Nobunaga wrote:... Bush should step down! Lies! Lies! Lies! Bush lied while good men died! Etc... etc... Halliburton! Cheney! Oil! Where are the WMDs?! Where is Osama?! etc.. etc..
... It's frightening how little people pay attention to what's actually going on in the world. You signed up with your pals in the "I Hate Bush" club and facts become irrelevant. Just keep repeating the lines, "No WMDs!", "Halliburton is Evil!"... etc... and that will get it done.
... I dislike President Bush, to rather a large degree, but I refuse to sign on with the club and strap on the blinders. Here is some food for thought, eh...
... 1. Halliburton and Bush designed this war well in advance to take huge oil profits? .... No. The frightening fact of the matter is, the vast majority of Iraqi oil forthcoming has already been promised to the People's Republic of China, sold not through American corporations, either.
... It IS possible that this was the intent from the very beginning. China possesses enough USD and holds them ransom against the US to sway US policy. The PRC could crash the American economy on a whim, if they so chose. That is the problem with having so much US currency in foreign banks - esp. government controlled banks. At the moment, China is too valuable to the US in trade, and the US too valuable to them to actually see this kind of economic attack, but it's a huge stick (as opposed to a carrot) that moves US foreign policy a great deal more than anybody wants to admit.
... Halliburton is making a fortune on construction contracts, yes, this is true enough.
Honestly, I could care less about the whole "It's a war for oil" inanity.
...2. No WMDs! BUsh Lied! .... yeah yeh yeah.... Saddam did in fact have WMDs, and GW Bush was not the first to warn about them. Bill Clinton also warned us about them, as did Senator John Kerry, and hundreds of other US politicians. You see, we KNOW he had them because we sold them to him.
Why not use that line then? Just "My fellow Americans, the weapons sold to Iraq in a deal some 30 years ago by a less intelligent man are missing, and we demand that Iraq produce proof that they were destroyed rather than sold."
Then the UN would've written a nasty letter to Saddam rather than us.
Reminds me of an old joke, "How did the US know Iraq had WMDs? Because they had the receipt."
... It was the late 70's and this upstart little country of Iraq was willing to fight those evil Iranians for us. We couldn't go fight the Iranians, in spite of the fact that they committed an act of war by taking the US embassy and hundreds of Americans as hostages... Vietnam was still much too fresh in people's memories and the very thought of any foreign war was absurd. So... the US sold Saddam the weapons to gas those Iranians back to Islamo-Heaven.
... And when the war ended, he (Saddam) used them on his own people.
... Selling Saddam those WMDs was not the best idea, and one that no doubt many have come to regret.
... It is pretty much known now that what remained of these WMD stores were trucked over the border to be hidden in Syria before the Americans arrived.
... But yet, the whole Nuclear Weapon scare was bad intelligence, I agree. It does not look like Saddam had any reputable nuclear weapons program in progress... though he surely wanted one.
So he had WMDs but couldn't hit us with nukes. What was he going to do? Build a giant sling shot and launch anthrax-filled balloons at us? The point is, if the war was about liberation, why not just use that as a case?
If Bush had come on TV and said, "Look, it's a Texas thing. This man is a threat to the world, and we're gonna go get him like my Dad tried to back in the 90s," he would've had me at hello.
It has all the ABCs of Spin,
- Assign blame
- Be adamant that your way is the only right way
- Commit to your line
... 3. Bush's approval rating is the lowest ever! Well... it IS very low, and deservedly so. Interestingly enough, the new Congress has even a lower approval rating at the moment.
I don't listen to polls. I don't care what everyone else thinks, I only care what I believe. That's why the only times I have voted, I voted for a third party candidate.
... This should everybody, I don't care if you love or hate the President, this should scare you....
... Since 1822, in the United States Congress, dissenting opinions to Bills presented on the floor have taken the form of revised bills, to foster debate. These revised bills simply represent, "If THIS is what it looked like, we would go for it... can we debate this thing and find some common ground?"
... The New House Speaker has put forth a motion to abolish this activity completely. This, if it passes, will effectively eliminate 80% of debate in Congress. When your government stops being about debating ideas and finding common ground, and starts to look like power-hungry politicians doing all they can to cement their power bases... you shold worry.
I am worried, why do you think I didn't vote?
To quote Douglas Adams, "The people who most want to be in power, are ipso facto the least suited for the job."
I don't vote because people who want to rule over others are fundamentally corrupted at a very basic level.
Look at every bill that gets passed. They're all crammed full of deals and sales and transactions that have nothing to do with the bill at hand. They snuck the Real ID act into a bill meant for defense funding. Anyone who would then veto the bill based on that action would instantly be "against the troops."
It wouldn't happen if the Line-Item Veto wasn't declared unconstitutional. But, c'est la vie.
... And why doesn't anybody know any of this stuff? It's not on CNN, FOX, ABC, etc... It's not "In Your Face!" enough to sell commercials, maybe? Or maybe you don't even care. I do...
Because facts get lost in the crossfire and everyone eventually simply resorts to slogans to substitute for debate.
Initiate discovery! Fire the Machines! Throw the switch Igor! THROW THE F***ING SWITCH!
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mad at how we have stretched, twisted and compressed things. Time to reassess the situation a bit.
