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I'm open minded, and I'm still waiting for someone to find those WMDs.
And waiting . . .
And waiting . . .
And waiting . . .
But WMDs was only the excuse, wasn't it, not the real reason? We went to Iraq, among other reasons, to secure access to its rich oil fields so we could keep fuel costs down. Sure glad that came off as planned!
It's amazing to me how so many Democrats love to laud themselves as the "open-minded, we are the world" party, while condemning Republicans as "war mongering idiots" who don't know anything. All the while, they continue to profess their opposition to the war, which is based on information of which they MIGHT have about 5% of . It's really funny how hindsight is 20/20, and everyone loves to act like the decision THEY would have made would have been the right one, etc. Nevermind the fact that Iraq's own TOP GENERALS under Hussein thought they had the WMD's. Nevermind the fact that our intelligence turned out to be flawed (this is assuming that Iraq didn't ship the WMD's out of the country in the MONTHS that we were threatening to go in, which is entirely possible). No, it's all Bush's fault, the Republicans are all stupid, etc. Yeah, let's all mindlessly vote for the Democrats, even though some of their policies are about as sound as a 500 pound block on a wicker chair (read: universal health care, tax policy, PATHETIC foreign policy, etc.)
I love how the Dems try to act like they're the "educated, open-minded" party....and don't even have the ability to logically deduce the fact that their opinions on many, many things are: 1) 20/20 hindsight, and 2) with about 5% (at BEST) of the relevant information. And you call George Bush an idiot.
you have got to be *$#$!@#@ kidding me. Let's ignore the actual people who attacked this city so we can run off with an ideological agenda to start a war and occupy a country we know nothing about and have no plan to unify or control. While we're at it, lets multiply by a significant factor the animus toward our country in that part of the world, and strenghten the hand of the Iranian government by creating a vacuum next door and
I would have told you the same thing in 2002. The problem with many of the Democrats who actually held office in 2002 is that they lost their cojones over the years and were too afraid of the "unpatriotic" propaganda machine to say no at the time. The Democrats are the "we are the world" party, relatively speaking, because almost all of the rest of the world wanted no part of this one. And this country does not become safer when it pisses off its longtime friends with a pseudo-Marlboro-Man "we don't have to listen to anyone because we're America" attitude.
I'd love to know a single facet of life in this country that hasn't gotten significantly worse under Bush, and that I could have told you in 1999. No 20-20 hindsight there
And pretty much every other first world country has universal health care. I pay $200 a month as a single person for what is supposed to be some of the best employer-provided health care in the US. I waited weeks to have an appointment with an orthopedist and another month to have some tests run. The doctor told me to e-mail him when the results came in and didn't reply for almost a month despite repeated calls and e-mails because "he gets 500 e-mails a day and just doesn't have the time." My uncle who had no insurance at all has gotten progressively sicker with things that could have been handled if caught early on. Now he's costing Medicare $5000 a day. My mother died because, when my father was laid off in 1996, they had to pay $1000 a month, money that they did not have, for crappy coverage due to her "pre-existing condition." Newsflash: our system does not work all that well.
And the Republicans are the last ones to talk about tax policy. People making half a million plus have a windfall while the nation's debt has soared. I make a large income in the highest tax jurisdiction in the country, and I am still doing just fine. I'd gladly pay taxes to live in a civilized country with a system that works that doesn't pass on the costs of its stupid war to my grandchildren.
The American Republican party is alone in standing far outside the mainstream of the enitre first world.
Last edited by holden125; 06-04-2008 at 12:08 PM..
While he is at it, why doesnt Obama say that kids under 21 can buy alcohol too - its illegal but we should give them the 21+ year old privileges.
As a matter of policy this wouldn't be a bad idea if we could change the culture of drinking. This is the case in Canada, pretty much all of Europe, and many other places. In none of the places where wine at meals is common at home and drinking is legal at 14 or 16 do you see young people getting smashed the way they do here. There is just a very immature attitude toward alcohol in the high-school and college age culture that we would do well to change.
