Oh, I'm not disagreeing with you. I'm just having a bit of fun at your expense. Hope you don't mind. 
Not really. I'm not going to tell you to shut up about it. 
Tch. You two should know better than that.
73.9% of statistics are made up on the spot. Includigthat one.
Did you guys know that a couple of days ago a crowd of Iraqis were sprayed with live ammo because the Americans thought they were looting weapons from a burning car?
At least 17 people died, including a reporter, and at least 50 were injured, including young children.
You can't tell me that's right.
Well it proves some people are trigger happy for one. Our cops seem to be big on that. What ever happened to ask questions then shoot once you've gauged the threat?
I think Bush threw that idea out the window three years ago, Tornadot... if it ever existed in the USA.
It's interesting though. A protester for fathers' rights dressed as Batman managed to scale the walls of Buckingham Palace in London yesterday. The discussion on the radio this morning suggested that if someone had done the same on the Whitehouse, he'd have been shot on sight as a terror suspect.
Well we do tend to make a big deal about anything...and that is what they want, mass chaos. Then they'll hit us when we're worried over something that isn't even a threat...incompetent CIA and FBI...we need new directors...
Agreed. That's one of the problems... As long as people in the USA are afraid of going about their daily lives terror then the terrorists get what they want without even having to lift a finger.
If nothing else, the attacks three years ago did increase the paranoia of American security forces and consequently a lot of people... They're still affecting a lot of policies even today.
I'm not going to say the terrorist have won or are winning, but I'd certainly disagree with the notion that America is... Especially considering Bush has kind of discontinued the search for Osama with the whole mess that is Iraq to distract everyones' attention.
Did a little informal polling. Over 90% of the soldiers I talked with support Bush.
All of which are soldiers that haven't been sent to Iraq to get their asses shot off by insurgents. Talk to soldiers who are actually at war and you'll probably get a noticeably different response.
Some of the folks asked are Iraqi Freedom veterans. They still supported Bush, and they complain that the media isn't giving any attention to the progress made in Iraq. Other soldiers asked are veterans of other deployments, Bosnia, Desert Storm, under different presidents.
Honestly, would you want to work for Kerry?
Jimro
Honestly, no.
But if it was a choice between him and Bush, I'd be begging to work for Kerry.
Pretty dumb question to ask Cycle or myself really if you think about it.
Honestly, would you want to work for Kerry?
Well, let's see here.
George Bush:
- Sent soldiers into a quagmire in Iraq, 1000 of which died, and thousands more wounded.
- Pays my cousin less to fight in a war in which three of his fingers were blown off than my mom gets paid to give seminars about AIDS.
- Cut soldiers' pay and made thousands stay in Iraq past their going-home dates. (Is there a technical term for that? I dunno.)
- Cut veterans' benefits.
- Started this whole mess in the first place.
John Kerry:
- Condemned the Vietnam war thirty-five years ago.
- Thinks the US should avoid starting wars.
Yeah, I think I would rather work for Kerry.
Cycle,
I appreciate your vehement attitude about how soldiers have faired under the Bush admin, but it is nothing new. Deployments were extended under Clinton, the man who cut funding 50% and raised deployments 300%, it was not a nice time to be in the military, come to think of it that hasn't changed.
About Bush Sr's tax hike, it was a compromise to get legislation passed. The democrats controlled congress and kept tacking on the tax hike to legislation, and since the president doesn't have line item veto it is all or nothing.
The tax hike under Clinton occured in the first two years of his term when democrats controlled congress. They didn't deliver universal health care tho, one of Bill's campaign promises.
Jimro
So wait, you're blaming Democrats instead of Bush for breaking the tax hike promise, but Clinton instead of Republicans for breaking the universal health care promise. Suuure.
Sonic,
The democrats controlled the House of Representatives, the Senate and the Presidency in the first two years of the Clinton administration.
Two Years.
Two years where they could have ram rodded through any legislation they wanted. Delivered on any campaign promises Bill made. How come the only thing they did was ban "assault weapons" (pistol grip, bayonet lug, and flash suppressor) and raise taxes?
