TEXAS
Clinton 1,140,944 50%
Obama 1,087,161 48%
And Ohio.
Does anyone else get the impression that had the Clintons redirected even a fragment of the red hot burning lust they exhibit for the acquisition of personal political power to the task of protecting their nation’s interests, there might well be a pair of towers still standing in New York CIty today?
Related! A victory for Clinton or a victory for the VRWC?
I’m just waiting for the headline
“Two-faced Obama caught lying to delgates”
Not holding my breath.
Yeah Raphael, almost a whole year! 11 entire months to completely fix everything Clinton broke in the biggest bureaucracy in the freakin’ world.
Tell me Raphael, you’re a “conservative”. Do you know what The Wall was? Who built it? Do you remember, perchance, the screaming and outrage when Bush started taking it apart?
I do. Try to fool somebody with a shorter memory, eh?
But Phantom, did Clinton ignore direct warnings that were handed to him by the director of the CIA and Secretary of State that warned of an imminent attack on US soil? No. Did Bush? Yes. Repeatedly.
Clinton was far from perfect, but let’s not get too crazy here. Bush couldn’t have picked a more disastrous file on which to drop the ball so completely. I guess for righties, the buck stops at the Oval Office – just not when they’re sitting behind it.
That, my friend, is why conservatives so infuriate. They love talking about accountability, but when they’ve got to line up and take their lumps, they’re usually ducking out the back door. And their fanboys and enablers are always quick to champion the lovable losers like Bush, who have so bungled up our collective national security by their sheer incompetence.
What’s really quite sad is that enablers like Phantom and the rest think they’re somehow benefiting from the sad-sack policies (whether economic or national security-related) that this bunch have put in place, when in reality, they’re going to have to bend over and take it like the rest of us when the other shoe drops.
Ah well…at least you’ll be first in line, with a smile on your face to boot.
Whoops – I should have said National Security Advisor, not SecState.
“Whoops – I should have said National Security Advisor, not SecState.”
Wow, thanks for clearing that up, pissant. We were all paying rapt attention.
I know dean, correcting mistakes, even really small ones…it’s so unlike what you’re used to on SDA.
Which presidency placed barriers between the CIA and FBI so that neither could inform the other about common internal and external targets? Which President was too busy playing golf to give permission for Bin Laden to be taken out? However blame for 911 is to be apportioned, Clinton’s time in power predates Bush – he had first crack at stopping it, and failed. Consequently, Kate’s comment is viable: had he applied himself while in power to his sworn duty with as much passion and effort as he is obviously capable of, a tragedy might have been averted. Nowhere in her comment do I see an exclusion of anything in which Bush may have been negligent, but after all, he is not the subject of the post. The Clintons were always proud of their ‘two-fer’ presidency, and as they seem intent on re-creating it – well, Bill anyway – and their hope has suddenly been resurrected, musings about his past priorities seem appropriate.
Perhaps Clinton would have had more time to deal with the nations’s business if he wasn’t busy trying to defend himself from impeachment. Too bad a presidential blow job is more important to right wingers than national security.
Maybe if national security would have been higher on the agenda than blow jobs, Clinton wouldn’t have had to defend himself.
“””””(supposedly with the highest IQ of all Presidents – and with expert advice) “”””
Posted by: cconn at March 5, 2008 9:01 AM
hate to burst yer bubble, butt me thinks that quite probably Bush’s is higher, so before you go blathering like a fool, I’m not a bush fan!!
and bush vs. clinton re. terrorists
it takes 6 months to get settled in on the job, an another to get to full swing, so “possibilities” of a threat ( and there would have been several) would be lessor than a “fact” of one having happened as on clinton’s watch.
butt hold fer a minute, Billybob clinton and old man bush are thick as thieves, so one has to wonder who actually dropped what and when.
the whole thing goes back several years into clintons admin.and he was also warned, so there is a lot of wiggle room here to lay blaim, much of it wiggles towards clinton
Just a small point of correction for the Phantom. President Bush was in office eight months. He was elected in November, 2000. His election was contested over and over again by Gore and the Dems. Was December before the Supreme Court affirmed for the umpteenth time that GWB was the winner. His Presidential Inauguration into office was in January, as is usual.
