Sticks and stones, my friend. Didn't vote for the man...

• Obama - the poster-boy for wimps everywhere
  • What a hate filled post. - Sorry for you...
    • Tell ya what. When I need your sympathy - I'll yank your chain.
    • There is not one thing in the post that leads to hate - just me
  • Wha do you suggest Obama should have done? - ()
  • Agree, posterboy - Pugmom
    • So much hatred in this posting, despicable.. - ()
      • Where were you when Bush was being "slandered"... - watcher
        • Bush was rightfully slandered, not by me, - ()
      • There is no hatred in that post - just me
      • It is not slander. It is freedom of speech - Backwards typist
      • Presidents have been "slandered" since there's been presidents - Patty
        • I agree with you 100% Patty - just me
        • why do we have to continue with what others before - ()
          • I see nothing wrong - Patty
            • I was talking about the slander that is going on on this board! Wake up, Patty!..nm - ()
              • No you were not - it's obvious you were talking about the presidents - see message
              • Sure ya were.... - Patty
                • And I was saying that in my opinion it is - ()
                  • Actually ANY slander is despicable, also in our - ()
                    • and yet you continue... - cj
            • Patty: that's what you are believing, you with your 'biblical, caged' mind..nm - ()
              • I am an atheist and yet I agree with Patty so find - Victoria
                • How can my world be snmall when I am an - ()
                  • You certainly are no independent - me
                    • No, you are wrong, kow can you know - ()
                • Is tht so? So I assume that you are a flip-flop, - ()
                • How do you assume that my world is small? - ()
                • And even though - Patty
                  • Excuse me? I would hardly call Obama - ()
                    • YIKES! If you would not call Barry from Chicago a far liberal.... - watcher
                      • a far-liberal would probably be someone - ()
              • LOL - Patty
                • look beyond your Bible, so that you can - ()
                  • Everyone has something they believe in.... - watcher
        • read my post farer down......sm - ()
          • Maybe... - Patty
      • it is called freedom of speech - nm - cj
        • this is going too far...........nm - ()
          • umm, no... - cj
            • freedom of speech excludes and stops at slander and foul language...sm - ()
              • you do not know what you are talking about - see message - just me
              • The 1st Amendment - for your reading
                • if you accept and confuse slander as freedom of speech - ()
                  • because slander is the 1st stage of violence and abuse...sm - ()
                    • utter nonsense - where in the world did you come up with this line - just me
                    • sm... - cj
                    • And many, many times... - Patty
  • Agree wholeheartedly - Old part-timer
    • And I also AGREE.. - Patty
    • Agree also. He is a leader who wants everyone to - like him...eventually will bite us all.nm
  • LOL.....(sm) - Just the big bad
    • Hi, JTBB, I posted exactly the same thought s a couple - ()
    • Not quite - see message - just me
      • Wrong again.....(sm) - Just the big bad
        • No you are wrong - - just me
      • Not right, as far as I can remember 59% voted for Obama...nm - ()
        • A distortion of the facts - see message - just me
        • With the help of ACORN he got 59% - - nm
    • Sorry...but he is not MY President. He is THE President.... - watcher
      • Iran's meddling accusations....sm - ()
      • yes, he IS your president, and he does not care a bit - ()
        • what?? - cj
          • my reply was for watcher', not for you. - ()
            • nothing of substance to say so.. - cj
              • I put my 'substance' in all my posts, I hate - ()
      • If Netanyahu continues to bomb Gaza, - ()
      • Ahmadinejad is doiing what Khatami is telling him to do.. - ()
      • If you are a US citizen, he is YOUR president - sorry about that chief - nm - rolf
        • I'll try to make this a bit clearer for you - just me
        • Sticks and stones, my friend. Didn't vote for the man... - watcher
          • **Sticks and stones?** How bizarre. - Which is it?
            • The sticks and stones were the smart-A (aleck, not a$$).... - watcher
          • every US president is more or less a puppet...nm - ()
          • If they had been elected, absolutely they would be my President - - Amanda
            • Okay....I don't have to like him or support him, but he IS MY President.... - watcher
    • I know you don't expect an answer. They just bash, bash, bash - But don't have anything positive to suggest
      • as said: jealous and hateful losers...nm - ()
      • After all the Bush bashing this is refreshing.... - watcher
        • Hmmmm......(sm) - Just the big bad
          • Drink some more Kool-Aid!! - nm
          • hmmmm.... - watcher
            • There are so many false statements in your post... - ()
            • Microscope in hand...LOL...(sm) - Just the big bad
              • I second your post and 'watcher's post - ()
              • I woulld call that one a slam dunk! - SNAP
                • The slam dunk was by "Watcher" - nm.
                  • wrong, full of wrong statements, see my upper post...nm - ()
                    • Then why did you second watchers post - above? ?????
                      • I wrote: I second JTBB's post, 'watcher's post is misinformed crap...sm - ()
                        • Sorry. My bad. Didn't realize - there was more inside
                          • no, it was my bad, because I forgot to put - ()

The messages you are viewing are archived/old.
To view latest messages and participate in discussions, select the boards given in left menu

You were called a **US citizen.**  Such audacity!

