Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Don't Blame Me, I Voted For Kerry -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Cogito who wrote (77441)	6/22/2006 2:35:34 PM
From: sea_biscuit	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 81568

Finally, when you resort to dirty tricks, like the "push polls" that were used against McCain in the primaries in 2000, you're beyond manipulation. Just before the primary there, a poll was commissioned in South Carolina, where likely McCain voters were asked "Would you be more or less likely to vote for McCain if you knew he had a black child?" This, of course, makes it sounds like he had a bastard with some black woman, when in fact he adopted a bangladeshi child. I really hope they do it to McCain again in 2008. The shameless bastage deserves to go through it one more time.

To: Cogito who wrote (77441)	6/22/2006 5:19:42 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 81568

It's manipulation when you always mention 9/11 and Saddam Hussein together, while knowing there's no real connection. This tactic was so effective that a majority of Americans became convinced Saddam was directly involved with that attack. To that I would reply, if you don't believe it yourself, it's manipulation. If you do believe it yourself, it's persuasion. Not the same thing. This is a subject where since 9/11 conservatives have been from Mars and liberals have been from Venus. Liberals have this great impulse to defend Saddam since Bush hates him and they hate Bush. So they say that there is no connection between Saddam and 9/11, which is probably true, and that there is no connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda, which is certifiably false. In fact, I would accuse the Bush administration of underestimating the Saddam-Al Qaeda connection in the runup to the war. The Bush administration, like the realists and the liberals, still clung to the outmoded idea that Saddam was a secular nationalist ruler. Saddam was a secular ruler when he came to power. But in the last ten years of the rule he tried very hard to become an Islamist ruler in order to co-opt the Islamist wave in Arab politics. Why is this important? It goes to motivation and ideology. Bush thought that once Baghdad was taken, once the regime fell, Saddam's men would have no more motive to fight since Saddam no longer had an ideology that anyone wanted to follow. They believed that only those regime elements with too much blood on their hands to give up would fight. But look what happened instead. Almost on the instant, American troops found themselves fighting Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia - an Islamist branch of the insurgency full of foreign jihadis and Iraqi Republican guards, flush with Baathist cash. This was serious because Al Qaeda is one organization that certainly knows how to provide an ideology. Do you really believe that the these people were strangers to each other before April 2003? They had a lets-get-acquainted tea party in Syria after the invasion? If you do, you might check the evidence: -Saddam trained terrorist at Salman Pak -IIS (Iraqi intelligence) aided Ansar al Islam, an Al Qaeda group -IIS send technical training to Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan in the use of poison gas -IIS listing OBL as an "intelligence asset" since 1992 -Saddam created terrorist militias before 2003, called Uday's Fedayeen -Since the insurgency began, the Baathists and the Al Qaeda fighters have been pretty well joined at the hip. Given this, what sense does it make to defend Saddam as "having no connection to 9/11" and decrying the manipulation that made the link? The Administration has been quite careful about not actually saying that Saddam had anything to do with planning 9/11, btw. But they are apt to speak of the Ba'athists and Al Qaeda as cooperating organizations because, well, they are.