[Rhodes22-list] stirring the hornet's nest.... (political)

[Wally Buck]

Brad,

Your post doesn't really answer any of Slim's points. As you know I have 
been against this was from day one. It doesn't matter what side led us into 
the mess.

Wally


>From: brad haslett <flybrad at yahoo.com>
>Reply-To: The Rhodes 22 mail list <rhodes22-list at rhodes22.org>
>To: The Rhodes 22 mail list <rhodes22-list at rhodes22.org>
>Subject: Re: [Rhodes22-list] stirring the hornet's nest.... (political)
>Date: Wed, 16 Nov 2005 03:15:59 -0800 (PST)
>
>Slim,
>
>Forgive me, I lied.  It is only 5am and I do have time
>for one more post.  This is something I ran across
>reading the morning papers.  Buchanan is not a
>favorite of mine but sometimes he "gets it".  Enjoy.
>
>Brad
>
>--------------
>November 16, 2005
>The Politics of War and the Patriot Card
>By Pat Buchanan
>
>Since the indictment of Scooter Libby, President Bush
>and Vice President Cheney have been under relentless
>assault.
>
>The gravamen of the charge is that Bush, Cheney and
>the War Party cherry-picked and hyped the intelligence
>on Iraqi WMDs and Saddam's ties to al-Qaida and 9-11,
>and spoke of mushroom clouds over U.S. cities based on
>flimsy evidence and forged documents that Saddam had
>reconstituted his nuclear weapons program.
>
>Echoed by anti-Bush media that can smell blood in the
>water, the Democratic Party is charging that Bush
>misled, deceived or lied us into war. With polls
>showing 57 percent of the nation no longer believes
>Bush to be honest and truthful, the unanswered charges
>have had a devastating impact.
>
>But Bush has a last card to play, and on Veterans Day,
>he played it, the ace of trumps in any president's
>hand: the patriot card.
>
>Speaking in Pennsylvania to the troops, Bush said that
>pro-war Democrats like John Kerry saw the same
>intelligence he did and voted to take Saddam down, and
>that Democrats now accusing him of faking intelligence
>are undercutting our fighting troops in Iraq.
>
>Translation: Democrats are giving aid and comfort to
>the enemy in time of war. We are one step away form
>the T-word.
>
>With his poll ratings at rock bottom and little to
>lose, Bush has just escalated the war politics.
>Democrats who have had it all their way since Cindy
>Sheehan set up Camp Casey would do well to wonder
>whether they have not ridden out a little too far into
>Indian country and are heading for the Little Big Horn
>where their daddies disappeared long ago.
>
>In the late 1940s, the Party of Truman and FDR was
>shredded by Nixon, Bill Jenner and Joe McCarthy for
>having sold out Eastern Europe at Yalta, lost China,
>and coddled communists and Stalinist spies like Alger
>Hiss and Harry Dexter White. And there was a reason
>the attacks stuck. They had the ancillary benefit of
>being true.
>
>The media may have rewritten history to make the
>Edward R. Murrow Left look like the heroes of the era,
>but the Democratic Party never recovered from the
>charge its leaders had groveled to Stalin. JFK knew
>it, and ran and won the presidency as an
>anti-communist hawk.
>
>A generation later, Nixon and Agnew charged the
>Democratic Party with having marched us into Vietnam
>and then, when the going got tough, of having turned
>tail, cut and run, and gone over the hill to march
>with the children against the war into which they had
>themselves led the United States. Those charges stuck
>for the same reason: They were true.
>
>Between 1961 and 1969, when America was plunged into
>Vietnam, Washington was Democratic, from the White
>House to the Capitol to the pro-war Washington Post.
>When Nixon arrived in 1969, Democrats started calling
>it "Nixon's War," but the country knew it was a
>Democratic war. And when the liberals turned on Nixon,
>America turned on them and gave him a 49-state
>landslide. Vietnam was the wheel on which liberalism
>was broken and the FDR New Deal coalition shattered
>forever.
>
>Now, Democrats have maneuvered themselves onto the
>same risky terrain once again.
>
>Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice took us to war, but
>Democrats were the happiest of camp followers. And
>everybody knows it. Daschle, Kerry, Edwards, Biden,
>Clinton and Schumer all declared Saddam a threat to
>the Middle East and the United States. All voted in
>October 2002 to give Bush his blank check to take us
>to war. Now that the war is dragging on toward its
>fourth year, now that footage of young men trying to
>walk with artificial limbs is on nightly TV, now that
>the morning papers report three or four more American
>dead every day, they are trying to say they were
>misled, they were deceived, they were lied to. It's
>not our fault!
>
>But the truth is they failed America. They handed to
