....Partly it’s a reaction to what happened in 2000, when the American people chose Mr. Gore but his opponent somehow ended up in the White House. Both the personality cult the right tried to build around President Bush and the often hysterical denigration of Mr. Gore were, I believe, largely motivated by the desire to expunge the stain of illegitimacy from the Bush administration.
And now that Mr. Bush has proved himself utterly the wrong man for the job — to be, in fact, the best president Al Qaeda’s recruiters could have hoped for — the symptoms of Gore derangement syndrome have grown even more extreme.
The worst thing about Mr. Gore, from the conservative point of view, is that he keeps being right. In 1992, George H. W. Bush mocked him as the “ozone man,” but three years later the scientists who discovered the threat to the ozone layer won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In 2002 he warned that if we invaded Iraq, “the resulting chaos could easily pose a far greater danger to the United States than we presently face from Saddam.” And so it has proved.....
>> Erik Prince (the CEO and founder of Blackwater) has ties to Dr. Dobson's 'Focus On the Family' conglomerate? Prince's father was a major financial contributor to Dobson.> President Bush's Coalition of the Willing (nations that supposedly willingly signed on to help U.S. troops in Iraq) has been called the 'Coalition of the Reluctant' in Roger Cohen's article in the New York Times:
....In Chisinau — you guessed it; that’s the capital of Moldova — Cagan asked for more sappers in Iraq. Moldova currently has 11 bomb-disposal experts there. Yes, 11.
In downtown Tirana, hub of a 20th-century exercise in Communist folly and now a place in need of American money, Cagan pressed the Albanians to go beyond their 120-strong contingent in Iraq. Albania is considering an additional 125 to 150 troops.
As for Cagan’s stops in the Macedonian capital of Skopje and Kazakhstan’s Astana, it’s unclear what transpired. Macedonia has 40 troops in Iraq; the Kazakhs have 27 military engineers. Other states visited included Ukraine, which may offer a little help in Iraq, and the Czech Republic, which has 100 troops in Iraq and got promises of military equipment....
How much money, special equipment, and training are given to these countries by Bush in exchange for
troops? We may never know.
