Dobbs 3K

So again, how and when will the president be punished for all of this? It really makes me angry to think that Bush is just going to get to walk off to his ranch after his term ends, and probably never face any real consequences, only to blame the next president when we inevitably leave the Iraq quagmire.

Yeah, I think you're right on that part. I wonder if we might eventually see some kind of Christian Nationalist party try to rise up and sway religious conservatives, pointing to the failings of the Republican Party in regards to things like that.

Exactly. Bush and his administration need to be punished for this debacle, but Congress is too spineless to do anything.

What is really hilarious is that the government, or the companies they've hired, are actually paying protection money to insurgent groups...and since these groups are supposedly linked to Al-Qaeda, we're now basically paying Al-Qaeda (at least if we follow the president's view). Doesn't anyone see how messed up this is? Why aren't the Democrats calling Bush to task for more stuff like this? When is enough, enough, and when are people actually supposed to be held accountable, either way?

Don't do it. There's plenty of other ways to be involved in stuff and make friends than pay dues to a frat, and walk around campus looking like the stereotypical frat douchebag in your Greek letter shirt. Yeah, the parties are supposed to be fun, if you like hanging out with the same people you're basically living with anyway...and who knows, maybe you can be involved in the next alcohol related frat death, or have someone fall off the frathouse roof pulling a prank and fall into a coma (yes, that actually happened at the school I went to).

After reading that, I actually want to go to Tropicana Field to enjoy the free parking and leather chairs behind home plate.

Yeah, it's pretty ridiculous, but Vick is the one who played into the stereotype of the low-brow gangsta thug black athlete. No one was trying to put him in that mold, he did it himself.

Well, maybe what we should have simply done was remove Saddam, and then leave, or leave a remote force to oversee things, but not get involved in the whole "nation building" non-sense.

I think what snuffbox might have been getting as was the fact that the GOP claims to be the party of conservative Christian values, but has seemed to fail pretty badly at walking the walk recently, with several scandals like this.

"Yes, but that's because Bill Clinton would have been too busy with Monica Lewinsky to properly conduct a war."/GOP commentator mode off/

Great, then Sid can do his angle where he wins the WWE Championship and has a lengthy reign before dropping the belt.

Yeah, but a lot of it is more than just Haliburton. It's basically a whole industry of war profiteering. Actually, it's not really profiteering, it's outright theft.

Well, I have to say, I'm surprised. Nice to see Jeff Hardy back on TV.

Can't wait to see how the right wing pundits try to spin this one. "The Democrats should be ashamed of driving this honest and decent man out of office!"

Glad I didn't order this one...I was thinking about it because I wanted to see Orton win the belt, and obviously that didn't happen. What is with WWE rarely doing title changes on PPVs now?

BTW, even though I think it's a total liberal rag, the latest Rolling Stone has a very compelling article about all the corruption that's gone on with companies getting contracts to "rebuild" Iraq and service the US troops. It's written by Matt Taibbi, whose writing I absolutely hate, but it's still a good article. It really leaves the question of how much more of this garbage we're going to take, and how and if the administration should ultimately be punished for allowing and even encouraging all of the corruption to go on.

I saw this last night and thought it was pretty funny. I think I would've found it funnier if not for all the preview scenes that gave away a lot of the funny moments in the movie. It's going to get kind of old hearing all the McLovin references, though...I was at a mall yesterday and there were already McLovin shirts for sale in a bunch of the stores. Surprised to hear anyone being bothered by the sleepover scene. I thought it was amusing.

I mainly meant Cheney and Rumsfeld. You could kind of lump Colin Powell in there as well (since he went before the UN and provided evidence that Saddam was building WMDs).

Were you actually serious when you typed this? Give me a break. Yes, Saddam was a crappy, evil dictator. However, he kept Iran and Al-Qaeda in check, as much as the Bush administration would like us to believe otherwise. Funny how Iran is (openly) building a nuclear arsenal and getting cocky only now that Saddam is gone, isn't it? I mainly think that, no, it isn't worth it to try and help people in shitty countries. Maybe if they're in our own backyard and it's practical, but mainly, it just doesn't work. I'm sick of seeing us try to help countries, and then they turn around and end up hating us. I think people mainly need to decide as a nation if they want to pull themselves up. Very few countries that have been created by a foreign power end up lasting as a free democracy. Look at the US...we're free because our forefathers wanted to be free, not because France or Spain said "Oh no, these people are oppressed by King George, we need to liberate them!" Oh, it's also funny how back when we were in the Gulf the first time, the same people in charge now thought removing Saddam back then was a bad idea...you know, back when we had international support and it might have been somewhat achievable to stabilize Iraq.

No, but his people weren't in a civil war, and terrorists weren't coming into Iraq, since you know, Saddam actually hated Al-Qaeda and didn't trust Osama bin Laden. The Kurds were oppressed and had been terrorized, but it's not like Turkey is letting the Turks in their country separate, and they're one of our biggest allies in the region.

I always hated when a babyface would have their opponent almost beat, and then when the heel manager/authority figure/whatever would get in the ring, the face locks that person in their finishing hold, and of course ends up getting waffled with a chair or eating their opponent's finisher. Chris Jericho did this multiple times in WWF/WWE, and it made him look like a total idiot. "Yeah, I'm about to win the title...wait! There's Stephanie McMahon! I'm going to lock her into the Walls of Jericho while turning my back to the opponent!"

