June 19, 2008
The Boston Red Sox are off today.
I’m reading Paul Shirley’s book “Can I Keep This Jersey?”, about his peripatetic pro basketball career. It’s excellent, and heartening to the extent that I’m not the only one whose skills go unappreciated and misused.
It’s very interesting to me that the Republicans are attacking Barack Obama as having a “September 10 mindset”, when the one group of people that has absolutely no credibility on fighting terrorism or ensuring our national security is the Republican Party. September 11 happened on the Republicans’ watch, and if they were a baseball manager, they would have been fired.
Rudy Giuliani, who knows a lot about combovers and infidelity, actually went so far as to declare that the Clinton Administration “did nothing” in response to the terrorism of the 1990s. Well, no, they didn’t half start a war in a terrorist hideout, fail to finish it and then invade a country that had nothing to do with terrorism and, in fact, hunted down terrorists within its borders. So, in that sense, no, he didn’t do what Republicans do, no. He did something that actually had a chance of working-trying to capture or kill terrorists. No wonder Republicans were so mad at him.
On the Slate Culture Gabfest, they are discussing an article in the Atlantic Monthly that asks “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” It’s an interesting thesis. I still read, certainly, but as Dana Stevens points out during the discussion, Google does help us outsource rote memorization tasks, which is something that humans really don’t need to do. One of the things a great professor of mine warned our class about was turning into memorizers. He told us we can look up facts-if we understand process, we can use facts to fill in the gaps. As time goes on, the rightness of his warning aches.
I spent my short ride home tonight singing Aerosmith's "What It Takes" at the top of my lungs out my open windows, my eyes tearing up.
Why do I still miss her, 20 years later?
Or do I miss the person I was then, who knew so little and thought he knew too much and would do anything for her?
No, I miss her. I miss her like hell, and I wish I never left her.
Gee, I'm sorry about the troubles you're having with the Intense Debate system. I heard about it on a podcast, and thought I'd try it out. It seems to be working fine for me.
ReplyDeleteAs for Iraq, Hussein did not fund and support terrorists. Hussein was secular, and hated any threat to his own power. In fact, there was a document found in the Iraqi archives in which Hussein's security service ordered the capture of two Al Queda members thought to be hiding in Iraq.
September 8, 2006, Senate Select Committee on Intelligence: "Saddam did not trust Al Queda or any other radical Islamist group and did not want to cooperate with them...refusing all requests from Al Queda to provide material or operational support."
"[Iraq] did not have a relationship, harbor, or turn a blind eye towards Zarqawi and his associates."
How you can call the Serbian action an invasion is beyond me. If soldiers aren't on the ground and lives aren't lost, it's not an invasion. By that logic, Germany invaded Britain during the Second World War.
And your claim that "nobody ever claimed Saddam was involved in 9/11" is simply ludicrous.
George Bush, May 1,2003: " With those attacks, the terrorists and their supporters declared war on the United States. And war is what they got."
January 20, 2004: "After the chaos and carnage of 9/11, it is not enough to serve our enemies with legal papers. The terrorists and their supporters declared war on the United States, and war is what they got."
July 4, 2005: "The war we are fighting came to our shores on 9/11. After that day, I made a pledge to the American people...We will bring our enemies to justice."
February 24, 2006: "We're taking the fight to those who attacked us."
Dick Cheney, September 14. 2003: "If we're successful in Iraq, then we will have struck a major blow right at the heart of the...geographical base of the terrorists who had us under assault now for many years, but most especially on 9/11."
If those statements don't say that Iraq was involved in 9/11, what do they say?
About Saddam funding and supporting terrorism, Iraq was identified by the State Department as a "State Sponsor of Terrorism" all throughout the Clinton administration. And before. and after.
ReplyDelete"How you can call the Serbian action an invasion is beyond me. If soldiers aren't on the ground and lives aren't lost, it's not an invasion"
Last time I knew, there were large numbers of troops in Kosovo.
As for the quotes, the first four from GWB are quite vague, and of course include Afghanistan, the nation that hosted the 9/11 terrorists. Feb 26 of course includes Saddam's regime in Iraq, which violated the cease-fire hundreds of times by targeting and/or shooting at peacekeeping partrols.
The Cheney statement might count. It is kind of vague and poorly worded, but you can get an "Iraq caused 9/11" out of it if you try. I wonder if it was pulled from some obscure talk show, which might explain the clumsy wording. It might be like when Al Gore took credit for inventing the Internet in another talk show. There, also, it was clumsy wording, and he did not mean to imply or say that. Did Cheney or anyone else repeat or clarify this?
Iraq was called a state sponsor of terrorism. Yet they did everything in their power to eject, impede, or thwart terrorist groups because Saddam was afraid of losing power. He didn't weep on 9/11, because he hated us. But that doesn't mean we had to invade.
ReplyDeleteAnd yes, there are troops in Kosovo now. But Clinton's actions involved primarily air power, had defined goals, and were well executed. None of which apply to the Iraq War. "He did it too," is not a defense in kindergarten, and it's not a defense here.
And the quotes are referring to Afghanistan, of course, but at the time those statements were made, we were in Iraq too. No distinction is made.
The fact that huge majorities of the American people thought, and a large percentage still think, Iraq was directly involved with 9/11, proves the point. If the Administration didn't tell them that, who did? The "liberal media"?
Bush was careful to point out that he never directly linked the two. But he did everything else but. You can't watch a three year old drown in a swimming pool, then say, "I told him not to go in there." This Clintonian hairsplitting was one of the things I thought George Bush wanted to get rid of.