it's well-written, interesting and informative. I'd recommend it to almost anyone who's interested in politics, including young people with any inclination toward public service.
I started reading it just to make sure Clinton is who I always thought he was. Yep, same guy. Superb politician with a zipper problem. Interesting case. But even I learned quite a bit along the way.
There's two reasons I'm an easy target for this book.
One is that I love political stories, and Clinton, who is a pol-to-the-bone, does, too. The Arkansas stuff alone is worth the price of admission. Doesn't matter who you are or what your politics are, if you are interested in how it works and what it takes, you cannot afford to miss the first part of this book.
Furthermore, I don't care who you are, you have to just stand back and admire the sheer American dream arc of this hopelessly hillbilly kid.
Now that I think about it, Clinton might resent that -- and he might be right. He became governor and then president in the most meritocratic way: He was smart enough.
No money, no privilege, no entitlements, no big-deal family, no ticket into Yale. His description of his intellectual development is fascinating and should be well noted by those who have debated the merits of the Japanese and the American systems.
The most pleasant thing about Clinton's recounting of all this is that he's just as amazed as you are. "Gee," he more or less says as he wanders along, "lookit this."
Perhaps the nicest thing about him as a human being is that he never tried to pretend he was anything other than who he was. I went to school in the East from the boonies myself and spent a lot of time trying to fake stuff, like knowing who Edith Piaf was and how to eat artichokes.
Probably my favorite anecdote in the book may look self-serving, but I think it's one that just stuck with him.
As a penniless college student, he went to New York and splurged at a steakhouse for $1.99 but actually rose and left the precious steak before he had even finished because he was so upset by the conversation at the next table. Just a teen-age kid complaining to his mom because she thought she had bought him what he wanted, a turntable, but what she got was not "the nice kind" -- it was "the cheap kind."
Now if there's one thing everyone will have to admit about Clinton, it's that he adored his mom (shrinks, hold forth). And it was clear to him this kid's mom had worked her tail off to buy the kid "the cheap kind," and Clinton was so upset by the ingratitude that he can still recall the conversation word for word 40 years later.
The second reason I'm a sucker for this book is that I'm interested in public policy -- unlike, for example, the current president. I don't consider myself a wonk, but I'm genuinely interested in how public policy shapes people's lives. Fascinating field.
As a procrastinating writer myself (my spices are in alphabetical order), I can understand why Clinton was late on deadline. But the book almost cries for a rewrite, a re-edit and a polish -- the travel diary should have been broken down into themes and principles. Might have produced a genuine classic if the publisher had been more patient.
Both praise and blame on a final point. Clinton's manners are so much better than those of everyone who has ever trashed him that it's a monument to his momma. In fact, this book is written with such a forgiving spirit that it's a shame.
I would have loved to have heard Clinton's unbridled opinion of the impeachment-Republicans and their hypocrisy.
With one notable exception, he is too, too forgiving. He does not like Ken Starr. He will not like Ken Starr. He will tell you exactly why.
Zithead, I'm quite sure Frank Duntz is one of your hero's.
It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that empathing
By Molly Ivins
Creators Syndicate
Recently on PBS's NOW With Bill Moyers, there was a long interview with Frank Luntz, the Republican pollster and message-meister. Luntz recently advised Republicans to explain "the policy of pre-emption and the war in Iraq" by recommending that "no speech about … Iraq should begin without a reference to 9-11."
This would be despite the fact that the 9-11 Commission concluded that Iraq has no connection to 9-11. Now you know why the administration continues to make this nonexistent connection.
Luntz described his methods with appealing pride. His job is to "set the context" and "frame the debate," which he learns how to do through focus groups, polls and dial sessions. But he kept drawing the line at the word manipulation.
No, no, he doesn't manipulate people, he insisted -- he merely gives them a context for the message; he merely discovers what it is they want to hear and how best to say it to them.
I'm listening to all this because this is what the shrewdies in Washington pay attention to -- you can't hardly be a political writer anymore without sources on linguistics, semiotics, message control and all this good business. It dates you something awful if you do old-fashioned stuff, like call politicos to find out how it's going.
