I apologize in advance here, folks. I usually try not to respond to OT
posts but...

On 2/19/04 10:51 PM, in article
, "Rick Folkers"
wrote:

What a bunch of horse****. You don't rate presidents on one issue.

But let's clear one thing up. Iraq was not tied either to 9/11 or to
Al queda. And there were no WMD's . Bush lied.


President Bush did not necessarily lie. By stating that, you make a huge
assumption based on your own obvious predispositions.

Hussein *did* have WMD prior to the Gulf War. It is a fact. It was
reasonable for the president to conclude that Iraq *still* had WMD (despite
his statements to the contrary) given Saddam Hussein's

-- Poor record on truth-telling in the past
-- Posturing and unwillingness to allow U.N. Inspectors access to verify his
lack of WMD.
-- His willingness to use WMD in the past, his support of terrorism, his
hatred of the U.S.

and

-- The intelligence that suggested Iraq was attempting to build up a program

Remember, that intel was flawed partially because it was restricted on the
sources it could use for HUMINT.

The question isn't: "Did Saddam Hussein possess WMD?"

He did. In fact, he used it.

The question is: "Where did the WMD go?" and perhaps "When did they go?"
Given the quagmire in post-war Iraq, we may never find out the real truth.

The majority of the country supported the war in Iraq before the war.
Secretary Powell made a good case for war in front of the U.N., but even in
the worst case, if Iraq's WMD program was, in fact, impotent, the end
justifies the means because,

-- Yet another evil dictator has been removed from power.
-- The U.S. has a means to remove itself from the Operation Southern Watch
quagmire that it had been involved in for 12 years.
-- Libya has decided to follow suit and come clean.

The real mistake was for the previous President Bush to fail to go into Iraq
in 1991 to remove Saddam Hussein from power when it would have been more
justifiable in the court of public opinion. To leave Saddam Hussein in
power for an additional 12 years thinking we could contain him or that he
would change was naïve.

Let's also not forget the president's (GWB's) leadership immediately after
9/11, his success in Afghanistan, his tax cut program, his prescription drug
program, and his ability to turn the post 9/11 economy around.

But beyond his foreign policy, which except for his lies I mainly support,
the son of a Bitch lied to start his war and then used the war to take away
freedoms I fought to protect.;

What freedoms? The constitution and its amendments have not been changed.

He then allowed foreign workers to take over American
jobs and is proposing more of the same. And for what? because his big
business buddies don't want to play fair market with American workers.
Big Business decides
they don't like the wages they have to pay so they claim they cannot get
workers, when the truth is they can't get wages for what they are paying.

Why do they *have* to pay those wages? We have a free market economy.
What's a fair market economy? Sounds like socialism.

So the Pres allows them
to bring in foreigners at lower rates. Then the Americans are laid off,
they can't buy, and more American laborers are laid off.


You're making no sense here. Jobless rates are declining. The economy is
on the turnaround, and the likely alternative to President Bush in the
coming election will be John Kerry (as Rob Schneider put it: "He's Ted
Kennedy without the booze and hookers.")

--Woody