Obama still ducking townhall debates

[ajmccarrell]

Originally Posted by strandinthewind

No, Bush and his admin. were told that the yellow cake into a nuclear bomb info. was completely inaccurate and they chose to use it anyway. They could not have sold the war without the exigency need and that was it.

Pay attention

You pay attention to something besides liberal conspiracy sites. It's kind of hard to move Yellow Cake that according to you didn't exist?!

http://www.philly.com/inquirer/world...to_Canada.html

http://www.factcheck.org/bushs_16_wo...q_uranium.html

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/m...4/ai_n14581562

http://www.propeller.com/story/2008/...f-yellowcake//

http://www.firesociety.com/forum/thr...h-Did-Not-Lie/

[strandinthewind]

SH got that yellowcake from Niger?

W knew about that in the SOU speech?

Again, both the White House and the CIA long ago conceded that the 16 words shouldn’t have been part of Bush’s speech.

[ajmccarrell]

Originally Posted by strandinthewind

SH got that yellowcake from Niger?

W knew about that in the SOU speech?

Again, both the White House and the CIA long ago conceded that the 16 words shouldn’t have been part of Bush’s speech.

Which is a world of difference away from being a "lie". It was a mistake as has already been said.

[strandinthewind]

Originally Posted by ajmccarrell

Which is a world of difference away from being a "lie". It was a mistake as has already been said.

You actually expect Rove to let W admit it was a lie

What I find hysterical is you never blame W. Everyone is wrong but W. He can do no wrong and when he does and faces allegations by numerous other people who were there, they are all wrong and W is merely clumsy - come one.

Put it this way, if your employee made such a drastic and clumsy mistake, would you fire them or would you say, gee all my customers are pissed and you have made me bankrupt, but that's okay, I forgive you?

[ajmccarrell]

Originally Posted by strandinthewind

You actually expect Rove to let W admit it was a lie

What I find hysterical is you never blame W. Everyone is wrong but W. He can do no wrong and when he does and faces allegations by numerous other people who were there, they are all wrong and W is merely clumsy - come one.

Put it this way, if your employee made such a drastic and clumsy mistake, would you fire them or would you say, gee all my customers are pissed and you have made me bankrupt, but that's okay, I forgive you?

Good lord you are dense! I did blame him. I said he made a mistake. I just said he didn't lie on purpose. Whether or not it was true is irrelevent. Whether or not he believed it was is the issue. Worst case, it is debatable. It is far from proven. You haven't named any people or made any argument that wasn't supposition from some lefty blog somewhere on the fringes of humanity. I believe in giving blame where blame is due, no more, no less. I don't believe, as you do, in imputing ill motives to everyone and anyone who makes a mistake that isn't a democrat. You can't prove a negative, unless you are Bush or conservative, then you are expected to in your world.

[strandinthewind]

Wednesday, Jul. 09, 2003

Bush and Iraq: Follow the Yellow Cake Road

Is a fib really a fib if the teller is unaware that he is uttering an untruth? That question appears to be the basis of the White House defense, having now admitted a falsehood in President Bush's claim, in his State of the Union address, that Iraq had tried to buy uranium in Africa. But that defense is under mounting pressure from a variety of sources claiming that the White House could not have been unaware that the claim was false, because it had been checked out — and debunked — by U.S. intelligence a year before the President repeated it.

So, the White House is not contesting the fact that the President made a false claim — merely whether he, or those who prepared his speech, knew at the time that it was false. And holding the line forces White House press secretary Ari Fleischer into a rhetorical dance that can only be called Clintonesque: conceding on the one hand that the claim made by the President was based on forged evidence that Iraq had tried to buy "yellow cake" refined uranium from Niger, but at the same time maintaining that "I see nothing that goes broader that would indicate that there was no basis to the President's broader statement."