Jimro
About Bush Sr. I'll say it pure and simple, the man broke his promise to the voters and rose taxes...compromise or not, he broke his promise and it went downhill from there.
I don't seem to remember Clinton's health care taking off. Either I was too young or didn't care or the Republicans helped to kill it...
Tornadot,
What stopped Bush Sr. from being re-elected was Ross Perot.
Perot was a conservative candidate who devided the conservative vote basically in thirds, two thirds for Bush, one third for Perot. Clinton won by plurality with 40% of the popular vote (2.4 million) and Bush was right behind with 38% of the vote (2.28 million) while Perot took home 22% of the votes (1.32 million).
Similar to Teddy Roosevelt and the Bull Moose Party, Ross Perot handed the presidency to the Democrats.
That's history.
Jimro
Have to read up on that...only recent example I thought of was say Nader stealing the presidency from Gore.
And I think Bush Sr. lost the vote because Clinton talked big and then acted very little once he got into office.
Nader has been a candidate in every election since I can remember. He and Lyndon LaRouche are interesting characters.
Jimro
I know I'm sounding like a complete idiot but LaRouche who?
This discussion of the stupidity of those in power in America doesn't concern me in the least, because I don't live there.
Somehow it's very easy to forget the real issue - that people are dying because of a war that Bush started.
Just do a google for Lyndon LaRouche and browse at your leisure.
Harley, only congress can declare war, which they did. Yup, Bush pushed for it, but congress approved it.
Jimro
Bush suggested it. It wouldn't have happened if he hadn't suggested it. There's a weralth of other measures he could have taken, but he chose to declare war on a country that had little if anything to do with that terrible terrorist attack on 9/11.
Jimro, PEOPLE ARE DYING.
Who had the majority isn't the point. Some Democrats, and most Republicans, didn't support the bill. Therefore some Democrats and most Republicans can be blamed. You can't criticize people who did support the bill for it not being passed, which is exactly what you did by blaming Democrats in general.
They had to know what they were getting into when they voted to go to war...and I hope they didn't think the Iraqis would welcome them with open hands...
Harley, only congress can declare war, which they did. Yup, Bush pushed for it, but congress approved it.
Indeed, Bush pushed for it. And he also lied to Congress about Iraq's military strength and objectives. 70% of Americans believed him at the time. Since Congressmen are Americans, I think it's fairly predictable for that to have happened.
Is it more Bush lying or Bush not bothering to check up on his information and making sure it is true?
Sonic,
If the Dems could raise taxes and put the now defunct AWB in place how come they couldn't deliver universal health care?
I'm not blaming the Democratic party of anything, only asking why they couldn't follow through on the leadership of their most charismatic member.
Cycle,
The DIA, CIA, NSA, and FBI gave the best they had at the time. When the most credible sources of intelligence give you their best, who are you going to turn to to check it?
I don't know if MI5 and MI6 had any better info, but I'm sure some of the Blair bashers will expound on that subject in some other thread.
Jimro
O-kay, since nobody seems to care about my point anymore, why not say how the war was justified and whether those justifications were accurate?
I'm in a really bad mood today, and it's got no rational explanation, so I'll just shut up now.
Urgh...
Harley, there are a thousand and one topics that have, at some point, been derailed to the war and why it was justified. Please don't make this another one...
It's already been made into one, Craig, unless you've had your head stuck in the sand for the last eight or so pages.
I tend to avoid political debate. I just read those words "What was the justification" as "EVERYONE HIT THE DECK!!! ICE BER... I MEAN FLAME WAR, RIGHT AHEAD!!!"
Just ignore me. I'll squeak off into the bunker, for lackey's and dead people only.
Plus, this is about the margin where "talking about Bush and his cabinet "lying" to start a war" becomes "why there was a war, how much of a bad man Saddam is and how the Iraqi's are better off after "our" help and then group B says "better by dying" and group A is like "you're just too ignorant to see beyond your own bias views" and group B is like "pot calling kettle black now" and then some random guy will jump out and scream "POLITICS GETS ME HIGH!!!!"
>.> Nostradarmis has spoken!
