The Bush Administration's blind eye to science

[UtahDan]

Originally Posted by MikeWaters

I'm not sure I understand the nature of Al Qaeda. I don't grasp the level of the threat to be honest. Sometimes I wonder if it is really the tail wagging the dog. That we will give up our entire constitution over some guy living in a cave in Pakistan.

I think that is the real disconnect between people who think as you do and people who think as I do. No broad brush there, eh? :-)

We can disagree all day long about the Iraq war and how we did it and what we should do now etc etc etc. What you are talking about there though is very illuminating to me because I think it explains most of your other positions. If you aren't convinced that the threat is real or serious then the cost benefit analysis of every thing we have done in reaction is very different.

Folks like me think that 9/11 demonstrated forever that the threat level is high. We ignored lots of other less serious attacks and they got worse over time. You may well see it as isolated and not that big a deal in the grand scheme. I'm not arguing to you that you are wrong, just that to many of us our world view changed that day. We realized that militant islam resides not just in a cave in Kashmir, but strapped to explosives in American cities.

Clearly, right or wrong, the president believes this too. This whole wire tapping thing really brought that into sharp relief. The adminsitration's response, or the tone anyway, really came across to me as "are you kidding, is there really anyone left who doesn't understand why we HAVE to do this sort of thing." Clearly a lot people, like you don't see the necessity because you haven't experienced the paradigm shift that some of us have, and not understanding how many of us now view the threat, are left to try to explain the administration's actions in terms of money, love of war, raw expercise of power, etc.

I think we can reasonably disagree about all of this, but I for one am convicned that everything that Bush has done, he has done because he thought he was protecting us. In the end he may well be wrong or may have over reached but I don't doubt what has motivated all this.

[ChinoCoug]

CIA concluded Sadaam wasn't a threat.