Luntz has discovered that the 4 percent of Americans who still have not made up their minds about this election tend to be working women, younger, new mothers and fairly low-wage earners.
I was pleased to hear Luntz explain how he'd uncovered the most interesting thing about these women. By dint of clever professional questioning, Luntz had come to notice that what the women seem to feel they need more than anything else is … time.
I was staggered, since I and every other female journalist I know have been saying this for only the past 20 or 30 years.
Yes, Luntz informed us, working women are feeling incredibly pressured, between home, job, aging parents, demanding kids, etc. Their lives are just a-jangle with demands and not enough time to fill them. Now here, explains Luntz, is where he comes in.
"You have to empathize," he said. "The very first thing you have to do -- it's not about issues; it's about empathy. They have to know that you care, that you understand them, that you understand the frustrations."
Say a candidate of his -- say, George W. Bush -- is at a town hall meeting. "'Now I want to talk to the ladies in the room' … 'the women in the room' is how I would put it," Luntz says.
"You say: 'Well, I'm gonna throw this out. I want you to tell me if I'm right or not. Ladies here, I'd say that your lack of free time is one of the greatest challenges.' And they'll all sit there, and they'll raise their hands, and they'll all nod yes. At that moment, you have bonded with those women."
Which is all well and good, except then I'm trying to envision what Bush says to them next.
The National Women's Law Center released a study in April, "Slip Sliding Away," on the erosion of women's rights. It found that under Bush:
• The Labor Department has refused to use tools at its disposal to identify violations of equal pay laws.
• Labor repealed regulations that allowed paid family leave to be made available through state unemployment funds. Now it's unpaid leave only.
• Labor has proposed new regulations that deprive millions of workers of the right to overtime pay -- and even gives tips to employers on how to avoid paying overtime when the law still requires it.
• The Department of Justice has weakened the enforcement of laws against job discrimination and abandoned pending sex discrimination cases.
Among the Bush budget cuts affecting the lives of millions of women are cuts in Head Start and other early childhood education programs, after-school programs, K-12 education, housing subsidies, child care, career education, services for victims of domestic violence, the nutrition program for women, infants and children (WIC) and Pell grants to help pay for college.
All in all, it's kind of hard to see how Bush could convince "the ladies" that he has helped take stress out of their lives.
Unless, of course, the lady is married to a guy who makes $1 million a year -- then she'd have $92,000 extra a year to spend from the Bush tax cuts.
Here's my problem. This is the record -- this is what's being done to women's lives. But it's so passé, you see, to write about it. No linguistics, no empathy, no putting it in context.
Just the record. No one does that kind of journalism anymore. How embarrassing.
Break out the twins, zithead!!!
gwb's daughter, barbara, is a cutie too!..........if the campaign cards are played right, she alone could get gwb a million votes
Like I said, Bush has got nothing else to run on!!!!!
Send In the Gowns
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: July 15, 2004
The president and the first lady said the twins weren't public figures, yet here are their figures in public.
The strapless sisters are helping a campaign that's increasingly strapped. Barbara and Jenna, glamming like the Hilton sisters, are in gowns in Vogue, and in vogue on the trail, giving Dad some much needed cover by uncovering their shoulders.
With even Republicans like Pat Roberts, the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, questioning whether the president would have launched a war against Iraq if he'd known how weak his case was, Mr. Bush needs all the distractions he can get.
There was faint support yesterday for Mr. Bush's feint on gay marriage. W. thought he had a bit in the maverick's mouth, but John McCain bit back, bolting over to the Democratic side to help embarrass the president by defeating the constitutional amendment that dare not speak its name. Senator McCain scorned the amendment banning gay marriage as "antithetical in every way to the core philosophy of Republicans." (Well, some Republicans.)
When the British report came out yesterday declaring that Saddam Hussein had no significant W.M.D., or perhaps no W.M.D., Tony Blair accepted "full personal responsibility" for "the way the issue was presented and, therefore, for any errors made."
