Bush supporters give me a break!
Find a Conversation
| Wed, 08-04-2004 - 2:17pm |
I truly feel like whenever I hear a Bush supporter speak, it is like listening to someone with Stolkholm syndrome, THEY ARE COMPLETELY BRAINWASHED!!! I mean, honestly, unless you are living in a cave (without internet, mind you) there is no way that the Bush supporters do not intake the same news that I do.
HE LIED!!! HE LIED!!! Let this serve as a newsflash to anyone who did not know. THERE ARE NO WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION. IF THERE ARE, HIS DAD SUPPLIED THEM. This is something that they were aware of befor the sent us into Iraq. That is unethical manipulation of your position of power.
For those of you who were just about to argue that we went in for "humanitarian" reasons to collapse the tyranical reign of Saddam, let me just halt you in your tracks. Why are we not in any country in Africa, in which there are civil wars, AIDs epidemics, and feminist repression running rampant due to governmental proceedings? Why are we not in China? Why are we not in Palestine (oh wait, I forgot, we are, sponsering their killing by the Israelis)? Becaus they do not benefit us? So what's the deal, we fight for humanity contigent on how much money we gain from it? Give me a break!
I read another posting about how Republicans are frustrated with the Democrats focus on how George Bush cannot speak. A couple interesting points: It worries us that he cannot speak because you'd think that after a couple years at Yale, the University rated number one on the recently released Princenton Review, that he would be able to process a few words. I guess the fact that he graduated with like a D average just does not count. Additionally, I would just like to call to attention the fact that over and over again science has come to the conclusion that the major difference between humans and the animal kingdom is our ability to speak, and our advanced methods of communication which in turn lead to organization and technology, thus the advancement of the human race. If he cannot speak, then he is getting closer and closer to the animal, right?
Finally, on the GOP thread several posters commented on how although Dems were calling them nervous, they were actually unwaveringly confident. Yeah, I would be too if my party had just rigged the last election!!
People, women, get to the polls!!
Let's make it like father, like son, one term!
Lani

Pages
Seriously though, You're going to lose the debate when you bring up Florida or show signs of a bleeding heart. I mean this with all due respect and know that I share your desire for Regime change:
Don't sweat it. The country is more than poised for change and you'll find that when people bail out on an incumbant, it's usually much later in the election year process. Americans won't be told how or who to vote for, they'll make up their own minds when the time comes.
Propose, don't oppose and tell all the mud slingers: Stop running your mouths and start running the country!
Thanks!
But I understand, I would not want to look like the "bleeding heart" Dem.
I cannot wait for the debates.
We provided no such warheads, chemical, biological, or high explosive.
~mark~
As for 1441, Iraq was continually out of compliance in one aspect or another, just as it had been out of compliance with the rest of the resolutions in place against it. They weren't allowing inspections at various times, kicking inspectors out periodically, not allowing them the access they were required to give them, an inability or unwillingness to account for literally tons of chemicals and biological agents which are still unaccounted for... the list goes on, all of it in violation of those resolutions which the UN put into place but never bothered to enforce.
Which also falls into place in regards to Bush not putting action in Iraq to a vote at the UN. They weren't even willing to enforce or followup on their own resolutions, so it's pretty much a closed case that they wouldn't have authorized preemption at that time. And unenforced resolutions, like unenforced laws, breeds contempt for them and those who put them into place to begin with. That's one reason for the lack of cooperation from Hussein, and his actions in flaunting those resolutions for about a decade, a failure to enforce them diligently.
~mark~
The U.S. has done all it is supposed to do by issuing statements of dislike. So I am very sorry for saying that the U.S. has done nothing to help. I mean it is not uncommon that thousand upon thousands of people are murdered, raped, starved, and force to leave their home in this day and age. We have issued our warning, so all of that will stop. We know how much the U.S. is feared and revered in the world. Unlike Sadaam, we can take Sudan leaders at their word.
"Thousands of people have been killed in Darfur and more than a million have fled their homes, in what is currently described as the world's worst humanitarian crisis."
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/1E058D80-FD78-4169-AC9F-10CE3A034EF0.htm
Sudan intervention could save lives
http://www.bangornews.com/editorialnews/article.cfm?ID=427017
Josh Keefe
While most American attention is focused on the war in Iraq and the upcoming presidential election, one of the worst humanitarian crises in recent years is playing out with little attention, or intervention, in the Darfur region of Sudan. Humanitarian crises and incidents of genocide have a horrifying way of reaching the ears and eyes of Americans after the fact, but this is an instance where intervention could save hundreds of thousands of lives.