Yeah, it's pretty much gone like that. Kerry is really trying hard here but Colorado is notorius for being Republican. Only liberal areas are Denver and Boulder...and even that is sketchy...let's hope this isn't a repeat of the last election...
Tornadot, America doesn't have a left wing. Anybody who tries to campaign for left wing gets arrested on charge of stirring up communism.
America must be the most capitalistic country in the world.
So of course the next election's going to be just like the last one. And even if Kerry does come into power and does pull the troops out of Iraq, it's going to take more that 4 years to sort out the mess Bush has gotten the American economy into, so the election afterwards will see Americans noticing for the first time that everything isn't perfect and voting Republican again.
The reason Labour was voted into power suddenly, with a huge majority, was because the UK was sick and tired of a lousy government spouting out the same old promises and always breaking them.
That's what happens when sheep rise up against the dogs. And one day it's going to happen to America.
Quote:
America must be the most capitalistic country in the world.
Say what? I really don't know what you're getting at there.
I would say Japan and South Korea are just as big as...whatever. America doesn't have a left wing?! Have you heard of the Deomocratic Party? Bill Clinton, remember him?
Quote:
Tornadot, America doesn't have a left wing. Anybody who tries to campaign for left wing gets arrested on charge of stirring up communism.
My fault, I'm afraid. What I meant on the phone, Harley, was that the only two parties with any chance of winning are both right wing parties (Democrats: right wing; Republicans: super right wing). The Democrats are not left wing, unless the fence has been moved to the Republicans' position, in which case anything that's not as far right as them is left wing. The notion that the Democrats are left wing is a common misconception rising from the dogmatic 'two party' political system that the USA suffers from.
There are left wing parties in the USA, but they're minority parties like the UK's Socialist Labour Party, the Green Party, Raving Loony Monster Party, etc. They exist, but they're not likely to win any time in the next century.
America does have a Communist party (according to Cookirini), but people haven't been hunted down for communist thinking for a long time in the USA. I don't think communism is generally liked over there, but I don't think it's hated as much as it was in the McArthy (sp?) era.
The Democrats support abortion, affirmative action, rising taxes (Okay so everyone wants that one), less military funding, universal health care, social security, and basically more ways for the government to gain power. I think those are all left.
But! The Republicans are just as guilty as anyone. There is no right party...just one you agree with more.
Oh yes...the Green Party is fiercely for the enviorment, right? I think the Dems support that too.
They aren't going to win because they're views aren't held by the mainstream public...or the majority...
Quote:
The Democrats support abortion, affirmative action, rising taxes (Okay so everyone wants that one), less military funding, universal health care, social security, and basically more ways for the government to gain power.
Two words: Patriot Act.
I don't know where people get the idea that the left wing is power mad from. The Nazis were the most extreme right wing party ever and I think Hitler's one of history's most power mad characters. If you go to extremes in either direction you will always end up with power mad dictators.
You've cited the party's outstanding policies that make the Democrats more left wing (or less right wing) than the Republicans there, but being more left wing than one party does not make another party totally left wing. That's a pretty dogmatic way of looking at the Republicans and Democrats.
The Democrats of the USA are far more right wing than, oh, say the Liberal Democrats in the UK, who are a left-of-centre party.
Cycle knows more about this than me so I'll wait for him to say what he knows, but I believe I'm right in quoting him that if the Democrats were Canadian then their name would be the Conservative Party of Canada.
How close the Canadian Tories are to the British Tories, I don't know.
Now how about a military draft? Is that left wing or right wing? Personally, I feel that's very right wing, and there are more Democrats that openly support the draft than Republicans.
The Democrats are right wing, the Republicans are just even more right wing.
I won't argue with you when you say the Democrats aren't as far left as some parties in Britian. I've heard how left they are...
Depends on the party. I think the three main parties look something like this:
Labour: right of centre
Conservative: a little right of Labour
Liberal Democrat: left of centre
They're not particularly extreme as far as left and right wing go, but there are more extreme parties than they, but they're not heard from that much. I'll mention the ones I know off though:
Green: pretty left wing
Socialist Labour: they're name says it; socialist (that's left wing)
Unity Coalition: left of centre
British National: nationalistic fascist (just a little more right wing than Bush)
I think that's about right. I don't know every party, mind.
