Jacques

I moved to blogspot. You can find my blog at:
kanuckistan.blogspot.com

Ok, I have a new favourite blog: Rude Pundit

Rude Pundit on Tonight's Vice-Presidential Debate
Rude Pundit on the Presidential Debate

Lies on Iraq
Paul Bremer (former head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, AKA the occupation, in Iraq) recently made a speech in which he said his biggest mistake was not being insistent enough about requesting more troops.
Here's what the Defense Department had to say about it via CNN:

A senior Defense Department official said that Bremer never asked for more troops and expressed annoyance the ambassador appeared to be second-guessing the advice of military officials. Bremer stepped down after the June 28 handover to an interim Iraqi government.

Here's an article from July, 2003:

The top American administrator in Iraq, confronting growing anti-U.S. anger and guerrilla-style attacks, is asking for more American troops and dozens of U.S. officials to help speed up the restoration of order and public services. Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld was reviewing the request from L. Paul Bremer, U.S. officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

Just one more example of how the Bush administration will lie in our faces to avoid admitting they screwed up.

The Facts on the Iraq Al Qaeda Connection
The CIA's take on it:

A new CIA assessment undercuts the White House's claim that Saddam Hussein maintained ties to al-Qaida, saying there's no conclusive evidence that the regime harbored Osama bin Laden associate Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
The CIA review, which U.S. officials said Monday was requested some months ago by Vice President Dick Cheney, is the latest assessment that calls into question one of President Bush's key justifications for last year's U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

Idiots
Apparently 60% of Republicans believe Saddam Hussein personally planned the 9/11 attacks. This, in spite of the fact that there is no evidence of any real relationship between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. As Atrios put it "Republicans: Too Stupid to Breathe".
The link

More on the aluminum tubes (much more compact than the first article):
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/05/opinion/05tue1.html

Corruption in Washington:
Not a big surprise, but the fact that $799,091,391 (that's right, almost 1 billion dollars) was spent on lobbying on the Medicare and energy bills is pretty amazing
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2004/10/03/back_room_dealing_a_capitol_trend?pg=full

Condoleeza Rice, Serial Liar or Serial Moron?
Either way, she definitely says "I don't know" a lot.
http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh100404.shtml
http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh062403.shtml
http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh041504.shtml
http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/10/04/kerry.global/index.html

Ok, it isn't very constructive, but it sure is funny
http://home.earthlink.net/~houval/gopconstrm.mov

Recaps from the debate:
http://www.dccc.org/NR/rdonlyres/C743793B-5D18-4A4D-A057-952882054D8E/0/DebateDesperationDone.wmv

Kinda demagogic, but still on target:
http://www.newdem.org/promise/video.php

Cheney in 2003: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article5145.htm
Cheney in 1992: http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/connelly/192828_joel29.html

So is Cheney a liar, or has he really just been completely blinded to the truth?

From Cheney's appearance on Meet the Press:

Mr. Russert: If your analysis is not correct, and we're not treated as liberators, but as conquerors, and the Iraqis begin to resist, particularly in Baghdad, do you think the American people are prepared for a long, costly, and bloody battle with significant American casualties?

Vice President Cheney: Well, I don't think it's likely to unfold that way, Tim, because I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators. . . . The read we get on the people of Iraq is there is no question but what they want to the get rid of Saddam Hussein and they will welcome as liberators the United States when we come to do that.

From Cheney's 2002 speech:

I would guess if we had gone in there [in 1991], I would still have forces in Baghdad today. We'd be running the country. We would not have been able to get everybody out and bring everybody home. And the final point that I think needs to be made is this question of casualties. I don't think you could have done all of that without significant additional U.S. casualties. And while everybody was tremendously impressed with the low cost of the (1991) conflict, for the 146 Americans who were killed in action and for their families, it wasn't a cheap war. And the question in my mind is how many additional American casualties is Saddam (Hussein) worth? And the answer is not that damned many. So, I think we got it right, both when we decided to expel him from Kuwait, but also when the president made the decision that we'd achieved our objectives and we were not going to go get bogged down in the problems of trying to take over and govern Iraq.

