~DS~ says:

C3 Osama bin Laden, appearing healthy as a horse, just appeared on tape speaking directly to the American people. I’ll bet you 10,000 dollars he wasn’t speaking from Iraq.
“I truly am not that concerned about him[Osama]. I know he is on the run. I was concerned about him, when he had taken over a country.” Bush 2002

C3 says:

One other question DS/Kerry:
Is Osama on the DNC campaign trail?
Between Osama and Clinton I think you guys have this thing won… Good to see the Democratic party looking so good and healthy.
You all work together so well… Like ying and yang.

Joe Carter says:

Tgirsch,
Hey, Joe, you’d better get about the business of discrediting David Kay.
Discrediting Kay over what? His claim that Saddam moved WMD’s to Syria? (I’m sure you believe Kay is credible on that, right?)
Or are you now saying that this counts as Saddam having WMDs since that is what Kay claims? (I’m sure Kay has changed your mind, right?)
As for “Game. Set. Match” I think that Kay’s contention that the military was there is backed up by the Army Major who says that his unit was there destroying the munitions.
Sometimes you make it too easy. ; )

Joe Carter says:

DS,
I’m extremely pissed off that he’s even alive, let alone healthy you idiot.
While I personally wouldn’t mind seeing OBL meet his Creator and have no qualms about the US helping to speed up that process, I think the longer he remains alive the more it hurts al Queda. The longer he hides like a coward the more his potential followers will see that he is nothign but a coward and a fraud. The fact that we have only heard from him twice in the past two years shows that he’s more concerned about saving his own skin than he is about the “Jihad.”
When he is dead — and I think that will be coming soon — he will become a martyr and be seen as a greater hero than he is now. So while I don’t like the fact that he is still breathing I think he is in the same position that Hitler was before he killed himself: more valuable to us alive than dead.

Joe Carter says:

Joe the lengths you will go to protect the bumblers in the WH is sometimes breathtaking. Kay was commenting on video shot by a news crew showing the weapons in situ…sheesh.
I don

Joe Carter says:

DS,
Yeah it’s great having him alive and threatening us Joe …
How exactly is he a “threat”? He has no more funding, no base of operations, he can’t contact his subordinates without us finding out about it. Why do you think he doesn’t release a new tape every week? Because he is taking a risk by exposing himself. He realizes that he is being upstaged by Zarqawi and is making a desperate attempt to show that he is still relevant.
Notice, for example, how he finally admitted to attacking the towers. That threw a monkey wrench in “the Jews did it” and other assorted conspiracy theories and undercut his cause. He is probably ticked off that Bush has told the world that while he is still a wanted man he is an irrelevant coward. That must have stung enough for him to come out of hiding. But he isn’t a much of a threat anymore.

C3 says:

I see you have regressed to name calling. Thanks for your personal story about 9/11. . . I one also, but prefer not to share it with you.
If you want to take a one liner out of the Bush text – that’s basically what you’re basing your whole argument on…
Of course Bush is concerened with capturing and/or killing OBL… But he also seems more concerned with yours, mine, and our troops safety than anything else. That cannot be said of your man “Kerry”.
Kerry is more concerned with politicizing every issue regarding Iraq and the war on terror just to get his traitorous ass into the WH. He has no stance on any of this, except to say that we need to build a real coalition… To do what exactly? To discredit the coalition that already exists. That’s his stance on the issue. What does that even mean. Does he have any plan whatsoever with any real issues that plague us today. . . or is he just spewing political rhetoric for his own advancement?
DS, can you just address the questions posed to you earlier…
Here they are again for your consideration:
With the new video tape of Osama Bin Laden being broadcast on your beloved “Al Jazeera”, given what he said,
if you were John Kerry-(President Elect) would you:
a) give in to the demands of the terrorist-(Osama) and cut and run?
b) stay in Iraq, defeat the insurgents, and help stabalize the situation?
c) hunt down and capture/kill Osama-(now that we know for sure that he is still alive)?
d) play like France, put your tail between your legs and scurry home – and hope that the terrorists don’t come over here again to kill more of us?
These are real questions that need real answers. Are you up for it DS… or are you just going to sit there on your level playing field and cry?
You/Kerry may be able to persuade someone to vote in your direction if you can address these questions honestly without interjecting “Bush bashing” into your answers.
What will you/Kerry do if elected?

