yeezus
It's OVER 5,000!
Fantastic question, but anyone who's moderately sane regrets it big time. Has screwed NJ time and time again.
2016 Presidential Primaries [ SUPER TUESDAY | 3-1-'16]
- Thread starter 57Brave
- Start date
Fantastic question, but anyone who's moderately sane regrets it big time. Has screwed NJ time and time again.
sturg33
I
Wasn't the war overwhelmingly supported by both sides?
Ron Paul was no supporter. But he's a pussy
Oklahomahawk
Boras' Client
Eh, I'm not sold on Christie the politician, but he seems like a decent guy "outside of work". I'm to the point where I just try not to loathe them all right now, especially since we're going to be stuck with most of them for at least another year, some of them for more than a year, a couple of them for a year and a half and God help us one of them for at least 5 1/2 more years.
Personally I don't think Hillary would be as terrible as the Rs think, but I"m just really sick and tired of the "same old thing" in Washington, the "R same old thing and the D same old thing".
You're up in the Tallahassee neck of the woods if memory serves, right?
zitothebrave
Connoisseur of Minors
Because he ran against Corzine,
zitothebrave
Connoisseur of Minors
Neither did Bernie Sanders.
50PoundHead
Hessmania Forever
I kind of get the same impression. He has some skills, but I see him as kind of a cross between his father and his brother (W., not Neil). Has this kind of "gee whiz" noblesse oblige boosterism mixed with this touch of discomfort. Frankly, of the Republican field, I think he's most "keep the car on the road" guy, although I like a lot of what Rand Paul says on foreign policy (minus the defense build-up).
Oklahomahawk
Boras' Client
Sorry man, no "teacher" stuff intended with the red. Being in Florida my attention span is shorter than normal and I just wanted to make sure I responded to all your points. No other intent was present.
sturg33
I
Sounds like a pussy to me
57Brave
Well-known member
Drop aPM if you're passing thru
57Brave
Well-known member
Frank Rich:
Right behind Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio became the second Republican hopeful to run into the latest GOP litmus test: being asked if it was a mistake to invade Iraq. (Scott Walker and Rand Paul have so far been able, just barely, to avoid the question directly.) What's the right answer here?
The reason Republican presidential candidates can’t come up with a “right answer” on Iraq is that there is no right answer that can satisfy both of their contradictory constituencies: (1) the voters they need to reach in the general election and (2) their party’s powerful neocon foreign-policy dead-enders, from Dick Cheney to Bill Kristol, who have not retreated one iota from their view that the Iraq War was the right thing to do, for the right reasons, and that anyone who says otherwise is soft on terrorism. Voters, by contrast, know full well that we blundered into Iraq for specious reasons, vaporizing thousands of American lives and some half million Iraqi lives (not to mention at least $2 trillion) with the end result of making America less safe and delivering Iraq into the clutches of both a new generation of radical Islamic terrorists and Iran. A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll last October found that a record high 66 percent of American adults thought the war wasn’t worth it. More record highs are sure to come. Even as Rubio was trying to stutter his way out of the Iraq-answer quagmire, Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province, was falling to ISIS. This was only days after a 19-year-old college student reminded Jeb Bush that ISIS itself was a byproduct of his brother’s invasion of Iraq and the mismanaged occupation that followed.
Keep in mind that the question that tripped up both Rubio and Jeb Bush was asked on Fox News. Imagine what will happen when the GOP presidential field has to take tougher questions from outside the right’s bubble. After all, as many have pointed out, the general tenor of the Fox question — “Knowing what we know now, would you have invaded Iraq?” — is stupid. As James Fallows has written, it’s comparable to asking, “Knowing what we know now, would you have bought a ticket on Malaysia Air flight 370?” The question rewrites history by postulating that “bad intelligence” about Saddam Hussein’s (nonexistent) nuclear weapons is what precipitated the war, duping the poor Bush Administration (and its Democratic enablers, including Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden) into a war they otherwise would have rejected. The reality is the reverse. The Iraq War was an idee fixe in the Bush White House shortly after 9/11 (if not before, in some quarters) and over the next year, false casus belli were fashioned to sell it.
