h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Gosho's place for Bushisms and... suchlike

Heard from the President's lips today : "Free nations don't export terrorism".

Umm... the Irish Free State Mr President? Okay, I know the IRA isn't state sponsored, but that's my point - it's never quite as simple, never quite as balck and white as Shrub likes to make it out to be. The voters still eat it up though

... and some "free nations" have their own terrorists

.... and some "free nations" train terrorists for other nations

... and some "free nations" create ill will that spawns terrorists.

I wonder which "free nation" I might be thinking about? I'm not telling, but its initials are USA.....

There are some feel that terrorism (in its modern sense, anyhow) was invented by the U.S. government during the Civil War. Sherman's march through Georgia, for instance. True, Germany and Russia greatly expanded and embellished state-sponsored terrorism a few decades later, but the basic concept was Made in America.

But seriously, Gosho, do you really listen to that twit? He's hopeless, like some kind of infection that just has to run its course. Nevertheless, he projects a cheery self-confidence that wears well, while John Kerry, sad to say, is prone to acting like a fussy Felix Unger who likes to scold people. Who do you want as your leader, someone cheerful and happy, or a scold? The election may be decided by that distinction.

Fortune Magazine is predicting a collapse in the real-estate bubble. It will not be helpful to the economy, so whoever gets elected in November will have some problems to cope with. For one thing, there's well over half a trillion dollars of home-equity-loan money that will become problematic as people realize that the collateral (their homes) may no longer cover the loans, and they won't be able to reach solvency by selling in a sinking market. A spike in interest rates could set off a slump in home prices. There is a lot of tricky economic stuff coming at us that Rubin used to be really good at steering around. I hope Bush's people have someone equally adept...

"But seriously, Gosho, do you really listen to that twit? He's hopeless, like some kind of infection that just has to run its course. Nevertheless, he projects a cheery self-confidence that wears well, while John Kerry, sad to say, is prone to acting like a fussy Felix Unger who likes to scold people. Who do you want as your leader, someone cheerful and happy, or a scold? The election may be decided by that distinction."

Well Paul, I *do* really listen to that twit, if by that twit you mean Dubya. The reason is that that there are millions upons millions of others who also really listen to him, eat up what he says, and will vote for him because of what he says, whether it's right or wrong. And that's very, very worrying. I've heard so many half truths and downright lies come out of his mouth on the campaign trail, as well as crap like "If John Kerry was President, Saddam Hussein would still be in power and a threat to world peace and American security" *Tumultuous jeering from the crowd*, cheerfully ignoring the fact that the invasion of Iraq was a massive blunder, costly, unwarranted, and now - according to Kofi Annan - illegal.

Doesn't matter to Dubya - he did it and he's standing by it. And so are all the voters because he's "cheerful and happy" about it.

I just hope that I hear John Kerry tell him, during the election debates, that no matter how many times you say something, it doesn't make it so, doesn't make it right if it was wrong in the first place. But even if John Kerry does say that, are the voters going to hear it? And even if they do, are they going to take any notice? I reckon not

http://news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=3509041
"US State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said the US believes that the war in Iraq “had a sound legal basis of international law and UN resolutions.”

Prime Minister Tony Blair’s office disputed Annan’s comments and reiterated that the British attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, had issued advice that Britain was acting legally."

"Opponents of the war appeared reluctant to say anything. And the UN spokesman said Annan had been making the same statement for more than a year so it should have been a non-story." http://news.scotsman.com/latest.cfm?id=3509041

The Globe and Mail, March 20, 2003:
"The U.S. war against Iraq is illegal, say dozens of Canadian law professors and experts in international law, according to a report in the Toronto Globe & Mail. An open letter signed by 31 of Canada's professors of international law at 15 law faculties from coast to coast, written on the eve of the deadline for the looming conflict, says a U.S. attack "would be a fundamental breach of international law and would seriously threaten the integrity of the international legal order that has been in place since the end of the Second World War."" http://eces.org/articles/000025.php

CBC News, Wed, 19 Mar 2003:
"Even before the strike against Baghdad, Boutros Boutros-Ghali said any U.S.-led invasion of Iraq without specific UN authorization would violate international law." http://www.cbc.ca/stories/print/2003/03/19/boutros_iraq030319

But then, again, what else is new?:
"U.S. Attorneys associated with the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) asked Judge Paul Friedman to permit the lawsuit brought on behalf of a bi-partisan group of U.S. representatives charging that American air war against Yugoslavia is illegal to proceed." http://www.agitprop.org.au/stopnato/19990604lawsuit.php

Agence France Presse, December 10, 2002
"The United States upset other Security Council members by removing the only complete copy of Iraq's declaration of its weapons of mass destruction from UN headquarters soon after it arrived, diplomats said Monday.

Diplomats here said not all 15 council members were consulted before a US official took the declaration -- containing almost 12,000 printed pages and several computer disks -- from the office of chief UN arms inspector Hans Blix shortly after it arrived late Sunday.
"There were no face-to-face consultations, and many members are upset," one diplomat said." http://www.lawyersagainstthewar.org/news/declaration.html

The Observer, Sunday March 2, 2003: "Revealed: US dirty tricks to win vote on Iraq war"
"Suggesting the levels of surveillance of both the office and home phones of UN delegation members, Koza also asks regional managers to make sure that their staff also 'pay attention to existing non-UN Security Council Member UN-related and domestic comms [office and home telephones] for anything useful related to Security Council deliberations'." http://observer.guardian.co.uk/iraq/story/0,12239,905936,00.html

Guess who said this: I have removed the names of certain countries to make it more of a challenge....
"#### has refused the peaceful settlement of relations which I desired, and has appealed to arms. #### are persecuted with bloody terror and driven from their houses. A series of violations of the border, intolerable to a great Power, prove that #### is no longer willing to respect the ####.

In order to put an end to this lunacy, I have no other choice than to meet force with force from now on. The #### Army will fight the battle for the honour and the vital rights of #### with hard determination. I expect that every soldier, mindful of the great traditions of #### soldiery, will ever remain conscious that he is a representative of the ####." http://www.lawyersagainstthewar.org/news/morgan.html

"I think a lot of people are saying, you know, gosh, we hope we don't have
war. I feel the same way, I hope we don't have war. I hope this can be done peacefully. It's up to Saddam Hussein, however, to make that choice." --
President Bush, November 2002.

All he left out was "by jingo".

I like to rattle people's cages, and it worked this time.

No matter how much power he has, he is still a twit, though. And now that we are in Iraq, we have to deal with the situation. Osama Bin Laden is said to hope Bush will be re-elected.

I don't much care what John Kerry might or might not have done had he been elected in 2000. There is no way to know. All we do know is that Shrubbery *was* elected, and we can see what he has done. This election should be a referendum on his performance. Instead, he keeps trying to make it a referendum on things that John Kerry would have done.

"And now that we are in Iraq, we have to deal with the situation"
I don't mean any disrespect Paul, but I just want to hold my head in my hands and weep when I hear people say that because it's so often used as a justification for the invasion of Iraq. I don't think you used it that way just then.

Would Iraq be any better off if all the coalition troops pulled out? Discuss.

I was not using it as a justification for the invasion of Iraq, Gosho. I was just trying to see the situation as realistically as possible. I know I'm a terrible tease at times, but I really want to be a realist. This is hard on others. Sorry.

We could wonder what Al Gore would have done had he been President when the planes hit the World Trade Center towers. Even Al Gore might have trouble imagining this situation. You can't know until you've been in the situation, and Al Gore never will be in it. Nor will John Kerry. That event was unique, and could only happen once, and has already happened. There is no turning back.

We are caretakers of Iraq now. We should never have gone in, but the invasion can't be undone now. That's all I meant.

Now honestly what did you think when you saw the planes hitting the towers?

I thought, "This is the ultimate TV coup." It was guaranteed to be caught on camera, and it was -- even the first plane, which was a bonus bin Laden could hardly have dared wish for. It could never be repeated. It out-blockbusted Hollywood.

It was designed to sting the American people's feeling of superiority, and that's exactly what it did. I am trivialising the horrible death of thousands of people here, and I am aware of that, but I merely point up the difference a bit of stunning TV coverage makes. Many more thousands have died before and since in the same struggle, and a lot of those others "didn't have it coming" either.

Now what would Gore have done? He could have resisted the temptation to maximise the affront. He could have had a revolt on his hands for doing so, and he could have been put out of power. But I think he would not have jumped onto the war wagon and invaded a third country.

I hope he wouldn't have invaded Iraq. If he was put out of power, whoever *was* in power in his place might have done some invading. I think more Americans would have gone along with his decision to invade Iraq if he had gone through the proper diplomatic channels and gotten United Nations involvement all along the line. Even George Bush Senior wanted to follow the protocol.

Anyway, I want to make it clear to our friends In the U.K. and elsewhere that I *never* supported Shrubbery's invasion of Iraq. He is *not* getting my vote. On the other hand, I still see the Kerry campaign as an uphill battle given some negatives that the candidate possesses.

We'll never know what Gore would have done, but I think we can be pretty sure of what he *wouldn't* have done - everything that Dubya *did*. And the biggest reason we know that? Cheney and his cohorts would not have had access to the kind of power they had to engineer the Iraq invasion. Make no mistake about it, they are the guilty parties in this debacle, more than Dubya, although as President he ought to have known better. He's like some kid who's been persuaded by bigger kids to do something he's thought about doing but needed to be pushed around in order to do it. And once he's done it he's going to get his comeuppance eventually... and the bigger kids may just get away wioth it, the way that bullies often do.

Gore would have been more technically sauvy.
We would have more security in that way by now.
The information would have been more likely to have come together and been useful either before or after to some extent.

He and Clinton worked a great deal on the technical side of things.
Catching up to technology that is availble but not protected or used to it's full potential was a concern. Clinton apppointing Janet Reno was all about Terrosism at home and afar. They made a big deal about it all. Then Wako happened and the one up north in the US....
the tide turned. Oklahoma City happened on the anniversary of Wako and there was mention and concern of it all.

Clinton was the first to give grave concerns to some about the loss of privacy. He was on the right track in many ways stressing the law on both sides really needed to catch up and money was needed to update all government computers and systems.

Carolyn Kennedy wrote a book about that when he was in office. It did not get the attention it needed from all sides. It should be marketed again. I have not read Clintons last book but have wondered if he discussed these things in it.

A lot of people did actually vote for Gore, but none of them were on the Supreme Court, sad to say.

Anyway, I thought the U.S. had officially handed over the reins of power to the new Iraqi government. No?

Did you see that Blair has announced that the US/UK forces are now fighting a 'Second War' in Iraq?

So that's okay then... the first one's over.

He hasn't yet told us who won the first one But so long as it's over, we don't need to worry about the reason it started

Iraq is a tar baby, easy to get into, hard to get out of.

http://home.nycap.rr.com/cyclone/disney/sots/tarbaby.htm

Trouble is, George W is more like Brer Rabbit than anyone else. He makes a lot of capital out of being consistently misunderestimated. But he's wilier'n a field full of foxes, and hard to hold onto, even after you pin him down good.

Excellent analogy Recumbentman

If he's misunderstood, it's because he *wants* to be misunderstood.