2125+ American Soldiers have Died

[Why BUSH]

When will he stop ?

[jon]

Don't use soldiers as your political device, hundreds of soldiers die each year by accidents but does anyone give a rats ass about them?...NO! People that use the death of soldiers as a political device should be ashamed as they woulden't give two cents to any of these soldiers if they passed them on the street.

[hadenuff]

How many people died in car wrecks? How many slipped in the bathtub? Better yet--how many died in a couple of years of WWII? War Between the States? Would you feel better if they were pushed from windows?

People die in wars. I guess you and your liberal buddies would be ok with terrorists bringing the war to us. 2000 is nothing compared to the Twin Towers attack. How many people died in that one day? Battlefield deaths for our brave troops OVER THERE are at a historic low. You had better thank President Bush and be happy that I'm not in charge.

You people using this worthwhile site to mindlessly bash the President should sit in a corner with a dunce cap on and think. Better yet, a tour of duty on the battlefield might do wonders for your attitude.

[mike L]

Yes maybe if your were the president, you wouldn't lie to the nation and get 2000+ soldiers killed!

Maybe with you in charge, wonder if dick chaney would be pulling your strings? Without chaney and rove bush would be just another Kerry.

How many children do you have if I may ask, I'm sure you wouldn't mind your own kids to go to Iraq and fight for, what are we there again fighting for? OIL! I'm sure you would be proud to tell the world how and why your child died and what he was fighting for.

Maybe if you were president, we wouldn't have a presidential staff that lies to grand juries, to congress, to the public, ect.

The Bush era is coming to a nasty end real soon, they will make Watergate and Nixon look like pre school kids playing in the sand box.

I'm sure at the end when all the chips fall and so does the Wuss administration, I'm sure you will still stand by the liars and war criminals.

Sounds like you were one of the people that believed in and supported such wars as the Korean and vitinam wars? History now tells us the american public was lied to, and you sir were the ignorant one again to fall for it.

Sir your president was sitting in a corner reading a book called my pet goat. He didn't what to do when he heard we got attack. SO he did what he thought was best, he read about the little goat.

Speaking of all time lows, president Wuss has the lowest approval rating ever!! The public sees now that he lies and has very low morals. Whats up with that?

Terrorists have already brought the war to our nation, the terrorist are called the Wuss administration, followed by the patriot act, scare tactics, push for the Christian movement. It's nice to know that the FEDS can eaves drop on public conversations without a warrant now, get medical records on innocent people, break into peoples homes and search without a warrant. Gee's sounds like I'm coping all this out of a history book from the Nazi Germany era.

[hadenuff]

This war about oil? Cool...when do we get it?

I would rather my children die for the cause of liberty than live as slaves in your vision of a Soviet Amerika.

Bush lied? When? "I did not have sex with that woman--Miss Lewinski!" Klinton even made her sign a false afidavit and presented it to the court...perjury.

Me, support the South Koreans? I spent four years there as an interpreter for the U.S. Army. What did you do?

I thank God that THIS President doesn't govern by polls. Mark Twain said there are three types of lies: Lies, Damned Lies, and statistics. Or just watch CNN.

As far as the police abuses in this nation, I joined a militia unit after what happened in Waco. What did you do?

[WaTcHeR]

November 2, 2005 - Democrats forced the Senate into a rare closed-door session yesterday, infuriating Republicans but extracting from them a promise to speed up an inquiry into the Bush administration's handling of intelligence about Iraq's weapons in the run-up to the war.

With no warning in the mid-afternoon, the Senate's top Democrat invoked the little-used Rule 21, which forced aides to turn off the chamber's cameras and close its massive doors after evicting all visitors, reporters and most staffers. Plans to bring in electronic-bug-sniffing dogs were dropped when it became clear that senators would trade barbs but discuss no classified information.

Republicans condemned the Democrats' maneuver, which marked the first time in more than 25 years that one party had insisted on a closed session without consulting the other party. But within two hours, Republicans appointed a bipartisan panel to report on the progress of a Senate intelligence committee report on prewar intelligence, which Democrats say has been delayed for nearly a year.

===You wonder why they would delay on such a thing, which I personally believe is far more important than some duffas lying about getting a blow job. Talk about a waste of the tax payers money. Yet this leads me up to the next story:

July 6, 2004 - In the past four years there has been an abrupt reversal in Congress's approach to oversight.

During the Clinton administration, Congress spent millions of tax dollars probing alleged White House wrongdoing. There was no accusation too minor to explore, no demand on the administration too intrusive to make.