>Bush the war power the Constitution had given to them.
>Having enlisted enthusiastically in a "cakewalk" war,
>national Democrats and Big Media are deserting and
>applying for conscientious objector status in what now
>appears an endless war.
>
>Sorry, it is too late for that.
>
>What Bush was saying in Pennsylvania is this: You may
>accuse me of falsifying intelligence, but you are
>falsifying history. And you will not get away with it.
>I am going to fight it out on this line, even if it
>costs me my presidency. But if I am going down, you
>are going down with me.
>
>If Iraq is lost to chaos and civil war, and this is a
>historic defeat and strategic disaster for the United
>States, Bush is saying, I will charge you with cutting
>and running, abandoning our troops under fire and
>losing the Iraq war. No wonder Bill and Hillary seem
>wary of throwing in with the Cindy Sheehan crowd.
>
>
>
>
>--- Slim <salm at mn.rr.com> wrote:
>
> > Never mind the spin or the rhetoric, forget about
> > so-called intelligence,
> > never mind your own left or right stripes.  What
> > does your gut really say to
> > you about this war?  Here's what mine tells me:
> >
> > First the tyranny of Saddam. This is no reason to
> > invade a sovereign state.
> > The US has ignored or even supported so many tyrants
> > I can't count 'em.  But
> > just to name a few, Pinochet, The Shaw of Iran, Kim
> > Jong Ill, even Saddam
> > himself was armed by the US.  So we say, "He's
> > abusing his own citizens so
> > we better go in there and take him down."  Not only
> > is this bad foreign
> > policy, but it's bullshit policy because we don't
> > really care.  We didn't
> > care about the Shaw's death squads or Pinochet's.
> > Why now Saddam?  The
> > whole tyrant argument holds no water at all.
> >
> > The same goes for the argument about spreading
> > freedom and democracy. What a
> > load of crap!  Don't tell me that our government
> > actually give a rat's ass
> > about an Iraqi democracy.  No, I'm not saying
> > democracy itself is crap, but
> > why would we care about Iraq when we don't care
> > about the dozens of other
> > non-democratic countries?  Why Iraq?  Why not invade
> > Cuba?  Isn't Fidel a
> > tyrant?  Why not North Korea?  We know Kim Jong Ill
> > is a tyrant.  This is
> > bad foreign policy.
> >
> > I agreed with Mike Abdullah when he stated we had no
> > business in Kuwait in
> > the first place.  We shouldn't be fighting other
> > countries' border battles.
> > As Mike said, What was Saddam going to do with his
> > oil?  Drink it?  He was
> > selling it on the open market and black market just
> > like every other Arab
> > state.  That was bad foreign policy.
> >
> > But whatever, then we had Saddam completely
> > contained with the no-fly-zone
> > and the sanctions.  He was no threat to us.  Perhaps
> > he was a "threat" to
> > Israel, but why go to war with someone you've
> > already beaten?  This is bad
> > foreign policy.
> >
> > Did we need to go in and hunt for WMD?  Do we need
> > to go into ANY country
> > hunting for WMD?  Again, why not North Korea?  This
> > is bad foreign policy.
> >
> > Did we need to go into Iraq to control the oil?  No.
> >  What have oil prices
> > done since then?  The exact same thing they would
> > have done had we not gone
> > to war.  They've gone up.  Happy now?
> >
> > Did we need to go into Iraq as a response to 9/11?
> > This is asinine foreign
> > policy.  Everyone knows Saddam had nothing to do
> > with that.
> >
> > Thousands are now dead or wounded so Halliburton
> > could make a windfall.
> > Folks, the definition of Fascism is when government
> > is in bed with business.
> > THIS IS VERY BAD FOREIGN POLICY!
> >
> > Our government is despised by nearly every soul
> > outside our borders.  And
> > over half those inside!  Do polls dictate our
> > policy?  I think not.
> > Although I noticed the Indonesians' attitude towards
> > us perked up a bit
> > after all the tsunami relief money that poured in.
> > But even our low-key,
> > happy neighbors to the north hate Bush.  The joke
> > going around Canada is
> > that all you have to do to get elected is to be
> > anti-Bush.  I won't go into
> > how mein furor is screwing Canada on the softwoods
> > issue.  I'll leave that
> > for another thread.  But we buy lots and lots of oil
> > from Canada so we ought
> > to be nice to her.  Guess who else wants Canadian
> > oil?  China.  And lots and
> > lots of it.  Maybe we should invade Canada.  Yeah,
> > that's the ticket, eh!
> >
> > It's beyond me how anyone can favor this war for any
> > reason.
> >
> > Slim
> >
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> >
>
>
>
>
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