With all due respect, lberia, Clinton was not impeached for inappropriate use of a staff intern, but for lying about it under oath. Perhaps if he had been less eager to find a new place to store his cigars, he would have had nothing about which to perjure himself.
Which is not really germane to the issue, save in that it too speaks to his priorities at the time. For all his faults, Nixon resigned rather than be impeached; Clinton was impeached and did not resign. I am left wondering what level of discovered malfeasance Clinton would have accepted before he left the office short of the end of his second term. Certainly he and his supporters thought then – and now – that being untruthful about a quick hummer from a young subordinate in the Oval Office didn’t rate.
ET: And he then moved into Iraq, which I consider an excellent strategy, because it used the weakest state in the area, a dictatorship also kept in place by vicious repression, to free the people from that mode, and enable democracy to move into the area..by the back door, so to speak.
There’s widespread democracy in Iraq in the same way that there’s widespread electricity available in Baghdad. Which is to say, there ain’t.
A series of Iraqi focus groups conducted in late 2007 by the US military found that the country’s various sectarian and ethnic groups, long fractured and co-oppositional, were starting to coalesce around some shared beliefs. That was the good news. The bad news? The shared beliefs were that (1) the US military invasion was the main cause of the violent differences among the Iraqi factions, and (2) the departure of “occupying forces” was the key to national reconciliation.
Why do I bring this up in the context of a discussion about democracy in Iraq? Because a short while ago, Bush signed an agreement with the Karzai administration committing to a long-term military presence in the country. This does not bode well for the future of the already tenuous ceasefires between once-warring factions, for a number of reasons.
One, the purpose of the surge was to buy time for political developments to take place (in terms of power-sharing and co-governance agreements, etc.). As the focus group findings make clear, such political development has until recently hinged on the US leaving the country. If the latter doesn’t happen, then neither will the former.
Two, the surge didn’t involve crushing the insurgent militias so much as it involved neutering them–either by convincing them, typically with financial and power inducements, to switch to the side of the official government, or simply by separating them through a complex series of roadblocks, etc. The end result is that there are now entire segments of the Iraqi army who a scant few months ago were the ones attacking coalition troops with IEDs. Their purchased cooperation won’t last forever.
The surge is now scheduled for withdrawal. Had the surge been focused on exterminating the enemy rather than buying them out, there might have been a chance that the imminent downscaling of the US military presence would facilitate the crucial process of national political reconciliation.
Instead, expect an increased number of “security incidents,” targeting both coalition troops and Iraqi sectarian groups, starting in a few months.
Remember when Ann Coulter went on Hannity & Colmes and swore to campaign for Hillary “if it’s McCain”? Sure you do! {youtube.com/watch?v=HuTqgqhxVMc}
Well, as it turns out, it’s McCain.
So, will Ann keep her word, or was she just doing her “I’ll say anything, just focus on me!” shtick again?
Warwick said it best at 10:27 AM:
“On the other hand, no one but Clinton had Sudan offer Bin Laden’s head on a platter and he declined.
So he gets more blame than the norm.”
Plus there was that chance for US special ops to take out Obama in his headquarters, nixed by Clinton and documented in that movie that he wanted to suppress.
You have to speak slowly to the trolls, SDAers. They don’t deal well with facts. For most sane people, knowing that Clinton could have taken the mastermind of 9/11 out, but didn’t, means that those two towers might still be standing if it weren’t for his decisions made when POTUS.
i.Sanderson. Karzai is the president of Afghanistan, not Iraq.
Democracy doesn’t switch on/off like a mechanical switch; it takes time to develop within a population that has only known ONE type of political system, tribalism. But, the Iraqi people have a constitution and a democracy. Both are working and moving out of sectarian tribalism.
There is no way that you will ever be able to ‘exterminate the enemy’ because tribalism, and its result, Islamic fascism, will take years to devolve to a marginal reality in the ME. They’ll always be around, just as extremists are around in other systems in the world; but, they’ll be marginal.
There won’t be a renewed set of ‘incidents’; the Iraqi people want to get on with their lives.
