quote: S&L Scandal the Clintons were involved in comes to mind,
The Clintons? I think it was the Bushes that were involved with the S&L scandal. I mean, Neil Bush was the president of a bank that went bust and cost the taxpayers a billion dollars.
And Jeb defaulted on a loan for a building of 4.5 million dollars. When the property was reappraised after the default, it was valued at 500,000 and what do you know, he bought it back from. . . himself(?), leaving the taxpayers to pick the other 4 million of the 4.5 million dollar loan. They later sold the building (You know, the one they bought for 4.5 million, defauleted on, then snapped up for half a million) for 7 million. But they didn't make a profit.
I think you have your scandals confused. I think you are probably talking about Whitewater, but compared to the 1.2 trillion dollar S&L scandal of the Reagan/Bush administration, it wasn't even really a blip on the radar.
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quote:I think you are probably talking about Whitewater, but compared to the 1.2 trillion dollar S&L scandal of the Reagan/Bush administration, it wasn't even really a blip on the radar.
You know, we've kind of addressed this particular method of debate as pointless and not helpful to anyone.
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smitty, I understand that politics can seem pretty hopeless. It very often feels like nothing we do will ever make a difference. But by failing to even try, we are giving up on the very idea of democracy.
Unlike many other countries, we Americans don't have a lot that binds us to gether as a country. We don't have a shared ethnicity, or centuries of shared history. All we have is our adherence to a set of ideals. That whole "goverment of the people, by the people, for the people", thing. You remember. It isn't a very practical idea and it is sometimes contrary to human nature and the ways of power. But, futile as it sometimes seems, many people have gone to jail, spent their fortunes, even given their lives because they believed in that ideal. The least we can do is vote and maybe send an occasional e-mail to our congressman.
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has." Margaret Mead
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quote: As far as Bush being out of power, that may be, but he has a brother, children of his own, heck even a VP who may consider running for president someday.
Jeb will not run for office for at least another two election cycles, it would be feasably impossible for this not to be seen as a ploy for a dynasty unless he waited a considerable period. The daughters stand absolutely no chance of becoming elected, lets face it, in the american electoral society a woman has no chance of becoming president unless she's basically Margaret Thatcher reborn. And Dick Cheney could never run on his own, not because of experience, he's one of the best, but his health is in too heavy a state of decay, no chance for a modern FDR.Therein Bush has no reason to grab for yet more power.
I believe that the Bush administration views this program to be a tool for the public good, not a weapon for personal gain. The facts are though, however unfortunately, that their are no facts, and even if the entire program were released we would into the public domain, we would never really know what we wanted to know, for we would be practically pulverized with swing, viewpoints, bias, and pundits, from all sides. C'est la vie. We must simply decide where our faith lies, and do what we believe to be right.
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Ummm, didn't Whitewater involve an S&L? Yup. Go Google it.
Kate, I'm actually one of these guys who try to make a difference in my community. If I have a clear path, I can operate without clear results. Here's the problem. How do you create this change? How do you get from Point A to Point B? By electing politicians who say they will change things? I do vote. I do send letters to my Congressman. But you're basically asking a group of people to give something up, in return for honor. And some people don't value honor quite as high as others. I'm open to ideas. I just haven't heard any, other than the generic "hold them responsible".
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Yup. All those things. Keep at it. If enough of us do, we can change things. Or at least we can honestly say to ourselves that we did our best and that we didn't give up.
Please don't think my rant was aimed at you specifically. It is more the idea that we can't do anything so why try, that I think is our worst enemy.
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Stay informed. Know how your elected officials vote on issues. Let them know if you agree. (I once e-mailed my congresswoman to urge her to support a bill. She e-mailed back to tell me that she was a co-sponsor. Heh.)
Inform others. Help get underrepresented voters to the polls.
Write or sign petitions.
Write letters to the editor.
Read news rather than watch it - and from multiple sources.
Volunteer or contribute to campaigns.
Run for local office.
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posted
Well, wome of those are good ideas (I should probably write more letters), some I already do, and some aren't very viable in this area.
And there's no way I would ever run for office. Too much mud slinging. I honestly believe the type of person who should be in office are exactly the people who will never run.
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More importantly, perhaps, the Clintons were found to have been involved in no wrongdoing with Whitewater. While you may believe otherwise, that's not pointing out any lies of any sort.
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Ummm, fugu, you've not convinced me yet who is lying about what. Considering how many times Whitewater was investigated, I would say there's something there. But, the Clinton's are smooth operators, and covered their tracks well.
