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Then it is very, very rare you can accuse someone of lying. More important, Bush can be open and honest now and admit his incompetence. He either lied or was incompetent to this or that degree. Remember we are talking about decisions made in haste without involving other nations or the UN. Now he has people defending him and saying it is possible he did not lie. If you are going to be hasty and set up a situation where 1) more Americans will die than those who were killed and serve as the justification for the war 2) what you do will make it more likely for extemists think the US needs a lesson 3) allies are threatened and alienated 4) you tranfer taxpayer funds to corporations you and you staff have professional and personal connections with than you need to take full responsibility for what you have done. In this case this would either mean admitting incompetence or lying of some combination of both. The money spent on this war - not Bush's money by the way - could have been spent fighting Aids or on cancer research, let alone not stripping it from this and future generation americans in the first place. 'Mistakes were made' kinds of speeches are dishonest and are not the kind of thing we accept from children. This is a myth. Very few soldiers were spat on. However nearly all returning injured vets or those in need of rehabilitation found that the very people who sent them to war were not interested in giving them adequate medical care. Talk about spitting. And soldiers over in Vietnam did not need to arrive home to lose morale. They lost it because of what they had to do over there as any even quick read of their memoirs and interviews will let you know. They knew that the war was devastating civilians, they could not connect to the goals of the war and many of them poor black and while and hispanic were not treated well by their own governments back home in the first place and were not satisfied with the justifications for the war once they arrived. They were, to some degree, predisposed to be skeptical. And they were right to be so. To blame the anti war movement or hippies for lack of morale skips the whole question of whether they were right to be anti Vietnam war. Remember this war was started by a lie: Tonkin Gulf incident. At least the increased US military beyond advisor presence there. Add to that that the war was being waged very much on civilians. Beyond direct bombing of villages, the anti civilian use of agent orange, mines, cluster bombs and so on was very much right in the faces of the soldiers there and this sure as shit affected morale. A look at how long the government took to even begin acknowledged that Agent Orange was damaging american soldiers will tell you where the real spitting was coming from.
SAM. Don't patronise me. You come across as a smart intellectual woman but your life experiences in certain fields appear to be lacking. You have a mindset that seems to generated from hate and anger towards the western world so everytime you write, i see the usual rhetoric i've come to expect. 1. You're still not providing me with concrete facts despite the downing street memo's which i've already pointed out can easily be a fake. If the evidence is so damning then why hasn't bush been impeached? Obviously there is more to this story than meets the eye and i'm not gonna make a call until all the facts are released... Which sadly may never happen 2. Don't take my use of the word spat on so literally... i meant it figuratively like sowhatifit'sdark put it. They were denied basic medical treatment, National servicemen had red paint thrown at them during Anzac day marches in Australia and there service overseas was not recognised subsequently they weren't awarded any campaign or combat medals. Just to name some of the mistreatments they recieved. These gross errors are slowly starting to be rectified here. 3. When you have opportunity to talk to a large number of servicemen and women that have returned from the gulf, who in large numbers confirm what i have just said... sharing little stories like that, you know the usual bleeding heart stuff.. Then maybe you'll see the side that doesn't get told. sowhatifit'sdark: I'm not here to debate if Dubya is incompetent... I know he is... He has focused his entire presidency on two issues. Iraq and the War on Terror. He has let the american economy slide and has generally failed to have his finger on the pulse. This is true. If it could be proven that he either lied or is grossly incompetent, then send him to prison or whatever you guys do to impeached presidents. I would fully support it. But as mentioned above, there is a side to the story you don't hear and unfortunately won't hear. The average soldier doesn't have as loud a voice as a disgruntled politician, the media, or liberal nut jobs (not all liberals because on the whole most can be good)
I didn't quite reply to the Vietnam point you raised sowhatifit'sdark. I agree, the campaign was waged horribly under aweful conditions. There were gross inadequacies in the command structure and the overall effectiveness of the campaign. The operational plan was very much reactional and lacked substance... There was no real leadership in the upper echelons which gave way to the gross treatment of the general populous of vietnam. Having said that, and with no bias at all, my belief is that the Australians performed exceptionally well and were one of the more effective countries in that campaign. I'm not blaming the failed campaign purely on hippies. That would be irresponsible of me. It is a mixture of the above things you have mentioned, plus mine, and the public response, that resulted in the loss of Morale... subsequently the campaign was doomed.