I think this stands on its own.

http://www.steveclemons.com/GOPMailer.htm

http://www.lancasteronline.com/pages/news/ap/4/campaign_mail

Amazingly, none of the prisoners in Guantanamo produced useful intelligence. People will say the darndest things if you torture them long enough.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/guantanamo/story/0,13743,1318702,00.html

If you follow the news, you've probably heard about the aluminum tubes by now. If you haven't, it's a story broken by the New York Times about one of the centrepieces of the Bush administration's justification for going to war with Iraq (before they retroactively changed it from WMD to bringing democracy to the Middle East). In spite of judgments to the contrary from the International Atomic Energy Agency, Bush claimed that Iraq had restarted its nuclear weapons program.

The New York Times article: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/03/international/middleeast/03tube.html
A good discussion on Legal Fiction: http://lawandpolitics.blogspot.com/2004_10_01_lawandpolitics_archive.html#109684586284713362

One of their main pieces of evidence were aluminum tubes they claimed were being used in centrifuges to enrich uranium. They claimed there could be no use for the the tubes other than in centrifuges. The Iraqis and international experts said they were for use in rockets. It turns out that the US has rockets built from aluminum tubes built to very similar specifications. Not only that, but the tubes were very poorly suited to use in centrifuges, to the point that one American expert said letting the Iraqis have the tubes (the shipment was actually intercepted) would have set any nuclear program back much farther than intercepting the shipment.

It also turns out that Colin Powell knew this when he made his speech to the UN. In fact, he made a bold-faced lie, because he said that the specifications for the tubes vastly exceeded the specifications for any comparable American rockets, in spite of having received a memo from his intelligence staff saying that this was untrue.

Condoleeza Rice is most likely guilty of the exact same lies, although it's harder to prove exactly how much she knew. She had admitted that when she talked about the tubes, she was aware of a debate about the their intended use. Given that admission, she did was at least very misleading when she said the tubes were "only really suited for nuclear weapons programs". She claims she didn't know the substance of the debate, but given her role as National Security Adviser, that just makes her grossly incompetent. This is stuff she should have known, especially since she was making public statements about it.

Here's part of what she had to say in an interview on ABC:

Saddam Hussein was a threat. He'd been a threat for 12 years. It was time to take care of that threat. It was not a time to continue the debate about whether you needed an 18th resolution after he had defied 17 of them. It was not a time in the post-September 11 environment to let threats gather.

Compare it to what Bush had to say during the debate:

Saddam Hussein was a threat. He'd been a threat for 12 years. It was time to take care of that threat. It was not a time to continue the debate about whether you needed an 18th resolution after he had defied 17 of them. It was not a time in the post-September 11 environment to let threats gather.

Here's the thing: How the fuck was Saddam Hussein supposed to disarm when he didn't have any fucking weapons to disarm in the first place. That's exactly what people were saying in the run-up to the war. Yes, it was stupid of him to be so un-cooperative when he didn't have much to hide. Yes, it was right of the United States and the United Nations to use the threat of force to force him to cooperate with inspectors. But, given that the threat of force was leading to more cooperation, given that Hans Blix was being given more and more of the access he wanted, and given that he hadn't found any evidence of banned weapons, there was no justification for an invasion. Saddam Hussein didn't disarm because years of sanctions and inspections had left him with nothing to disarm. Bush invaded Iraq because he wanted to fulfill the neo-con wet dreams of Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney, and their like so that he could show he wasn't a wimp like his dad was.

