Originally posted by HatMan:
I'm not going to convince you, and you're not going to convince me. We've each got our sources and our beliefs.
But Bush did lie to our troops. They had contracts specifying how long their tours of duty would last, with the option to renew or not. Contracts expired, but he still needed troops there. So he broke the terms of the contract and refused to bring them home, forcing them to stay.
He followed the rules. The rules entitled the commander-in-chief to extend tours of duty. This is a lie? That's a stretch. I don't remember President Bush ever giving a timeline. Do you? I seem to recall the words, "long war" and "may last beyond our lifetimes and certainly beyond my administration." That was said back in 2001. I didn't ever hear, "you'll be home by Christmas," or "it'll be over quickly and you'll never have to go back." I'm with Pam. The definition of lying has been completely redefined for President Bush and really, really re-defined for President Clinton.
And while they were there, what did he do for them? Well, after he slashed taxes on the people with the least need for yet more money, seriously cutting into government revenue, he went and spent piles of money we didn't have on the war. Multi-million dollar missiles. Billion dollar airplanes. Huge transportation costs. Thousands and thousands of mercenaries paid several times what our troops make. You know where he decided to cut corners? Protecting our troops. Body armor? Forget it. Don't have the money. Armored vehicles designed to be far less vulnerable to IEDs? Too expensive.
John Kerry, who I'll bet you voted for, voted against body armor. Oh, after he voted for it, of course. The military had supply problems, partly because Bill Clinton gutted the military. Every Democratic president's first task upon taking office is always to gut the military. And the men and women in uniform know it. That it's the job of Democratic presidents to gut the military and the job of Republican presidents to build it back up is a given like the sun coming up in the East.
But at least they had people to keep them company. The national guard is the branch of the military tasked with dealing with emergencies on US soil. When something like Katrina happens, its their job to come in and help out. They have the equipment to get through to difficult places and clear roads and paths, and the uniformed manpower to provide help and order. And if terrorists actually strike within the country, it's their job to mobilize and respond. So where were they and their equipment when we needed them? Where were our national defenses against terrorist attack? Sent off to Iraq. Because, for some reason, they were having trouble getting enough troops. I guess he lied to them, too, because their terms specify service on US soil.
What good's the National Guard when the governor (I'm looking at you, Kathleen Blanco) won't send them in and won't let the president go in with troops until it was too late. Ever heard the term, Posse Comitatus? Once the Coast Guard, the Navy, and the Army were allowed in, relief help came quickly. Oh wait, there aren't any. They're all in Iraq. I guess all those Coast Guard choppers pulling people from their rooftops were special effects by Industrial Light and Magic.
And spies. We needed good intelligence. People who could quietly go around, find our enemies, and figure out how best to defeat them. Valerie Plame, a covert operative specializing in WMDs, was outed. Bin Laden wasn't found. We were in Iraq for years before the people in charge realized that they were using the wrong tactics. So where were all our spying efforts going? Spying on Americans. Things like warrantless wiretapping of US citizens. Why no warrants? They were easy to get. Quick, quiet, nearly 100% approval rate. But a secret executive order said not to bother with petty things like due process and civil liberties. In this and many other things, the Bush administration has shown us that they care more about their own unchecked power than they do about anything else - rights, freedoms, laws... right up to the constitution itself. (Where's Tempus in all this? "Let's wrap fish in the constitution and chuck all the old laws...")
Plame was outed by her own husband, probably the biggest publicity-hound there ever was. Plus his own book, the Politics of Truth (an oxymoron if I've ever heard one) proved she wasn't covert. She was a desk jockey, not a covert agent and had been for six years. Covert agents don't do photo layouts for Vanity Fair.
President Clinton gutted our intelligence services. President Carter made sure that human intelligence (humint) was non-existent. You're trying to tell me that Democrats support intelligence services?
Power wasn't the reason why the warrants were deemed unnecessary. The process of obtaining warrants usually took so long that the need for wiretaps was over before they got approval. Minutes mattered. Even hours was too long. And those warrantless wiretaps were only permitted for calls into the US from outside or to outside the country. That rule was absolute. Any intra-US calls required a warrant. The Speaker, Minority Leader of the House, the Majority and Minority Leader of the Senate, the chairman and vice chair of both Intelligence committees and the chief judge of the FISA court were kept fully informed of everything that was happening related to the program. This was unchecked power? Unchecked power is the abolition of habeas corpus and the unilateral imposition of an income tax by Abraham Lincoln, one of our greatest presidents. The Emancipation Proclamation would have been an egregious misuse of executive power. I guess you would have had President Lincoln impeached.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Environmental policy has been set back 30 years. Education is a mess. I could go on.
Yeah he signed the bill to outlaw incandescent lights that Democrats so desperately wanted to become law, meaning that we're going to be filling our landfills with poisonous, mercury-filled flourescent light bulbs. I hate fluorescent lighting. You should be demanding Nancy Pelosi's removal for that one.
Since when was education a federal matter? Go talk to your governor about that. He's a Democrat, isn't he? Why hasn't he fixed it? I would have voted against the No Child Left Behind Act as an unconstitutional encroachment upon state powers. Doubly-so especially since Ted Kennedy wrote most of it.
And you're trying to tell me that he's done a good job? Been honest with us? Managed things well? Protected us from attack instead of making new enemies and stripping our defenses? Made us stronger?
Yes. When was the last successful attack on American soil? A president's chief job is to keep the country safe, not to provide cradle-to-grave services and a pension. Considering there hasn't been a successful attack, I'd say he's doing his main job quite well. al Qaeda's on the run. bin Laden's been reduced to a video star. Zarqawi's dead and 30 feet under (big bomb crater). Saddam and his precious boys, Uday and Kusay, are safely in the ground, no longer free to rape and kill millions of their own people. al Qaeda's tied up in Iraq, desperately trying to stop the spread of democracy, knowing that democracy is the death knell of terrorism and not free to launch unlimited attacks on us or our allies.
