Biking w/o Cindy Sheehan

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washing...ush-bike_x.htm

--
http://anonymous.coward.free.fr/temp...tiondeaths.png

Robert Chung wrote:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washing...ush-bike_x.htm
http://anonymous.coward.free.fr/temp...tiondeaths.png

This story makes me detest him a bit less, but he's still done more
damage to the US and the rest of the world than any other president the
US has ever had.

"Jay S. Hill" wrote in message
ink.net...
Robert Chung wrote:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washing...ush-bike_x.htm
http://anonymous.coward.free.fr/temp...tiondeaths.png

This story makes me detest him a bit less, but he's still done more damage
to the US and the rest of the world than any other president the US has
ever had.

Always nice to see the educated opinion of diplomats and government service
workers who have real experience in these matters.

And of course we all know that Clinton didn't do any damage to this country
by selling top secret ICBM guidance technology to the Chinese while hauling
bags of loot into the White House. He didn't do any damage by GIVING North
Korea nuclear technology and materials which has since allowed them to build
nuclear bombs and threaten Japan.

Do you suppose the fact that a policy put in place by one of Hillary's
cronies prevented the FBI from obtaining information which said that
Mohammed Atta was planning a major terrorist strike inside the USA and which
would have probably prevented 9/11 just MIGHT be construed by some people
(probably only friends and relatives of 9/11 victims) as being damaging to
the US in the eyes of the world?

In article ,
"Robert Chung" wrote:

