Bill O'Reilly: "Bush sucks"

fucking asshole. he can keep bush for all i care.

Y'know, Clinton bombed the shit out of Baghdad many a'time while in office. He just didn't invade.

i mean yeah it's sort of a boy who cried wolf scenario but still

(obv i think bush and his cronies and their policy is shit, do not take this post to mean anything to the contrary)

of course Saddam Hussein is evil and I feel little sympathy, the fact that I feel any is interesting. I felt bad for him when his sons were killed and their bodies shown on TV (even more despicable if you consider that they were just on the run from an army that invaded their country for non-existent reasons!!)

has anyone ever harped on you for doing something you didn't actually do? and they won't believe you? how fucking frustrating is that?

it's the reason there are so many movies about people who are wrongly confused

does anyone else start to feel this weird sense of retrospective empathy for saddam hussein.....?

Empathy for another whipped-ass dictator? Maybe, if I wasn't enjoying his punishment so much.

Even if they do find WMDs now, it's still obvious that they didn't necessarily think for sure that he actually had them (as the CIA stated) and it sets a dangerous precedent. Which is perhaps the bigger issue here. Bush and his cronies have destroyed any trust other countries has in us, which is a cliche at this point but a true one.

i think we're all caught in some fritz lang nightmare scenario and this really brought it home

Absolutely, but other countries were losing faith in the US long before Bush entered office. Clinton slowed the process down a bit, but the rot had already started.

I'm sure Georgy likes hearing about that one.

* == I'm being sarcastic about this part.

Two points I found interesting: first, the month's worth of ration the Iraqi government distributed to the people on the eve of the US bombing; second, if he was such a paranoid tyrant, how come he allowed SO MANY guns to be held by private citizens? That country is crawling with weapons of all sorts, not very common in repressive autocratic societies. He must not have been TOO afraid of his people (unlike Castro, who is very iron-fisted about any weapons.).

Iraq was a fairly unified country a year ago... only now are we seeing the sides being drawn for the coming civil war.

As for this rewriting of Saddam as some sort of misunderstood humanitarian, excuse me while I vomit. The whole WMD issue was so much of a power struggle. Saddam knew the more reign he gave to inspection teams, the weaker he'd appear to Iraqis, to Arabs, to the rest of the world. So he tried to maintain some semblance of his defiant stance towards the West. And this time, he got squashed for it. Whether he had had weapons or not, I think his posture would still have been the same.

Damn skippy.

In short, he didn't fear the Iraqi populace as much as the US would have you believe, though he might have hid from Kurdish or US plots.

What about the US / CSA conflict though? 'Twas violence that kept us together... the burning of Atlanta, et al.

Anyone with half a fucking brain would have known the likelihood of Iraq having these weapons was far from a sure thing (esp. after they didn't use a single one in the "war").

Only one US expert on Iraq, Scott Ritter, agreed with you. His recent CSPAN interview was good. I'd like to see him get the recognition he deserves. He was pilloried.

yeah I feel this weird empathy.

Even as an avowed Bush-hater and full term opponent of the war (which I felt was an obvious set-up, tho I figured they'd find at least trace WMD somewhere), I think your empathy is badly, badly misplaced. Feel empathy or sorrow for Iraqis, before and after, would be my sanctimonious sounding advice.

unlike Castro, who is very iron-fisted about any weapons.

With a lower per capita gdp, at least Castro can point to high literacy and relatively good healthcare. According to ye old almanac, Iraq had only 58% literacy and vastly inferior child mortality rates. This is not intended as a defense of Castro.

...I always felt that those who snickered about him hiding like a coward in a hole forgot the fact that he was essentially hiding out...

Agreed, so meaningless.

Wait a minute... that Almanac is for 2001, the height of the sanctions... Iraq was very honest about it's problems during this time, it's poor health care, etc. Before the first Gulf War, it was relatively prosperous and even moderate compared to some of the neighbors. Whether you blame the lack of good health care on Saddam is besides the point (he spent everything on palaces, etc.)... most folks agree the net effect of the sanctions was very bad for the average Iraqi citizen. Cuba receives most of it's medial supplies from Europe, who has no sanctions.