Mark O says:

Larry,
Nobody here is rejoicing over Iraqi civilian deaths. It seems you don’t grok why we might have gone into Iraq. Recall after 9/11 Bush said that we were at war against state sponsored terrorism. Saddam’s state was in bed with terrorists. He certainly was making no effort to track them down and stop them. Hell, he paid $25k to each family of a dead bomber in Israel. That is why Iraq mattered. He managed to convice the world he had active WMD programs. He planned to revitalize him once his massive UN bribery operation brought the sanctions (which were failing) down. Get it? If you have any evidence that the US military directly targeted civilians, it’s to me (and would be to everyone else).
~DS~
I quibbled with your analogy because it didn’t reflect the basic innumeracy of those who think the “missing” HMX/MDX is an issue.
Regarding Bush’s comment which you quote about OBL, you are quoting out of context. He was pointing out that OBL by being forced into hiding has been rendered ineffectual. If you pay attention, we are still looking for him. But you will also observe he hasn’t exactly been burning up the air-waves drumming up support for his cause. His current status (missing, with tapes that may or may not be new, or anonymously dead somewhere) may actually be preferrable strategically to his public death or trial and execution.
It strikes me that the main difference of opinion on the Iraq war stems from a disagreement of what war we are fighting. Some think it is a war on al-Qaeda only. Some think it is war not just against al-Qaeda but all states who sponsor terror. That is the core of the disagreement as far as I can tell. There are those who think the 2nd war is too ambitious and too costly. We lost more lives in 9/11 than Pearl Harbor. WWII cost us half of our GDP for what, 5 years? So far, this war is still being fought on the cheap.
Kerry is for fighting the first war. Bush is fighting the 2nd.

C3 says:

Joe,
DS ignores all questions that weaken his party-line stance.
Isn’t that the level playing field you speak of DS?
Ignoring the questions will not make them go away DS.

~DS~ says:

C3 I think I’d put everything including the kicthen sink into Afghanistan near the Pakistan border and hunt those guys down. As far as Iraq, we’re so screwed there I have no idea what to do. Let them have elections in Jan and maybe we can withdraw gracefully hoping the nation doesn’t shortly implodes afterward is our best bet.
I’m not going to pick on you anymore Joe. I appreciate your good nature and you putting up with this whole nasty mess of the explosives. There’s no point in me being a poor sport. The losers in this aren’t you or the WH, it’s whoever gets attacked with that stuff. I admire your loyalty, I just think it’s misplaced and a bit Orwellian. Have a good evening and perhaps we’ll know more tomorrow ok?

Terry says:

DS Wrote:
“Terry I’d draw the line at something like “White House Penetrated by German agents and attacked Peru by mistake based on faulty Intel and spoon fed by the German Agents while letting Hitler run amok” for example.”
Uh . . . that makes no sense at all DS. It’s gibberish. Is there some kind of coded reference to Jewish neocons in there? Or Al-Quaeda agents in the White house? For a minute I thought you were going to throw in Willy Wonka and the Oompa-Loompa’s. Or do you think that’s a meaningfull response to my question:”Given the following actions by the US in WW2 when would you have demanded a change in administrations? Or would you have given them a pass?”
I suspect that you think the global context of GWOT & WWII would make a difference, but you dodged the question. Seems to be habit with you.
Why don’t you vote for the guy McCain’s endorsing? At one time you say you prefered him for Prez over Bush. Don’t you trust his judgement?