There have been several books written about the run-up to the war in Iraq. For those who are foggy on the history now being sanitized, I’ll cite one representative example from my own that illustrates how Jeb Bush’s brother and his posse operated. On Sunday, September 8, 2002, the Times ran a front-page story by Michael Gordon and Judith Miller with the headline: “U.S. Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts.” The article quoted anonymous “hardliners” who ominously argued that “the first sign of a ‘smoking gun’ ... may be a mushroom cloud.” The suspect Times story postulating incipient A-bombs, the “mushroom cloud” sometimes included, was regurgitated that same Sunday morning on every talk show by administration officials: Condoleezza Rice (CNN’s Late Edition), Cheney (Meet the Press), Donald Rumsfeld (Face the Nation), and Colin Powell (Fox News Sunday). A month later, George W. Bush invoked that propagandistic “mushroom cloud” in a speech and added another bit of fiction to it: a nonexistent link between Saddam and Al Qaeda. That “mushroom cloud” locution, by the way, was not the product of bad intelligence but the creation of a White House speechwriter, Michael Gerson, now a Washington Post op-ed columnist.
And so a more revealing question that should be asked of potential presidents today is, “Knowing what was known then and now, how would you prevent such duplicity in your White House?” Also: “Would you hire the architects of the Iraq fiasco for any job in your administration?” Some of them are already foreign-policy advisers and tutors to the candidates, with Jeb Bush even seeking the counsel of Paul Wolfowitz, one of the prime perpetrators of the pre-war fantasy that the war would be a cakewalk. Tough questions must be asked of Hillary Clinton as well. She didn’t start calling her cynical Senate vote in favor of the Iraq invasion “a mistake” until after it had helped cost her the 2008 election. She needs to provide a fuller explanation of what she did knowing what she did then, and to explain her unreconstructed reflexive hawkishness when confronted with almost any foreign-policy choice.
Right behind Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio became the second Republican hopeful to run into the latest GOP litmus test: being asked if it was a mistake to invade Iraq. (Scott Walker and Rand Paul have so far been able, just barely, to avoid the question directly.) What's the right answer here?
The reason Republican presidential candidates can’t come up with a “right answer” on Iraq is that there is no right answer that can satisfy both of their contradictory constituencies: (1) the voters they need to reach in the general election and (2) their party’s powerful neocon foreign-policy dead-enders, from Dick Cheney to Bill Kristol, who have not retreated one iota from their view that the Iraq War was the right thing to do, for the right reasons, and that anyone who says otherwise is soft on terrorism. Voters, by contrast, know full well that we blundered into Iraq for specious reasons, vaporizing thousands of American lives and some half million Iraqi lives (not to mention at least $2 trillion) with the end result of making America less safe and delivering Iraq into the clutches of both a new generation of radical Islamic terrorists and Iran. A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll last October found that a record high 66 percent of American adults thought the war wasn’t worth it. More record highs are sure to come. Even as Rubio was trying to stutter his way out of the Iraq-answer quagmire, Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province, was falling to ISIS. This was only days after a 19-year-old college student reminded Jeb Bush that ISIS itself was a byproduct of his brother’s invasion of Iraq and the mismanaged occupation that followed.
Keep in mind that the question that tripped up both Rubio and Jeb Bush was asked on Fox News. Imagine what will happen when the GOP presidential field has to take tougher questions from outside the right’s bubble. After all, as many have pointed out, the general tenor of the Fox question — “Knowing what we know now, would you have invaded Iraq?” — is stupid. As James Fallows has written, it’s comparable to asking, “Knowing what we know now, would you have bought a ticket on Malaysia Air flight 370?” The question rewrites history by postulating that “bad intelligence” about Saddam Hussein’s (nonexistent) nuclear weapons is what precipitated the war, duping the poor Bush Administration (and its Democratic enablers, including Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden) into a war they otherwise would have rejected. The reality is the reverse. The Iraq War was an idee fixe in the Bush White House shortly after 9/11 (if not before, in some quarters) and over the next year, false casus belli were fashioned to sell it.
