I think it means that there would have been war in Afghanistan either way. That may be true. Nonetheless, there would have been no “Patriot Act” and no war with Iraq, since the ideologues in charge of both the former and the latter are squarely in Bush’s camp.
The true difference between democrat and republican is that when republican does something, no matter what he does, he gets bad press.
When democrat does something, no matter what he does, he gets god press.
Thus, if a democrat were in office, the Patriot Act would have passed (might have been different, but similar in one degree or another) it is just it would have been initiated by a democrat, and all the democrat-controlled medias would have praised it instead of deriding it and what-not…
What this comes down to: I really really don’t like partisan politics.
A POX ON BOTH YOUR HOUSES!
Thank you for clarifying SK. Although I think you’re right about the Iraq thing, if Saddam tried to something from his hole, I think we would have ended up in some sort of conflict with Iraq anyway. That would have to do more with terrorism though instead of “weapons of mass destruction”.
Originally posted by Chris StarShade
The true difference between democrat and republican is that when republican does something, no matter what he does, he gets bad press.
That is the opposite of the truth. Dude, Bush has received practically no negative press from the mainstream media pretty much since he took office, and especially after Sept. 11th happened. Major newspapers even corrected his lapses in grammar for him in their transcripts. He doesn’t even have to answer tough questions in press conferences, because if those get asked, the people asking them aren’t allowed to ask questions again. Think back to the press conference right before the war - not only did anyone ask Bush a single real question, the questions they did ask were along the lines of simpering bullshit like “Please tell us how your faith guides you in this crisis.” That’s more like Emperor-worship than it is like reporting, and indeed, some so-called “commentators” were waxing eloquent about Bush the “warrior-king” (actual quote). A depressingly large number of people who got their news from mainstream networks thought that Saddam Hussein had a role in September 11th and that we’ve actually found WMDs in Iraq. If the press was so much against Bush, why the fuck would people think that these completely false statements that Bush has been pushing were true? Hell, just recently he lied twice when he claimed that Saddam Hussein never let the inspectors into Iraq. Not a single news organization called him on it.
The only real mainstream source of criticism of Bush has been Paul Krugman in the New York Times (and the two guys on Crossfire), but don’t let that fool you - the NYT only runs him once a week, alongside of neoconservative ideologue William Safire, neoconservative ideologue Thomas Friedman, and other folks of this type. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page has been so rabidly pro-Republican over the past decade that it sometimes directly contradicts the news printed on the front page of the WSJ itself. And if you want to talk about “Democrat-controlled media,” one of the two biggest media organizations in the world is run by Rupert Murdoch, who owns the neoconservative rag The Weekly Standard and of course Fox News, the most biased organization on television. There are also many right-wing think tanks funded by the other right-wing sugar daddy, Richard Mellon Scaife; they do nothing but produce extremist rhetoric in the form of columns, books, and “studies” day after day. Even The New Republic, which is supposed to be the big Democratic magazine, is really owned by one Republican and one conservative Democrat, and endorses Joe Lieberman when it has anything good to say about Democrats at all. And that doesn’t even begin to cover the ideologues on talk radio whose only purpose is to lie about Democrats, liberals and the antiwar movement, and claim in the process that they aren’t biased. Yes, poor Bush - it’s so unfair that he occasionally has to deal with mild criticism despite the fact that his pals have had a stranglehold on the basic terms of the debate!
Originally posted by BahamutXero
Although I think you’re right about the Iraq thing, if Saddam tried to something from his hole, I think we would have ended up in some sort of conflict with Iraq anyway.
The whole point is that Saddam Hussein would <i>not</i> “try something from his hole,” regardless of who was in office, for the simple reason that he was <i>incapable</i> of doing any harm to the United States. He didn’t “try something from his hole” with Bush in office, either. That “issue” was literally pulled out of thin air one day with no provocation whatsoever, because the Bush administration was planning to go to war with Iraq from day one.