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Bert -

I agree with your post, but I have a concern. While Rove should be sent home due to his involvement with the leak… I’m still wondering about the memo that was sent aboard Air Force One on it’s way to Africa. It seems to me that this memo outlines the attack on Wilson (‘The shoot the messenger’ mentality that gets to the heart of Bush’s approach to pre-war intelligence.) If the memo lays out the attack this way - then it seems to be much more important than Rove. ???

Any thoughts on this?

For now Tony, speaking as a partisan Dem/political operative, nothings more important than the evidence against Rove! Because, contrary to the potency of the evidence you’ve suggested, nothing has been more damaging to the credibility of the Bush administration.

The public case against Rove has been simple (Did he or didn’t he?), while the more insidious machinations of the White House have been ignored.

—- off topic —-

I have another question for you… no one else yet seems to be able to answer this.

Why do facts have so little to do with people’s political perception? I’ve wrestled with this since Nov. last year. I don’t think reality matters so much when people get in a voting booth. Is it their gut they go with? Fear? Comfort level with past voting decisions?

You see - and I know many do not agree with this - we have a President who lied about reasons to go to war. Some people can argue that he only based his decision on bad intelligence. That can be argued, but what can’t be argue is that he told us with absolute certainty that Saddam was an immediate danger to us all. He set out a series of defining points that lead more Americans to loose their lives, and every one of those points were false. There was proof of this… but it had no effect.

I don’t think people really like Bush all that much. In fact, very few people I’ve met have given him more than ‘the lesser of 2 evils.’ I didn’t really like Kerry that much, and Edwards (who I’ve met, worked with and liked quite a lot) was ‘handled to death’ and became kind of a smiling idiot - and that is exactly who he is not. If you took a poll on people’s level of satisfaction with their choices - I think it starts to look a lot more like who has lost rather than who won.

So - if all that makes sense, what do people want out of politics? If it’s a political party, how is that defined? If it’s more of a simple representation of basic concerns and not so much about hot topics and divisive issues - how do you create a movement around that?

I guess, in the end, I’m not so concerned about tearing this Administration down… it seems very capable of doing that on it’s own. I want to look at all this and figure out how we build ourselves up. I can look to DC and see quickly who I am not. I know a lot of people who are closer to Democrat than anything else, and I think it’s high time we put some definition around what that means, and start selling that to the public. I think it’s what people want.

Why do facts have so little to do with people’s political perception?

In America?

Simply, it depends on how well they fit into their already established, partisan perspective. Meaning, those closely engaged, who are also hoping to shape the debate. For the rest of the country who actually vote, it depends on the veracity of the ‘facts’ that eventually filter through to them!

I long ago argued, that the reason Tony Blair’s approvals were hovering around 25-30% percent in Britain, were a direct result of his requirement to appear before Parliament several times a week to be subject to direct and uncensored questioning.

Have you ever seen Bush subject to such an extended grilling?

Furthermore, a lot of the evidence we read about the Bush administration never makes it to the dwindling segment of Americans actually paying attention. Or, it’s filtered through Fox News. For every voter like you and I concerned about the direction of this country, there are equal numbers totally immersed in an ESPN or ‘reality’ culture, totally oblivious.

Finally, 9/11 has given many Americans the excuse to ignore the machinations of the Bush administration. By eventually holding Bush accountable, would be like admitting defeat in Iraq, or admitting we failed to the rest of the world.

Bert and Tony:

I’d say that people do look at facts, to some degree, though often through the lens of their existing perceptions. For instance, Tony mentions that he knows very few who like George Bush and can look at DC and know who he is not, while Bert feels that FoxNews has some inordinate amount of sway that other media outlets dont have.

Facts are facts, but the conclusions reached after looking at those facts are much more in the line of opinion.

Truman ordered the atomic bomb dropped—-that is fact. Out of this single fact comes two opposing conclusions. One is that Truman was a terrible man who committed a war crime against humanity. The other is that Truman saved the lives of up to a million young American soldiers by avoiding an invasion of the Japanese homeland.

It is not so much the facts that are in error. It is the conclusions that people often reach.

We have reached a point in society where a simple mistake has become a “lie”. You can see evidence of this all throughout politics and conversation. We have come to a point where one comment can undermine years of service. We have come to the point where partisan politics is more important than the good of the country.

Facts remain factual, by definition. What we do with those facts is up to us.

Well, it sure does seem like it’s a fact that Saddam was not an immediate threat to the United States.

