Aside to all: Started this post and then got hit by some technical/weather related glitches. Satellite internet can be a curse at times. Sincerely thought it was saved in draft form rather than posted so I could finish it later. It’d be funnier if it hadn’t already happened (sorta) once today on another post.
Even half finished it awakened Insipid so I’ll let it stand with just a little minor editing.
Let us begin with Jonn’s post.
I won’t riff on Kerry, you are allowed to have your opinion. [shrug]
Those of us who helped kick Kerry aside are once again being demeaned it seems. Mentioned a book in a comment, it’s a book that explains how a process led to a truth.. A truth that most can acknowledge without difficulty.
Kicked the exchange over to one of the authors and he told me about a price change.
My debate was whether to promo that a new price for the eReader version on FB or here. You lose
Said Scott: “I just dropped the Kindle price of TSTRS to $0.99, so it should be within most budgets.”
There is ample documentary evidence that the Swift Boat veterans (none of which were there when he actually earned his Silver Star- the one guy on a boat with him wasn’t present at the time) are liars. There is certainly ample documentary evidence to support his claims. There’s an after-action report, there’s the Silver Star citation, there’s investigations by ABC News, the Washington Post and the Associated Press that all contradict the Swift Boats propoganda.
If John Glenn ever became the Democratic nominee i’m sure Conservatives would argue he never made it into space.
What’s really strange about the Swift Boaters du jour is how easily disproven their claims are. All you have to do is listen to ANY speech by President Obama in which he mentions the death of Osama Bin Laden and you’ll know that he absolutely does give credit to the troops.
In fact if anyone can be accused of “spiking the football” it’s George W. Bush. Hell he did a whole endzone dance, clad in a flight suit (even though he didn’t fly the plane and could of arrived by helicopter saving the taxpayer money). As always, Republicans are seeing what they want to see in President Obama- an arrogant (code word for uppity) braggart unwilling to credit the troops- rather than what is there. Someone who amply praises the troops every time the subject comes up.
It’s unusual when all you have to do to debunk someone is say “listen to the whole speech”.
hello troll…..
George W. Bush reference = instant fail. Of course, every post you make is pretty much exactly that.
@3- Oh, i’m sorry, I forgot, George W. Bush is now Voldemort- he who shall not be named.
Funny how both former Democratic Presidents can speak at OUR convention whereas you all have to pretend that George W. Bush did not exist. Can’t even have the father, reminds us too much of the son.
No, just that you keep blaming him for everything, and hold the current regime accountable for nothing. That card has long since worn out.
Oh hey Insipid is back! Refresh my memory are you the liberal arts major that works in fast food, or are you the guy that got booted from the Army after 6 months and hates real veterans?
in·sip·id adj.
1. Lacking flavor or zest; not tasty.
2. Lacking qualities that excite, stimulate, or interest; dull.
@5- What you call “blaming” i call “pointing out reality.” I’ll stop blaming Bush when you start.
@6 Someone has to explain to me how making up a pathetic fantasy constitutes an insult.
I can do the same shit-
J.M. Are you the loser who lives in your mothers basement playing with your toy pistol all day?
J.M. Are you the guy with the huge beer belly and no teeth that gets misty eyed listening to Hank Williams music and lives in a trailer park?
My guess is that neither of those statements make you feel bad because they’re almost certainly not true.
If these “zingers” make you feel particularly clever, keep at it. But they’re neither funny nor particularly effective as far as insults go. You’ll save yourself a lot of time by just calling me an asshole.
This is why I don’t debate with you, it’s pointless. On the other hand, pointing and laughing at you when you do everything you can to cover for the fraud in chief, no matter how outrageous it gets, is well worth it.
Insipid, here is the link to the transcript of Obama’s speech on Bin Laden’s death.
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20058783-503544.html
In it, he credits the intel teams and “a small team of Americans” once in the first ten paragraphs. He has two more mentions of the Intel and counterterrorist teams in short paragraphs later on in the speech.
In contrast, he mentions himself using the words “I” and “Me” no less than six times in the first ten paragraphs.
Contrast this to the speech given when Saddam was captured. In the first line of Bush’s speech, he credits the military for the capture. There are only four mentions of the word “I” and none of the word “me”.
Those four times that the word “I” is used are in the context of “I have a message”, “I thank the members of our armed forces”, “I congratulate them”, and “I also have a message for all Americans.”
There was no attempt by Bush to claim credit, because he knew that it was not his efforts to capture Saddam. However, Obama wanted EVERYONE to know that it was all him. He decided to hunt Bin Laden, and he was the one who made the decision to pull the trigger.
My fourteen year old niece could have made the decision to kill Bin Laden, that was a no brainer.
http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/12/14/sprj.irq.bush.transcript/index.html
Almost forgot one thing Insipid.
Asshole.
@1: If there was such overwhelming documentary evidence that the SBVs were lying, then John F-ing Kerry would have a very easy slam dunk case to sue. But, since he hasn’t, it shows more that he knows the truth and his version won’t stand up in a court of law, but folks like you only care about the court of public opinion.
When you’re in the military and operating in the same AO with other units, there are some people that are known by reputation due to their actions. John F-ing Kerry is one of them. I have talked with a man who was a member of the Brown Water Navy and was on PBRs in the same AO as JF-ingK at the same time and I asked him his impression of JF-ingK. He stated he wasn’t in his unit, but that Kerry was well known throughout that area and was only interested in John F-ing Kerry (kind of a narcissist like our current CinC).
Funny how insipid all of a sudden knows the cost per flight hour of a helicopter versus the jet used by President Bush (and quick, insipid! What’s the plane used by him and what is the typical helicopter used by a CV air wing and what are the ranges of each–no fair peeking!)
Personally, if AW1 Tim had said so, I’d probably believe him, but then again, he knows what the fuck he’s talking about. Maybe had you served you’d know when to talk, and when not to in matters such as these.
