Why I'll vote for McCain over Obama

[Bang]

Well, I wish I could argue that we would invade Italy and/or Brazil, but I can't. Sorry.

I sorta think you have me confused with someone else though... or else, I don't understand the opinion I have that you are attributing to being relevant to this.

Perhaps I do.

Which is not entirely surprising.

~Bang

[BigMike619]

Im voting for McCain so that when he wins theres a chance that some over the edge leftist will kill themselves.

thats hysterical to a degree...

but some of these lefties on here make it worth debating..

[mjah]

It's always hilarious to hear how Bush, a "moron" duped all the smart people into a war with "BS intelligence." Seems like there were plenty of morons to share the blame. But by all means, let's just call it Bush's War.

Hmm, it is a curious name. Let's think about this. Who was it who decided to wage that war?

- Congress? Hmm. Nope. They were (are) collectively morons, and gave Bush a blank check, "if he decided to use it". Yeah, right. Now many of them pretend they were just trying to give him leverage. What a bunch of worthless lemmings. They're to blame too. But what's interesting is: they didn't make the call. That's the president's job. After all, he's The Decider, isn't he? Didn't he say that himself? Congress gave him enough rope to hang his entire administration, and they did it foolishly. But he's the one who built the gallows, fashioned the noose, and kicked open the trapdoor. Saddam died in a matter of seconds, but Bush's legacy is already writhing in agony and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Congress didn't do all that.

- Was it the mean, evil liberal education system? No, they didn't declare Bush's War either.

- Was it those awful activist judges? Actually, some of them are downright terrible. But nope. Not them.

- How about all those fornicators and abortionists? Did they decide to start Bush's War? As I recall, no. And I was one hell of a fornicator at the time, so I would know.

So who was it who launched Bush's War?

Hey, I guess that name is pretty fitting after all. I'm glad we went through this little exercise. Now I feel better than ever about that name!

With regard to the intel: First of all, given that none of the more inflammatory bits ever even came anywhere close to being true, I certainly hope you agree that the intel was BS, and that a reasonable person who had access to all of it (Prez, VP, SoS, SoD, etc.) would have found it full of more holes than Saddam's head -- even at that time.

Anticipating a common dead-end argument that many (though by no means all) Bush supporters make: Ridiculing the Iraq "evidence" BushCo peddled is not just 20/20 hindsight. It's not a 9/11 situation where you pretend to put a bunch of widely disparate pieces together after the fact and then yell, "SEE!?! IT'S SO OBVIOUS!!!!!" In fact, it's exactly the opposite situation. In 2002 and 2003, there were plenty of people saying the case was shoddy precisely because the pieces didn't fit together. Several of the pieces didn't even exist, in fact.

One of the dissenting voices was the CIA's Director of European Operations. But the one guy on Earth who actually knew about the complete BS nature of much of the BushCo intel, and communicated that fact directly to the administration multiple times, apparently wasn't reliable enough to compel the Decider-In-Chief to abandon his Crusade. (Bush's word, not mine!) I'll leave it to others to speculate as to why.

But there's little wonder why people call Bush a moron!

And Bush didn't "dupe all the smart people into a war." He didn't need to. He got the idiots and sheep in Congress to give him authorization, remember? It was a political decision, not a decision based on intelligence.

Some folks in Congress voted for it because they wanted Hussein out at any cost -- a poor decision. Others voted for it because they believed in the intelligence case Bush made, and apparently didn't bother to read the reams of reliable counter-indicators. (The 2002 NIE would have been a good start, and any conscientious member of Congress absolutely should be reading those things cover to cover every year.) Yet others voted for the war because in the post-911 torrent of rah-rah patriotism, they foolishly reasoned it was politically impossible not to. Talk about cowardice.

I made no case. I suggested that history is more fairly judged after enough time has passed to accurately access the entirety of a situation. I'm not arrogant enough to say I know what they will say then. But I'm willing to bet that they will have far more information available to them then, than we do now.

Agreed. I'm merely playing the odds as well. Unfortunately for your argument, the odds are not in your favor.

Make a list of the ten most unpopular presidents, as judged by their reputations at the end of their respective administrations. It doesn't have to be perfect, in light of the fact that polling hasn't always existed and it's hard to gauge this for some presidents. But you can do a reasonably good, if not perfect, job.