~DS~ says:

I wonder if these kids hit in our show piece fire works show called “Shock and Awe” were terrorists? I can’t imagine why the Iraqi’s don’t fall to their knees thanking us!
http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://aztlan.net/holdingtolife.jpg&imgrefurl=http://aztlan.net/iraqichildrenhorror.htm&h=276&w=409&sz=20&tbnid=AgXB1rBcspwJ:&tbnh=81&tbnw=120&start=5&prev=/images%3Fq%3Diraqi%2Bcasualties%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26ie%3DUTF-8%26sa%3DG
Maybe that six year old girl whose dead in her uncle’s arms, her right foot blown off leaving a bunch of bloody tendons hanging out, was holding an RPG with sarin in it huh?

~DS~ says:

C3 why the hell are we in Iraq if we’re after OBL?

~DS~ says:

TY C3, now why are we in iraq if we’re after OBL? Doesn’t it make more sense to be in southern Afghanistan with tens of thousands of troops instead of Iraq?

~DS~ says:

Ok C3, but doesn’t it make sense to go after the terrorists that actually attacked us and threaten to do so in the future with more vigor than alleged terrorists in Iraq who have not attacked us?

Terry says:

DS wrote-
“Terry imo getting conend by a known conman who now appears to have been operating for Iranian Intel and being goaded into attacking a country that wasn’t a combatant in 9-11 is gounds for replacing the senior leadership who got snookered. So if someone did that in WW2 I’d think the samr thing. I’m in 2004 of course so there’s not a hell of a lot I can do about that. But I’m interested in your take or anyone else who cares to chime, what does a leader and his advisors have to do in war time mistake wise to warrant in your minds being replaced?”
But you still haven’t answered the question. I’m very open and direct, not dodgy. I’d give the political administrations of the allies in WWII a complete pass. In some of the cases I might be happy if incompetent officers got the sack, but a complete pass on Dresden, Hiroshiam, and Nagasaki among other possible mistakes. Because they won. When you win, you get to shape events rather than be shaped by them. When you win, it’s your vision of the future that prevails, not the enemy’s.
To let you know where I’m coming from, I work in a scientific field but I spent several years in college doing the liberal arts thing. Lots of history & lit courses. In English I specialized in rhetorical analysis. I’m a registered independant and I have voted for the Libertarian for president twice since 1980. I have never voted for a Democrat for president.
I thought the whole Bosnia/Yugoslavia was not our business, but once we were in I wanted a complete NATO victory. Because when your the world’s last superpower you can’t appear weak. I did not support McCain for the republican nomination in 2000 because I thought he was temperamentally unsuited for the job. He was, I thought, too apt to be ruled by anger. Also his “American Greatness” theme was too fascistic for me.
Since September 11, 2001 we have destroyed two of the world’s most violence prone, anti-American regimes, while suffering less than 2,000 casualties ourselves and inflicting a remarkably small number of civilian casualties on the enemy. And your response is “throw the bums out”?
You ask “what does a leader and his advisors have to do in war time mistake wise to warrant in your minds being replaced?”
My answer is lose. We have had two brilliant military campaigns so far to effect regime change in Afghanistan and Iraq. I would like to see more, rather than fewer, terrorist regimes put on notice. If you want to see what an American loss and retreat looks like for us and the rest of the world, review the decade of the 1970′s.

Mark O says:

Larry,
I did not call you a “sick bastard”, please review the names on the posts. However, I would point out that you seem to also have not read all of my previous post (5:07pm today). If you did, you seem to have missed the point. By all apearances you and ~DS~ both are supporting what one might call war #1 (the war on al-Qaeda). Everyone else is here talking about war #2 following the “Bush Doctrine” and has thought the war is against “terrorists and those who harbor them”. When you make your rhetorical points to justify war #1 it doesn’t impress when the rest of us are talking about war #2. Your arguments just keep missing the target.
This is why I think ~DS~ keeps insisting that the Iraq war is a total snafu. If we were just fighting war #1 he would be correct. Since we aren’t, it isn’t.

Terry says:

DS-
You wrote “Would it be OK now if you gave me your thoughts on my question, which I did by the way ask first, since I’ve answered yours?
What does a leader and/or his advisors have to do mistake wise, before you would support replacing them with someone else and giving that someone else a shot?”
I answered this question in my last post very specifically. To quote myself:
“You ask “what does a leader and his advisors have to do in war time mistake wise to warrant in your minds being replaced?”
My answer is lose. We have had two brilliant military campaigns so far to effect regime change in Afghanistan and Iraq. I would like to see more, rather than fewer, terrorist regimes put on notice. If you want to see what an American loss and retreat looks like for us and the rest of the world, review the decade of the 1970′s.”
You still have not answered my question, so I’ll repeat it:
Given the following actions by the US in WW2 when would you have demanded a change in administrations? Or would you have given them a pass?
-Failed to foresee the attack on Pearl Harbor: 2,500 US casualties
-Concentration of resources on the European Theatre though Germany had never attacked the US mainland
-MacArthur’s doomed retreat to Mindanao
-The disastrous landing at Dieppe in 1942 (3000+ casualties)
-The April 1944 practice D-Day landing in England that was attacked by U boats (600 US dead)
-The firebombong of Dresden by US & Brits (100,000+ civilians dead)
-Dropping Atomic bombs on two militarily insignificant Japanese cities (150,000 civilians dead)

~DS~ says:

Well Mark, I’ve been asking this question for a long time here and in other forums. I’ve been asking it on the Internet of true believer Bush supporters for months now. I’ve asked it in many forms such as my last few posts where I said “What would a leader and/or his advisors have to do mistake wise for you to vote against them?” I’ve asked it politely, I’ve asked it aggressively. I’ve asked evangelicals and neocons, old fashioned fiscal conservatives and new fangled nationalists. I first started asking it to help out a friend who is doing her dissertation in sociology a few months ago.
Would you believe not one strong Bush supporter has given me a single solid answer in all that time? Most have avoided the question entirely Mark as you just did for about the thrid time. Oh I’ve had answers, but they’ve been ridiculous ones. One lady told me that “if Bush had come back from Vietnam and betrayed his fellow soldiers I’d vote against him,” an obvious dig not at Bush but at his challenger. One guy told me piously that if Bush lied about an affair he’d vote against him, another dig at someone who is not Bush. One participant answered “He would have to start a nuclear war by hitting the button accidentally.”
Terry just answered that Bush would have to “lose the war in Iraq or Afghanistan,” an answer which puts the resolution safely outside of the current timeframe and places it within the context of subjectiveness, not to mention allowing Bush to not be held accountable as long as we have troops in country, no matter what the progress of the conflict, because they might ‘still win.’
(It’s interesting than when asked about problems in Iraq the WH generally responds with something like “We have to stay the course, to pull out now would give the insurgents the idea that we’re not their to stay”…Folks…the insurgents LIVE their. They know we’re not there to stay! They’ll wait a hundred years for us to leave. Are we planning on staying that long?)
A few people have mentioned with no further explanation, “Yes he’s made a few mistakes, BUT” and gone on to explain why the mistakes don’t matter. But that’s not the question folks. The question is, what kind of serious mistake in foreign policy could the Bush WH, or any other leader or a leader’s advisors do in the WH, do in principle that would persuade you to vote against them?
I would suggest that starting a war with a country on premises that that country is the most serious threat in the world to the US, and finding out you’re dead wrong while not hitting a known threat with the same or equal resources is a pretty freaking huge mistake and one worthy of being replaced.
I would argue that being penetrated by an operative of a foreign Intel service working with a country on the terrorist watch list who is a known con man and who passes top secret information on to that nation due to his access to the WH is grounds for voting against that WH.
But what I’m asking here is what would your criteria be?
And the fact that hardly anyone even tries to answer that question with anything besides ridiculously vague answers like Terry gave, let alone with an honest candid answer they would apply equally to any WH, is disturbing because it implies that among some Bush supporters there is nothing plausible he can do or could have done which would persuade them to vote against him!
If so, what is the point of arguing about the merit of his decisions and policies? If some of you are of the opinion that Bush is, literally, inerrant and you can state no reasonable no external data or events which would cause you to reverse that a priori assumption, then I have to wonder, what are we doing here folks?
Why would you bother to even argue the facts and the inferences and pretend to be weighing those items against each other and posing like you’re actually coming to a rational decision?
I’m asking you, what reasonably possible set of decisions could the President make that would cause you to vote for John Kerry in this election? If you can’t answer that with an honest answer, then you’re simply not capable of making rational decisions and you’ve already given over control of your life to a politician whom you will support in this election no matter what he does. That’s fine if that’s the case, it is your life, but it’s dishonest to portray yourself as rational, for you have left the realm of reason and you’re operating under similar mental provisions as a member of any cult in which the Leader is held as inerrant.

