"War on Terror" Unfunded Options

[Midnight Rambler]

Bush, before:

“I believe it is the job of a President to confront problems, not pass them on to future Presidents and future generations.”

Bush, now:

The White House confirmed Wednesday that its new budget next month will not request a full year’s funding for the war in Iraq, leaving the next president and Congress to confront major cost questions soon after taking office in 2009.





Now the republicans are trying to tell us that Bush isn't a "real" conservative. He's not a Reagan conservative. Give me a break. He was the republican conservative wet dream when he was running the first time. When the second election rolled around everyone could see he was a disaster but the conservatives backed him anyway.


You can say what you want but Reagan never balanced a budget. Never even came close. Bush hasn't even tried. I do remember Clinton doing it. No, the republican congress didn't do it for him. If you do a little research you find that he had to shut down the government to force the republican congress to go along with a balanced budget.

Will your taxes go up with a Democrat in office? Yes. Becuase no matter who is elected the chickens are coming home to roost and you can't pay the bills by cutting your income (taxes).

[Robert]

###Warning###----- ###Warning### -----###Warning###

The following post contains ADULT material

Consider this your final Warning

If you would like to precede, please scroll down



































BTW when I said ADULT material
I wasn't talking about PORN.
Sorry to disappoint you.


I was talking about an ADULT discussion concerning events in the news.





HF, I'm assuming you're talking about the report you mentioned here
http://www.mobclan.com/forums/upload/index...c=16455&hl=

So lets take a closer look
The main focus is
"A study by two nonprofit journalism organizations found that President Bush and top administration officials issued hundreds of false statements about the national security threat from Iraq in the two years following the 2001 terrorist attacks."
An the underlying basis for the assertion above
"The study counted 935 false statements in the two-year period. It found that in speeches, briefings, interviews and other venues, Bush and administration officials stated unequivocally on at least 532 occasions that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or was trying to produce or obtain them or had links to al-Qaida or both."

Oh my GOD, 935 false statements.
Look at the number, 935, that is shocking!!!!
Final proof Bush mislead the U.S. to war!!!
Off with his head!!!.

A few questions.
1) Have you ever heard the saying " Hindsight is 20/20"
That's a pretty important fact to keep in mind and why.
All these 935 "lies", only became lies after the fact.
At the time they were based on available information.
This whole report is nothing but the newest smoking gun, that unfortunately isn't really smoking.
Supposedly, Bush was the leader of this huge misinformation campaign to go to war with Iraq.
On what basis does this report make him the leader of the huge misinformation campaign?
Simple, Bush and other members of the executive branch got more face time in front of the cameras, so they naturally had more instances of these "lies"
My 1st question would be what would be the grand total for members of congress?
Would it be more or less than Bush? If more, would the same conclusion then be drawn that congress mislead the U.S. to war?


2) "A study by two nonprofit journalism organizations"
Did you wonder who those two INDEPENDENT and NON-PROFIT organization are.
"Center for Public Integrity", heck with a name like that they have to be good, wouldn't you think?
A closer look at funding for the "independent" Center for Public Integrity show the majority of their funding comes from several Left wing groups:
George Soros , one of Bushes most outspoken critics, funnels money to them indirectly via several foundations
Then there are other groups such as:
The Streisand Foundation
The Ford Foundation
The Los Angeles Times Foundation
Gives a whole new meaning to INDEPENDENT and NON-PROFIT

3) So this groundbreaking, leave no stone unturned investigation, found 935 examples of Bush lying.
This is kind of a repeat but it's an important point to make.
For example, If I made the statement that the stock market was going to fall in February based on the current economic information available to me.
One of two things will happen.
I'm right, in February the stock market falls as I said it would
I'm wrong and the stock market doesn't fail.
Well according to the logic used in this story. I'm not simply wrong, I LIED.
Using this same logic it would be just as fair to say if you get a math problem wrong, not only did you get the answer wrong, "You LIED about the answer"
Does that honestly make sense to you?

4) Call me crazy but I'm not sure what about this story makes it news.
According to the NY Times who rushed to make this their headline story admits at the end of the news piece that it's not really news.
From the NYT article it says....
There is no startling new information in the archive, because all the documents have been published previously.
Wouldn't that make a normal person wonder why their leading story, by their own admission wasn't really news.
Along the same lines why didn't the NYT and AP who 1st ran this story do the littlest bit of research and see who the real financial backers were to this INDEPENDENT and NON-PROFIT organization that put together the story.

5) So when Bush says something it's a lie.
When everyone else says the same thing, it's a mistake
http://www.youtube.com/swf/l.swf?video_id=...4Q&border=1
Or there is the 26 senators ( Primarily Democrat ) who wrote a letter to Clinton in 1998
Pushing for Clinton to take military action over Iraq's refusal to end its WMD programs.
http://www.iraqwatch.org/government/US/Let...in-10-9-98.html

What a difference 4 years can make for people like:
Carl Levin, Joe Lieberman, Frank R. Lautenberg, Chris Dodd, Bob Kerrey, Dianne Feinstein, Barbara A. Mikulski
Thomas Daschle, John Breaux, John F. Kerry
1998 - Urges Clinton to take military action to force Saddam to end his WMD programs.
2002 - We only voted to invade Iraq because Bush LIED to us about WMD's
Am I the only one who thinks that fails the smell test.
If not then your saying in 1998 those 26 senators where "Mistaken"
While in 2002 they were purposefully "LIED" to by Bush who wanted to go to war even though he apparently was the only leader in the world who actually knew their wasn't WMD's in Iraq
Oh yea, stick to that story, it's a good one.


