The Obamanation

[TheMercenary]

A complete LIE! how can you fools vote for this scumbag?



Barack Hussein Obama Sr. (Obama's father) Born: 4/4/36 Died: 11/24/82 at the age of 46. He was 5 years old when WW II started, and less than 9 1/2 yrs old when it ended.

Lolo Soetoro (Obama's step father) Born: January 2,1935 Died: 3/2/87 at the age of 52.

He was 6 years old when WW II started, and 10 years old when it ended. He must have been the youngest Veteran in the war.

[DanaC]

Bush told a much bigger lie.

[TheMercenary]

Originally Posted by DanaC

Bush told a much bigger lie.

Really, what was that? What evidence do you have that he actually 'lied"?


lie:
noun
1.
a false statement made with deliberate intent to deceive; an intentional untruth; a falsehood.

[TheMercenary]

Originally Posted by DanaC

Bush told a much bigger lie.

Come on Dana, really. Please present your evidence for the world to see. So far no one has been able to prove that assertion. Not that is not true, because you obviously have information the rest of the world is not privy to, but really, tell me.... because if you can prove that Bush "lied" I will be on your side....

Waiting....

[TheMercenary]

[SamIam]

Originally Posted by TheMercenary

"Now, I have lost all patience with you. You wouldn't read any material that doesn't support your agenda if your life depended on it."

Took you a while to reply, didn't it. I assume you are implying that the pot is calling the kettle black. Believe it or not, I do read the cut and pastes you post when they are not a 1,000 words long and actually have paragraph breaks.

Then I check the link (if you give one) and the material is written by someone like "The Coalition to Disband the Evil Socialist Tea Party."

Meanwhile you refuse to read the information put out by the non partisan outfits like the Congressional Budget Office (damn Commies!), and when you do read a sentence or two, you think their report is evidence against Obama.

Obama must be one incredibly powerful man. Every bad thing, no matter how large or how small, that happens anywhere in the world is due to Obama.

To misquote Monster, "If it rains in Ann Arbor, it must be Obama's fault."

Oh, I did like the cricket.

[BigV]

Originally Posted by TheMercenary

A complete LIE! how can you fools vote for this scumbag?



Barack Hussein Obama Sr. (Obama's father) Born: 4/4/36 Died: 11/24/82 at the age of 46. He was 5 years old when WW II started, and less than 9 1/2 yrs old when it ended.

Lolo Soetoro (Obama's step father) Born: January 2,1935 Died: 3/2/87 at the age of 52.

He was 6 years old when WW II started, and 10 years old when it ended. He must have been the youngest Veteran in the war.

Snopes says no lie.

The facts you post above are true and correct. Let me ask you this though, why would you list Lolo Soetoro? Who is he? He's not Barack Obama's father, you name his father in the previous sentence. It's my guess that you listed him because he was a man in Barack Obama's life that served in the role of father. One man of a few who served in that role, including Stanley Dunham, Barack Obama's grandfather, who was the man in his life when Obama was about ten years old. His father "figure".

I have a father. I have a stepfather. I frequently refer to each one as my "father", and I've never had a youtube callout for lying. But I'll make one if you'll post it and call me a liar. I would be HONORED to be in the same company as Barack Obama.

Is this the best you can do? I think you're merely uninformed mercy, and not clumsy, pandering, proselytizing, believing or lying. A repentable sin of political speech.

[DanaC]

Originally Posted by TheMercenary

Come on Dana, really. Please present your evidence for the world to see. So far no one has been able to prove that assertion. Not that is not true, because you obviously have information the rest of the world is not privy to, but really, tell me.... because if you can prove that Bush "lied" I will be on your side....

Waiting....

What do you mean, 'on my side'? I don't have a side.

I don't have proof that Bush lied. There's plenty of compelling evidence to suggest that he did. Plenty of evidence to suggest Blair did too. But clearly, I am not personally privy to the kinds of information streams that could answer to that. That doesn't mean he didn't lie.

Why the 'waiting' by the way? I live in England, you numpty, I'd gone to bed.

[DanaC]

Clearly, given that I am an ordinary British citizen posting from Yorkshire and with no access to secret government documents of any kind, I am unable to offer 'proof'. But... plenty of people have made excellent cases for Bush having at best chosen to be deliberately blind to any facts that might get in the way of his invasding Iraq, and at worst knowingly stated falsehoods in the run up to that invasion.

Here's an interesting piece from George Mason University's History News Network, 2003. Before you say it, yes, I realise this is an opinion piece. But, the considerations the writer set out for his students are compelling in my opinion.

Should The President Get The Benefit Of The Doubt?

When these statements were made, Bush's let-me-mince-no-words posture was convincing to many Americans. Yet much of the rest of the world, and many other Americans, doubted them.

As Bush's veracity was being debated at the United Nations, it was also being debated on campuses -- including those where I happened to be lecturing at the time.

