I just now got back and cleaned up from having an EEG this morning. I had to wake up at 8:30am after having slept for only two and a half hours, get dressed, drive for an hour to Walter Reed, wait in the Psychiatric department, all before finally spending 45 minutes getting hooked up to a machine. My appointment was supposed to be at 10:45am, but unfortunately an infant came into the ER and he needed the EEG machine before I did. I was fine with that, I had a book to read. All I can say is I’m glad I didn’t promise to come into work today.
As a very nice man hooked my head up to the EEG machine, we talked about a lot of things; my toe (it always comes up), the military, cloning, animal-human organ transplants. The whole nine yards, really. The conversation was pleasant, but being hooked up wasn’t. I had to hold still while he picked various spots on my scalp, scrubbed it with an incredibly abrasive cleanser (Kyan so wouldn’t have approved), squirted some white goop onto the raw spot of skin, put some kind of gauze over that, and then once he was done applying all of that, he hooked up the wires. I felt like I had a bunch of weird, synthetic dreadlocks. The whole process wasn’t too nice, but it wasn’t exactly bad either. It was getting it off that was difficult, but more about that later.
After I was hooked up, the test itself only took about twenty minutes. For most of it, I just had to lay there with my eyes closed. But then I had to take very short, fast breaths for a few minutes, to try and deprive the brain of oxygen in order to look for a very specific form of seizures. Just when he told me I could stop, my arms were starting to go numb, I wanted to toss my cookies, and my lungs hurt like mad. It wasn’t fun. To cap off the test, I had to squeeze my eyes shut while an incredibly bright light strobed at me at varying rates and intensities. That was enough to really solidify my headache. I was more than ready to go home by the time he told me I was done.
I stood at the sink in that little room, trying hard to peel the goop out of my hair. It was no use, really, since it was all clumped up in my hair. Eventually, after getting the most obvious bits out, I just pulled my nasty hair back into a ponytail and went off to find Mom. She had gone to the medical library to try and help with my research for the First Star project. I found her, and off we went. It’s now three o’clock in the afternoon and I’ve just now finished in the shower, trying to rid my hair of that nasty goop. If I had said I was coming into work today, I wouldn’t have gotten there until five o’clock in the afternoon, which would have been really silly.
Time to change the subject.
I’ve been thinking a lot over the weekend about the Democrat presidential candidates, what they’ve said over the past few months, what they’re doing. In general, I’ve really just been thinking about the supposed furor over President Bush, and the subsequent angst of the presidential candidates. We can’t get ten minutes into a debate or a press interview, it seems, without someone letting out a Bush joke, a slam, or some kind of insult. It’s really bothering me because this upcoming election will be the first I’ve ever had the privilege to vote in, and by my own rules I already can’t vote for anybody but Bush. And that’s worrying me. My rule is this: after witnessing the crude and vicious personal attacks during Clinton’s reelection campaign – from all parties involved – and the subsequent tactics employed by both Bush and Gore in the 2000 elections, I promised myself I would never vote for someone who would stoop so low as to resort to personal attacks. They can debate issues, they can dispute someone’s worthiness of the office of President. But they can’t call names, they can’t baselessly insult, they can’t raise anger just for the sake of raising anger. I want facts, I want reason. I don’t want a playground shouting match.
I made that promise to myself and I intend to keep it. That’s why I’m so worried about the upcoming election. I have seen every single Democrat candidate for President blindly insult President Bush for very personal and unrelated reasons. To me, that’s nothing but childish and I won’t support that. Bush hasn’t really entered the campaign yet, because he doesn’t need to, so I’m not sure how he’ll respond. If he too responds with personal insults, that’ll cancel out my vote for him as well and I’m afraid I’ll be forced to write someone in. Call it a waste, but that was my promise to myself. It’s not my fault if the candidates are lowering their standards. I don’t have to support them in their childishness. I don’t see them as worthy of my vote. I see such actions as a window into their own character and integrity. If they are lacking faith in their own platform enough to resort to petty insults, what does that say about their steadfastness, their beliefs; their passion for democracy?
Anyway. I’m confused. Furthermore, I’m tired of the slander. It’s gotten to the point, I believe, that we’re so buried in slander that we can’t find the truth anymore. That’s why I’m asking for help. I’ve been hearing *so* much *so* often about Bush being secretive, Bush being incompetent, Bust being a liar. You know what I realized as I was struggling to pull clumps of white goop out of my hair? I haven’t seen a real analysis of these supposed lies and scandals. I have yet to see a real break-down of the lies and policies that they believe Bush enacted with shady intentions. Instead, all I’m hearing is rhetoric, and whatever facts I have been able to get a hold of have been so spun that it’s easy to contradict them.
