Remember the ditto monkey I told you about? He sent me another message. Here's my reply...On Sunday, Sep 12, 2004, at 11:30 US/Eastern, Daren Phillips wrote:
Dental records aren't enough? I don't care if he was AWOL. Many people have used bad judgment when they were younger.No, dental records aren't enough. You don't go to the dentist when you're on drill weekend--you don't have time. You make an appointment and they see you when you're not on drill weekend. And the dental clinic wouldn't have known he was AWOL.
In the days before computers-on-every-desk, military people carried a card in their wallet. It looked a little like a credit card and had your name, social security number and separation date--the day you got out of the service--on it. When you went to the dentist or the doctor, you showed them that card as proof you were entitled to use that facility. They imprinted the card at the bottom of the treatment form and put it in your records. As long as Bush had that card and it wasn't outdated, he could go to the dentist.
I was in the Army twelve years. I didn't even know anyone who'd ever gone AWOL--we would have considered it a great personal failure. To know that our nation is being led by a man who went AWOL for months--who arguably deserted--matters a great deal to me.
And most of the people who used as much "bad judgment when they were younger" as Bush did--and trust me, he was the Bad Judgement King--are not president of the United States.
What are the 3 times Bush was arrested? I know of the DWI. Does this disqualify him from being president?The DWI you know about.
He was arrested in Connecticut for stealing a Christmas wreath.
And he was arrested in either Connecticut or New Jersey (it was at either Yale University or Princeton University) for inciting a riot after a Yale-Princeton football game that resulted in their tearing down the goalposts.
It may not disqualify him to be president, but it raises questions about his integrity--we also know that when he was in the National Guard, he did a stint of court-ordered community service with an organization called Project PULL.
911 would have happened if Clinton were in office. Clinton had knowledge about the attack on the USS Cole. Security advisor's resigned because Clinton did nothing. Why were 2 embassies bombed and the World Trade Centers Bombed and OK City? If Bush had of started detaining middle eastern people you democrats would have crucified him and and the ACLU file hundreds of lawsuits claiming their civil rights are being violated. Kind of like what you have done at Guantanamo bay. Are their any Islamic militants there that you want to support?First, I don't know WHO is in Guantanamo Bay. They pretty much just grabbed people who were in contested areas and shipped 'em off. Probably half of those people are just farmers innocent of any involvement. But we've spent so much time treating them like crap, even if we had the number-three guy in the Taliban sitting in there we'll never know it. If you'd been locked in a dog kennel for three years like some of those people have been, you wouldn't tell your captors a thing. Neither would the people who are locked up there.
You believe the e-mail that was going around right after 9/11 about all the terrorism that happened during Clinton's watch. Check snopes.com; that thing has been thoroughly debunked.
Okay, let me see:
First WTC attack: committed by Islamic militants. The people who did it are all serving life sentences.
Two embassies bombed: notwithstanding the part about embassies being in foreign countries (who all have police forces and armies), those people have been caught and brought to justice.
Oh yeah, let's talk Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia. Y'all like to bring that one up until you find out that we worked with the Saudi police to catch all of those people. The Saudis beheaded them so they're not a problem anymore.
Oklahoma City: Please, PLEASE don't lump Oklahoma City in with Islamic terror! Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, the two people who did that attack, were Americans and war veterans! McVeigh was executed in the Terre Haute federal pen and Nichols will probably be executed once he's convicted.
Let's also talk about the December 31, 1999, attacks al-Qaeda did in the United States. What attacks? you say. Exactly right. There were no attacks. They planned to do them, but the Clinton administration stopped them.
The USS Cole incident was avoidable, and why the HELL hasn't the captain of the Cole been court-martialed? When you go into a known unfriendly port, you're supposed to put out security on the ship. This means you put observers along the side of the vessel and you put observers at the waterline. Two sailors in a jonboat with a machinegun would have stopped the Cole attack if they would have been in the water, but they weren't. Clinton actually thought of taking action against the terrorists for the Cole--but decided to pass it on to the Bush administration because he didn't want to pass a just-started war on to his successor the way Bush's father did to him eight years before. They knew who did it and in the briefing to the incoming administration, the Bushies were told "this is who did this, this is where they are, this is who you send to go get them." Bush, of course, did nothing.
