Big Ol' Smitty

((Actually, human rights was one of the big justifications Bush used here. He didn't use it with the UN because, clearly, they would not have given two shits. And the phrase "immediate threat" was never used by Bush. He, in fact, said that the day Saddam becomes an imminent threat, we'll see mushroom clouds. We can't AFFORD for him to become one. -=Mike )) There was still a strong implication that we were in immediate danger. Perhaps the public should have been more savvy and recognized that Bush was not saying these things explicitly though. I think Bush's rhetoric was misleading. I would agree that we could not afford to let Saddam become such a threat, though. But haven't reports shown that the sanctions were doing a pretty good job of keeping him from becoming such a threat?

((We go in and stop Saddam, a huge human rights villian, and we are suddenly as bad as he is? What? Seriously, with the massive scandals in the UN dealing with Iraq (That you seem to love to ignore when talking about the huge imperialistic hegemony that the US is apparently forcing upon the world), how else could we have resolved the situation?)) I think that if the administration would have "framed" the war as removal of a human rights villain then the war would have been much more widely accepted. Instead, the war was justified on grounds that Iraq was a huge, immediate threat with close ties to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The "removal of a human rights villain" justification was sort of introduced after the fact.

((Spoiled ballots aren't good --- but they are a fact of life. We cannot avoid it. As George Will said, an inability to follow the rules and vote properly is not disenfranchisement. It is you not taking your responsibilities seriously.)) Agreed.

"(contrary to the opposition view that had evidence and that the majority tried to keep out of the report entirely)" Okay, I will grant you that the commission was partisan. However, even the members with dissenting opinions did not deny that there were problems with voting. Spoiled ballots are a problem. The suggestion that black voters were disenfranchised does seem suspect, though--I agree.

(You mean the state with a lower spoiled ballot percentage than the city of Chicago? The state where a whopping TWO PEOPLE would testify that they had any problems with voting?) "The United States Commission on Civil Rights, a federal agency, did conclude in a majority opinion in June 2001 that African-American voters were disproportionately affected by Florida's electoral problems and called on the Department of Justice to investigate possible violations of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The majority opinion blamed the voting problems on state officials who "ignored the mounting evidence of rising voter registration rates in communities" and failed to devote more resources to such communities. The majority of the Commission estimated that African-American voters cast about 54 percent of the roughly 180,000 uncounted ballots and that 14.4 percent of African-American voters cast ballots that were rejected compared to 1.6 percent of other voters. " There were clearly voting problems in Florida in 2000. Just because Chicago had problems too doesn't mean that Florida did not.

http://www.pipa.org/OnlineReports/Pres_Ele...ort10_21_04.pdf Discuss.