Bush's mistakes

[bishop]

heh.. i have a tendency to mess up my acronyms.. at least i'm not the only one..

http://www.google.com/search?q=fica+...en-US:official

[Zeebadee]

Quote by: dsanthony There are legal ways to oppose the war.

Juat as there are legal ways to run the war. Releasing information about illegal activity can't be a crime if that activity should never have happened in the first place.

Quote by: dsanthony Mainly, run anti-war candidates, then lose as you did in 68 and 2004. Deal with it. You lose. It's called democracy.

You keep trying to make a connection between what you call treason and some vague notion that the purpose of releasing "classified" information is to negate the election. Well, the information is out, and bush is still on office, so what the heck are you rambling on about?? And, BTW, one doesn't have to wait until the next election in order to legally oppose the war or any other action of whatever administration happens to be in office. I am perfectly justified and within my rights in criticizing bush policies without having wait and run an "anti-war" candidate. You said it yourself, "It's called democracy".

Quote by: dsanthony Any response which addresses criticism of the war's leadership is valid. Attempting to sabotage the war effort is treason.

Don't you think that the current AG would prosecute if he had any chance at all that treason (or sabotage) had actually occurred??

[Zinkovich]

Hahaha. Sorry, but this article that just came out on the onion is somewhat relevant(and hilarious):

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/51140

In a decisive 1-0 decision Monday, President Bush voted to grant the president the constitutional power to grant himself additional powers. "As president, I strongly believe that my first duty as president is to support and serve the president," Bush said during a televised address from the East Room of the White House shortly after signing his executive order. "I promise the American people that I will not abuse this new power, unless it becomes necessary to grant myself the power to do so at a later time." The Presidential Empowerment Act, which the president hand-drafted on his own Oval Office stationery and promptly signed into law, provides Bush with full authority to permit himself to authorize increased jurisdiction over the three branches of the federal government, provided that the president considers it in his best interest to do so.

I'm not posting it as an argument of course, but as a joke. You know, a lighthearted island amongst what will likely soon become a sea full of partisan despair.

[Rainbow]

In a decisive 1-0 decision Monday, President Bush voted to grant the president the constitutional power to grant himself additional powers

"decisive 1-0 decision"
" grant himself"
It is really (damn) good :-)))

[Osborn F Enready]

ROFLMAO

ahh yes, the Onion.

[Sonart]

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Quote by: bishop i don't disagree with any of your points, i simply think that your list is way too short and forgiving.

Indeed. It's interesting that dsanthony gets to distinquish between what amounts to constructive criticism and what amounts treason. He then goes about listing things that even conservatives have conceded were errors. How convenient. Since obviously conservative supporters of the war can't possibly be wrong, these qualify as constructive criticism, while he can then declare that any critiques beyond those conceded by Republicans are somehow treasonous.

Quote by: dsanthony Alot of the invective from the left (on this forum and in the real world) states, falsely, that conservatives are blindly following their "fuhrer" and condemn anyone who criticizes his actions. That is of course nonsense.

Sorry, ds, conceding a little in the face of the obvious, in order to salvage the appearance of objectivity, doesn't get Bush off the hook. It's like when Bush finally conceded some errors were made... like saying "Bring it on". In the list of mistakes, Bush's cowboy talk goes to the very bottom of the significance list. I'm reminded of a conversation between Princess Leia and Han Solo in Star Wars

Princess Leia: "Why, you stuck up, half-witted, scruffy-looking nerf-herder."
Han Solo: "Who's scruffy-looking?"

Try adding these to your list, dsanthony...

1. Starting the War in the first place -- From the moment the Bush League first hinted at invading Iraq, even before any discussion of WMD, I knew it would be a mistake. There are things an advanced, modern military can and there are things that history has shown again and again and again that they can't do, and the one biggest thing they can't do is occupy hostile countries that don't want them there, especially if those countries are surrounded by sympathetic neighbors. We saw it in Vietnam, in Beirut, in Somalia and in the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Bush's own father knew this clearly. Our military did brilliantly what modern militaries can do... confront a conventional army and push off territory friendly to our interests, just as we did in WWII. But Bush Sr. had no intention of invading and occupying Iraq, for the exact reasons it was a mistake for his son to do it.

--"Had we gone the invasion route, the U.S. could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different--and perhaps barren--outcome."-- George H.W. Bush, A World Tranformed 1998

A barren outcome in a bitterly hostile land. Sounds pretty much like what we have today. Invading and occupying a large, hostile nation, surrounded on nearly all sides by even more hostile muslim populations, smack in the middle of mideast in which guerilla warfare and terrorism have become practiced artforms was a really, really BAD idea.

