[mrnoodle]

Originally posted by richlevy
But at the time Bush was in the Guard, it was a way to serve with no risk.

I have been made aware of this by several people now. I was speaking from the vantage point of someone who has several friends in the National Guard now who are in Iraq. lol interesting sidenote - there is a for sale sign on what used to be their unit HQ. Maybe that's how we're funding this....

That because 'people' don't singlehandedly start wars and overrun countries.

Doesn't translate. If he was still in the Guard, then it would be valid. But this was 30 years ago. To me, it's on about the same level of importance as his alleged drug use. Maybe he did, maybe he didn't, but it's nothing that really matters today. (I actually defended the Slickmeister on that, too - all the ancient history stuff is just dumb)

But it does speak to character...silver and bronze starts...are given for actions 'above and beyond' doing what you are told. I cannot even imagine Bush in the same situation as Kerry was in performing on the same level as Kerry.

Battlefield character is a different thing from personal character. Lots of people in combat situations would fall on a grenade for their buddies, but have no problem raping the locals or shooting little kids.

..lack of planning, supply, organization, etc.

I've heard no evidence of this. What I've heard from one Lt. who got to come home for his wife's childbirth is that you couldn't imagine the squalor until you witnessed it yourself, and that they had already improved the people's lives 100 fold. Some of them were getting electricity for the first time in years. He said he couldn't believe how filtered the media (both conservative and liberal) messages were. Iraq outside the palace walls was essentially a sewage dump before we got there. This was only one man's viewpoint, of course.

However, his policies ignored the reality that enough monopolies and oligopolies existed that regulation was necessary for a fair market. The burnout at the end of the 80's was partly due to the market realizing that there were long term consequences to the short term gains.

A brief google search yielded a bunch of stuff on this, most notably that prior to 1982, we were in recession about 1/3 of the time. Since then, we've been in recession (I'll be generous, since I don't have the exact data) maybe 9 months out of 250. That's about 4 percent of the time. And Reagan is mostly responsible for it. I'll stay with my original comment.

You also can't bomb everyplace they might be or invade every country where you think they may be hiding. Bush is basically pointing his finger at almost every country in the middle east. But he's treating North Korea with kid gloves because they have nuclear weapons. This lesson is not lost on any country. GWB has done more to promote nuclear proliferation than Dr. Strangelove.

The lesson, if any, is evident in Libya's sudden cooperative spirit. They know we mean business. Of course we're not going to pick nits with Korea. Diplomacy still has a chance there, whereas in Iraq, diplomacy was doomed to fail because of the administration. Not to mention the strategic clusterfuck that would result from trying to fight a 2-theater war with a military gutted by the previous administration. But that aside, Bush has shown every willingness to negotiate. He just has limits. That's strength, not hawkishness.

Damn, you people keep each other on your toes, don't you?