If the SEAL team raid on Bin Laden's compound had gone down like Carter's attempt to free the Iranian hostages, how many of you would be yelling about how Bush deserved most of the credit for the result?
Those two situations are apples & oranges. You obviously have zero understanding on what Republicans are saying about OBL's death or the failed Iran hostage rescue. I don't feel like wasting the time of listing the 20 or so bullet points explaining how different they are.
I strongly recommend you just post on DailyKos or whatever and have everyone agree with your nonsense.
Simply pointing out that had it gone wrong you'd be howling for BHO's blood even louder and nary a peep about how it was Bush's prep work and torture policy that got them into that situation.
You don't disappoint, that's for sure.
unsure of your "savior" NoBama to be trying to pull this out of your ass.
1. Carter's problem began and ended in his presidency. No one else had anything to do with it.
2. Without GWB's "prep work" and "torture policy" as you call it, they wouldn't have had the intel to get Bin Laden.
3. Had something gone wrong, yes, it would have been on "NoBama's" head, as he has so adamently been saying, it was HIS plan, HE approved and ordered it, and HE is taking credit for it as he should be.
4. But unlike Carter's case, where he came out and admitted he was responsible. I doubt very much, "NoBama" would EVER accept responsibility, he would blame someone else, that's his M.O.
But, nice try.
"Without GWB's "prep work" and "torture policy" as you call it, they wouldn't have had the intel to get Bin Laden."
Biggest fucking BS since WMD in Iraq. It is known fact, KSM lied repeatedly under duress. According to reports, OBL lived 5 to 6 years in that house so, if GWB and gang had the intel, how come they did not go in and get OBL. If GMB had the intel and didn't get him that even worse than not having the intel.
Right is sounding like Pakistani military and government. They are saying they didn't know OBL was there and the righties are saying with Torture and water boarding, we knew OBL was there but didn't do anything. The more the right tries to spin the incidence to their favor, more foolish it sounds like statements coming out of Pakistan.
Try sources other than Faux.
1. Carter's problem began and ended in his presidency. No one else had anything to do with it.
2. Without GWB's "prep work" and "torture policy" as you call it, they wouldn't have had the intel to get Bin Laden.
3. Had something gone wrong, yes, it would have been on "NoBama's" head, as he has so adamently been saying, it was HIS plan, HE approved and ordered it, and HE is taking credit for it as he should be.
4. But unlike Carter's case, where he came out and admitted he was responsible. I doubt very much, "NoBama" would EVER accept responsibility, he would blame someone else, that's his M.O.
But, nice try.
do you just make it up as you go along?
Even "NoBama" says that they didn't know exactly where he was until 6-8 months ago.
Even "NoBama's" people say they got the tip about the courier, which led to Bin Laden's location, from KSM and others under "intense" questioning.
BTW, there were WMD's in Iraq. Did you convenently forget that he used them on his own people, when he gassed the Kurds in northern Iraq, and then kept bragging to the world, and his own political cronies, that he still had them?
Before you get on this board and open your mouth and prove your an idiot, you should get your facts right.
You start with a rational thought and then compeltely lose it. Yes, they didn't know where OBL was until 6-8 months ago. In fact, they didn't know he was in Abbotabad until they broke into his room! (See above thread about luck). As far as the waterboarding, anyone with an open mind knows there's two sides on that and the jury's out. Major (though unnamed) sources say KSM lied after waterboarding. If true, do you really think we needed to waterboard him 180 times just to get him to lie? Do you really think that lie was so crucial in getting OBL? The basic info about the courier didn't come from KSM or al-Libi, but from others. And waterboarding was not used on them.
As for WMDs you are totally out to lunch. Yes, everyone knew he used WMDs on his own people. So what? That was years before. He bragged about having them? Big deal! His own people were telling him about programs that didn't even exist! If they existed, how come we found nothing...repeat NOTHING, after we went in there. How come even former Bush people acknowlege he had no active WMD programs in 2003? So I guess you also don't believe them?
Talk about someone who "opens his mouth," "proves himself an idiot," and "should get your facts straight." Yes, AF goes off the deep end sometimes but you are making him look smart, dumba.
-- Modified on 5/6/2011 9:51:52 AM
if I have a gun and you saw me shoot someone in the head last week, then today, I come up to you empty handed and say I'm going to shoot you in the head, are you going to believe me and think I might do it, and take some action to defend yourself, or say, because I don't have the gun in my hand, that I am lying, then wet your pants, cry like a baby, and blame someone else as I pull out a gun.
Looking back, second guessing, is easy, dealing with it in real time is completely different.
