Showing posts with label Osama Bin Laden. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Osama Bin Laden. Show all posts

Saturday, January 31, 2015

Mirrored Ideologies: Why Huckabee's Recent Remarks Should Make You Worry

by Nomad

HuckabeeMike Huckabee's recent remarks sound vaguely familiar.


The other day on his Christian television show, former Arkansas governor and possible presidential candidate, Mike Huckabee made an attention-grabbing statement. He said that he feared for the nation. 
"We cannot survive as a republic if we do not become, once again, a God-centered nation that understands that our laws do not come from man, they come from God.
He was not, he hastened to add, demanding a theocracy. No way, no how. The problem, he said, was our secularism.

His critics would say that Huckabee's statement is yet another sign - as if we needed any more- that this man is unsuitable for political office and probably always was.

Monday, March 26, 2012

Karl Rove and the Truth about the Hunt for Bin Laden 2/2

President Bush
President George Bush 
by Nomad


Part One of this series

Distraction
In our examination of the Bush administration’s failure to bring bin Laden to justice, we now come to Jan. 29, 2002. It was the date of the president’s State of the Union address- known more famously known as the “axis of evil” speech.
In his speech, he identified Iraq, along with Iran and North Korea, as an "axis of evil." He vowed that the U.S. "will not permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons."

Two years later, in a speech on the floor of the Senate, Senator Edward Kennedy would astutely note what the president did not mention in the famous speech.
In the aftermath of the terrorist attack on Sept. 11th President Bush right spoke about the need to put Afghanistan on the right course....


Instead of finishing the job, however, President Bush foolishly and recklessly diverted America's attention from the real war on terrorism in Afghanistan by rushing to a war in Iraq, a country that had no operational links to al-Qaida terrorist.
That shift was all but sealed by the time of President Bush's State of the Union Address on January 29, 2002. Karl Rove had told the Republican National Committee that terrorism could used politically... That is Karl Rove in 2002: Republicans could "go to the country on this issue."
What did President Bush say about bin Laden in the State of the Union address that day? Nothing.
What did he say about the Taliban? Nothing.
Nothing about bin Laden, a fleeting mention about al-Qaida, nothing about the Taliban in that State of the Union Address.
With those words, we lost our clear focus on the imminent threat to our national security- Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida. The president had checked the box on Afghanistan and was poised to use the 911 attacks to advance his Iraq war agenda..
Without a doubt, the war with Iraq has distracted us from the hunt for Osama bin Laden.
Osama Bin Laden Nomadic Politics
Osama Bin Laden
One of the greatest challenges for the administration was not finding bin Laden but finding a way to seamlessly link Saddam Hussein with, if not bin Laden, then  al-
Qaida.

It wasn’t going to be easy. Only a month after the 9/11 attacks, an FBI agent met with a number of people who had had ties to bin Laden regarding any connections between Hussein and  al-Qaida  The informers laughed at the suggestion. Bin Laden hated the Iraqi dictator, calling him a “Scotch-drinking woman-chasing infidel.”