So which was hurled at you?  A stick or a stone?

Stop the name calling, the crying, the ranting and GET BEHIND OUR PRESIDENT AND OUR COUNTRY!  Don't be a traitor!  You don't like it--Leave!! 

Everybody gets one vote (hopefully only one) to make her voice heard.  One side has to lose.  Be prepared either way. 

his own personal reasons.

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/20050620/why_george_went_to_war.php

The Downing Street memos have brought into focus an essential question: on what basis did President George W. Bush decide to invade Iraq? The memos are a government-level confirmation of what has been long believed by so many: that the administration was hell-bent on invading Iraq and was simply looking for justification, valid or not.

Despite such mounting evidence, Bush resolutely maintains total denial. In fact, when a British reporter asked the president recently about the Downing Street documents, Bush painted himself as a reluctant warrior. "Both of us didn't want to use our military," he said, answering for himself and British Prime Minister Blair. "Nobody wants to commit military into combat. It's the last option."

Yet there's evidence that Bush not only deliberately relied on false intelligence to justify an attack, but that he would have willingly used any excuse at all to invade Iraq. And that he was obsessed with the notion well before 9/11—indeed, even before he became president in early 2001.

In interviews I conducted last fall, a well-known journalist, biographer and Bush family friend who worked for a time with Bush on a ghostwritten memoir said that an Iraq war was always on Bush's brain.

"He was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999," said author and Houston Chronicle journalist Mickey Herskowitz. "It was on his mind. He said, 'One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief.' And he said, 'My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it.' He went on, 'If I have a chance to invade…, if I had that much capital, I'm not going to waste it. I'm going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I'm going to have a successful presidency.'"

Bush apparently accepted a view that Herskowitz, with his long experience of writing books with top Republicans, says was a common sentiment: that no president could be considered truly successful without one military "win" under his belt. Leading Republicans had long been enthralled by the effect of the minuscule Falklands War on British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's popularity, and ridiculed Democrats such as Jimmy Carter who were reluctant to use American force. Indeed, both Reagan and Bush's father successfully prosecuted limited invasions (Grenada, Panama and the Gulf War) without miring the United States in endless conflicts.

Herskowitz's revelations illuminate Bush's personal motivation for invading Iraq and, more importantly, his general inclination to use war to advance his domestic political ends. Furthermore, they establish that this thinking predated 9/11, predated his election to the presidency and predated his appointment of leading neoconservatives who had their own, separate, more complex geopolitical rationale for supporting an invasion.

Conversations With Bush The Candidate

Herskowitz—a longtime Houston newspaper columnist—has ghostwritten or co-authored autobiographies of a broad spectrum of famous people, including Reagan adviser Michael Deaver, Mickey Mantle, Dan Rather and Nixon cabinet secretary John B. Connally. Bush's 1999 comments to Herskowitz were made over the course of as many as 20 sessions together. Eventually, campaign staffers—expressing concern about things Bush had told the author that were included in the manuscript—pulled the project, and Bush campaign officials came to Herskowitz's house and took his original tapes and notes. Bush communications director Karen Hughes then assumed responsibility for the project, which was published in highly sanitized form as A Charge to Keep.

The revelations about Bush's attitude toward Iraq emerged during two taped sessions I held with Herskowitz. These conversations covered a variety of matters, including the journalist's continued closeness with the Bush family and fondness for Bush Senior—who clearly trusted Herskowitz enough to arrange for him to pen a subsequent authorized biography of Bush's grandfather, written and published in 2003.

I conducted those interviews last fall and published an article based on them during the final heated days of the 2004 campaign. Herskowitz's taped insights were verified to the satisfaction of editors at the Houston Chronicle, yet the story failed to gain broad mainstream coverage, primarily because news organization executives expressed concern about introducing such potent news so close to the election. Editors told me they worried about a huge backlash from the White House and charges of an "October Surprise."

Debating The Timeline For War

But today, as public doubts over the Iraq invasion grow, and with the Downing Street papers adding substance to those doubts, the Herskowitz interviews assume singular importance by providing profound insight into what motivated Bush—personally—in the days and weeks following 9/11. Those interviews introduce us to a George W. Bush, who, until 9/11, had no means for becoming "a great president"—because he had no easy path to war. Once handed the national tragedy of 9/11, Bush realized that the Afghanistan campaign and the covert war against terrorist organizations would not satisfy his ambitions for greatness. Thus, Bush shifted focus from Al Qaeda, perpetrator of the attacks on New York and Washington. Instead, he concentrated on ensuring his place in American history by going after a globally reviled and easily targeted state run by a ruthless dictator.