And since you’re so bent out of shape about the fact he wore a flight suit, perhaps you could explain or refute the need for him to wear one at all–you know, jet aircraft, G-forces, shit like that.
Finally, you want to talk about “victory laps?” Look at the video I referred to Jonn earlier this morning. Queen Jeanne the Spending Machine is dummer than a bag of hammers (apologies to bags of hammers) but she and this administration are pimping that same meme out and have been ever since OBL assumed room temperature, no thanks to Obama, although to hear him and his sycophants talk about it, he was there pulling the trigger himself.
“I’ll stop blaming Bush when you start.”
Yet you will deflect any blame for the current administration with your dying breath.
I’d like to thank insipid for his contributions to this thread. I was debating whether or not to buy the Kindle book (even at 99 cents). Insipid’s posts convinced me that I should buy it, even if it had not been reduced in price.
I don’t normally go where uninspired has been, but here goes:
I would like to point out that the bailout legislation proposed by G. W. Bush in July 2008 was rejected by the legislature (Wall Street Journal front page story), but was rewritten and passed in 2009, and is now resulting in a $25.5 billion dollar loss to taxpayers as a direct result of loss of value in the shares of General Motors stock owned by the US government. The “too big to fail” thing? A complete disaster. And that’s only part of the story.
Unemployment prior to the current administration ranged from 4.4% to 6.5%. The stock market ‘crash’ occurred in March 2009, unemployment spiked to 8.7% in April 2009, with a high of 10.0% by October 2009, and a low of 8.1% in April 2012, currently standing at 8.3% as of August 16, 2012. (Bureau of Labor statistics).
The debt-to-revenue ratio has leaped from 165% in 2008 (Bush) to 262% this year(Obama), according to the International Monetary Fund. The current president has done nothing to close the gap between spending and revenue, nor has there been a budget drawn up or passed since the beginning of 2010.
I think the only thing I’d blame Bush for was being a drunk, a putz and a bad shot.
I’ll happily go along with what you want, sip. Asshole.
Almost forgot, this is sure to drive Sip batshit crazy, seems at least one writer at Newsweek, the mag that sold for a Dollar, has the stones to call it as he sees it.
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/pj-gladnick/2012/08/20/duers-kossacks-go-berserk-over-newsweek-obama-cover
Yo, UpNorth, I read the Newsweek article, printed it out for posterity. I checked Niall Ferguson’s statistics. They are correct. Oh, the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth!
I am SOOOOOO glad I did not vote for that clown.
@11- You really need to keep away from arguing the law.
Defamation cases are among the most difficult cases to win even when the person defamed is NOT a public figure. When the person is a public figure it is virtually impossible. It’s the reason why people can accuse Bill Clinton of murder and the reason why Al Franken can call Bill O’Reilly a “lying liar”. The elements that MUST be proven in a successful defamation suit are (taken directly from my notes, in fact!):
1. There must be a false statement of fact about a plaintiff.
2. It must be published. Here published means being made available to a third party. Defamation can be oral (slander) as well as printed (Libel).
3. There has to be some level of fault. The defendant has to of acted negligently or acted with malice. One or the other of these standards has to be met. We use the actual malice standard if the plaintiff is a public figure, we use the negligence standard for everyone else.
4. There has to be damages (unless you can prove negligence per se- which doesn’t apply here).
While Kerry could in a hypothetical suit prove 1 and 2 he would not be able to prove 3 and 4. Maybe they lied because they hated Kerry, maybe they lied because they loved Bush, but it’s hard to determine actual malice- especially when it comes to a political campaign.
And proving damages would also be prohibitive. There’s no records of Kerry seeing a psychiatrist over the things the SBVFT said. Even if you wanted to argue that the allegations caused Kerry to not get the Presidency, so what? Not getting a job isn’t a valid claim for damages. Plus how the hell would you prove that the lies of the SBVFT were a direct result of him not getting the job anyway? Short of massive polling that would probably dwarf the cost of a suit, i’m not sure how you could show such a thing based on preponderence of the evidence.
In short, massive fail, Old Trooper the absence of a defamation suit is by no means an admission of the truth of the claims.
Kerry was a turd, swift boat vets didn’t lie. If anything they did this country a favor by making sure that asshat didn’t occupy the WH. End of story.
@10- See how easy?
A former adviser to John McCain writes a critical article abut Barack Obama and that’s supposed to upset me? I detected dishonesty by the third paragraph- the predictions President Obama made were based on bullshit numbers given by the Bush administration.
@15- the facts are that the economy was hemorrhaging 750k jobs a month at the end of Bush’s Presidency 2.2 million in his last three months alone. It continued to hemorrhage jobs for 6 months until his policies took offense. Since they have there has been over 20 months of consecutive job growth, FAR more than in the entire Bush Presidency. The economy was CONTRACTING at a rate of nearly 9% when Bush left office. We would be in great depression now were it not for the herculean efforts of President Obama. His efforts to save the US and world economy alone earns him a place as one of the great presidents. Bush is the drunk driver that ran over the U.S. economy. Dr. Obama has done a miraculous job fixing it up, but the damage was not done by Bush, not President Obama.
#22 is one of the fucking idiots you need to be more concerned about than the fucking idiot occupying the WH, because he’s part of the mob of fucking idiots that put him there. See the new Newsweek cover yet Sip? Yeah, it’s over when Newsweek starts saying we need a new (actual) President.
Two weeks ago Newsweek called Mitt Romney a wimp. Diffrent cover authors write different articles. I didn’t get excited about the one two weeks ago and i’m not upset about the one out now.
Of course not, the rest of your gaggle of idiots should be worried. The end is near.
