Originally posted by TOC:
Right. Everyone who was against the Iraq war was misinformed. There was absolutely nothing wrong about attacking Iraq, and instead the only problem was that Bush failed to teach the rest of the world that they were wrong and he was right.
You have quite the talent of reading things into comments that aren't there. I recognize people can have different opinions on whether the invasion of Iraq was justified, but the particular point I was making here was that Bush was unfairly tarred as a liar, for manufacturing evidence as an excuse to go into Iraq. This was the beginning of the end of his presidency as he allowed Democrats to spend five months lying about him before he started fighting back. The nail was Katrina. The point made here had nothing to do with whether he was justified or not as justification isn't even part of the argument. The point was that he went in with the best information he had at the time. The point about WMD stockpiles was wrong, but it was not a lie. The justification argument can be handled separately. I would say it still was justified due to what Saddam was planning, but others will disagree with me. Fair enough.
Democrats who voted for the war resolution could have simply claimed that the incorrect intelligence fooled them as well as the president, but they couldn't leave it at that. Instead, they had to have been lied to in order to vote the way they did in order to satisfy the anger of the leftist fever swamps. So they went out to destroy the president with the help of their media allies, despite the fact that every commission convened showed the president never lied and that the intelligence presented to Democrats on the two Intelligence committees was essentially the same as the intelligence provided to the president. Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), Vice Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee even said as much until he was pressured by his fellow Democrats to backtrack. Representative Jane Harman (D-CA), Vice Chairwoman of the House Intelligence Committee, backed up the president and lost her vice-chairmanship and was passed over for chairman when Congress switched sides in 2006 because she dared to tell the truth rather than back the party line that Bush lied, people died.
In politics, everything is fair game and is a blood sport, so I can't complain about what the Democrats did, but I can criticize the president for staying silent for so long and letting himself be tarred as a liar. He had made a promise that he would try to be more bipartisan after winning in 2004 and look where it got him.
As for Katrina, you missed the point again. I never said that Katrina didn't do damage to the country or to the region as you seem to imply. The damage was great and the loss of lives were quite significant. The economic damage was also tremendous as the economy lost over a million jobs and lost $200 billion in damages. But by unfairly tagging President Bush with all the blame essentially paralyzed the rest of his presidency, something you never want to see of the leader of the free world.
I will say one thing. While Bill Clinton was guilty of committing perjury before a grand jury, the Republican reaction was unjustified in that it took Clinton's eye off the ball. He spent much the rest of his administration defending himself against legal matters leading to contempt of court charges and disbarment, but to paralyze the President of the United States with so many dangers in the world is unwise. While Bill Clinton was worrying about lawyers, al Qaeda plotted while his administration did nothing about it.
The same thing happened with George Bush. He tried to be proactive with Katrina only to be rebuffed by the governor and the mayor, yet he was blamed for being aloof and not paying attention and for general incompetence. The press and Democrats crucified him unjustly and his administration was essentially derailed for the rest of his term.
Just as the right suffered from Clinton Derangement Syndrome in the late 90's, the left has a terrible case of Bush Derangement Syndrome right now.
As for all the arguments about supply-side economics, I'll just point to my past arguments, of which there are many pages worth. I don't need to rehash them again except to say that you're misleading people by saying they were tax cuts only for the rich. Tax cuts were always for everyone who paid taxes, and percentage of tax cuts were higher for those in the lower brackets, making the tax code more progressive. I think you object to rich people getting more of their money back, regardless of what the tax cuts do to help the lower brackets. That's fine, but it's definitely wrong to say only the rich got tax cuts. Percentage is what matters, not raw amounts. A richer person will always get more dollar-wise, but that's a no-brainer. They pay a heck of a lot more, so of course they'd get more back. To say they got tax cuts disproportionately in their favor is incorrect.
I don't defend tax cuts for the rich because I like rich people. Rich people will always do well no matter what their tax rate is. I defend tax cuts because rich people supply ALL THE JOBS. Take money from them and you have fewer jobs. It's as simple as that. 70% of all jobs are supplied by small business filing as S-Corporations, proprietorships, and partnerships, which file under personal income tax rates where most of the money goes back into the business rather than into the owners' pockets. So a lot of these "rich" aren't actually as rich as you think with their money tied up in investing in the business. So all those tax cuts for the rich are tax cuts for job producers. For that, I will always contend that is better than raising their taxes.
As for why the rich will always do better, they tend to work harder and take more risks, often working 90+ hours a week with no vacations for years to get their small businesses off the ground. As I said, 70% of all jobs are supplied by these small S-corps, not the mega-corporations. With higher risks, the rewards are higher as well. This is why the gap between rich and poor always grows, during the good times and bad. This is not to say poor people don't necessarily work hard, but a hard working person who takes no risks will never get rich. It's a necessary but not sufficient criteria. The gap grew during the Clinton Administration as well for exactly that reason. The rich don't need help, but the more money they have, the more people they can hire. You don't get jobs from poor people. This is why Europe has a chronically high unemployment rate. Chronically high taxes means chronically few jobs. Europeans would kill for our unemployment rates even during our recessions.
I will say my parents were hardly rich when they ran their little tiny grocery store of perhaps 800 square feet. With their high cash flow, they were in the higher tax brackets and would have been considered the "rich." But they never had a vacation in nine years, worked every day from 6 am until 11 pm seven days a week, and they never had much in actual earnings for themselves even in the best of times. Nobody who knew them would ever have considered them even close to being rich as they practically lived like paupers, just trying to earn enough money to send their kids to a public college (both my sister and I went to UC San Diego and paid in-state tuition) and sock a little bit away for retirement, knowing that Social Security will never be reliable. They never ate out. They never bought a new car, and they wore ten-year old clothes with patches. They lived in a townhouse of about 1200 sq. ft. in Alexandria, VA for all the time they ran the business. My mother, who's 4'9" wore my clothes that I had as a kid. These are the type of people liberals would like to tax into the ground since the left would have considered them rich, according to the tax code.
If Obama wins and he raises the taxes he promises to do, I have to say I'm glad my parents are now safely retired (my mom is 69 and my dad is 84), living on their savings, and now no longer even show up on their tax returns. If they were still in business, they probably wouldn't be for long.
Anyone wonder now why I find it offensive whenever someone says we need to tax the rich and make them pay their fair share? It's their money and what right does the government have to take so much of it and then demand more? It's their experiences and the hard work they had to go through, and the sacrifices they made for my sister and me that made me the conservative that I am today.
You are correct that some of my arguments against Bush were from the right. I am right, so naturally I'd criticize him when he starts acting like a liberal.