I like you, but I don't agree with you at all. The intelligence at the time indicated that Iraq was harboring terrorists, and that they had WMD's. We gave them plenty of time to cooperate and they refused. Even Hussein's own top generals have admitted as much. You ARE looking at it with hindsight. Nevermind that no one knows whether the WMD's ever existed at the time or whether they were funneled out of the country during the time that we gave them to comply and allow inspectors in to do their jobs. The fact is that we, as citizens, have about 5% of the information that our leaders had at the time. So neither I nor you can confidently say that the decision to go in there was the wrong one at the time. Do you think that we shouldn't go after countries that are harboring terrorists with plans to attack the U.S. just because we don't want to "upset" some of our friends? Are you kidding? Yes, for diplomatic reasons, they should be consulted. But we should NOT let their opinion on the matter be the final word on what we do or don't do in terms of defending ourselves. Given the nature of the war we're fighting (not the one in Iraq, the one against a stateless enemy), it's REQUIRED that a large part of our strategy be offensive rather than defensive. Have some decisions within the war been questionable? Of course, and in hindsight some have proved good while others bad. That's what happens in every war. As far as health care goes, you're smarter than the argument you just made. No one ever said ours was perfect, but if you know anything about health care in many other countries where the system is government-run, the care is worse and the waits are even more horrendous. You can't argue that our system should be changed to socialized medicine because ours doesn't flow seamlessly; you have to compare it to those systems, which are, in fact, even worse in many cases. As far as the Democratic party being the "we are the world" party, they're the first to jump in your face when you have the nerve to disagree with them, and point out the flaws in what they're saying. I'm not accusing you of that here, but that seems to be a very common theme among them. As far as tax policy goes, I'm a tax attorney and I'll just say that I respectfully disagree with you for many reasons on that point.
But WMDs was only the excuse, wasn't it, not the real reason? We went to Iraq, among other reasons, to secure access to its rich oil fields so we could keep fuel costs down. Sure glad that came off as planned!
Of course access to oil is always a very big concern for us, and it should be. It baffles me when people act like we're the bad guys for protecting our own interests by trying to make sure that we have access to oil. You should realize that there are only two more important things necessary to the survival of our country than oil, and they're called "food" and
"water." Seriously, think about that. Just imagine what would happen to us (and many others) if we were cut off from this resource today. Many, many would die because if you think about it, millions of people wouldn't be able to get access to food and water if oil weren't available to us. And no, I don't think we went over there to "secure access" as that implies something that I don't think was the idea. A better way to word it would be that a part of the reason we went in was to ensure that we weren't cut off from that resource, and given the strained relationship we had at that point with that country (and several others), that was a very real possibility. That should tell you something about how dependent we are on that resource-something that HAS to change. I'm a Republican, but that doesn't mean that I don't fully support our move to other resources for our energy supply. The degree to which we depend on oil right now is downright scary.
I like you, but I don't agree with you at all. The intelligence at the time indicated that Iraq was harboring terrorists, and that they had WMD's.
Wrong. No terrorists. No WMM. The inspectors found nothing prior to the war.
This is not hindsight. I, with tens of thousands of New Yorkers, marched against the war before the first bomb was dropped. I have a picture on my fridge and I am holding a sign that reads "Let the Sanctions Work." This is why Senator Clinton will never get a vote from me for the rest of my life. Many of us, directly affected by the attacks on 9/11, could see through the hawk's march to war - the twisting of "facts" to make a case for war.
Now with his term coming to an end, let's watch the former members of the Bush administration make their confessions in their complicity in this useless war.
I like you, but I don't agree with you at all. The intelligence at the time indicated that Iraq was harboring terrorists, and that they had WMD's. We gave them plenty of time to cooperate and they refused. Even Hussein's own top generals have admitted as much. You ARE looking at it with hindsight. Nevermind that no one knows whether the WMD's ever existed at the time or whether they were funneled out of the country during the time that we gave them to comply and allow inspectors in to do their jobs. The fact is that we, as citizens, have about 5% of the information that our leaders had at the time. So neither I nor you can confidently say that the decision to go in there was the wrong one at the time. Do you think that we shouldn't go after countries that are harboring terrorists with plans to attack the U.S. just because we don't want to "upset" some of our friends? Are you kidding? Yes, for diplomatic reasons, they should be consulted. But we should NOT let their opinion on the matter be the final word on what we do or don't do in terms of defending ourselves. Given the nature of the war we're fighting (not the one in Iraq, the one against a stateless enemy), it's REQUIRED that a large part of our strategy be offensive rather than defensive. Have some decisions within the war been questionable? Of course, and in hindsight some have proved good while others bad. That's what happens in every war. As far as health care goes, you're smarter than the argument you just made. No one ever said ours was perfect, but if you know anything about health care in many other countries where the system is government-run, the care is worse and the waits are even more horrendous. You can't argue that our system should be changed to socialized medicine because ours doesn't flow seamlessly; you have to compare it to those systems, which are, in fact, even worse in many cases. As far as the Democratic party being the "we are the world" party, they're the first to jump in your face when you have the nerve to disagree with them, and point out the flaws in what they're saying. I'm not accusing you of that here, but that seems to be a very common theme among them. As far as tax policy goes, I'm a tax attorney and I'll just say that I respectfully disagree with you for many reasons on that point.