I’m tired of it, and I won’t take it anymore. Instead, I have a proposal. I’ve compiled a list of questions that I believe will help me get to the bottom of this whole anti-Bush movement. I need your help, though. I don’t know what the concerns are anymore, I don’t know what shady policies people are referring to; I don’t know what lies you’re concerned about. I’ve seen a few twenty-something’s wearing “Impeach Bush” t-shirts, and I don’t know why. I’ve tried to find out why, but nothing that I’ve found is really that convincing. Actually, from what little I
I’ve decided that no one will ever find a candidate the perfectly suits them, and I think part of that is due to the fact that every candidate wants to please everyone. Therefore, I look for the best candidate, and for me personally — the one that best represents my views — that candidate is Bush.
As for the attacks on him, I see them as largely emotional, much in the way Clinton was attacked (although Clinton actually did perjure himself). I believe the whole lie thing comes from him going to war on the basis that Saddam has weapons of mass destruction, but that hindsight shows there probably wan’t proof. That’s not a lie in my opinion, especially given the fact that most of the world had cause to suspect Saddam.
I am a great lover of logical thinking, and a heart that seeks truth. That is why I too am bothered with the unsubstantiated Bush crap. If you ask someone, anyone what bush has lied about, or done dishonest, they can not tell you. They ride the waves of their emotion that crest on hatred of an opponent that isn’t what they think he is. But when you ask for proof they love to twist the issue back to emotions, and feeling of how evil he is to make us go to war. Bush himself largly ignores these attacks on his character, and just does his job the best he knows how.
It urks me to no end that he is honest as they come, and hardworking, but people still call him dumb, uneducated, and pretty much stick there tounges out at him. Which one is dumb!? The one that ignores such people, and doesn’t call names, or the masses that follow the trend of bush hate, because thats what seems p.c. at the moment?
This probably sounds weak, but a lot of this “Bush is a liar” stuff depends on your definition of a liar. Must someone tell an outright lie, or is giving misleading information enough? I don’t have hard facts for you, but my impression from the White House press conferences and speeches between 9/11 and the opening of the war on Iraq is that the administration (and I’m not solely blaming Bush for this) deliberately misled the American public into a false linking of Saddam, 9/11, and ‘weapons of mass destruction’ that allowed them to gain popular support for the war.
I recall seeing poll results right before the war began that suggested that a lot of people believed Saddam was involved in the 9/11 attacks. I got a feeling that a whole lot of people believed he had nuclear and biological weapons aimed at us as well. Most of the press releases from the White House justifying an attack played on these sentiments, and in my (admittedly unscientific) conversations with people I got the impression that those were the primary reasons they supported the war.
It’s a pretty big controversy at this point whether or not the administration knew better. I’m pretty sure they knew that Saddam and Al Qaida were not directly linked at all. I suspect that they deliberately inflated the chances of Saddam having WMD. The inspection process, such as it was, certainly didn’t support the notion that he had them. I know a lot of government officials claim they truly did believe he had WMD, so I’m not really sure what to think. Those who call Bush a liar don’t believe it, and I have a hard time with the way they justified things based on such shaky facts. I believe it was dishonest, if not an outright lie. Bush was complicit with it, knowingly or not.
Anyway, as the war went on and we realized that there were no WMD, I think too many people who supported the administration just said, “Okay, well, now that I think about it I think it’s worth it for all these other reasons I didn’t consider as strongly before,” without looking critically upon the dishonest manipulation that had got them there in the first place. Maybe the war would still have been fought, but the real reasons for it would be in the open and it would truly be the will of an informed nation.
Anyway, sorry for the length and not putting it in your survey format, but that’s my take of the situation. I hope you find my thoughts at least somewhat reasonable.
Levi – Don’t worry about the length. Of course I find your concerns reasonable – this little experiment is simply an effort to find the Lies and to try to research them from a middle-of-the-road standpoint. I was just looking to see exactly what people’s problems are with Bush, see if I can’t get past the rhetoric and look at the cold hard facts.
As for the Lie about whether or not Saddam had WMD, I’m not convinced by this one at all. It’s a matter of a timeline. First off, I really believe it’s far too early to say that “there were no weapons of mass destruction.” We haven’t even begun to explore all of the potential storehouses, or even the random things buried in the desert. As a nation, I find that we’re all incredibly arrogant regarding just how much we know. There’s so much left out there in the desert that we don’t know about. We can’t give a definitive verdict until we’re done looking. So, my stance on that “he never had them” comment is that it’s too early to tell. Not saying they’re out there, not saying they’re not; we just don’t have the evidence to say there never were any to begin with.