Anyone else but me see the irony in the following:
(1) insipid arguing how “bad” Bush (43) was for the economy when unemployment is worse today – 3yrs 7 months later – than the day when Bush left office (which was the highest unemployment during the Bush presidency),
(2) insipid not mentioning the fact that the economy under the current administration had the longest run of 9+% official unemployment since the Great Depression (and is still in the toilet at over 8%), and
(3) insipid arguing that Bush was fiscally irresponsible when the Obama administration has added more Federal debt in 3 1/2 years than the Bush (43) administration did in a full 8 years?
Piece of free advice for ya, insipid: ya might not want to argue the current POTUS’s “sterling” economic record as a plus. That’s a losing argument – because this administration, like the Carter administration before them, are economic fools. An administration with economic sense would have the economy doing far better today.
I’ll cut the current administration some slack for 2009 – they inherited a bad situation, just like Bush(43) did re: Islamic terrorism and al Qaeda in Jan 2001. But after the first year, you own it. And things haven’t improved much at all since the current administration began in Jan 2009.
Oh, and for the record: in December 2008, the last full month of the Bush(43) administration, the average number of people employed was approx 143,328,000. Last month, July 2012, the average number of people employed was approx 142,220,000. That means 1.1 million fewer people are working today than in December 2008.
Yeah, that’s a great record on “job creation”. After 3 1/2+ years, we’re still “in the hole” 1.1 million jobs.
http://www.dlt.ri.gov/lmi/pdf/usadj.pdf
They did not inherit a “bad situation” in 2009. They inherited the worst economic downturn since the great depression. We lost 2.25 million jobs in the last three months of the Bush administration and continued to lose jobs at the rate of about 700 thousand a month until President Obama’s policies FINALLY came into effect. Since then it’s been a slow but steady gain of employment ever since. Even Mitt Romney admits that it is unfair to blame a new administration for not being able to fix job losses from a previous administration. At least that’s what he thought in the FAR LESS SEVERE downturn of 2006:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArRj-dQXX3Y&feature=player_embedded
In fact if the Republicans weren’t blocking aid to the state and the jobs act- uncontroversial measures when asked for by Reagan and Bush- we’d be looking at unemployment at around 7% right now. The fact that it has taken years to recover is because of the huge amount of damage Bush did, and the the obstructionism of Congress.
Again, virtually the entire Debt is from policies of Bush and the great recession that he caused. It comes from having less jobs and greater outlays due to unemployment. That and the fact that Presidet Obama put the wars actually on the books.
The actual irony is that the party that insists on “taking responsibility” won’t.
Again, insipid: after the first year, the current Administration owns things – lock, stock, and barrel. Things aren’t any better today than they were 3 yrs 7 months ago.
You’re grasping at straws. Face up to the fact that your hero has “screwed the pooch” on the economy. And on most everything else he’s touched since day one, for that matter.
I never thought I’d see a POTUS that made Jimmy the Clueless look good by comparison. But the current guy just might be the one to do that.
And don’t give me that “GOP obstructionism” crap, either. The Democratic Party owned both houses of Congress from 2006 through 2010. Things didn’t improve then (they actually got worse during that entire time frame). What little improvement we’ve seen began after the GOP took control of the House of Representatives in 2011 and started providing some modicum of adult leadership in Congress. So don’t blame the GOP for all the current mess. The ones who controlled both houses of Congress and, since Jan 2009, the Presidency, own a big chunk of the blame. And since 2010, they own it all.
You know it’s bad when the anointed one is compared to Jimmy Carter, and Jimmy Carter vehemently rejects the comparison.
No, they own NOTHING. The fault is entirely Bush’s whose policies caused a global catastrophe. Your statements are as absurd as someone blaming the doctors of Gabby Giffords for not fixing the problem caused by Laughner. After all, laughner only had her for a second, the Doctors have been taking care of her for over a year now. How come she’s not 100% yet? Because the damage was THAT bad. Again, we were losing 750K jobs a month when President Obama took office and the economy was contracting at 9% and continued to do so until his policies took effect. The fact that we’re recovering at all is miraculous and it is due to the astounding leadership of President Obama.
As far as the myth of the President “owning” both houses goes- the the Dems only had a filibuster-proof majority (including two independents) from the time that Al Franken was finally seated (July 7, 2009) until the point that Teddy Kennedy passed away (August 25, 2009). That’s only seven weeks. By the time Al Franken was sworn in on July 7, 2009, Ted Kennedy had not cast a Senate vote for about four months because he was terminally ill with brain cancer. (He died on August 25, 2009.) Robert Byrd was also hospitalized from May 18 through June 30, 2009 and may not have been well enough to attend Congress and vote for some time afterward. Byrd (who died in June 2010) was also periodically too ill to attend and vote during the September 2009-February 2010 period.
So no, the Dems only had a super majority for 7 weeks. And that’s counting Joe Lieberman as part of the majority- a guy who campaigned for John McCain! Furthermore this Party that used to CLAIM to eschew politics made the political decision when President Obama came to office to fillibuster and block EVERYTHING even things they agreed with. Apparently they love power more than they love the country.
It’s ok insipid, it’ll be over soon. Life will go on, just with someone else in the White House.
Insipid: if a party cannot pass effective legislation with majorities in both houses of Congress for four years – and with a POTUS of their party in the White House for two of those four years – then they are incompetent.
Further: if you’ll look at the deficit and large-scale economic figures from 2004 or so to the present, they show a pronounced worsening starting in the 2007-2008 time frame. As I recall, that happens to coincide with the time the Democratic party took both houses of Congress and the last two “lame duck” years of the Bush(43) administration. So no – the Bush(43) administration does NOT get full blame for the current economic downturn. The Democratic Congress of 2007-2008 gets a good chunk of the blame too.
Bottom line: the Bush(43) administration deserves some of the blame for the current economic mess – but only some. However, the Democratic Congress of 2007-2008 gets a good deal of the blame also. And today, it’s irrelevant. After a year in office (e.g., Jan 2010), the current administration owns credit/blame for the economy – and everything else. At that point, he’s operating on his budget, approved by his Congress (well, if they’d bothered to approve a budget, that is), and has been operating with “his guys” and under his policies for a full year. And nothing has improved vis-a-vis the day they took office 3 1/2 + years ago. Indeed, in many ways we’re actually worse off today than when the current administration began.
