That's right. I agree. And now that the Democrats are all jumping on him like a rotting carcus in the desert, it really does wonders for their party platform. If this is all the democrats have for the next election, I'm not voting for one.
Forgetting for the moment that some Democrats actually really care about things in Iraq, it's hardly abnormal behavior. Come on dude, it's not like it's ALL they've got. Personally, I think any 'average' American that would 'vote in' Bush 'again' needs his head examined...
I don't vote. I don't know what a republican or a democrat is. All I know is under which administration life seemed better. And it aint this one. We are kept in fear everyday with bogus reports that just fade off into space after a few days.
I only accept Kirsten Dunst to say, "Bring Em On" Bush must have watched that movie, the night before... not that I did... it's only from what I've heard...
I honestly did not vote for Bush at the beginning and found him to be the less educated of the two. I have since realized that it was me who was absolutely wrong. Bush is very educated in the most important thing -- social intelligence. He knows how to get people to love him for who he is. Bush shows that you don't have to be perfect to be the leader of the strongest nation on Earth. He will most likely get my vote in the next election. I've seen the alternatives, and I'd much rather have him around for four more years. That is totally the opposite position from which I would have taken just a few years ago.
Damn clever of him and Karl Rove to concoct that whole 9/11 thing. That anthrax episode was just a rumor Rumsfeld started. The washington snipers were just misunderstood. All those suicide bombings in Israel are exaggerated. USS Cole could have developed that hole in its side plenty of ways. Khobar Towers and Rhyadh were not bombings but typical shoddy Sauid construction failures. Bali, Kenya bombings were probably caused by gas leaks.
And Human Rights For All With Saddam's weapons of mass destruction nowhere to be found, the president's Iraq talking points now center on the humanitarian upside of having ousted the Butcher of Baghdad. His speeches are liberally peppered with mentions of "mass graves," "torture chambers," and encomiums to "freeing the people of Iraq from the clutches of Saddam Hussein." He's all but doused himself in the sweet-smelling scent of human rights and put on an Amnesty International t-shirt. But, OK, let's say we take the president at face value and buy his new argument that ending humanitarian crises through military force is good foreign policy. Then how can he justify embarking on his first trip to sub-Saharan Africa next week without including on his itinerary Congo and Liberia? His five-day visit will include stops in Senegal, Botswana, Uganda, Nigeria, and South Africa -- but not the absurdly named Democratic Republic of Congo, site of what one African expert has labeled "the worst humanitarian situation on the entire face of the earth." You'd think a president willing to send 200,000 U.S. troops to Iraq because of Saddam's mass graves might want to check out firsthand the 20 mass graves recently unearthed in the Congo, freshly filled with close to 1,000 victims of genocidal massacres. There's your causus belli right there -- that is, if there is any substance to this new Bush doctrine that evil dictators who abuse their own people must be deposed, by force if necessary, even if they pose no imminent threat to the United States. But I guess the 3.3 million people who have died in the Congo since 1998 -- to say nothing of the horror stories of macheted infants, incinerated villages, and soldiers mutilating and even cannibalizing their victims -- are not enough to justify a second muscular application of the Bush human rights doctrine. They aren't even enough to motivate the president to squeeze a Congo stopover into his African schedule and bring some much-needed international attention to this massive humanitarian crisis. I'm not talking about making nice with dictators; I'm talking about using the power of his office to help stop the bloodshed. He also won't be going to war-torn Liberia, a nation of 3 million with historical ties to America, where 200,000 people have been killed, a million more displaced, disease is running rampant, and beleaguered citizens are pleading with the United States to intervene. After 700 people were massacred in a rebel attack on the capital city of Monrovia two weeks ago, African leaders called on President Bush to send in 2,000 U.S. troops as part of an international peace keeping force. Both the Pentagon and the State Department are in favor of such a move, but the White House has so far declined to expand its adventures in dictator-eradication to Africa. Of course, that hasn't stopped the president from paying lip service to alleviating the suffering going on there. Just last week he said: "We are determined to help the people of Liberia find the path to peace." But, apparently, not determined enough to go to the country himself to facilitate a ceasefire agreement between the warring factions. Instead, he's dispatched 35 -- that's not a typo, "thirty-five" -- U.S. troops to the country, as he put it, "solely for the purpose of protecting American citizens and property." Wow, I bet Liberian President Charles Taylor is quaking in his jackboots. Taylor, whose murderous regime could teach Saddam a thing or two about torture and mass murder, was last month indicted for war crimes by a U.N. court While trying to drum up outrage at Saddam earlier this year, the president catalogued a list of his atrocities, including mutilation and rape, and proclaimed: "If this is not evil, then evil has no meaning." But the president's fly-over of Africa's hearts of darkness, riven by mutilation and rape, shows that it's his humanitarian rhetoric that has no meaning. Here is true evil, but next week will instead be dominated by a series of photo-ops with smiling children and platitudes about the virtues of democracy. If more proof of the hypocritical selectivity of Bush's moral outrage were needed, look no further than the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, when, in the name of liberating the Iraqi people, the White House gladly linked arms with a host of countries its own State Department had castigated for significant human rights violations -- including Uzbekistan, Colombia, Georgia, Eritrea, Macedonia, Rwanda, Uganda, Ethiopia, Azerbaijan, and the Dominican Republic. Given these countries' dismal human rights record, maybe we should have called them the Coalition of the Willing to Torture, Execute, and Rape. The suddenly fashionable humanitarian justification for the war in Iraq is nothing more than yet another White House deception designed to cloak the fact that the original justification -- Iraq as an imminent threat -- hasn't panned out. Which is just too darn bad for the long-suffering souls of Congo and Liberia. http://www.ariannaonline.com/columns/files/070203.html
"This is why the Democrats will never have the upper hand in foreign policy. Their criticism of Bush's swagger stems not from an ethos of gentlemanly self-restraint but from a pathology of perverse self-loathing." John Coumarianos
"No, I don't think it's merely rhetoric. One of the many layers of the arguments for invading Iraq focused on the difficulties of waging a serious war on terror from a distant remove. Being based in Iraq helps us notonly because of actual bases; but because the American presence there diverts terrorist attention away from elsewhere. By confronting them directly in Iraq, we get to engage them in a military setting that plays to our strengths rather than to theirs'. Continued conflict in Iraq, in other words, needn't always be bad news. It may be a sign that we are drawing the terrorists out of the woodwork and tackling them in the open." Andrew Sullivan