The only reason we're still there is so Bush can pass the buck to the next president, and blame them for the eventual pullout and following humanitarian disaster.

Exactly. Let the UN deal with it if they want to at this point. Any sort of tangible victory is going to be years away at this point, and the US can't really afford that, and doesn't need it, frankly. Let our troops come back to the US and protect us here, if needed.

It is true that the administration is basically playing toy soldiers with our troops. They're staying for multiple tours way too long and often. No thought is being given to the psychological trauma being inflicted.

Link found on Drudge: Bush: there will be no pullout from Iraq while I'm president Ewen MacAskill in Washington Thursday August 23, 2007 The Guardian President George Bush sought to buy more time for his Iraq "surge" strategy yesterday by making a risky comparison for the first time with the bloodshed and chaos that followed the US pullout from Vietnam. Making it clear he will resist congressional pressure next month for an early withdrawal, he signalled that US troops, whom he hailed as the "greatest force for human liberation the world has ever known", will be in Iraq as long as he is president. He also said the consequences of leaving "without getting the job done would be devastating", and "the enemy would follow us home". Mr Bush's speech came on the day that the US suffered one of its highest daily death tolls since the 2003 invasion, with 14 troops killed when a Black Hawk helicopter crashed. In a speech to army veterans in Kansas City, Mr Bush invoked one of the US's biggest military disasters in support of keeping troops in Iraq: "One unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America's withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like 'boat people', 're-education camps' and 'killing fields'." The speech was aimed primarily at what White House officials privately describe as the "Defeatocrats", the Democratic congressmen trying to push Mr Bush into an early withdrawal. The issue is set to come to a head next month when the US commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, gives a progress report to Congress. Gen Petraeus is expected to say that the surge has produced military successes but that there has only been limited progress on the political front. In relation to the latter, Mr Bush was forced yesterday to backtrack after 24 hours earlier expressing frustration with the Iraqi prime minister, Nour al-Maliki. Alarmed by the harsh reaction of Mr Maliki, Mr Bush hurriedly rewrote his speech to praise him: "Prime Minister Maliki's a good guy, a good man with a difficult job and I support him." The speech overall reflected the White House belief that it is shifting American public opinion behind the surge - the injection of 30,000 extra US troops into Iraq that has brought the total US force in the country to its highest level, 165,000. The Bush administration wants to keep the surge going until at least next April, at which point the overstretched military will be forced to begin reducing troop numbers anyway. Although Gen Petraeus has not yet completed his report, a Pentagon source said the US presence could be down to 110,000 by the end of next year. The army, as of yesterday, had no plans to replace five brigades, each consisting of 3,400 to 4,000 soldiers, when their 15-month tours expire next summer. Freedom's Watch, a conservative group, yesterday launched a $15m (£7.5m) advertising campaign in 20 states saying: "It's no time to quit. It's no time for politics." Mr Bush's former White House spokesman, Ari Fleischer, who works for the group, said: "We want to get the message to both Democrats and Republicans: don't cut and run, fully fund the troops, and victory is the only objective." The White House has been emboldened by a Gallup poll published yesterday showing approval ratings for the Democratic-led Congress had dropped to 18%, the lowest since the survey of the public views of the legislature began in 1974, and an earlier Gallup poll showing support for the surge had jumped in a month from 22% to 31%. Two of the most influential senators on military affairs, the Democratic chairman of the armed services committee, Carl Levin, an advocate of an early withdrawal, and John Warner, a veteran Republican who recently broke ranks with Mr Bush over the war, issued a statement this week lauding the surge's "tangible results". Mr Bush, until yesterday, had strenuously avoided making explicit references to Vietnam. It is a gamble, risking reminding Americans that Vietnam was a military quagmire and reminding them of the shambolic retreat from the embassy rooftop in Saigon on the day that a Black Hawk crashed in Iraq killing 14 US soldiers. But Mr Bush tried to turn the argument around as he made a series of contentious political parallels. He argued that US involvement in the far east had turned it from a continent in 1939 with only two democracies - Australia and New Zealand - into one where democracy was the norm: he mentioned Japan, South Korea and Vietnam. "In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge began a murderous rule, in which hundreds of thousands of Cambodians died by starvation and torture and execution," Mr Bush said. Some historians argue that it was the US covert bombing of Cambodia that produced the Khmer Rouge rather than US withdrawal from Vietnam. Mr Bush added: "In Vietnam, former allies of the United States and government workers and intellectuals and businessmen were sent off to prison camps, where tens of thousand perished. Hundreds of thousands more fled the country on rickety boats, many of them going to their graves in the South China Sea." He said that there had been lots of critics of US involvement in Vietnam at the time. But he quoted from Graham Greene's novel The Quiet American, the words "I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused", implying that, with the benefit of hindsight, they were wrong, just as critics of the Iraq war will later seen to be misguided. He will expand on that in a speech next week in which he will say he has not abandoned his ambitious idea that Iraq could be in the vanguard of bringing democracy to the Middle East. Since the British government hinted recently that it planned an early pullout from Iraq, it has come under increasing pressure from the White House. US general Jack Keane yesterday became the latest American to criticise the proposed British move. He told the BBC that the situation in Basra was deteriorating. "From a military perspective I know what the [uS] commanders are trying to avoid is having to send reinforcements to the south from forces that are needed in the central part of Iraq. That situation could arise if the situation gets worse in Basra if and when British troops leave," he said.