I think the Democrats are making the same mistake they made in '72, when they put McGovern against Nixon. If there was ever a Presidency that was in trouble it was Nixon's--any halfway credible candidate could have beaten him but the Democrats failed to field a halfway credible candidate.
The Bush Presidency is in far less trouble than Nixon's, and Kerry doesn't seem to be making any better impression than McGovern did, so it appears to me that the Democrats, handed a golden opportunity, have once again shot themselves in the foot.
One artillery round with sarin gas, a round that in the past 14-15 months could have come from anywhere in the Middle East? Not exactly a slew of WMDs, is it, but it is a sop to neocons who have been drowning in lack of any factual data relating to the actual presence of WMDs.
Mustard gas? Where?
Yo. In Leavenworth where they belong.
Charlie Self "The test and the use of man's education is that he finds pleasure in the exercise of his mind." Jacques Barzun
The evidence? "Facts" passed on by the various intelligence groups, and misinterpreted by the adminstration.
I'm not going with this any more. You're not going to change my mind that Bush is a straw man, propped up by Cheney and Cheney is one of the bigger thieves in the world. And I don't see a chance of changing your mind.
So any further exchange is pointless.
Charlie Self "The test and the use of man's education is that he finds pleasure in the exercise of his mind." Jacques Barzun
You most certainly can. You must cancel all bids first though. Reasons commonly given are 'item is no longer for sale' or 'item was lost or broken'. It is a bad practice but it happens all the time and it is bending the rules. I think most sellers that cancel their auction because the bids aren't high enough are stupid, as most bids come in on the last minute. Put a reserve on it if you need to.
I dumped all the non wooddorking contributors and Micheal Moore wanna-bees a few months ago. Lost one or two posters I didn't want to, but the tone of what's left is so much more civil that it's darned near a nice place again.
I notice we've gone from "the President lied" to the administration misinterpreting intelligence data. Looks like it was "misinterpreted" by a lot of people on both sides of the aisle. But I guess in your mind, they aren't culpable. I'd say this is a good time for you to bail out, too.
Well, no. I was being generous, accepting the little Bush's interpretation. If you want the honest truth, I think he lied like a rug and pushed like crazy for the interpretations he got, which he then had presented as the ultimate truth.
Enough.
Charlie Self "The test and the use of man's education is that he finds pleasure in the exercise of his mind." Jacques Barzun
If he isn't, I am. Actually, I'm not calling anyone a liar on the WMD issue - they were all taken in by false intelligance, a lot of which apparently came from Chalabi, who was our fair- haired boy at the time.
But there are a lot of other issues, like linking Iraq and 9/11 by inference in every speech. Like calling an open truck with canvas sides a bioweapons lab - even Saddam wasn't THAT stupid!
I could go on, but this is just a vent. It won't change anyones mind. If they haven't seen through Bush/Cheney/et al by now they never will.
And no, I don't like Kerry. Once again I have to vote for the lesser of two weevils.
Did you miss the announcement, by OUR military, that it was an unlabelled leftover from the '91 war or before, and that the insurgents who tied it into their bomb probably didn't even know what it was?
Or did faux Fox even mention that part of the story?
I haven't seen it. Can you post a citation? But so what if it was? The total number Iraq was supposed to have was zero. The real question is, are there any more? I don't know, and I sure as hell know you don't know. Personally, I find it hard to believe that we found the only Sarin-filled shell in a country larger than California. Earlier in this thread, I posted a list of quotes from a list of Democrats publicly stating that Iraq had WMDs. If Iraq didn't possess them prior to our recent military action, the intelligence community didn't know it. My belief is that we had incomplete data that suggested Iraq did possess WMDs and a long history of intransigence on the part of Saddam with him not allowing inspections, then allowing them but holding inspectors up at the front gate while moving the stuff out the back, then kicking inspectors out, etc. Unfortunately, Saddam had given us every reason in the face of incomplete data to assume the worst. So, forced to assume the worst, we went to the UN. Even with Saddam thumbing his nose after UN resolution after resolution, the UN didn't see fit to enforce its own resolutions. We're beginning to get an understanding of why that was with the corruption in the oil for food program starting to come out.
Interesting as they may be, those points are utterly irrelevant. The stuff was not supposed to have been there at all. And yet it was.
You keep asking "where are those Iraqi WMDs?" Obviously one, at least, has been located. Does it not occur to you to wonder (a) where it was being stored, and (b) how many more are there where that one came from?
