Politics As Usual

[Shape Shifter]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
that Hussein had "weapons of mass murder":

Does this mean W is changing his position on gun control?

[Replaced_Texan]

I was catching up on Tivoed episodes of the Daily Show last night, and I have to make a confession.

I don't like Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe very much.

Yeah, yeah, he's the party cheerleader, and he's supposed to be upbeat and energetic, and Goooooo Democrats. But he's also an irritating, non-question-answering, weasly guy that makes me want to throw stuff at him in a (probably doomed) effort to get him to shut the fuck up.

I'm glad I got that off my chest.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by Replaced_Texan
I was catching up on Tivoed episodes of the Daily Show last night, and I have to make a confession.

I don't like Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe very much.

Yeah, yeah, he's the party cheerleader, and he's supposed to be upbeat and energetic, and Goooooo Democrats. But he's also an irritating, non-question-answering, weasly guy that makes me want to throw stuff at him in a (probably doomed) effort to get him to shut the fuck up.

I'm glad I got that off my chest.

2

[SlaveNoMore]

You know, I thought Iggy has a few vaild points there, until I got to this zinger

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop

• Indeed, thanks to the administration's bungling, it's a list that's grown to include North Korea.

Then again, since he didn't specify, maybe he meant the Clinton administration.

etf formatting

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by SlaveNoMore
You know, I thought Iggy has a few vaild points there, until I got to this zinger



Then again, since he didn't specify, maybe he meant the Clinton administration.

edited to say: Never mind, I don't even want to get into the North Korea thing now. Maybe Larry Davis will cover for me.

[SlaveNoMore]

Tyrone Slothrop
edited to say: Never mind, I don't even want to get into the North Korea thing now. Maybe Larry Davis will cover for me.

Agree. Useless waste of time.

[Sidd Finch]

Originally posted by sgtclub
I think it strongly supports the case for war.

You think the finding that Iraq "Had the strategic intention of resuming the pursuit of prohibited weapons programmes, including if possible its nuclear weapons programme, when United Nations inspection regimes were relaxed and sanctions were eroded or lifted" strongly supports the case for war, rather than for maintaining sanctions?

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Wonkette has a bunch of memos from inside FOX News ("News") here. Wow. Inside the place, there's no pretense of objectivity. (E.g., "The president is doing something that few of his predecessors dared undertake: putting the US case for mideast peace to an Arab summit. It's a distinctly skeptical crowd that Bush faces. His political courage and tactical cunning are worth noting in our reporting through the day.").

[Gattigap]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
Wonkette has a bunch of memos from inside FOX News ("News") here. Wow. Inside the place, there's no pretense of objectivity. (E.g., "The president is doing something that few of his predecessors dared undertake: putting the US case for mideast peace to an Arab summit. It's a distinctly skeptical crowd that Bush faces. His political courage and tactical cunning are worth noting in our reporting through the day.").

I like better:

"Into Fallujah: It's called Operation Vigilant Resolve and it began Monday morning (NY time) with the US and Iraqi military surrounding Fallujah. We will cover this hour by hour today, explaining repeatedly why it is happening. It won't be long before some people start to decry the use of "excessive force." We won't be among that group. . . More than 600 US military dead, attacks on the UN headquarters last year, assassination of Irai officials who work with the coalition, the deaths of Spanish troops last fall, the outrage in Fallujah: whatever happens, it is richly deserved."

Yeah! They're goin' in, kickin' ass, and we're covering it down to the last dead pansy-ass Iraqi scumbag! And no fuckin' spin, people!

[Gattigap]

Originally posted by Replaced_Texan
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmp...p/gay_marriage

48-50. Kerry and Edwards were the two missing senators. They needed 60 and couldn't even get half the Senate.

Feh. How bland.

With WaPo's Harold Meyerson lamenting that the Bushies' main goal is to scare the shit out of the Christian Right ...

The Senate, as all its members know full well, is no more likely to come up with 67 votes for this bit of campaign-year demagoguery than it is to enact workers' and peasants' soviets. It's not just liberals but also centrists and conservatives (Lynne Cheney among them) who oppose placing a ban on gay marriage and possibly civil unions in the Constitution. But then, the amendment is being offered today simply because it will help the scare campaign hasten more right-wing evangelicals to the polls this fall. For, as the right tells the tale, what gay-marriage advocates are seeking is not simply the right to have the state sanction such marriages but the right to close down churches that don't.

.... the last thing we need is for the media to sensationalize these latest developments.

Fortunately, Wonkette kept her head in sober headlines reporting that Senate Pounds FMA with its Hot Steel Rod of "No."

Sniff. I fear for our country today.

Gattigap

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Confirmation that Bush wasn't worrying about the details of uranium in Niger. The New York Times reports that the CIA's 93-page National Intelligence Estimate about Iraqi WMD was boiled down to one page for President Bush. Naturally, the Senate would like to see it, and the White House doesn't want to cough it up.

It's hard to say that Bush was lying if he simply couldn't be bothered to hear what his people had to say, and saw his job as simply repeating whatever they stuck into the State of the Union. I guess it's easy to be a "firm" leader if that means making sure that you don't ever learn enough to change your mind.

• A National Intelligence Estimate is not an ordinary report. It marks the one occasion when the Central Intelligence Agency warrants its name, acting as a central entity that pulls together the assessments of all the myriad intelligence departments, noting where they agree and where they differ. Most NIEs are produced on an annual basis. Occasionally, the CIA is asked to produce what used to be called a "special" NIE. The 2002 estimate in question, titled "Iraq's Continuing Program for Weapons of Mass Destruction," was such a document. It was ordered so that the president could decide, in an informed manner, whether to go to war. The president is the main consumer of the NIE; it is written entirely for his benefit. To shrink the thing into a single page—to remove all distinctions between certainty and guesswork—is to evade the whole point.

[sgtclub]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
President Bush evidently disagrees with you.

Please.

[sgtclub]

Originally posted by Sidd Finch
You think the finding that Iraq "Had the strategic intention of resuming the pursuit of prohibited weapons programmes, including if possible its nuclear weapons programme, when United Nations inspection regimes were relaxed and sanctions were eroded or lifted" strongly supports the case for war, rather than for maintaining sanctions?

Yes, when coupled with "In support of that goal, was carrying out illicit research and development, and procurement, activities, to seek to sustain its indigenous capabilities" and "developing ballistic missiles with a range longer than permitted under relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions," especially when viewed shortly after 9/11.

[The Larry Davis Experience]

Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
edited to say: Never mind, I don't even want to get into the North Korea thing now. Maybe Larry Davis will cover for me.

I would, but I myself don't know what we're doing with NK now. It seems from the news articles that we are offering NK the same deal that Clinton cut with them in '94 (verifiable dismantling of the nuke program in exchange for energy subsidies). But judging by the muted response to the reports of this proposal I assume that I'm missing some deep foundational principle that allows conservatives to keep vilifying the '94 deal while supporting our current stance with NK.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by sgtclub
Please.

"There were no WMD, and containment had both prevented Iraq from building nuclear weapons and forced it to shut down its nuclear program, but we had to invade Iraq anyway because someday, containment might have stopped working, and then Hussein might have started up his nuclear program again, and might have then built some weapons."