Republicans investigated whether the Clinton administration sold burial plots in Arlington National Cemetery for campaign contributions. They examined whether the White House doctored videotapes of coffees attended by President Clinton. They spent two years investigating who hired Craig Livingstone, the former director of the White House security office. And they looked at whether President Clinton designated coal-rich land in Utah as a national monument because political donors with Indonesian coal interests might benefit from reductions in U.S. coal production.

Committees requested and received communications between Clinton and his close advisers, notes of conversations between Clinton and a foreign head of state, internal e-mails from the office of the vice president, and more than 100 sets of FBI interview summaries. Dozens of top Clinton officials, including several White House chiefs of staff and White House counsels, testified before Congress. The Clinton administration provided to Congress more than a million pages of documents in response to investigative inquiries.

At one point the House even created a select committee to investigate whether the Clinton administration sold national security secrets to China, diverting attention from Osama bin Laden and other real threats facing our nation.

When President Clinton was in office, Congress exercised its oversight powers with no sense of proportionality. But oversight of the Bush administration has been even worse: With few exceptions, Congress has abdicated oversight responsibility altogether.

Republican Rep. Ray LaHood aptly characterized recent congressional oversight of the administration: "Our party controls the levers of government. We're not about to go out and look beneath a bunch of rocks to try to cause heartburn."

Republican leaders in Congress have refused to investigate who exposed covert CIA agent Valerie Plame, whose identity was leaked after her husband, Joe Wilson, challenged the administration's claims that Iraq sought nuclear weapons. They have held virtually no public hearings on the hundreds of misleading claims made by administration officials about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and ties to al Qaeda.

They have failed to probe allegations that administration officials misled Congress about the costs of the Medicare prescription drug bill. And they have ignored the ethical lapses of administration officials, such as the senior Medicare official who negotiated future employment representing drug companies while drafting the prescription drug bill.

The House is even refusing to investigate the horrific Iraq prison abuses. One Republican chairman argued, "America's reputation has been dealt a serious blow around the world by the actions of a select few. The last thing our nation needs now is for others to enflame this hatred by providing fodder and sound bites for our enemies."

Compare the following: Republicans in the House took more than 140 hours of testimony to investigate whether the Clinton White House misused its holiday card database but less than five hours of testimony regarding how the Bush administration treated Iraqi detainees.

There is a simple but deplorable principle at work. In both the Clinton and Bush eras, oversight has been driven by raw partisanship. Congressional leaders have vacillated between the extremes of abusing their investigative powers and ignoring them, depending on the party affiliation of the president.

Our nation needs a more balanced approach. Congressional oversight is essential to our constitutional system of checks and balances. Excessive oversight distracts and diminishes the executive branch. But absence of oversight invites corruption and mistakes. The Founders correctly perceived that concentration of power leads to abuse of power if unchecked.

The congressional leadership is wrong to think that its current hands-off approach protects President Bush. In fact, it has backfired, causing even more harm than the overzealous pursuit of President Clinton. Lack of accountability has contributed to a series of phenomenal misjudgments that have damaged Bush, imperiled our international standing and saddled our nation with mounting debts.

Asking tough questions is never easy, especially if one party controls both Congress and the White House, but avoiding them is no answer. Evenhanded oversight is not unpatriotic; it's Congress's constitutional obligation.

=== Talk about priorities being out of whack! I'm just asking why the double standard? Don't get me wrong, I don't respect Clinton or Bush, just on the principal that neither is a believer in the constitution nor a true representative of the American people. At least 60% of the people that is.

[Meg]

What happened between 2001 when both Rice & Powell stated that Saddam was not a threat, and 2003 when their position changed to the one where he posed an immediate threat.

Why were the UN inspectors not allowed to complete the task they had been assigned?

Many, if not all, of the international community agreed that if Saddam posed the kind of threat Bush claimed he did, he should be taken down. The UN wanted the inspectors to complete their work prior to any decision on military action being made.

If the UN inspectors had been allowed to complete their task, the only premise that Bush had for the invasion would have been removed.

When Plames's husband started telling the truth about the Iraq intel, he had to be silenced, so his wife was outed and he was discredited.

None of the above is partisan. I detest the democrats as much as the Republicans.

America deserves better than either of them can offer

[clark]

My view in Iraq- it was BUSH who sent the troops into "harms way". Bush and Cheney sent them in believing that they would be greeted with flowers and parades. That the mission would be over quickly ("Mission Accomplished", "We're turning a corner", ad nauseam). That sent them in with vast disparities between the Army and National Gaurd in body armor, armored Humvees, etc. That claimed he would never send our military in to fight without a CLEAR mission (WMD's, Saddam-Al Qaida, etc.) and NEVER use our troops to "nation build"! He said he'd have a clearly articulated exit strategy...rather than allow or troops to be caught in lengthy wars that weakened our force commitment elsewhere. He said he would have the support of our allies in NATO and the UN before he committed troops...claiming Clinton "weakened" that coalition. There were not enough troops to protect the Iraqi weapons bunkers and ammo dumps. The HMX and BMX that are now being used in the Improvised Explosive Devices were due to this strategic error. Thousands of our troops and tens of thousands of Iraqis have been maimed and injured due to this incompetence!

