Er... What? Could you please elucidate on this statement? :confused:

Let's play a game called "Democrat or Terrorist?"

Unfortunately, the sentence construction and semantic differences make it an easy game. But the point remains.

More in a bit, I gotta get some work done.

Well, Noodle, the spooky part to me is that there actually is some truth in a few of those statements. I am far from being an advocate of terrorism, but they do make some good points about what's going on in the US. I feel deeply concerned about what is going on at the National level and the direction this country seems to be turning. The US was once a great republic. I don't like what it seems to be turning into these days. :(

Let's play a game called "Bush or Bin Laden".

Guess which person said which quote:

I see immediate differences between your quotes and mine. Mine reflect seething hatred, and the fact that both Democrats and terrorists share a common enemy is telling.

Your quotes are, for the most part, simple platitudes that could've been spoken at any random Rotary Club meeting or high school speech class. You fail to make your point, although I recognize what it is.

It should tell you a lot about how despicable their common enemy is.

It's like an alternate universe here sometimes. Did you read what you just posted before you pushed 'send'? I fear greatly that you did.

And just how do repubicans sound talking about Democrats? How did conservatives sound talking about Clinton? Was it dramatically different?

Sure I read it. I don't like Bush. The terrorists don't like Bush either. That doesn't mean I'm buddies with the terrorists.

If two distinctly different groups like the terrorists and Democrats can agree that Bush is bad, then maybe, just maybe, Bush is bad.

If we had been at war, you would have been hard-pressed to find a Republican trying to undermine the efforts of the commander in chief, at least until the thing was won. That's my opinion, at least.

Not that we would have stuck around long enough to win. Somalia, anyone?

Wag the dog! Wag the dog!

A wagged dog can bite around more than one hundred eighty degrees of arc.

Should I start a new thread of wholly new and original proverbs?

I for one accept that we are at war, for I do not accept the specious argument that we need to declare a war to be fighting one: history and the Supreme Court both render the verdict that it is not so. The United States has been in about a hundred and fifty armed conflicts/shootouts, and has formally declared a state of war in but five of them. Too, the War Powers Act pretty much codifies the fighting of wars without Congressional declaration.

Democracy's foes are banking on democracies' not lasting out a protracted conflict. I say we must render this strategy sterile, and be better at protracted conflict from the very beginning than democracy's foes are. An enemy of democracy is an enemy of all mankind, wealth and the good life wealth provides, Mom, apple pie with cinnamon, and so forth, no? Why shouldn't mankind therefore stamp these foes out? And should we even care how long it takes or how much stamping we do? That's only a matter of logistics -- bringing up enough bullets to parcel out among the screwballs that insist upon martyrdom.

If all of Islam's Idiots fell down dead this afternoon, what opportunities does this open up for the sensible, moderate Muslims?

Glatt: they won't like Bush's successor, either; I'd bank on it.

Yeah, you FOR ONE do.

Yeah, we've pretty much screwed the pooch when it comes to the Middle East. I bet the US could elect Bin Laden as president, and the Muslim world STILL wouldn't like us very much.:eyebrow:

Hey, there's an idea, why didnt I think of that?

I disagree with you. The way I remember it, when Clinton was planning on protecting innocent victims in Kosovo from ethinic cleansing, the repubicans were critical:

August 12, 1998

And all the while were attacking him at home with more than nasty name-calling.

August 17, 1998:


I especially enjoy reading the repubican criticism of this military action. "highly complex ethnic conflict", "almost total lack of clarity and coherence as to the outcome the Administration's policy is designed to produce, and "address these flaws in its policy before U.S. forces are committed ...operation has now become precisely what the Administration promised Congress and the American people it would not be: an ill-defined, open-ended nation-building project -- with no end in sight" ("stay the course anyone?) all sound like the same criticisms of the Iraq policy coming from the other side of the aisle. :p

Politicians have short memories. :cool:

I love how the Dems and Reps traded seats on that. A pox on both their houses.