And I don’t really think you want to go where you’re going, fella. By your logic, one each William Jefferson Clinton is fully to blame for 9/11. After all, the Clinton administration treated al Qaeda and other radical Islamic terrorist organizations as a minor law enforcement matter and largely ignored the threat – even after al Qaeda publicly declared war on the United States in 1996 – as well as turning down three different chances to take out or take custody of bin Laden. Are you really willing to concede that 9/11 was 100% Clinton’s fault?
Wow, Zero! Not only is sKerry still whining about the truth of his service, so are his supporters.
Incredible. You done good here, brother.
First off, the administration did get a huge amount of legislation passed, despite obstructionism. In fact they’ve passed as much legislation as any since Johnson.
By your own admission the recession officially started in 2007 the same time the new Democratic Congress came to power. How can they have caused anything especially since George Bush found his magic veto pen at the time. couldn’t you’re just trying to spin your way out of taking responsibility, as usual. They Republicans suck at getting things done, but they’re great at obstructing.
Bottom line is this: Republican policies are a disaster wherever they’re tried. Over the past thirty years ever since Saint Reagan got into power we’ve been governed basically by Friedman supply side economics (followed by Clinton too even though he’s a Democrat) and that has led us to a continued cycle of boom and bust, decimated the middle class and turned us from the largest creditor nation to the largest debtor nation.
For the fourty years before that we were led under Democratic priniples characterized by Keynesian demand side economics and that led us to the longest sustained period of economic growth in history and a middle class so robust that the average single male could raise his family on ONE income.
The fact that Republicans can’t govern is also evidenced on the State level as well. It’s no coincidence that the poorest states in the Union are all the reddest states and the richest states are mostly the bluest. The states with the lowest murder rates are blue the highest red, the states taking the most federal dollare, Red, the states dishing out the most money to the Federal Government, blue. Most abortions, Red, most divorce, Red and on and on and on. There is no evidence anywhere that you can point to that shows that Republicans know how to govern.
Speaking of Reagan, here’s some nice quotes for you. Seems like he didn’t get your memo regarding strict time limits for casting blame:
===============================================
“The problems we inherited were far worse than most inside and out of government had expected; the recession was deeper than most inside and out of government had predicted. Curing those problems has taken more time and a higher toll than any of us wanted.”
1983 state of the Union- three whole years after taking power!
These are all 1982 State of the Union:
“To understand the State of the Union, we must look not only at where we are and where we’re going but where we’ve been. The situation at this time last year was truly ominous.”
…
“In the last six months of 1980, as an example, the money supply increased at the fastest rate in postwar history 13 percent. Inflation remained in double digits and Government spending increased at an annual rate of 17 percent. Interest rates reached a s taggering 21 1/2 percent. There were eight million unemployed.”
…
“First, we must understand what’s happening at the moment to the economy. Our current problems are not the product of the recovery program that’s only just now getting under way, as some would have you believe; they are the inheritance of decades of tax and tax, and spend”
==========================================================
I guess that Reagan couldn’t accept responsibility!
As far as 911 goes, Fella, not only do i want to go there, i’m positively eager to go there. That is another fuck up on Bush’s part. Only this one led to the death of over 7,000 Americans counting the Iraq war. If you’re stupid enough to go there, i’ll give you all the rope you want.
insipid: sure. Explain why 9/11 is Bush’s fault when (1) he had been in office less than 8 months at the time, (2) when the Clinton administration had largely ignored the threat for 7+ years, and (3) when the Clinton administration had refused to take custody of/take out bin Laden on at least 3 different occasions (once from Sudan, once from the Saudis, and at least once in Afghanistan, if I recall correctly). Go ahead. This I want to hear.
You see, unlike you I actually know a bit about the mechanics of how the Federal government operates. I’ve worked in jobs where I’ve seen just how long it takes for new senior leadership and new policies to make a significant impact. At the senior levels of government, that really takes somewhere around a year – and changes are effected most strongly by the budget cycle. (The Federal fiscal year is Oct-to-Sep, so Bush was still operating on Clinton’s last budget in September 2001 – remember?) And the Bush administration’s senior appointees had by and large only been on their jobs about six months (most weren’t confirmed until Feb/Mar or later, as I recall).
Further, to develop significant intelligence and military capabilities in general takes considerably longer than one year – multiple years is far more typical. Those were the capabilities we needed at the time to counter the threat posed by Islamic terrorism, which the Clinton administration largely ignored (they treated that threat in general as a law enforcement matter). You simply don’t fix more than seven years of severe neglect – starting with the 1993 WTC bombing which should have been our wake-up call to the very real threat posed by al Qaeda and other radical Islamic terrorist groups – in 7 1/2 months.
So go ahead – tell us how 9/11 was all Bush’s fault, and how Saint Willie was blameless. I really wanna hear this. I’ll enjoy seeing you embarrass yourself as an absolute fool and neophyte.
Poor Obama. If he gets re-elected, look at the mess he’s going to inherit from the previous administration.
@37: We have to give credit where it’s due. And for the White House, credit for the DECISION rests mostly on Hillary Clinton. She was smart enough to see the long term political effects of not taking out OBL (Mostly becuase she saw it happen with Bill) and beat off the Chicago mob to get the right thing done..
Do you have any idea how ridiculous you seem Hondo? I guess not. Lucky for you that you’re arguing from the safety of this site where your acolytes are there to salve your ego. On the one hand your arguing that Obama should have been able to turn the entire economy around from the worst fiscal crises in 70 years in just a year, but that Bush can’t implement an effective anti-terror program in 8 months. Laugh out loud funny.
First off, the talking point that the Sudanese were ready to hand over Bin Laden has been rated a pants on fire lie by every fact-check group that looks at it. I’ve already linked to that quite a number of times. It’s a big honking lie.
