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shawnmmcc
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Ogie, then would you support putting Rumsfeld through the wringer for lying to Congress, and the press as incompetent #$%@s for letting him get away with it. Or "is that different"?
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Ned
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of Aptos, CA
Oct 1999
time: 21:23
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quote:
Originally posted by shawnmmcc
Uh, Ned, did you google Kinseki? Then go and get a transcript of Rumsfeld claiming he didnt' know he would need extra troops to Congress just a couple of months ago. In that case the laziness benifitted the Bush adminstration very nicely, you didn't have the headline Rumsfeld lies to Congress, tries to claim did not know about lack of forces since he fired the General who tried to warn him or however it would be headlined. Or, since there is no five word easy headline or 30 second soundbite that generates quick money, plus it really would get alot of people pissed, maybe that's why it didn't get covered. Plus, reporters are people to, and can be just as lazy as the rest of us. |
"Gen. Eric Shinseki, the outgoing Army chief of staff, told Congress in February that "something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers" would be needed to govern Iraq after a war.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld discounted that estimate within days.
"Any idea that it's several hundred thousand over any sustained period is simply not the case," he said."
http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/06/03/sp...te.iraq.troops/
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shawnmmcc
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Thank you Ned. By the way, remember our exchange over "Rumsfeld, Man of the Year?" My views have been thoroughly vinidicated, just like you help connect the sources on the justification or lack thereof for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Please note my point - if Bush would fire the man as incompetent, THAT would show leadership. Being unable to discipline and fire incomptent subordinates is a fatal leadership flaw. We suffered for it in Vietnam under a Democratic adminsitration, and we are suffering under it now under a Republican administration. By the way, at this point I strongly suspect Iraq is so screwed up there are NO good solutions, only less bad ones, aka Vietnam by 1970. You want to get scared, Ned, start googling the Styker, Rumsfeld's other pet project - but that is for a whole additional thread. Check the unit TOE also - no organic artillery (the old air power makes it unneccessary bit - until bad weather, insufficient air support given level of combat, or simply unfavorable terrain make you need that 155mm fire mission NOW). The man is as dangerous as McNamara was.
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shawnmmcc
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Ned, you had intelligence people in the CIA, State Department, and DOD who had been gaming Iraq since the first Gulf war. From what I've been able to catch, ALL of them warned Rumsfeld about the problem with occupying the country, and that he was proposing deploying too few troops. That's not a mistake, it's pigheadedness.
He brought in his own people, who regurgitated exactly what he wanted. THAT is incompetency. I said it then, and since this happened while you were away, I'll mention that my sister's husband is, actually was to use the proper tense, one of Rumsfeld's 1000 statistics, i.e. he's dead, we got to bury him in July a sniper got him in Iraq. Note neither the US nor the interim government has control in several urban areas, and we have even abondoned cities to insurgent quasi-government. That is not "going well" Ned, at least how I define it.
Ned, we are going to end up either with a Civil War or a quasi-Moslem statem, not the wonderful democracy that will change the Middle East - one of Bush's justifications. Think Vietnam and similar, though not identical, arguments reference communism. The new state will not have the common human rights we associate with freedom of religion or anything approaching equality for women. It will not change one damn thing in the Middle East, and will very likely end up closer to Iran than the United Stated. We can talk in about two years - care to guess how many American service men will have died to put in a quasi-democratic government (sort of like being slightly pregnant) with Clerical oversight and religious courts in parallel to the civil ones? By the way, I have to go to sleep, I'll check in tonight.
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Ogie Oglethorpe
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Marietta, GA
Dec 1999
time: 05:23
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Had to rely on establishment media (yeah I know you all will think NY Post anything but) for this but anyway:
quote:
CBS'S BIG BLUNDER?
By JOHN PODHORETZ
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Email Archives
Print Reprint
September 10, 2004 -- THE populist revolu tion against the so- called mainstream media continues. Yesterday, the citizen journalists who produce blogs on the Internet — and their engaged readers — engaged in the wholesale exposure of what appears to be a presidential-year dirty trick against George W. Bush.
