Deleted to post a smaller pic...sorry about the other one being so big. I guess those soldiers were SERIOUS. :lol:
I thought it was humourous, so I could see it one more time! Of course I find the following humorous also :lol: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15512649/site/newsweek/
Maggie, who are you and how do you know me? Am I under Patriotic Act surveillance? Last Friday night in Lowe's I bought a Boston Butt and 4 boxes of cereal, plus 3-4 items. Freaky! Anyway to answer the question....SPECIFCALLY...here's an agenda. Seconds 1-10 I would have thought.....Dick's playing a trick.... Seconds 10-20 I would have thought....Oh crap....... Seconds 20-30 I would have said.....I'm sorry boy and girls, being President of the United States is an important job and I have to go take care of some urgent business that came up. I promise I will come back another day and finish reading some books with you. (Actually, that only took 8 seconds to say). Seconds 28-35 Out the door and off camera. Seconds 35-45 <to my aide> Get me Condi and Tenet on the phone immediately... I would have been on my way to try and handle the emergency and not sitting there with some confused look on my face. I am in the GOP and even I can see this guy is the one of the biggest boobs ever elected. It would be nice if you could get past your blind party allegiance and acknowledge this guy has accomplished little to nothing in six years. He has had a Republican Senate and Congress for two years and has failed to reach any resolutions on illegal immigration or Social Security reform (2 of his alleged priorities). The faith based initiatives program has floundered without any leadership. Don't even get me started on the failed foreign policy.
Even dismissing the fact that many at the Mustansiriya University have had an axe to grind with the US government since the formation of the initial Provisional Government before the Iraqi elections, there is much to question about the randomness and geocentric nature of the polling. From a sample of “1,849 randomly selected households,” we are to believe a number like 655,000? Stunning boldness rivaling that of the Zarqawi himself. And 90% of those asked had death certificates? Where were they randomly polling, at the morgue itself? Who issues Iraqi death certificates? And now we are getting somewhere… Who knows more about Iraqi deaths (from which to potentially ‘randomly sample’ families)? Perhaps “eight Iraqi physicians organized through Mustansiriya University in Baghdad”? A Baghdad university would select doctors from which city? Perhaps the most dangerous one in Iraq? To where might they venture out to ‘randomly sample’? In a dangerous country, there is comfort in familiarity…even if it is Baghdad. ‘Random sampling’ in and around Baghdad (and other high-intensity combat zones) in a ‘mortal exit poll’ and then extrapolating the findings across the whole of the Iraqi population is fundamentally flawed and false. It would be parallel to entering Rahway State Prison and determining that 30% of the inmates committed murder, concluding therefore that 30% of the American public are murderers (an equally fictitious figure of approximately 100 million). http://rapidrecon.threatswatch.org/2006/10/on-mortal-exit-polling-in-iraq/ Duh...like Mr. "Human Rights Watch" Waldman is going to say his own methodology is flawed? Mr. Waldman was part of the "study" team. Why on earth would he provide anything other than a glowing opinion of the validity of his own study? :roll: Nuff said. This is nothing more than "statistical" numbers and has nothing to do with a body count. And as we all know, statistics can be skewed to represent what ever you want them to represent.
Of course there would be no way a person could miss-speak in such a important fashion, right? That would be like calling a candidate for whom you were stumping by the wrong name .... twice. :lol: :lol:
Well...perhaps Mr. Kerry needs public speaking lessons. Here's another recent "Miss-speak", compliments of John Kerry: Kerry: These guys have failed America. The people who owe an apology are people like Donald Rumsfeld, who didn't send enough troops, who didn't listen to the generals, who has made every mistake in the book. . . . Imus: . . . Senator John McCain, he seems to think--he seems to agree with the Bush administration about your comments. And you know him, obviously, better than I do, but I know him pretty well. And he probably knows what you meant, too. Kerry: I'm sorry that John McCain has said what he said. John McCain's been a friend for a long time. But I have to tell you, I think John McCain is wrong about this. John McCain has been a cheerleader for a policy that is incorrect. John McCain says we ought to send another 100,000 troops over there. First of all, we don't have another 100,000 troops. Secondly, if you send them over there, it's going to do exactly what's already happened, which is attract more terrorists and more jihadists. Our own generals are telling us that it's the numbers of troops that are the problem. Straight from the mouth of old "Flip Flop" Kerry himself. I think the Dems are correct. Kerry should shut the heck up. He just keeps making a bigger fool of himself.
Well, not having the full context of the interview it is hard to give any definititive understanding, except maybe in the case of having already made up your mind on what you hope was said. What may have been discussed, is impossible to tell, but I am going to work on the assumption that we are dealing with Iraq only and not Afghanistan. This set of statements would be correct if the first had been in reference to the initial deployment of troops and the second in reference to the current period. If you are familiar with an old saying "a stitch in time saves nine" you would understand that it takes less in preventive actions that in actual repair of damage. With that in mind, if there were insufficient troop numbers deployed initially, there would be less control and the situation could worsen significantly. Once the situation got out of hand it would take many more troops to pacify the situation if that were even possible. The pacification would create more hostile feelings and could psuh them passed the "critical mass". Thus we have the second statement, which says that 100,000 troops would not be enough. It does not say that there is not a number of troops that would be enough to stabilize the situation now, but that 100,000 is not that figure. It also states that we do not have 100,000 troops readily available, which wpuld make any discussion of larger numbers moot. While one might assume 100,000 troops deployed earlier would have had some impact on the situaiton, there was never a statement of a sufficient figure. That may have been due to the need for more troops than were available, that is would gut the efforts to find Osama (the supposed prime target from the beginning), or any of several other reasons that could have pointed to the futility of the initial invasion and destabilization of the area.
When this Kerry thing came up I sent him an e mail to ask for his explanation. Today I got a response, and here it is. quote.. Thank you very much for your comments. As a combat veteran, I want to make it clear to anyone in uniform and to their loved ones: my poorly stated joke at a rally was not about, and never intended to refer to any troop. This is the finest military that we’ve ever had. I have fought a lifetime on behalf of veterans. We have the finest young men and women serving us in the United States military that we’ve ever had, and I’m proud of that. As a combat veteran, I know the dedication, integrity, and commitment of American troops. I’ve lived it. Had George Bush and Dick Cheney lived it one minute of their comfortable lives in combat they would never have sent American troops to war without body armor or without a plan to win the peace and they wouldn’t be exploiting our troops today. The White House’s attempt to distort my true statement is a remarkable testament to their failure in making America safe. It is a stunning statement about their willingness to reduce anything in America to raw politics. It is textbook Republican campaign tactic. Try to change the topic; try to make someone else the issue; not the policy, not their responsibility. I apologize to no one for my criticism of the President and of his broken policy. If anyone owes our troops in the fields an apology, it is the President. It's their willingness to distort, their willingness to mislead Americans, their willingness to exploit the troops, as they have so many times at backdrops, at so many speeches at which they have not told the American people the truth. It’s George Bush’s broken policy that kills and maims our heroes in Iraq every single day. His pathetic attempt to distort a botched joke about President Bush is a shameful effort to distract from a botched war. President Bush owes an apology to our troops and to their families for mistake after mistake in Iraq. George Bush didn’t do his homework when he ran from sound intelligence about Iraq. Dick Cheney didn’t learn from the lessons of the Gulf War when he forgot his own advice not to get bogged down in Iraq. George Bush didn’t do his homework when he ignored General Shinseki’s advice to go to war with enough troops to maintain order. This entire administration didn’t learn anything about telling the truth; otherwise they would have leveled with the American people that we are stuck in a civil war in Iraq today. ....unquote