His failure to do these things, and to put necessary forces in Afghanistan to actually finish off Al Qaida THERE helped the terrorists shift their forces to Iraq, obtain high quality weapons and explosives in a country with essentially open borders.

Why didn't we fight them in Afghanistan? Instead the ridiculous right argue that we have to fight terrorists "there" in Iraq. On the doorstep to the oil industrial centers of the world, a much more ready source of radicalized ARABS (who cared little about Afghanis, in actuality). The new argument is that it's essential to stop these terrorists from gaining a foothold in Iraq where they will become an oil power! DUH! They weren't THERE before...we "picked" the site of the duel! The Iraqi's are suffering from OUR CHOICE...not their's!

Lastly, the oil is not being produced in the Sunni heartland. If this was a real fear we could simply pull back to Kurdistan and the heavily Shi'a Basra region, establish those areas as largely autonomous areas...and let the terrorists and the Sunni resistance turn on each other in the OIL-LESS Middle of Baghdad, Anwar, and Fallujah. The pipelines between Kurdistan and Basra are regularly destroyed any ways. Ship Kurdistan's oil to Turkey and Basra's through the Gulf! DUH!

[hadenuff]

Meg said:

When Plames's husband started telling the truth about the Iraq intel, he had to be silenced, so his wife was outed and he was discredited.

You seem smart, so please don't hitch your wagon to that horse; wait until all the info is in. Ms. Plame was never a covert agent, she was a pencil pusher, who mysteriouly got her husband the assignment that started all this. You are wise not to whole-heartedly trust either party, but I'd wait before I jumped on the Wilson/Plame bandwagon. It smells of a load of manure.

[Craig T]

Quote: "45 percent of Iraqis support attacks against coalition forces, rising to 65 percent in some areas, and that 82 percent are 'strongly opposed' to the presence of foreign troops. Demands for U.S. withdrawal have also been signed on by one third of Iraq's Parliament."

Question: At what point do you finally decide you're you're in the wrong place, in the wrong war?

How high does the "45 percent" need to go?

[hadenuff]

Check your sources out closely. You seem to be repeating some misleading statements put out by Kerry.

[WaTcHeR]

2245 +

[CRAZYGIRLSUSAN]

well in my opinion if you are fool enough to go fight for someone elses rights and not your own families, constitutional rights, well they get what they deserve, but dieing for someone else stupidity is sad way to go, when you allow our own military to let the government, violate our rights.

I say be a man and stay where your needed and go find bush, and put him right beside suddam hussien himself. they both should be prosecuted to the fulliest power of the courts

[Bush can eat shit and]

Quotes from when Clinton committed troops to Bosnia:

"You can support the troops but not the president."
--Rep Tom Delay (R-TX)

"Well, I just think it's a bad idea. What's going to happen is they're going to be over there for 10, 15, maybe 20 years."
--Joe Scarborough (R-FL)

"Explain to the mothers and fathers of American servicemen that may come home in body bags why their son or daughter have to give up their life?"
--Sean Hannity, Fox News, 4/6/99

"[The] President . . . is once again releasing American military might on a foreign country with an ill-defined objective and no exit strategy. He has yet to tell the Congress how much this operation will cost. And he has not informed our nation's armed forces about how long they will be away from home. These strikes do not make for a sound foreign policy."
--Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA)

"American foreign policy is now one huge big mystery. Simply put, the administration is trying to lead the world with a feel-good foreign policy."
--Rep Tom Delay (R-TX)

"If we are going to commit American troops, we must be certain they have a clear mission, an achievable goal and an exit strategy."
--Karen Hughes, speaking on behalf of George W Bush

"I had doubts about the bombing campaign from the beginning . . I didn't think we had done enough in the diplomatic area."
--Senator Trent Lott (R-MS)

"I cannot support a failed foreign policy. History teaches us that it is often easier to make war than peace. This administration is just learning that lesson right now. The President began this mission with very vague objectives and lots of unanswered questions. A month later, these questions are still unanswered. There are no clarified rules of engagement. There is no timetable. There is no legitimate definition of victory. There is no contingency plan for mission creep. There is no clear funding program. There is no agenda to bolster our over-extended military. There is no explanation defining what vital national interests are at stake. There was no strategic plan for war when the President started this thing, and there still is no plan today"
--Rep Tom Delay (R-TX)

"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is."
--Governor George W. Bush (R-TX)