Mr. Bush, by contrast, took full personal irresponsibility. Still pressing the preposterous case that he has made America safer, even though we are inundated with threats from Al Qaeda, and that he is winning the war against terror, even though there are more terrorist attacks, the president had to go farther afield to find a sufficiently enthusiastic audience.
Instead of fleeing to Canada to dodge a war, W. had to flee practically to Canada to defend a war. In the middle of July, the president was campaigning in the middle of nowhere, in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan — the first president to bother to trek up to Nick Adams country since William Howard Taft.
Mr. Bush must have left the buck in deer country because the White House keeps passing the blame to the same C.I.A. that Dick Cheney and his Pentagon henchmen leaned on to supply the rationale they needed for the war they were determined to launch.
They're trying to turn George Tenet from lapdog to scapegoat, while letting Dick Cheney, the 800-pound gorilla who tried to turn the little C.I.A. analysts into parrots, continue his rumble in the jungle.
If this sounds like "Animal Farm," it is. What is more Orwellian than President Bush's rhetorical fallacies?
Campaigning at the nuclear lab in Oak Ridge, Tenn. — he finally found nuclear-related capability — Mr. Bush defended the Iraq war: "So I had a choice to make: either take the word of a madman or defend America." He also said of the terrorists, "We will confront them overseas so we do not have to confront them here at home."
That's nonsense. Just because more terrorists are attacking Americans abroad doesn't mean terrorists aren't poised to also attack us at home. And in fact, Bush officials keep warning us that terrorists are planning "something big" here, as the acting C.I.A. director, John McLaughlin, said yesterday in a radio interview.
It's just like the president's other false dichotomies: You're either with us, or you're with the terrorists. If we don't stop gays from marrying, it will destroy the institution of marriage.
His illogic's flawless and may be catching. A Washington Post poll published yesterday found that 55 percent of Americans like the way Mr. Bush is handling terrorism, up five points in three weeks. So even though the poll showed that a record high number of Americans say Mr. Bush's war was a mistake, more Americans trust Mr. Bush to make the U.S. more secure.
Many voters think that the president and vice president are unjustifiably putting lives at risk by going to war with a false premise and creating more terrorists. But many voters are apparently dithering because they are too wary of the alternative to boot out Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney.
The nub of this election is that John Kerry has so far failed to convince voters that he'll do what Mr. Bush promised to do and hasn't: go after Osama and Al Qaeda and destroy them. Unless Mr. Kerry can make that sale, Americans face not a false dilemma, but a real one. my bold
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/15/opinion/15DOWD.html?n=Top%2fOpinion%2fEditorials%20and%20Op%2dEd%2...
Not true, zithead. What you do when you are caught in a whopper and are knee deep in it, is you tell them to go f*** themselves. Hmmm, now I feel better.
any chance you will ever be current?........it's obvious ol' joe is feeling the heat, especially when it looks like he's really been caught in a whopper, and of course that's what you do when you're knee deep in it, you start talking about horse turds
hmmm...just got on Ihub, see I am about 80 posts behind yet no response to my simple question.....wonder why!?
Question to my republican Americans: Why are no conservative/right wing groups demanding a paper trail to electronic voting???
Members of liberal groups rallied in 19 states yesterday to demand that new electronic voting terminals have paper receipts to ensure accurate election recounts in the November presidential race.
The rallies are part of a movement led in part by MoveOn.org, People for the American Way, Democracy for America and other liberal groups that are aligned with the Democratic Party and who are fearful of another close election as in 2000, when Florida's disputed voting results were thrust into the courts to determine a winner.
Question to my republican Americans: Why are no conservative/right wing groups demanding a paper trail to electronic voting???
Members of liberal groups rallied in 19 states yesterday to demand that new electronic voting terminals have paper receipts to ensure accurate election recounts in the November presidential race.
The rallies are part of a movement led in part by MoveOn.org, People for the American Way, Democracy for America and other liberal groups that are aligned with the Democratic Party and who are fearful of another close election as in 2000, when Florida's disputed voting results were thrust into the courts to determine a winner.
