the voice of reason! completely true. nm

• an article - Grim Reaper
  • no one can predict - Whistler
    • the voice of reason! completely true. nm - everybody just breathe

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Can we get the political board back to the true purpose of this board – to share opinions of why we like our candidate.  Not bash and cut down others because they don’t agree with you.

I stayed away from this board for the past couple days because anyone who had anything positive to say about Sarah Palin got slammed, bashed, kicked down, etc.  After awhile I found it all too draining, and was not seeing any reason to come.  Yes, I did see some of it towards people who favored Barack Obama, but if you read the posts again it is mostly towards anyone who favored Sarah Palin/John McCain.

I thought the political board was for posting information regarding politics and candidates.  What I have seen for the past few days is that it has been an attack board.  Especially if you have anything positive you want to share about Sarah Palin.  You say something good about her and you get attacked, you answer back, and you get attacked more, and then when you get mad and pretty much say stop attacking me, they come back with this “Geez, I’m allowed to have an opinion”.

Another thing I am tired of seeing is the slanderous, hate filled, really off the wall comments about Sarah Palin.  The latest was something about her daughter actually had her baby.  Talk about just bizarre comments.  I thought what’s next, she’s an alien from another planet?  The more I kept reading the more the comments were getting just really weird and bizarre.  Of course nobody ever having any proof of any of these allegations.  I then came to realize that the posters were just trying to get a fight going.

I also saw posts that had nothing to do with politics but attacking a poster named Sam.  Again, probably trying to get another fight going for no good reason and on things that have nothing to do whatsoever with politics.  I’ve read “Sam is like an annoying nat that you sway away”, “Sam, please let me know where you work” or “she must have her quota” or “sam is to the politics board as oracle is to the”  This childish rhetoric is getting old.  I’m not defending sam she is a big girl and I can see by her posts she can take care of herself, but my point is that this has nothing to do with politics.  If you want a fight maybe you could request that the administrator create a separate “fight and degrade” section.

I’ve read the administrators post a couple different times called Beware of Flaming.  She/he said as long as we realize that not everyone is going to agree we shouldn’t wear our feelings on our sleeves and a little more oversight on here would be good.  Let people express his or her opinion and move on.  If you don’t like someone just ignore that person. “It’s not rocket science, you know” (I liked that statement)

I consider posting on this board a privilege and not a right.  If you don’t agree with something and you post that you don’t agree and state the facts why (and are civilized about it) that’s one thing, but when you bash and degrade others without showing proof and just want to start fights and belittle others it just seems a bit juvenile to me.

I come to the politics board to hear ideas and stuff (facts) about the candidates.  That is how I’m learning about each one, but I don’t want to read people attack other posters for no good reason.  I'd like to hear about Obama/Biden & McCain/Palin, but I want to hear facts.

If you like to fight so much why don’t you pick on people that you can fight to face to face. 

Rodney King "why can't we all just get along." Name-calling serves no purpose. Can't we just refer to ourselves as Americans. Can we agree to disagree? I see a bright future. I am sorry your future is so dark and meaningless.

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.

 This is quite long but if you just read the the last lines, the no mores, it will move you. While our **leaders** were out there borrowing rhetoric from WWII and not from the good guys either, the mayor of Salt Lake City had some words of his own to share.

I have not been on the boards much lately because I just don't know what to say. There is so much that is so wrong that I am completely overwhelmed, so much death, so much torture, so much pain, so much greed, so much **depraved indifference***, so much deceit and on and on and on.   I am grateful there are still those who can put words together and produce a piece of coherent outrage. The mayor of Salt Lake is one of them.

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0902-03.htm

wisdom.  Not often seen herewithin.

...I am every single person that has ever posted on the liberal board.  You have obviously found me out.  I have so many different monikers it is very very difficult to keep them straight.

As far as my being mad or angry as you suppose, no not in the least.  Most of my energy is spent trying to change syntax and moniker as often as possible on the MT Stars liberal board.

only answer is hop around the globe, play eenie, meenie, miney, moe and choose another sovereign country to invade.

It didn't happen here.....yet.  But every single terrorism expert believes it's not a matter of if but a matter of WHEN.  And Bush is helping them by not protecting us satisfactorily and by providing THEM with OTJ training in Iraq.

Yes, I think I'm beginning to "get" it.

As far as what I feel about Conservatives, I've voted Republican a number of times in my life, so don't tell me what I think because you haven't a clue.  I vote for the candidate, not the party, and if Bush and Kerry are the best this country can offer up, we need to worry about much more than terrorists.

Your posts show how completely filled with rage and hatred you are.  I have not called anyone a name, but you just called me many.  Enough said.

Mentally ill, angry, hateful, and getting more out of control by the minute.

I suggest we don't read their/her posts any more and don't attempt to respond to them.  If they don't have an audience for the insane hatred they spew, maybe they will go away.  There's no point, anyway.  As in my post below, if I hold up three fingers and YOU see three fingers and the rest of the WORLD sees three fingers, they will only see ONE finger, turn it into something ugly and hateful and then and accuse me of giving them the bird.  How in the world can someone communicate with people like that?

I say we just start to ignore them before they pollute this board any further than they already have.  It's getting out of control.

They're turning the Liberal board into a sewer like they did the Conservative board.