Since the D memos have never been seriously questioned by anyone in a position to know, let's accept that they are less likely to be fake than any other unofficially released documents pertaining to the justification of the war, right? So they are about the best evidence you could possibly get - there's a lot of other evidence (Joe Wilson hands us some, Judith Miller some, John Conyers has a summary in the Congressional Record, etc), but those memos pretty much nail it in the short version (There are quite a few of them, btw - more than one batch of documents that have been sort of filed under the general category, and not just the one photocopied page with the famous "fixed" quote on it). So the question of why Bush hasn't been impeached is an interesting one. Some of us have been pointing out that it has been an interesting question for several years now. His enemies have had a hard time getting organized or getting their case in the public eye, and his friends have proven remarkably loyal amid one scandal after another. Why are you blaming any of it on "hippies" ?
pjdude: Who admitted it was real.. links please,. So far in my research i've come across nothing the indicates admission on the british part iceaura: The hippies had a great mindset and used the political system which encourages free speech to its full effect. Some great things came out of the era, especially some pretty cool music. But at the end of the day, the fact that the war was so unpopular at home was probably a contributing factor in the denial of basic services for veterans when they returned home. I guess ultimately we're in a hazy agreement locked in a stalemate over the D street memo's. So lets leave that one there. I don't think his enemies are as incapable as you label them, I think the situation that is more likely is that there ultimately is no way they can prove it. Bill Clinton lied about an affair... Ok so what.. Bush lied about WMD's... If i were his enemy i'd be all over that like a fat kid on a lollipop
So you are assuming that all the evidence implicating W in lying about the WMDs (have you read Conyers's provisional summary, or noticed House Resolution 635 12/18/05 http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d109:h.res.00635: ), wiretapping, contracting, attorney general manipulating, vote rigging, torture and renditioning, etc, is bogus because he has not been impeached. As a theoretical exercise: suppose some of this accumulating pile of uncontradicted (even admitted, in the case of the wiretapping) evidence turns out to be valid - say the Downing Street memos, that a couple of British authorities have verified and no one has contradicted. What would that tell you ? So far you have been dismissing evidence based on assumptions about political reality - that W&Co are vulnerable to their many enemies if they screw up, that the press is biased in the necessary way, or at least both honest and capable in the necessary arena, that Congress is both honorable and capable in at least this matter, and so forth. On the one side, assumptions. On the other side, a growing pile of dismissed evidence. Is there a tipping point ?
The tipping point would be either SOLID facts or an admission I'm not dismissing evidence, i'm merely putting it into a pile that classifies it as not solid. The House resolution 635 you have pointed out, unless i'm reading it wrong, is merely telling me that there is an investigation underway... that this investigation/committee is taking their sweet time but there is one nonetheless. Doesn't prove a thing. On Conyers's provisional summary. I have looked up a large amount of imformation regarding Conyer and as far as i can tell he hasn't had much to do with Bush lying about WMD's to justify war in Iraq. Just Vote rigging. Why are you trying to lead me down this garden path, i'm not debating whether he lied or rigged elections, i'm debating whether or not he lied to go to war On Wiretapping, see above On attorney general manipulation, see above On vote rigging, above On Torture, above At the end of the day, you accuse me of dismissing evidence, i accuse you of dismissing reason and reality just to convince yourself that behind every rock there is a leprechaun. Look i don't blame you for doing this, Dubya is quite unpopular, but i'm trying to put forth the reality of the situation and on the balance of probabilities (sorry my phrase of the day) he's not guilty... not innocent.. but still not guilty
On WMDs, we have the solid facts (Downing Street memos prominent, but not the only - Judith Miller's disgrace at the NYT, White House involvement in the Plame business over Wilson's report, the failure of the White House to provide any legitimate sources for its claims since the humiliation of their exposure, etc etc etc) On torture, we have solid facts and admission. On wiretapping, we have pretty good facts and admission. On attorney general manipulation, we have pretty good facts and otherwise inexplicable refusal to answer questions. On vote rigging we have pretty good facts - statistical anomalies and aberrant poll results, for example. Do you tip on any of those ?