Another big honking lie is the one that says that Clinton did nothing to fight terror in his time in office. The truth was that he was extremely active in fighting terror and it was the Republicans that were accusing him of “wagging the dog”. There was one President that came close to killing Osama Bin Laden that was Bill Clinton (Osama bin laden managed to escape thanks to warnings from Pakistani officials- folks Romney and McCain say our BFFs) and the President that got him Was President Obama, Bush the lessor gave Osama Bin Laden a pass.
While I know Al Franken is the devil incarnate, you won’t find any factual errors in this long passage I’m about to paste in the blind hope that MAYBE you’ll learn something. Unlike the bullshit you just spewed you won’t find any actual errors (unless you don’t get a joke). Here’s the real story of Bush’s response to terror:
============================================================
Excerpt from:
Al Franken’s book: Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them
Chapter Operation Ignore
Bill Clinton’s far-reaching plan to eliminate al Qaeda root and branch was completed only a few weeks before the inauguration of George W. Bush. If it had been implemented then, a former senior Clinton aide told Time, we would be handing [the Bush Administration] a war when they took office.” Instead, Clinton and company decided to turn over the plan to the Bush administration to carry out. Clinton trusted Bush to protect America. This proved, nine months later, to be a disastrous mistake – perhaps the biggest one Clinton ever made.
Clinton’s National Security Advisor Sandy Berger remembered how little help the previous Bush administration had provided to his team. Believing that the nation’s security should transcend political bitterness, Berger arranged ten briefings for his successor, Condoleezza Rice, and her deputy, Stephen Hadley. Berger made a special point of attending the briefing on terrorism. He told Dr. Rice, “I believe that the Bush administration will spend more time on terrorism in general, and on al Qaeda specifically, than any other subject.”
Which brings me to a lie. When Time asked about the conversation, Rice declined to comment, but through a spokeswoman said she recalled no briefing at which Berger was present” Perhaps so, Dr. Rice. But might I direct our mutual friends, my readers, to a certain December 30, 2001, New York Times article? Perhaps you know the one, Condi? Shall I quote it? “As he prepared to leave office last January, Mr. Berger met with his successor, Condoleezza Rice, and gave her a warning. According to both of them, he said that terrorism-and particularly Mr. bin Laden’s brand of it-would consume far more of her time than she had ever imagined.” (Italics mine.)
When I read this, my instinct was to shout for joy and dance around the room, naked, celebrating the finding of a lie. And I did. “Badda Bing!” I cried, as I ran around the house, my genitals flopping wildly, embarrassing my wife and her bridge group.
After the dressing down from my wife, who really read me the riot act, it occurred to me that all I had really found was a contradiction between Time and the Times. Maybe The New York Times had it wrong. Maybe Dr. Rice, considered a paragon of integrity, had told Time magazine the truth-that her predecessor had never warned her about the impending threat from al Qaeda and its evil mastermind. It was time for the Franken investigative juggernaut to assert itself. I called Dr. Rice’s office, prepared to pierce the infamous White House veil of secrecy with a lance of white-hot journalistic enterprise. I left a message, and they called me right back with the answer. A White House official told me that Dr. Rice had met with Berger at a briefing, and he had told her about the seriousness of the al Qaeda threat. Condi lied to Times! Badda Bing!
Anyway. After Berger left, Rice stayed around to listen to counterterrorism bulldog Richard Clarke, who laid out the whole anti-al Qaeda plan. Rice was so impressed with Clarke that she immediately asked him to stay on as head of counterterrorism. In early February, Clarke repeated the briefing for Vice President Dick Cheney. But, according to Time, there was some question about how seriously the Bush team took Clarke’s warnings. Outgoing Clinton officials felt that “the Bush team thought the Clintonites had become obsessed with terrorism.”
The Bushies had an entirely different set of obsessions. Missile defense, for example. The missile defense obsession proved prescient when terrorists fired a slow-moving intercontinental ballistic missile into the World Trade Center. If only Clarke had put his focus on missile defense instead of obsessing on Osama bin Laden.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was obsessed with a review of the military’s force structure, which had the potential of yielding tremendous national security dividends ten or fifteen years down the road. I, personally, am a longtime proponent of force structure review, as anyone who has had the misfortune to spend any time around me when I am drunk can attest. But I don’t think it should be to the exclusion of everything else. Let me give you one little example: I also believe in FIGHTING TERRORISM.
While all the Bushies focused on their pet projects, Clarke was blowing a gasket. He had a plan, and no one was paying attention. It didn’t help that the plan had been hatched under Clinton. Clinton-hating was to the Bush White House what terrorism- fighting was to the Clinton White House.
Meanwhile, on February 15, 2001, a commission led by former senators Gary Hart and Warren Rudman issued its third and final report on national security. The Hart-Rudman report warned that “mass-casualty terrorism directed against the U.S. homeland was of serious and growing concern” and said that America was woefully unprepared for a “catastrophic” domestic terrorist attack and urged the creation of a new federal agency: “A National Homeland Security Agency with responsibility for planning, coordinating, and integrating various U.S. government activities involved in homeland security” that would include the Customs Service, the Border Patrol, the Coast Guard, and more than a dozen other government departments and agencies.
The Hart-Rudman Commission had studied every aspect of national security over a period of years and had come to a unanimous conclusion: “This commission believes that the security of the American homeland from the threats of the new century should be the primary national security mission of the U.S. government.”
The report generated a great deal of media attention and even a bill in Congress to establish a National Homeland Security Agency. But over at the White House, the Justice Department, and the Pentagon, President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Attorney General Ashcroft, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld decided that the best course of action was not to implement the recommendations of the Hart-Rudman report, but instead to launch a sweeping initiative dubbed “Operation Ignore.”