The other half of that Lie, or as you said, misinformation, is a matter of intelligence. Go back in time for a minute. Everyone seems to forget that no one – not even the French, Germans, or Russians – ever denied that Saddam had WMDs. Indeed, there were reports that came out where the French and Russians admitted to transferring dangerous chemical and biological weapons in exchange for oil contracts. When someone files a questionnaire on this Lie, then I’ll be happy to search for those reports and post them in a follow-up questionnaire with my research and such. You said that Bush misled us, whether he knew it or not. You can’t lie to someone if what you’re saying you have every reason to believe is true. Bush could have been wrong, yes, but the majority of available consensus at the time corroborated his story. It couldn’t have been a lie perpetrated solely by the Bush administration if other nations were under the same belief because of their own intelligence and sources.
Furthermore, not much has been said about misleading intelligence coming out of Iraq at the time just before the war. I’ve seen other reports that clearly showed that Saddam’s own aides were exaggerating their claims regarding purchasing nuclear and biological weapons. If Saddam was being lied to, and led to believe he had WMDs, then you can’t fault American or British intelligence for believing it as well. We have hard documents that state Saddam’s intent to purchase, and his ability to purchase, and indeed, receipts of sort for those purchases. If those receipts were falsified by Saddam’s own aides, we would have had no way of knowing that *at the time* the Lie was supposedly told.
Those are my issues, in a nutshell, with this Lie. Again, I’d like to see it in questionnaire format so I can adequately research it, but this is what I know so far. Thanks, Levi, this was helpful. 🙂
The problem with the WMD issue is that we know he had them, we just don’t know when he got rid of them, where he did, or if he did. We certainly know that he had the intent to buy WMD and that he had the means. As for Democrat’s version of events or Republican’s… It’s difficult to determine who is being honest. There’s been too much mud-slinging on the issue (on both sides).
Heather, like you, my views on abortion and gay marriage are very specific and detailed and probably not very popular in this crowd. I’m firmly on the right when it comes to the economy and in the middle on social issues.
I have no doubt, and I’m not arguing, that Saddam would have liked to have WMD, and was in the process of obtaining them at some point. He had to have had some at one point, because he used them on his own people. I think there was significant, though certainly not definitive, evidence that he had disposed of them before the war began, though. When Bush was campaigning for war, there was less evidence of this, but I still think there was plenty to raise some doubts as to the need of war over a WMD threat. Plenty of people who were part of the inspection process didn’t believe there were WMD and ended up resigning in protest or being ignored. The government just continued to insist that it knew more than we did, and that we should all shut up and believe them. WMD exist! Iraq has them aimed at us! We must invade NOW to protect our people! That’s the sort of sentiment they created, and I don’t believe it was founded in any reality that the government was aware of. There was just enough intelligence to that effect to make it seem plausible if repeated loudly and often enough.
Why, if the evidence of WMD was so great, were the nations of Europe (who were actually in range of the sort of weapons Saddam could conceivably have gathered) not anxious enough about them to join wholeheartedly in the war effort? You’d think they’d be a bit worried if they thought they were in immediate danger.
I get the feeling, in my attempts to merge the information coming from both sides of the controversy, that Bush and his advisors were looking for an excuse to get rid of Saddam. The WMD/terrorism angle, although not truly representative of the real reasons they wanted to remove Saddam, was the most likely to gain public support for their effort, so they played it up. No, it wasn’t an outright lie; they’re not stupid enough to do that. But I think it was more than a little dishonest. Then again, the government has a long history of being dishonest to us with respect to foreign affairs. Bush and his administration aren’t the least bit unique in this respect, but then I don’t think the White House is the source of it; they just end up going along.
Europe didn’t fear Saddam because 1)they aren’t the Great Satan and 2)they were selling him supplies and didn’t think that he would get rid of his suppliers. France, Germany and Russia all had economic ties with him. They knew that he wouldn’t want to upset that applecart.
Just wanted to say how proud I am of you for trying to find out the facts and decide for yourself on all this political stuff. My two cents are these: WMD or no WMD, didn’t Saddam get squirrely with the inspectors? I thought that was the whole reason. And has the anti-Bush camp just decided to not acknowledge that the DOW recently broke 10,000 again, which is generally a good economic sign?
