Re: [MLUG - DISCUSSION] [POLITICS] The Bush War

[Rick <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On Sun, 2007-09-30 at 14:56 -0500, Mike Miller wrote:

> The Congress never has access to the same intelligence that the President 
> has.  The President decides what Congress will be allowed to see.  A more 
> accurate statement would be "Congress had access to all of the 
> intelligence the President was using to promote the war."
> 
So, you make the claim in one paragraph that Congress only had the
access that the President granted them, but a couple of paragraphs down
you point to Feinstein's report that indicates, to the contrary, that
somehow intelligence was manipulated to a certain end. Uhm...clue phone,
it's *always* manipulated for someones agenda. 

So, was Congress misled? or lazy?

If this is a question of hindsight versus foresight, then who the hell
are they to armchair quarterback after the fact? The answer is, they're
politicians who were too chickensh*t to vote what they say was their
conscience during the immediate post-9/11 days. None of them wanted to
vote for anything that might get them labeled as pro-terrorist or
anti-American in the "omg, we've been attacked" aftermath. This is how
we ended up with such lovely pieces of legislative work as the Patriot
Act. So, instead of lighting up the discussion, they followed the herd
and now try to wiggle out of that decision based on the argument that
"we were lied to" to which I call BS. As US senators and
representatives, they're supposed to have the panache see thru any
potential smoke screens and make the best decision for *us*. 

FYI, in case you've forgotten, I despise all career politicians, liberal
and conservative is irrelevant to me.


> http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/darkside/
> http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/8798997/the_man_who_sold_the_war/
> http://thinkprogress.org/2007/07/22/mcconnell-pentagon/
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downing_Street_memo
> 
> Don't miss PBS's "The Dark Side":  You can watch the whole thing on the 
> web (first URL above).

When I get my media server up and running at home, I'll check it out. 


> Congress could easily have stopped Bush?  What makes you think that? 
> Bush was promoting the fear and doubt:  "We don't want the smoking gun to 
> be a mushroom cloud."  Cheney had a "1% doctrine" - do you know about 
> that?  They were lying to the people and you agree that they were 
> deceiving us in an attempt to promote their war, but you choose to blame 
> Congress because you believe that Congress could "easily" have stopped 
> them.  Vern -- you are blaming the wrong people.  The Congress was a 
> Republican Congress -- both House and Senate.  Massive power was in 
> Republican hands and Democrats who wanted to fight it would have put 
> themselves in grave jeopardy at re-election time unless they were in a 
> very solidly Democratic district.

Of course Congress can stop Bush, that's their frigging job. It simply
takes a bit more solidarity than most career politicians are willing to
put out.


> The Republican Congress.
> 

Oddly, I don't recall any Democrats sparking any anti-war debate at the
time. Oh, there's plenty of them today now that they can get a mob to
support the position, but before hindsight came into focus, there wasn't
squat. 


> I should have known you'd find a way to blame Clinton.
> 

It's more efficient to despise all politicians...


> The second one is a funny choice because it was a report to the President 
> telling him how intelligence reports could have been so distorted.  He 
> knew how they were distorted because he had distorted them.  From 
> FactCheck's first URL above, we have this from Dianne Feinstein:
> 
> http://a257.g.akamaitech.net/7/257/2422/13jul20041400/www.gpoaccess.gov/serialset/creports/pdf/s108-301/feinstein.pdf
> 
> Instead of reading the whitewashed Republican reports, read her report and 
> reports by other Democrats.
> 
> The CIA was under Bush's control and Tenet was giving Bush what Bush 
> wanted to receive.  This structure was determined to be a very bad idea 
> snd the CIA was restructured, based on the Senate Report, so that the 
> Director of the CIA did not report directly to the President.  Maybe that 
> will help a little, but he now reports to someone who reports to the 
> President.  That's a rather weak buffer, I think.
> 
> So Vern, what you aren't getting is that the President had a lot of 
> control over intellligence reports.  Analysts were being pushed around, 
> told that they should "check again" when they came up with things the 
> Administration didn't like.
> 
> The facts are really very plain.  You even admit that the President was 
> manipulating the people.

And our Congressional representatives, Republican and Democrat alike,
rode the wave of popular opinion just like good little robots.

> 
> Bush wants the credit for this war.  He says that history will prove him 
> right.  Why then don't you want this war to bear his name?  I think it is 
> completely appropriate.  This *is* the Bush War in Iraq!  I hope my 
> advocacy for this name change, one the President should happily accept, 
> does not make me seem to be a "bloodthirsty, ignorant zombie," as you 
> suggest above.  Bush's allies and advocates should also want this name 
> change and Bush should be delighted by it.
> 

Who the hell cares what it's called today? Call it the Bush's Happy
Go-Lucky Party Time for all I care. What exactly does that do to help
either the Iraqi people or our servicepeople in harm's way? It's this
sort of non-sensical posturing that achieves nothing but creating
division.

> Mike

Rick
-- 
<Clinton> "Here in canada, we have a special program to deal with the
homeless, its called "winter""


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