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[Drinky Crow]

If you're incapable of basic reason and research, you hafta get your marching orders from SOMEWHERE.

As for Tommy Franks, if his bungling isn't enough to disqualify his opinion, his loyalty to the apeshit Bush Faction certainly is. Here's Tommy, shitting his pants before Rummy:

In the months leading up to the war, a split developed inside the military, with the planners and their immediate superiors warning that the war plan was dangerously thin on troops and matériel, and the top generals—including General Tommy Franks, the head of the U.S. Central Command, and Air Force General Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—supporting Rumsfeld. After Turkey’s parliament astonished the war planners in early March by denying the United States permission to land the 4th Infantry Division in Turkey, Franks initially argued that the war ought to be delayed until the troops could be brought in by another route, a former intelligence official said. “Rummy overruled him.”

Many of the present and former officials I spoke to were critical of Franks for his perceived failure to stand up to his civilian superiors. A former senator told me that Franks was widely seen as a commander who “will do what he’s told.” A former intelligence official asked, “Why didn’t he go to the President?” A Pentagon official recalled that one senior general used to prepare his deputies for meetings with Rumsfeld by saying, “When you go in to talk to him, you’ve got to be prepared to lay your stars on the table and walk out. Otherwise, he’ll walk over you.”

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?030407fa_fact1

And here's Spencer Ackerman on Franks' failures as a general (yes, it's TNR, but they've been hawkish sons-of-bitches until recently, when, like former hawk and Republican golden child Ken Pollack, they started to realize just how inept this Administration was at actually executing a war and how they'd been so thoroughly and blatantly lied to): http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040830&s=ackerman083004

Whee!

 

[Drinky Crow]

At this point, it just blows my mind that ANYONE can think that folks like Bush/Cheney/Rummy/Ashcroft/DeLay are GOOD for America and Americans.

At some point, this election has turned into a sporting event for Republicans, and it's now become a matter of rooting for your team and fearing to admit defeat. Your candidate can be an inarticulate puppet, your VP a war-profteering decrepitoid, your Secretary of Defense a hyperbolic warmongering anti-Constitutional thug, your Attorney General a crazy Christian Fundamentalist, and your Speaker of the House an ethically bankrupt crook, but THEY'RE YOUR TEAM and if you don't support 'em, THE DAMN LONGHAIRS WIN AND WE'LL ALL BE HUMPING TREES, EATING TOFU, AND MARRYING MEN. I can understand the support from Fundamentalist Christians -- after all, you folks really hate the Constitution, tolerance, foreign folk, Islam, and civil rights -- but the rest of you, especially those of you with libertarian leanings: shame! Shame on you! I understand that all this fightin' talk coming out of the White House has you jinxed up on your testosterone reserves and that you ain't gonna hear no sass talk like "appeasement" (which apparently encompasses every diplomatic venue that doesn't involve hoisting an Ay-rab on a bayonet), but you've had your squealing teenboy high and now it's time to let your adult side shine through.

Squeal all you will about tangential issues like UN corruption (BIG SURPRISE), tinpot dictators who support this nebulous and all-too-easily appropriated concept of "terror", ludicrous eschatological scenarios, and endless less-than-slippery slopes about the death of marriage/capitalism/religion, but in the end, you've been lied to and you've been sold a really fucked up bill of goods that IN NO DEMONSTRABLE WAY BENEFITS AMERICA OR AMERICANS, and for some reason, you'll say PLEASE SIR MAY I HAVE ANOTHER. Good job, jerks!

As a show of good faith, I'll tick 100 (!!) points off my tag. Yay, Drinky Crow, you ROCK!

 

[SteveMeister]

Woo hoo! Drinky Crow for president!!!

 

[PS2 KID]

This year is a sucky year for candidates. Come to think of it so was 4 years ago. We really need to fix this two party system. I'd rather have some hot shot CEO who's good at reforming struggling companies and making them profitable than any of these candidates.

or

Vote SONNY from I Robot for president.

 

[cvxfreak]

I find the URL thing really funny. :lol

 

[Pimpwerx]

As a show of good faith, I'll tick 100 (!!) points off my tag. Yay, Drinky Crow, you ROCK!

I was about to say Doug, your ticker's broken or something. That thing should be going like the national debt counter in reverse. :lol But yes, I agree with your post, which is why I'm voting Nader. Now let's see you try to lash out at that. :lol PEACE.

 

[Azih]

Pimpwerx supports Dubya for president.