The British National Party (white) will never get into power since it's effectively British Nazis, the Green Party is mad about the enviroment and nothing else, and the Liberal Democrats (yellow) are being given their chance soon - we've tried right wing, and right center, and they haven't worked, so now we're trying left wing, and I doubt that will work either.
Cycle knows more about this than me so I'll wait for him to say what he knows, but I believe I'm right in quoting him that if the Democrats were Canadian then their name would be the Conservative Party of Canada.
That's exactly it.
American political climate lecture by a canadian and a brit.
Obviously when we expand the political arena to contain all of the western world then the US is very conservative. However, in our own realm, we have dems and repubs, that are liberal and conservative to our own culture.
However, the Democrats use the UK as a model for their gun banning attempts ala Feinstein. Canada is used as a model for the Dems proposed "Universal Healthcare", as proposed by Clinton and Kerry. The Democratic party supports gay marriage, even if Kerry only supports "civil unions". The Dems support unlimited access to abortion.
I'd say that the Dems are pretty liberal by western standards. Obviously not as liberal as some of the socialist parties in other countries, but not too far off either.
Compare the stance of the BNP and the Libertarian party and they are often similar. The BNP is "far right wing" in the UK and Libertarians are "far right wing" in the US.
Yes there is an American Communist party, and they've had a candidate in every election since they formed, but normally there are around 11 candidates for President, but usually only 2 or 3 get enough media time to effectively campaign.
So in conclusion, the US does have the whole spectrum of political favors, and as a nation we are not exclusively "right wing".
Jimro
I learned this during the Lewinsky debacle: you never want to say that American politics have reached the low water mark, because it can always get lower.
As the lawyers would put it, by introducing an attack on Kerry's military record, the Bush team "opened the door" for the current discussion of his own Vietnam-era service record.
CBS, to everyone's surprise, went out and did an actual piece of journalism in which they unearthed some actual evidence to substantiate the charges that have been circulating since 2000 about George W. Bush having been sleazed into the National Guard by his father's friends and then deserted his post for several months so he could work on his father's campaign (or so he could avoid failing a physical due to his drug and alcohol abuse, or both).
The rest of the media, shamed by this example, responded the only way they knew how: by picking up some bullsh-t that had been posted on right-wing blogs and websites and repeating it as if it were credible.
Now, CBS is in the absurd position of having to defend itself for having a few reporters on staff who can still do their jobs; and all over the United States thousands of people, sane and insane, are getting into heated arguments about which kinds of typewriters were capable of producing a superscript TH in 1972.
I hate to say this to Americans and I always regret it afterwards, but guys, there's an entire world out here waiting with bated breath to see whether your political system is still functioning well enough to allow you to vote out a government that is obviously and breathtakingly corrupt after having endured four years of their mismanagement, mistakes, and outright pillage. And it's got to be depressing to them, too, to feel as if the fate of the world is going to hinge on the history and development of the IBM Selectric.
I personally do not care that much about whether Bush went AWOL in 1972. My problem is that he's AWOL now. This was crystallized for me this past April, when the fighting in Iraq started to boil over after a long period of comparatively quiet seething.
As you may recall, on April 8th of this year, Condoleeza Rice testified before the 9/11 Commission. Most of the subsequent commentary focused on the moment at which she was forced to reveal the title of the infamous Presidential Daily Briefing from August 6, 2001: "I believe the title was 'Bin Laden Determined To Attack In The United States.'"
That certainly was a startler, especially since she then went on to insist that this memo was not any kind of a warning about any kind of terrorist attack or anything like that. They had had no warning, she said; they could never have imagined such a thing; anyway they hadn't had enough time to do anything to prevent something like 9/11. After all, they had only been in office for 233 days when it happened.
Rice repeated "233 days" frequently during her testimony. Dana Milbank and Robin Wright at the Washington Post must have been struck by it, since they were at work on a piece about the recent uprising in Iraq, and the fact that while Americans were dying there in unprecedented numbers, Bush was on vacation in Crawford:
This is Bush's 33rd visit to his ranch since becoming president. He has spent all or part of 233 days on his Texas ranch since taking office, according to a tally by CBS News. Adding his 78 visits to Camp David and his five visits to Kennebunkport, Maine, Bush has spent all or part of 500 days in office at one of his three retreats, or more than 40 percent of his presidency.