Which means the people who laid out the rational for war to us were either wrong or liars.

The opinion comes in on whether they were lying, or whether they were wrong (or somewhere in between). But the fact remains that the rationale for going in was incorrect. Which is a problem.

Then you have to ask yourself: can I trust the individuals who made plans based on (at minimum) false conclusions, to execute an incredibly complex plan based on what reality actually is?

So far, I keep seeing the same mistakes. We’re defeating “terrorists” in Iraq, yet their numbers have stayed the same (or grown) in the last few years. Maybe we’re not getting good information on who the enemy is.

I’ve seen no less than 4 different permutations of reconstruction plans executed, which indicates that our opinion of reality continues to change. I see repairs in the health and electricity sectors continually flipping between opinions of various private companies, and the opinions of Aid organizations and the U.N. But no commitments to a long term plan, in fact, no commitment to any infrastructure solution.

We’ve done well with the food sector.

Security, electricity, health. I hear a different reason from each department (on their websites) of what the issues are and what the solutions are. At this point, things should be clearer.

It seems like this war has turned into politics as usual.

Julia:

No offense, but some of what you consider factual is more accurately opinion. Here is a rationale for the war which I have heard mentioned by supporters. Whether you choose to agree with it is not consequential to the conversation; what IS consequential is that there is a logical rationale.

The rationale, in a nut shell, is that Saddam was somewhat contained during the 90’s, though he continued to try to break containment. He constantly was non-compliant with UN resolutions (UN resolution 1441 details the many issues). Though under sanctions, Saddam was getting closer to having the sanctions removed. Had he been successful, this would have broken the containment. With containment broken, his truest dangerous nature would have been on the loose. Therefore, the US acted before he could break that containment.

An analogy would be a prisoner digging his way under the fence getting caught before he ever reached freedom. The warden could honestly punish the prisoner for escaping, while the prisoner could claim that he never escaped and should not be punished.

Julia, my intent isn’t to rehash the reason for the war. It is simply to suggest that there are rational reasons for supporting this war. You may disagree with my conclusions for doing so, but I’d hope you recognize the logical thought inherent in the conversation.

Joe-
I think it’s pretty simple. Colin Powell presented information that sounded pretty solid at the UN, trying to make your argument. If the UN had agreed it was right to invade at that poinw, your argument would be a good defense for the war. Instead, with the promised veto of the UN security council a factor, the president took us to war with a “Coalition of the Willing”, arguing that the WMD/terrorist threat was too great to ignore. Our war becomes a pre-emptive fight, so that means it’s fundamentally important to our justification for the war that we be right about our picture of what’s going on.

And we weren’t. Hence, our problem. Later we learn that the people who prepared this case selectively listened for, passed on, and built up the evidence that served their case, while excluding contradictory evidence of import when it didn’t fit their needs. There’s tons of evidence for this.

So we’ve put our nation on the line, on the advice of a government that selectively edited the picture of what was going on in order to take us to war on support they would not get from the whole truth, or the verified, corroborated information at hand.

Should we be happy they did us such a favor?

Additionally:
Knowledge of Plame’s identity may have reached the White House before Wilson’s editorial came out.

Joe,
Your comments fall in line with the latest changes being put out by the admin in the talking points. That is, the newest rationalizations for invading Iraq. Even if one could agree with some of what you are saying, it still does not change the facts of what has gone on before.
Stephen’s case that our reasons for the war should be correct. I will add “true and right” in terms of ethics and morality. When those reasons that were given are discovered to be wrong, and then we find that there is strong enough evidence to suggest that the intel was selectively used or possibly altered, we can’t be persuaded to accept a Machiavellian rationale as the answer.
Either the truth was told or it wasn’t. If the reasons you mention for invading Iraq were not enough to convince the US (and the world) before, why should we accept them now?
Considering what has happened in the Senate in the past, no less than hearings before the full Senate should be acceptable. If the issue of steroid use in MLB was worthy of Senate hearings, are the issues of the present administration manipulating intel to get us into a war and possibly outing a cia operative worth any less?
And I disagree with you on one issue. You say that facts are facts, but the conclusions based on those facts are opinions. I say they are judgements, and they should now be made by the Senate after comprehensive public hearings.
Note that I’m not saying yet that anyone committed the crimes; I’m saying these serious issues mandate Senate hearings.
Of course, I believe they won’t happen as long as the repubs control Congress, regardless of the evidence that is revealed.

Cole -

Well put. I def. agree. My question on Iraq is this: if we invaded Iraq because of UN resolutions you state, then 1) why was there so much focus on the weapons inspectors? 2) If not for imminent threat, why pull these inspectors out of Iraq and invade with 30 days left to complete their job (up to this point - the UN inspectors had found no WMDs or weapons that were in violation of the UN resolution. 3) How do explain Bush’s SOTU statement: There are some who say we should wait {…} in the shape of a mushroom cloud. (Sorry , but I can not find the exact quote… but if someone has it close by, that would be great.)

Why was it only after the 9/11 commission - that put a good bit of the blame on the CIA - that the Bush Admin. changed their tune and started admitting that there were no WMDs in Iraq, that there was no connection between Saddam and 9/11 attacks.

I can only see 2 possibilities: lies or incompetence.

In case people have forgot, Bush is the leader, and it’s solely up to the leader to be responsible for their words and actions. Since he has refused to own up to his responsibility, I can only see these as lies. If anyone can prove otherwise, I will humbly apologize. Until then , my mind is quite set.

Now - onto the Rove scandal. Based on Bush’s past record - I am amazed that people are surprised that he does not keep his word and remove his friend and closest political advisor from office. Bush does what works best for him in the moment… long range planning is not really his suit. I’ve also seen enough posted here to know that Bush supporters will try and refute the ‘lies.’ OK, but I think an intelligent look over the past 5 years at least reveals the impression of impropriety. I think we all should demand that the Oval Office be above this. (Yea – I know, Clinton Clinton Clinton… Play that drum again, but it does nothing to excuse Bush of his responsibilities.)

Monday, October 7, 2002
CINCINNATI, OHIO

“Eleven years ago, as a condition for ending the Persian Gulf War, the Iraqi regime was required to destroy its weapons of mass destruction, to cease all development of such weapons and to stop all support for terrorist groups.

The Iraqi regime has violated all of those obligations. It possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons. It has given shelter and support to terrorism and practices terror against its own people.”

—-

“We agree that the Iraqi dictator must not be permitted to threaten America and the world with horrible poisons, and diseases, and gases, and atomic weapons.”

—-

“We know that the regime has produced thousands of tons of chemical agents, including mustard gas, sarin nerve gas, and VX nerve gas. Saddam Hussein also has experience in using chemical weapons. He has ordered chemical attacks on Iran, and on more than forty villages in his own country. These actions killed or injured at least 20,000 people, more than six times the number of people who died in the attacks of September 11.

And surveillance photos reveal that the regime is rebuilding facilities that it has used to produce chemical and biological weapons.

Every chemical and biological weapon that Iraq has or makes is a direct violation of the truce that ended the Persian Gulf War in 1991.”

—-

“We’ve also discovered through intelligence that Iraq has a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical and biological weapons across broad areas. We are concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using UAVs for missions targeting the United States.

And, of course, sophisticated delivery systems are not required for a chemical or biological attack — all that might be required are a small container and one terrorist or Iraqi intelligence operative to deliver it.

And that is the source of our urgent concern about Saddam Hussein’s links to international terrorist groups.

Over the years, Iraq has provided safe haven to terrorists such as Abu Nidal, whose terror organization carried out more than ninety terrorist attacks in twenty countries that killed or injured nearly 900 people, including 12 Americans.

Iraq has also provided safe haven to Abu Abbas, who was responsible for seizing the Achille Lauro and killing an American passenger. And we know that Iraq is continuing to finance terror, and gives assistance to groups that use terrorism to undermine Middle East peace.

We know that Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist network share a common enemy — the United States of America. We know that Iraq and al Qaeda have had high-level contacts that go back a decade. Some al Qaeda leaders who fled Afghanistan went to Iraq.”

—-

And we know that after September 11, Saddam Hussein’s regime gleefully celebrated the terrorist attacks on America. Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists.

Alliances with terrorists could allow the Iraqi regime to attack America without leaving any fingerprints.

Some have argued that confronting the threat from Iraq could detract from the war against terror. To the contrary, confronting the threat posed by Iraq is crucial to winning the war on terror.

—-

Saddam Hussein has held numerous meetings with Iraqi nuclear scientists, a group he calls his “nuclear mujahedeen” — his nuclear holy warriors.

Satellite photographs reveal that Iraq is rebuilding facilities at sites that have been part of its nuclear program in the past.

Iraq has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes and other equipment needed for gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons.

If the Iraqi regime is able to produce, buy, or steal an amount of highly-enriched uranium a little larger than a single softball, it could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year.”

—-

“There is a reason. We have experienced the horror of September 11. We have seen that those who hate America are willing to crash airplanes into buildings full of innocent people. Our enemies would be no less willing — in fact they would be eager — to use a biological, or chemical, or a nuclear weapon.

Knowing these realities, America must not ignore the threat gathering against us. Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof — the smoking gun — that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”

(FOUNT IT.)

(AND HERE’S THE KICKER!)

“If we have to act, we will take every precaution that is possible. We will plan carefully, we will act with the full power of the United States military, we will act with allies at our side, and we will prevail.”

Can anyone read these statements - all by Bush in a single speech… and say that knowing what we know now and what he knew then, that we were told the truth when committing our soldiers to this war?

When I see how wrong this admin was in their reasons for the Iraqi invasion (or at least in the reasons they told us about), I can’t help but ask, how wrong are they about other things? How much of the information we are getting from them is not either accurate or the whole story?
So the UN was wrong for not supporting the invasion, therefore we need to send Bolton to straighten them out. But it turns out that they weren’t wrong. So do they need to be straightened out?
Private accounts will save social security. Only, private accounts won’t save social security. They don’t even address the shortfall. They will only shift the responsibility to individuals and create more debt. Ultimately, they may even destroy social security.
CAFTA is good for the country. But at least half of congress (regardless of how the vote turned out), and more than half of the country do not agree.
The economy is getting better. Yet jobs are still down and the cost of everything (largely as a result of the increase in oil prices) is up.
Tax cuts (with more on the horizon) will help the economy, yet no mention is made as to how the increasing deficit and debt harm the economy. And there is absolutely no plan as to how to pay for the deficit and debt caused by the increased spending and decreased revenue (except to decrease domestic spending). That will be left up to future administrations.
Health care was a major issue in the elections. Have we heard of this issue from the admin since then?
And now, back on topic: The Rove situation. We’re told that anyone “involved” will be let go. Then it’s “anyone guilty of a crime” will be fired.
Is there any wonder why we doubt what we hear from the white house?

Excellent article, Bert - and good posts tony.

Why do facts have so little to do with people’s political perception?… Is it… Fear?

Are you kidding?! We had the Vice President of the United States tell us that if we voted for Kerry, terrorists would come and cut our heads off. My priest told the congregation that if we voted for Kerry, we couldn’t receive communion anymore. Of course it’s fear and gut feelings. The GOP machine has become very good at manipulating them.

BTW, there’s a good TNR article on why Democrats haven’t been able to get our message out. And we do have a message - Bert gave us the Center for American Progress link, and here’s what Democrats stand for, a a good solid contract with America - backed by real legislation - from the Senate Democrats site.

From the TNR article:

…the plain fact is that liberals have plenty of new ideas. Troll websites of the Center for American Progress, the Brookings Institution, or the Century Foundation, and you will find them teeming with six- and twelve-point plans for any problem you can imagine

…Indeed, devising earnest new ideas is the very thing liberals enjoy the most. Accusing them of having no new ideas is like accusing a member of the Kennedy family of excessive sobriety

…The truth is that liberal ideas aren’t getting any circulation because Democrats are out of power

Excellent (if fatalistic) article. Did you know that Senate Democrats, along with ex-CIA director Woolsey just unveiled the Democratic plan for energy security? Of course not. The press didn’t cover it at all because there’s no way Republicans are going to let it get to the floor.

How amusing that Bert would pretend to be “injecting facts” into the conversation in the same breath that he invokes “Karl Rove’s indictable acts.”

Really, Bert? Are his acts indictable? Perhaps they are—nobody knows, not me or you. That’s for a special prosecuter to decide.

Talk about echo chambers! Left-wing bloggers think that this is the “biggest crisis” the White House has ever faced because they post on it a hundred times a day on sites that only like-minded far left partisans ever read. Somehow I think that Karl Rove is sleeping pretty easy at night.

Joe,

The President is required to submit a legal argument to Congress to justify his position that the nation needs to go to war. This argument, written down ahead of time, is then enshrined as the rationale of why we went to war. That rationale, which can be googled, or you can find it on the government website itself, is wrong. There’s no wriggle room. We require the writing down, and presentation of the reasons, so no one can re-create those reasons later.

Sure, there may be very good reasons to go to war with Iraq. Those reasons may be the reasons why you support the war. But they’re not in that document.

