The beginning of the End for all great Empires occurs when they "over-extend" themselves and try their hand at Nation building. I fear that George Bush has "over-extended" our Country in a very similar fashion. George Tenet's testimony today at the Senate Armed Services Committee is highly reflective of an administration that did not wish to listen to objective intelligence regarding WMD and Saddam Hussein, let alone any connection between Saddam and al-Qaida. If you have any doubt about this, I urge you to take a look at the line of questioning, and the answers that CIA Director Tenet provided. I also don't trust a leader that has never been in combat, but yet tells the American public that he will only use "war as a last resort" only to go bullheaded into war, risking American soldiers for a so-called pre-emptive strike that had nothing to do with an immediate threat.
Quote from Cdhern regarding John Kerry: "Yes he is a Nam vet, although I'm not impressed with his achievement there. But after he came home, he became a coward. This has got to be one of the most absurd let alone idiotic statements that I have ever seen made on ET. I'm a Republican I can certainly appreciate the service that John Kerry gave to his country in Vietnam. Anyone that says otherwise is an asshole, moron, or both. http://www.snopes.com/politics/kerry/service.asp
What are you talking about Waggie? Were you on here bashing Clinton when we went into Kosovo? I mean give me a break. That chicken shit Clinton ran off to Canada to avoid the war and then takes unilateral action and launches a pre-emptive attack on Kosovo because Milosovic killed 200 of his own soldiers. Saddam killed 200,000! Stop being a dove Waggie. We have serious issues in the world right now and if we don't fight these fights now, your family will be fighting them in your own backyard. Is your family ready to take arms? Are you Waggie? Are you ready to stand a post and find out how tough you really are when your life is on the line? Maybe you are, maybe you aren't. But do you really want to find out. We need to bring some stability to this world. Let's forget about peace for a second and try for stability. It is absolutely paramount that we bring peace and stability to the middle east. Don't you understand Waggie then what the Saudi's launch ICBM's at Israel, they are also launching them at San Fran too. No, maybe not directly but its called nuclear fallout or should I say nuclear holocaust. It will take 72 hours for the radiation to reach San Francisco Bay. Your life as you know it will be over. This is why you should care about what is happening between Israel and the radical fundamentalists. This is why I stand behind Bush. Now, is Bush playing by the rules? Probably not, but neither was Jack Kennedy when he went head to head with Kruschef(sp) during the Cuban missile Crisis. I'm not so sure FDR played by the rules during WWII or Winston Churchill for that matter. I'm not so sure I trust LBJ with what he did with Vietnam. The bottom line is, our leaders have an infinite amount of information that we simply don't have access to and never will. You just need to accept the fact that we will never have the information that are leaders are using to base their decisions off of. All we can do is elect leaders who we believe will lead with character and honor and dignity. We put our faith in them. I believe that our future is bright. We will win this war on terror. We will be safe. And I only believe that because George Bush is in power.
Wow waggie, what a wonderful hunk of a man you are. Do you always display such manners towards women you disagree with? It would have been finer display of manliness to just simply suggest I read the link you provided. Vulgarity exposes so much of a persons intellect. IF indeed Kerry's performance in Nam is as that link indicates, then fine, I stand corrected. But what about his actions AFTER he came home? Which brings to mind a question: Waggie, how old were you at the conclusion of the Viet Nam war? If you were old enough, what did you see, what did you feel?
I must say that I find it absurd that you would go through a long winded rambling of how you feel much safer with George Bush as the leader of our Country, and then use Senator and distinguished Vietnam Vet John Kerry as your whipping boy to hammer your point home. That is so freaking sad, I don't even know where to begin. It doesn't matter whether or not you are male or female. The gender card doesn't have anything to do with calling a highly decorated Vietnam Vet a coward. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. I am 44 years old. I'll let you do the math. Hopefully you do math better than you think before you speak. http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/vietnam.html
Yeah I know, but I have to live with all his pious speeches about black and white thinking and ad hominem attacks and then this guy makes a black and white argument and makes an ad hominem attack. I think the democratic party should just change their name to the hypocritical party and appoint ART as their party spokesperson.
WE have been through this argument before. I have no problem with securing our Nation-State. And as I have told you before, I am a big proponent on spending money on our Military and developing the kind of tremendous ISR effort ( Intell, Surveillance, Reconn ) that money can buy. In fact, one of my biggest long term holdings is in an electronics defense company that trades on the NYSE and it has been in our family since 1998, which is a helluva long time for an old futures scalper like me! In any event, I simply have a problem with how our intelligence agency has been prostituted by the current Administration. Why even bother having a CIA if you aren't even going to listen to them? In my opinion, the "whoring" of our intelligence agency by the Bush Administration for the invasion of Iraq was one of the sadder moments of our Democracy. Mav, this has nothing to do with LBJ or Clinton or Kennedy or a trip down administration memory lane . . . This is about NOW, and the circumstances that lead to an invasion based on "faulty" intelligence, or not even listening to the intelligence that we had in an objective fashion. Besides, even in the "worst case scenario" in which I agreed with you that a regime change was necessary in securing our Country and you believed that Saddam Hussein needed to be taken out, why risk any human lives when you have the Predator and Global Hawk in your arsenal, already proven weapons in the battlefield of Afghanistan? Or did you need to somehow "shock and awe" the rest of the Arab Community in order to make your point and kill many innocent women and children and watch several U.S. soldiers get picked-off day after day after day?
Waggie, apparently you missed my point about not having access to all available information. The fact of the matter is we don't know and probably will never know what Bush knew and what he didn't know. So why freaking speculate? Why pretend that you are sitting in those pentagon meetings looking over classified information. Is there something we don't know about you Waggie? Do you have some kind of security clearance? Because if you don't then you know about as much as we do, which is a little bit more then jack squat. Which makes me very suspicious of your motives here. Since we are dealing in a game in which we are given only fragments of information and yet somehow you have managed to put together the puzzle and come to your own conclusions. Look, if we discover that Bush lied to the American people, I will be the first person on ET to condemn him. If we find out that there was no credible information to attack Iraq on then my support for him will cease. However Waggie, keep in mind that everything Bush has said about Iraq is exactly what Clinton and Kerry said word for word. So if Bush is lying to us, then so is Bill Clinton and so is John Kerry. In fact, everyone must be in on this lie, the whole world must be lying to us. The pentagon lied, the CIA lied, Blair lied, all the undercover agents lied, Tenet lied, everyone. Now that just doesn't seem plausible now does it? Waggie, I have to say that I am very disappointed in your selection of Jerry Brown as your choice to replace Bush. Why? Because if you are a republican like you claim, are you telling me you can't name one person in your own party, not one senator, not one congressman, not one governor, not one mayor, not even maybe an attorney general, not one republican in the entire party? So you name a freaking democrat and you tell me you are a registered republican. If that is true, I think you are a sellout. I'm sorry, I know that is a harsh word. And I am not saying anything negative about you as a trader or as a person, but you are a sellout to your own party if you can't even name one person anywhere in the country from the party that you supposedly are registered with. That's pretty sad.