On several occasions, students asked me the following question: Should they believe the president of the United States? My answer was that they should give the president the benefit of the doubt, for several reasons deriving from the usual procedures that have operated in every modern White House and that, I assumed, had to be operating in the Bush White House, too.

First, I assured the students that these statements had all been carefully considered and crafted. presidential statements are the result of a process, not a moment's thought. White House speechwriters process raw information, and their statements are passed on to senior aides who have both substantive knowledge and political insights. And this all occurs before the statement ever reaches the president for his own review and possible revision.

Second, I explained that -- at least in every White House and administration with which I was familiar, from Truman to Clinton -- statements with national security implications were the most carefully considered of all. The White House is aware that, in making these statements, the President is speaking not only to the nation, but also to the world.

Third, I pointed out to the students, these statements are typically corrected rapidly if they are later found to be false. And in this case, far from backpedaling from the president's more extreme claims, Bush's press secretary, Ari Fleischer had actually, at times, been even more emphatic than the president had. For example, on Jan. 9, 2003, Fleischer stated, during his press briefing,"We know for a fact that there are weapons there."

In addition, others in the administration were similarly quick to back the president up, in some cases with even more unequivocal statements. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld repeatedly claimed that Saddam had WMD -- and even went so far as to claim he knew"where they are; they're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad."

Finally, I explained to the students that the political risk was so great that, to me, it was inconceivable that Bush would make these statements if he didn't have solid intelligence to back him up. Presidents do not stick their necks out only to have them chopped off by political opponents on an issue as important as this, and if there were any doubt, I suggested, Bush's political advisers would be telling him to hedge. Rather than stating a matter as fact, he would say:"I have been advised," or"our intelligence reports strongly suggest," or some such similar hedge. But Bush had not done so.

And here, is the list o statements made during the period in question:

Bush's statements, in chronological order, were:
United Nations Address, Sept. 12, 2002:
"Right now, Iraq is expanding and improving facilities that were used for the production of biological weapons."
Radio Address, Oct. 5, 2002:
"Iraq has stockpiled biological and chemical weapons, and is rebuilding the facilities used to make more of those weapons."
"We have sources that tell us that Saddam Hussein recently authorized Iraqi field commanders to use chemical weapons -- the very weapons the dictator tells us he does not have."
Cincinnati, Ohio Speech, Oct. 7, 2002:
"The Iraqi regime... possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons."
"We know that the regime has produced thousands of tons of chemical agents, including mustard gas, sarin nerve gas, VX nerve gas."
"We've also discovered through intelligence that Iraq has a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas. We're concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using these UAVS for missions targeting the United States."
"The evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. Saddam Hussein has held numerous meetings with Iraqi nuclear scientists, a group he calls his"nuclear mujahideen" -- his nuclear holy warriors. Satellite photographs reveal that Iraq is rebuilding facilities at sites that have been part of its nuclear program in the past. Iraq has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes and other equipment needed for gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons."
State of the Union Address, Jan. 28, 2003:
"Our intelligence officials estimate that Saddam Hussein had the materials to produce as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent."
Address to the Nation, March 17, 2003:
"Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised."

Full article at http://hnn.us/articles/1506.html

[DanaC]

Now. Taking all that into account, if we then look at the statements made by two prominent CIA advisors to the President who insist that their attempts to draw his attention to inconsistencies in the reports and their own intelligence which suggested that in fact there was no WMD programme in Iraq, what we see is President navigating the facts in a knowingly dishonest fashion, whilst always retaining the politically important 'plausible deniability'.

On Sept. 18, 2002, CIA director George Tenet briefed President Bush in the Oval Office on top-secret intelligence that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction, according to two former senior CIA officers. Bush dismissed as worthless this information from the Iraqi foreign minister, a member of Saddam's inner circle, although it turned out to be accurate in every detail. Tenet never brought it up again.

Nor was the intelligence included in the National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002, which stated categorically that Iraq possessed WMD. No one in Congress was aware of the secret intelligence that Saddam had no WMD as the House of Representatives and the Senate voted, a week after the submission of the NIE, on the Authorization for Use of Military Force in Iraq. The information, moreover, was not circulated within the CIA among those agents involved in operations to prove whether Saddam had WMD.

On April 23, 2006, CBS's "60 Minutes" interviewed Tyler Drumheller, the former CIA chief of clandestine operations for Europe, who disclosed that the agency had received documentary intelligence from Naji Sabri, Saddam's foreign minister, that Saddam did not have WMD. "We continued to validate him the whole way through," said Drumheller. "The policy was set. The war in Iraq was coming, and they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy, to justify the policy."

Now two former senior CIA officers have confirmed Drumheller's account to me and provided the background to the story of how the information that might have stopped the invasion of Iraq was twisted in order to justify it. They described what Tenet said to Bush about the lack of WMD, and how Bush responded, and noted that Tenet never shared Sabri's intelligence with then Secretary of State Colin Powell. According to the former officers, the intelligence was also never shared with the senior military planning the invasion, which required U.S. soldiers to receive medical shots against the ill effects of WMD and to wear protective uniforms in the desert.