Now, how many of those really unpopular presidents turned out to be judged reasonably well by history? As far as I can tell, one. Truman.

Nixon? Yeah, right.

Carter? Something tells me, hell no.

What about the older guys? Lincoln, had he lived, would have seen himself revered by the end of his term, so you can't count him in either category. Buchanan? Lousy then, lousy now. Harding? Hoover? Terrible, terrible. 4th-dimensionally terrible. The assessment has not changed.

That leaves some room for a few other guys in there. Maybe Coolidge -- same story -- Pierce -- same story. Sucky.

Then there's the one guy who probably has the most in common with Bush: James K Polk. He got the Oregon Territory from England, an obvious boon. His positions on slavery made it clear that he didn't care about black people (sorry, that line was impossible to pass up.)

On his watch, the first Treasury was founded, helping to secure the nation's financial future. He waged a completely elective but popular war against Mexico, getting what would become the entire southwest US -- an obvious benefit -- in a reasonably short, sweet, decisive battle with a clear outcome. Totally unnecessary, but a huge and obvious boon to the country. The war was over before his ONE term was up, and in a wise move for himself and the country, he didn't run again.

Okay, so maybe he didn't have that much in common with Bush. :laugh:

No, seriously, he did. The one thing he did have that Bush didn't, though: wild approval from the people. Because he was smart enough to manufacture it and hold it, via an elective war with a clearly foreseeable outcome and a point, plus a popular and productive domestic agenda that he was able to realize.

Interesting thing about Polk: He's less well revered now than he was at the time. Hmm.

And here's another interesting tidbit. You know all those pesky, stagecoach -- oops, I mean limousine -- liberal pantywaists arguing that Bush is a bad president? Apparently just because of his name, not because of his abysmal record (yeah, right)? Because they just believe what they read in the newspapers? Because they're Bad Unpatriotic Americans? Well, Polk had those too.

Polk's biggest detractor in Congress?

...Some sissy liberal America-hating flag-burning child-eating idiot Congressman...

...From Illinois...

...Named Abraham Lincoln. Who turned out to be a much better and wiser president.

So, let's tally up the scores. That's ONE really unpopular president (Truman) who deservedly became quite a bit more popular with the passage of time.

And how many really unpopular presidents who stayed in the dumps? Like, all the rest?

Oh, and Truman, the one guy who did get better treatment with time:

- Didn't stomp all over the Constitution

- Didn't openly spy on Americans

- Didn't make a rule of appointing completely incompetent boobs to important national posts

- Didn't decide that the Magna Carta isn't so important after all

- Didn't decide that he was free to sign bills into law with one hand and write "Never mind" with the other hand

Honestly dude, things are NOT looking good for the wing-and-a-prayer notion that Shrub will grow with time. Even if you just play the odds and don't even look at who he is or what he did, he is in all likelihood completely sunk.

So, you must know all the future lotto numbers as well, right?

No. Quite the opposite, in fact! I can tell you that your draw in the Pick-6 Maybe Bush Will Be Popular Someday Lottery has an insanely small chance of winning. But feel free to play it if you want to. Feel free to play it over, and over, and over, and over, and over, as you seem eager to do. Maybe you'll get unbelievably lucky and it will be worth it.

Of course, chances are insanely high that you won't, and you'll just be wasting your money.

Now, if only the Bush War money, like the lottery, went into things like schools instead of going into the toilet.

Meant if the war eventually leads to change in the Middle East, and it is viewed by qualified historians to have been the catalyst, then it will soften the criticism of some of the mistakes made along the way.

Wait, that's what you mean?

You mean if Iraq becomes a true democracy instead of falling apart (it was only held together by tyranny in the first place), and then most of the rest of the Middle East voluntarily abandons over 1,000 years of cultural history, and abandons their religion which (according to Fox News) can't be separated from the violence, and all of it goes democratic in the next 50 years, and Palestine delivers Israel a Trojan Horse full of petunias, and Sunnis and Shiites get together and go to Toby Keith concerts together? And it's somehow traced to Bush's War?

Sure. In that case, Bush will look A-OK. And if my aunt grows a set of balls, I'll start calling her Uncle Janet.

And if James Buchanan turns out to have had a heroic reason to sit back on his indecisive ass as the Civil War began -- say, because a complicated set of circumstances dictated it to be the only way to prevent a giant black hole from swallowing the Earth in 1859 -- I'm sure he'll have a spot on Mount Rushmore too.

Keep on hoping, brother.

and our Constitutional freedoms are compromised in perpetuity

The sky is falling! The sky is falling!

So sad that you'd react this way. It's just really unfortunate.

and our president fails to uphold his oath of office

Impeach him or STFU.

You won't get me to STFU if you try for a thousand years, cool guy. But I'd be happy to get rid of him and Cheney at the same time. Unfortunately, Congress seems to be mostly full of idiots at the moment. So, since you're apparently the authority on impeachment, just do one thing. Just give me control over Congress and see how quickly it happens. Your head will spin. Then you can say hi to President Pelosi for a few months. HAHAHAHAHAHA.

That is bad. Maybe we should have just kept feeding them missile secrets.

Neither is tolerable. But ultimately, the debt situation with China is FAR FAR FAR more damaging than stolen missile secrets.

Now your Boston's kicking in. If you don't know that the Universities in this country lean so far left that they're laying down, then you must be a product of them.

That doesn't even make sense. There's no doubt that universities everywhere (not just the US) look right to see Middle America. So you really have no point here.

Well, my views of Clinton are based on more than what you've read in the funny papers, or the internet.

You seem to be under the misapprehension that you're somehow not parroting a bunch of BushCo propaganda nonsense. Particularly with regard to that blood red Bush War Kool-Aid you're drinking.

The view that war with Iraq was idiotic did NOT get very much exposure in the "funny papers" back in 2003. I would have told you the same thing then that I'm telling you now: Bush's War was an idiotic gambit, and an obviously idiotic one at that. Bush created his own legacy of failure with it, and there's really no realistic future scenario in which that legacy will change.

I'm still shocked that damn near half the voters in this country were ignorant enough to vote for Gore.

You think Gore could have found some way to be a worse president than Bush?

Once again, you love to play those losing hands. :laugh:

[techboy]

What if we invade Italy in response?

War for gelato sounds good to me!

[robotfire]

We need to stop thinking of what the "Framers" wanted, remember I highly doubt they could vision what we see today. They created a government that would be flexible over time, they understood that there would be challenges in the future that they could not think of.

Pretty soon many people will look at the constitution as a bible and not what it really is. This is what scares me with all this talk about what we did over 230 years ago.

I have yet to understand what all of this constitution talk has to do with me getting another grocery store. I'm just saying, is all.

[DaveMason]

robotfire, have you considered Ron "Ru" Paul? He is the only candidate who cares about keeping the Constitution. All other candidates hate the Constitution. They plan on replacing it with a page full of their favorite Garfield comic strips.

If you need me to, I can show you several bar graphs that I found on the internet showing how Dr. Paul is actually winning the election so far.

[Ax]

mjah, my little fiddle. You're just too easy to play. I feared we would hijack the thread, but no one has seemed to mind yet, so, what the heck?

I won't cover the whole hysterical rant. I'll just continue to amuse myself at your expense. You can thank me later for supplying you with a chance to let loose on your self therapeutic rant. No charge.

Hmm, it is a curious name. Let's think about this. Who was it who decided to wage that war?

Which one, Lincoln's or Saddam's?

- Congress? Hmm. Nope. They were (are) collectively morons

More common ground.

- Was it the mean, evil liberal education system?

Woah! Even I didn't call them mean and evil. You must really loathe them.

Hey, I guess that name is pretty fitting after all. I'm glad we went through this little exercise.

Again, no charge.

With regard to the intel: First of all, given that none of the more inflammatory bits ever even came anywhere close to being true, I certainly hope you agree that the intel was BS, and that a reasonable person who had access to all of it (Prez, VP, SoS, SoD, etc.) would have found it full of more holes than Saddam's head -- even at that time.

Here's the problem slappy. We don't know what half of it is, much less "all of it."

I hate to break it to you like that. But you actually don't know everything.

But there's little wonder why people call Bush a moron!

Well, most do it because deep inside, they know he's better/smarter than they ever will be, and it pisses them off.

And Bush didn't "dupe all the smart people into a war." He didn't need to. He got the idiots and sheep in Congress to give him authorization, remember?

So, you can read between the lines. Very good.

His positions on slavery made it clear that he didn't care about black people

You meant Lincoln, right?

...Some sissy liberal America-hating flag-burning child-eating idiot Congressman...

...From Illinois...

...Named Abraham Lincoln. Who turned out to be a much better and wiser president.

- Did stomp all over the Constitution

- Did openly spy on Americans

- Did decide that the Magna Carta isn't so important after all

- Did decide that he was free to sign bills into law with one hand and write "Never mind" with the other hand.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig2/miller1.html

Congress was adjourned at the time and for the next three months, ignoring his constitutional duty to call this legislative branch of government back in session during a time of emergency, Lincoln assumed dictatorial powers and did things, like raise an army, that only Congress is supposed to do. He shut down newspapers that disagreed with his war policy, more than 300 of them. He ordered his military officers to lock up political opponents, thousands of them. Although the exact number is not known, Lincoln may well have arrested and imprisoned more than 20,000 political opponents, southern sympathizers, and people suspected of being disloyal to the Union, creating what one researcher has termed a 19th century "American gulag," a forerunner of the 20th century’s political prison and labor camps in the former Soviet Union. Lincoln denied these nonviolent dissenters their right of free speech and suspended the privilege of Habeas Corpus, something only Congress in a time of war has the power to do. Lincoln’s soldiers arrested civilians, often arbitrarily, without any charges being filed; and, if held at all, military commissions conducted trials. He permitted Union troops to arrest the Mayor of Baltimore (then the third largest city in the Union), its Chief of Police and a Maryland congressman, along with 31 state legislators. When Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney wrote an opinion that said these actions were unlawful and violated the Constitution, Lincoln ignored the ruling.

And this goes back to my original point, that you were over dramatizing the Constitutional crisis, IMO.

Honestly dude, things are NOT looking good for the wing-and-a-prayer notion that Shrub will grow with time. Even if you just play the odds and don't even look at who he is or what he did, he is in all likelihood completely sunk.

Damn! I guess my only hope is for him to be assassinated. Then he'll become a god like sacred cow. Absurdly overrated you know, like JFK. And to a much lesser extent, Lincoln.

And if my aunt grows a set of balls,

They'll be the first in your family in generations!

(Sorry. Really do mean it as a joke)

You won't get me to STFU if you try for a thousand years, cool guy. But I'd be happy to get rid of him and Cheney at the same time. Unfortunately, Congress seems to be mostly full of idiots at the moment. So, since you're apparently the authority on impeachment, just do one thing. Just give me control over Congress and see how quickly it happens. Your head will spin. Then you can say hi to President Pelosi for a few months. HAHAHAHAHAHA.

If you don't think they would love to do it, and would if they thought they had even half a chance, then you're crazy as a loon.

[The Brave Little Toaster Oven]

mjah, why would you use Lincoln? that dude is so overrated in our history its sad

[robotfire]

robotfire, have you considered Ron "Ru" Paul? He is the only candidate who cares about keeping the Constitution. All other candidates hate the Constitution. They plan on replacing it with a page full of their favorite Garfield comic strips.

If you need me to, I can show you several bar graphs that I found on the internet showing how Dr. Paul is actually winning the election so far.

First of all, I'm now outraged to find out the candidates' hatred of the Constitution, and I'll vote for whoever openly likes it (if any of these fatcats are willing to step up!).

Second of all, I think it would be rude of me to ask you to produce those bar graphs. I have no reason not to trust you.

[Smoot Point Really]

In other news...

'Report on Sept. 6 strike to show Saddam transferred WMDs to Syria'

By JPOST.COM STAFF

An upcoming joint US-Israel report on the September 6 IAF strike on a Syrian facility will claim that former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein transferred weapons of mass destruction to the country, Channel 2 stated Monday.

Furthermore, according to a report leaked to the TV channel, Syria has arrested 10 intelligence officials following the assassination of Hizbullah terror chief Imad Mughniyeh.

[Henry]

mjah, why would you use Lincoln? that dude is so overrated in our history its sad

Not really. I wish I had time to address the revisionist history going on in this thread, but I don't. So I'll just have to say that the way Lincoln has been dragged through the mud the past few years by revisionists with political agendas is even more sad, and leave it at that.