AP,
Woolsey is an interesting guy. This is neither here nor there, but I think you’d enjoy reading this article:
http://www.library.cornell.edu/colldev/mideast/wools.htm

Cole,
You expressed precisely what I was trying to say earlier (though more succinctly). In new news, The GAO just came out today and stated that, despite the 9 billion we’ve spent, there has been little improvement, and the oil and electricity sectors remain worse than before the war:
http://www.yubanet.com/artman/publish/article_23321.shtml

I’m trying to help get some hospital supplies into Iraq for a hospital in need, and it’s amazing what a mess things are. By the way, if anyone knows a long-term solution for referigerated shipping in Iraq, I’m looking. I could get the military to help (although there’s no easy way to do that), but it would be preferable to find a long term shipping solution that can be utilized by the hospital once the troops leave. A majority of the hospitals are re-using things as mundane as face masks and syringes, which, when coupled with problems with the water sanitation system, is most likely killing a lot of patients. To be perfectly clear,, this was a problem before the war, but it’s gotten worse since. So, if anybody has any ideas, let me know.

Julia and others:

I’d hoped this wouldnt devolve into a discussion on the Iraq war which has gone on in other threads ad nauseum. The intent was to show that intelligent and honorable people can disagree honorably, and can view “facts” and reach different conclusions based on those facts.

I started with the Truman example, since it was long ago. I showed that given the same set of facts, people have generally fallen into two trains of thoughts that are 180 degrees opposite. How can this be, since the factual evidence is the same? Shouldnt everyone see the facts and reach the same conclusion?

In theory, that should happen. In the real world, we have enough facts to put part of the puzzle together. What we never ever have are the pieces of the puzzle to account for what might have happened if. In real life, once we take one path of action (going to war, NOT going to war, negotiating, allowing the UN to negotiate, or whatever), we are deprived of knowing what might have happened had we taken a different path.

In the Truman example, might 1 million young Americans have died had we not used the atomic bomb? WE DONT KNOW, and we never will. We can speculate but we will never know. It is the same with Iraq. How would Iraq have turned out without war—-we just dont know.

Cole:

Your post hinges on a number of ideas that you want to present as facts. For instance, private accounts were only one part of the Social Security plans, and it was said early on that they would not financially save SS. You present it as the entire solution, which of course it was not.

You ignore the UN’s problems, and we know they have many. Have they ever been capable of stopping war? Have they successfully helped the people of the Balkans, the Congo, the Sudan, Niger…or have these people suffered while the UN TRIED to help unsuccessfully?

You fail to mention how tax receipts are up, despite the fact that taxes have been cut. How is this possible??

Your post illustrates precisely what I was posting about. When you take facts and then assume the projections or conclusions, while presenting them as the only possibility, you do your own argument injustice.

For instance, private accounts were only one part of the Social Security plans

It was the only part. Other ideas fleetingly appeared here and there, but nothing substantial.

…and it was said early on that they would not financially save SS.

It was said by Democrats, and eventually, grudgingly, the administration acknowledged the fact.

You ignore the UN’s problems…

Haha! And you’re ignoring Cole’s point. The UN was right about Iraq; Bush was wrong.

You fail to mention how tax receipts are up, despite the fact that taxes have been cut. How is this possible??

Jack provided the answer in a different thread: The rich are making exponentially growing piles of money off of our Wall Street recovery - and consequently paying more in taxes.

AP:

As I feared, too many people missed the point of my comments and focused on rehashing old arguments. Thats why I initially went with the Truman example to avoid that.

I have little interest in rehashing all the arguments about Iraq. None of my points will change your viewpoint, since yours are entrenched. The vice versa is true.

The intent was simply to show that intelligent and honorable people can disagree on the facts. You choose to disregard THAT point in order to attempt to claim how your viewpoints are the only correct ones. It just isnt so, but in the interest of not continuing that particular line of discussion, I’ll simply end now.

There is a very interesting point in ‘rehashing old arguments”: it’s called a track record. The point is not specific just the war in Iraq, or the SS debate, or Bush’s concerns for finding OBL, or the ongoing Rove scandal. It’s all of them taken together.

Each issue might have small parts that can be argued or put under a lawyer’s microscope, but if you look over Bush’s ENTIRE record, you will see a pattern arise sharply: he is not forthright with information and he does not accept responsibility for failure.

Each new scandal or issue brings up old ones because they all point to the same base issue. From the beginning, I had issues with Bush’s intentions and feigned honesty… and time has only proved my assumptions correct.

Bert — wonderful article.
Tony, Cole and Julia — excellent replies!

I think it’s obvious that the majority of American’s no longer trust that these Neocon’s have America’s best interest at heart. Only the most dyed-in-the-wool true believers are scrambling to excuse the fact that for purely political reasons they thought nothing of seriously undercutting our ability to gather intelligence at exactly the time when we’ve never needed it more.
I think it’s fairly safe to say that the Neocon’s will soon be going down — the only tragedy is that their influence will undoubtedly be with us for several more years.

Joe,

My response to you was that while it is valid to say that the reason we went to war was so Saddam would not have the sanctions lifted, and thus be “uncontained”, the fact is the President had to submit his argument to Congress to start the war, and here it is:
http://www.c-span.org/executive/presidential/Report107_243.pdf#search=’presidential%20determination%20%20iraq%20war’

That argument is the factual basis that we can debate the reasons why the President thought it was necesarry to go to war.

So we can debate what his supporters believed, but we can’t debate what he wrote down as his legal and factual basis for war.

And the end result is that a huge portion of that legal and factual basis for war was inaccurate, as fully admitted by the CIA when they discovered that individuals like “Curveball” misled them about whether Saddam was colluding with terrorists or had an active weapons program.

The outstanding issue is the other portion of the argument, the argument that we should go to war because Saddam Hussein had not proven to us that he wasn’t a threat (under U.N. law), and actively given us reason to believe he was a threat. Now, is that reason alone good enough for war? And does the fact the rest of the argument was wrong matter? I suppose that IS debateable.

But we can’t move the debate into other arguments, because those arguments were not presented. We can’t change history to suit our new understanding of the truth.

And that’s the issue with Rove as well. Either he didn’t tell reporters that Wilson’s wife worked for the CIA or he did. Well, he did. Scott McClellan said he didn’t. Rove said he never “told anyone her name.” (i.e. “It depends on what your definition of “is” is.”) The argument has changed.

The administrations position for why war was necesarry has changed. It HAS to have changed, because the information presented in the legal argument to go to war has bad data in it. Since those justifications are no longer valid, then the factual basis for war is different now than when we started. That’s not debatable.

My problem is that it seems like everything is open for interpretation and re-interpretation. But there are a lot more facts around than we acknowledge. The President had an infinitie variety of arguments he could have made for a war, but there were a finite number of reasons he actually presented. We can’t debate the infinite arguments he could have made, only the argument that he did.

Joe, you took some statements out of context and put your own meaning to them. For example;

“You fail to mention how tax receipts are up, despite the fact that taxes have been cut. How is this possible??”

I was talking about not getting the whole story regarding the fact the the increased debt and deficit would harm the economy. These things are further fueled by a decrease in revenue. Overall revenue is down.

“You ignore the UN’s problems, and we know they have many. Have they ever been capable of stopping war? Have they successfully helped the people of the Balkans, the Congo, the Sudan, Niger…or have these people suffered while the UN TRIED to help unsuccessfully?”

And show me where our efforts were any better in those countries? Remember Somalia? How about something more recent; like Iraq? Are Iraqi’s people not suffering more than they were before? I don’t see the US having any better answers than the UN. And the UN was right about the WMD’s, and we were wrong.

“Your post hinges on a number of ideas that you want to present as facts. For instance, private accounts were only one part of the Social Security plans, and it was said early on that they would not financially save SS. You present it as the entire solution, which of course it was not.”

There was no other part of the plan until it was hammered home by democrats that it would not resolve the shortfall. My statement was a fact, not an idea. I still have not seen anything that will fix the shortfall except reducing benefits. Oh WOW! there’s a plan! That fixes it! Take the benefits away, and there will be no shortfall! Duh! Why didn’t I think of that?
(sarcasm not aimed at you, Joe)
But even with my clarification on these points that you mentioned, my main point was made. The eroding of trust in this administration is their own fault. They’ve consistently made their case for something, and we find out later that it is not correct, or sometimes not even the truth.

By the way, I grew up with a guy we called “Joey Bagadonuts”. He was a great friend of mine. So in spite of disagreeing with ya’, I still like ya’.

You choose to disregard THAT point in order to attempt to claim how your viewpoints are the only correct ones.

No, I just pointed out that you didn’t even have the facts right.

But I think your main point, that people will come to different conclusions over the meaning of facts (once they have them), is correct. I’d even go so far as to say you’ve discovered a platitude. Keep up the good work. :)