While the Bush administration may have been sweating, just a little during the past two months, over the absence of WMD finds in Iraq, a majority of Americans appear willing to believe that going to war was justified even if no such weapons are ever found. Across the Atlantic, however, Bush's closest ally, Prime Minister Tony Blair, is being roasted daily by Britain's media and legislature, some of the fiercest attacks coming from within his own party. Just this week, a parliamentary inquiry exonerated Blair's government on the charge that it "sexed up" intelligence reports to exaggerate the threat posed by Saddam's regime, but nonetheless remained deeply skeptical of the case made by Blair for going to war.

The fact that Blair's and Bush's governments face parallel but separate inquires from their own legislatures operates, in some ways, like the police tactic of interrogating suspects separately in the hope of finding discrepancies in their testimony. The U.S., for example, started a lot earlier than the British conceding that actual weapons of mass destruction may never be found in Iraq. British officials were apoplectic some weeks ago when the President and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld suggested Saddam may have destroyed his banned weapons before the invasion. Blair, after all, has stuck by the promise that WMD will be found in Iraq — at least until this week, when he began the subtle migration to a claim that the coalition may only find evidence that Iraq had maintained weapons programs rather than any actual weapons.

Blair, moreover, appears to be sticking by the Niger uranium allegation despite the White House retraction, insisting that it was based on sources besides the forged letters. U.S. officials had hinted, also, that other sources had pointed to Iraqi efforts to acquire uranium in Africa, but that none of these leads was considered strong enough to include in the President's speech.

Hardly surprisingly, the Democrats are demanding an inquiry. The surging support for antiwar Vermont governor Howard Dean in the Democratic nomination race signals deep discomfort among the party's core supporters over the war, and some of those who voted for the war may be inclined to use the presence of fake intelligence in President Bush's case for war to back away from their own support for the invasion. Still, they may have plenty to work with, because there's plenty of evidence emerging to challenge the White House assertion that it was not informed, before the State of the Union speech, that the Niger claim had been debunked by U.S. intelligence.

Just last weekend, the man sent by the CIA to check out the Niger story broke cover and revealed that he had thoroughly debunked the allegation many months before President Bush repeated it. Ambassador Joseph Wilson emphasized that he had reported back through traditional channels, and asked whether his report had been ignored because it didn't fit with the administration's preconceptions about Iraq.

More troubling questions arise from the claim by IAEA chief Dr Mohammed el-Baradei, who was in charge of the nuclear component of the prewar UN inspection program in Iraq, that he was provided with the Niger "evidence" only in February, despite it having been shared on Capitol Hill the previous October. The U.S. and Britain were publicly committed to sharing intelligence with the UN inspectors in order to help them find a "smoking gun," yet el-Baradei was kept in the dark about evidence that was ostensibly directly relevant to his inquiry. And, of course, almost as soon as he was shown the Niger documents, el-Baradei and his team concluded that they were forgeries. Also, despite U.S. and British claims that "other sources" had indicated Iraqi efforts to buy uranium in Africa, el-Baradei stresses that the Niger forgeries were the only evidence offered to the investigators.

Even more damning are reports that CIA sources insist the Bush administration was made aware some time before the State of the Union address that the Niger allegation was false. If those prove true, it kicks the jams out from under the administration's claim that the presence of a falsehood in the President's case against Iraq was simply the product of ignorance. And it may be expected that the CIA will more and more sharply signal that it passed its findings up the food chain, because on the basis of Ambassador Wilson's revelations, they'd be left to take the blame if they didn't. Then again, the media may turn its attention to the role of the Vice President's office: After all, Ambassador Wilson claims his inquiry was initiated by a request from Dick Cheney's office to check out the allegation. So presumably, Wilson's findings will have been reported back there. If so, the former ambassador is not the only one who will want to know what they, and other top officials, made of, and more importantly did with his information.

And right now, the game in Washington is to pin the blame for the fact that a fib, conscious or unconscious, made it into the State of the Union address. And in a summer news trough, that's bad news for the White House.

http://www.time.com/time/columnist/k...463779,00.html

from http://ledge.fleetwoodmac.net/showth...=wilson&page=4

[ajmccarrell]

You do realize that there is a difference between an op-ed column and actual news right? Opinion and fact are two different things.