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I don't have to convince you, I merely have to point out you haven't provided any examples of a previous Presidential administration successfully keeping up a lie despite there being public proof to the contrary.
As the Clintons were found to have no wrongdoing in Whitewater, it doesn't much matter if you think they were lying. Its perfectly possible to think someone's lying about nigh anything. That's irrelevant to the examples being looked for, though.
Of course nearly every Presidential administration we've had has lied, at the very least about national security. The question is if other Presidential administrations have used lies for such pernicious propaganda purposes, pushing their agenda despite the evidence they're building on being demonstrably false.
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quote:Originally posted by smitty: Well, wome of those are good ideas (I should probably write more letters), some I already do, and some aren't very viable in this area.
And there's no way I would ever run for office. Too much mud slinging. I honestly believe the type of person who should be in office are exactly the people who will never run.
Well, I guess you are proving your own point.
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My point smitty, was that the S&L scandal, which is referred to as the S&L scandal, wasn't the S&L scandal you were talking about. That was called Whitewater. Two different things. Tangentially related, but wholly separate names.
You know, I don't think we should shut up about the lying because they all did it. We only found out they all did it during our lifetime. We we were kids, we didn't know that every president since Eisenhower was lying to us about Vietnam.
There is a difference between keeping a secret, keeping your mouth shut, and lying to the people. Maybe they need Presidential seminars explaining the difference and which of the two they are allowed to do.
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quote:Or the other politicians went with the flow, knowing they could change their story when they wished. I hate to tell you guys, but we don't get enough information to make even a slightly informed opinion about these subjects. All we ever get is he said / he said.
Given that we don't have any access to the facts, we have to form our opinions on what we know about the reliability of our sources.
We know from hind sight that the Bush administration has been an unreliable source of information in the past. The information they presented to pursuade us to attack Iraq, is now widely known to be false. It doesn't matter whether they knowingly mislead the country or merely failed to verify the facts they were given. Either way, they misinformed us about something which was crucially important and has lead to the death of thousands.
That well established history should make every American highly sceptical of information coming from the Bush administration. In the he said/she said debate -- we know without question that we can't trust this administration to give us the truth.
"Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice . . . ."
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Well, Rabbit, I'm less sure of the "widely known to be false". I don't know without question whether or not he can be trusted. I understand there are many who feel as you do. But there are also many who don't. Which is bore out by the whole "getting re-elected" thing. So your feelings on the matter are not the end-all answer. Sorry.
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smitty: The Bush administration now acknowledges that most of it was false. This is not in dispute. Of course, they assert this was due to failures in the intelligence community, but not in the higher levels of the administration.
There certainly were failures in intelligence, but there are also reports by people like this guy: Click on the obvious story
And we do have Rice and Cheney (among others) on record saying things about how Iraq's recently purchased aluminum tubes could only really be used for uranium refinement, when there is proof their offices received strong reports by the energy department's nuclear experts not just disagreeing with the notion, but saying it made no particular sense at all.
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Yup, they went ahead and agreed with what the papers were already saying. Of course, the papers never acknowledged that there was evidence of illegal arms. There just wasn't the slam dunk nuke they were looking for.
I get the impression from some of my military friends that it was the administrations way of saying "we'll never prove our assertions, let's just give in". I'm sure there was some faulty intel. But saying it was outright lying....
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smitty: Ah, so anyone who criticizes the administration, despite being an intelligence expert who was a high level insider during the period in question, is making things up? No wonder you trust the character of those in the Bush administration, you've decided not to believe anyone who tells you otherwise.
Also, your adamancy that much of it may not have been false is amusing. Perhaps you'll believe Bush himself? We know it was false.
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quote: He values loyalty and appoints people that are loyal to him. Sometimes that is their major qualification.
Ah yes, because Condi Rice is well known for a being a brainless oaf and all think of her as a uneducated nitwit.
And Rumsfeld and Cheney, neither one of them have ANY sort of experience at all, unless you count serving in multiple administrations in multiple positions and performing briliantly.
Oh, and yes of course Carl Rove is a complete fool, as so well proven by his botching of Bush's campaigns.
Yes, clearly these people have no other qualifications other than being loyal to G.W.
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How about you apply that sarcastic eye to his cabinet, Shepherd? Right now, you've named the high-profile appointees.
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I don't have a benchmak for believing the people in the intelligence community, either. Disgruntled employees say lots of things. Especially if they are morally opposed to war, or upset at some slight, or just wanting attention.