ROTFLMAO...while it may be a matter of time until Bush haters realize what an imbecile Kerry is, the time has long since passed that most everyone realizes what an imbecile Bush is. Sadly, I doubt the families of tens of thousands of our finest find any humor in Bush/Kerry, the best you have to offer.
Village idiot??? Have you taken a good, unbiased look (try to get that big zit out of the way) at our president?? As ROTFLMAO said, I find it funny Bush/Cheney is the best you have to offer, but please, don't dump Cheney for who would be president??
looks like it takes a village idiot to decide what a village is
You know what zithead, I would rather have someone in the White House with no skills and couldn't get a single thing done than this bumbling fool making all the wrong decisions.
But your right, put the twins out front and center to pick up an extra million votes 'cause Dad certainly can't run on his merits. Great candidate, huh zit and ROTFLMAO???
And I love this beauty
the way kerry spends money,
Now that is priceless, Republicans, the conservative party of fiscal responsibilty. Yeah, right. How does that hook, line and sinker taste, zithead??
And hey, that stool comeback was oh-so funny, but once again you avoid the questions posed. Spree has got you nailed for the chickenhawk dodger you are.
Well, zithead, I never, ever thought I would say this, but this was, by far, your best post ever. For once, the coherent thoughts you expressed showed a depth and understanding of issues I did not think you possessed.
Keep up the good work.
http://www.investorshub.com/boards/read_msg.asp?message_id=3549803
zithead, I think you have been squeezing them a little too hard
how convenient, and of course she'll have absolutely no influence in a kerry administration...lol!..........
And Nancy visited with an astrologer but so what?? My complaints with Reagan have to do with him, not his wife. Just as you parade Bush's twins out ready for Rove time, the fact they were underage drunks doesn't change my opinion of him one way or the other.
don't have the time repeat myself
What!!! You gotta be kiddin' everyone here...lol. Zit, that is all you do.
you can preach that edwards line all you want, but it will become a front and center issue for americans to judge this election......and if you think edwards will escape the scrutiny of his ambulance chasing background,
Good. As your chickenhawk hero would say, Bring it on
how convenient, and of course he has absolutely no input into the direction of kerry and the dems............if george soros was a conservative, the screams from the liberal biased media would be deafening as to how his special interest, soft money donations were ruining our democracy, while completely violating the intent of campaign finance reform
But of course DeLay's antics to fund and redraw districts is just fine with you. I think the word you used was hypocrite.
Sounds like a great ad!!!! Call Karl now!!!
Sounds like another front is about to open. Has your son turned 17 yet??
so iran, the 5th largest oil producer, who tries to tell the world about their (cough! hack!) legitimate non-hostile development of nuclear power, now tells us this?
By the way, I haven't heard you spout off much lately regarding the war we won and the winning of the peace. Which leg on the stool was that again???
zithead, I can understand you laughing so hard as you are the self-proclaimed funniest guy in these parts, though it is possible you could be funny if not for being so sad, biased and full of hatred. You are a classic example of casting stones in a glass house.
Correct me if I am wrong but last time I checked Teresa Kerry was not running for office.
Regarding an expose on how Edwards earned his money, I know it galls you to no end that someone can make a ton of money defending average Americans against the greed of large corporations. But you go on pickin' your zits lookin' for something, anything, to discredit him, but hey, 'fair and balanced' Faux "News" will do that for you.
Last time I checked, Soros wasn't running for office so I couldn't couldn't give a zit if he 'spends whatever it takes in his hatred of gwb'.
And as usual, you shoot the messenger all the while ignoring the message regarding one of your hero's, the bug varmit Mr. DeLay. Keep up the lame work.
A Push for Bush
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: July 10, 2004
Since President Bush hasn't called me to ask how he can get re-elected, I'm afraid this will be gratuitous advice. But what the heck. . . .
Now that John Kerry has found a running mate, Mr. President, you need to lose one. Dick Cheney has to fake chest pains.
