Fenian's Rainbow

Re: Hillary -Mission Unaccomplished

I'm going to live in Havana until it's all over.

 

Re: Hillary -Mission Unaccomplished

Richardson supports a ban on cockfighting. That's enough for me. ;D



On a serious note, Richardson's got the best resume of anybody in the race -- on either side. Hands down, there's nobody close. He's got the local/gubernatorial experience running things, and he's got the international/foreign policy experience. The man's been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize four times.

Everyone knows about Wen Ho Lee, so you can form your own opinion on that. His "I was drafted by MLB" schtick was ill-advised, but it's debunked now. Can't hurt him any worse than "I didn't inhale" or "I was a cokehead", like the last two presidents.

Richardson's the most qualified candidate this country has, and if we still think "the guy we'd like to drink with" would make a good candidate after all this time, well, god help us all. ... :

 

Re: Hillary -Mission Unaccomplished

The Dowd column was pretty hard-hitting:

Dick Durbin went to the floor of the Senate on Thursday night to denounce the vice president as “delusional.”

It was shocking, and Senator Durbin should be ashamed of himself.

Delusional is far too mild a word to describe Dick Cheney. Delusional doesn’t begin to capture the profound, transcendental one-flew-over daftness of the man.

Has anyone in the history of the United States ever been so singularly wrong and misguided about such phenomenally important events and continued to insist he’s right in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary?

It requires an exquisite kind of lunacy to spend hundreds of billions destroying America’s reputation in the world, exhausting the U.S. military, failing to catch Osama, enhancing Iran’s power in the Middle East and sending American kids to train and arm Iraqi forces so they can work against American interests.

Only someone with an inspired alienation from reality could, under the guise of exorcising the trauma of Vietnam, replicate the trauma of Vietnam.

You must have a real talent for derangement to stay wrong every step of the way, to remain in complete denial about Iraq’s civil war, to have a total misunderstanding of Arab culture, to be completely oblivious to the American mood and to be absolutely blind to how democracy works.

In a democracy, when you run a campaign that panders to homophobia by attacking gay marriage and then your lesbian daughter writes a book about politics and decides to have a baby with her partner, you cannot tell Wolf Blitzer he’s “out of line” when he gingerly raises the hypocrisy of your position.

Mr. Cheney acts more like a member of the James gang than the Jefferson gang. Asked by Wolf what would happen if the Senate passed a resolution critical of The Surge, Scary Cheney rumbled, “It won’t stop us.”

Such an exercise in democracy, he noted, would be “detrimental from the standpoint of the troops.”

Americans learned an important lesson from Vietnam about supporting the troops even when they did not support the war. From media organizations to Hollywood celebrities and lawmakers on both sides, everyone backs our troops.

It is W. and Vice who learned no lessons from Vietnam, probably because they worked so hard to avoid going. They rush into a war halfway around the world for no reason and with no foresight about the culture or the inevitable insurgency, and then assert that any criticism of their fumbling management of Iraq and Afghanistan is tantamount to criticizing the troops. Quel demagoguery.

“Bottom line,” Vice told Wolf, “is that we’ve had enormous successes, and we will continue to have enormous successes.” The biggest threat, he said, is that Americans may not “have the stomach for the fight.”

He should stop casting aspersions on the American stomach. We’ve had the stomach for more than 3,000 American deaths in a war sold as a cakewalk.

If W. were not so obsessed with being seen as tough, Mr. Cheney could not influence him with such tripe.

They are perpetually guided by the wrong part of the body. They are consumed by the fear of looking as if they don’t have guts, when they should be compelled by the desire to look as if they have brains.

After offering Congress an olive branch in the State of the Union, the president resumed mindless swaggering. Asked yesterday why he was ratcheting up despite the resolutions, W. replied, “In that I’m the decision maker, I had to come up with a way forward that precluded disaster.” (Or preordained it.)

