Go Back   I-Mockery Forum > I-Mockery Discussion Forums > Philosophy, Politics, and News
FAQ Members List Calendar Search Today's Posts Mark Forums Read

Reply
 
Thread Tools Display Modes
  #1  
theapportioner theapportioner is offline
Mocker
theapportioner's Avatar
Join Date: Feb 2003
theapportioner is probably a spambot
Old Feb 7th, 2004, 10:56 PM        Bush on NBC's "Meet the Press" Sunday
Just to let y'all know.
Reply With Quote
  #2  
mburbank mburbank is offline
The Moxie Nerve Food Tonic
mburbank's Avatar
Join Date: Mar 2001
Location: right behind you
mburbank has disabled reputation
Old Feb 8th, 2004, 10:04 AM       
I must to the house of the Lord, so I won't get to see this trained monkey act, but I've already read exeprts from it.

If this administrations gets away with saying the case for war was "Sadaam had the intention to make weapons at some point, maybe soon, if he was able to", then we as a nation will have the President we deserve.
Reply With Quote
  #3  
Brandon Brandon is offline
The Center Square
Brandon's Avatar
Join Date: Apr 2003
Location: Migrant worker
Brandon is probably a spambot
Old Feb 8th, 2004, 12:38 PM       
He said that he's not sure as to whether or not Osama will ever be brought to justice. Once translated from Bullshit to English, that means "never gonna happen."
Reply With Quote
  #4  
theapportioner theapportioner is offline
Mocker
theapportioner's Avatar
Join Date: Feb 2003
theapportioner is probably a spambot
Old Feb 8th, 2004, 09:06 PM       
Heh, it's funny, he wouldn't talk about his Skull and Bones membership :P
Reply With Quote
  #5  
mburbank mburbank is offline
The Moxie Nerve Food Tonic
mburbank's Avatar
Join Date: Mar 2001
Location: right behind you
mburbank has disabled reputation
Old Feb 9th, 2004, 09:32 AM       
He also claimed not to know Kerry personally. Now Yale is pretty big and I guess it's possible that with a two year difference they maight not have known each other, but Skull and Bones? Kerry would have been a W's initiation for God's sake.

But then W. has claimed not to remember if his own father was at his initiation. I guess W. was pretty much drunk a lot of that time.
Reply With Quote
  #6  
BombsBurstingInAir BombsBurstingInAir is offline
Member
BombsBurstingInAir's Avatar
Join Date: Feb 2003
BombsBurstingInAir is probably a spambot
Old Feb 9th, 2004, 12:39 PM       
Maybe JFK was the one lying about knowing GWB personally at Yale?
__________________
Hi.
Reply With Quote
  #7  
mburbank mburbank is offline
The Moxie Nerve Food Tonic
mburbank's Avatar
Join Date: Mar 2001
Location: right behind you
mburbank has disabled reputation
Old Feb 9th, 2004, 12:45 PM       
You've been away awhile.

Perhaps. I'm just saying. Two skulls n' boners at Yale at the same time not knowing each other? Isn't that what secret societies are for?
Reply With Quote
  #8  
El Blanco El Blanco is offline
Mocker
El Blanco's Avatar
Join Date: Feb 2003
Location: New York, NY
El Blanco is probably a spambot
Old Feb 9th, 2004, 07:29 PM       
Duh, its a secret.
__________________
according to my mongoose, anyway.
Reply With Quote
  #9  
mburbank mburbank is offline
The Moxie Nerve Food Tonic
mburbank's Avatar
Join Date: Mar 2001
Location: right behind you
mburbank has disabled reputation
Old Feb 10th, 2004, 09:35 AM       
Here's another great moment from the interview.

Russert asks W. if he's worried Iraq might become an extremist Islamic republic along the lines of Iran.

W says:
"They're not going to develop that. And the reason I can say that is because I'm very aware of this basic law they're writing. They're not going to develop that because right here in the Oval Office I sat down with Mr. Pachachi and Chalabi and al Hakim, people from different parts of the country that have made the firm commitment, that they want a constitution eventually written that recognizes minority rights and freedom of religion."

Welll, thank God that's all ironed out. Add this to the list of things that W. has 'no doubt' about.
Reply With Quote
  #10  
teh_mastar! teh_mastar! is offline
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Jan 2004
Location: Wilmington, NC
teh_mastar! is probably a spambot
Old Feb 10th, 2004, 10:44 AM       
"No Doubt." -- The new hit single by the Bush Administration.

W: "Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised."

