Quote from waggie945:
WE have been through this argument before.
I have no problem with securing our Nation-State.
And as I have told you before, I am a big proponent on spending money on our Military and developing the kind of tremendous ISR effort ( Intell, Surveillance, Reconn ) that money can buy. In fact, one of my biggest long term holdings is in an electronics defense company that trades on the NYSE and it has been in our family since 1998, which is a helluva long time for an old futures scalper like me!
In any event, I simply have a problem with how our intelligence agency has been prostituted by the current Administration. Why even bother having a CIA if you aren't even going to listen to them?
In my opinion, the "whoring" of our intelligence agency by the Bush Administration for the invasion of Iraq was one of the sadder moments of our Democracy.
Mav, this has nothing to do with LBJ or Clinton or Kennedy or a trip down administration memory lane . . . This is about NOW, and the circumstances that lead to an invasion based on "faulty" intelligence, or not even listening to the intelligence that we had in an objective fashion.
Besides, even in the "worst case scenario" in which I agreed with you that a regime change was necessary in securing our Country and you believed that Saddam Hussein needed to be taken out, why risk any human lives when you have the Predator and Global Hawk in your arsenal, already proven weapons in the battlefield of Afghanistan?
Or did you need to somehow "shock and awe" the rest of the Arab Community in order to make your point and kill many innocent women and children and watch several U.S. soldiers get picked-off day after day after day?
Waggie, apparently you missed my point about not having access to all available information. The fact of the matter is we don't know and probably will never know what Bush knew and what he didn't know. So why freaking speculate? Why pretend that you are sitting in those pentagon meetings looking over classified information. Is there something we don't know about you Waggie? Do you have some kind of security clearance?
Because if you don't then you know about as much as we do, which is a little bit more then jack squat. Which makes me very suspicious of your motives here. Since we are dealing in a game in which we are given only fragments of information and yet somehow you have managed to put together the puzzle and come to your own conclusions.
Look, if we discover that Bush lied to the American people, I will be the first person on ET to condemn him. If we find out that there was no credible information to attack Iraq on then my support for him will cease. However Waggie, keep in mind that everything Bush has said about Iraq is exactly what Clinton and Kerry said word for word. So if Bush is lying to us, then so is Bill Clinton and so is John Kerry. In fact, everyone must be in on this lie, the whole world must be lying to us. The pentagon lied, the CIA lied, Blair lied, all the undercover agents lied, Tenet lied, everyone. Now that just doesn't seem plausible now does it?
Waggie, I have to say that I am very disappointed in your selection of Jerry Brown as your choice to replace Bush. Why? Because if you are a republican like you claim, are you telling me you can't name one person in your own party, not one senator, not one congressman, not one governor, not one mayor, not even maybe an attorney general, not one republican in the entire party? So you name a freaking democrat and you tell me you are a registered republican. If that is true, I think you are a sellout. I'm sorry, I know that is a harsh word. And I am not saying anything negative about you as a trader or as a person, but you are a sellout to your own party if you can't even name one person anywhere in the country from the party that you supposedly are registered with. That's pretty sad.