[vermicious knid]

Bush's people would leak false information to the New York Times, and then Dick Cheney would go on Meet the Press and say "Look, it's in the New York Times, it must be true!"

[JWS]

Originally Posted by Musicman408

Yeah, I definately liked Hillary more than Obama, but what can you do now, right? Gotta learn to move on, and knowing that we need a Democrat, I've got to vote for Obama.

Are you old enough to vote?

[gldstwmn]

Originally Posted by ajmccarrell

LOL! Do you support universal health care? If so, that is fascist by definition. I think you don't know what fascist actually means, nor do you have a basic grasp on history.

I don't think YOU know what fascisim is. So why don't you explain your point on Universal Healthcare instead of being a condescending jackass?

[ajmccarrell]

Originally Posted by vermicious knid

Bush's people would leak false information to the New York Times, and then Dick Cheney would go on Meet the Press and say "Look, it's in the New York Times, it must be true!"

Based on what?! Your say-so?

So you are accusing the hyperliberal NY Times, who won't even publish McCain's own op-ed piece of being a shill for Bush administration on no evidence whatsoever and you would like to be taken seriously.

[ajmccarrell]

Originally Posted by gldstwmn

I don't think YOU know what fascisim is. So why don't you explain your point on Universal Healthcare instead of being a condescending jackass?

According to wikipedia, "Fascism is an authoritarian nationalist political ideology and mass movement that holds traditionalist notions of reversing cultural decline or decadence, and which seeks to achieve a millenarian national rebirth by exalting most commonly the nation state, but sometimes the race, and which promotes unity, strength and cultural renewal."

So, using the authority of the government to takeover a private industry for "cultural renewal" and "unity" and "change" is the VERY definition of fascism. Everything in that first paragraph, including using the race card, is EXACTLY everything Obama says. Michelle Obama says "eschew Middle-Classness", IE avoid "decadence". Obama seeks to use the power of the government to "unite". If you are not terrfied of this man, you don't have a concept of history.

How about this one, "Fascism is] a genuinely revolutionary, trans-class form of anti-liberal, and in the last analysis, anti conservative nationalism. As such it is an ideology deeply bound up with modernization and modernity, one which has assumed a considerable variety of external forms to adapt itself to the particular historical and national context in which it appears, and has drawn a wide range of cultural and intellectual currents, both left and right, anti-modern and pro-modern, to articulate itself as a body of ideas, slogans, and doctrine. In the inter-war period it manifested itself primarily in the form of an elite-led "armed party" which attempted, mostly unsuccessfully, to generate a populist mass movement through a liturgical style of politics and a programme of radical policies which promised to overcome a threat posed by international socialism, to end the degeneration affecting the nation under liberalism, and to bring about a radical renewal of its social, political and cultural life as part of what was widely imagined to be the new era being inaugurated in Western civilization. The core mobilizing myth of fascism which conditions its ideology, propaganda, style of politics and actions is the vision of the nation's imminent rebirth from decadence. — Roger Griffin, The palingenetic core of generic fascist ideology"

So, the Obama playbook of "profits are too high", you're being "screwed by the corporations", "elect me and I will use the power of government for 'change'", "I work across the isle" That is nothing but fascist sloganeering. His church-like following is liturgical politics. His, "you will have an epiphany" speech is just exactly what fascism is. The reason the young people are so capitvated by this guy is because he IS new to America. We've never seen an old-style European fascist in this country before.

Why should I look up terms for you that you don't understand and explain them for you? That's not being condescending, that is expecting the person that you are having a debate with to have a basic grasp on the historical context of what they are saying. Basically, you don't like Bush and say he's fascist because you heard someone else say it and you thought it sounded good. Right? Bush has problems, certainly. Fascism isn't one of them.

[strandinthewind]

^^

Once again, you display a thorough misunderstanding of what you are talking about. Then again, you thought the R's pushed the Civil Rights legislation through Congress and W doesn't lie (apparently ever).

BTW - what are the 14 characteristics common to fascist regimes. This may be a good place for you to start your edification.