~DS~ says:

John Q Public is another interesting example of the phenomena I’m talking about. Now he wants to see video of all the material or he will ignore the past sets of falsehoods he’s been fed and assume ‘victory’. he also points out that while one single sarin shell is worth 200 billion and 100 US lives, 380 tons of explosives is ‘no big deal’. This is puzzling to those of who feel that reality is really the best way to approach dealing with the universe. Let’s recap:
Well consider the fiasco that this thrread started with. Almost 400 tons of HE turn up missing indicitive of the lack of proper planning and of being undermanned, the WH quickly states that ‘there is a strong probability it was removed by Saddam’. But that didn’t stick so it was redo time. The next story was that the amounts were exaggerated.
Joe repeated the WH/DoD line asserting that there was only three tons of RDX to start with-tuck this assertion away as we will use it later. And repeated the rumor denied by even the DoD that the “Russians almost certainly moved the remaining material to Syria”. And even laughed at me and others when we suggested the undersecretary was not being truthful about what happened. And then the rejoinder that after all there were ventilation shafts in the bunkers…
Well, lo and behold video evidence emerged showing a sealed bunker bearing an IEAE seal being opened on live video and this report had been filed long ago, not to mention the station is owned by a staunch republican. Would the WH have gotten away with lying it if that video hadn’t been in existence? Probably, at least among the true believers.
I think it’s safe to say that Joe and the regs here would have simply accepted their word without question.
So the crew is interviewed and mentions that there were several other bunkers in the vicinity also sealed. UN Inspectors review the footage and call it cold, that’s the stuff!
Meanwhile Rudolph Giuliani is cowardly blaming the troops while the DoD is releasing a pic showing an empty Iraqi flat bed next to one of the bunkers (Which it turns out wasn’t even in the part of Al qaqa under scrutiny). It’s a full court press folks! And both are clearly oblivious that the cover story is being undermined as they speak.
Caught completely flatfooted by the video, the DoD and the campaign stalled. They’re cornered all right!
But not for long. This morning we’re given a hastily arranged news conference in which a soldier claimed he had destroyed hundreds of tons of explosive material, mostly RDX, which is you recall under the previous set of stories there were only three tons of! The soldier has no proof for what he claims, and the DoD spokesperson even claims that the sealed material was not among the material in question.
The Vice President, who recently asserted that Iraq was a ‘remarkable success’ calls it over on the stump!
Ahh but there’s a flaw. The soldier claims he did this on April 13, 2003 and the eye witness video was shot on April 18th 2003. What will be the next set of excuses? Who knows. Fortunately about this time it turns out our sworn enemy is alive and appears on video tape and the B/C campaign is deliriously happy that the perpetrator of 9-11 is still alive and comes to their rescue knocking the story at last temporarily off the front page along with a new criminal investigation initiated by the FBI looking into contract illegalities involving Halliburton! Pretty sad when your “War President” has to breathe a huge sigh of relief that our sworn enemy is still alive, in good health, and making political points with the world!
But what concerns us here is this dastardly sequence of events in which the story for covering their ass changes as each new twist and turn exposes their lies, and they try to recover only to get slaughtered again. And with each failure and expose that they were lying many on this board went merrily along with the party line apparently uncomprehending, or simply not caring, that the previous story had been exposed as a lie. And now the same folks that were saying a few days ago that a single obsolete sarin shell is a deadly weapon and worth the entire cost of this mess are whining that 380 tons of HE isn’t really that big a deal. The cognitive dissonance is remarkable in this one example and illustrative of the amazing lengths some hard core supporters are willing to go to in apologize for the WH screw up and the subsequent attempted white wash cover-up. This is what I’m talking about when I say that many Bush supporters-not all-display a stunning similarity to what is seen among Moonies or other hard core cult members who hold their divine leader as inerrant. If it doesn’t bother you when your lied to and mislead in rapid sequence then there really is no point in discussing facts with because there are no facts which could change your minds.