What I refuse to believe is that a madman, who is known for torture, gassing his own people, and starting wars suddenly turned over a new leaf and had NO WMD's. The fact that we found no stockpiles is more damning to me that if we had found one or two. This guy was using the UN "sanctions" to make himself richer. Why would I believe that he DIDN'T have these weapons? What was his motivation for getting rid of them? It's much more likely that he was able to move them into a sympathetic country.
I think the Pres was caught in a situation where everyone was accusing him of lying, he had nothing to back up his claims, so he passed it off as a mistake.
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Oddly enough, there weren't any countries sympathetic to Iraq to speak of. Oh, some show support to the insurgents now, but Iraq had managed to piss just about everyone off.
As for your continued rejection of the failures of US intelligence despited repeated testimony from members of the intelligence community and the President of the United States, I can only shake my head and wonder.
We know the Niger evidence was forged (badly, too). We know our "source" for a major nuclear problem was wrong in all particulars so far checked and has a history of lying. We know that the aluminum tubes so considered damning by Cheney, Rice, and Powell were, just as our own Energy Department nuclear experts told us long ago, useless for nuclear centrifuges and perfect for a variety of missile it was perfectly legitimate for Iraq to have. We know every location we had considered likely to be a site for current development chemical or biological weaponry turned out to be a perfectly legitimate site for some other purpose.
These are all massive failures in intelligence. Are you telling me you somehow know they weren't wrong? If so, could you provide one (note: just one) shred of evidence to that effect?
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Fugu, I don't know anything. Was some of the intelligence faulty? Surely. Any intelligence is going to have faults.
As for "prefectly legitimate sites", you do realize that many chemical weapons are very close to pesticides?
There were signs that Saddam had been working towards nukes. We've found several hidden caches of weapons, stored to be recovered after the war. We know he had chemical weapons. We know he was flaunting the UN sanctions. That's all I know.
Just so we can be clear, I'm not supposed to believe the President, except when he says something you agree with, right? I don't know what the truth is over there. But I'm not buying CNN's version of everything.
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a. Chemical weapons deteriorate over time, as do biological weapons. It's likely that the weapons Saddam had deteriorated, and he didn't have the resources to build new ones. Also, chances are he's not going to use them even if he has them, he had them during the Gulf War, and didn't use them.
b. Building nukes is hard. It's not something that no one notices that you do, and it's not something you do when you're say, strapped for resources. If you're that worried about nukes, you should have been far far more worried about Iran and North Korea.
As it happens, I think the Bush Administration saw the evidence it wanted to see. Maybe not the best judgement call on the part of the most powerful man on the planet, but neither is it lying.
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quote:What I refuse to believe is that a madman, who is known for torture, gassing his own people, and starting wars suddenly turned over a new leaf and had NO WMD's.
Keep in mind that the chemical weapons he was known to have -- the ones that the U.S. sold him in the 1980s -- do not have an infinite "shelf life." IIRC, they were no longer usable at the time of the second invasion of Iraq.
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Good point by Twink and Blac. But this is also stuff a decent chemist could make, too. And I'm not going to argue that the admin saw what it wanted in the intelligence.
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quote:But this is also stuff a decent chemist could make, too.
With appropriate supplies, yes. Certainly many of the supplies needed for some chemical weapon agents are readily available here in North America, but I have to question whether Iraq could manufacture weapons-grade material in sufficient quantities and with adequate delivery systems to be a threat to much of anyone.
If the Bush-Blair memos I linked to are accurate, the Administration had decided to invade Iraq well before they even presented their information, such as it was, to the U.N. To that end, Bush suggested the possibility of painting U.S. planes in U.N. colours to provoke an attack that would constitute a material breach of Resolution 1441, thereby legally justifying an invasion. If that's the case, saying "they saw what they wanted to see" would be putting it mildly; they wanted to invade Iraq and were apparently willing to say just about anything in order to do so.
[Edited for grammar.]
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I've never even asserted the President has lied, because I've never caught him at it. But you can be darn sure when he ever-so-rarely admits a mistake its one that was actually made.
Its not just that our intelligence was wrong in parts, but that it was nearly 100% wrong. If you're going to try to justify the war intelligence, then at least research a single piece of moderately major, contemporary intelligence in support of the war that turned out to be correct. I'm not aware of even one.
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quote:Originally posted by Blacwolve: As it happens, I think the Bush Administration saw the evidence it wanted to see. Maybe not the best judgement call on the part of the most powerful man on the planet, but neither is it lying.
