George Bush Is Evil

Yes, yes, but what about the results?

Okay, so Bush is Evil.

Iraq was about the oil. Or about delivering beatings to poor brown people. Or maybe it was just stupid. Whatever. I'll accept any claim you might make about Iraq. Heck, let's even allow that maybe--just maybe!--9/11 was engineered by Evil Zionazi Neocons as an excuse to put U.S. troops in Iraq to make it easier to nuke Iran's peaceful uranium processing facilities.

I'll grant you anything.

But let me ask you a question or two.

Who is doing more to rebuild Iraq today, private and federal U.S. agencies, or the "insurgents"?

I mean, we all know that Halliburton is horribly corrupt and is skimming a huge percentage of the reconstruction budget to line their own evil pockets. But it's still less than half the budget. What's happening to the rest of the reconstruction budget? It's being used for reconstruction.

Meanwhile, what's the insurgency doing? Blowing up things--often things that have been reconstructed, or are in the middle of the reconstruction process. And what's worse, they're blowing up people. Not just evil occupation troops and greedy private contractors and brutal mercenaries, either. They're blowing up civilians. Churchgoers (well, mosque-goers). Children.

They blew up the U.N. building, and took special pride in killing the top U.N. reconstruction official and driving the U.N. out of the country entirely.

Doesn't it seem , by any objective measure, that right now today Halliburton--in all its greed and incompetence--is doing more for the people of Iraq than the insurgency is?

We hear that Iran and Syria are enabling the free flow of insurgents into Iraq. What are those insurgents bringing? Disaster recovery experts? Aid workers? Food and medicine? Schoolteachers? Diplomats? Project coordinators? Laborers? Construction materials? What, exactly, are they doing to help build a better tomorrow for anybody? What are they offering, besides death and destruction?

By all means, let us explore the shortcomings of our government and it's contractors. But don't you dare tell me that Halliburton, in all its disglory, isn't the best thing going in Iraq today, and is making a positive change while the opposition faction runs around killing people and destroying infrastructure.

It's sad, but if the insurgents were actually a reconstruction agency, and were twice as corrupt and incompetent as Halliburton, they'd still be doing infinitely more good in the world than they're doing right now--which is no good at all, and quite a lot of bad.

Everybody seems to think that the worst problem facing us today is a corrupt and incompetent Halliburton. We should be so lucky. I'd rather have an imperfect reconstruction contractor than a perfect insurgency. Which one are you working to get rid of?

Not that I actually believe all the horror stories about American ugliness. I'm just saying that even if those stories were true, the plain fact is that the U.S. doing more for Iraq today than all of its opponents put together. Even if you believe that the Bush Administration is acting out of greed and ignorance, it's clear that their greed and ignorance is having a significant positive side effect in Iraq. Meanwhile, the insurgency that claims to care so much about the wellbeing of their fellow arabs does nothing but kill them and destroy their country.

I ask you again: of all the troubles facing Iraq today, which one is your priority?
5,739 views 25 replies
Reply #1 Top
Well said.
I bet no Halliburton employees ever booby-trapped the body of a dead child so that it would explode when the parents came to claim it, killing them, too.
That's the kind of people no...barbarians, that the Lefties support, whether they admit to it or not.

Have an insightful on me.
Reply #2 Top
George Bush is Eeeevvviiiilll!

And the liberals are just idiots. Ignorant stupid idiots as well.
Reply #3 Top
And the liberals are just idiots. Ignorant stupid idiots as well.

Heh.

It's obvious that the opposition faction thinks I'm an ignorant stupid idiot myself. Now, I know that this isn't true. Since the opposition faction is also made up of real live human beings, I assume that they also aren't really ignorant stupid idiots.

I'm just, you know, waiting to see some evidence.
Reply #4 Top
Evil? Nah. Misguided? Perhaps.

So your question is this: corrupt Haliburton vs. murdering insurgents

Why not got-their-shit-together Haliburton vs. murdering insurgents?

I don't think it's too much to expect honesty and integrity from our own. We may not always get it, but we should always demand it.

But to answer your question, I support the US efforts to stabilize and rebuild Iraq.
Reply #5 Top
I hate to raise the hackles of Bush fans out there, but really, what we're trying to right now is confront the problem we didn't need to have because we're already there. We give moral support to our troops because they have to do their job and we just hope they come home safely. We keep a respectful silence on the initiatives of a Commander-in-Chief even if the strain on our resources shows and an honorable closure to this War seems evasive at the moment. But to compare a military opponent (terrorists) to a "horribly corrupt" company( to use y your words) just to make Halliburton look good makes your post suspect as being in Dick Cheney's payroll. But then again, it could just be points.
Reply #6 Top
It's more a question of priorities, for me.

Also the bizarre insistence by some people that the real problem in Iraq is the contractor who is imperfectly contributing to a better tomorrow.

Again, the Iraqis would be lucky if Halliburton's skimming was their worst problem--which isn't actually a point I concede. But if you believe that Halliburton is corrupt, there's still the problem that even in their corruption they're still helping people.

How can you justify all the time and energy you spend opposing them, rather than opposing, say, the people blowing up their countrymen in the name of saving them?

I look forward to the day that TexaWahine's vision of an transparently honest Halliburton comes to pass. I believe that day is coming, slowly but surely. But like I said, what are my priorities? There's only so many hours in a day, and only so much sugar in my blood. Thus, I'm going to rate "terrorist asshats who kill people" higher on my To-Do List than "reconstruction contractors who aren't perfect". It sounds to me like TW has a similar idea.

I'd love to hear why Gene, for example, reverses those two items.
Reply #7 Top
but but but {liberal speaks} but Bush is responsible for all the deaths everywhere, because. well he just is! and if you do not agree with me you must be a neocon Nazi. jingoistic pig!!
Reply #8 Top
Perhaps it is time to join the satanists. It does seem as if evil is going to save the world.
Reply #9 Top
Great Point Stutefish! (one that I've made before, but is very worthy of another point of view!)

Cindy Sheehan, Michael Moore and others throw the term "Freedom Fighters" around when referring to the bacteria infesting Iraq. Yet none of them can give one example of the "Freedom" for which the bacteria fight.

To be against the war in general is one thing, but to take sides is not "anti war" it is merely "pro" the other side. To side with the bacteria is to back terrorism.
Reply #10 Top
but but but {liberal speaks} but Bush is responsible for all the deaths everywhere, because. well he just is! and if you do not agree with me you must be a neocon Nazi. jingoistic pig!!


Hmm, sounds more like Dabe than Super M Man!
Reply #11 Top
I'm evil too. We have a secret handshake, but I forgot it.
Reply #12 Top
It does seem as if evil is going to save the world.
----Leauki

Only if you're a liberal; then you prefer it that way.

I'm evil too. We have a secret handshake, but I forgot it.
---BakerStreet

You make the AC/DC-Tommy Lee "devil horns" with your index and pinkie fingers, then you interlock them with the other person, touching the backs of the folded (middle and ring) fingers 666 times. It takes a while, but at least we know who we are, right?
Reply #13 Top
Yet none of them can give one example of the "Freedom" for which the bacteria fight.[/quote---PT2K

They fight the freedom we're trying to bring them.
Reply #14 Top
Ah, but Righwinger, what if we're not trying to bring them freedom?

What if Iraqi freedom is just a side effect of greedy and ignorant American efforts to arrange things for their own benefit? I don't believe this, but what if we pretended for a moment that this is the case?

Doesn't that still leave a gaping hole where the opposition presents its own positive side effects to blowing people up?

Unless the positive side effect is the killing of Americans and the weakening of our country. But of course our own countrymen would never settle for that as a complete justification for all the insurgent violence... would they?

Reply #15 Top
I don't think freedom is a gift that can be given, which is part of the reason why I find this war suspect.

The Iraqi people have to demand what they want. If they want freedom, then it is up to them to fight for it. We can help, sure. We can be their allies. But we can't give them freedom.
Reply #16 Top
If this was a 'civil war' as many make it out to be, we wouldn't be seeing 160 deaths every so often, we'd be seeing thousands a day. This is a nation filled to the brim with military-trained civilians with access to arms. What do they do? Line up to get jobs in the new government. Making the recent attacks out to be "civil war" would be akin to calling Oklahoma City an act of "civil war."

The movers-and-shakers of the so-called "revolution" in Iraq aren't even Iraqi, and last week they stated openly that the Shia in Iraq were their enemies as well. That tells me this has nothing to do with restoring Saddam Hussein, or forging some sort of anti-US Iraq.

This is a hateful, nazi-esque minority trying to impose rule on the majority, which is exactly what we went there to change.
Reply #17 Top
Evil is waiting in line at the grocery store for 45 minutes with a screaming two year old who wants a damn candy bar (they keep right there), only to have the cashier say, "Sorry hon, this is my last customer (meaning the person in front of me). Now why couldn't she tell me that 40 minutes ago? EVIL!!
Reply #18 Top
Yes Tex. You can not give freedon or democracy. No one gave it to us and we can not give it to Iraq. Compounding the problem is the Moslem/Christian conflict. I do not know why Bush went into Iraq but I do not believe it will, in the end, be to our benefit. We have spent the lives and injuries of our youth, spent $300 Billion and made many new enemies that will not forget. How that has made America safer is something I would like someone to explain.
Reply #19 Top
This is what Paul O'neil had to say about the Iraq war and Bush


REUTERS
Bush planned Iraqi invasion pre-Sept. 11 - report


NEW YORK (Reuters) - Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill charges in a new book that President Bush entered office in January 2001 intent on invading Iraq and was in search of a way to go about it.

O'Neill, fired in December 2002 as part of a shake-up of Bush's economic team, has become the first major insider of the Bush administration to launch an attack on the president.

He likened Bush at Cabinet meetings to "a blind man in a room full of deaf people," according to excerpts from a CBS interview to promote a book by former Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind, "The Price of Loyalty."

To go to war, Bush used the argument that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and had to be stopped in the post-Sept. 11, 2001, world. The weapons have never been found.

"From the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go," O'Neill said in the "60 Minutes" interview scheduled to air Sunday. "For me, the notion of pre-emption, that the U.S. has the unilateral right to do whatever we decide to do, is a really huge leap."

CBS released excerpts from the interview Friday and Saturday.

The former treasury secretary and other White House insiders gave Suskind documents that in the first three months of 2001 revealed the Bush administration was examining military options for removing Saddam Hussein, CBS said.

"There are memos," Suskind told CBS. "One of them marked 'secret' says 'Plan for Post-Saddam Iraq."'

Another Pentagon document entitled "Foreign suitors for Iraqi Oil Field Contracts" talks about contractors from 40 countries and which ones have interest in Iraq, Suskind said.



BENT ON WAR

O'Neill was also quoted in the book as saying the president was determined to find a reason to go to war and he was surprised nobody on the National Security Council questioned why Iraq should be invaded.

"It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it," said O'Neill. "The president saying 'Go find me a way to do this."'

White House spokesman Scott McClellan rejected O'Neill's remarks.

"We appreciate his service. While we're not in the business of doing book reviews, it appears that the world according to Mr. O'Neill is more about trying to justify his own opinions than looking at the reality of the results we are achieving on behalf of the American people," he said Saturday.

O'Neill also said the president did not ask him a single question during their first one-on-one meeting, which lasted an hour. The president's lack of engagement left his advisers with "little more than hunches about what the president might think," O'Neil told "60 Minutes."

Suskind's book, whose full title is "The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill", uses interviews with O'Neill, dozens of White House insiders and 19,000 documents provided by O'Neill.

O'Neill, who was fired due to disagreements over tax cuts, spent a difficult two years in Washington, joining the Bush administration with a background as a no-nonsense corporate executive.

Copyright 2004, Reuters News Service
Reply #20 Top
I don't think freedom is a gift that can be given, which is part of the reason why I find this war suspect.

The Iraqi people have to demand what they want. If they want freedom, then it is up to them to fight for it. We can help, sure. We can be their allies. But we can't give them freedom.


I'm sure the French troops and the Minority of Colonists who were for independence from Enland would tend to disagree.

Iraqis didn't even have the means to prevent their Olympic Soccer players from being killed or tortured, freedom under scum like Hussein is no more a choice for them as walking through South Central LA at midnight and surviving would be to you and me.

The fact is, freedom for Iraqis wasn't our main purpose for going back to Iraq (it was mentioned from the beginning, but not with much emphasis), but what a great follow on mission, wouldn't you say?
Reply #21 Top
COLONGangrene!
Yes Tex. You can not give freedon or democracy. No one gave it to us and we can not give it to Iraq.


Wrong you anti freedom pinworm slime! WRONG as usual! The freedom that you take for granted was handed to your over pampered, spoiled rotten, butt on a silver platter! Don't you dare sit there and pompously excrete that filth that no one gave us our freedom. You and your whole existence are a slap in the face to every man and women who died for the freedom you refuse to respect... The budding freedom you now resent for others.

The least of the people in Iraqi and Afghanistan who faced death just to vote have more appreciation for the freedom that they don't really even comprehend than you have in your whole elitist pissant existence!!!!


Now float away into the sewer of your life you maggot laden mouse turd!
Reply #22 Top
ParaTed2K

You are a piss poor excuse for an American. I served my country and my community. You have no idea what I have done.You support a policy that kills Americans with no real benefit and that is sad. No other country came and gave us freedon. No other country fought our battlers to preserve that freedon. In all the wars we fought to preserve our way of life, it was the US not anyone else that sent their youth to give us ANYTHING. You are an ass and a disgrace to this great nation!
Reply #23 Top
Gene, for your service to country and community, I am grateful. For your parading it around as a catch-all excuse for some of the most incredible tomfoolery... not so much.
Reply #24 Top
I tried to access his DOD records. None exist for a Col Gene. Or even a Lt. Col, major or captain. There was a 1st Louie that got a dishonorable for going AWOL.

Guess we know now.
Reply #25 Top
Well My DD 214 says otherwise and I receive a retirement check each month. Another BS JoeUser in post # 24. Below is my biorgaphy which appears in my book. You can also find my biography in Who"s Who in the World 1989/1990





About the Author

Gene P. Abel is a person that is not satisfied with the status quo and has always been in the forefront of change. He was born in Allentown, Pennsylvania in 1941. Mr. Abel is from a German and Scottish heritage and was educated in the public school system. He earned a B.S. from Penn State in finance/economics and an MBA from Lehigh University. He was a distinguished military graduate and received a regular army commission as a second lieutenant in the field artillery branch of the Army in 1963. Abel served as a nuclear weapons officer in Germany and a member of the nuclear release authority that begins with the President and ended with Lt Abel. Upon the completion of his tour in Germany, he spent two years as a finance officer at Ft Lewis, Washington. After four years of active duty he accepted a reserve commission as a Captain in the Army Reserve and left active duty in 1968.

He remained in the Army Reserve until 1993 and retired at the rank of Colonel. He is a graduate of the Army War College and was awarded numerous medals including a Meritorious Service Medal on two occasions. He was promoted to Colonel after only 19 years of service and was nominated for promotion to general officer soon after completing the Army War College. However, his lack of combat service, which is most likely the result of his very sensitive assignment in nuclear weapons, prevented his promotion to the ranks of general officer. Colonel Abel’s last assignment was as the Commander of the US Army Financial Services Activity. This unit had the responsibility to insure payment and the financial operations for of up to 500,000 troops in time of war.

After leaving the Army, he became a financial analyst in the space and electronics industries. In 1969 he began a 13 year career as a mid-level executive at the University of Pennsylvania and then at the Hahnemann Medical College and Hospital. In 1981, he was asked to return active duty to head the team redesigning the military pay system of the Army Reserve and National Guard.


In 1983, upon returning to civilian life, he became an officer of a 2-billion-dollar bank where he was in charge of the bank operations at over 50 locations. In 1985, Mr. Abel returned to education and was appointed Dean of Business Services at the Reading Area Community College. His last position was the chief operating officer for one of the largest school districts in Pennsylvania. During the more than 12 years he served as the chief operating officer of the Central Bucks School District, he built over $120 million of new schools in addition to running this rapidly growing school system.

Mr. Abel was active in politics in the 70's and served as a committee person and campaign chairman for the state legislator in his area. His biography appears in Who’s Who in the World and Who’s Who in Finance and he was certified for Federal Senior Executive Service positions.

He has written scores of articles that have been published throughout the country.
In 1998 he retired to Southwest Florida with Carol, his wife of 26 years. He is president of the Cape Coral Housing, Rehabilitation and Development Corporation, a nonprofit organization that provides low-income senior housing and helps low income homeowners repair their homes.
77
He serves Board Chairman of the Christ Lutheran Church School in Cape Coral, Florida. Mr. Abel has three children, three stepchildren and three grandchildren.