[gldstwmn]

Originally Posted by ajmccarrell

According to wikipedia, "Fascism is an authoritarian nationalist political ideology and mass movement that holds traditionalist notions of reversing cultural decline or decadence, and which seeks to achieve a millenarian national rebirth by exalting most commonly the nation state, but sometimes the race, and which promotes unity, strength and cultural renewal."

So, using the authority of the government to takeover a private industry for "cultural renewal" and "unity" and "change" is the VERY definition of fascism. Everything in that first paragraph, including using the race card, is EXACTLY everything Obama says. Michelle Obama says "eschew Middle-Classness", IE avoid "decadence". Obama seeks to use the power of the government to "unite". If you are not terrfied of this man, you don't have a concept of history.

How about this one, "Fascism is] a genuinely revolutionary, trans-class form of anti-liberal, and in the last analysis, anti conservative nationalism. As such it is an ideology deeply bound up with modernization and modernity, one which has assumed a considerable variety of external forms to adapt itself to the particular historical and national context in which it appears, and has drawn a wide range of cultural and intellectual currents, both left and right, anti-modern and pro-modern, to articulate itself as a body of ideas, slogans, and doctrine. In the inter-war period it manifested itself primarily in the form of an elite-led "armed party" which attempted, mostly unsuccessfully, to generate a populist mass movement through a liturgical style of politics and a programme of radical policies which promised to overcome a threat posed by international socialism, to end the degeneration affecting the nation under liberalism, and to bring about a radical renewal of its social, political and cultural life as part of what was widely imagined to be the new era being inaugurated in Western civilization. The core mobilizing myth of fascism which conditions its ideology, propaganda, style of politics and actions is the vision of the nation's imminent rebirth from decadence. — Roger Griffin, The palingenetic core of generic fascist ideology"

So, the Obama playbook of "profits are too high", you're being "screwed by the corporations", "elect me and I will use the power of government for 'change'", "I work across the isle" That is nothing but fascist sloganeering. His church-like following is liturgical politics. His, "you will have an epiphany" speech is just exactly what fascism is. The reason the young people are so capitvated by this guy is because he IS new to America. We've never seen an old-style European fascist in this country before.

Why should I look up terms for you that you don't understand and explain them for you? That's not being condescending, that is expecting the person that you are having a debate with to have a basic grasp on the historical context of what they are saying. Basically, you don't like Bush and say he's fascist because you heard someone else say it and you thought it sounded good. Right? Bush has problems, certainly. Fascism isn't one of them.

And you're no closer to a point on fascism with regards to Universal Health Care than you were two posts ago. I still don't know WTF your point is. I don't think you do either.

[KarmaContestant]

Originally Posted by ajmccarrell

So, using the authority of the government to takeover a private industry for "cultural renewal" and "unity" and "change" is the VERY definition of fascism. Everything in that first paragraph, including using the race card, is EXACTLY everything Obama says. Michelle Obama says "eschew Middle-Classness", IE avoid "decadence". Obama seeks to use the power of the government to "unite". If you are not terrfied of this man, you don't have a concept of history.

You have no idea what you're even talking about. Why don't you provide your own definitions to support your claims instead of relying on wikipedia and conservative blogs? Where is your voice?

The concept of universal heathcare has nothing to do with fascism. There is no plot to 'take over' the health care industry. That's not what proponents of universal healthcare in America are looking for.

It's really simple - so simple that you probably won't even grasp it: those of us who support universal healthcare are only looking for medical insurance that is government provided and available to everyone regardless of one's economic standing or health condition. If you want United Healthcare, or Cigna or Aetna - that's your right, but there should be another option that is a guarantee for everyone at fair and equal rates for everyone. There is nothing fascist about that, but I can easily see how those who profit from greed would be fearfully opposed to something that might level the playing field.

In our modern world there is no reason whatsoever that every person should not have access to medical care and prescription drugs. Currently this isn't the case even in America. We have a duty as Citizens to provide for one another, and let me point out something: if you are so opposed to a national healthcare program, should I also assume that you are opposed to police departments, libraries, fire departments, public schools, military - would you prefer that we do away with all of those social institutions?