The public face of Operation Ignore would be an antiterrorism task force led by Vice President Cheney. Its mandate: to pretend to develop a plan to counter domestic terrorist attacks. Bush announced the task force on May 8, 2001, and said that he himself would “periodically chair a meeting of the National Security Council to review these efforts.” Bush never chaired such a meeting, though. Probably because Cheney’s task force never actually met. Operation Ignore was in full swing.
Unbeknownst to Bush and Cheney, Richard Clarke was doggedly pushing his plan to put boots on the ground in Afghanistan and kill Osama bin Laden. Thanks to Clarke’s relentless efforts, the plan was working its way back up the food chain, after having been moved to the bottom of the priority list, right below protecting the public from giant meteors.
On April 30, Clarke presented a new version of the plan to the deputies of the major national security principals: Cheney’s chief of staff, Lewis Libby; the State Department’s Richard Armitage; DOD’s Paul Wolfowitz; and the CIA’s John McLaughlin. They were so impressed, they decided to have three more meetings: one on al Qaeda, one on Pakistan, and a third on Indo-Pakistani relations. And then a fourth meeting to integrate the three meetings. Sure, scheduling these meetings would take months, and would delay the possibility of actually acting on the plan and eliminating al Qaeda, but, according to a senior White House official, the deputies wanted to review the issues “holistically” which as far as I can tell means ”slowly.”
On July 10, 2001, nearly five months after the Hart-Rudman report had warned of catastrophic, mass-casualty attacks on America’s homeland and called for better information sharing among all federal intelligence agencies, Operation Ignore faced a critical test. Phoenix FBI agent Kenneth Williams sent a memo to headquarters regarding concerns over some Middle Eastern students at an Arizona flight school. Al Qaeda operatives, Williams suggested, might be trying to infiltrate the U.S. civil aviation system. He urged FBI Headquarters to contact the other intelligence agencies to see if they had information relevant to his suspicions. Had Williams’s memo been acted upon, perhaps the CIA and FBI would have connected the dots. And had Hart-Rudman been acted upon, perhaps the memo would not have been dismissed. Operation Ignore, now in its 146th day, had proved its effectiveness once more.
The holdovers from the Clinton era – Clarke and CIA Director George Tenet-were going nuts. Bush administration insiders would later say they never felt that the two men had been fully on board with Operation Ignore. Tenet was getting reports of more and more chatter about possible terrorist activity. Through June and July, according to one source quoted in the Washington Post, Tenet worked himself nearly frantic” with concern. In mid-July, “George briefed Condi that there was going to be a major attack,” an official told Time.
Only Time would tell what happened next.
On July 16, the deputies finally held their long-overdue holistic integration meeting and approved Clarke’s plan. Next it would move to the Principals Committee, composed of Cheney, Rice, Tenet, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and Rumsfeld–the last hurdle before the plan could reach the President. They tried to schedule the meeting for August, but too many of the principals were out of town. They had taken their cue from the President. August was a time to recharge the batteries, to take a well-deserved break from the pressures of protecting America. The meeting would have to wait till September 4.
No one understood better the importance of taking a break to spend a little special time with the wife and dog than President George W. Bush. Bush spent 42 percent of his first seven months in office either at Camp David, at the Bush compound in Kennebunkport, or at his ranch in Crawford, Texas. As he told a $1,000-a-plate crowd at a fund-raiser in June, Washington, D.C., is a great place to work, but Texas is a great place to relax.” That’s why on August 3, after signing off on a plan to cut funding for programs guarding unsecured or “loose” nukes in the former Soviet Union, he bade farewell to the Washington grind and headed to Crawford for the longest presidential vacation in thirty-two years.
On its 172nd day, Operation Ignore suffered a major blow. Already, the operation was becoming more and more difficult to sustain as the intensity of terror warnings crescendoed. Now, on August 6, CIA Director Tenet delivered a report to President Bush entitled, “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” The report warned that al Qaeda might be planning to hijack airplanes. But the President was resolute: Operation Ignore must proceed as planned. He did nothing to follow up on the memo.
Actually, that’s not entirely fair. The President did follow up, a little bit. Sitting in his golf cart the next day, Bush told some reporters, “I’m working on a lot of issues, national security matters.” Then, Bush rode off to hit the links, before dealing with a stubborn landscaping issue by clearing some brush on his property. The next day, he followed up again, telling the press, I’ve got a lot of national security concerns that we’re working on Iraq, Macedonia, very worrisome right now.”
But Iraq and Macedonia weren’t the only things on Bush’s mind. “One of the interesting things to do is drink coffee and watch Barney chase armadillos,” he told reporters on a tour of the ranch later in his vacation. “The armadillos are out, and they love to root in our flower bed. It’s good that Barney routs them out of their rooting.”
On August 16, the INS arrested Zacharias Moussaoui, a flight school student who seemed to have little interest in learning to take off or land a plane. The arresting agent wrote that Moussaoui seemed like “the type of person who could fly something into the World Trade Center.” Trying to pique the interest of FBI Headquarters in Washington, a Minneapolis FBI agent wrote that a 747 loaded with fuel could be used as a weapon. lf this information had been shared and analyzed, for example by a newly founded Homeland Security Agency, it might have sparked memories of the Clinton-thwarted 1996 al Qaeda plot to hijack an American commercial plane and crash it into CIA Headquarters.
On August 25, still on the ranch, Bush discussed with reporters the differences between his two dogs. “Spot’s a good runner. You know, Barney-terriers are bred to go into holes and pull out varmint. And Spotty chases birds. Spotty’s a great water dog. I’ll go fly-fishing this afternoon on my lake.” And you know something? He did just that.