I disagree.
The administration saw the evidence it wanted to see because that's all the evidence it looked at. Whether Bush and Co. deceived us, or deceived themselves so they could deceive us, it's still deception, and it's still lying.
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Shepherd: Yes, but apparently you haven't. I've accused several people in the administration of lying, but never Bush. I've asserted the administration (including Bush) said many things to justify the war that turned out to be incorrect, and often badly, laughably incorrect, but this does not necessarily mean a lie was (always) involved.
This President is incredibly PR-savvy. His administration as a whole has made a concrete effort to ensure he's never in a situation where he has to lie (or it can be proven he lied, no way of knowing). Furthermore, their political strategy centers around never having to admit a mistake -- he signs any bill that gets put before him, if something may have been in error they do a PR campaign to change topics/emphases/history (reasons why we went to Iraq for $500, Alex?), et cetera. You can be darn sure whenever Bush has to admit a mistake there was actually a mistake made.
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quote:The administration made clear to the CIA what they wanted to hear.
People who didn't say what they wanted to hear were dismissed as loonies.
These things are either unproven or exaggerated.
However I qualify that by saying that even though I still think the Iraq war is justified, I believe our reasons for being there were terribly presented, misprioritized, and mismanaged by the Administration.
I believed then and believe now that had the Administration stuck with the fact that Saddam was still hedging on weapons inspections, that he was a brutal dictator with ties to terrorism (not just al Qaeda which is to this day debateable at best), and that we needed a drastic change in how we deal with regimes and men like Saddam Hussein post 9-11...he would've had his war, and virtually none of the problems about it today would be riding him, and us.
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Oh, and fugu...while you have not directly accused President Bush of lying himself while he was actually speaking...there are only so many times you can accuse a leader's subordinates of lying, deceiving, twisting, etc., and point out how it benefits the leader, before people start rather expectedly getting the impression that you're sure the leader is lying, too.
I mean, that's really the only other option besides "the President is stupid" that your frequent assertions on Administration news permits. Either President Bush is incompetent, and his Administration is lying and cheating constantly, right under his very nose and he doesn't know it...or he does know it.
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I think fugu's drawing a distinction between actually lying, as Bush only rarely does in public, and habitually being the cause of lies in other people.
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That still leaves only two possible conclusions: either he's accidentally the cause of lies in others, in which case he's a dunderhead, or he's instructing them to lie for him and is the cause THAT way.
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It should be noted that the the NRC determined that key documents Bush used were forgeries by doing a google search. If Bush did not know the information he presented was false when it could be so easily determined, then he and his administration are guilty of gross negligence. When one makes a decision that will cost thousands of human lives and billions of dollars, it is ones ethical and moral responsibility to double and triple check the facts. Even if you think Bush didn't know the information was bad, his behavior was highly unethical.
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Whatever your views on the administration, we must all agree the Karl Rove is a public relations/campaign master.
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Given Karl Rove, I would imagine that any random sampling of any given ten-minute period from his day would have at least a 50% chance of containing evil. And I'm including sleep periods.
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quote:Even if you think Bush didn't know the information was bad, his behavior was highly unethical.
And we've come full circle to the very same question I asked before: which is it? Is Pres. Bush lying, or is he incompetent?
Pres. Bush is not the one who actually checks the veracity of documents his Administration uses, Rabbit. You know that. It would be much more reasonble for you to say it has been unethical of him not to apologize and explain this behavior by his subordinates, rather than expect he never have done it in the first place as though he himself was the one who did it.
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Rakeesh: of course I think Bush bears some fault for employing such subordinates, and I've said as much. I recall on hatrack asserting Rice should have been fired, for instance, and that it spoke badly of Bush for not doing so.
However, my position regarding these things has been constant. I've always been very careful to only accuse those of lying that I can actually prove (though of course the theoretical possibility remains the people involved were astonishingly incompetent or being kept isolated due to some sort of bizarre internal conspiracy), and I resent people basically telling me that I've really been accusing the President of lying, when I haven't, or of being otherwise grossly inconsistent in my position.
Rakeesh: there's a third possibility (assuming I'm reading "dunderhead" correctly). He just doesn't particularly care if his subordinates tell lies to others, provided they're loyal and truthful to him, and the lies they tell don't harm his position. That's the possibility I lay my money on, and is what's been implied by most of my statements on the subject.
edit: I realize I said "Rakeesh" twice . . . silly me. *pies self*
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I don't know what the truth is over there. But I'm not buying CNN's version of everything.
