<p>Oh, and a lot of people agree with me. Many don’t. I don’t need to explain why and don’t care why people do or don’t agree.</p>
<p>“That free flow of opinions just kills some liberals. Now I’m told that the same is true of folks in the majority in red states, too, which just goes to show that all blowhards are the same, no matter how they turn the lever in the polling booth.” Very well put, Zoosermom.</p>
<p>Well, I’m certainly not against a strong military. It kills me that the Republicans are gutting our armed services in a quagmire war from which there is no exit strategy or even a coherent definition of the goals.</p>
<p>Hindoo, I think Kerry would have been awful because I don’t think he’s tough enough to stand up to terrorists, and I think our enemies already existed and weren’t created by Bush. That’s all. My reason. But, hey, you could have been right. Who knows? As I’ve said repeatedly, our next president is going to be a democrat (ok, fine, I always say it’s going to be Hillary) so we’ll find out.</p>
<p>Interesteddad, you might be surprised to find that I agree with every thing you posted in #324, except that I hold every Congress person responsible who voted for the war, right behind the administration.</p>
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<p>What’s interesting though, if you read the liberal blogs, that conservatives often post in the comments at many of them, and quite argumentatively. And the admins, etc, are fine with it. </p>
<p>Conservative blogs on the other hand, tend to have comments turned off, so no one can post a dissenting view, or very closely monitor the comments and quickly erase anything off-message. Free Republic, one of the most popular conservative forums, doesn’t even allow Giuliani supporters to post anymore, they’ve all been banned, except for perhaps a few that have kept mum to avoid the purge.</p>
<p>It’s the same with the call-in shows. Much more dissenting views are allowed on the liberal shows than the conservative ones. </p>
<p>Bill O’Reilly will actually have the mike turned off if a guest says something he doesn’t want his audience to know. When one woman he had on his show tried to explain–truthfully–that the WH offer for Rove’s testimony did NOT include a written transcript, O’Reilly yelled at her, had her mike turned off for the remainder of the broadcast, and (falsely) assured his audience that the offer did include a transcript. </p>
<p>Not only don’t many of them allow opinions they don’t like, some of them don’t even allow FACTS they don’t like.</p>
<p>Zoosermom–And you might be right. Who knows? As for a Democratic president … again, who knows? Hillary is not a shoo-in. I’m a pretty solid Democrat and I prefer two or three candidates over her at this point. As I think you said before, it’ll be an interesting campaign on both sides of the political spectrum.</p>
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<p>Was Congress aware that the uranium memo was a forgery? And did they have reason to believe that war strategy and planning would be made by the AEI and not military experts?</p>
<p>I still think Iraq was seeking uranium in Africa.</p>
<p>Conyat (no, really, I am responding to you!) I’ve found the opposite to be true on certain liberal comment threads. Would you let me know what sites you’re referring to so I can go and snoop?</p>
<p>What liberal places do you think conservatives’ comments are censored, the way Free Republic and Bill O’Reilly censor?</p>
<p>Democratic Underground. I don’t read O’reilly or Free republic, so I can’t speak to them. I’ll scope out Free Republic, but O’Reilly makes me heave, so I’m staying away from him. (I apologize for not quoting – using ZG’s new computer and have no idea what I’m doing.)</p>
<p>Free Republic’s banning of the Giuliani supporters (and their 2004 ban of Bush supporters) has been widely commented on.</p>
<p>I don’t read Democratic Underground, but I’ll take a look.</p>
<p>I’ll have to take your word for that since I’m only vaguely familiar with the site, but I am going to check it out. Perhaps they won’t want me there anyway, since I did vote for Giuliani once.</p>
<p>I don’t really blame either side for voting for the war. I think they thought it would be conducted like the first Gulf War. You may remember that those who voted against it were roundly condemned after the fact. I don’t think anyone dreamed that Bush would turn it into such a fiasco.</p>
<p>Mathmom, I certainly didn’t. This is so far beyond my imagination. But I do think that Bush has been arrogant in the extreme in the occupation period.</p>
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<p>No. Rumsfeld/Cheney and the neocons were able to successfully squelch contrary evidence.</p>
<p>In fairness, Sadaam was able to successfully bamboozle the highest levels of the US intelligence community with his “Beware of Dog” sign, even though he didn’t have a dog. There are two reasons for that.</p>
<p>a) US intelligence was shocked after the 1991 invasion to learn how close Saddaam was to a successful, albeit crude, uraniaum enrichment program. Institutionally, they wanted to err on the side of caution.</p>
<p>b) Nobody could really grasp Sadaam’s irrational behavior of subjecting his country to punative sanctions unless he was hiding a program.</p>
<p>Combine those with the Rumsfeld/Cheney/Wolfowitz/Chalabi selective presentation of intelligence and it is was difficult for the dissenting intelligence to get through. Powell didn’t think he was lying to the United Nations, but he didn’t have a lot of contrary intelligence. It was effectively shortstopped.</p>
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<p>They weren’t. They didn’t need to. Iraq had a stockpike of yellowcake uranium from their own small mines. What they didn’t have was an enrichment program. Their nuclear program had been destroyed in the 1991 Gulf War. After a year of cat 'n mouse after the war, Saddam had finally given the green light for full cooperation with the UN inspectors in the '92 - '93 time frame. The entire program was disclosed to the UN inspectors. The sanctions had made it impossible to restart the program. Remember, the western intelligence services have embedded moles at all of the suppliers for necessary proprietary nuclear technology. They also had moles in the A.Q. Khan network, so they were able to keep close tabs on rogue states trying to develop nukes.</p>
<p>In the run up to the war, the CIA had recruited US family members of the Iraqi “nuclear team” to make family visits to Iraq. What they found was that the engineers and scientists were being held under duress (the US refused to help a number of them defect). They were doing “busywork” on civilian projects with an eye towards keeping the knowledge base in place. But, they all laughed when asked about a nuclear program…because they knew that they had shared the whole thing with the UN inspectors and couldn’t believe that the CIA was seriously asking about an Iraqi nuclear program. They could barely feed their children, let alone design and build nuclear weapons from scratch with nothing.</p>
<p>The only real concern the intelligence experts (like Hans Blix) had was that Saddam had managed to hide stocks of biological or chemical weapons. Not finding those was the big surprise. Nobody knowledgeable thought Sadaam had a nuke program.</p>
<p>I knew I had seen this somewhere. And at a conservative blog too:</p>
<p><a href=“Polipundit.com - Portal Berita Terkini”>Polipundit.com - Portal Berita Terkini;
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[quote]
Of the twenty-four liberal blogs in the top quintile, Dailykos, TPM Caf</p>
<p>What about lucianne.com? That site certainly accepts comments and is one of the most influential. Powerline also has a forum and is quite influential, so I’m not sure about those statistics.</p>
<p>She may allow comments, but she’s not so much for the dissenting opinions: “Articles from AntiWar.com and Spotlight are not welcome on Lucianne.com. Anyone posting articles from any of these sites will be banned without notice.”</p>
<p>ETA: Looks like her ban policy does also include the KKK, etc. Not too surprising considering she lost the Marine Corps as an advertiser due to racist comments by her users.</p>
<p>I didn’t see any conservative comments at DU or liberal comments at lucianne. But that could be self-selection. I don’t think anyone from the other side would much want to post at either place.</p>
<p>ETA: Looks like she’s more influential than I thought. She sure did a number on Free Republic’s hit count at one point.</p>