6) 935 false statements, almost 1000 times over a 2 year period.
Out of a huge number like that I'm sure they can point to 100's of times Bush knowingly lied.
After all, this ground breaking study done by the two nonprofit journalism organizations has to be more than a simple exercise in arithmetic, counting every time Bush said Iraq and WMD's in the same sentence.
So the obvious question would be, how many out of these 935 false statements can they show Bush KNOWINGLY lied at the time he made the statement?
100's?
Surely over 50.
Then a bare minimum, dozens.
Okay... Okay.... How about 10?
5, can you at least show 5, that would be less than 1% of the time. We're only asking for 1 little percent.
Fine! have it your way. One example out of the possible 935 will be enough to please the "Bush Lied and people Dies" crowd.
So what is the final number of times where this report show Bush KNOWINGLY lied, or mislead the U.S. at the time the statement was made?
The final count would be a big fat ZERO.
So it really is true, hindsight is 20/20
Excuse, I'm lost, why was this a leading news story again?



7) In the weeks leading up to the expected vote on military force in Iraq.
Four democratic senate leaders requested a NIE ( National Intelligence Estimate ) report
This was done to see if the most current intelligence information available would either affirm or conflict with the information put out by the Bush administration.
What did the NIE report say?
From the summary.
[b]With High Confidence:
* Iraq is continuing, and in some areas expanding, its chemical, biological, nuclear and missile programs contrary to UN resolutions.
* We are not detecting portions of these weapons programs.
*Iraq possesses proscribed chemical and biological weapons and missiles.
" Iraq could make a nuclear weapon in months to a year once it acquires sufficient weapons-grade fissile material."
and
"Baghdad for now appears to be drawing a line short of conducting terrorist attacks with conventional or CBW against the United States, fearing that exposure of Iraqi involvement would provide Washington a stronger cause for making war."

If anyone is interested, you can find the unclassified portion of the NIE report here.
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB...t%20release.pdf
I think it's worth mentioning, if you actually read the independent intelligence report put together for the senate at their request. Then you did better than 72 percent of the senators.
In fact out of all the Republican and Democratic 2008 presidential wannabes, only Sen. Biden took the time to read the full report.
Sen. Edwards initially said he also read the full report but then changed his mind when he was made aware there was a list of who read it due to the fact you had to sign for it.


How pathetic is it that this report was put together at their request, yet 72 percent of the senators didn't even bother to read it before making what was probably one of the most important votes in their lives? If the U.S. would go to war and invade Iraq.
I guess they were to busy giving themselves a pay raise an holding critical votes about renaming several Post Offices.
BTW it's not as though it would really matter because it basically said the exact same thing as the Bush Administration was claiming.
Why is that? Well it's not because he was lying or purposefully misleading the congress or public at large.
It's because he got the same faulty intelligence information , just like the congress when the request their own individual report.



8) So we now come to the final hold card for the Bush lied fan boys.
The story goes, the Bush Administration bullied the intelligence community to falsify or otherwise
draw the conclusions Bush wanted. As Bush had already decide to invade Iraq an pressured the whole intelligence community into going along with his plans.
Actually that question was dealt with in 2004
When a Bi-partisan Senate Select Committee was formed to review Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq.
What did they conclude concerning the complaint the administration had pressured intelligence analyst?
From the report:
The Committee did not find any evidence that Administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capabilities.
and
The Commission found no evidence of political pressure to influence the Intelligence Community's pre-war assessments of Iraq's weapons programs. As we discuss in detail in the body of our report, analysts universally asserted that in no instance did political pressure cause them to skew or alter any of their analytical judgments. We conclude that it was the paucity of intelligence and poor analytical tradecraft, rather than political pressure, that produced the inaccurate pre-war intelligence assessments.


What did they find as the cause of the intelligence failure?
the NIE relied more on an assumption that Iraq had WMD than on an objective evaluation of the information they were reviewing. This "group think" dynamic, led analysts, intelligence collectors, and managers to "interpret ambiguous evidence as conclusively indicative of a WMD program" and led them to "ignore or minimize evidence that Iraq did not have an active and expanding program." This problem was compounded by a lack of reliable information from inside Iraq. After U.N. weapons inspectors left Iraq in 1998, the U.S. intelligence community did not have any human intelligence sources in Iraq collecting information about WMD. In addition, the NIE failed to adequately and accurately explain uncertainties about the reliability of some key sources and its final conclusions. As a result, the estimate implied that the WMD evidence was more solid than it really was, the Senate report said.

You can view the whole Senate Select Committee Report on Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq here:
http://intelligence.senate.gov/108301.pdf

Another interested read regarding why the intelligence community failed, is a letter written by Stuart Cohen the Vice Chair of the National Intelligence Council
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB...%20Programs.htm
It has detailed answers to several Myths that surround the NIE report given to Congress in 2002.
I would consider it a must read for anyone interested in the subject.