I can't speak about literacy, except that many people don't go to school for a variety of reasons.

i want to distance myself from any statements that imply that saddam was anything but awful

i was just saying that despite this fact i found myself with this weird spontaneous and very basic human empathy for *that one particular situation he found himself in*

"What do you want me to do? Go over and kiss the camera?"

Sure thing, Bill.

How's that Qadhafi doing?

what purpose does he think those white collars serve?

How else could you get paid, Bill? After all, your judgemental behaviour paid for your car, house and current girlfriend.

TAIPEI (Reuters) - Relatives of a kidnap victim in Taiwan struck a passing motorcyclist with
more than $600,000 in cash when they tossed the ransom money to the kidnappers from a highway
overpass.

The $600,000 ransom, packed into two nylon bags, landed on 57-year-old Lu Fang-nan when he
rode under the overpass just as a relative of the victim delivered the money according to
kidnappers' instructions, local media said on Thursday.

"What does this have to do with me? Why did I get hit? I'm certainly unlucky enough," the
mass-circulation United Daily News quoted Lu as saying.

Lu, who later sought medical attention for swelling and bruising of his left leg, said he rode off not
realizing he had been toppled off his motorcycle by a small fortune.

Newspapers said police were closing in on several suspects in the kidnapping of an electronic
components merchant, who was returned unharmed to his family.

Doesn't Qadhafi rolling over makes the Bush tactic look more right then wrong?

I think David Kay's testimony further debunks the claim that Bush lied or exaggerated:

"Senator Kennedy and I talked on several occasions prior to the war that my view was that the best evidence that I had seen was that Iraq indeed had weapons of mass destruction.

I would also point out that many governments that chose not to support this war -- certainly, the French president, [Jacques] Chirac, as I recall in April of last year, referred to Iraq's possession of WMD.

The Germans certainly -- the intelligence service believed that there were WMD.

...

In my judgment, based on the work that has been done to this point of the Iraq Survey Group, and in fact, that I reported to you in October, Iraq was in clear violation of the terms of [U.N.] Resolution 1441.

Resolution 1441 required that Iraq report all of its activities -- one last chance to come clean about what it had.

We have discovered hundreds of cases, based on both documents, physical evidence and the testimony of Iraqis, of activities that were prohibited under the initial U.N. Resolution 687 and that should have been reported under 1441, with Iraqi testimony that not only did they not tell the U.N. about this, they were instructed not to do it and they hid material.

...

In the course of doing that, I had innumerable analysts who came to me in apology that the world that we were finding was not the world that they had thought existed and that they had estimated. Reality on the ground differed in advance.

And never -- not in a single case -- was the explanation, "I was pressured to do this." The explanation was very often, "The limited data we had led one to reasonably conclude this. I now see that there's another explanation for it."

- David Kay, Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Comm., Jan. 28, 2004 ( http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/01/28/kay.transcript/ )

Does anyone believe Qadhafi would have rolled, or that we'd know what we do about the Libyan programs, if we hadn't gone into Iraq?

If you ignore the evidence that Q has been trying to come in from the cold for the last how-many years it does. It's possible that the person exploiting the circumstances here was more Q than W. I think I heard that the arms bust that went down in the gulf was a tip from Q to show his bona fides.

The other fact yr scenario ignores is that with the US effectively tied down HARD in Iraq and Afghanistan, the US has even LESS capability to whip Q's ass. Of course, we could bomb them, but certainly not a real shock and awe. There's no troops to do it.

I'm very concerned about the North Korean situation. I'm not eager to underestimate their military capabilities or Kim's Madman factor but I sure hope the diplomatic route and cutting off oil shipments and that sort of thing grinds their Seoul-bombing missle-launching potential to a halt fast. It's looking like a real holocaust over there. Good thing Hitler never got the bomb.

If it had to do with Qadhafi wanting to come in from the cold, great. That's just more proof that Saddam didn't, never did, and was still a real threat.

I'm not sure I'd call it rolling over, but even so only if:
1) You think his actions are more attributable to perceived threats than existing aging/mellowing tendencies.
2) You think it's more probable than not that this isn't a ploy. It's rumored for instance that he is at present collaborating with Al Qaeda more than at any point in the past.

And even if it is right, it's only right as to weak actors, not strong ones like North Korea and Iran.

please let this happen...