~DS~ says:

John you sounded defensive [shrug]. If you’re not a Bush supporter my apologies and I don’t hold it against you even if you are a Bush supporter. I don’t perceive that as some kind of ‘dishonor.’
I’ve said before and I’ll say it again, I believe reasonable people can disagree on whether or not Iraq was an honest mistake. Reasonable people can disagree on whether or not a mistake of this magnitude is grounds for voting the President and his advisors who made the error out of office. Reasonable cannot disagree on the fact that it has turned out in retrospect to be a mistake or that it is in hindsight an error and enormously costly one at that. That suggests a peculiar type of cognitive dissonance, one which I find fascinating, and one which is for the first time in my adult life found outside of fringe groups like the KKK or cult like the Moonies.
I assumed you were a Bush supporter because you’re defending the missing explosives using the latest party talking point that ‘the missing explosives represent X percentage” of all the explosives in Iraq. You were a handy exemplar of why this is obviously a poor argument and offered yourself as a convenient canvas uopon which I could draw my thesis.
First to address your claim about the explosives being irrelvant, that argument is wanting but it immediately highlights three glaring inconsistencies:
1. It’s like saying President Clinton only had oral sex with 0.01% of the women he could have slept with and told the truth about matters in general 99.99% of the time. Or that the people killed in 9-11 represent only a tiny fraction of the population of the world so what’s the big deal? IOW the argument of small numbers is not enough, in and of itself, to marginalize the missing explosives past the point of relevancy.
2. It fails to address that a series of falsehoods and misleading suggestions which preceded it form the WH/DoD. IOW it does not lend credibility to the user for it leaves the user open to charges of complicity in the cover-up which preceded it.
3. It sidestep the reason the missing explosives are so germane in the over all perception among the dispassionate analysts that the war has been pursued using too few troops and the argument avoids the implication that the WH talking point “The world is safer without Saddam in power’ is in fact questionable. It also undercuts prior positons by many on this board where a few obsolete sarin shells represented a danger so serious it was worth the cost of 100 plus US lives and hundreds of billions of doolars to secure them.
All these inconsistencies hurt the perception of WH competence and truthfulness(and by proxy those who parrot it), so I assume that anyone who helps them in avoiding those consequences is not fully objective and thus a likely supporter, as well as an example of the phenomena I’m researching.
What I’m interested with here, in fact one of the reasons I’m in this forum and others like it, aside from the fact that I like many of the people here and have come to know them well enough to admire many of their qualities and that I like spirited discussion about evolution Vs IDC, the topic which attracted me to the forum initially, is to observe this phenomena of blind loyalty to the WH and explore the depth, roots, and the conditions under which that dedication can be discarded by those who profess it. IOW, what is the ‘deprogramming’ routine?
I feel there is a palpable community of almost cult-like devotional love of the WH among the general corpus of Bush voters. Some, and again not all by any means, appear to be so emotionally attached to this administration that they’re incapable of acknowledging any sign of human error whatsoever among the cabinet and the President.
Consider for example the recent OBL tape. It’s a dicey development for either campaign of course. True it did take some of the heat off the WH over the explosives, the attempted cover-up of the explosives, and the President seems to poll better when the country is in fear of terror attacks. One might assume theB/C campaign is likely pleased it came out when it did. But they can’t act like they are and they have to be very careful as it underscores the WH’s failure to capture OBL, so they’re being vary cautious in how they handle it.
Almost everyone, regardless of which side they’re on, is trying to claim that OBL ‘wants the other guys candidate to win’. We’ve seen for example some Republicans claim AQ wants Kerry to win and we’ve seen the same among some democrats claiming OBL wants Bush to win. Among world analysts there is a consensus that AQ would slightly prefer that Bush remain in power as Bush is disliked among ur western europoean allies and despised in the Muslim world, and this serves the interests of an enemy of the US. But all these claims and counter claims ignore the obvious reason why that tape was released. Americans are so self interested; It’s not about us at all!
On Osama bin Ladenany side that has the word America in ti.
This is a very far reaching tactic he’s using BTW. Not only will he claim credit for affecting the election no matter who wins and garner prestige in the Muslim world, the campaign in this country who loses side will immediately take the bait and jump on it shouting “See! You did what OBL wanted you to do!” Thus sowing discord among the electorate and fermenting further division.
Anyway, that being said I think we can all agree OBL is a figure head representing our sworn enemy who directed an attack on 9-11 killing almost 3000 innocent Americans and that his capture would be a great relief for all Americans. In the immediate aftermath President Bush said “Wanted dead or alive’, one of the few soundbites in all of my adult life uttered by any politician that sums up my feelings perfectly.
But when I suggested that OBL being on the loose and having the power to come into our living rooms via CNN was a painful reminder that this WH hasn’t yet at least managed to capture or kill him, Joe Carter immediately jumped in to apologize for the WH saying apparently with no sense of remorse or inconsistency shouted “How exactly is he a “threat”? He has no more funding, no base of operations,” etc. And then went on to pitch an unbelievably hysterical phrase of wishful thinking that OBL is actually hurting Al Qaeada by being alive!
Now clearly he has a base of operations, he was after all in a studio quality video in good health and appearing completely at ease. He clearly can threaten the world as AQ attacks have occurred in Spain and Indonesia and in other places since 9-11. In fact he threaten America directly on that tape. And one would have to be pretty silly, or simply in denial, to seriously believe that sympathetic Muslims from around the world don’t worship the man like a modern day Luke Skywalker fighting the Evil Empire and aren’t funneling money to him anyone they can from oil rich regimes where he’s revered. And as far as ‘hurting’ AQ by not being dead, that’s so laughably chock full of wishful thinking and naivet