“Perhaps Clinton would have had more time to deal with the nations’s business if he wasn’t busy trying to defend himself”
lberia , I agree with you Slick Willy ignored his oath of office.
You’re Right!
ET, you’re absolutely correct, of course, about the Karzai error. I momentarily confused my theaters of war. I meant the “al-Maliki administration.”
I agree with you that “democracy doesn’t switch on/off like a mechanical switch” and that extremism can never be completely eradicated. But what you fail to see is how this flawed “on/off” thinking has been active in motivating the war in Iraq all along!
From the start, it was assumed by the hawks in the Bush administration that deposing Saddam would be the hardest task, and that once removed, Western-style democracy would be warmly embraced by the Iraqi people (i.e., democracy would “switch on”). Not so, in reality.
And so the much-ballyhooed surge, which similarly assumed that by simply suppressing the sectarian violence for a little while, national reconciliation would have the space and time to take place (i.e., democracy would “switch on”). Not so, in reality.
The old chestnut stands: democracy cannot be forced at gunpoint.
Yes, there’s a constitution, but importantly, and in protest over the perceived bias towards Shia interests, none of the Sunni members of the original drafting committee signed the document. The present lack of progress on national unification is largely linked to disagreement over constitutional elements.
Yes, there is a democratically elected government, but only on paper. In reality, the al-Maliki government is hopelessly riddled with corruption. This isn’t merely my own observation; it comes from reports produced by US embassy officials in Baghdad stating the same. It also comes from the mouth of Judge Radhi al-Radhi, the former head of the Commission for Public Integrity, the Iraqi government’s top corruption watchdog agency, who resigned in protest at the sheer magnitude of the problem and the unwillingness of officials to reform the system. Indeed, graft and malfeasance are so ubiquitous within the al-Maliki administration that Judge al-Radhi actually recommended that the US stop supporting it.
As for your prediction that there won’t be any future spike in incidents, well, only time will tell who’s correct.
I. Sanderson – I agree with your comments, but, moving from a tribal to a civic mode of social and political organization is not something that can be done easily. It takes time. It took the West four hundred years; it won’t take the ME that long (one hopes!!) but it can’t be done rapidly.
Structures don’t change overnight. A tribal (or other) mode of organization is embedded within every interaction of one person to another person. The duties, obligations, moral requirements of support etc that one owes to one’s family, to members of one’s tribe etc – can’t be thrown out in the wash, so to speak. The individual brought up in such a system would be psychologically unable to behave in such a amoral manner.
To start to feel obligations and the possibility of constructive interactions with people who are not kin, who are not members of the same tribe but who are ‘citizens’ in a civic society – that takes time.
Give it five years – and there’ll be a tremendous change.
The ME has no choice; it has to move into a civic mode and a democracy – because of the size of its population and because it must have an industrial economy. The population size and the economic mode make a civic mode and a middle class an absolute necessity.
Sanderson:
“The old chestnut stands: democracy cannot be forced at gunpoint.”
I know Germany and Japan are little known countries that are hard to find on the map but you might like to look up the results of some unpleasantries that occurred last century with regards to guns and democracy in these small unimportant countries.
Warwick, the post-WWII German and Japanese cases are often trotted out as superficial examples of how democracy can indeed be exported at gunpoint. A closer examination, however, reveals that their transitions to democracy in fact owed very little to US intervention, and rather can be linked to a number of political and economic antecedents that were already gestating prior to the war.
I suggest you look up Christopher Coyne’s “After War.”
Sanderson,
I’d say that the allies WROTE their constitution had more than a bit to do with it. That and destroying their former regimes.
I’d also say that I’d put little faith in the usual marxist a-holes producing their fantasy works in their tenured birdcages up in the ivory towers. Anti-American, anti-western and anti-democracy slants are very popular in a certain cross-section of society. We call them leftards on this forum. They run universities (among other state apparatus.)
There are intellectually dishonest people pervading campuses across the western world. The quality of education today is atrocious. The campus regime directly out of Orwell’s worst nightmare.
Of course, those who agree with the mindset are blind to its less-savoury nature.