So by last April, the amount of time that Bush had spent goofing around on his movie set in Crawford exactly equaled the amount of time that Condoleeza Rice and the gang had had to work out their anti-terrorism strategy before 11-09-2001. And, in fact, Bush was at Crawford when that August 6th PDB was issued.
It's the kind of coincidence that just makes a person think. Specifically, it makes a person think, hey, maybe those first 233 days of the Bush Administration might have been put to better use if the President currently in office had actually been, you know, IN THE OFFICE.
If your employers allowed you to spend 40% of your time on vacation, you'd get five months of vacation every year. You could knock off in April and come back in September. Which would be nice for a while, until you started to feel some nagging doubts about whether the people stuck covering for you back in the office were really covering for you, or whether you were going to show up and find out that of the eight important projects you had been working on when you left, three have been f-cked up beyond repair, three have been transformed into something you never envisioned, and the two most important ones haven't been touched since you left your desk.
And that's why most people don't get 40% of their work days as paid vacation, whether they're the President of the United States or not.
Between the photo-ops and the fund-raisers and the campaign appearances and the trips to the three different vacation spots, it is perhaps not surprising that so many of the moments of crisis that Americans have faced during his presidency have occured when he was somewhere other than where you might expect a President to be. The big one, of course, was September 11, which found him sitting in an elementary school classroom in Florida listening to the students read My Pet Goat.
Thanks to Fahrenheit 911, we have had the chance to watch footage of those now-infamous seven minutes, during which Bush, having been told by Andrew Card that the nation is under attack, sits petrified on his chair at the front of the room while the children go through their drill.
He says nothing. He is not following the story, but it's hard to tell if anything else is going on inside his head, apart from the slow expansion of those black pools of fear in his eyes. This has never happened before. He is not prepared for it and there is no script to follow. He has no idea what is supposed to happen next. So he does what he's always done: he sits where he's been put and waits for the handlers to come in once this appearance is over and tell him where he's supposed to go.
My brother went through a Steve Martin phase when we were younger, and on one of Martin's albums he loses his place in the middle of a routine and has to stop talking. Then he picks up a few seconds later, saying, "Sorry, my brain went to Bermuda there for a minute." I have used that line on occasion myself; let's face it, we all have moments when our brains go AWOL. Seven solid minutes, however, is a long time for one's brain to spend vacationing in Bermuda; it's so long, in fact, that Moore made the decision not to include the entire sequence in his film, presumably because he felt he couldn't ask the audience to spend that much time watching nothing happen.
But this isn't just about those seven minutes. To understand the importance of the Pet Goat incident, you have to look at what it reveal about the way Bush approached his job.
On a morning when more than 3,000 people died in New York City because they had gotten up and gone to the office that day, Bush was out on yet another school reading photo op. He went on an astonishing number of these visits during the first months of his presidency - so many, in fact, that by August of 2001 he was starting to get ribbed for it in the press, especially because regardless of the age and grade level of the children, he always read The Very Hungry Caterpillar.
Now when I say "the press" here, of course, I'm not talking about mainstream outlets like CNN. Far from wondering aloud, as Ariana Huffington and others had done, why the President of the United States was apparently incapable of reading anything more challenging than a book pitched at four year olds, the good people at CNN's Inside Politics let us all know why Bush was sent out on those photo-ops in the first place:
ALBUQUERQUE, New Mexico (CNN) - In recent days, it's been hard to tell that President George W. Bush has been on vacation for this month of August. Yes, he's been spotted on the golf course at times, but other images have prevailed over pictures of the president engaged in summertime leisure activities. There he was on Wednesday reading a book to second graders in Albuquerque, and delivering a speech about his thoughts on education. He then planned to head to a job training center located in a predominantly Hispanic, working class part of town, before wrapping up a two day trip away from his vacation base - his ranch in Crawford, Texas.