Darfur residents die by the invisible hand of disease, starvation and the all too visible hands of the Arab Janjaweed militia forces, which have been killing and raping African villagers on a massive scale. Thirty thousand have died already. Human Rights Watch has reported that more than 1 million people have been dis-placed from their homes by the violence and are living in disease-ridden camps. The U.S. Agency for Interna-tional Development estimates that if the situation continues, at least 350,000 people will die of starvation, disease, and malnutrition.
Where does the blame fall? The Washington Post recently said, “Darfur is a tragedy with many authors,” but the media have ignored one author’s participation. That author is the United States of America, a nation that, on Aug. 20, 1998, used cruise missiles to destroy a pharmaceu-tical plant in southern Sudan. Then President Clinton said the strike was ordered because the “the factory was involved in the production of ma-terials for chemical weapons.” U.S officials also believed the plant had links to Osama bin Laden, who had ordered the bombing of U.S em-bassies the week before. Investigators later found no evidence of any sinister operations at the factory.
The incomparable Noam Chomsky discussed the bombing at length in a 2001 interview, citing many articles illustrating the horrific costs of the strike. The factory, named Al-Shifa, “produced 90 percent of Su-dan’s major pharmaceutical products,” The Boston Globe’s Jonathan Belke re-ported a year after the strike. Ger-many’s ambassador to Sudan wrote in the Summer 2001 edition of the Harvard International Review that “it is difficult to assess how many people in this poor African coun-try died as a consequence of the de-struction of the Al-Shifa factory, but several tens of thousands seems a rea-sonable guess.” James Astill of The Guardian reported that the Al-Shifa factory was the “only one producing TB drugs — for more than 100,000 patients, at about 1 British pound a month.” Costlier imported drugs were too expensive for an impov-erished nation trying to pull itself out of a then 15-year-old civil war.
While no price can be put on the thousands of lives lost as a result of the destruction of Su-dan’s primary medical produc-tion facility, what may be the greatest cost of the attack was the destabiliza-tion of Sudan’s fragile political establishment. While there is no clear evidence that the current humanitar-ian crisis in Sudan is the result of the Al-Shifa bombing, consider this: the month after the bombings, the Finan-cial Times reported that the bombing “appeared to have shattered the slowly evolving move toward compro-mise between Sudan’s warring sides.” Astill, in his Guardian piece, wrote that the attack “overnight into the nightmare of important extremism it had been trying to escape.”
Without the U.S. bombing, and the subsequent “nightmare of extremism,” would the cur-rent bloodshed be taking place?
While it is fair to say the bombing of the Al-Shifa factory was responsible for tens of thousands of innocent lives lost, it may as yet be un-fair to say that the U.S bombing caused the current humanitarian cri-ses in Sudan. It is hard to argue, how-ever, that the attack did not lay the groundwork for it, fueling tribal and ethnic strife as well as violent funda-mentalism. These are always the nec-essary ingredients for genocide and widespread humanitarian tragedy.
We have gained nothing by bombing Sudan on that August day six years ago. But for hundreds of thousands of Sudanese, everything has been lost. The cruise missile that sen-tenced so many Sudanese to death was paid for by our tax dollars. That so-bering fact should make people reas-sess their definition of “terrorist.”
*************************
http://news.ft.com/cms/s/0c62d0c6-e6e3-11d8-aff8-00000e2511c8.html
Sudan and UN agree Darfur plan
By Reuters August 5 2004, 14:05
The U.N. special envoy to Sudan says he and Sudan’s foreign minister have agreed a plan to tackle the humanitarian crisis in Darfur and to avert sanctions threatened by the U.N. Security Council.
Jan Pronk, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s special representative, told reporters on Thursday: “The government of Sudan has to be commended for keeping its promise (on action in Darfur).”
”We have full access and we have to make full use of this opportunity by coming in with more food, more planes, more trucks, more medication,” he added.
Some 30,000 people are estimated to have died and 2.2 million are in urgent need of food, medicine and shelter in the western Darfur region where two main rebel groups launched a revolt last year, complaining of official neglect.
The U.N. Security Council has demanded Khartoum disarm Janjaweed auxiliary militias used by the government to suppress the rebellion and asked Annan to report back in 30 days on how much progress the government has made.
The Janjaweed have long competed with the settled population for land but are accused of going on the rampage in response to the revolt, setting fire to villages, killing, raping and driving people off their land.
SUBSTANTIAL PROGRESS NEEDED
The Council said if Sudan was not showing substantial progress it intended to consider a range of measures, which could include economic and diplomatic sanctions.
Pronk said he and Sudanese Foreign Minister Osman Mustafa Ismail agreed on detailed policy measures that should be implemented to save Sudan from Security Council action.
”If that text is agreed upon by the (Sudanese) cabinet as a whole and if that text is implemented, then I have very good hope that the Security Council...can only come to the conclusion that there is indeed substantial progress,” he said,
”If there is indeed substantial progress, then there is no need to consider further action,” he added.
