Is George W. Bush Accountable for Any of This?

Posted on September 8, 2004 by Michael Froomkin
This entry was posted in Politics: US: 2004 Election. Bookmark the permalink.

9 Responses to Is George W. Bush Accountable for Any of This?

  1. Mojo says:
    September 8, 2004 at 1:46 am

    Cheney said the nation risks falling back into a “pre-9/11 mind-set” that terrorist attacks are criminal acts that require a reactive approach.
    In Iraq, the vice president said, the United States has taken out a leader who used weapons of mass destruction against his own people and harbored other terrorists.
    “Saddam Hussein today is in jail, which is exactly where he belongs,” Cheney said.
    Can they even spell irony?

  2. Dave Straub says:
    September 8, 2004 at 9:05 am

    Michael: Good post, but just wanted to point out that your Marshall link appears to miss its mark by one. This appears to be the right link.

  3. Michael says:
    September 8, 2004 at 9:09 am

    Link fixed. Thanks.

  5. norbizness says:
    September 8, 2004 at 10:33 am

    Accountability? That’s just a pre-9/11 mindset talking. Reconfigure yourself, son!

  6. Doc. Z says:
    September 8, 2004 at 10:58 am

    All of it!

  7. zgveritas says:
    September 8, 2004 at 4:01 pm

    Mr F.,

    George Bush is only here on earth acting as the Lord’s agent. We do not question his actions or his motives. Nor can we hold him accountable. That would be blasphemy.
    The Lord works in mysterious ways.

  8. Brett Bellmore says:
    September 8, 2004 at 9:08 pm

    Surely Bush can’t be accountable for a thousand of our soldiers being dead… Unless maybe you think that none of them would have died in peacetime. Join the military, and be immortal until a war is declared? I think not. In reality, a fair number of those thousand died of non-combat related causes.

    And, surely by now, you must be aware that Cheney’s remark was edited in such a way as to alter it’s meaning.

    Really, feel free to dislike the guy; I despise him myself, and will be voting Libertarian again this year. But you could you at least dislike him honestly?

  9. Mojo says:
    September 9, 2004 at 1:43 am

    Surely Bush can’t be accountable for a thousand of our soldiers being dead… Unless maybe you think that none of them would have died in peacetime.
    Yes, people in the military sometimes die even without wars. In a typical year about 65 of a group of 130,000 military personnel would have died. But of around 130,000 in Iraq at any one time, over 1000 have died, 691 of them in the past year up through the end of August. Now the folks deployed to Iraq would actually have had a slightly lower death rate than that since people with chronic illnesses (more likely to die) wouldn’t be deployed, but I’ll ignore that as a favor to the President. So I’ll be generous and only blame Bush for 626 dead Americans per year plus allied troops plus US civilian workers plus Iraqi civilians who are collateral damage from US operations. (Please note that I don’t include any of the deaths in Afghanistan since that is a legitimate war and soldiers expect that they might be killed protecting the country. What they don’t expect is that their lives will be thrown away.)
    Non-combat related causes is b***s***. Most of those counted in that number by the military are things like crashing into a ravine because they were driving way to fast to try to get through ambush sites quicker. I worked with a guy who just dropped dead on the way to the chow tent from an undiagnosed heart problem, but he was the exception. If a pilot crashes because he was flying his chopper through the streets at below rooftop height to avoid the missiles and ATGMs, he’s a combat casualty in my book.

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