That's the difference between the Clinton administration, who held weekly meetings on terrorism all through its eight years, and the Bush administration, who had exactly two meetings on it in the nine months between his inauguration and 9/11: Clinton stopped terrorism. Clinton tracked down terrorists and jailed them. Bush just talks about it. Where the hell is Osama bin Laden, by the way?
And because you brought up 9/11, let's talk about how Clinton would have handled it.
Presidents receive a briefing every day. In August 2001, Bush received one entitled "Bin Laden Determined To Strike Within U.S." If Clinton would have received this document, here's what would have happened:
1. The administration would have called the airlines and told them that there is an increased threat level, so if anyone shows up at your airport with a one-way ticket paid for in cash--airline tickets say on them how they were paid for--for a long flight and they don't have any luggage at all, please detain them for questioning. This in itself would have stopped 9/11, because all nineteen of those people paid cash for their one-way cross-country tickets and none of them had luggage.
2. The administration would have further informed airport security to detain for questioning anyone with no luggage who is acting in a "suspicious manner"--being overly nervous about flying, for instance. Apparently all of those people were acting real jittery; if you knew you were going to die in a few hours, you would too. This would also have stopped 9/11.
3. An airliner is required to file a flight plan. They are very detailed maps of the route the plane is going to take from departure to landing, and they're so complex that they just draw up one for each flight number and use it every day. These flight plans give the plane a corridor that's about a mile wide that it must stay inside. (It's not as hard as it sounds; even if the plane gets into extreme winds the computerized navigation systems on modern airliners can keep the plane within a thousand feet of the middle of the corridor.) If the plane goes outside this corridor, federal law requires that the Air Force send up two fighter aircraft to investigate--there are Air Force bases scattered all over the United States, and this is why.
A real-world example: In October 1999, a golfer named Payne Stewart and four other people boarded a Learjet to fly from Florida to South Dakota. The cabin pressure system wasn't working and all five people died from hypoxia at 45,000 feet. The airplane went off its filed flight plan in Florida and was intercepted by a Florida-based fighter jet. It was passed on to other interceptors twice before it crashed. The Air Force figured out that it would crash in a sparsely-populated area and that it wasn't a threat, so they just followed it until it ran out of fuel and crashed.
What happened on 9/11? The four jetliners went off-course and three crashed into buildings. The Air Force didn't respond until after the two New York attacks had come to fruition, they responded from the wrong base for DC--Langley instead of Andrews--and they did their job in Pennsylvania. (There was debris spread out over eight miles. While there were brave acts of heroism on that plane, the Air Force shot it down--which is exactly what is supposed to happen.)
The stupidest thing I've ever heard is the "there was an exercise simulating the same thing going on, so we thought it was just exercise play." There is a federal law that says they have to use "notional players"--made-up countries, made-up terrorist groups or whatever--in exercises, and for just this reason. You're not even allowed to plot exercise enemy activity on a map in red--it has to be orange. When I was in school, we fought the Romanoff Army (the Romanovs were a family of Russian tsars) and in field exercises we always fought the Krasnovians. If real bad guys start doing the same thing the exercise bad guys are doing, you will know the difference.
If the Air Force would have gone up and got these guys, we still would have had a 9/11 but it wouldn't have been like the one we had.
4. And if Bill Clinton would have been going to a meaningless photo opportunity and someone walked up to him and said "a plane has just flown into the World Trade Center," Bill Clinton would not have gone to an elementary school to watch second-graders read from a storybook. He would have gone to his plane, picked up the phone and started making calls. As opposed to what Bush did, which was to sit on his ass in a classroom for twenty minutes after the second tower was hit, then posed for pictures with teachers, then made a speech, then...you get the idea.
