a 100 more links is not nessacary.... here is the voting map... http://realpolitik.us/03image/usmap-large.php if you think Gore should of won.. then you need to find a way to remove the electorial college so it doesnt happen again. If you do that... you might as well elimnate the Senate and the Represenatives because they will no longer be needed... Please have a look at the vast area bush won over gore...

from what you are saying is because gore wins NY City and a few other major cities that should be good enough for him to be in office.

i can go on and on about this.. but i wont.

Yes, I've seen that tired old map many times. Too bad for Bush that they don't decide elections area, square footage, or tumbleweed count. They decide it by number of people and states.

The FACT of the matter is that Gore was ahead in Electoral votes prior to Florida, and had every legally cast vote in Florida been counted, we now KNOW that Gore won the popular vote in Florida as well.

I do not intend to clutter this site with the reams of facts, and logic, and proof I've seen and posted since the 2000 election. It is all in my forum:

http://forums.delphiforums.com/n/rspin/
(Read the threads in the "2000 Election" folder)

I'm happy to discuss it there or via email. The truth shall set you free (unless you are Republican).

Although I voted for Gore, I half-expected Bush to win. Then I got interested in the process and TV coverage in Florida. That drove me to do a LOT of research and fact-finding. I have posted literally thousands of times since in various political forums. My statements on the subject are based on facts, logic, and research.

My favorite bumper sticker, with Florida plates

Don't blame me, I voted for both of them

on the other point, ?
Truth is to Politics (liberal or republican) as
Free is to Microsoft

As for who won the election, I like hamburgers, and there is nothing you can do about it.

RO

LOL! Here's a bumber sticker I'm ordering:

Let's actually ELECT a president this time! Vote Democrat!

Illegal if you accept the existence of international law, which many people do.

Really? You would fully support a government which lied to justify its case for war? (You can take this as a hypothetical example if you don't think the US government lied.) Given that the US government is pretty vile at the moment, would you fully support any country which invaded the US on a false pretext and installed a new democratic government?

Most of them starved to death because of US/UN-imposed sanctions. Saddam would probably have been deposed at the end of the First Gulf War if the US hadn't given Saddam free reign to put down revolts using extreme violence. So it's pretty hypocritical for supporters of US foreign policy to get bleeding hearts for the Iraqis under Saddam, given that Saddam's power was maintained quite delibarately by the US for over a decade. Of course states should be allowed to correct their past mistakes, but

* The US has never properly apologised for its earlier support of Saddam, even though the current administration includes many of the same people who were supporting him in the 80s.
* Triumphalism is inappropriate when a country belatedly decides to turn against a brutal dictator responsible for immense amounts of murder and torture, whom it has previously supported.

Oh come on, the media doesn't have to "search out" the dissatisfied — they attack American forces every day. If you want to get an idea of Iraqi opinions of the invasion, try looking to opinion polls instead of anecdotes. The Iraqis certainly are glad to be rid of Saddam, but if I remember correctly a large majority want the US occupation to end immediately.


Erm, yeah. Let's just assume that the government always does the right thing. You're right to point out the irony of the US change of policy towards Saddam. It makes perfect sense if you assume that US foreign policy serves the interests of US elites, rather than the interests of ordinary Iraqis.

If American foreign policy was at all concerned with protecting the Kurds, the US would invade Turkey immidiately.

Alex

dadepfan: the link you provide is broken. I get this at the top of the page:

Oops! We couldn't find the page you were looking for. Please try again, or use this page to find a Forum.

Sorry! Try this one:

http://forums.delphiforums.com/rspin/

I'm niether a republican or democrat.. I think political parties will be the fall of america, as far as I am concerned it will happen and there is no way around it.

Or maybe this one:

forums.delphiforums.com/RSPIN/start

The problem is that my browser already knows I'm a Delphi member, so the URL in my address bar does not work for non-members! Also, the delphi site can be SLOW!

D.

You know, when I first started paying attention to Politics (during the 2000 election), and started spending lots of time on political boards, I was AMAZED and DISMAYED by the size and depth of the gulf of hatred between the radical right and far left.

Personally, I'm just an analytical guy. logic is my God (to a fault and beyond!). I've always been kind of conservative by nature, but logic has led me more to the Liberal side of the fence than the Conservative side.

1) Ok, you say they broke international law, which law, point to the transgression? I hear illegal war so often, prove it, what international law did they break? If you believe that the UN SUPERCEDEs what any member country can do according to their laws, you are mistaken. The UN was against the war (at that time), the US followed their laws and rules for engaging in war, and there is NOTHING illegal about that. Heck, if everyone had to get permission to run their country as they see fit from the UN, it would take 32 years to renew your driver's liscence. So put it in black and white, which LAW was broken. Prove me wrong, prove yourself right, spell out the law that says the US illegally invaded a benign country and war crimes should be prosecuted. Can you?