 

[calder]

When I move to the US (sigh, as a socially liberal Canadian* do you think my vote will be wasted in Texas no matter who's president? ) it's nice to know at least one person already shares most of my opinions. Of course, Drinky Crow articulates them about a hundred billion times better than I ever could and does actual research to back up his arguments which I pretty much never would, but still I'm willing to hitch my wagon and nod along thoughtfully like I had the exact same points on the tip of my tongue too.



*rough US equivalent: wild-eyed unreconstructed Marxist. Shit, if there's one thing I hate about the 2 party system is the simple fact that neither party is even really what I'd normally vote for given a proper number of choices like we almost have here. How the hell can you shoehorn the full gamut of social/economic issues into some turgid binary option?

 

[Incognito]

DarienA, Makura/Ripclawe are just feeding us, virtually verbatim, the busted strawmen so crudely constructed on the front page of instapundit.com.

It's funny, because I scan instapundit.com just find out what sort of ludicrous idiot spin the latest bad news out of the world theatre will get, and I find that "informed conservatives" barely even bother to reformat the talking points before cutting-and-pasting them into the "Reply" box.

:lol

i offer the following evidence to ga-ot members, from instapundit.com

Personally, I find it hard to fault the Bush Administration for thinking this way. And had they failed to engage Saddam, we'd be hearing -- from many of the same critics of the war -- that their failure to do so was evidence of ineptitude ("How could you leave such a vicious dictator free to cause us trouble, smack in the middle of the mideast?") along, probably, with claims that it was somehow a way of enriching Halliburton.

then, later, from makura

It's politically advantageous for the Democrats to pretend otherwise at the moment , but no doubt these are the same people - if we HADN't gone into Iraq - who would now be whining about how the Bush administration has failed the American people by leaving someone like Hussien in power in a post 9/11 world. They'd probably even be blaming the inaction on some Halliburton/big oil conspiracy

for shame. such blatant plagiarism would at best net you a big fat "F" from any self-respecting institution of higher learning, and at worst, expulsion.

 

[videogamer]

for shame. such blatant plagiarism would at best net you a big fat "F" from any self-respecting institution of higher learning, and at worst, expulsion.

His wording is pretty different, maybe he thought the same thing. Or maybe he saw it before hand and is just repeating the points.

 

[Tommie Hu$tle]

for shame. such blatant plagiarism would at best net you a big fat "F" from any self-respecting institution of higher learning, and at worst, expulsion.

You act like the GOP has a wide variety of talking points to go with. Didn't you hear the President? They say the same things all the time.

 

[Mega Man's Electric Sheep]

The lad's phrasing is quite different, maybe he concurred with that line of thought.


"Or maybe he saw it before hand and is just repeating the points."


That's his point. That people just adopt these opinions as their own and spit them out on cue.

 

[videogamer]

are these the "talking points"?

 

[Mandark]

Believing Mohamed Atta met with an Iraqi official does not mean you think Iraq helped with 9/11 - which Cheney never claimed.

That's not the only thing Cheney has said, as Keio pointed out.

This is actually pretty simple. Many people believe Iraq was connected to 9/11 (according to Gallup, 62% of Republicans). This belief benefits Bush politically, making people more likely to vote for him, and to support his biggest policy choice. It is in Bush's interests for people to believe this. Neither he nor his cabinet has made any effort to correct this misperception. They have said several things that cultivate this belief. It's obvious what they're doing and why.

I'm saying I think Kerry/Edwards were being disingenuous if they ever claimed that the reason they voted for the resolution was because they saw it as only a deterrent. If you don't want to go to war, you don't vote to give the President the authority to.

Kerry supported another version of the resolution, that I believe was proposed by a Republican senator, which tied the authority to evidence that Saddam had WMD's and was not disarming. But Dick Gephart broke ranks and supported the president's version of the bill in the House, which killed any chance of lining up support for the other bill. Politically speaking, Kerry can't come out and say "I didn't want to grant him such unchecked authority, but that ass Gephart sold me out."

In any case, Kerry supported a more restricted bill, immediately made a speech urging caution after voting for the president's version, and Bush was still promoting the idea of a peaceful resolution at the time. Kerry can't be totally absolved of responsibility for allowing the war to happen, but his stance was pretty clear. It's possible to be against a near-unilateral war, but to prefer that possibility to a total lack of leverage in negotiating with Saddam.

Do Saudi Arabia, Iran, or North Korea have the history of UN violations and hubris towards the UN that Saddam had?

Yes they do. You really don't get out much, do you?

Are Saudi Arabia, Iran, or North Korea at least willing to begin negotiations?

Saddam let inspectors in the country. What exactly was he not negotiating about that these countries will talk about?

HalfPastNoon: Nice catch. Real nice.