Pardon me but weren't most of the laws in the "Patriot Act" part of some plan drafted by Democrats in the last administration, that were never passed?
I swear I read that somewhere once.
I have been very critical of Bush on certain things on this site. And there are few Freepers who slavishly worship Bush without questions. There has been criticism of Bush from all directions on this site. No politician can please everyone all the time. You can't judge a politician from just your own narrow perspective but look at the big picture. Yeah- I disagree with Bush on some pretty big issues. But he isn't "evil". I may digree with certain courses he has taken but I rest assured that he believes in the course he takes and did it because he believed it to be right.
I had no such faith in the previous President whom I don't think believed a word he himself said and whose every public act was cynical and self serving.
David Brooks in the NYT today regarding the Halliburton slander:
Last week, Kelman wrote an op-ed article in The Washington Post on the alleged links between contributions and reconstruction contracts. "One would be hard-pressed to discover anyone with a working knowledge of how federal contracts are awarded — whether a career civil servant working on procurement or an independent academic expert — who doesn't regard these allegations as being somewhere between highly improbable and utterly absurd," he observed.
The fact is that unlike the Congressional pork barrel machine, the federal procurement system is a highly structured process, which is largely insulated from crass political pressures. The idea that a Bush political appointee can parachute down and persuade a large group of civil servants to risk their careers by steering business to a big donor is the stuff of fantasy novels, not reality.
The real story is that the Halliburton subsidiary, Kellogg, Brown & Root, won an open competition to provide the service support for overseas troops. This contract is called the Logcap, and is awarded every few years. KBR won the competition in 1992. It lost to DynCorp in 1997, and won it again in 2001.
Under the deal, KBR builds bases, supplies water, operates laundries and performs thousands of other tasks. Though the G.A.O. has found that KBR sometimes overcharges, in general the company has an outstanding reputation among the panoply of auditing agencies that monitor these contracts.
But some circumstances are not covered under Logcap. During the Clinton administration, the Pentagon issued a temporary no-bid contract to KBR to continue its work in the Balkans. In the months leading up to the Iraq war, Defense officials realized they needed plans in case Saddam Hussein once again set his oil wells ablaze. KBR did the study under Logcap. Then in February, with the war looming, Pentagon planners issued an additional bridge contract to KBR to put out any fires that were set. KBR had the experience. Its personnel were in place. It would have been crazy to open up a three-to-five-month bidding process at that time.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1018969/posts I would point out that Halliburton, unlike the UN, is still there.
I'll bet the pimple faced dick weed that wrote that hateful crap about W got lucky with some leftette the night it hit the stands.
Where do the DemoRATS come up with this "stuff"? The are sick, power-starved, and infantile!