Ismail had earlier told journalists the plan would outline how the government would deal with the Darfur issue in the coming 30 days.
Asked on Wednesday what evidence there was that Khartoum was complying with the U.S. resolution, Pronk said: “They have deployed many more policemen in the region and they have stopped their own military activities against villages.
”They have lifted all restrictions on humanitarian assistance.”
***************************************8
Sudan hits back over Darfur allegations
By Roshan Muhammed Salih
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/99CECA52-C05A-442A-B81F-1994D1C296A1.htm
Thursday 05 August 2004,
More than a million Darfurians have been displaced
Sudanese officials and an alleged militia leader have poured scorn on international claims about the conflict in western Darfur.
They told Aljazeera that Darfurian rebels, who are widely perceived to be the victims of the conflict, must share the blame for the crisis.
And they say the international media is wrongly portraying events in Darfur as a racial war, when it is really a dispute over land.
The comments come as the Sudanese government is bearing the brunt of world condemnation for the crisis in its western province.
Powerful western nations, as well as the United Nations, human rights groups and Darfurian rebels, say Khartoum is directly responsible for the killing of more than 50,000 people and the displacement of more than a million others.
They accuse the government of training and arming a militia, known as the Janjawid, to wipe out opposition to its rule in the province.
UN resolution
The situation is so acute that the UN Security Council has given Khartoum a month to disarm the Janjawid or face punishment.
A UN resolution last Friday also required Khartoum to facilitate free access for humanitarian groups and to allow about 1.2 million displaced people and 150,000 refugees in neighbouring Chad to return home.
"Janjawid means nothing, but it is a word used to encompass all evil. A convenient way for Americans to understand who are the good guys and who are the bad - it is easier to sell policies that way"
Musa Hilal,
Arab tribal leader
Western nations have further raised the possibility of military intervention to protect the Darfurians.
But Sudan has reacted with indignation to the accusations.
Khartoum, which has called the Janjawid "bandits", says the Darfur rebels are prolonging the conflict to force a foreign intervention.
It says Washington is using the crisis to try to topple its government, and that any military intervention may lead to the disintegration of the country.
Darfur marginalisation
The Darfur conflict erupted in February 2003 when two rebel groups - the Sudan Liberation Army/Movement (SLA/M) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) - demanded an end to alleged economic marginalisation and sought power-sharing within the Sudanese state.
The movements, which are drawn from members of the Fur, Masalit, and Zaghawa tribes, also sought government action to end alleged abuses by their rivals - pastoralists who were driven on to farmlands by drought and desertification.
Darfurian rebels are themselves
accused of atrocities
But an Arab tribal chief, who Washington accuses of being the most senior Janjawid leader, told Aljazeera.net his tribe is only defending itself.
Musa Hilal, speaking from house arrest in Khartoum, said: "When the rebellion began last year, the government approached us and armed us. My sons were armed by the government and joined the Border Intelligence.
"Some tribesmen joined the Popular Defence Force. I called my tribe to arms as well. We were caught up in an uprising the rebels began - what should I have done?"
He added: "We had camels stolen and young men murdered - banditry performed by the Zaghawa. When we retaliated, the Zaghawa joined with the Fur. When the tribes retaliated, they called in the world community. Now Zaghawa support the rebels - they are enemies."
'Janjawid' denials
Hilal, who denies his tribe has committed any atrocities, said his force will disarm when the Darfurian rebels respect a ceasefire.
He added: "Rebels constantly talk to human rights groups and aid workers as if the Janjawid were some kind of organised army. There is no political or military common policy for the tribes that are fighting rebels for their very existence. They started this war.
"I believe that all sides are involved - the so-called Janjawid militias, organised militias, too many unemployed men with too many guns, government forces and definitely also rebel forces"
Jan Egeland,
UN Emergency Relief Coordinator
"Janjawid means nothing, but it is a word used to encompass all evil. A convenient way for Americans to understand who are the good guys and who are the bad - it is easier to sell policies that way."
A Sudanese official, who refused to be named, told Aljazeera the Darfur crisis is being turned into a race issue by much of the media, which portrays it as "Arab tribes" attacking "black Africans".
But the official said the tribes, which are all Muslim, are of mixed ethnic stock and the conflict is a land issue between nomads and subsistence farmers in the region.
Jan Egeland, the UN Emergency Relief Coordinator, has also said the war is more complex than is generally reported.
Ethnic cleansing?
In an interview with the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, he said: "There are many armed groups and many criminal gangs in Darfur...
"I believe that all sides are involved -the so-called Janjawid militias, organised militias, too many unemployed men with too many guns, government forces and definitely also rebel forces."
Darfur's tribes are of mixed
ethnic stock
He added: "It's complex because some have said it doesn't fit the legal definition of ethnic cleansing. The same tribes are represented both among those who are cleansed and those who are cleansing."