2) I don't think they lied, however, if people were being tortured, beaten, raped and living under tyranny here in the US, absolutely. It wouldn't happen, civil war would break out first, but if what happened in Iraq was happening here, let er rip. It isn't though. No, things aren't perfect here, corruption, etc, but I have yet to hear of the Governer of any state's son raping 30 women a month.

3) No, they starved because Saddam wanted them to. The oil for food, and aid was blocked by Saddam to put reverse pressure against the US saying, see, people are starving. The sanctions NEVER blocked food, Saddam did NOT want the people fed.

4) You absolutely have a point. He should have been taken out during the Gulf war, it was WRONG to leave him there. That said, at least the right thing was done, finally.

5) Dissatisfied...re-read what I said. There is a lot of violence, extremeism, and lots of people getting killed (although I suspect a lot less than when Saddam was in control), I am talking about how a HUGE portion of Mr and Mrs Iraq are so very glad that we are there, the coalition, and yet, we never hear from them.

On a different front, if you actually believe that European news is covering the whole issue fairly and without bias, more power to you. I have yet to hear the BBC say ANYTHING positive in ANY respect towards the conflict. I used to watch it often. I remember a commentator getting so mad he couldn't speak when he interviewed a person and they managed to corner the interviewer into admitting that they would rather have left Saddam in power than president Bush be the one who takes him out. It was incredibly funny.

Now, BBC ain't Europe, but I tried to catch the news flavor overseas in English versions of newspapers, and honestly, if I wasn't here, I too would probably believe that Saddam really wasn't so bad, the US was evil and Bush was the devil reincarnated.

Anyway, I still like hamburgers, and I know I have no chance of changing anyone's mind about anything.

RO

Ignore, somehow I double posted the same.

Things which violate the UN charter (which the Iraq war did) are commonly referred to as illegal according to international law. I can't prove that they're illegal any more than I can prove that murder is illegal, but I wasn't using any obscure or unsual sense of the word "illegal". Your example of driving licences is silly, because its an area of law which the UN Charter makes no reference to. It's very obvious that if every country only needed to respect its own rules in order to go to war, any war, however terrible, could be perfectly legal. By your definition of the applicability of international law, 9/11 was perfectly legal (so long as Afghanistan or Saudi Arabia thought it was).

Let's take a more analogous example. Say an IRA terrorist is known to be living in America and the British government asks for him to extradited, but America refuses. Would it then be OK for Britain to invade the US, in order to secure custody of the terrorist? Would it be OK for Britian to bomb a street in Boston, because the terrorist was known to live in a house there, and have support from the community ("terrorist sympathisers")?.

Saddam used control of the food and medicine supply to gain political control (you don't rebel against the person who's your one source of food). Restricting the amount of food/medicine which was allowed into Iraq alowed Saddam to stengthen his political control. Investigations have shown that Iraq actually had an extremely efficient food distribution system (e.g. Unicef described it as "flawless"). The problem was that not enough food was getting through under the oil for food program, causing countless numbers of children to starve.

I live in the UK, and the BBC I've watched has been definitely more pro-war than anti-war (there are proper academic studies which confirm this, I believe, although I admit to not having read any of them since I watch BBc news regularly, and can come to my own conclusions). I find it especially hard to believe that an interviewer would have expressed their own opinion on a serious BBC news program, since the BBC is quite strict about interviewer neutrality. What program are you referring to? The BBC always holds government policy up to criticism, but this is just a requirement of giving balanced coverage, not a bias (something which I suppose it would be easy to forget if you usually watch Fox propaganda).

I don't see why. You really ought to give some specific examples of biased news coverage, otherwise we're just having an argument in a vacuum.

Anyway, some final thoughts.

a) The gulf war was a UN war, they stopped Bush 1 from taking Saddam out. He wanted to, the UN wouldn't let him.
b) The world is a better place now that Saddam et all are out of power.
c) The people of Iraq are much better off, and they have a real future to look forward to
d) The US has learned a bitter lesson about 'The enemy of my enemy is my friend'. A lot of the weapons in Aphganistan were American supplied from the Soviet war with them. 'The enemy of my enemy can still be my enemy'.
e) The current president did not do d), and had the cahonie's to finish what Bush 1 wanted to in the face MANY counties who wanted the status quo because of THEIR $s at stake in Iraq. The level of hypocracy from 'pristine' countries opposed to the current war is borderline criminal.
f) Would Gore have done the same thing, I hope so, but we'll never know, Bush did, and my hat is off to him.

Anyway, my compile is done, time to deploy, then pick my son up from football, then cut some grass here in the land of the free. Imagine, in the not too distant future, kids in Iraq who's worries will be scoring a goal, homework,clothes, and whether they should buy that ipod or that skooter they want, and not whether their parents will just disappear in the night.

RO

Hey- I'm glad Saddam is gone to. It's just too bad that Bush didn't do it for the Iraqi kids

D.