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washing...ush-bike_x.htm




August 14, 2005

Someone Tell the President the War Is Over

By FRANK RICH

LIKE the Japanese soldier marooned on an island for years after V-J Day,
President Bush may be the last person in the country to learn that for
Americans, if not Iraqis, the war in Iraq is over. "We will stay the
course," he insistently tells us from his Texas ranch. What do you mean
we, white man?
A president can't stay the course when his own citizens (let alone his
own allies) won't stay with him. The approval rate for Mr. Bush's
handling of Iraq plunged to 34 percent in last weekend's Newsweek poll -
a match for the 32 percent that approved L.B.J.'s handling of Vietnam in
early March 1968. (The two presidents' overall approval ratings have
also converged: 41 percent for Johnson then, 42 percent for Bush now.)
On March 31, 1968, as L.B.J.'s ratings plummeted further, he announced
he wouldn't seek re-election, commencing our long extrication from that
quagmire.
But our current Texas president has even outdone his predecessor; Mr.
Bush has lost not only the country but also his army. Neither bonuses
nor fudged standards nor the faking of high school diplomas has solved
the recruitment shortfall. Now Jake Tapper of ABC News reports that the
armed forces are so eager for bodies they will flout "don't ask, don't
tell" and hang on to gay soldiers who tell, even if they tell the press.
The president's cable cadre is in disarray as well. At Fox News Bill
O'Reilly is trashing Donald Rumsfeld for his incompetence, and Ann
Coulter is chiding Mr. O'Reilly for being a defeatist. In an emblematic
gesture akin to waving a white flag, Robert Novak walked off a CNN set
and possibly out of a job rather than answer questions about his role in
smearing the man who helped expose the administration's prewar inflation
of Saddam W.M.D.'s. (On this sinking ship, it's hard to know which rat
to root for.)
As if the right-wing pundit crackup isn't unsettling enough, Mr. Bush's
top war strategists, starting with Mr. Rumsfeld and Gen. Richard Myers,
have of late tried to rebrand the war in Iraq as what the defense
secretary calls "a global struggle against violent extremism." A
struggle is what you have with your landlord. When the war's
über-managers start using euphemisms for a conflict this lethal, it's a
clear sign that the battle to keep the Iraq war afloat with the American
public is lost.
That battle crashed past the tipping point this month in Ohio. There's
historical symmetry in that. It was in Cincinnati on Oct. 7, 2002, that
Mr. Bush gave the fateful address that sped Congressional ratification
of the war just days later. The speech was a miasma of self-delusion,
half-truths and hype. The president said that "we know that Iraq and Al
Qaeda have had high-level contacts that go back a decade," an
exaggeration based on evidence that the Senate Intelligence Committee
would later find far from conclusive. He said that Saddam "could have a
nuclear weapon in less than a year" were he able to secure "an amount of
highly enriched uranium a little larger than a single softball." Our own
National Intelligence Estimate of Oct. 1 quoted State Department
findings that claims of Iraqi pursuit of uranium in Africa were "highly
dubious."
It was on these false premises - that Iraq was both a collaborator on
9/11 and about to inflict mushroom clouds on America - that honorable
and brave young Americans were sent off to fight. Among them were the 19
marine reservists from a single suburban Cleveland battalion slaughtered
in just three days at the start of this month. As they perished, another
Ohio marine reservist who had served in Iraq came close to winning a
Congressional election in southern Ohio. Paul Hackett, a Democrat who
called the president a "chicken hawk," received 48 percent of the vote
in exactly the kind of bedrock conservative Ohio district that decided
the 2004 election for Mr. Bush.
These are the tea leaves that all Republicans, not just Chuck Hagel, are
reading now. Newt Gingrich called the Hackett near-victory "a wake-up
call." The resolutely pro-war New York Post editorial page begged Mr.
Bush (to no avail) to "show some leadership" by showing up in Ohio to
salute the fallen and their families. A Bush loyalist, Senator George
Allen of Virginia, instructed the president to meet with Cindy Sheehan,
the mother camping out in Crawford, as "a matter of courtesy and
decency." Or, to translate his Washingtonese, as a matter of politics.
Only someone as adrift from reality as Mr. Bush would need to be told
that a vacationing president can't win a standoff with a grief-stricken
parent commandeering TV cameras and the blogosphere 24/7.
Such political imperatives are rapidly bringing about the war's end.
That's inevitable for a war of choice, not necessity, that was conceived
in politics from the start. Iraq was a Bush administration idée fixe
before there was a 9/11. Within hours of that horrible trauma, according
to Richard Clarke's "Against All Enemies," Mr. Rumsfeld was proposing
Iraq as a battlefield, not because the enemy that attacked America was
there, but because it offered "better targets" than the shadowy
terrorist redoubts of Afghanistan. It was easier to take out Saddam -
and burnish Mr. Bush's credentials as a slam-dunk "war president,"
suitable for a "Top Gun" victory jig - than to shut down Al Qaeda and
smoke out its leader "dead or alive."
But just as politics are a bad motive for choosing a war, so they can be
a doomed engine for running a war. In an interview with Tim Russert
early last year, Mr. Bush said, "The thing about the Vietnam War that
troubles me, as I look back, was it was a political war," adding that
the "essential" lesson he learned from Vietnam was to not have
"politicians making military decisions." But by then Mr. Bush had
disastrously ignored that very lesson; he had let Mr. Rumsfeld publicly
rebuke the Army's chief of staff, Eric Shinseki, after the general dared
tell the truth: that several hundred thousand troops would be required
to secure Iraq. To this day it's our failure to provide that security
that has turned the country into the terrorist haven it hadn't been
before 9/11 - "the central front in the war on terror," as Mr. Bush
keeps reminding us, as if that might make us forget he's the one who
recklessly created it.
The endgame for American involvement in Iraq will be of a piece with the
rest of this sorry history. "It makes no sense for the commander in
chief to put out a timetable" for withdrawal, Mr. Bush declared on the
same day that 14 of those Ohio troops were killed by a roadside bomb in
Haditha. But even as he spoke, the war's actual commander, Gen. George
Casey, had already publicly set a timetable for "some fairly substantial
reductions" to start next spring. Officially this calendar is tied to
the next round of Iraqi elections, but it's quite another election this
administration has in mind. The priority now is less to save Jessica
Lynch (or Iraqi democracy) than to save Rick Santorum and every other
endangered Republican facing voters in November 2006.
Nothing that happens on the ground in Iraq can turn around the fate of
this war in America: not a shotgun constitution rushed to meet an
arbitrary deadline, not another Iraqi election, not higher terrorist
body counts, not another battle for Falluja (where insurgents may again
regroup, The Los Angeles Times reported last week). A citizenry that was
asked to accept tax cuts, not sacrifice, at the war's inception is
hardly in the mood to start sacrificing now. There will be neither the
volunteers nor the money required to field the wholesale additional
American troops that might bolster the security situation in Iraq.
WHAT lies ahead now in Iraq instead is not victory, which Mr. Bush has
never clearly defined anyway, but an exit (or triage) strategy that may
echo Johnson's March 1968 plan for retreat from Vietnam: some kind of
negotiations (in this case, with Sunni elements of the insurgency),
followed by more inflated claims about the readiness of the local
troops-in-training, whom we'll then throw to the wolves. Such an outcome
may lead to even greater disaster, but this administration long ago
squandered the credibility needed to make the difficult case that more
human and financial resources might prevent Iraq from continuing its
descent into civil war and its devolution into jihad central.
Thus the president's claim on Thursday that "no decision has been made
yet" about withdrawing troops from Iraq can be taken exactly as
seriously as the vice president's preceding fantasy that the insurgency
is in its "last throes." The country has already made the decision for
Mr. Bush. We're outta there. Now comes the hard task of identifying the
leaders who can pick up the pieces of the fiasco that has made us more
vulnerable, not less, to the terrorists who struck us four years ago
next month.