And now for the rant:

People complain about Liberals hating Bush. It isn't that we hate Bush, it's that we hate what's he's done as President. We hate having a President who actually lies in order to take the country to war. We hate having a President who ignores the advice of his generals and doesn't send in enough troops to do the job when he does go to war. We hate having a President who lies about how the progress of the war because he's afraid it'll damage him politically. We hate having a President who says that anyone who points out his lies is "unfit to be commander-in-chief". We hate having a President who is so cynical that he undermines the credibility of Iraq's new Prime Minister by bringing him to the United States to give a speech to help in his election campaign. We hate it when the President makes the same charges of unfitness to serve when his challenger points out the lies in that speech, a speech written by the US State Department. We hate having a President who indebts future generations by insisting on giving the rich tax cuts at a time when the country is facing billions and billions in extra expenses to deal with the war in Iraq. We hate having a President who actually says that it's more important to give the rich a tax cut than to invest in homeland security.. We hate having a President who changes position on every important national security issue (the Department of Homeland Security, the 9/11 commission, the National Intelligence Director), but accuses his opponent of being flip-flopper, in spite of massive evidence to the contrary.

One of my points above is so important, that I think I need to include relevant quotes from the Presidenial debate, just in case you missed it:

LEHRER: We'll come back to Iraq in a moment. But I want to come back to where I began, on homeland security. This is a two-minute new question, Senator Kerry.

As president, what would you do, specifically, in addition to or differently to increase the homeland security of the United States than what President Bush is doing?

KERRY: Jim, let me tell you exactly what I'll do. And there are a long list of thing. First of all, what kind of mixed message does it send when you have $500 million going over to Iraq to put police officers in the streets of Iraq, and the president is cutting the COPS program in America?

What kind of message does it send to be sending money to open firehouses in Iraq, but we're shutting firehouses who are the first- responders here in America.

The president hasn't put one nickel, not one nickel into the effort to fix some of our tunnels and bridges and most exposed subway systems. That's why they had to close down the subway in New York when the Republican Convention was there. We hadn't done the work that ought to be done.

The president -- 95 percent of the containers that come into the ports, right here in Florida, are not inspected.

Civilians get onto aircraft, and their luggage is X- rayed, but the cargo hold is not X-rayed.

Does that make you feel safer in America?

This president thought it was more important to give the wealthiest people in America a tax cut rather than invest in homeland security. Those aren't my values. I believe in protecting America first.

And long before President Bush and I get a tax cut -- and that's who gets it -- long before we do, I'm going to invest in homeland security and I'm going to make sure we're not cutting COPS programs in America and we're fully staffed in our firehouses and that we protect the nuclear and chemical plants.

The president also unfortunately gave in to the chemical industry, which didn't want to do some of the things necessary to strengthen our chemical plant exposure.

And there's an enormous undone job to protect the loose nuclear materials in the world that are able to get to terrorists. That's a whole other subject, but I see we still have a little bit more time.

Let me just quickly say, at the current pace, the president will not secure the loose material in the Soviet Union -- former Soviet Union for 13 years. I'm going to do it in four years. And we're going to keep it out of the hands of terrorists.

LEHRER: Ninety-second response, Mr. President.

BUSH: I don't think we want to get to how he's going to pay for all these promises. It's like a huge tax gap. Anyway, that's for another debate.

I'm not sure what a tax gap is, but it's pretty clear that Bush doesn't think homeland security is worth the investment.

I was trying to come up with an analogy for the whole "changing horses in midstream thing". I thought I had a pretty good one, and then I saw this (patriotboy, AKA "Jesus' General" is usual good for a few laughs):

http://patriotboy.blogspot.com/2004/10/staying-course.html

I was working on something along the lines of: When your boat is sinking, you don't stay in the boat, you find another boat that doesn't fucking sink. Now, a boat isn't a horse, but the President of the United States isn't a horse either. The whole point of having a democracy is that you kick a guy out of office when he fucks up. Since Bush has fucked up in Iraq, Afghanistam, North Korea, Iran, the economy, homeland security, and the budget to name a few, he gets the boot. Not has Bush been a shitty president, but Kerry would make a great president (more on that later).