The Top 9 Reasons Why A Democratic President Can't Handle The War On Terrorism.

In how many Muslims has Bush instilled a hatred for America?
Worldwide,I would guess that Bush has inspired many tens of thousands of times more terrorists than he has eliminated.
Out of a billion Muslims, how many would be moved to violence to defend their cause.Especially those who have reached adolescence while witnessing Bush's crusade.
Take Iraq for example, there was no Al Queda in Iraq before Bush invaded.Bush has created terrorism where there was none.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Wildkow @ Jun 23 2007, 04:53 AM) [snapback]466802[/snapback]</div>

Didn't the irish hate brits for a long time? Weren't they viewed as terrorists? Did Britain have to destroy the all of ireland and kill a significant percentage of men, women, and children to make nice? Or this method only acceptable when applied to brown non english speaking people?

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(burritos @ Jun 23 2007, 01:09 PM) [snapback]466907[/snapback]</div>

AMEN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

What war on terror? You mean the Republican PR program to sell imperialistic invasion?

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Wildkow @ Jun 23 2007, 04:53 AM) [snapback]466802[/snapback]</div>

It should be possible to coexist peacefully.If it wasnt for oil we wouldnt have any interest in meddling in the Middle east.If everyone drove a hybrid or EV we wouldnt need any Mideast oil at all.
With the Trillion dollars and counting, Bush has already spent on Iraq we could have begun to develop alternate energies.Even fusion may be obtainable with that kind of money.
Either we find a peaceful route or the United States will be literally bankrupt trying to conquer a quarter of the worlds population.
Look how the Soviet Union ended up after Afghanistan.

 

This is a post designed to inflame and provoke a response. Let's accept as a given:

1. The majority of the posters to this board tend to be liberal and hate George Bush.
2. Wildkow knows this.
3. Wildkow has his/her own pre-conceived political beliefs which, based on the tenor of this post, are inflexible and closed to discussion.

Responding is pointless. I think you are a knee-jerk, inflexible, ignorant, lock-stepping goon to the party which is ruining this country and even ignoring it's own supposed principles in a rush to line the pockets of a few individuals.

You think I am a whiny liberal with no moral values, no fiscal sensibility, and no guiding principles who is selling out our country.

These things are not going to change. No actual dialog is possible.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Wildkow @ Jun 23 2007, 02:30 AM) [snapback]466780[/snapback]</div>

As opposed to retrain and recruit which Bush is providing for them now.
<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Wildkow @ Jun 23 2007, 02:30 AM) [snapback]466780[/snapback]</div>

Are you talking about Bush's re-election or are you still talking about the Democrats?

 

That's why Mr. Lieberman stands independently now.

And, for the record, I do not hate Mr. President. Though what's going on in Iraq needs to be changed, I still have some faith in the man. I mean, is it that much fun for everyone to bash my Commander in Chief?

C'est la vie. Thank God for the 1st Amendment

On a side note, it kinda reminds me of what happened earlier today. I was standing in line after an air show to be ferried back to the parking lot I parked my car in. Admittedly, we waited quite some time (and boy does my un-sunblocked skin show it!). However, in spite of the fact that the show was free to get into and performances were put on for free, all someone really had to say was that the wait for the bus was ridiculous, and that the airshow coordinators had really screwed up the airshow. It didn't matter that there were dozens upon dozens of uniformed personnel called in on a weekend to provide us services only to get griped at instead of thanked for their service.

 

How to Sell a War.

"The war on Iraq won't be remembered for how it was waged so much as for how it was sold. It was a propaganda war, a war of perception management, where loaded phrases, such as "weapons of mass destruction" and "rogue state" were hurled like precision weapons at the target audience: us.

To understand the Iraq war you don't need to consult generals, but the spin doctors and PR flacks who stage-managed the countdown to war from the murky corridors of Washington where politics, corporate spin and psy-ops spooks cohabit."

"The Bush claque of neocon hawks viewed the Iraq war as a product and, just like a new pair of Nikes, it required a roll-out campaign to soften up the consumers. The same techniques (and often the same PR gurus) that have been used to hawk cigarettes, SUVs and nuclear waste dumps were deployed to retail the Iraq war. To peddle the invasion, Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell and company recruited public relations gurus into top-level jobs at the Pentagon and the State Department. These spinmeisters soon had more say over how the rationale for war on Iraq should be presented than intelligence agencies and career diplomats. If the intelligence didn't fit the script, it was shaded, retooled or junked.

Take Charlotte Beers whom Powell picked as undersecretary of state in the post-9/11 world. Beers wasn't a diplomat. She wasn't even a politician. She was a grand diva of spin, known on the business and gossip pages as "the queen of Madison Avenue." On the strength of two advertising campaigns, one for Uncle Ben's Rice and another for Head and Shoulder's dandruff shampoo, Beers rocketed to the top of the heap in the PR world, heading two giant PR houses: Ogilvy and Mathers as well as J. Walter Thompson.