-- Regards, Doug Miller (alphageek-at-milmac-dot-com)
For a copy of my TrollFilter for NewsProxy/Nfilter, send email to autoresponder at filterinfo-at-milmac-dot-com You must use your REAL email address to get a response.
Bottom line: Dammit! I'm a Democrat! I've been a Democrat all my life! None of the quotes you have posted above showing that *everyone* misinterpreted the available intelligence data is going to make me change my mind that Bush is not a lying sack of crud. I'm a Democrat and I'm not going to change my mind!
Unlabelled leftover that was *not* supposed to be in existance. The question of the day was not that insurgents didn't know what they had, but the question that *anybody* could have found a shell (actually to date 3 shells) that didn't exist. Remember, Saddam didn't have have *any* more WMD's (zero, zip, zilch, nada). The insurgents weren't in power before the conflict, Saddam was. So either Saddam and his troops were incredibly careless, or somebody better start worrying where the rest of those "unlabeled, forgotten" shells are before the insurgents do figure out what they have and really start hurting people.
At least they mentioned the fact that the sarin gas shell was found. CNN didn't find it newsworthy enough to mention for several days after it was found.
In terms of "Untidy armies losing chemical weapons by accident" the score for the US Army is still considerably higher than the Iraqis. Since 1998, more chemical weapons have been uncovered in the back garden of the Korean Ambassador's residence in Washington than have been found in Iraq. More VX has been spilled over Johnson Atoll by carelessness than has shown up around Tikrit or Baghdad.
No one ever claimed that Iraq never had assorted nasties (Hey, we _sold_ the damn things to them). The real question is simply "Was the post-'91 UN inspection period effective at removing them", and the answer to that increasingly seems to be positive.
It's obviously unrealistic to wave a magic wand and have all their previous traces vanish. Finding the dregs (for that's all we're talking about) of an old and abandoned campaign and claiming that it represents _continuing_ involvement is blatantly letting a political agenda bend the facts.
The "dregs" in that sarin shell could kill 1000-2000 people. The lethal dose is 1.7mg, and it was a 3 or 4 liter shell. How many lethal doses are enough to be considered a weapon of mass destruction? If you don't consider
1000 or 2000 dead to be "mass destruction", what number is your thresshold for this?
How many more shells that they have that they don't have do they have?
I don't consider death as destruction. I see it as murder.
WMD means anything and nothing, Are you going to consider a 767 as a WMD? You should as it killed more than your 2000.
About your shell, I bet that shell has more fingernail gouges than can be counted from your type of person holding onto it for dear life in your justification for the 'war' and unjustified occupation of another country.
The shell is too little too late.
And your figures are off, 1 to 1.7 GRAMS skin, that's roughly 1.5cc (1.09 sg @
25C). You could kill your 2 to 4000 people, IF you had them strip so the dose could make 100% contact.
This reminds me of the Cosby comment in that the Radical Right will grab hold of anything they can present out of context in order to support their claims.
One frigging shell. ONE. ONE shell justifies everything that's happened and that's going to happen.
I can say one thing for that ONE shell: At least it is real, unlike the excuses used to justify the Iraq War.
A stash of 100 or so would do it for me.
I'm going to need more than something that could have fallen from a transport.
(yes, I wrote mg when I should have written ml. My bad.)
Word games? Next are we going to argue about what the definition of the word "is" is?
My 2000?
My shell?
My type of person? What, the kind that believed S.H. when he said he had 'em, and who is now shown to have been telling the truth?
I'm not justifying anything, I'm pointing out the fact that a shell that has enough toxins to kill 1000 or more people is plenty enough of a W of MD (or MM if you prefer) to fit any reasonable definition.
Or, maybe it's just the beginning. 3 by the way, the other 2 had mustard gas in them. Which he also wasn't supposed to have.
Let's talk about inhalation then, shall we?
Before the shell was found, "your people" were whining that none were found. Now that this one, and the two mustard shells have been found, your people are dismissing them. The inescapable conclusion is that there is nothing which could convince you to deviate from your chosen mindset.
How many lethal doses is enough to convince you?
So, at a conservative estimate of 1000 doses per shell, you won't consider it WMD until there's enough to kill 100,000 people?
Oh, I'm sure there's a _perfectly_ innocent reason why a shell that's not supposed to be there at all, just happened to fall off a truck and bury itself where our troops would be. Probably happens all the time, ya know? Woopsie, we lost _the one shell_ that we have with the nasties in it. Yeah, that sounds pretty plausible. Sheesh.
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