Bush's father was behind the Willie Horton ad. I don't know if W had anything to do with it. It is a true ad that Dukalkis (sp) fer-lowed Willie Horton. Whats the problem. Also the ad was only ran once. The liberal media kept playing it over and over again when they were talking about it.Bush's father's political consultant Lee Atwater was the leader of the team that built the Willie Horton ad. Dubya Bush was on this team.
And where in HELL did you get the idea that our media is liberal?
What documents did Karl Rove forge? When was he arrested for breaking and entering.Give me a day or so to find out if he was arrested--we know he did it but not if he was arrested. He has forged negative documents in every race he's ever been in.
However, I don't think he forged these. I think they're real, and the White House is proving it by not denouncing any of them. If these were fictitious, the White House would have denounced them the day they emerged.
But if they were forged, remember that the White House released them.
I don't care if Bush was AWOL he will do a better job than Kerry in keeping the country save.I think not. Bush has made the country less safe.
A simile: You have a dog. It's a great dog unless someone kicks it in the head, and then it bites you. Do you build it a fence so people won't kick it in the head, or do you let people kick it in the head until a kid gets bitten and Animal Control kills it?
Bush is faced with a dog named Islam that is great until someone kicks it in the head, which he's doing by building permanent military bases, filling Islamic countries with infidels and bombing wedding parties.
Kerry will meet with the people who run Iraq and get them to stop shooting at each other, which will free up troops to go to Afghanistan to catch al Qaeda, to Pakistan to catch al Qaeda and to Saudi to catch al Qaeda. These three countries are where al Qaeda is and none of them want al Qaeda there.
WMD's was bad evidence coupled with the fact that Saddam wouldn't let UN inspectors in the country for 12 years. We had other political exiles that attested to the WMD program but it turned out the guy was a liar. The other reason we went into Iraq is to show the other middle eastern countries we mean business.We went into Iraq for two reasons:
1) Iraq has a lot of oil. In the run-up to war, the Bush administration--which is predominantly oilmen--was cutting deals with oil companies to divide Iraq's resources. Remember the speech Bush gave just before he kicked off the combat? In it he spoke directly to the citizens of the country he was about to destroy. He told the Iraqis not to destroy the oilwells before he told them anything else.
2) There is a group called the Project for a New American Century. In their controlling document, "Rebuilding America's Defenses," they call for establishing permanent bases in Iraq as a staging area for attacks against countries in that region. PNAC would be an inconsequential group of right-wing whackos except that among its signatories are Richard Cheney, Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz. All three are MAJOR players in the Bush administration.
You are absolutely right that WMDs were "bad evidence." When you make shit up like the Bushies did, and you listen to people with an agenda, people like the criminal Ahmad Chalabi, like the Bushies did, and you call this evidence, you get bad evidence. As for Saddam, there were UN inspectors in Iraq from the end of the Gulf War until 1998. In 1998, President Clinton decided that Saddam was not cooperating and launched Operation Desert Fox, which was the eight-day siege of Tomahawk missiles directed against suspected WMD production and storage facilities. Clinton pulled the inspectors out of Iraq before the start of the siege. After the siege, Saddam announced that all of the inspectors were really intelligence agents sent to spy on Iraq in violation of the treaties he signed after Desert Storm--he was right--and wouldn't let them back in. But during the pre-OIF inspection period, the inspectors reported good but not perfect cooperation and that the Iraqis were granting them access to anything they wanted to look at. Saddam even offered to leave the country to prevent war and Bush turned him down.
In reality, the UN inspection teams destroyed about 75 percent of Saddam's WMD arsenal and almost all of his production capability, and Desert Fox took care of the rest of it. There were no WMDs.
I haven't noticed Bush looking drunk or anything like that.That's because you haven't been looking. Any old sergeant can look at someone and tell that they're on something. As an old sergeant, I look at photos of his campaign appearances and see a drunken man standing before me. Look at his eyes. This guy's trashed all the time lately.
* * * * *
I'd like you to go to
http://www.newamericancentury.org and download the PDF "Rebuilding America's Defenses." This is the game plan for the Bush administration.
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