At the state department Beers, who had met Powell in 1995 when they both served on the board of Gulf Airstream, worked at, in Powell's words, "the branding of U.S. foreign policy." She extracted more than $500 million from Congress for her Brand America campaign, which largely focused on beaming U.S. propaganda into the Muslim world, much of it directed at teens.

"Public diplomacy is a vital new arm in what will combat terrorism over time," said Beers. "All of a sudden we are in this position of redefining who America is, not only for ourselves, but for the outside world." Note the rapt attention Beers pays to the manipulation of perception, as opposed, say, to alterations of U.S. policy."

"The themes of her campaigns were as simplistic and flimsy as a Bush press conference. The American incursions into Afghanistan and Iraq were all about bringing the balm of "freedom" to oppressed peoples. Hence, the title of the U.S. war: Operation Iraqi Freedom, where cruise missiles were depicted as instruments of liberation. Bush himself distilled the Beers equation to its bizarre essence: "This war is about peace."

Beers quietly resigned her post a few weeks before the first volley of tomahawk missiles battered Baghdad. From her point of view, the war itself was already won, the fireworks of shock and awe were all after play."

"Almost immediately upon taking up her new gig, Clarke convened regular meetings with a select group of Washington's top private PR specialists and lobbyists to develop a marketing plan for the Pentagon's forthcoming terror wars. The group was filled with heavy-hitters and was strikingly bipartisan in composition. She called it the Rumsfeld Group and it included PR executive Sheila Tate, columnist Rich Lowry, and Republican political consultant Rich Galen.

The brain trust also boasted top Democratic fixer Tommy Boggs, brother of NPR's Cokie Roberts and son of the late Congressman Hale Boggs of Louisiana. At the very time Boggs was conferring with top Pentagon brass on how to frame the war on terror, he was also working feverishly for the royal family of Saudi Arabia. In 2002 alone, the Saudis paid his Qorvis PR firm $20.2 million to protect its interests in Washington. In the wake of hostile press coverage following the exposure of Saudi links to the 9/11 hijackers, the royal family needed all the well-placed help it could buy. They seem to have gotten their money's worth. Boggs' felicitous influence-peddling may help to explain why the references to Saudi funding of al-Qaeda were dropped from the recent congressional report on the investigation into intelligence failures and 9/11.

According to the trade publication PR Week, the Rumsfeld Group sent "messaging advice" to the Pentagon. The group told Clarke and Rumsfeld that in order to get the American public to buy into the war on terrorism, they needed to suggest a link to nation states, not just nebulous groups such as al-Qaeda. In other words, there needed to be a fixed target for the military campaigns, some distant place to drop cruise missiles and cluster bombs. They suggested the notion (already embedded in Rumsfeld's mind) of playing up the notion of so-called rogue states as the real masters of terrorism. Thus was born the Axis of Evil, which, of course, wasn't an "axis" at all, since two of the states, Iran and Iraq, hated each other, and neither had anything at all to do with the third, North Korea.

Tens of millions in federal money were poured into private public relations and media firms working to craft and broadcast the Bush dictat that Saddam had to be taken out before the Iraqi dictator blew up the world by dropping chemical and nuclear bombs from long-range drones. Many of these PR executives and image consultants were old friends of the high priests in the Bush inner sanctum. Indeed, they were veterans, like Cheney and Powell, of the previous war against Iraq, another engagement that was more spin than combat ."

"But it's not hard to detect the manipulative hand of Rendon behind many of the Iraq war's signature events, including the toppling of the Saddam statue (by U.S. troops and Chalabi associates) and videotape of jubilant Iraqis waving American flags as the Third Infantry rolled by them. Rendon had pulled off the same stunt in the first Gulf War, handing out American flags to Kuwaitis and herding the media to the orchestrated demonstration. "Where do you think they got those American flags?" clucked Rendon in 1991. "That was my assignment."

The Rendon Group may also have had played a role in pushing the phony intelligence that has now come back to haunt the Bush administration. In December of 2002, Robert Dreyfuss reported that the inner circle of the Bush White House preferred the intelligence coming from Chalabi and his associates to that being proffered by analysts at the CIA.

So Rendon and his circle represented a new kind of off-the-shelf PSYOPs , the privatization of official propaganda. "I am not a national security strategist or a military tactician," said Rendon. "I am a politician, and a person who uses communication to meet public policy or corporate policy objectives. In fact, I am an information warrior and a perception manager.""

"What the Pentagon sought was a new kind of living room war, where instead of photos of mangled soldiers and dead Iraqi kids, they could control the images Americans viewed and to a large extent the content of the stories. By embedding reporters inside selected divisions, Clarke believed the Pentagon could count on the reporters to build relationships with the troops and to feel dependent on them for their own safety. It worked, naturally. One reporter for a national network trembled on camera that the U.S. Army functioned as "our protectors." The late David Bloom of NBC confessed on the air that he was willing to do "anything and everything they can ask of us.""

(So much for the "liberal" press)

"It could have been different. All of the holes in the Bush administration's gossamer case for war were right there for the mainstream press to expose. Instead, the U.S. press, just like the oil companies, sought to commercialize the Iraq war and profit from the invasions. They didn't want to deal with uncomfortable facts or present voices of dissent.