Instead, said the former officials, the information was distorted in a report written to fit the preconception that Saddam did have WMD programs. That false and restructured report was passed to Richard Dearlove, chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), who briefed Prime Minister Tony Blair on it as validation of the cause for war.

Both the French intelligence service and the CIA paid Sabri hundreds of thousands of dollars (at least $200,000 in the case of the CIA) to give them documents on Saddam's WMD programs. "The information detailed that Saddam may have wished to have a program, that his engineers had told him they could build a nuclear weapon within two years if they had fissile material, which they didn't, and that they had no chemical or biological weapons," one of the former CIA officers told me.

On the eve of Sabri's appearance at the United Nations in September 2002 to present Saddam's case, the officer in charge of this operation met in New York with a "cutout" who had debriefed Sabri for the CIA. Then the officer flew to Washington, where he met with CIA deputy director John McLaughlin, who was "excited" about the report. Nonetheless, McLaughlin expressed his reservations. He said that Sabri's information was at odds with "our best source." That source was code-named "Curveball," later exposed as a fabricator, con man and former Iraqi taxi driver posing as a chemical engineer.

The next day, Sept. 18, Tenet briefed Bush on Sabri. "Tenet told me he briefed the president personally," said one of the former CIA officers. According to Tenet, Bush's response was to call the information "the same old thing." Bush insisted it was simply what Saddam wanted him to think. "The president had no interest in the intelligence," said the CIA officer. The other officer said, "Bush didn't give a fuck about the intelligence. He had his mind made up."

The CIA officers assigned to Sabri still argued within the agency that his information must be taken seriously, but instead the administration preferred to rely on Curveball. Drumheller learned from the German intelligence service that held Curveball that it considered him and his claims about WMD to be highly unreliable. But the CIA's Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation, and Arms Control Center (WINPAC) insisted that Curveball was credible because what he said was supposedly congruent with available public information.

For two months, Drumheller fought against the use of Curveball, raising the red flag that he was likely a fraud, as he turned out to be. "Oh, my! I hope that's not true," said Deputy Director McLaughlin, according to Drumheller's book "On the Brink," published in 2006. When Curveball's information was put into Bush's Jan. 28, 2003, State of the Union address, McLaughlin and Tenet allowed it to pass into the speech. "From three Iraqi defectors," Bush declared, "we know that Iraq, in the late 1990s, had several mobile biological weapons labs ... Saddam Hussein has not disclosed these facilities. He's given no evidence that he has destroyed them." In fact, there was only one Iraqi source -- Curveball -- and there were no labs.

When the mobile weapons labs were inserted into the draft of Powell's United Nations speech, Drumheller strongly objected again and believed that the error had been removed. He was shocked watching Powell's speech. "We have firsthand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails," Powell announced. Without the reference to the mobile weapons labs, there was no image of a threat.

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/bl...wmd/index.html

[DanaC]

Plausible deniability is not good enough when it comes to casus belli.

But hey, you have fun painting Obama as a liar and a cheat.

[infinite monkey]

No one died when Obama lied.

But yeah, I think Obama's smarter than to spew easily discounted lies. I *know* he's an evil socialist and all, that's he's threatening our comfy lives, our security, but he's not stupid.

[henry quirk]

...Mr. Obama is a man of *mediocre intelligence who promotes *mediocre ideas.

At best: he's simply, currently, the shiniest, most visible, cog of the bunch.

The 'real' threat is not Mr. Obama but the inertia he (knowingly? unknowingly?) serves: the bureaucratic, cultural, inertia that's been in play since before the first proto-human climbed down out of the tree and said, "This here ground is good!" (and then was promptly set upon by all the other, more timid, proto-humans for daring to think and do for him- or her-self).

Mr. Obama (along with any other 'leader' you care to name) is simply a vehicle for, and tool in, the only real war, that being the war between the **'WE' and the 'I'.



*The status quo, convention, cog-thinking, 'society' and 'community' over 'civilization', the reduction of 'one' to simple resource for 'many'.

**All others are mere echoes, shadows, of this essential conflict which can be summed up in this question, 'Who owns 'me'?'

[infinite monkey]

A leader leads. Unless I'm a puppy, I don't have my very own designated leader. Our leader is to lead 'us' not 'me' or 'I' because, let's face it (and as hard as it is to believe) I'm NOT the only person on the face of the earth.

[henry quirk]

There is something approaching seven billion individuals on the Earth and not a 'WE' or 'US' anywhere to be found (except in the heads of folks who 'want' to be part of something bigger).

I'm not interested in being a component of 'WE', so, I don't need to be led.

I understand lots of folks 'do' want (or need) to be led...great and fine...*just leave me out of it.



*Which, of course, is a clear violation of how cogism works.

Cogism demands the participation of every last man, woman, and child.

Deviancy is discouraged and punished.