You don't have to have an "active WMD program" to have those weapons stock piled away. And as you have admitted, he DID have them and he DID use them. Any sane person would believe that he still had them and would use them again.
I guess you would have sat back on your ass and waited to see if he really had them and used them before you did anything...
Sometimes, you just can't "negotiate" with creatures who's only purpose in life is to cut your head off. Sometimes you just have to take them at their word, defend yourself and be done with it.
"Gomer", your thread above is proof positive that you're too gullible & ignorant to participate on this board-----
And has nothing to do with Liberal or Conservative. Re WMDs, when I said "no active WMD program" that includes stockpiles of active weapons! And, in fact, there were no stockpiles! That's why they didn't find any, idiot! As for looking back and second guessing, you also ignore we had UN weapons inspectors in there keeping an eye on him. Yes, he played games with them and they never found any weapons. And do you know why? BECAUSE THERE WEREN'T ANY !! If there were, how come US troops never found them? Do you think they didn't look hard enough? Do you think Bush, Cheney, Rummy et al were lying when they said they couldn't find any?
Bottom line, you are so dumba it's impossible to have a rational discussion with you. Like the man said:
"You can't fix stupid."
PS: And don't tell me that when they found a few rusty nerve gas shells left over from the Iran/Iraq war that counts. There were hardly any at all and they were unusable.
why not also credit GWB for the current lousy econonmy ?
When Hell freezes over-----LOL !
ANOTHER fucking moron--------
Wait a minute... It's even more stupid!
Republicans are reminding the public that the intelligence was acquired from Bush policies because:
1) Every liberal has been bitching about it for over 8 years. Because as we all know, enhanced interrogations don't really work and the CIA did it just because they're super-mean guys. And everyone knows that you can get so much more info from terrorist if you read them their Miranda rights and send them to a federal penitentiary in Idaho with $8 an hour guards as opposed to a military prison with CIA interrogators.
2) Obama certainly wasn't going to give the Bush policies credit. here's a quick clip from his speech: "I, I, ME, ME I, I, I, ME, I".
Hey Priapus,
When you jerk-off at night do you fantasize about Obama wearing a Rambo outfit and storming the compound with guns blazing? Are you at all aware that it was the military that conceived and executed the mission and your little boy crush just signed off on it? I hope you are enjoying his first good moment. 487,000 new jobless claims this week and it's all Bush's fault.
my, my aren't we SENSITIVE ! "Dish it out but can't take it" ?!----LMAO !
"OC", your "metrosexual whining" means that the following pic is a slaute to you------
Do you even have an argument at this point? At least the libs on this board make arguments and try to be persuasive. As I stated before: You're boring.
I know you've reached a level of Zen that I doubt I ever will ... but good god man, stop eating your own brownies 
you should know better than to ask for honesty from the Right ... it's not in their vanacular my good fellow
But thanks for the laughs ... I mean shit .. now the 'CONS say we shouldn't have killed OBL at all ... yeah that's gonna go over well come 2012 ... ahhhhhhhh 4 more years !! 4 more years !! 4 more years !!
It'll make BillyBrat's head explode ... if it hasn't already
Now this is ironic. The thread title is "intellectual honesty (insert extra punctuation)"
Please tell us kind Sir, precisely which Republicans are saying that we should not have killed OBL at all?
I await your list of names with baited breath.
PS. Its vernacular not vanacular.
You are asking for an apples and oranges comparison. If the mission had gone wrong the mistake would have been in the execution of the mission, not the tremendous amount of work it took to acquire the intelligence.
The credit Bush gets is in the intelligence network created on his watch that gathered the vital intel that eventually bore fruit.
The mission itself, the decision to use ground troops rather than a missile, and the unqualified success of that decision, are to Obama's credit. The very reason I give Obama such high praise was that it took alot of guts to use ground troops rather than just sending in the missiles. A missile strike would have taken out the compound quite nicely, killing everyone in it. But there would almost certainly have been civilian casualities (bad), and chances are we wouldn't have been able to say definitely that we got OBL (not good, but we could have lived with it). Maybe they'd have found enough body parts to run DNA on, maybe they wouldn't have. But the upside would have been that no American troops were put at risk in the operation.
Instead of taking the easy route though, Obama chose to go for the slam dunk, and sent in the ground troops. The strike was surgical, no civilian casualties, and allowed us to know with 100% certainty that we got the bastard. The downside though, was that if we had lost any soldiers, critics would complain that we should have just sent in the missiles. I'm still shocked that our soldiers didn't suffer so much as a hangnail. And there is no doubt in my mind that if the mission had somehow gone horribly wrong - if we'd lost the men sent in, and failed to get OBL, that would have put Obama's chances of re-election at less than 0%. So basically, Obama put his presidency on the line when he made the much riskier decision to use ground troops, and for that he alone gets the credit.
What you don't seem to be understanding Puck is that recognizing the contributions made during Bush's term in office in no way diminishes Obama's success. If you are looking for intellectual honesty, try a little bit yourself by admitting that the intelligence trail extends back over 6 years, and Obama has only been in office for 2 of those 6 years.
While I think the jury's out on the value of the intel gleaned from KSM and al-Libi, Bush clearly deserves some credit, too. All the assets used in the raid were nurtured during his terms. See thread above.
It depends how it went wrong.
If it went wrong because the intel was off and bin Laden wasn't there, that would be a problem traceable to Bush interrogations, etc. (That doesn't mean the idea was wrong. Every investigation has false leads and that is not an argument not to investigate. However, that would be traceable in that direction.)
If it went wrong because wind knocked down a copter, but it was later determined that bin Laden was there, the fault would not be Bush's or Obama's. Neither of them would control the wind, or that type of event.
Carter's problem was not one failed mission. JFK screwed up Bay of Pigs, and Ike screwed up the pilot that crashed in Russia (I think it was Ike and I forget the name. Sorry.) It was the fact that Carter could not dig himself out of the morass.
To just say, "if the mission failed," is not enough to determine blame, unless you know why and what happened next.
Was the U2 pilot shot down over Russia. No blame should go to Ike, that's just how the game was played back then. An old colleague of mine was in the AF unit that used to fly similar missions with B-47s along the Russian border to draw up their fighters and test their radar. The same unit today was very active in the intelligence-gathering that nabbed Bin Laden.
Excuse the senior moment. The memory ain't what it used to be.
And get this, the mission was flown from a base in Pakistan. The plane was damaged by a Soviet SAM and Powers bailed out over Russia. The Soviets knew about the mission and had it's forces on high alert.
Did Ike know that the Russian SAMs could hit a U2? Yes. Did the Russians know that a U2 was coming?
Yes. Military missions are always a gamble and must always be viewed as such. In the U2 incident the US learned that Soviet air defenses had evolved to the extent that high altitude flights over Russia were
no longer possible. Was getting that knowledge worth the risk? Yes.
The problem with that Puck, is that conservatives would have to be humbled and give Obama the credit he deserves. But instead they twist themselves up like pretzels.
It's got to be a hard sell for them. For them to admit that daddy was incompetent, they would have to admit that they were incompetent for believing in him. They'd rather do a pretzel dance in a vain hope of being able to save face.
Their position is quite a flimsy one. It's that intelligence work is pieced together from multiple pieces, and that some of those pieces came from torture, and since daddy ordered the torture, daddy should get credit.
However, since the American People are not privy to all those pieces of intelligence that led to this successful mission by Naval Seal Team 6, they can only speculate that the intel from torture was significant in this operation.
That's really all they have. Speculation.
Funny thing about this...all the torture seemed to happen early on, I believe ending in 2002. Every study done on torture tells us that detainees are more likely to tell interrogators what they think they want to hear rather than the truth. And in the case of Benyam Mohammed, it appears they tortured just because the administration got off on it.
But if this torture was indeed so fruitful, then why did the Bush administration close it's bin Laden unit, effectively giving up on looking for him?
I agree with you on this one. But I make a separate point re giving Bush some credit, which is that all the military and intelligence assets that made this possible were, at a minimum, continued and nurtured during his administration. And I don't accept the "logic" that whatever lapse he may have had (not really provable) in letting 9/11 happen, negates this.
First off, I don't think anyone in their right mind should be elbowing others out of the spotlight to claim "credit" for what was essentially an execution.
Look, sometimes executions sans judge and jury are needed. And when that is needed, you send in guys like the Seals. They did a good job, got their men, and got the hell out.
But it's an EXECUTION damn it. Let's be honest -- that's what it was.
It had to be done, and as far as I am concerned, NEITHER president had to look down a gun barrel, pull the trigger, and end someone else's life; and so neither president can really claim credit.
Now, if the operation had been botched -- just like the operations that were botched in Iran under Carter or Somalia under Clinton -- I would certainly be pissed. There is no reason, given the resources we have available, for operations to be botched and our fighters to be dragged through the streets. Yeah, I'd blame the sitting president for that -- especially after he had been in office for a couple of years. (If it happened early in the term I'd blame the prior president because the prior president would be responsible for our level of operational readiness inherited by the new Pres.)
Hey -- I might be a "right winger," but I try to be fair.