Posts by James Bremner
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From Russell's post:
The Republicans in Congress decided from the outset that their future would be inextricably tied to George Bush and his policies. It has become this sad session of members sitting down and drinking Kool-Aid delivered by Karl Rove. Congress became a mere extension of the White House."
Simply not true. In the session just finished, the Repub House bucked Bush on his two biggest initiative this session, Social Security Reform and Immigration reform/amnesty.
I will read the RS article, but I read and hear that stuff all day long, that kind of stuff is nothing new. Some of it is has a basis and some of it may well be correct, but most of it isn't. Bush does seem to have a strange characteristic about him; he brings the worst and most delusional in his opponents.
I made the point yesterday; do you remember all the BS about Karl Rove and Valerie Plame? It went on not for months, but for several years. It was all a Rovian conspiracy to punish an administration critic by outing his under cover wife, Rove was going to be frog marched out of the White House etc. etc. Turns out Richard Armitage accidentally let the name slip to Bob Novack. There was no "there" there, I mean nothing, nada, zip, it was all hype and bullshit. So many of the charges leveled at Bush and Co. are like this, bullshit and hot air. It is mostly just politics, trying to distract and tie up an administration so it can't advance its agenda. Pathetic in many ways, don't these people have something more useful to do than dreaming up nutty Rovian conspiracy theories?
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Clarke wrote:
Which leads to the conclusion that the johnny-come-lately Big Brother approach espoused by the NSA is simply egregarious over-reach by the security agencies, and is not needed for actual security.
What about the UK plane plot that was uncovered a few months back? There was a plot to blow up the Brooklyn bridge in 2002 or 2003 that was uncovered due to intelligence sharing enabled by the Patriot Act.
You are absolutely correct that Bush going after Al Qaeda and tearing up the organization has been very effective, but there is also no doubt that the bastards (they may be different bastards)are still trying to kill as many infidels as they can.
In any case, the NSA wasn't a Johnny come lately effort, it was underway quite quickly after 9/11, the NYT revealed its existence only recently. If you capture a bad guy in Afghanistan or Pakistan or Iraq who has a bunch of US phone numbers on his laptop or written down somewhere, why an earth wouldn't you listen in on any calls made? Wouldn't it be madness not to?
Most Americans agree with this kind of stuff. A poll come out a few weeks ago that showed about a third of Americans thought the Govt. had gone too far in its efforts on the war on terror, one third thought the level of its efforts v loss of privacy etc. was about right, and about a third thought it hadn't gone far enough. Bet you didn't read that info in NZ did you?
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Russell Brown wrote:
What dumbfounds me is the way that conservatives seem happy to overlook the abandonment of basic conservative values here. Fiscal fecklessness, pork-loaded spending bills (just check the numbers for the pork explosion in the last five years), the unprecedented intervention of lobbyists
Believe me conservatives are not happy about any of that at all, they feel terribly betrayed by the Repub Congress and Whitehouse and this was a major factor in yesterdays' result.
Alistair wrote:James' willingness to maintain his engagement is to be admired. Somewhat.
A couple of points about my motivations:
If someone has facts and reasoning that I am not aware of that rebut my views, I want to find out as fast as possible.Communicating with people of similar views is boring, and I like a bit of back and forth, it is good fun.
There is an element of a desire to perform a public service here. I am a Kiwi who lives in the US and loves both NZ and the US. The gulf of misunderstanding between the countries has never been greater and is so frustrating when ever I go home for a visit. NZ is like an echo chamber, it is all "US bad", "Bush bad", blah blah blah, there is no attempt to understand or to look at things from another perspective, it is painful to say the least. There are sound reasons why the US does some of the things that it does of which most NZers are either completely unaware or seriously misinformed.
So I try to push back a bit. If I make a Kiwi stop and think "there might be a bit more to this than I have heard" or "maybe it is not quite like that after all" then I have succeeded in my quest
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Danielle, do you have anything useful or intelligent to add to the discussion?
If you don't agree with my points, rebut them. -
Craig is 100% correct about "the worst congress ever".
Has anyone here heard of Dan Rostenkowski, the Dem chairman of the Way and Means Committee until 1994. The guy was a major league crook.
Harry Reid, about to be the Dem Majority leader in the Senate has his 4 sons working as lobbiests. If the Dems wants to root out corruption, that would be a great place to start.