The first time he begs to be removed from the ticket, you should show your loyalty and refuse. Only after he has sorrowfully insisted — absolutely insisted! — on retiring should you reluctantly consent. (This should happen well before the Republican convention so it doesn't look too desperate — or staged.)
Four years ago, Mr. Cheney brought national security credentials and gravitas to your ticket. But this November, he'll remind swing voters of the Iraq mess, intelligence-fixing and the leak of the name of the glamour spy, Valerie Plame. Not to mention Halliburton's overcharging.
Mr. President, many voters find you likable and a better bet on national security than Mr. Kerry — as they say, Mr. Kerry looks French — but they wake up at night wondering whether you're actually a hard-line, mistake-prone ideologue. And that's the problem with Mr. Cheney: the first thought swing voters have when they see the vice president is "hard-line, mistake-prone ideologue."
So you need a running mate who revives the 2000 image of you as a compassionate conservative. That's Colin Powell, if he — and Alma — would do it.
Mr. Powell reassures swing voters because he's not an ideologue, and he would improve your standing among black voters. In 2000 you won only 8 percent of the black vote, but you could raise that to 25 percent or more with Powell.
If Powell won't do it, there's Rudy Giuliani. He's strong on national security and crime, but soft on abortion, which is what you need with swing voters. Then there's John McCain; that choice would allow you to win at least the first battle with Mr. Kerry.
As for issues, Mr. President, you need some. The main election themes now are Iraq and the economy, neither of which is shaping up in your favor. You need a good wedge issue, one that can be used to paint John Kerry as a Massachusetts liberal. The trick is to turn the election focus so it's about values, not issues.
The Confederate flag issue worked wonders in Southern battleground states in the past and could perhaps be revived. Gay marriage is a possibility nationally, although you'll have to approach it carefully. Most voters are against gay marriage, but they're also against anti-gay bigotry.
The best potential wedge is the Ten Commandments, and if you boldly seize this issue, you can win in November. You could encourage local governments to put up versions of the Ten Commandments in offices in the South and Midwest, and then paint Mr. Kerry as anti-God if he demurs.
Frankly, if your dad could link Michael Dukakis to Willie Horton in television ads, imagine how much more effective it would be to run TV spots linking John Kerry and Satan!
Oh, and there's an October surprise you can spring that will almost guarantee a victory. After you've taken Mr. Powell as your running mate and he's won plaudits around the country, announce a week before the election that you're taking time off from the campaign on doctor's orders because your own heart has been under strain. That way, you'll get an extra week's vacation on your ranch — and, if voters believe it, another term in office.
(For the president's eyes only: Mr. President, you're probably wondering why you should take advice from a columnist who criticizes many of your policies. You may even imagine that I'm an ardent Kerry supporter. But look at it this way: I want to be read, and if Mr. Kerry wins, he'll adopt boring, reasonable positions, and I'll be stuck with nuanced analyses that even my mother won't read. In contrast, you may not always be great for this country, but you're terrific for sputtering pundits.)
(For my regular readers only: Don't feel betrayed by this column. I'm not actually being as helpful to the president as you may think. Mr. Bush has shown that he pays close attention to all my advice because he consistently does precisely the opposite. So Mr. Cheney is now guaranteed a spot on the ticket.)
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/10/opinion/10KRIS.html?n=Top%2fOpinion%2fEditorials%20and%20Op%2dEd%2...
The Real Enemy Staring Us in the Face
By BOB HERBERT
Published: July 12, 2004
Justin Hunt, a young man from Wildomar, Calif., about 75 miles east of Los Angeles, was determined to join the Marines. When recruiters pointed out that he was grossly overweight, he spent a year losing more than 150 pounds. Then he signed up and was promptly sent to Iraq, where he was killed last Tuesday in an explosion. He was 22.
Three American soldiers, not yet publicly identified, were killed yesterday in two separate attacks on military patrols north of Baghdad. On Saturday four marines were killed in a vehicle accident near Falluja. And five more American soldiers were killed Thursday in a mortar attack on a base in the Sunni-dominated city of Samarra.