Nevertheless, human rights groups say the Sudanese government is responsible for "ethnic cleansing" and crimes against humanity in Darfur.
In a report in May, New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) said Khartoum and the Janjawid militias "it arms and supports" have committed numerous attacks on civilians among the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa tribes.
HRW said government forces oversaw and directly participated in massacres, summary executions of civilians, burnings of towns and villages, and the forcible depopulation of wide swathes of land.
Rebel pleas
It said the government and "its Janjawid allies" killed thousands of Fur, Masalit, and Zaghawa, raped women, and destroyed villages, food stocks and other supplies essential to the civilian population.
The militias have also driven more than one million civilians, mostly farmers, into camps and settlements in Darfur where they live on the very edge of survival, the report said.
"The Janjawid are a government institution like the interior and foreign ministries, mainly designated for cleansing, genocide, rape and subduing under the direct auspices of the vice president's office"
Mahjub Husain,
Sudan Liberation Movement
In response to the crisis, the Darfur rebel movements have called for rapid international action.
They have demanded that Khartoum disarm the Janjawid, bring those who allegedly committed crimes to justice, allow unimpeded humanitarian access to the region, and free prisoners of war.
Mahjub Husain, external liaison officer for the Sudan Liberation Movement, told Aljazeera that the rebels only sought to globalise the crisis because of the "overwhelming crimes perpetrated against the Darfur people".
"We view all the measures taken by the Sudanese regime as superficial and characterised with procrastination and deception," he said.
'Genuine grievances'
"The Janjawid are a government institution like the interior and foreign ministries, mainly designated for cleansing, genocide, rape and subduing under the direct auspices of the vice president's office."
He added: "We call for the liberation of Sudan from the current attitude of ... marginalising , from injustice, from servitude, from slavery and from all the culture that has no respect for human rights."
Umar al-Bashir says Washington
wants to topple the government
Meanwhile, the Sudanese government, which has pledged to disarm the Janjawid, acknowledges the rebels in Darfur have genuine grievances.
Hasan Abd Allah Bargo, a Sudan government representative and a negotiator with the Darfur rebel movements, told Aljazeera: "Darfur is underdeveloped like other regions of Sudan ... but we don't agree on using armed struggle to resolve this matter."
He added: "The issue of economic development has been exploited by some political parties."
Other Sudanese officials, such as Khartoum's envoy to the African Union (AU), have accused Washington of using the Darfur crisis as a pretext to topple the Sudanese government, which Washington has long opposed.
Foreign intervention
Usman al-Said, Sudan's ambassador to the AU, told reporters last week that western military intervention in its remote western region would risk splitting Africa's largest country and unsettling its neighbours.
"The Americans are targeting the government of Sudan because of its political stance," he said, pointing to Sudan's policies on prominent Arab issues such as Iraq and the Israel/Palestinian dispute.
"As for the US... Bush wants to see a quick end to this problem. He wants to list Sudan as one of his achievements in this election year"
Mustafa Usman Ismail,
Sudan Foreign Minister
Moreover, Sudanese President Umar al-Bashir has said the international community is ignoring reports about ceasefire violations by Darfur rebels.
He has argued the rebels were the ones who walked out on peace talks and should be held responsible for exploiting the situation to make political gains.
Sudan's Hasan Abd Allah Bargo told Aljazeera: "The rebel groups are presently disinterested in conforming with the current arrangements, thus paving the way for foreign intervention. This will breed a new crisis for the government."
Sudanese Foreign Minister Mustafa Usman Ismail has also questioned the need for foreign troops in Darfur, saying his government was doing all it could to disarm militias.
"Why should we have to rush and to talk about military intervention as long as the situation is getting better?" he said last week. "My government is doing what can be done in order to disarm the militia."
He added: "As for the US... Bush wants to see a quick end to this problem. He wants to list Sudan as one of his achievements in this election year."
Israel is a somewhat different situation, as they aren't an overt strategic threat to their neighbors as well as their own citizens as Iraq had been.
~mark~
The UN didn't act because it didn't want to, too many competing loyalties and interests, something which in large part wasn't the case when the resolutions were first put into place. And as far as US policing everywhere, it's a practical impossibility to police everywhere, even if you're talking about our own country, much less the entire planet. Due to the inherent practical limitations every country operates under we have to pick and choose where to get involved, a judgement based at least in part on the potential threat to regional and world peace and stability. Humanitarian considerations also come into play, but even a country as strong as ours has limitations on how far it can spread out it's forces.
~mark~
Hi Lani1130 and welcome the board!
The purpose of the party threads, like the GOP Treehouse for example, is for people of that party to be able to share their opinions of their party's actions, ideas, and opinions of the other party,
Miffy - Co-CL For The Politics Today Board
Pages