Meaning two deadly tractor-trailers, of course.[/i]
Reply With Quote
  #11  
theapportioner theapportioner is offline
Mocker
theapportioner's Avatar
Join Date: Feb 2003
theapportioner is probably a spambot
Old Feb 10th, 2004, 03:27 PM       
I liked what Andrew Sullivan said about it in the New Republic:

Edit: arrows indicate Bush's/Russert's quotes.

***

Attention Deficit
by Andrew Sullivan

Many conservative commentators greeted the president's "Meet The Press" interview with considerable gloom. President Bush, they argued, seemed tired, bumbling, didn't actually answer the questions asked, and failed to address the most important issues out there in the country. I disagree somewhat. I felt his answers on the war and its general rationale, his willingness to concede errors, and his demeanor were strong and appealing to those who aren't already turned off by this president's character and personality. But it was in the second part of the interview that things, to my mind, unraveled. Bush offered no compelling rationale for reelecting him. He offered excuses on the economy; and, on the critical matter of the country's fiscal health, he seemed scarily out of touch. Here's the most worrying section of the interview, with some of my comments:

>>> RUSSERT: The General Accounting Office [GAO], which are the nation's auditors ...

>>> BUSH: Yes.

>>> RUSSERT: ... have done a study of our finances. And this is what your legacy will be to the next generation.

>>> It says that our current fiscal policy is unsustainable. They did a computer simulation that shows that balancing the budget in 2040 could require either cutting total federal spending in half or doubling federal taxes.

>>> Why, as a fiscal conservative, as you like to call yourself, would you allow a $500 billion deficit and this kind of deficit disaster?

>>> BUSH: Sure. The budget I just proposed to the Congress cuts the deficit in half in five years.

>>> Now, I don't know what the assumptions are in the GAO report, but I do know that, if Congress is wise with the people's money, we can cut the deficit in half. And, at that point in time, as a percentage of GDP, the deficit will be relatively low.

One simple, perhaps nit-picky, point: To the question "Why ... would you allow ... this kind of deficit disaster?" the president replies, "Sure." Sure? I think I know what the president means. It's a verbal place-saver, a pause. But it's surely worth pointing out that I know of no one who can reply to an allegation that he is about to deny with an actual affirmative. "Did you kill your wife?" "Sure. I never touched her." Who talks this way?

Then the president uses the phrase "if Congress is wise with the people's money." But the point is that, in the last three years, the Congress has, by any measure, been grotesquely unwise with the people's money. And the president vetoed not a single spending measure. In fact, his own budgets exploded spending on both war and homeland security and every other government department, from Labor to Agriculture, before the pork-sniffers in Congress even got started. Then the president simply reiterates, and doesn't explain, something no one believes, which is that the deficit can be cut in half in five years--before, as even he would have to concede, it heads into the stratosphere.

So, in one response, we have a one-word answer that means the opposite of what it should; we have an irrelevance; and we have a pipe dream. And the president expects the people to trust him with their money? If your financial adviser came up with such an answer, after a huge drop in your personal savings and massive loans coming due in a few years, you'd fire him. Back to Bush:


>>> I agree with the assessment that we've got some long-term financial issues we must look at. And that's one reason I asked Congress to deal with Medicare. I strongly felt that, if we didn't have an element of competition, that if we weren't modern with the Medicare program, if we didn't incorporate what's called health savings accounts to encourage Americans to take more control over their health care decisions, we would have even a worse financial picture in the long run.

>>> I believe Medicare is going to not only make the system work better for seniors, but it's going to help the fiscal situation of our long-term projection.

OK, let me put this gently here. Is he out of his mind? The minor reforms to Medicare are indeed welcome in providing more choice and some accountability in the program. But the major impact of his Medicare reform is literally trillions of dollars in new spending for the foreseeable future. He has enacted one of the biggest new entitlements since Richard Nixon; he has attached it to a population that is growing fast in numbers; and the entitlement is to products, prescription drugs, whose prices are rising faster than almost everything else in the economy. Despite all this, the president believes it will "help the fiscal situation of our long-term projection"? Who does he think he's kidding? It's like a man who earns $50,000 per year getting a mortgage for a $5 million house and bragging that he got a good interest rate.


>>> BUSH: We've got to deal with Social Security as well. As you know, I mean, these entitlement programs need to be dealt with.

>>> We are dealing with some entitlement programs right now in the Congress. The highway bill, it's going to be an interesting test of fiscal discipline on both sides of the aisle. The Senate's is about $370, as I understand, $370 billion; the House is at less than that, but over $300 billion. And, as you know, the budget I propose is about $256 billion. So...

It would appear from this response that the president believes that highway construction is an entitlement program. Again: Does he have the faintest idea what he's talking about?