Nothing sums up this unctuous approach more brazenly than MSNBC's firing of liberal talk show host Phil Donahue on the eve of the war. The network replaced the Donahue Show with a running segment called Countdown: Iraq, featuring the usual nightly coterie of retired generals, security flacks, and other cheerleaders for invasion. The network's executives blamed the cancellation on sagging ratings. In fact, during its run Donahue's show attracted more viewers than any other program on the network. The real reason for the pre-emptive strike on Donahue was spelled out in an internal memo from anxious executives at NBC. Donahue, the memo said, offered "a difficult face for NBC in a time of war. He seems to delight in presenting guests who are anti-war, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration's motives."

The memo warned that Donahue's show risked tarring MSNBC as an unpatriotic network, "a home for liberal anti-war agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity." So, with scarcely a second thought, the honchos at MSNBC gave Donahue the boot and hoisted the battle flag.

It's war that sells."

I love my country. I hate the current administration. I'm not too keen on a lot of my other "public servants" either. I keep voting the bums out, but the sheeple with the retention of a mayfly keeping voting them back in again. Maybe all of us liberals should take a page out of the Neocon playbook and all get ourselves an arsenal of guns. Liberals were responsible for the first revolution. Maybe we need a second one.

 

So you are saying that we need another president like Bush. The boon for terrorists everywhere.

News for you. Terrorism IS a law enforcement and intelligence problem. Approaching it militarily is waht has led to the disastrous situation we have created.

 

If Bush reads this, he might get ideas.

"In a bold move to undermine the international terror network,
President George W. Bush today named former deputy defense secretary and
World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz to be the new president of al Qaeda.

Mr. Wolfowitz, who has no experience running an international terror organization, struck many Washington insiders as an unlikely choice for the al-Qaeda job.

But in a White House ceremony introducing his nominee for the top terror post,
President Bush indicated that Mr. Wolfowitz's role in planning the war in
Iraq and bringing scandal to the World Bank showed that he was "just the man" to bring chaos and disorder to al-Qaeda."

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Godiva @ Jun 24 2007, 01:03 AM) [snapback]467158[/snapback]</div>

hehehehe

 

FDR was a Democrat; he was a pretty good Wartime president (and did okay with domestic policy, too).

 

This issue has old roots that run deep and strong. They started to grow well prior to the current administration, and those immediately before. To throw everything at their feet is rather shallow.

These radicals hate us, our religions, our lifestyles, they have been programmed this way from the day they were born. They are immersed in these beliefs 24/7. They would make the most ardent left or right-wingers seem open-minded by comparison.

They give not a wit about who holds the office, other then how much said individual can be manipulated to their advantage. I don't think you will be able to properly judge the current administrations job without a full understanding of the full dynamics of the situation. You do not have this understanding, despite the proclamations from the press on both sides. There are always multiple layers to a complex subject, and much has been unspoken.

I honestly don't believe that America gives a rat's behind about democracy in the middle east, or whether their people are oppressed. America cares about what is best for America, as it should. I do not believe that this President, or any other in these modern times, would knowingly send our men in harms way for such PC reasons.

President Bush has made himself the target. Maybe he deseves to be, we will know in time. I just wish there would be a more measured approach to the dissent. After all, you may be wrong.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Allan1 @ Jun 25 2007, 03:29 PM) [snapback]467769[/snapback]</div>

I'm assuming that you're not addressing me, specifically. I agree with some of what you're saying, but do feel that "America cares about what is best for America, as it should" is another one of those complex areas. Perhaps redefining what's 'in our best interests' and what 'our best interests' are (and why) would be helpful...and create additional options for us, too.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Allan1 @ Jun 25 2007, 04:29 PM) [snapback]467769[/snapback]</div>

Thank you. At least someone actually read Wildkow's post. All I saw was Bush hatred. No response to all the attacks before President Bush "created" all the terrorists.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Pinto Girl @ Jun 25 2007, 04:48 PM) [snapback]467781[/snapback]</div>

Exactly "Pinto Girl"! These are not black and white issues - they deserve debate and introspection, but the current climate both left and right discourage discourse. More the shame. I hold your opinions with respect as you are open to my thoughts, and I to yours.

I may be totally wrong in my thinking. I can put myself in the Presidents place though - He has made decisions that have cost good men their lives, and can't define the true reasons for doing so for the politics involved. All he can do is stay the course, absorb the blows and try to comfort the fallen and their loved ones in a private manner. What a supremely lousy position to be in. I question how he (or the military leaders he has chosen) have conducted the war, but not the reasons we are there.

Let us not forget the whole dynamic of our friends and allies from Isreal. They remain surrounded with nations pledged to their destruction. How this plays into the big picture of what we are involved in is yet another dynamic I have no idea about, but probably plays a part.

I would ask civility in discussion, respect of those making the calls none of us would want to, and restraint from the hate which so easily rolls off the tongue in political debate these days. We really are the good guys, despite what may be reported, and remain a destination of hope for oppressed and desperate societys worldwide.

(sound heard of one man stepping down from his soapbox, head bowed with humility)