I also predicted the 2012 election exactly right and I think you're full of shit here.
The 2012 election was crazy easy to pick. Doing so correctly is not a mark of any particular insight.
This is a wager bet not a political discussion.
My last presidential prediction was 100%
I predicted Romney nomination and the loss to Obama.
I just wanted to see if that's people's primary complaint about him, and I guess it is.
But why attack Bush? The things you described I don't think should be ascribed to the person himself necessarily. If Barack Obama was president then or if it were Hillary Clinton, do you honestly think things would be different during the last decade?
Yes I do. Not just because they're a different calibre of President. Also because they do not surround themselves with neocons.
I think W thought the same thing about his 'presidency,' but Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rove appreciate your understanding though
I think short of being part of the wealthiest 5%, a politically active evangelical holy roller or a just a plain ol GOP sockpuppet, voting for any of those idiots is outright lunacy. Another Bush in office or a Koch Bro. servant becoming president will not bode well for this country, of that I have no doubt whatsoever.
I've no understanding for Cheney, Rumsfeld, or Rove. None whatsoever.
Mark this spot. Jeb Bush will win the next presidental election, and will be re-elected for a second term.
Romney will be Vice President pick.
Americans are tired of a Democrat president. They want a White conservative president for a change.
All of P&N should be locked.
Run along... politics and news is too intricate for you... Scurry back to the safety of OT where the Mensa members hang out...
Or what, you'll be an asshole? That's my one weakness, don't do that D:
Obama and Hillary aren't Neocons? are you sure? Hillary voted for the War in Iraq and Afghanistan. Look at what Obama has been doing in the middle east during his administration. If Obama fully re-invaded Iraq by the end of his administration, I would not be surprised. Clintons, Obama and Bushes have a lot more in common than you probably are willing to admit. If it weren't for 9/11 or WMDs, I don't think we would have been in the middle east during the last two decades which is why Bush I left Iraq in '91 as the "job" was considered "done".
there is a truly depressing survey by the Annenberg Public Policy Center that found that 227 years after the signing of the Constitution only 36 percent of Americans can actually name the three branches of government
Only 2 of 5 voters can name the three branches of the federal government. And 49 percent of Americans think the president has the authority to suspend the Constitution.
Yes, I am confident they are not neoconservatives. Neither was Bush himself, by the way. He surrounded himself with them, though, and let them drive his foreign agenda as soon as 9/11 happened.
The Dem`s can run anybody they want and Republicans will still lose!!Hillary will never win because she is not likeable and most of America believes that she is responsible for the blue dress.
If the Dems run Hillary they can pack it in and go home.
Alright if you don't consider Bush a neocon which I guess I can agree with, how do you not see that if Hillary and Obama in the same position Bush was in, they wouldn't have done the same thing? To have a liberal who wouldn't have inched towards removing WMDs from Iraq or invading Afghanistan looking for Binladen, you'd need a super liberal like Bernie Sanders or something. Hillary and Obama are just too moderate in foreign policy to do nothing.
Do you mean the position of having to deal with the aftermath of 9/11? While such a tragic and historically unprecedented event certainly demanded a strong political response, it's by no means clear that that response had to take the form of a military invasion, and certainly not of Iraq, based on who the actual hijackers were, and based on the fact that Al Qaida (rather than Iraq) took credit for the attacks. Or perhaps you're not referring to 9/11?how do you not see that if Hillary and Obama in the same position Bush was in, they wouldn't have done the same thing?
We didn't invade Iraq because of 9/11, nowhere have I read the Bush admin say that's why they were invading Iraq. Invasion of Afghanistan was because of 9/11. Whether the uneducated populace thought the reason for the Iraq war was due to 9/11, that's their problem. All the rednecks who are too uneducated to know the difference between Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Kuwait, Cuba, Canada, Japan, China, what ever, they have no problem invading an tearing shit up because it gives them an excuse to say USA #1, we'll kick your ass!Well, let me put it this way: neoconservatives are not the only kind of person who consider use of military force justified in certain circumstances. The difference is the range of circumstances that they consider acceptable for waging war, and the means they find acceptable for selling war to the citizenry.
For example: Hillary did indeed vote in support of the Iraq War Resolution, but (according to her, at least) this was because she genuinely believed the lies/intelligence that there was an viable WMD threat from Saddam Hussein, and she moreover had the impression that W. was going to only use the military option after exhausting all avenues with the UN inspectors.
The neocons, on the other hand, went specifically out of their way to manufacture and sell the lies about WMD (in spite of what the US intelligence community was actually saying), because they wanted a pretext to go in there and make the kind of mark on the world that they thought befitted the world's remaining military superpower. That's an important difference, and what I've just typed has been quite thoroughly documented.
