George Bush jr is a bad man

Thanks for the quick reply Pro. Most of Pro’s proof lies on the Iraq war, which, in the last round I showed largely wasn’t of George Bush’s design. He was fed bad information, and most of the aggression and even the policy behind the Iraq war was a Rumsfeld/Cheney brainchild. The Patriot act was all Cheney; being an obsessive personality, who from day one was deeply concerned with safeguarding America as well as increasing what he saw as unfairly diminished Presidential power. Cheney worked for Nixon and was a spitting image. He had drawn up plans to invade Iraq and kill Saddam in 1990. Literally minutes after 9/11 Cheney was contacting his staff to find a link to Iraq. The Patriot Act was everything Cheney wanted, not everything Bush wanted. Pro quotes a stat that isn’t entirely representative of popular opinion post 9/11. Polls showed that after 9/11 only 42% opposed a war in Iraq, while a majority voted for it. The Christian Right proved quite powerful in its persuasion as well; for example, the Land Letter. In February 2003, popular support against the Iraq war went down to only 27%, and a majority of the population believed that Iraq was probably linked to 9/11 – (so did Bush, for that matter). Again, you can’t say it was some kind of insane radical departure. Many popular voices called for war. It took until June 2005 for a majority to turn against the Iraq War. I don’t make the mistake of assuming that the Iraq war was an immoral war. Strategic blunder, perhaps, but immoral, no. It hoped to overthrow a wicked, evil man and establish a working democracy. It hoped to save a population that had been gassed with neurotoxins, routinely kidnapped and tortured and otherwise terrorized by its government. Saddam was a ruthless tyrant, and Iraq was a state sponsor of terrorism. Indeed, the threat of nuclear armament is not something to take lightly. How can you say that is immoral? How can you say that Bush had no legitimate reason? If you want to be pessimistic, even the promise of unrestricted Kurdish oil is a legitimate reason, I hate to say. As for the torture, that was again a Cheney/Rumsfeld movement. Rumsfeld set the tone in the Pentagon. It was Rumsfeld who directly supervised the army field manuals that condoned torture and waterboarding. He arranged the legal memos for torture techniques to be approved, and personally invited high-ranking US commanders to introduce new techniques in the field. He sent General Geoffrey Miller to go from Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib – it was his fault that the terrible abuses occurred. Cheney and his gang of freaks were just as bad. For example, Cheney and his lawyer David Addington set up a kind of secret intelligence service that funneled information from the Pentagon directly to Cheney. He kept closer tabs on intelligence than Bush did – a man who didn’t often read the reports. He collected many followers in the Pentagon and routinely exercised his power. The linking of Iraq to 9/11 was a top priority for Cheney. When the evidence emerged showing that he had concocted much of the evidence, it was Cheney who pushed for extreme practises of torture, perhaps in vain, trying to find some kind of a link that wasn’t there. His friend John Yoo, for example, a lawyer for Bush, was tasked by Cheney with drafting the legal memos to expand administrative powers. It was Yoo, Cheney and a small group of lawyers that write and passed most of the blatantly unconstitutional papers. Cheney, ever a master of spin, still says stuff like, “Waterboarding, the way we did it, was, in fact, not torture” and loves to repeat things like “Well, torture, to me…is an American citizen on a cell phone making a last call to his four young daughters shortly before he burns to death in the upper levels of the Trade Center in New York City on 9/11.” To compare Pol Pot to the Bush administration is just outrageous. Pol Pot slaughtered 3 Million people in four years! Pol Pot was a Communist dictator who kidnapped millions and forced them to work in collective farms and work camps. That is hardly a fair comparison. Sources: http://www.cnn.com... http://www.pbs.org... http://en.wikiquote.org... http://www.gallup.com... http://www.washingtonpost.com... http://tortureaccountability.org... http://tortureaccountability.org... http://www.theatlantic.com...