The Herskowitz interviews add an important dimension to our understanding of this presidency, especially in combination with further evidence that Bush's focus on Iraq was motivated by something other than credible intelligence. In their published accounts of the period between 9/11 and the March 2003 invasion, former White House Counterterrorism Coordinator Richard Clarke and journalist Bob Woodward both describe a president single-mindedly obsessed with Iraq. The first anecdote takes place the day after the World Trade Center collapsed, in the Situation Room of the White House. The witness is Richard Clarke, and the situation is captured in his book, Against All Enemies.

On September 12th, I left the Video Conferencing Center and there, wandering alone around the Situation Room, was the President. He looked like he wanted something to do. He grabbed a few of us and closed the door to the conference room. "Look," he told us, "I know you have a lot to do and all…but I want you, as soon as you can, to go back over everything, everything. See if Saddam did this. See if he's linked in any way…"

I was once again taken aback, incredulous, and it showed. "But, Mr. President, Al Qaeda did this."

"I know, I know, but…see if Saddam was involved. Just look. I want to know any shred…" …

"Look into Iraq, Saddam," the President said testily and left us. Lisa Gordon-Hagerty stared after him with her mouth hanging open.

Similarly, Bob Woodward, in a CBS News 60 Minutes interview about his book, Bush At War, captures a moment, on November 21, 2001, where the president expresses an acute sense of urgency that it is time to secretly plan the war with Iraq. Again, we know there was nothing in the way of credible intelligence to precipitate the president's actions.

Woodward: "President Bush, after a National Security Council meeting, takes Don Rumsfeld aside, collars him physically and takes him into a little cubbyhole room and closes the door and says, 'What have you got in terms of plans for Iraq? What is the status of the war plan? I want you to get on it. I want you to keep it secret.'"

Wallace (voiceover): Woodward says immediately after that, Rumsfeld told Gen. Tommy Franks to develop a war plan to invade Iraq and remove Saddam—and that Rumsfeld gave Franks a blank check.

Woodward: "Rumsfeld and Franks work out a deal essentially where Franks can spend any money he needs. And so he starts building runways and pipelines and doing all the necessary preparations in Kuwait specifically to make war possible."

Bush wanted a war so that he could build the political capital necessary to achieve his domestic agenda and become, in his mind, "a great president." Blair and the members of his cabinet, unaware of the Herskowitz conversations, placed Bush's decision to mount an invasion in or about July of 2002. But for Bush, the question that summer was not whether, it was only how and when. The most important question, why, was left for later.

Eventually, there would be a succession of answers to that question: weapons of mass destruction, links to Al Qaeda, the promotion of democracy, the domino theory of the Middle East. But none of them have been as convincing as the reason George W. Bush gave way back in the summer of 1999.

But there's a difference between gaffes and a lack of knowledge, much less a willingness to pass FAIR legislation.

Biden sponsored the violence against women act and has had to fight republicans to extend the life of that bill every time it comes up.  He is a very strong advocate for women.  Check out his voting record.

Knowing this is late, I hope you had the best day ever!

Six months after the gassing of Kurds in 1988, the White House lent Saddam a billion dollars.  In 1991, at the end of the Gulf War, US troops stood idly by while Saddam's presidential guards ruthlessly suppressed the uprising by the Kurds that Poppy Bush encouraged and had called for.  In 1980, Saddam was made an honorary citizen of Detroit, Michigan.  He was our friend back then, even though we knew his blood thirsty ways.  We even supplied him with WMD, which we then destroyed with fly over bombing through the 1990's with sanctions placed on the country to weaken it even more.  We also were friends with Osama in the 1970's when we had him and Afghan freedom fighters fight against Russia as we did not want Russia to have control of Afghanistan.  In essence, Osama was trained by our CIA for war.

...why is that?  I hope you don't generally treat your friends this way.

As far as me singling people out to torment -- it would only be you and it would be singular.  Plus, I didn't "single" you out, just saw your posts on a PUBLIC forum and as I said, they looked kind of mean and cruddy.  However, I would say you are the PLURAL stalker.  Come one, come all you will take them on and condemn and mock all that folks say on the liberal board!!  And then accuse them of all being the same person.   Lots of paranoia goin' on in that ole brain of yours, doesn't sound very healthy at all!!!   No, sir!!!

few nieces who are biracial and they are absolutely beautiful kids.  I think some of the cutest kids are "oreos."