I could link you to some good academic literature on what makes someone a neocon if you like, but it's rather long. An acceptable layman's substitute for it can be had by looking at the beliefs of neocons like Marco Rubio and Max Boot, e.g., as described in this article.
Edit: Almost forgot, this one by Max Boot himself is essential reading.
As for your question: Do you mean the position of having to deal with the aftermath of 9/11? While such a tragic and historically unprecedented event certainly demanded a strong political response, it's by no means clear that that response had to take the form of a military invasion, and certainly not of Iraq, based on who the actual hijackers were, and based on the fact that Al Qaida (rather than Iraq) took credit for the attacks. Or perhaps you're not referring to 9/11?
We didn't invade Iraq because of 9/11, nowhere have I read the Bush admin say that's why they were invading Iraq. Invasion of Afghanistan was because of 9/11. Whether the uneducated populace thought the reason for the Iraq war was due to 9/11, that's their problem. All the rednecks who are too uneducated to know the difference between Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Kuwait, Cuba, Canada, Japan, China, what ever, they have no problem invading an tearing shit up because it gives them an excuse to say USA #1, we'll kick your ass!
The third one by itself, as I think I said earlier, is a reason to help the Iraqis but it's not a reason to put American kids' lives at risk, certainly not on the scale we did it. That second issue about links to terrorism is the one about which there's the most disagreement within the bureaucracy
The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason
No thanks. No more Clinton. No more Bush. We need new blood.
Didn't we have new blood for the last 7 years? Look where that got us, he turned on the anchor baby clause amongst other things, cant do more harm to the country than that.
I think the next election will be the Koch brothers vs China, you see the citizens united ruling fucked up the country like nothing else before. Bush are no friend of Koch, so I dont think he will even be the front runner once the primaries begin. Clintons are big friend of China so we know who's the next Dem candidate will be, unless her effects of brain damage start showing up early. I think the next election is still very much up in the air
All the rednecks who are too uneducated to know the difference between Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Kuwait, Cuba, Canada, Japan, China, what ever, they have no problem invading an tearing shit up because it gives them an excuse to say USA #1, we'll kick your ass!
I'm not talking about what rednecks believed, I'm talking about the neocons' logic for invading Iraq. Although not the main reason, the Bush Administration's official case for invading Iraq included the notion that Saddam had ties with Al Qaeda (the organisation that took credit for 9/11), though admittedly they did not claim Iraq 'was behind' 9/11. see here and here, for instance. Edit: Oh, and for Bush's own articulation of it back in 2002, read this. For a detailed collection, see Section D (Page 21 onwards) of this.
The main ingredient in the Administration's case for war was the idea that Iraq retained viable WMD and the capability to use those WMD against the US. Even if you believed that, however, it was probably not enough by itself to convince you that war was justified. After all, the US itself had WMD at the time, as did Israel, North Korea, Britain, France, Egypt and so on. If WMD capability alone was enough for war, we'd have all nuked each other out of existence long ago. Something else was needed, and that's where the Iraq/al Qaeda linkage came in. Not the main argument, to be sure, but an important ingredient to help convince people that in the case of this particular guy, and his particular WMD, the US could not just leave things be.
What's interesting about the alleged Iraq/al Qaeda linkage is that not everyone within Bush's Administration was comfortable with the idea. Neocons like Wolfowitz believed passionately in the linkage, and Wolfowitz himself is in fact reported to have already started insisting on an invasion of Iraq at a Camp David meeting on September 15, 2001 (yes, FOUR days after 9/11), because Saddamn Hussein's moral reprehensibility made him an inevitable target "if the war on terrorism was to be taken seriously." That's according to Bob Woodward his 2003 book, Bush at War.
If we listen to Wolfowitz himself, in the famous Vanity Fair interview from May 2003, we hear that the Administration's case for war was actually built on 3 concerns:
1) The WMD issue,
2) Saddam's "support for terrorism," and
3) His criminal treatment of the Iraqi people
Wolfowitz himself adds a fourth concern, which is the "connection between the first two." He also says:
and earlier:
So WMD was the core ingredient in the Administration's case for war. Support for terrorism and the al Qaeda linkage was a secondary reason because not everyone within the Administration could agree on it. But the neocons certainly could.
I have more evidence for this if you're interested, but I fear I've already gone on enough of an OT rant for now.
The point is that a Jeb Bush Administration staffed with yet anough round of neoconservatives risks to take us back to the terrible days of invading countries on shaky grounds, and using traumatic events like 9/11 to rally people behind those invasions.