There have been several books written about the run-up to the war in Iraq. For those who are foggy on the history now being sanitized, I’ll cite one representative example from my own that illustrates how Jeb Bush’s brother and his posse operated. On Sunday, September 8, 2002, the Times ran a front-page story by Michael Gordon and Judith Miller with the headline: “U.S. Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts.” The article quoted anonymous “hardliners” who ominously argued that “the first sign of a ‘smoking gun’ ... may be a mushroom cloud.” The suspect Times story postulating incipient A-bombs, the “mushroom cloud” sometimes included, was regurgitated that same Sunday morning on every talk show by administration officials: Condoleezza Rice (CNN’s Late Edition), Cheney (Meet the Press), Donald Rumsfeld (Face the Nation), and Colin Powell (Fox News Sunday). A month later, George W. Bush invoked that propagandistic “mushroom cloud” in a speech and added another bit of fiction to it: a nonexistent link between Saddam and Al Qaeda. That “mushroom cloud” locution, by the way, was not the product of bad intelligence but the creation of a White House speechwriter, Michael Gerson, now a Washington Post op-ed columnist.
And so a more revealing question that should be asked of potential presidents today is, “Knowing what was known then and now, how would you prevent such duplicity in your White House?” Also: “Would you hire the architects of the Iraq fiasco for any job in your administration?” Some of them are already foreign-policy advisers and tutors to the candidates, with Jeb Bush even seeking the counsel of Paul Wolfowitz, one of the prime perpetrators of the pre-war fantasy that the war would be a cakewalk. Tough questions must be asked of Hillary Clinton as well. She didn’t start calling her cynical Senate vote in favor of the Iraq invasion “a mistake” until after it had helped cost her the 2008 election. She needs to provide a fuller explanation of what she did knowing what she did then, and to explain her unreconstructed reflexive hawkishness when confronted with almost any foreign-policy choice.
Rands not a pussy and he's more electable than his dad. Goes hand in hand.
AerchAngel
<B>Secretary of Statistics</B>
Didn't Hillary agree with the war? Did they interview her on the question?
sturg33
I
Yes - opposing the Iraq war makes you a pussy.
And about 100x smarter than the majority of our government
sturg33
I
I'm sure the 8,000+ US soldiers who were killed in Iraq wished a pussy was the commander in chief. All that war has done was cause us 8,000 lost soldiers, over 100,000 wounded soldiers, over 1 million dead civilians, and $6 trillion in spending... And all that's left us with is... ISIL
BUT AT LEAST NO ONE CAN ACCUSE OF US BEING PUSSIES DAMNIT! MURICA!
BUT AT LEAST NO ONE CAN ACCUSE OF US BEING PUSSIES DAMNIT! MURICA!
zitothebrave
Connoisseur of Minors
Hilary and Biden both voted for the War Resolution. They were cowards who were scared of being attacked for voting against Bush while his popularity was so high post 9/11.
bravesnumberone
Well-known member
But she's not going to be asked the question.
50PoundHead
Hessmania Forever
She's on record. I suppose she can argue that she agreed with the dishonest case that the White House made. And she can say she would have run the war differently. That's not to excuse her vote and she'll have to 'fess to that. She will run to the right of Obama on foreign policy. The Clintons like to talk about the conspiracies against them, but I think Leon Panetta's book was a Clinton effort to differentiate Hillary from Obama.
57Brave
Well-known member
Senator Bob Graham had it right - he had access to the intel and screamed till his lungs bled. But status quo / conventional wisdom won the day.
If the Pres,VP,Sec of State rang the alarm of WMD or nuclear attack -- I dont agree but I certainly understand how Senators and Congressmen would hop in line.
Hans Blix.
So far Rand Paul is the only (R) that hasn't given the Bush 43 team a pass.
The question that needs asking is why would anyone EVER want to listen to Bush 43 foreign policy (or economic for that mater) people?
Bush himself
Cheney
Wolfowitz
etc etc etc
Those are Jeb and Rubio's foreign policy team.
Now, work backwards
If the Pres,VP,Sec of State rang the alarm of WMD or nuclear attack -- I dont agree but I certainly understand how Senators and Congressmen would hop in line.
Hans Blix.
So far Rand Paul is the only (R) that hasn't given the Bush 43 team a pass.
The question that needs asking is why would anyone EVER want to listen to Bush 43 foreign policy (or economic for that mater) people?
Bush himself
Cheney
Wolfowitz
etc etc etc
Those are Jeb and Rubio's foreign policy team.
Now, work backwards