What the bloggers and their audiences did was call into profound question the authenticity of four documents proudly trumpeted by CBS News in a much-heralded investigative report on Wednesday night's edition of "60 Minutes" about the president's National Guard service in the early 1970s.
These were "previously unseen documents . . . obtained by '60 Minutes,' " the network bragged Wednesday night on its Web site. Their author, supposedly, was Bush's squadron commander, Jerry Killian, who died 20 years ago.
They "include a memorandum from May 1972," CBS reports, "where Killian writes that Lt. Bush called him to talk about 'how he can get out of coming to drill from now through November.' " A document dated "18 August 1973" complains that Killian is being asked to "sugar coat" Bush's record. "I'm having trouble running interference and doing my job," the document says.
Liberals went wild with glee about the story, especially after the onslaught on John Kerry's Vietnam record by his fellow Swift-boat veterans.
Kevin Drum, the most talented of the left-wing bloggers, wrote: "This story is a perfect demonstration of the difference between the Swift-boat controversy and the National Guard controversy. Both are tales from long ago and both are related to Vietnam, but . . . in the National Guard case, practically every new piece of documentary evidence provides additional confirmation that the charges against Bush are true."
Drum simply assumed that the documents were above-board. So did The New York Times and The Washington Post, both of which put the story on its front page on Thursday.
They were doubtless swayed by the fact that CBS said " '60 Minutes' consulted a handwriting analyst and document expert who believes the material is authentic."
Maybe "60 Minutes" should have tried another expert or two.
CBS made the four documents available in their original form on its Web site Wednesday night.
And by yesterday morning, they were being examined with a fine tooth comb.
The Minneapolis lawyers who run powerlineblog.com were on the case early. Two of the blog's readers directed their attention to a note left on an Internet bulletin board on the freerepublic.com Web site — the 47th posting on the topic there.
Post No. 47 pointed out that there was something off about these documents from the 1970s: The spacing between the letters and the words was proportional, and only a few IBM electric typewriters could achieve that effect back then.
From there it was off to the races. Once anyone who had had experience writing and typing in the 1970s began examining the documents, it was impossible not to see some weird anachronisms that suggested they had been crafted not on a 1970s typewriter, but using Microsoft Word.
Charles Johnson, who runs the wonderful littlegreenfootballs.com, simply typed one of the memos over using Microsoft Word's New Times Roman font and, lo and behold, the document came out exactly identical to the one on the CBS site, down to the letter spacing.
The documents contain such features as superscript lettering, which is done automatically by Microsoft Word, and curly quotation marks. A brief glance at a Web site called selectric.org, run by an amateur typewriter fanatic, reveals dozens of IBM electric typefaces — and none of them has curly quotation marks.
By 3 o'clock, the very careful and honest Jim Geraghty, who produces invaluable material every day on nationalreview.com's Kerry Spot, was saying flatly, "CBS had better have one heck of a defense for this."
Yeah, it had better. I thought on Wednesday that it was scandalous for "60 Minutes" to turn over a good deal of its time on Wednesday night to one Ben Barnes, a one-time Texas political powerhouse who now claims he got George W. Bush into the National Guard.
The problem is not, as some would have it, that Barnes has raised half a million dollars for Kerry. The problem is that Barnes has already lied about this on videotape, and I use the word "lied" without difficulty, where he says he pulled strings for Bush when "I was lieutenant governor of Texas."
The thing is that George W. Bush was sworn into the National Guard in May 1968. Ben Barnes didn't become lieutenant governor until 1969.
From the lies of Ben Barnes to the apparent forgeries of who-knows-who-did-it — why has "60 Minutes" exposed itself in this way?
We all know why. Its producers and others in the media think George Bush deserves to be beaten up now because of the beating administered to John Kerry in August. In some weird way, the editors and producers believe this is fairness at work.
Instead, they have unmasked themselves. Or rather, they have been unmasked by ordinary people who can see what they and their hired experts evidently could not.
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10-09-2004 19:52
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