Subject:
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Re: Help me with the math
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Fri, 10 Sep 2004 17:04:59 GMT
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Viewed:
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1239 times
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In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Christopher L. Weeks wrote:
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In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Bruce Schlickbernd wrote:
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In lugnet.off-topic.debate, John Neal wrote:
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Well, Bruce, it took many men many months and many million $$$ to gather
that information-- how unfair to expect a new administration to be on top
of that. Why wasn’t that information assembled by Clinton? I think it is
more than fair to hold the officeholder for the previous 8 years a little
more accountable than Bush!
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Not particularly unfair at all. Bush had enough to go on. And Clinton, for
the umpteenth time, is not running for re-election. Quit using him as the
universal excuse.
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I’m usually wrong about how to reason with John, so maybe I should just shut
up. But would it make things easier if those of us who think that Bush was
seriously negligent in his handling of the intelligence regarding the 9/11
attack admitted that Clinton was also? I mean, of course he was! And at
least some of us have been saying so for years. But that doesn’t change the
fact that Bush sat on his hands for eight months.
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John said “Bush is brilliant” and that is what I am arguing about. Not “Clinton
is an idiot”. John is playing a game: Bush is not responsible for anything that
has gone wrong, it’s all Somebody Else’s Fault. Essentially, he’s trying to
drag the conversation about Bush off target. You fell for it.
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John’s making it out like eight months isn’t enough time, but frankly, there
was no single more important thing that he should have been attending to.
Nothing. I’d grant any president a month to find his feet. If it had
happened during his first month, I’d side with John. But eight months later?
He dropped the ball. And lots of people died.
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If it happened in the first month I wouldn’t be making an issue of it. It
didn’t.
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And he reacted. And he’s been reacting ever since. The only proactive stuff
he seems to have done has been bad.
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My point exactly. How is Bush brilliant? Did he stop the World Trade Center
attack? No. John cries that he wasn’t responsible. Okay, let’s accept that
for the sake of the argument: how does that qualify Bush as “brilliant”? Point
of fact, it doesn’t. He attacked Afghanistan, where Al Qaeda was based with the
support of the Afghan government. One can argue necessary, but hardly
brilliant. Did he get Osama bin Laden? No. Since that was the primary goal,
certainly it was less than brilliant. Did he commit the resources necessary to
get Osama? Since we don’t have him, the answer is self-evident. Did we have
more resources to commit? Yes. What did we do with them? Attack Iraq. Why?
To stop Saddam’s cache of WoMD from being used in one way or another. Did he
actually have any? No. Again, John can argue that it was the right thing to do
based on faulty intelligence that somehow Bush isn’t responsible for
maintaining, but does it in any way qualify as “brilliant”? No, it was a
mistake.
-->Bruce<--
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Message has 1 Reply:
 | | Is Bush an idiot? (was: Help me with the math)
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| (...) What if his goals are completely opaque to us? What if severing the restrictive ties of international prestige is a goal for the new world order crowd? What if handing an unquenchable mess to a Democrat so that four years later the next step (...) (20 years ago, 10-Sep-04, to lugnet.off-topic.debate, FTX)
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Message is in Reply To:
| | Re: Help me with the math
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| (...) I'm usually wrong about how to reason with John, so maybe I should just shut up. But would it make things easier if those of us who think that Bush was seriously negligent in his handling of the intelligence regarding the 9/11 attack admitted (...) (20 years ago, 10-Sep-04, to lugnet.off-topic.debate, FTX)
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