Among those left to swelter in the D.C. heat that August was one Thomas J. Pickard. No fly-fishing for him. In his role as acting FBI director, Pickard had been privy to a top-secret, comprehensive review of counterterrorism programs in the FBI. The assessment called for a dramatic increase in funding. Alarmed by the report and by the mounting terrorist threat, Pickard met with Attorney General John Ashcroft to request $58 million from the Justice Department to hire hundreds of new field agents, translators, and intelligence analysts to improve the Bureau’s capacity to detect foreign terror threats. On September 10, he received the final Operation Ignore communique: an official letter from Ashcroft turning him down flat. (To give Pickard credit for adopting a professional attitude, he did not call Ashcroft the next day to say, “I told you so.”)
Clarke’s plan to take the fight to al Qaeda lurched forward once more on September 4, 2001. Eight months after he had first briefed Condi Rice about it, and nearly eleven months after Clinton had told him to create it, Clarke’s plan finally reached the Principals Committee that served as gatekeeper to the commander in chief. Bush was back from his trip, rested up, and ready for anything.
Cheney, Powell, Rice, Rumsfeld, and the other Principals debated the plan and decided to advise Bush to adopt it with a phased-in approach. Phase One, to demand cooperation from the Taliban and make fresh overtures to al Qaeda opponents such as the Northern Alliance, would begin the moment the President signed off on the plan. Phase Zero, however, came first: wait several days as the proposal made its way to the Bush’s desk.
On September 9, as the plan cooled its heels, Congress proposed a boost of $600 million for antiterror programs. The money was to come from Rumsfeld’s beloved missile defense program, the eventual price tag of which was estimated by the Congressional Budget Office at between $158 billion and $238 billion. Congress’s proposal to shift $0.6 billion over to counterterror programs incurred Rummy’s ire, and he threatened a presidential veto. Operation Ignore was in its 207th day.
On Operation Ignore Day 208, Ashcroft sent his Justice Department budget request to Bush. It included spending increases in sixty-eight different programs. Out of these sixty-eight programs, less than half dealt with terrorism. Way less than half. In fact, none of them dealt with terrorism. Ashcroft passed around a memo listing his seven top priorities. Again, terrorism didn’t make the list.
On that day, I left for Minneapolis to visit my mom and play some charity golf.
On the next day, the world shook.
The day after that, they started blaming Clinton, covering their tracks, and accusing liberals of blaming America.
Hart-Rudman Report – February 15, 2001
http://www.nssg.gov/PhaseIIIFR.pdf
http://www.avatara.com/operationignore0.html
^What this shows us, all of that copy/paste gibberish, is insipid is INCAPABLE of independent thought. Just regurgitating what he reads, much like a mccaw that imitates words without actually knowing what they mean.
Oh, and you’re also just plain about the relative “economic stability” of the post-World War II period and the post-Reagan era, insipid. During the 35 1/2 years between the end of WWII and Reagan’s inauguration, there were eight recognized economic recessions – 1945, 1948-1949, 1953-54, 1958-1959, 1960-1961, 1969-1970, 1973-1975, and 1980. And, frankly, the 1981-1982 Recession under Reagan was also partly caused by policies under Carter, so let’s call that 8 1/2. In contrast, there have been 4 recognized recessions since Reagan was inaugurated in 1981: 1981-1982, 1990-1991, Mar-Nov 2001, and 2007-2009.
Lets see: 35 1/2 years and 8 recessions under your beloved Keynesian economics – or one about every 4 years 5 months. And since Reagan’s economic policies, four recessions in 31 1/2 years – or roughly half as often (one every 7 years 10 months). And that’s giving Reagan full blame for the 1981-1982 recession, which has it’s roots in Carter’s economic policies. Give Carter 1/2 the blame for that one and it becomes 8 1/2 recessions in 35 1/2 years for Keynesian economics (a recession every 4 years 2 months) and 3 1/2 recessions in 31 1/2 years under Reagan’s economic policies (1 recession every 9 years).
Yeah, that Reagan – he really destabilized the US economy and made it more subject to boom/bust! Under his policies, recessions occur less than half as often!
However, only our last recession – you know, that one that you claim your “hero” corrected – has had a “recovery” that left the economy in general worse off than it was at the beginning. And we’re still worse off today. The economy is still in the toilet today. Hell, we’re still worse off than we were in December 2008.
Further, you really display your ignorance of both economics and US history by your claims above. The boom and bust cycle has been a fact of US economic life since virtually the day the United States began. For a relatively brief but decent explanation, see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recessions_in_the_United_States
Yeah, it’s Wikipedia. But it’s a decent overview of economic downturns throughout US history, starting with the Panic of 1797 and continuing to the present day.
One of those recession was only technically a recession becasue of the decline in GDP from WWII ending. Another was caused by the Oil embargo of 1973. Of those recessions none of them came even close to matching the cataclysmic recessions of the Reagan era culminating with the near-depresion Bush got us into and Obama is trying to dig our way out of. Nice try, Hondo, but as usual, Fail.
insipid: believe a comic-turned-“selected-not-elected” Senator if you like, fella. Ditto a disaffected former employee like Clarke (people closer to the actual intel effort against al Qaeda, specifically Michael Scheuer, have indicated Clarke downplayed the threat vice being the “town crier”). Keep telling yourself your heroes are blameless. History won’t agree, but you’ll probably stay happy by continuing to delude yourself.
You obviously have no experience in working with large organizations (e.g., those of governmental-scale, like DoD and/or other Federal departments) and have no idea just how much time and effort it takes to change their policies, operating procedures, and the like. I do. And yes – it really does take more than 7 months to change policies that have been in place for literally 7+ years in an organization composed of literally millions of individuals, like DoD and/or the Federal government. Throw in turf wars, inter-departmental bureaucratic infighting, conflicting organizational priorities, personalities and personal agendas, and the like, and sometimes 2 or 3 years is more like it.
This is why the Department of Defense, for example, often makes strategic plans a decade or more out. Why? In some cases, it simply takes literally years to counter significant foreseeable threats.