Robert Chung wrote:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washing...ush-bike_x.htm


War? **** that, I kicked some fat reporters ass!
He's had five weeks to train for the ride. Five ****ing weeks.
At least he's racking up miles as he hones in the all time Presidential
OOO record.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...080201703.html

On Sun, 14 Aug 2005 19:11:42 GMT, "Tom Kunich"
wrote:

"Jay S. Hill" wrote in message
link.net...
Robert Chung wrote:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washing...ush-bike_x.htm
http://anonymous.coward.free.fr/temp...tiondeaths.png

This story makes me detest him a bit less, but he's still done more damage
to the US and the rest of the world than any other president the US has
ever had.

Always nice to see the educated opinion of diplomats and government service
workers who have real experience in these matters.

And of course we all know that Clinton didn't do any damage to this country
by selling top secret ICBM guidance technology to the Chinese while hauling
bags of loot into the White House. He didn't do any damage by GIVING North
Korea nuclear technology and materials which has since allowed them to build
nuclear bombs and threaten Japan.

Do you suppose the fact that a policy put in place by one of Hillary's
cronies prevented the FBI from obtaining information which said that
Mohammed Atta was planning a major terrorist strike inside the USA and which
would have probably prevented 9/11 just MIGHT be construed by some people
(probably only friends and relatives of 9/11 victims) as being damaging to
the US in the eyes of the world?



Until this last election I've always voted R.

W is a dumbass.

In article ,
"Robert Chung" wrote:

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washing...ush-bike_x.htm

"I like speed," says Bush, who wore a red-white-and blue helmet and a
Western-style bike jersey, complete with pearl snap buttons. His
loose-fitting black shorts bore small rips from his crash in Scotland.

Western-style bike jersey?

http://www.nashbar.com/profile.cfm?c...rand=1611&sku=
13911&storetype=&estoreid=&pagename=

Whaddya know.

--
Ryan Cousineau http://www.wiredcola.com/
"I don't want kids who are thinking about going into mathematics
to think that they have to take drugs to succeed." -Paul Erdos

"D. Ferguson" wrote in message
...
On Sun, 14 Aug 2005 19:11:42 GMT, "Tom Kunich"
wrote:

"Jay S. Hill" wrote in message
hlink.net...
Robert Chung wrote:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washing...ush-bike_x.htm
http://anonymous.coward.free.fr/temp...tiondeaths.png

This story makes me detest him a bit less, but he's still done more
damage
to the US and the rest of the world than any other president the US has
ever had.

Always nice to see the educated opinion of diplomats and government
service
workers who have real experience in these matters.

And of course we all know that Clinton didn't do any damage to this
country
by selling top secret ICBM guidance technology to the Chinese while
hauling
bags of loot into the White House. He didn't do any damage by GIVING North
Korea nuclear technology and materials which has since allowed them to
build
nuclear bombs and threaten Japan.