The reality of Iraq, as The Times’s brilliant John Burns described it to Charlie Rose this week, is that a messy endgame could be far worse than Vietnam, leading to “a civil war on a scale with bloodshed that will absolutely dwarf what we’re seeing now,” and a “wider conflagration, with all kinds of implications for the world’s flow of oil, for the state of Israel. What happens to King Abdullah in Jordan if there’s complete chaos in the region?”

Mr. Cheney has turned his perversity into foreign policy.

He assumes that the more people think he’s crazy, the saner he must be. In Dr. No’s nutty world-view, anti-Americanism is a compliment. The proof that America is right is that everyone thinks it isn’t.

He sees himself as a prophet in the wilderness because he thinks anyone in the wilderness must be a prophet.

To borrow one of his many dismissive words, it’s hogwash.

 

Re: Hillary -Mission Unaccomplished

The most frequent non-right wing nut criticism leveled at Sen. Clinton, one with a solid grounding in fact, is she's too cautious and calculating in everything she does.
Perhaps this is sheer contrarianism, but I actually think her approach might be a net POSITIVE with the great mass of voters who aren't particularly into politics.
Bush is unpopular, so it stands to reason many voters will be looking for someone unlike him. A president who always looks a very long time before she leaps would have an obvious appeal on those grounds.

 

Re: Hillary -Mission Unaccomplished

Re: Dowd's column: Cheney will go down as one of the worst VPs in history. I guess the competition isn't that fierce - I don't think they usually harbor this much power.

Woodward's "State of Denial" book paint Rumsfeld and Cheney as bumbling morons, and Bush as their compliant cheerleader with next to no intellectual curiosity and complete trust that these idiots were running the ship. Bush seems to be a victim of his own trust in his people. Then again, as good as it is to delegate, you still have a responsibility to stay on top of things.

As far as the election. I want to support Hillary badly. For one thing, I loved Bill. For another ... I guess she's been planning to be president so long, I think I'd feel bad for her if she didn't get it done. But I'll get over that part.

Anyway ... I'm pretty sure Obama's my guy. I'm convinced after reading "Audacity of Hope" that he'll be able to strike a great balance between helping boost the poor people of this country while not advocating unlimited handouts. I'm convinced the country would be better off after his administration than before.

 

Re: Hillary -Mission Unaccomplished

In the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile delivery capability, and his nuclear program. He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including Al Qaeda members, though there is apparently no evidence of his involvement in the terrible events of September 11, 2001. It is clear, however, that if left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will continue to increase his capacity to wage biological and chemical warfare, and will keep trying to develop nuclear weapons. Should he succeed in that endeavor, he could alter the political and security landscape of the Middle East, which as we know all too well affects American security." -- Hillary Clinton, October 10, 2002

 

Re: Hillary -Mission Unaccomplished

Thanks, Boom... those 4 1/2-year-old quotes are of great significance.

 

Re: Hillary -Mission Unaccomplished

Agreed - just wanted to make sure my quote function worked as we head into 2008 election. You have to fire it up every now and then.

 

Re: Hillary -Mission Unaccomplished

What is incorrect about that? It was faulty intelligence.

 

Re: Hillary -Mission Unaccomplished

I love that "It won't stop us" line more and more, every time I hear it.

What human garbage.

 

Re: Hillary -Mission Unaccomplished

Great Line!

No wonder last weekend’s “Saturday Night Live” gave us a “Hillary” who said, “Knowing what we know now, that you could vote against the war and still be elected president, I would never have pretended to support it.”

 

Re: Hillary -Mission Unaccomplished

Maureen Dowd is one of the last people on the planet who has the right to look in bewilderment at Dick Cheney, George W. Bush and Iraq and wonder how all of this could have happened.

She should have taken such a scenario in 2000 -- and as anyone who has Googled "Project for a New American Century" knows, it wasn't farfetched in the least -- into account before being one of the loudest and shrillest voices in the clowning chorus that wooden and phony Earth-toned Al Gore was unfit to be president.

One of this nation's most talented writers, no doubt. But in this instance, Maureen can take that Pulitzer and stick it up her ass.