2. Getting the Reason Right -- For all practical purposes, the Bush League invaded, overthrew and occupied a sovereign nation, that wasn't threatening anyone, wasn't mobilizing to threaten anyone and hadn't the means to threaten anyone, BY MISTAKE! For clearly stated reasons that simply didn't exist. When has that happened in history? (unless the mistake was intentional... a pretext)

And I don't care what Bill Clinton or anyone else said about Saddam. What he didn't do was make the mistake of invading, and resisted intense lobbying to do so. Bush is the President of the most powerful nation on earth and the presumed leader of the free world. It was his job, his duty, to get it right. Instead, when faced with intelligence that was completely ambiguous on whether or not Iraq was a threat, he chose to circumvent his own intelligence services by setting up an ad hoc intel source, Rumsfeld's Pentagon Office of Special Plans, for the sole purpose of cherry picking intelligence to suit his purpose.

3. Unilateralism -- It's quite possible that nothing has done more harm to our interests than Bush's refusal to cooperate internationally and put together a legitimate coalition. For heaven's sake, when Bush Sr. attacked Iraq in Kuwait, he had SYRIA -- Iraq's closest ally -- on board. Bush has only alienated the rest of the world, the middle east is going in the exact opposite political direction that Bush predicted, and America's once undisputed global respect and world leadership is in tatters, which a now humbled Bush and Condi Rice are desperately trying to patch back together.

4. Dismissing the possibility of an Insurgent Resistance -- Despite clear warnings from his senior military and his combined intelligence services, the Bush League blithely dismissed any idea that a guerilla resistance would arise, despite a National Intelligence Council report in Jan. '03 that predicted that a local unsurgency would arise, that it would receive widespread support from the broader Muslim world, and that sectarian divisions would become a problem.

Rumsfeld's war plan, based on a smaller, more mobile force, was entirely based on a war that would end within weeks. His Army Chief of Staff, Gen. Eric Shinseki, suggested that occupation would require up to 300,000 troops, for which he was literally and figuratively dismissed. Gen. Tommy Franks himself recommended up to 200,000 troops, but was overruled by Rumsnamara.

5. Dismissing the need to consolodate Afghanistan in order to focus on Iraq -- Given the Soviet experience in Afghanistan, it was incombent the we followed through with the rebuilding and stabilization of Afghanistan after our invasion. Instead, the vital resources for this job were diverted to Iraq, with results that are plainly visible today with the resurgence of the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan. Afghanistan is now roughly where the Soviet occupation was 5 years into their occupation, with Kabul and the major cities under coalition control and little else.

Only after these massive blunders do your list of screwups even begin, dsanthony.

Quote by: dsanthony But, as a counterpoint, I'd like to present some of the mistakes attributed to FDR and Truman during WW2.

This is a pointless excercise. In WWII, Nazi Germany was the military superpower of its day and had conquered, by force of arms, almost the entire European continent, while its ally by treaty, Imperial Japan, the worlds naval superpower, had conquered almost the entire Asian continent and the Pacific. Whatever errors were made, we had no choice but to fight that war. Iraq, on the other hand, was threatening no one and had no means to threaten anyone.

AND, we won WWII in 3 and a half years. This November will be 3 and a half years that we've been in Iraq, and now even Generals Pace and Abezaid have conceded that we probably won't win in ten years, if ever.

Quote by: dsanthony yawn... your points have made over and over to the point of nausea. If you don't like the discussion here, you can of course join the myriad other slogan-filled threads.

Incredible. The errors you're willing to concede are worthy of discussion, but anything else is simply sloganeering???

Wel, tell ya what... it was only after the Hurricane Katrina fiasco that the truth finally struck me. The war in Iraq wasn't an isolated foulup. It was a symptom of a much broader problem, that this administration was simply incompetent. Nothing they've touched has worked out. They have no control over the Republican congress, which has been spending like drunken sailors, their policy intitiatives have been expensive boondoggles, they're totally in the pockets of the oil,gas & coal industries, and America's scientific community is in alarmed rebellion over the Bush Leagues roughshod treatment and pandering to the Religious Right and the energy industry.

I believe George W. Bush is a patriot and means well, but beyond that he's simply an arrogant, mule-headed, intellectually shallow, Peter Principle case study who got where he is through his charm, his father's name and other people's money, and he's doing massive harm to our country.

Quote by: dsanthony Fact is, Bush won 2 elections. Dems might not like it, but there it is. If they disagree with Bush's policies, let them put forward a strong candidate in 2008

Yeah, right. Just like conservatives accepted that Bill Clinton won two elections. Blow it out your butt.


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