Yes, mistakes were made with the intelligence - but these mistakes were made around the globe. The rationale for opposing the war - that despite Saddam's violations a war would cause a humanitarian crisis and result in hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties - proved to be monumentally off the mark but that doesn't mean those espousing such views are liars. So far Bush was wrong about WMD stockpiles but right about the level of casualties we were facing, and those nations opposing the war were wrong about both.

Assuming that Qadhafi's timing had little or nothing to do with Bush and Iraq and is just a coincidental result of mellowing tendencies is naive in the extreme. And you can't possibly think Qadhafi is doing *BOTH* 1 & 2 - mellowing with age and sneaking under the radar to collaborate with al qaeda - can you?

Of course not. My point is that there is no solid reason to believe that any one of these three options is more probable than another, and that to do so is naive. There is no res ipsa here.

Well if you're making the argument that even when every major intelligence agency on earth thought he had stockpiles and had been elluding and violating the UN resolutions since the end of the gulf war, we had no reason to go to war, then we're just going to have to disagree.

Provide support for the assertion that "every major intelligence agency on earth thought he had stockpiles." Stockpiles of what? If so, why is there a profusion of evidence that demands were made on the intelligence agencies of the two leading Western powers by their political patrons to provide them with analyses that justified their political aims? If that is what every major intelligence agency thought, then why did the only actual people who had been in Iraq - the UN inspectors - believe that he did not have nuclear weapons? I, like many other people prior to the war, believed that he had a few remaining bioweapons and a chem weapon capacity (or is it the reverse?), which even if operable had not been used for years (when we tolerated it). I was much closer to right than you were then. I am now too.

Or google it: http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/opinion/article/0,1299,DRMN_38_2606243,00.html

Specifically: It would be one thing if officials had cooked the intelligence in order to support war. Then we could understand a reluctance to acknowledge an intelligence fiasco. But as Kay himself explained in an interview aired Sunday on National Public Radio, pro-war Bush officials were hardly alone in believing in dire reports of Iraqi weapons. The British, French, German and Russian intelligence services all shared this view, as did Clinton national security officials in the 1990s. And although Kay didn't mention it, the United Nations itself concurred. Indeed, in UNSCOM's 1991-1999 report and UNMOVIC's analogous 173-page report of March 2003, arms inspectors detailed Iraq's ongoing efforts at producing and concealing WMDs, including the lethal nerve agent sarin, tabun gas and anthrax.

Besides Scott Ritter, who are you referring to?

What everyone wanted, Stuart - everyone, that is, except George W. Bush and his cronies - was to confirm the existence of WMD before invading. Remember? That's all. All that France, Germany, Russia, etc wanted was a couple more months. (France huffed and puffed but they might have come around if everyone else did. And if they didn't, who cares? They're FRANCE, disagreeing is what they're supposed to do.)

Everyone thought Saddam had WMD. G.W.B. et al are more surprised than anyone, I think, that they haven't been found. They thought it was a lock. But they just couldn't wait. It has turned out worse than they ever could have imagined.

What has?

You certainly can't mean the war at large. The loudest voices condemning the 530 soldiers we've lost are the same voices warning of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilian and military casualties, tens of thousands of American deaths, a humanitarian disaster lasting months if not years, and so on and so on and so on.

haha. maybe i'll be substantive later.

"Worse than they ever imagined" --> that the "reconstruction" would have gone so badly, and that their justification for it would have dissolved.

They're human beings, you know, not pieces in a Stratego game for you to weep piously over. Like Jessica Lynch, who served her time and then, I believe, had some things to say about how her image was promoted and abused. But I forgot, there are only noble heroic statue worthy Americans led by our flawless leader and evil Islamofascists who are horrible in your world, no middle ground. Figures.

I actually agree with a lot of what you said in that first paragraph to response to me. Not all of it, of course, not merely because of potential differences in ideology but because you're carefully choosing your words. Thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands didn't die, but hundreds of Americans and thousands of Iraqis have, and the difference in scale is cause for relief but the waste is no less tragic and horrifying. Would the WTC haunt your dreams any more or less if only 1500 died? 7000? Suicide bombers and terrorists won't kill thousands of Americans in Iraq, you say confidently, sternly patting yourself on the back for noting that more of your fellow citizens will yet die as you happily sit far, far away, confident in your belief that everyone over there doubtless shares your vision and conviction of the world and convinced that there could never be someone actually with a US uniform and a gun there thinking otherwise about the people in power you tug your forelock obsequiously to, perhaps. But for how long will those numbers of dead slowly increase, and will others yet kill them elsewhere? Is a terrorist's anger any less, is the loss of a government structure with no WMD to contribute to the cause in the first place a guarantee?