Hey Texas,
I like you too but I have no qualms about saying that my political views were formed in Cambridge, Mass., Greenwich Village, and the 18th Arrondissement of Paris. I'd like to think I can discuss these things without getting overheated, but that works better some days than others. Lately I think the U.S should have quit while it was ahead, let the confederates split (with Staten Island as a going-away gift), and left well enough alone by leaving the Mexicans and Native Americans in peace instead of throwing 2 senators at all those western states that like to play the laconic rugged individualist while taking massive federal subsidies and using water that only gets to them thanks to government-built dams and irrigation systems that New Yorkers paid for.
I don't know what secret information they had at the time but they took their case to the people, as they should in a democracy, and I was not sold at the time. Like UpsonDowns, I did not support this war even before it happened. Most Americans did not. Before they went ahead and invaded, polls indicated majority opposition to the idea. After the administration went ahead anyway, the public rallied behind the idea, mostly because people think it's necessary to support the war if they are to support the troops, who are just told where to go and have no say in the matter. It is not hindsight just because the views I held all along were later vindicated.
I do not support invading every country that may contain terrorists intent on attacking the U.S. for the simple reason that there would, unfortunately, be too many countries. As events have shown, and as plenty of people predicted, it's hard enough to invade and occupy one. The U.S. and the European colonial nations have learned time and again that in today's world it is difficult to occupy a country whose people don't want you there. The military victory over the Iraqi army was the easy part; we learned in 1991 that could be done in six weeks. The hard part is figuring out how to make a viable nation there. Now we are bogged down and in no position to go cowboy in 20 more countries. You cannot kill every potential enemy, particularly because doing so creates more enemies, which the evidence indicates we have done.
I have family in Derry, Ireland, who have had plenty of terrorism from both sides to deal with, and lost a cousin to it. I lived in Paris in 1995 and 1996, when there was a wave of smaller terrorist attacks. Nobody liked that much but there was no call to go invade Algeria, where the terrorists came from, and get them all. And I was here when the World Trade Center was hit. I passed through the Trade Center concourse at 11:30 the night before, saw the planes hit and the buildings fall from a mile away that morning. I waited three hours to give blood at St. Vincents and saw people rolled in on stretchers, and others covered in ash walking dazed northward. There was no traffic on 7th Avenue except hundreds of police cars and ambulances racing downtown.
Like most everyone on this board, I saw the flyers for missing people everywhere for weeks, half the streets in my old Brooklyn neighborhood were renamed for people killed that day, and I've had to ride the subway through a closed station held up by wooden beams for seven years and walk past soldiers with machine guns in Grand Central. My friend's father from Massachusetts died on one of the flights out of Boston; my classmate's fiance was killed here. And there is still a big hole in my city. None of which obliges me to support a war with poor rationale, little international support, and no particular plan for what comes next in that country, and it's intriguing that there is greater support for this kind of thing in Texas and Oklahoma than here in New York City, where we actually had it happen.
Nobody wants to go through another attack, but there have been more U.S. soldiers, and a lot more Iraqis, killed in this war than were killed here that day. There is also a curious imbalance--on the theory that they may pose a risk to us, we feel empowered to invade and occupy an entire country and plunge it into chaos. Who then posed a greater threat to whom?
As far as health care goes, that is the classic U.K. straw man argument. Margaret Thatcher bled the British NHS dry in the 80's and the quality of the care has gone down dramatically. That system is poorly organized and poorly run, but the U.K. and recent years in Canada are all we ever hear about from opponents of universal healthcare. A cousin of mine had no idea any other countries actually had any kind of universal system. My experiences in the French system have been uniformly positive, and it covers everyone for barely half the cost per person of our bloated bureaucracy. No nightmare waits, no limits on what doctor you can see, etc. They system combines government payments with supplemental private insurance, and works very well. This article from last summer parallels my personal experiences and those of my friends who live there. I would, in a head to head comparison, take it any day, both for my own care and for the knowledge that everyone is covered. The World Heath Organization ranks it first in the world. Germany, Netherlands, plenty of other places, just fine also.