Had Clinton and his cronies done their job, 9/11 would not have happened. Period. But they didn’t. They treated terrorism as just another law enforcement matter vice a serious threat. As history clearly shows, they simply did not devote sufficient resources to countering that threat. While a few folks within the Clinton administration took the threat seriously, (Scheuer and his group, perhaps Clarke – but not to the extent he claims IMO), most didn’t.
IMO, based on what I’ve seen, the Bush administration likely didn’t recognize the critical nature of the situation for a key 3 months or so (Feb-Apr) – largely IMO because they were getting pushback from their career workforce due to the 7-year-old Clinton-era mindset that terrorism wasn’t a serious threat and could be handled as a law enforcement matter. A bit later, that began to change – but by then, it was already too late to overcome 7+ years of abject neglect. Hell, it was probably already too late in January 2000 – much less January 2001.
Oh, and I wouldn’t crow too much about Clinton going after bin Laden in 1999, insipid. The most likely reason bin Laden escaped in 1999 is directly traceable to Clinton administration bungling. The Clinton administration insisted on telling Pakistani officials we were executing that operation, thus allowing the Pakistanis to warn bin Laden. Even the village idiot should have foreseen that happening. I’ll give the Obama administration some credit in that respect; for all their other missteps, they didn’t repeat that particular error.
insipid, the 1981-82 recession is generally traced to the 1979 oil shock and Carter’s botched economic policies, too. And that’s also immaterial.
Yes, the end of World War II caused a short recession. Ditto the 1973-1974 Arab Oil Embargo and the 1979-1980 oil price spike (which was just as bad as the Arab Oil Embargo – prices nearly doubled then, too). But reality is they’re still recessions, regardless of cause. Deal with it.
However, compared to past recessions the Obama administration is failing miserably at dealing with this latest one – just like Carter failed at dealing with the economic downturn in 1980, causing another, worse one a year later – and just like FDR failed at dealing with the Great Depression (see the Recession of 1937 for details). Even Morgenthau admitted in 1939 that the “New Deal” economic policies had been pretty much worthless in bringing the US out of it’s economic funk. World War II was necessary to change things.
In any case: the reason for a recession simply doesn’t matter. US history shows they happen periodically, with disturbing regularity, and there’s not much the USG can do to prevent them. The boom/bust cycle appears to be to some extent inherent in a free economy. That is documented fact, and is therefore something that the USG periodically has to deal with. And they seem to be substantially less common under Reaganesque economic policies than when the USG runs under Keynesian economic dogma. I’m sorry that reality doesn’t support your beloved talking points here, but facts are stubborn things.
Especially when you ignore them. Then they tend to whack you in the head from your blind side when you least expect it.
@Hondo, can you believe that THING is quoting Al Franken, for pete’s sake? Isn’t Al on the same level as Jesse Ventura and his paranoid conspiracy team?
Seriously, when someone quotes Al the Idiot, they’ll never want for moonshine.
@38 — JM, laughed so hard I nearly fell of my chair.
The current administration has had 3 years and 8 months to revive a sluggish economy. Bureau of Labor statistics show plainly that unemployment has not been reduced by more than 1.7 precentage points since the highest level in April 2009, which level was 10.0%. The current unemployment level is 8.3%. There are not enough jobs being added to offset the continuing and new unemployment claims. Job growth is sluggish at its best, backpedaling at its worst. 3.6+ million Americans who have lost their unemployment benefits are now on Social Security disability benefits. These are government statistics released on a weekly basis.
The current administration has failed to deliver on its promises made at inception. There has not been a budget proposed or passed since 2010. The current administrator has failed the people who voted him into office in every possible way. Yeah, he offered “hope and change”. Hope is mostly hot air when you can’t pay the bills and put food on the table. The change has been negative at the very least, and threatening at its worst.
And has anyone heard from Tim Geithner lately? He’s been mysteriously absent. Oh, that’s right — he’s become Washington’s whipping boy. Man, he should have turned down that job offer. Poor Tim hasn’t made much headway in his struggles to grapple with office politics and banks and Europe and the fact that the current administration wants to snatch defeat from the very jaws of victory.
Here are some more statistics under the current administration’s aegis:
2++ million homes are now in foreclosure.
3.8 million mortgages are now delinquent, almost half of those are three months past due. That is NOW, 2012, NOT 2008.
Home values have dropped by 30% since October 2008, a loss of 7 trillions dollars in wealth for American families.
There is a proposal to use eminent domain to seize mortgages and refinance them, coming from one of Obama’s bigger political contributors Steve Gluckstern. This was in the newspaper this morning. However, that plan will only apply to people living in California, so people in the rest of the country need not hope for any change.
Yeah, I would say that’s a hell of a change.
And it truly doesn’t matter who WAS in the White House in 2008. It only matters now, 3 years and 8 months later, who is in that office now, because NOTHING HAS BEEN DONE. NOTHING HAS IMPROVED. THE ONLY CHANGE HAS BEEN FOR THE WORSE.
@46 “a loss of 7 trillion in wealth for American families”
I suspect that was not the “Hoped for Change” people wanted when they elected President Obama, who knew his plan for redistributing wealth meant redistributing the wealth into thin air?
The sum total of Obama’s legislative experience as a senator was co-signing a couple of dozen of other peoples bills and introducing 4 or 5 original (although meaningless) pieces of legislation, and now we as a people are benefiting from this depth of experience.
Perhaps the people will find their senses and vote for a change in November.
I think I’ve got insipid figured out
Bush = responsible for everything bad but nothing good within 30 seconds of getting sworn in.
Obama = responsible for everything good but everything bad is still Bush’s fault 3 1/2 years after Obama was sworn in.
@VOV — That’s from the housing report. Comes out every week. I agree, this is not the change people hoped for. My sister’s mortgage is underwater and she’s worried, because she’s nearing retirement and now she’s not sure she can afford to move near her grandchildren.
@Twist — By Jove, I think you’ve got it!
@Insipid: Dude, you just qouted AL FRANKEN. That’s a worse admission of defeat then breaking Godwin’s law.