Monte wrote:
You are going to need to prove that, DE. This is your standard "nuh uh" defense.
You used it in your own post:
Monte wrote:
Bush really *did* fail to protect this nation, both on 9-11, and subsequently by inspiring hatred and rage in the middle east, and giving our enemies lots of great recruiting points like torture and Guantanimo Bay.
Claiming Bush failed to defend the nation on 9-11, or "created rage int he middle east" is exactly the same "anything he does is wrong" stance as Claiming Obama is responsible for Ft. Hood. Anything we do to defend ourselves is going to create rage int he middle east to some degree because our enemies will always cast it negatively to poorly-educated people who follow a religion that tells us we should be subservient to them anyhow.
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He was supposed to put down the book, apologize to the children and their teacher, and immediately get to work. Instead he had to be told *twice* that the nation was under attack.
In other words, you hve no idea what he was supposed to do, just "something else". Show what he could have done and how it would have changed anything.
As for "being told the nation was under attack twice", show exactly, word-for-word what he was told.
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Not a lone gunman. But an ariplane-shaped bomb. Several of them, in fact. He faltered in the face of emergency. Again, you are drawing a false equivalence between a single shooter and the largest attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor. It's just astonishing to me that you could do so with a straight keyboard.
Of course it's astonishing to you. You're totally ignorant of the reality of how inadequate our air defense system was to deal with this crisis. It wouldn't be so astonishing if you started looking at it in more depth than "But he was reading t3h b00kz0rz!" Really, as a grown man who understands English, you should not have a hard time grasping that if there are limited air defense assets and they are a cetain distance away from planes (never mind that WHICH planes had been taken was still not well-understood) and a limited amount of time to do anything, that only certain courses of action are feasible at ll, and it may not matter what anyone does because there is simply nothing that can be done. Once those planes were taken, about the only ways they could be stopped was passanger revolt or being shot down.
Passanger revolt worked.. but the PResident would cause that how? Oh that's right, he couldn't. He could scramble fighters, but that was already done. Tell me Monte, what fighters were available and what was their armament? How far were they from the aircraft, how rapidly could they scramble, and was it, in fact, known which planes were taken? Could the fighters catch up to the aircraft before they reached NYC or DC with available fuel loads?
I know you're going to just ignore all that and your next repsonse won't address it. That's ok; that's so everyone else can see just how unwilling you are to deal with facts.
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You are in some ways correct. However, he clearly displayed a failure of leadership in not immediately reacting to an attack on our nation of that magnitude.
How? What positive result would have come from him doing anything else? IT isn't a failure just because it intuitively strikes you as wrong.
In fact, if you were qualified to command anything more complex than an SUV you'd understand that the commander of anything rarely actually does a great deal once combat (and 9-11 was a form of combat) begins. Plans are put in place
beforehand and subordinates, including subordinate commands carry out the plan. An organization that has to be run in detil from the top will not be able to respond to complex situations because once person can only manage so much. It's quite possible that the President could have made things worse on 9-11 by "leading". Would you feel better if he'd ordered the shootdown of the Delta flight that was tohught for some time to have been seized but wasn't? That could very easily have happened.
So he was reading a book. If his subordinates felt it was something that he HAD to deal with, such as a nucelar strike, he'd have been pretty much hauled out bodily for his own safety. In fact, the people there with him didn't even know what the magnitude of the attack was right away and had no reason to convey any urgency to him.
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What mattered is when the President ignored the intelligence briefing entitled "Bin Laden Determined To Strike America", telling the analyst that handed him the report that they had "covered their ***". What mattered is how his administration ignored repeated attempts on the part of the previous administration to brief them on the threat that Al Qaeda posed until just before the attacks on 9-11. What matters is that the President's response after 9-11 was not only to invade a nation on this planet that has never been successfully conquered in recorded history, but to also invade a neighbor of that country that had nothing to do with the attacks on 9-11. He split our resources and thought he could still win where Alexander the Great failed.
Ok first of all, thinking that Alexander's failure is in any way relevant is hilarious. Second, "detemined to strike America" does not mean he got a briefing that the 9-11 attack was supposed to happen, which was the analogy you posted above. Don't try to claim you didn't:
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No one gave Obama an intelligence brief that said "Hasan Determined to Open Fire on Fort Hood". The same cannot be said for George W Bush in regards to 9-11.
Obama getting a brief that a specific person would shoot up a specific place would be the same as Bush getting a briefing that there would be a specific attack on 9-11. You claimed he got one. Don't start trying to claim "strawman", that would just be lying.
As for these "repeated briefings" you're just making vague allusions. They wanted to brief him on
what threat specifically that Bin LAden represented?
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The only reason these accusations are flying right now is that the right is absolutely desperate to try and paint Obama to be as bad as their previous, failed administration. The truth is, this attack is *nothing* even close to 9-11. As horrible as this tragedy is, it is a shooting, and not a series of fire bombs that killed thousands of people, destroyed millions in property, and sent our economy into a serious tailspin.
The scope of the attack really has nothing to do with how well it was managed.
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It's embarassing to see this shooting compared to 9-11. Seriously. And it's sad that the right continues to try and use national tragedies to score cheap political points against the Obama administration. When 9-11 happened, people rallied around the President.
It's even more embarassing to watch a grown man try to ignore the basic physics of how many fighters are available to intercept how many targets.
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They were going to be angry at us anyhow. IF there hadn't been Gitmo, there'd have been something else, even if they had to fabricate something.
False.
No, that's quite true. Are you really trying to claim Al Quaeda would not fabricate some reason for people to hate us? Are they above that?
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Yoiu have no idea what you're talking about.
Ad hom fallacy.
No, not at all. That's the conclusion: you don't knwo what you're talking about. It's not the argument. Apparently you don't even understand how the fallacy works, and you clearly don't even understand what happened on 9-11 beyond that planes hit buildings.
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How do you figure it was sheer luck? It was one guy with two guns, correct? Not a series of hijackers in what amounts to flying fuel air bombs filled with people.
It's sheer luck that Obama got this crazy and Bush got those. How do you know there won't be another 9-11 on Bush's watch? Did Obama do something to arrange to have to deal with a much smaller attack?
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The hell it isn't. He could have led. He could have got up from his phot op, and done his job as CiC. Instead, he read a story.
Like what? What exaclty should he have done differently? Part of the job of the commander is to
not panic nor create one.
The bottom line is that it doesn't matter what the **** he was doing because there wasn't anything he could do.
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No, it can't. Your "nuh uh" tactic fails terribly in this situation, DE. You cannot reasonably say that it's the same situation when it is so clearly, absolutely, not even remotely comparable. Bush *failed* in response to 9-11, so many times, and in such costly ways, that it's difficult to even describe. This shooting, while tragic, is *not* 9-11, and Obama's response was perfectly fine.
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I've already said Obama's response was fine. Once again you're slyly trying to pretend I'm arguing a position I'm not when in reality I'm jsut callign your bullshit.
Moireover, there's no "nuh uh" tactic. Me contradicting you is not a nuh uh tactic. All you're doing is ignoring facts and pretending I'm claiming there was a prolem with what Obama did when I already specifically said there wasn't.
The situations are very much the same. Neither President could really have done much of anything about them.
As for the difficult to describe, costly ways of Bush's failure, they're difficult to decribe because they don't exist. You're trying to ddrag in all kinds of issues well after the incident in order to create an impression of failure, and you're just totally ignoring (like everyone else on the left) the impossibility of doing anything at the time. It's just the same refusal to amke an honest comparison.