we'll see. You guys really don't like this government monitoring do ya? sheesh.

What is the big deal about being able to speak eloquently and all that? Bush's mistakes in his speech make him more realistic. Normal people would talk just like he does when speaking in front of large audiences about important stuff. I don't see why people expect him to be so much better than everybody else at speaking. I know you'll probably say he's the president, he should be able to speak well. I have seen him speak well personally, but I know he makes mistakes. I don't see why the president should be held to a higher standard anyway. He is a citizen of the United States just like anyone else. He's not a king, he hasn't been educated more than most people, he is just an American, that's the point of Democracy, so regular people can hold office.

This country needs a new clean slate of Politicians and Bueaucrats(sp?)... New Government for all... of course... that could just make more things fucked up and Political Correctness would be so strict in would affect people's rights. DOWN WITH DEMOCRACY.

people of intelligence should be in power, then they would not fuck up so much with foreign affairs for example, and I do believe Bush's lack of being able to put a sentance together does not make the people who voted for him look very....clever as to say.

oOo:

Talk about double speak...You're saying him lying under oath about getting a blow job because the Republicans were HELL-BENT on bringing him down is greater grounds for justification on impeachment then a president who KNOWINGLY broke the law to spy on US citizens. FFS if Bush got a blow job and lied under oath all he would have to say is "9/11 and national security! ehehehehehehehehehehehehehe" and he would be pardoned. It's un-be-fucking-lievable what Bush has gotten away with.

LMFAO, Regular people do not run this country. If regular people did people like Kerry, Clinton, Bush, Byrd, Frist, etc wouldn't be in power. The US Government is full of (Described by Kurt Vonnegut) of winners...

[quote:cadb6] Of course, we have only a one party government. It's the winners. And then everybody else is the losers. And, the winners divided into two parties. The Republicans and the Democrats.

DAVID BRANCACCIO: Well, you write in the book you say that the last election, the two leading candidates were two C students from Yale, as you put it.

KURT VONNEGUT: Two members of Skull and Bones at Yale, for God's sake. If I mean, that's what a charade the combat between the Republicans and the Democrats is. It's rich kids. Winners on both sides. So the winners can't lose. And, of course, the losers have no representation in Congress or whatever.

But look, yeah. We had to choose between two members of Skull and Bones? What about if we had to choose between two members of Sigma Chi at Purdue? Wouldn't somebody have said what a minute. What the hell happened here?

DAVID BRANCACCIO: But you're saying you don't see senior political figures really, anybody representing the interests of people who are struggling?

KURT VONNEGUT: No, are not representing the American people. And, so there are people who made a hell of a lot of money one way or another. Making it during the war, incidentally. As you know, maybe the war is a bad idea. But some people are making a ton of money off of it. And they want to hang on to whatever they've got. And so they bank roll political campaigns for both Republicans and Democrats.[/quote:cadb6]

stammer hit le spot

I agree Stammer, the way campaigning has changed over the last century or so makes it harder for poor people to get elected. My point is that people who get elected can come from anywhere in America and have completely different backgrounds.

My main point was that the Presidential role was created to be one that is not held as more important than common citizens, otherwise he would become like a king. Therefore, to expect him to be able to speak better than everyone else is stupid. Granted, he should be able to speak well in certain occassions for different purposes, but I don't think it's that big of a deal. He doesn't totally bomb during the State of the Union and he has tons of speeches that he's done well, you only see the ones he messes up.

so who should we put into power? the other option was John Kerry, who had lower grades than Bush through most of their college years.

So are you saying that if you were to mispeak , the people who still understood you and agreed with you are stupid? I guess what I'm trying to say is, how does screwing words up (sometimes) under pressure in front of large audiences make him stupid? Hell, most people here would do the same thing yet we wouldn't consider ourselves stupid...

Blair atleast talked Bush out of bombing the al jazeera headquarters...He has some morals atleast.

Source: (Their are other sources, but this one is pleasing to the eyes)

By Robert Fisk - 26 November 2005

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fis ... 329375.ece

http://www.selvesandothers.org/article12420.html

On 4 April 2003, I was standing on the roof of al-Jazeera’s office in Baghdad. The horizon was a towering epic of oil fires and burning buildings. Anti-aircraft guns in a public park close to the bureau were pumping shells into the sky and the howl of jets echoed across the city. I was about to start a two-way interview with al-Jazeera’s head office in Qatar when an American rocket came racing up the Tigris river behind me. Its rail-train "swish" brought a cry from the Qatar technician who picked up the sound on his earphones.

"Was that what I think it was?" he asked. I fear so, I replied, as the white-painted cruise missile zipped beneath one of the Tigris’s bridges and disappeared upstream. After finishing my "stand-upper" - television demands rooftop scenes from Baghdad even to this day, when most of the reporters are confined to their offices and hotels by teams of hired mercenaries - I descended to the al-Jazeera newsroom where the Jordanian-Palestinian bureau chief, Tareq Ayoub, was trying to put together his next report. You, I told him, have the most dangerous television office in the history of the world.

I remarked how easy a target his Baghdad office would make if the Americans wanted to destroy its coverage - seen across the Arab world - of civilian victims of the Anglo-American bombing of Iraq. "Don’t worry, Robert," Tareq had replied. "We’ve given the Americans the exact location of our bureau so we won’t get hit." Three days later, Tareq was dead.