The Patriot Act is an act that the Bush Administraion asked congress to pass soon after 9/11. They passed it, The Patriot Act includes the right for government officials to search without warrent. That goes directly against the 4th Amendment in the Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights also guarentees the right to a lawyer which Bush has yet to supply the U.S. citizens to at Guantanamo Bay. Prisoners there have been held for years without formal charge.
Heather, I think it’s wonderful how you’re asking questions yourself and looking for real answers and not just what the media and proponents of criticism tell you. Having said that, remember that essentially no one really knows the truth, except perhaps Bush and the administration, the people physically involved in the situation, etc. That makes up a very small amount of people that actually are able to answer your questions truthfully. Of course they are, as every person, biased too, and so probably won’t give you a truthful answer should you get the chance to ask your questions.
With that in mind, we should still try to educate ourselves on these matters, especially now that it’s election time soon.
Coming from Europe myself, and having been exposed to European media, my perspective is a little different. Not just being positioned elsewhere, but also having experienced a different perspective through the media over here
Anyway, just like you, I’m not an expert, I can give you no hard facts (although I could dig it up of course, but perhaps that is overkill for this comment :), I can just tell you what I’ve been told. Just like the rest of you. Now I see some things being forgotten in this whole debate, things that I never see mentioned in American media (at least not when I’m watching it 4 AM American time :), and I’d like to ask the Americans who have posted their comments, what they’re thoughts are on the following:
1) CIA recruited the Iraqi Baath party (including a young Saddam Hussein) to murder the leader of the country, Abdul-Karim Kassem.
2) Osama bin Laden and his organization of ‘Afghanies’, who faught against the Russian occupation of Afghanistan until 1988, was finansed and equipped by CIA/USA in order to damage Soviet maximal damage. Talibanes were trained and supported by USA’s allied Pakistan, and with massiv support from Saudiarabien.
3) The US is supporting Saudiarabia, which seems no better than the regime of Saddam. Will the American administration make claims that Saudiarabian regime must be removed in 10 years from now, forgetting their support of the regime?
Ok, I’ll stop now. My point is not that I know the truth and you don’t. My point is that these stories are presented in the media time and time again, at least here in Europe. My point is that it’s not just a matter of whether Bush lied or not about WMD. That is definitely an issue, but the issues are many!
On the issues already brought up. Bush did not claim that Iraq might have WMD, he said he was absolutely certain Iraq had WMD. Such a claim demands evidence and we have seen none. The prime minister of my own country made the same claim and that upsets me. I consider it a lie. Would you yourself be able to make the same claim in front of the entire nation and be able to justify it? I just have a hard time understanding any American not feeling they’ve been lied to.
Apart from that, Bush claimed that al-Qaeda and Saddam was somehow linked. That’s an outright lie.
Heather, it’s great that you’re trying to do your own research. I hope you’ll look into the above as well.
As for myself, I would not rule out the Democratic candidates for personal attacks. Personal attacks are unfortunately a part of any political campaign – Democratic or Repulican (you said it yourself, Bush used dirty tricks in 2000, why should he deserve your vote now then?). Throwing your vote out because of that is not worth it in my opinion, you’ll never end up voting then. Consider more issues than just that one and then decide who to vote for.
Love,
Simon
Great points, Simon. I think it’s good to step outside one’s personal viewpoint for a while to gain perspective on issues. The Democrats and Republicans are so polarized (in the sense of polarized filters in sunglass lenses) that even when what they say consists entirely of true facts, it can be misleading due to what they leave out. And, as we’ve seen, people never restrict themselves to true, provable facts in discussion. There’s always an element of opinion and conjecture.
This spin on everything makes it very hard for people within the USA to get objectively neutral facts from which to reason. The populace, and therefore the majority of those working in the media, are split largely into two political groups, so spin tends to reinforce the agendas of one party or the other. People will generally subscribe to one side or the other, and from that point they receive filtered information and commentary from their side. The other side starts to look hopelessly misinformed and even insane or dishonest. A 3rd party who is not part of American culture is not subject to this particular polarizing filter. Of course, there are probably a different set of distortions in this case, but by examining the differences one is likely to get a clearer approximation of the truth.
Colon Powel admitted that there is no credible evidence linking Al Quada with Saddam. Check any online news programs.
Just dropping in to suggest a book: “Dude, Where’s My Country?” by Michael Moore. It contains a great deal of “Bush is a liar”, but it’s mostly satire, and it provides factual information and cites references. Really, look into it.