With respect to taxes, I'd welcome the chance to hear your thoughts, but a lot of it comes down to values. Tax attorneys almost by definition are responsible for minimizing tax liability, but I'd rather see more paid in if people would get more out.
I like you, but I don't agree with you at all. The intelligence at the time indicated that Iraq was harboring terrorists, and that they had WMD's. We gave them plenty of time to cooperate and they refused. Even Hussein's own top generals have admitted as much. You ARE looking at it with hindsight. Nevermind that no one knows whether the WMD's ever existed at the time or whether they were funneled out of the country during the time that we gave them to comply and allow inspectors in to do their jobs. The fact is that we, as citizens, have about 5% of the information that our leaders had at the time. So neither I nor you can confidently say that the decision to go in there was the wrong one at the time. Do you think that we shouldn't go after countries that are harboring terrorists with plans to attack the U.S. just because we don't want to "upset" some of our friends? Are you kidding? Yes, for diplomatic reasons, they should be consulted. But we should NOT let their opinion on the matter be the final word on what we do or don't do in terms of defending ourselves. Given the nature of the war we're fighting (not the one in Iraq, the one against a stateless enemy), it's REQUIRED that a large part of our strategy be offensive rather than defensive. Have some decisions within the war been questionable? Of course, and in hindsight some have proved good while others bad. That's what happens in every war. As far as health care goes, you're smarter than the argument you just made. No one ever said ours was perfect, but if you know anything about health care in many other countries where the system is government-run, the care is worse and the waits are even more horrendous. You can't argue that our system should be changed to socialized medicine because ours doesn't flow seamlessly; you have to compare it to those systems, which are, in fact, even worse in many cases. As far as the Democratic party being the "we are the world" party, they're the first to jump in your face when you have the nerve to disagree with them, and point out the flaws in what they're saying. I'm not accusing you of that here, but that seems to be a very common theme among them. As far as tax policy goes, I'm a tax attorney and I'll just say that I respectfully disagree with you for many reasons on that point.
You are buggin right now. Intelligence? Come on now, stop that. They showed a bunch of over head pictures of fire trucks and EMTvehicles and said they were mobile nuclear launchers. Then they had Britain come in with the assist. Britain's "intelligence" was some paper written by some university student over there on his "findings" on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Lets get our facts straight. Bush is a screw up, he lied and thats it, period.
Here is a link (http://www.channel4.com/news/article.jsp?id=253293 - broken link)and you can find MUCH more if you do some research on the matter.
Alright, guys. Holden, you've made some valid points and quite frankly I learned something from reading it, especially in regards to the French system of healthcare. I really have no knowledge of it, and I appreciate the fact that you do. Perhaps some sort of mixed (private and government-funded) system could work well, and I agree with you that I'd like it if I knew that everyone were covered. I myself am not covered at this time, and haven't been in 10 years (since I was 17, all through college, law school, and the ll.m.); luckily however I have 3 family members who are doctors and I rarely get sick, but I'm still taking a gamble. Obviously, I'll be covered when my job starts there in early September, but as of now I haven't been covered since I graduated from high school. Obviously, I've been lucky in that respect and would rather not take the risk. From the doctor's point of view, you'd like to think that it might benefit them to, given their duty to provide care and having to do so for those uninsured at this time. If all were insured, the overall net effect might help them financially. In summary, thanks for sharing your insight on the French system.
As far as your comments about letting the confederacy win, I can't tell if that's a slight at people like myself who are from the South. Honestly, it sounds like you're implying that we're less intelligent and/or the values of the two parts of the country are so different that they should be separate. Clarify that if you get a chance, because I hope it's not the former.
And as to why those of us down here support the war moreso than those of you do up there, that could be attributable to a number of things. It is interesting that it's that way, but my guess has to do with the two places having different underlying cultures, with us being more "cowboy" as you like to put it. That's understandable because that's probably true given our history. While in some cases it can probably be detrimental, it's also just what some situations need. Like many things, the best recipe likely calls for a little bit of both, similar to the ideologies of both political parties. Neither is perfect by itself, and the ideal system would incorporate things from both. Unfortunately, that's not what we have right now.
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