Not exactly. There was partisanship aplenty in both cases, but Republican rhetoric didn't even begin to approach the level of hatefulness of today's Dems'. They tried to make it sound like it was the worst name-calling and character assassination in history, but it didn't hold a candle to what we're hearing today. Furthermore, the Hollywood and Washington D.C. cocktail party crowd had the left's best interests at heart then and now, and 5 Fox News Channels couldn't begin to counter the spin that they produce in the news and entertainment world. Furthermore, Milosevic didn't have an al-Jazeera to parrot the talking points of Republicans in order to undermine the effort there.

The right and the left hate each other, but the similarities end there.

It was far worse.

OH YEAH! I forgot about the Clinton body count. Good find.

But it's still not worse.

(and I still think it's probably true -- if Hillary wins the White House, watch the count go up)

Well, I think both sides are in it for their own gain, especially at the Washington level. So, there's actually TWO things they have in common.

Far worse.
So you're hardly speaking from the moral high ground, here.

How does Republicans yelling "murder" > Democrats yelling "murder"?

I believe Americans (and the Uk) have violent capabilities. Can anybody say 600,000 dead iraqis?

My response was to your assertion

Well, there was a military action (granted, not a "war"), and the republicans' *actions* (and we all know they speak louder than words) was to stab the commander-in-chief in the back with an impeachment proceeding. One that the repubicans knew would never get enough votes, but distracted the government during an armed conflict. Maybe if Clinton's focus would not have been on the impeachment he could have stopped 9/11 from happening. Hey, you know what? REPUBLICANS CAUSED 9/11! :p

Yeah, I heard that. Saddam killed 300,000, and Bush's actions have killed twice that. He should be doubly proud.[/sarcasm]

Who is Bush supposed to have murdered?

And I'm not talking about bad policies that resulted in deaths; both sides will call those rhetorical "murders". I think plenty of people laid Blackhawk Down and Waco directly at Clinton's feet. It's not as many "murders" as Bush's toll, but you can't claim the dearth of death on Clinton's watch as a point for Republicans.

But are there any actual murders being blamed on Bush?

Well, there's this guy.

Oh, you meant George. :redface:

The 600,000 figure isn't trustworthy, coming as it does from a source that is anti-American-foreign-policy-success first and carefully accurate a distant second. The methodology used to make this estimate is open to considerable question to put it mildly. The actual figure may be a twelfth that -- circa 50,000, and how much of that Iraqi-on-Iraqi in this low-grade civil war?

And still the real brawling stays in the Sunni provinces, after years of troublemaking. Seems it can't spread to any effect, which gives me hope for a democratic and wise and humane future for Iraq.

How about for the guy in the other car?

I've always suspected GWB had his own Chappaquiddick in his past, and it's possible that he still does. IMO, noone who went around that impaired and with that much of a sense of entitlement could possibly have been safe on the road. Maybe he got lucky, or maybe to this day a few thousand goes out each month to the family of some kid in Texas.

Basically, stuff like this always comes out after a president leaves office.

The 600.000 figure doesn't measure actual bodies but compares death rates against a historical average. This means that it is not just considering violence, but also the effects of a severely degraded infrastructure that has still not been rebuilt. Poor sanitation, water, and a lack of electricity make Iraq closer to a third world country than it was before the invasion.

The 600,000 is definitely inaccurate, but probably closer to the truth than the 50,000 who died by violence. Wars in the past have shown that disease kills more people than bullets.

Of course, the US, operating on the 'you broke it, you bought it' principle, has been pouring money into Iraq for reconstruction, above the 5 billion a month we are spending on the military. What's shameful is that these hundreds of thousands of deaths only represent the tip of the suffering of the population in spite of the money we are throwing at the problem, money that should have been spent rebuilding the US. This will be the legacy of the Iraq war.

A trillion dollar annual GDP and a Dow Jones flirting with 12,000 and he says "money that should have been spent rebuilding the US." (!) This is why I don't think you use your intelligence very well, Rich.

So you think that stockbroker will be better off when his Mercedes goes off that crumbling bridge than he would have been in a Ford? :right:

Better airbags? He just might. :p

More seriously, it's still true that a rising tide lifts all boats.