Don't get me wrong, the Repubs deserved a kick in the butt for either getting on the take in a few cases, and not doing anything to stop it in many other cases. -
Russell,
To reiterate a point I made yesterday, the kind of law enforcement we need is full on law enforcement that has the tools provided by the Patriot Act, the NSA program the Swift program and probably a bunch of other programs that the New York Times hasn't found about and published on their front page (yet) at its disposal. An approach that focuses on prevention. The kind of law enforcement approach that the US had in the 1990s when the CIA was barred, by law, from sharing information about terrorists with the FBI and other law enforcement agencies is much less successful than the full court press we have now, after all that approach led directly to 9/11. I fly across the Atlantic every now and again and I want the law enforcement to have every tool they can to stop Al Qaeda. It pisses me off that law enforcement are not allowed to use profiling, one of the most effective techniques at picking up bad guys. We will never beat those guys when we tie law enforcements arms behind their backs and blindfold them al la the Clinton DOJ in the 1990s.
To stop Al Qaeda, we need full on law enforcement and military action, like the bombing of the Madrassa in Pakistan last week where Zawaheri was understood to be.Re Rummy: Bush is wasting his time if he thinks by being "nice" to Pelosi et al, by dumping Rummy, that he will get some cooperation and bipartisanship, he wont, they will just spit in his face and make more demands. If he wanted to dump Rummy, he should have done it months ago, when it might have made a difference to last nights’ results.
Another point on the election. Do you hear the silence, the silence of no Republicans going ballistic about the result, making accusations of fraud and filing lawsuits? A lot of the results were very, very close, but no hissy fits. The Missouri senate seat was won by only a relative handful of votes, and Talent conceded even though there is an FBI investigation underway into an ultra liberal group called ACORN which is accused of fraudulently submitting 35,000 voter registration forms. If the boot was on the other foot, the noise would be deafening.
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Alastair
So the Dems won the House (expected) and look to have won the Senate (unexpected). You don't win 'em all, that is democracy (although how I wish the US would tidy up its voting systems to prevent voting fraud and get rid of gerrymandering etc.)When you look at how many races in both the House and the Senate were decided by very close margins it is clear that this result is not a "tsunami" that was predicted by so many, so if they can clean their act up and get back to their 1994 style conservative roots, the Repubs will be in a position to be very competitive at all levels in 2 years time.
Now the Dems have to govern and we will get to see if they can be constructive and useful and move the country forward, and not just shriek and scream and whine without offering hardly a useful idea or policy like they have for the last so many years. In 2008 the Dems, and to some extent the Dem Presidential nominee will be running on a track record, not just against the Repubs and the Bush administration, that is a much harder task.
Iran will now feel even more certain that with a divided govt., the US will be even less able to confront them on their nuke program. I saw just the other day a bunch of Arab countries, Saudi, Egypt, some Gulf states have all of a sudden gotten very interested in nuclear "energy" programs. A nuke arms race in the Middle East, does that make you feel more or less comfortable about our world? Doesn't help me sleep at night.
If you were an Iraqi insurgent or Al Qaeda head hacker, would the thought that the now increased chances of a precipitous US withdrawal from Iraq, leaving the field wide open for you, make you feel your chances of success have just increased or not?
These are not trivial questions or the raving of right wing nut. If you think they are, then you are not a serious or perceptive observer of world events.
For all our sakes I really, really hope the Dems rise to the occasion, but based on their previous statements and years of over heated rhetoric, I am not confident that this is possible. I would be delighted to be proven wrong. We shall all see!! Such is the democratic process!!
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Alistair, sorry to interrupt your echo chamber, or should that be circle jerk?
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By the way, do exit polls include all the advance voting that has been taking place for a couple of weeks now?
No, they dont.
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Joe, was the planned attack on multiple airplanes that was stopped recently in the UK another one of those highly unlikely events? There seem to have been quite a few of those “highly unlikely” events over the last few years, Madrid, Bali, London etc. Maybe they are not so highly unlikely after all.
So we are just supposed to do nothing to try to stop Bin Laden and Co from doing again what they have very clearly stated that they want to do again? I don’t get it. What is your suggested course of action?
I think we have hit on one of the central differences between people in places like New Zealand who feel that this terrorism stuff is all very far away and remote with no likely hood of impacting them, and those of us who live in the US and travel to New York and DC and who fly the Atlantic reasonably regularly and feel that any possibility of a terrorist attack is unacceptable and that the government can and should do whatever it can do to try to stop a terrorist attack before it happens.
We live in different worlds and look at each other and wonder what the f@#k the other person is thinking. I don't know what to do about it but 9/11 was real, it wasn't a 3 d holograph or a stunt faked by Chimpybushhitler to make money or as an excuse to invade Afghanistan and Iraq. It was cold blooded murder on a horrendous scale.