Raquel, welcome to the party! The more the merrier.
I will, of course, take some issues with some of your comments but you expected that, right?
You wondered why people don't take Bush's "lies" as seriously as Bill Clinton's. That's because it's never been proven that Bush has lied. As Pam eloquently put it, people have completely redefined the definition of lying when it comes to President Bush. Lies are intentional mistruths. We'll take Colin Powell as an example. Nobody questions his integrity. He was in on most of the discussions as Secretary of State and saw all the intelligence the services had provided. He's stated that for the most part, we were mistaken that we believed Iraq had an ongoing weapons program in place. Since he was in charge of presenting the evidence to the UN, he apologized for being wrong. He did not apologize for lying to people. Even after he left the State Department, he never once intimated that the president lied about anything.
The only reason there are some people who believe he "lied" is because of Democrats trying to cover their rear ends with their virulently anti-war constituents. It's impossible for them to be at fault for their votes on Iraq because obviously somebody had to have lied to them. And you know the press in the US. Whatever a Democrat says is axiomatic. Whatever a Republican says is looked at with suspicion or just plain ignored. Hence the fairy tale was spun that Bush lied, people died. Paul accuses the president of cherry picking. Well, how does he know that? Because some Democrats, fearing for their re-election said so? Oooh. I prefer to listen to House Intelligence Vice Chairwoman Jane Harman and Senate Vice Chairman Jay Rockefeller, Democrats both, who also saw the intelligence and believed them. Because Harman preferred to tell the truth as she saw it rather than tow the Democratic Party line of Bush lied, people died, Harman was overlooked as Chair of the Intelligence Committee when Nancy Pelosi took over the Speaker's chair. The job went to an inexperienced Congressman named Silvestre Reyes, a guy who couldn't answer the question of whether al Qaeda was made up of Sunnis or Shiite. His answer was laughingly both. The real answer is that al Qaeda considers the Shia to be heretics and would like nothing better than to wipe them off the face of the earth.
So any accusation is just that, an accusation. It has never been proven that the president said anything he believed to be false. If you are liberal, then you are inclined to believe Bush deliberately lied. That's fine, but it's not fact. Now with Bill Clinton, that was fact. He lost his law license and was disbarred from the Arkansas Bar and from the Supreme Court. He's a proven liar. Whereas Democrats HOPE Bush lied. They don't like thinking that intelligence might have been wrong, despite the overwhelming evidence from every major intelligence service in the world.
As for the statement that Bush would have lost re-election in 2004 if 9/11 hadn't happened is strange. How would you know that? The entire dynamic of the 2004 election was the War in Iraq. And Bush was re-elected despite that drag on his popularity. Without 9/11, there would never have been a War in Iraq. The 2004 elections would have definitely been about something else, most likely a good or bad economy or some other issue like Social Security. It would have been a run-of-the-mill election without national security as a major issue, likely. I don't know that for sure because I can't see into an alternate universe where al Qaeda didn't attack us. The world was drastically altered on that day. To project 9/11 as the only reason Bush would be re-elected is a far stretch. We don't know if he would have been. It would all depend on what the issue of the day was. It most likely wouldn't have been terrorism or war.
President Bush campaigned in 2000 on a platform of fixing things at home. He would be a domestic president instead of an international president. He barely mentioned foreign affairs in his campaigning, partly because he was inexperienced. In a debate he had trouble coming up with the name of the president of Pakistan. Without 9/11, this would have been a very different seven years. For all you know, you might have ended up being a big Bush supporter, though agreeing with everything Ann and Paul say probably means that you'd be a Democrat in which case you'd probably hate Bush anyway. We'll never know, though.
I've heard in some quarters Democrats accusing him of lying because he had campaigned on being a domestic president, yet he focused his entire administration on the War on Terror. Some people will go to any lengths to denigrate the opposition.