>>> RUSSERT: But your base conservatives--listen to Rush Limbaugh, the Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute--they're all saying you're the biggest spender in American history.

>>> BUSH: Well, they're wrong.

Based on what? They have the numbers. All the president has is words.


>>> RUSSERT: Mr. President...

>>> BUSH: If you look at the appropriations bills that were passed under my watch, in the last year of President Clinton, discretionary spending was up 15 percent, and ours have steadily declined.

OK, let me be candid here and say I don't know what he means. Does he believe that discretionary spending has declined each year under his watch? Surely not. It has exploded during his administration. Is he saying that the rate of increase has slowed? Again: surely not. As Joshua Claybourn has shown, Clinton's last budget increased domestic discretionary spending by 4.56 percent. Bush's first budget increased it by 7.06 percent. His second increased it by over 10 percent. We have a few options here: The president doesn't know what he's talking about, or he's lying, or he trusts people telling him lies. But it is undeniable that this president is not on top of the most damaging part of his legacy--the catastrophe he is inflicting on our future fiscal health.


>>> And the other thing that I think it's important for people who watch the expenditures side of the equation is to understand we're at war, Tim, and, any time you commit your troops into harm's way, they must have the best equipment, the best training, and the best possible pay. That's where--we owe it to their loved ones.

Fine. So why has the president increased discretionary spending outside of defense and homeland security by such a huge amount? Why the massive agricultural subsidies? Why the vast new Medicare entitlement? Couldn't he have said, "Look, we're at war. We cannot afford these other things right now." Did that even occur to him?

I'm not one of those who believes that a good president has to have the debating skills of a Tony Blair or the rhetorical facility of Bill Clinton. I cannot help liking the president as a person. I still believe he did a great and important thing in liberating Iraq (although we have much, much more to do). But, if this is the level of coherence, grasp of reality, and honesty that is really at work in his understanding of domestic fiscal policy, then we are in even worse trouble than we thought. We have a captain on the fiscal Titanic who thinks he's in the Caribbean.

Andrew Sullivan is a senior editor at TNR.
Reply With Quote
  #12  
mburbank mburbank is offline
The Moxie Nerve Food Tonic
mburbank's Avatar
Join Date: Mar 2001
Location: right behind you
mburbank has disabled reputation
Old Feb 10th, 2004, 03:36 PM       
Jesus. Coming from Andrew Sullivan, that is an extremely damning critique.
Reply With Quote
  #13  
teh_mastar! teh_mastar! is offline
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Jan 2004
Location: Wilmington, NC
teh_mastar! is probably a spambot
Old Feb 11th, 2004, 02:05 PM       
Why can't this man take a public speaking course? Every over word is "um" or "uh" or some unintelligible audible pause. If you get nervous, just don't speak, man. This Scott McCellan fellow has the same problem. The guy sounds so damn passive.

I can imagine the President blowing saliva bubbles in front of television cameras and finally asking, "are we on yet?"
Reply With Quote
  #14  
ziggytrix ziggytrix is offline
Mocker
ziggytrix's Avatar
Join Date: Mar 2003
Location: i come from the water
ziggytrix is probably a spambot
Old Feb 11th, 2004, 04:06 PM       
Quote:
The president doesn't know what he's talking about, or he's lying, or he trusts people telling him lies.
I've believed the third option to be the case from day 1.
__________________
BOYCOTT SIGNATURES!
Reply With Quote
  #15  
kellychaos kellychaos is offline
Mocker
 
Join Date: Feb 2003
Location: Where I Started But In A Different Place
kellychaos is probably a spambot
Old Feb 12th, 2004, 04:49 PM       
Quote:
Originally Posted by teh_mastar!
Why can't this man take a public speaking course? Every over word is "um" or "uh" or some unintelligible audible pause. If you get nervous, just don't speak, man. This Scott McCellan fellow has the same problem. The guy sounds so damn passive.
Averting your eyes (especially upward), blushing, repetitive physical tics and overuse of "filler words" are often a sign that someone is lying.
__________________

Wherever you go, there you are.
Reply With Quote
  #16  
teh_mastar! teh_mastar! is offline
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Jan 2004
Location: Wilmington, NC
teh_mastar! is probably a spambot
Old Feb 13th, 2004, 12:31 PM       
http://www.corporatemofo.com/stories...etthepress.htm
Reply With Quote
Reply


Thread Tools
Display Modes

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

vB code is On
Smilies are On
[IMG] code is On
HTML code is Off
Forum Jump

   


All times are GMT -4. The time now is 07:09 PM.


© 2008 I-Mockery.com
Powered by: vBulletin
Copyright ©2000 - 2024, Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd.