Defending the Presidency of George W Bush

Thanks again to Pro for her remarks. I will now respond to those comments.OverviewI certainly grant that talking about events in past administrations which impacted events in the Bush administration may be relevant to this debate. However, the purpose of my overview was not to exclude any discussion of prior presidents, but rather to point out that simply assailing Obama and Clinton as bad does not somehow make Bush good. That remains an non-sequitur.Pro's CasePro continues to shift the blame towards Clinton for 9/11, and this continues to be her only talking point in the round. The are a few preliminary points to be made here: (1) even if Bush were not primarily responsible for 9/11, that does not magically make his presidency good, nor does it make his historical position as a president defensible. Clearly, "not doing something bad" is not the same as "doing something worthwhile." And, moreover, Pro is really cherry-picking the issue she wants to discuss. She seems to want to debate: "9/11 was not mainly Bush's fault," instead of "Bush's Presidency." (2) Pro fails to address the point I raised that "Bush was aware that al-Qaeda was trying to attack the US, but that Bush failed to respond to those threats appropriately." Extend this point. Drops in debate are considered concessions, and it is also standard to prohibit new arguments in the final round, because neither debater has much time/space to respond to last-minute assertions and cover everything else that has been said. Given this, Pro should not be permitted to address that drop (or any other) later in this debate. But now, I will address Pro's specific claims here.Clinton cut defense spending, endangering the U.S. While it is true that spending under Clinton did drop, it is untrue that Clinton was the one advocating for the cuts; that was Congress [http://www.nytimes.com...]. But that is all immaterial really, because Pro cannot, and has not, draw a line of causality between reduced budgets and 9/11; in other words, she has never shown that the low budgets of the Clinton administration were major (or even minor) contributors to 9/11. Frankly, there is good reason to believe there is no causal link, because despite the cuts to intel budgets, the intel agencies told Bush about the threats to 9/11. My opponent dropped this! Allow me to quote from my source from last round: "[g]oing on for more than a page, the document recited much of the evidence, including an interview that month with a Middle Eastern journalist in which Bin Laden aides warned of a coming attack, as well as competitive pressures that the terrorist leader was feeling, given the number of Islamists being recruited for the separatist Russian region of Chechnya. And the C.I.A. repeated the warnings in the briefs that followed. Operatives connected to Bin Laden, one reported on June 29, expected the planned near-term attacks to have 'dramatic consequences,' including major casualties." Clearly, Bush had the information he needed to put the country on high alert, and he failed to do so. Homeland Security was done only after 9/11, not before. Now, if Pro is discussing other kinds of military cuts (like cuts to conventional forces), then those wouldn't have stopped an unconvential attack like 9/11. Intelligence and prevention is the most relevant area of military spending to discuss here.Con's CasePro drops my entire case. Extend it.Thank you. Thus, I negate.