My position is of the person who is grateful that is didn't get any worse than it has -- yours was one of the desperation, because nothing less than total success sustains it, justifies it, allows it to thrive. You crow louder in confidence because of the turn of events as far as it goes and react to reversals with silence and the faintly embarassed sense that if they go away they never happened in the first place, and only when pressed do you admit that things might not be perfect -- and you react as if I've physically attacked when I've done so, which is pretty poor behavior considering those of your fellow citizens who have lost hands, feet, limbs over there. Your pain and anger is as nothing.

But perhaps this is all shouting at nothing. Because in the end, superpatriots bore me. I've mentioned my dad before, a patriot through and through, he taught me to love my country not as a source of crusade but as a source of potential pride, a man who served his country for over thirty years in the Navy but never lost his intelligence and perspective, who differentiated between party and power and policy rather than staking all his dice on one throw. I have not lost that love and will never lose it, I hope never to lose the perspective and review he brought to considering the political world. You, though -- you love not too wisely but too well. I can tell the difference.

If I went half as far in making unfounded assumptions about you, Ned, as you do about me, I'd be demanding you explain yourself for spending your weekends plotting against Freedom and hating Happiness. It's ridiculous.

You haven't demonstrated that to me otherwise. I don't think you have for quite a lot of people here. Stand by your words, you said them.

(I do know someone who has, and I'd love to get her insight into the current political situation right about now).

How about every time you say something I disagree with I just ask you why you hate songbirds and sunny days?

Why do you provide the raw materials for it and then refine them constantly? As for claiming I am not responding to the content of your posts, hey -- I just gave you a huge helping of content on philosophical grounds to chew on and I'm not seeing you say much about any of that.

Let us be clear with each other -- you claim I reduce you to a caricature that does not represent the real you, which is fair in that clearly none of us are posts on a webboard, etc.; certainly I wouldn't say I was everything on here no matter how many posts I make. I claim your own posts reduce you to that caricature and show little else but that caricature, and that your responses to criticisms and questions merely hone it -- and keep in mind further that unlike many other posters here, say someone like Don or Keith, if we wanted to talk in general philosophical alignments, your public image has almost solely and constantly been about this war and its aftermath, to the point where you seem like you're a robot. So what exactly do you expect?

Why do you provide the raw materials for it and then refine them constantly?

That's what your opinion of what I'm doing. If the only way you can comprehend my posts is by thinking "Only some sort of right-wingnut robopatriot would say that" then its kind of out of my hands. Otherwise, I don't know what I'm supposed to do to convince you. I would hope that I've done at least a decent job of elaborating and fleshing out and supporting my viewpoints a little more than the kind of "Against the war? What, you some kind of commie?" poster you seem to see me as.

Is it a crime that I'm not particularly interested in participating in threads about FAPs and sex and bad haircuts?

I'm out for the weekend. See you cats on Sunday. Have a Happy Valentine's Day.

My hope is that what the other democracies aren't seeing is the evidence that Powell is going to reveal on the 5th. If that falls through, and there are no damning revelations, or they stay "too sensitive" for too long, then I'm going to feel very disappointed, and confused, and to some extent betrayed.

-- Stuart (gonzomoos...), January 31st, 2003.

"Next on A Current Affair: All lawsuits are true!"

Moo Moo Mizzou!

DAEREST MAEN WHITE MAN, WHY YUO HAEV SO ULGY THINIG-A-LING?

Love that liberal media.

(xp)

mixtape ts: yngwie v. o'reilly!

Yngwie: Curses in Swedish before he Unleashes the Fookin' Fury!
O'Reilly: Curses America before he Unleashes the Pasty, Unwashed Vienna Sausage of Horror!

(Oh, sorry, wrong guy...)

that's Falafel Of Horror

then he sniffs it! EW!

ya learn sumthin' new every day.

falafel! falafel! it pleasures me! bring me my pleasures!

psst: i may know a few good employment lawyers in NYC, andrea!