In other words, these tours to elementary school classrooms had been arranged as a way of making it look as if Bush was still working when he was actually taking "the longest vacation taken by any recent president":
Perhaps the most important effect of Bush's 2-day trip and other recent events, some political analysts say, is simply that Bush is seen at work. "I think they're trying to stifle the inference that when he's working he doesn't work, so they have him working while he's on vacation," said Lee Miringoff, an independent pollster who heads the Marist Institute for Public Opinion in New York.
This little gem is dated August 16, 2001 - ten days after a vacationing Bush either read or maybe didn't read the "Bin Laden Determined to Attack" PDB. And apart from the valuable lesson it gives us about how tamely the American media allows itself to be led - look back at that opening paragraph, which reproduces the very spin that it discusses further down in the piece - what this piece shows us is that although Bush's handlers were aware that the American public were starting to get the feeling that Bush was playing hooky, their solution was not to have him actually do some work, but to try to make it look as if he were working.
Sticking Bush in a classroom full of cute kids and having him recite a book he had no doubt already memorized was apparently enough to fool CNN into believing that Bush was on top of things. It was not enough to fool Bin Laden.
By the time 19 of Bin Laden's operatives hijacked four American planes 26 days later, Bush's handlers had indeed gotten together and made one very important decision. They had figured out, no doubt after a lot of late-night poring over many thousands of opinion polls, that it was crucial to get Bush away from The Very Hungry Caterpillar before people started to get the idea that he could not, in fact, read. So they decided to give My Pet Goat a whirl.
September 11, 2001 taught us a lot. It does not appear to have taught Bush much. In April 2004, he was, once again, on vacation in Crawford when the latest phase of the Iraqi resistance began surging forward. He remained on vacation while people continued to die in the war he and his advisors had moved heaven and earth to start. I well remember staring at my monitor, reading the mechanical expressions of concern that Bush had phoned in to the media from Crawford, and thinking, forget Vietnam. This bastard can't even be bothered to show up for his own f--king war.
You hear all the pundits now wringing their hands and wondering why we're still talking about Vietnam in this day and age. Well, I'll tell you why: it's because after banging our heads against the wall of media complicity for the past three years, we have all learned that it is impossible to have a frank conversation about what's going on right now.
You can't talk about the fact that during one of the worst periods in American history, Bush has been an absentee president. You can't get a conversation started about what that really means. You can't get the pundits to wonder whether Bush's extraordinary neglect of his responsibilities is the result of negligence, malice, incompetence, or some combination of the three. You can't talk about what it means that Bush has held fewer press conferences than any recent president, that his campaign staff is going to unheard-of lengths to make sure that every single person at every one of his campaign events is a bona fide Bush supporter who understands that he can't be expected to answer substantive questions, or that Bush is now trying to duck out of a debate that would require him to respond on live television to questions put to him by undecided voters. You cannot get anyone at the major outlets to acknowledge the obvious fact that Bush's inability to do his job has been making the United States more and more hated, and more and more vulnerable, with every day that passes.
You can't talk about any of this. The media are all dedicated to telling us day after day that this is a normal state of affairs and that everything is just fine, and that all we have to worry about is what might happen one day if, God forbid, the voters replaced Bush with someone who could and would actually work. To talk about Bush's record of absenteeism in the twenty-first century would require them to acknowledge that the ship of state is in the middle of a category five hurricane and the captain is somewhere down in the cabin watching Veggie Tales. And nobody wants to be the first to tell their viewers that.
So instead it all has to be done in code. We can only talk about Bush's failure to do his duty now by talking about his failure to do his duty then. As much as I enjoy a good mudfight, I just get sick of the game sometimes. Would it really cost the American people so much to confront the danger they're in, and to just come out and say that they could forgive Bush for skipping out on his duty in the Texas National Guard if only he hadn't skipped out on his duty as President? Or that it would be possible to overlook the fact that in 1972 Bush exploited his family connections to keep his own ass safe and his own secrets hidden while other men went off to die in a war that he supported, if only he wasn't doing the exact same thing right now?