Mark O says:

~DS~
You ignore my questions, but insist I answer yours. Fine. I’ll try to answer yours.
To whit: What sort of mistakes could could Bush make that would cause him to lose my support?
I thought I’d made it clear that IMHO Bush hasn’t made any serious mistakes yet (regarding the execution of the war). However, here are some mistakes he could have made which would have cause him to lose my support.
Overcommiting our resources without backing at home. For example, if he had attacked Syria, Iran, Lebannon, and North Korea at the same time as Iraq. (as an aside: To match our commitment in WWII we would be throwing $2.5 trillion/year and 30 million soldiers into the fray. Would you have perferred that as our 9/11 response? I don’t think the political climate would have supported it. I’m not sure I would support that.)
Doing nothing. If for example, after declaring the Bush doctrine and after toppling the Taliban, we had pulled out and done nothing more but “diplomatic and legal actions”. This is what I gather as the Kerry proposal.
Pulling out of Iraq immediately after getting Saddam.
Likwise Afghanistan when we get OBL.
Executing the war in a manner not taking care to minimize the loss of civilian life wherever possible.
Micro-managing the war. Trying to run the battlefield from Capitol Hill.
How’s that?
Now answer my question. What your conception of the purpose of this war? Is it as I suspect, for you against al-Qaeda to the exclusion of other terrorists? Or, do you feel it is a war “making no distinction between terrorists and the states that harbor them”?
A second question for you. In your considered opinion should Lincoln have pulled the trigger on General Grant? Would you have voted for McClellan in the mid-War election?

JBP says:

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=40088