Al-Jazeera had indeed given their office’s map co-ordinates to the Pentagon. In fact, the State Department’s public affairs officer in Qatar - a man of Lebanese descent called Nabil Khoury - had pointedly gone to the station’s management on 6 April to assure them their bureau would be spared. Then on 7 April, as Tareq Ayoub broadcast at 7.45am from the same spot on the roof on which I had been standing, an American jet flew across the Tigris and fired a single missile at al-Jazeera. Its explosion killed Tareq instantly. This was no errant attack. "The plane was so low, we thought it was going to land on the roof," Tareq’s colleague Taiseer Alouni told me afterwards.

And Taiseer should know. He had been Kabul correspondent for al-Jazeera in 2001 when a cruise missile smashed into his (mercifully empty) bureau. Al-Jazeera had been broadcasting bin Laden’s threats and sermons from Afghanistan and no one doubted at the time that the attack - which the Americans claimed was a mistake - was deliberate. After the killing of Tareq Ayoub in Baghdad in 2003, the Pentagon’s soulless letter of explanation expressed its sorrow for Ayoub’s death but did not even bother to offer an explanation for the attack. Why should it? After all, on the very same day, an American Abrams M-1 A-1 tank fired a shell into the Palestine Hotel, killing three more journalists. Small arms fire, the Americans said, had been coming from the building. It was a lie.

Nor was I surprised. Back in Belgrade in 1998, I had watched the Americans bomb Serbia’s television headquarters, an act which, as I wrote next morning, allowed Nato to strike at targets for the words men and women said - rather than the deeds they committed. What precedent did this set for the future? I should have guessed.

So what was so strange about George Bush’s desire to bomb al-Jazeera in 2004? That Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara - the man who supposedly persuaded the American president to desist from this latest insanity - should now threaten the British press under the Official Secrets Act lest they divulge the entire can of worms is quite in keeping with the arrogance of power which we now associate with the Bush-Blair alliance. British ministers cravenly repeated America’s lies when US aircraft killed the innocent in Baghdad in 2003 and they will happily cover up Bush’s continued desire to bomb his supposed enemies, however innocent they may be.

When al-Jazeera first broadcast across the Arab world, the Americans hailed its appearance as a symbol of freedom amid the dictatorships of the Middle East. The New York Times’s messianic columnist Tom Friedman praised it as a beacon of freedom - always a dangerous precedent, coming from Friedman - while US officials held out the station’s broadcasts as proof that Arabs wanted free speech. And there was some truth in this. When al-Jazeera broadcast a brilliant 16-part series on the Lebanese civil war - a subject scrupulously avoided by Beirut television stations - the crowded seafront Corniche in front of my Lebanese home became deserted.

Arabs wanted to see and hear truths that had been denied them by their own leaders.

But when the same al-Jazeera began broadcasting bin Laden’s words, all the enthusiasm of Friedman and the State Department dried up. By 2003, US deputy defence secretary Paul Wolfowitz - that paragon of democracy who asked why Turkish generals did not have "something to say" when the democratically elected Turkish parliament prohibited US troops from using their territory for the invasion of Iraq - was fraudulently claiming that al-Jazeera was "endangering the lives of American troops". His boss, Donald Rumsfeld, told an even bigger lie: that al-Jazeera was co-operating with Iraqi insurgents. I spent days investigating these claims. All turned out to be false. Tapes of guerrilla attacks on US forces were delivered anonymously to the station’s offices, not filmed by al-Jazeera’s crews. But the die was cast. Iraq’s newly elected government proved its democratic credentials by throwing al-Jazeera out of the country - just as Saddam had threatened to do in early 2003.

Of course, al-Jazeera is no golden child of journalism. Its discussion programmes are often weighed down with uncompromising Islamists, its dutiful presentation of bin Laden’s tiresome sermons balanced by interviews with Western leaders far tougher than any questions put to al-Qa’ida’s bearded leadership. But it is a free voice in the Middle East - and so was attacked by the Americans in Kabul and in Baghdad. And almost in Qatar. And thus British journalists must now be suppressed by Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara if they dare to reveal the latest revelation from the dark and bloody pit into which Messrs Blair and Bush have plunged us.

al Jazeera broadcasts anti-american propaganda, fueling insurgency and hatred of america in the middle east. I can understand how it could be taken as a threat to the safety of American troops over there.

Watch control room, great documentary..it talks about your "terrorists t.v argument" and how it has no ground. It's a station for arabs, made by arabs. And I do believe that what they are doing is not fuelling an ideology of "terrorism" but showing other arabs the way the media is supposed to be presented, I'll give you a hint...a word you never hear in western media..."truth". That's what they show and they show it properly. Read the articles on their website, its remarkable. They show tapes of suicide bombers and things of that nature because they want to show other arabs that this is what the war has turned to, it would not be going on if the Americans were not there. And I'm glad that this station exists, rather than Iraqis watching CNN...

no, i still feel confident saying that Al Jazeera can only stand to fuel anti-American feelings in the middle east.

Well whats your ground for being there? Bringing democracy? That's the question al-Jazeera poses to its viewers.


It's showing Arabs that what America is doing to Iraq is bringing democracy by using the point of soldiers bayonets...and thats not justifiable in any way. Bringing a country that was held by the mongols, the british among many other empires throughout history is hopeless. Do you really think that everyone wants a democracy in Iraq?

I beleive the majority does.

Western media = Fear and lies
Eastern media = Courage and truth

Who woulda thunk it?! eek:

imwithstupid:



stupid: