Actually, it appears that jake has not read the Duelfer report, which states that Saddam's plan was to use the 21.3 billion he skimmed from the UN oil-for-food program via bribes and kickbacks to suborn the UN sanctions (by means of payoffs to officials in the governments of UN Security Council members, to opinion shapers, to media, and to UN officials), at whcih point he would resume his building of a nuclear program. He had already hidden nuclear centrifuge parts in one of his nuke scientists' rose garden, and had made inquiries concerning purchasing yellowcake uranium ore in Africa (yes, Wilson's private notes showed that he lied in his public pronouncements on this issue, possibly because he was a Kerry supporter attempting to damage Bush any way he could), and was connected with the A. Q. Khan rogue nuclear proliferation network, both directly and through Libya (we found this out when Qadaffi renounced his own nuclear program and furnished us with the intelligence we subsequently used to roll the network up). Saddam also had warehoused precisely the types of explosives that are used as nuclear triggers at his Al QaQaa munitions facility. Saddam was a clear and continuing danger to both the region and the globe, one that Bush I and Clinton failed to deal with, and one that Kerry most likely wouldn't have dealt with, either, should Saddam have remained in power until a Kerry presidency. Then, we would be facing a second North Korea in a much more critical and dangerous part of the world. These are not melodramatic or memebotic rantings, but uncomfortable and inconvenient facts that puncture the fantasy myth, near and dear to Anybody-But-Bush-crusading hearts, that Saddam had no nuclear designs, and that Bush Lied (the Bush Lied meme is one of their favorites) when he stated that Saddam DID have such designs. These people like to call themselves the reality-based constituency, but if reality is constituted from an interconnected nexus of facts, it turns out that it is they who are truly the reality-challenged ones.
[Joe] I'll bet you that your reputation vote on me, and Jake's, and Rhino's, and Mermaid's, and Irvken's, and Zloduska's, and Casey's are lower than Jonathan's is (or Bill Roh's would be). Hermit's also.
[David] Probably and that would lend credence to my hypothesis while disproving your assumption.
[Joe] If, as I suspect, people like Jake and Rhino and Casey and and Mermaid and Irvken and Zloduska would not raise my reputation rating regardless of what I do or do not post in the future (unless I lie and say that I think they're right, which they aren't, a fact which, in several cases, I have conclusively demonstrated), it proves my point in spades, as well as illustrating how an emotion-based grudge will tend to trump reason-based re-evaluation, of both my position and their own. It ain't fair, but it's realistic. People hate being publicly proven wrong. And they don't forget who did the proving.
All of which will not dissuade me from publicly correcting the errors I discern here.
Re:The intoxication instinct
« Reply #17 on: 2004-11-26 11:07:54 »
I find it tedious that a topic on altered states is now focussed on American, and CoV, politics. Have we not been through all this before? Must it be a scab that requires continual picking?