For what?
Even as these brave troops were dying in the cruel and bloody environs of Iraq, the Senate Intelligence Committee in Washington was unfurling its damning unanimous report about the incredibly incompetent intelligence that the Bush administration used to justify this awful war.
The bipartisan committee, headed by Republican Senator Pat Roberts, declared that the key intelligence assessments trumpeted by President Bush as the main reasons for invading Iraq were unfounded.
Nearly 900 G.I.'s and more than 10,000 Iraqi civilians have already perished, and there is no end to the war in sight. The situation is both sorrowful and disorienting. The colossal intelligence failures and the willful madness of the administration, which presented war as the first and only policy option, can leave you with the terrible feeling that you're standing at the graveside of common sense and reasonable behavior.
A government with even a nodding acquaintance with competence and good sense would have launched an all-out war against Al Qaeda, not Iraq, in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11. After all, it was Al Qaeda, not Iraq, that carried out the sneak attack on American soil that destroyed the World Trade Center and part of the Pentagon and killed 3,000 people. You might think that would have been enough to provoke an all-out response from the U.S. Instead we saved our best shot for the demented and already checkmated dictator of Iraq, Saddam Hussein.
Bin Laden and Al Qaeda must have gotten a good laugh out of that. Now they're planning to come at us again. On Thursday, the same day Iraqi insurgents killed the five G.I.'s in Samarra, the Bush administration disclosed that bin Laden and his lieutenants, believed to be operating from hideouts along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, were directing an effort by Al Qaeda to unleash an encore attack against the United States.
According to Tom Ridge, the homeland security secretary, the latest effort may well be timed to disrupt the fall elections.
If that happens, I wonder if we'll finally get serious about the war we should be fighting against bin Laden and Al Qaeda. Maybe not. Based on the impenetrable logic of the president and his advisers, a new strike by Al Qaeda might lead us to start a war with, say, Iran, or Syria.
If we know that bin Laden and his top leadership are somewhere along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, and that they're plotting an attack against the United States, why are we not zeroing in on them with overwhelming force? Why is there not a sense of emergency in the land, with the entire country pulling together to stop another Sept. 11 from occurring?
Why are we not more serious about this?
I don't know what the administration was thinking when it invaded Iraq even as the direct threat from bin Laden and Al Qaeda continued to stare us in the face. That threat has only intensified. The war in Iraq consumed personnel and resources badly needed in the campaign against bin Laden and his allies. And it has fanned the hatred of the U.S. among Muslims around the world. Instead of destroying Al Qaeda, we have played right into its hands and contributed immeasurably to its support.
Most current intelligence analysts agree with Secretary Ridge that Al Qaeda will try before long to strike the U.S. mainland once again.
We've trained most of our guns on the wrong foe. The real enemy is sneaking up behind us. Again. The price to be paid for not recognizing this could be devastating.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/12/opinion/12HERB.html?n=Top%2fOpinion%2fEditorials%20and%20Op%2dEd%2...
Machine at Work
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: July 13, 2004
From a business point of view, Enron is a smoking ruin. But there's important evidence in the rubble.
If Enron hadn't collapsed, we might still have only circumstantial evidence that energy companies artificially drove up prices during California's electricity crisis. Because of that collapse, we have direct evidence in the form of the now-infamous Enron tapes — although the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the Justice Department tried to prevent their release.
Now, e-mail and other Enron documents are revealing why Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, is one of the most powerful men in America.
A little background: at the Republican convention, most featured speakers will be social moderates like Rudy Giuliani and Arnold Schwarzenegger. A moderate facade is necessary to win elections in a generally tolerant nation. But real power in the party rests with hard-line social conservatives like Mr. DeLay, who, in the debate over gun control after the Columbine shootings, insisted that juvenile violence is the result of day care, birth control and the teaching of evolution.
Here's the puzzle: if Mr. DeLay's brand of conservatism is so unpopular that it must be kept in the closet during the convention, how can people like him really run the party?
In Mr. DeLay's case, a large part of the answer is his control over corporate cash. As far back as 1996, one analyst described Mr. DeLay as the "chief enforcer of company contributions to Republicans." Some of that cash has flowed through Americans for a Republican Majority, called Armpac, a political action committee Mr. DeLay founded in 1994. By dispensing that money to other legislators, he gains their allegiance; this, in turn, allows him to deliver favors to his corporate contributors. Four of the five Republicans on the House ethics committee, where a complaint has been filed against Mr. DeLay, are past recipients of Armpac money.
The complaint, filed by Representative Chris Bell of Texas, contends, among other things, that Mr. DeLay laundered illegal corporate contributions for use in Texas elections. And that's where Enron enters the picture.
In May 2001, according to yesterday's Washington Post, Enron lobbyists in Washington informed Ken Lay via e-mail that Mr. DeLay was seeking $100,000 in additional donations to his political action committee, with the understanding that it would be partly spent on "the redistricting effort in Texas." The Post says it has "at least a dozen" documents showing that Mr. DeLay and his associates directed money from corporate donors and lobbyists to an effort to win control of the Texas Legislature so the Republican Party could redraw the state's political districts.
Enron, which helped launch Armpac, was happy to oblige, especially because Mr. DeLay was helping the firm's effort to secure energy deregulation legislation, even as its traders boasted to one another about how they were rigging California's deregulated market and stealing millions each day from "Grandma Millie."
The Texas redistricting, like many of Mr. DeLay's actions, broke all the usual rules of political fair play. But when you believe, as Mr. DeLay does, that God is using you to promote a "biblical worldview" in politics, the usual rules don't apply. And the redistricting worked — it is a major reason why anything short of a Democratic tidal wave in November is likely to leave the House in Republican hands.
There is, however, one problem: a 100-year-old Texas law bars corporate financing of State Legislature campaigns. An inquiry is under way, and Mr. DeLay has hired two criminal defense lawyers. Stay tuned.
But you shouldn't conclude that the system is working. Mr. DeLay's current predicament is an accident. The party machine that he has done so much to create has eliminated most of the checks and balances in our government. Again and again, Republicans in Congress have closed ranks to block or emasculate politically inconvenient investigations. If Enron hadn't collapsed, and if Texas didn't still have a campaign finance law that is a relic of its populist past, Mr. DeLay would be in no danger at all.
The larger picture is this: Mr. DeLay and his fellow hard-liners, whose values are far from the American mainstream, have forged an immensely effective alliance with corporate interests. And they may be just one election away from achieving a long-term lock on power.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/13/opinion/13KRUG.html?n=Top%2fOpinion%2fEditorials%20and%20Op%2dEd%2...
Yeah, easy, the danged liberal biased media has been operating for 40 years. Thank goodness for the 'fair and balanced' Faux News.
Good to have you posting hair, Duke. By the way, I'm gonna guess big hair was something you possessed years ago.
Hairy Duo Scores Well In Overnight Poll
Was that the post of Hillary being VP that has you so self-laudatory?? Yup, you are waaaaaaaaaaaay ahead.
i'm actually ahead of the media when observing the news landscape
Zithead, your ability to obfuscate is fast becoming legendary around these parts yet you have the unique ability of parsing words that even Bill Clinton would have to appreciate...all while completely lost.
You just go on thinkin', and with you I use that word loosely, that the liberal biased media somehow cost 41 the election. But, I guess, it was the liberal biased media's fault that they showed Bush stating "Read my lips, no new taxes". Damn, that blasted liberal biased media. If only Karl Rove had been around then, huh?? I must admit you possess the unique ability to take something rather simple and complicate the dickens out of it, all the while flat wrong. Congratulations, zithead.
By the way, your mantra 'liberal biased media' is soooooo thought provoking and original, I am really impressed with your depth and knowledge. Please keep demonstrating your stimulating and fresh ideas for us all.
Thanks in advance!!