Arrest order for Bush and Cheney

[Final-Fan]

masschamber said:

Final-Fan said:

 

OK, fair enough, but that was only a small part of the laundry list of scandals and abuses that we have come to know collectively as Watergate.  The "enemies list" is pretty infamous but it hardly exonerates Nixon if he wasn't aware of that one thing.  I don't think you'll find many, if any scholars, who would justify letting Nixon off the hook because of all the good he's done.  If you get caught embezzling from the company you work for, would you expect to get let off the hook because of the great work you've done for your company?

I'm well aware that not every single thing in the past 7 years has been a complete and utter failure, but let's look at your example of Afghanistan.  Sure, it went well, we kicked the Taliban out.  But now six or seven years later the Taliban is once again growing in strength.  Why?  Partly because the United States has shifted its attention -- and manpower -- to Iraq, where an occupation that happened for no sufficient cause was criminally mismanaged and continues to drain blood and treasure from the U.S. Army and the U.S.A.  Your defense that the situation allowed us to uncover corruption in the Oil for Food program is frankly ludicrous.  There are better ways to expose corruption than by invading a fucking country and creating a hotbed of terrorist activity.  Are you familiar with the saying "the cure is worse than the disease"?

So the Bush administration had a completely justified invasion and occupation (Afghanistan) which has been hamstrung by the diversion of hundreds of thousands of troops to another invasion and occupation which not only happened under false pretenses but was done so poorly that five years later sectarian violence is only beginning to subside, if it is subsiding and not just in a temporary lull.  Iraq is the reason bin Laden is at large.  bin Laden is free and Hussein is dead.  Of the two, bin Laden is the only one who successfully mounted an attack on the United States.  Bush's priorities are not where they should be.

As for the rest of the Bush administration's achievements:  Failure to rebuild after Katrina.  Illegal wiretapping.  Psychotically huge deficits.  Underfunding border patrols and wondering why illegal immigration is so hard to keep under control.  I don't keep a list of these things but if I did it would be pretty damn long.

Bush might not be the worst president in U.S. history, but he's sure in the running.  And hey, he's still got a year to go; he's still got a chance to lock up the title.

actually there are plenty that would let Nixon off the hook on the grounds of the China card alone, frankly watergate no matter how you slice it was political espionage, and it's pretty nieve to think that every president isn't involved with similar tactics, Kennedy's families' mod ties, the convienent death of Huey Long, Ross Perot are all suspicious things,

spying on the opposing party is hardly more important than China or Detente or any number of other action that Nixon enacted,

and one other thing, secretarian violence has always existed in what is now known as Iraq

First off, could you please end your paragraphs with periods?  I keep wondering if something hasn't been cut off.  Thanks.

Now, as for scholars letting Nixon off on account of the good he's done, link please.  These have to be reputable individuals respected for their historiography.

What exactly is suspicious about Ross Perot?  And as for Huey Long, although I was aware of some uncertainty about the exact circumstances of his death, none of what I have heard pointed to the sort of stuff you seem to be impying.

Frankly I don't think we ought to be as complacent as you are about illegal actions on the part of our executive officers, and I think that such complacency is damaging to our democracy.  To me, any good citizen should be in favor of stamping out that kind of crap.  And the only way to stamp out such behavior is to punish those who engage in it.

As for sectarian violence in Iraq, not really, unless you are talking about violence several orders of magnitude smaller.  Hussein may have been a repressive dictatorial bastard but he did keep order.