Do you suppose the fact that a policy put in place by one of Hillary's
cronies prevented the FBI from obtaining information which said that
Mohammed Atta was planning a major terrorist strike inside the USA and
which
would have probably prevented 9/11 just MIGHT be construed by some people
(probably only friends and relatives of 9/11 victims) as being damaging to
the US in the eyes of the world?



Until this last election I've always voted R.

W is a dumbass.

You know, I heard EXACTLY the same thing about Vietnam. All of you bozos
screamed like little girls about **** you knew nothing about and then after
some 4 million people were slaughtered by the communists in Vietnam, Laos
and Cambodia not one of you effiminite *******s said a single word.

On Mon, 15 Aug 2005 01:59:43 GMT, "Tom Kunich"
wrote:





Until this last election I've always voted R.

W is a dumbass.

You know, I heard EXACTLY the same thing about Vietnam. All of you bozos
screamed like little girls about **** you knew nothing about and then after
some 4 million people were slaughtered by the communists in Vietnam, Laos
and Cambodia not one of you effiminite *******s said a single word.



You heard that W was a dumbass? Wow, who knew back then?

You're steamrolling on something you know jack **** about.

If "slaughter" is the criteria then we've dropped the ball a number of
times between Vietnam and Iraq. What has W done about the Sudan?

And I don't hear anyone saying nothing should be done about terrorism
or Iraq. Just that playing cowboy is the wrong way to go about it.

And captain flip flop is not just fking up in the Iraq department.

Foreign policy- ****
Environmental issues- ****
Stem Cell research- ****
Religion- kooky ****

I'm as conservative and capitalistic as they come but this knuckle
head has just screwed up a too many things. For all the time I've
spent explaining that Reagan was good, I have 10x more to say about
how W is bad.

On 8/14/05 6:59 PM, in article
t, "Tom Kunich"
wrote:

"D. Ferguson" wrote in message
...
On Sun, 14 Aug 2005 19:11:42 GMT, "Tom Kunich"
wrote:

"Jay S. Hill" wrote in message
ink.net...
Robert Chung wrote:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washing...ush-bike_x.htm
http://anonymous.coward.free.fr/temp...tiondeaths.png

This story makes me detest him a bit less, but he's still done more
damage
to the US and the rest of the world than any other president the US has
ever had.

Always nice to see the educated opinion of diplomats and government
service
workers who have real experience in these matters.

And of course we all know that Clinton didn't do any damage to this
country
by selling top secret ICBM guidance technology to the Chinese while
hauling
bags of loot into the White House. He didn't do any damage by GIVING North
Korea nuclear technology and materials which has since allowed them to
build
nuclear bombs and threaten Japan.

Do you suppose the fact that a policy put in place by one of Hillary's
cronies prevented the FBI from obtaining information which said that
Mohammed Atta was planning a major terrorist strike inside the USA and
which
would have probably prevented 9/11 just MIGHT be construed by some people
(probably only friends and relatives of 9/11 victims) as being damaging to
the US in the eyes of the world?



Until this last election I've always voted R.

W is a dumbass.

You know, I heard EXACTLY the same thing about Vietnam. All of you bozos
screamed like little girls about **** you knew nothing about and then after
some 4 million people were slaughtered by the communists in Vietnam, Laos
and Cambodia not one of you effiminite *******s said a single word.


A bunch of liberal weasels. Lookin for anything to latch on to.......

http://www.thereporter.com/sheehan/ci_2936043

http://www.thereporter.com/sheehan/ci_2936045

http://www.thereporter.com/sheehanopinions/ci_2936053

Cindy Sheehan's incessant Bush-hating landed her on the Web site of
Al-Jazeera, a propaganda arm for Muslim terrorists, and splintered her
family, who mourn the loss of her son, Army Spc. Casey Sheehan, who died
last year in Iraq. Mrs. Sheehan is now a tool of America-haters. She has
joined the family of radical Democrats in defiance of her son's blood
relations.

Her family has had enough. Cherie Quarterolo, Casey's godmother and aunt,
wrote a letter to KSFO saying the family broke its silence because "our
family has been so distressed by the recent activities of Cindy."