So to Hell with the superscript, with Ben Barnes's daughter, with CNN and Fox and all the rest of them. I don't give a sh-t about where George W. Bush was in 1972. But I know exactly where he was on September 11, 2001. That's enough for me; and it ought to be enough for everyone else in the US, and indeed, the whole western world. Forget 30 years ago.
Since January 2000, Bush has racked up a piss-poor attendance record and even worse job performance, and if he were anyone else he would have been fired long ago. And when he finally is fired in November, even I am not going to b-tch about how much vacation he takes. Once the most powerful nation on earth has a real President, Bush can take all the vacation he wants.
Cycle...you must have a lot of time on your hands...
Next we're going to hear that Bush had an affair with one of his secretaries...hey! Every president seemed to be guilty of this one...
Only problem with politics...once you get into it, you begain to feel the power you have and become overwhelmed by it. It can turn good men into corrupt men within a matter of a year or two.
No, that doesn't mean I'm talking about Bush!
Ah yes, Cycle, I heard of Bush's reaction to the news that the USA was under attack... Honestly, I'd have performed better than he did that day. The least he could've done was made up some excuse to leave the school and take his jumbo jet back to Washington DC ASAP.
Yet another wonderful essay, Cycle. Keep it up!
Oh yes, and Jimro, if you don't like a Canadian and a Brit telling the truth about American politics, then I advise you to keep your mouth shut if you ever have the inclination to say anything about Canadian or British politics.
When last I looked, left and right wing were universal concepts and every nation's parties existed on the same scale. Interesting how America has an exclusive system when it suits debate. Honestly, if you feel like having your own system you could shift the fence right up to the Republicans and call them a 'moderate' party.
But see, that's flawed, isn't it?
Cycle,
The presidents home is in Crawford Texas. With modern communications the president can do his job from nearly anywhere. To assume that because he isn't in the white house means he's goofing off is laughable.
The "Seven Minutes" of F9/11 don't mention that Ari Fleischer was in the back of the room away from the cameras hold up a sign that said "Say nothing". F9/11 is also pure propaganda. Of course Bush has had dealings with Bin Laden's family, he (Bin Laden) is related to a bunch of the Saudi Royal family.
Your post puts twisting the facts onto a higher level, almost an art form. Who does the president work for? Obviously Americans, and he hasn't been AWOL in his duties, because everywhere he goes, the job goes with him.
You are much too intelligent to fall for a line of BS like this from a conservative propaganda source, why assume we would?
Jimro
The presidents home is in Crawford Texas. With modern communications the president can do his job from nearly anywhere. To assume that because he isn't in the white house means he's goofing off is laughable.
First, that's not the point. Besides, if that were true, then anyone could spend 40% of their time on vacation. My mom doesn't have to be physically there to give seminars about AIDS; she can do it by webcam. Alas, most Americans are unable to get even two weeks of paid vacation each year, let alone five months.
Second, it might be worth mentioning that every time something bad happens, it turns out that Bush was on vacation, or campaigning, or whatever.
The "Seven Minutes" of F9/11 don't mention that Ari Fleischer was in the back of the room away from the cameras hold up a sign that said "Say nothing".
That's interesting, you know, because I haven't heard about that. Ever. You'd think that the media, or Bill O'Reilly, or maybe even Bush himself would have mentioned it, but I don't recall ever hearing about it ever. Also, a thorough search of the first ten results that come up after googling "'ari fleischer' NEAR 'say nothing'" shows nothing about a sign that says "Say Nothing".
F9/11 is also pure propaganda. Of course Bush has had dealings with Bin Laden's family, he (Bin Laden) is related to a bunch of the Saudi Royal family.
Fahrenheit 9/11, bin Laden, and the Saudis have nothing to do with what we're talking about.
Your post puts twisting the facts onto a higher level, almost an art form. Who does the president work for? Obviously Americans, and he hasn't been AWOL in his duties, because everywhere he goes, the job goes with him.
And a ruddy good job he's doing of it, eh? Need I paste that list again?
Cycle,
I challenge you to find something good that Bush has done.
Jimro
Overthrowing the Taliban.
That's it?! I'm sure there are a few things you can list, if you try real hard that is....
