Dear Bart:
Nice work with Chris.
I'd like to take exception with some things he wrote myself.
He disagrees when you call Bush stupid, but Bush
is either stupid or brain wiring damaged in some way,
verbally or cognitively or both. He cannot speak
off the cuff without glaring grammatical errors, or without
mangling common expressions that 8 out of 10
people would get right. The average bright junior high school
student speaks better English than Bush. Most
foreign heads of state speak better English than Bush.
I know sharp people who can't spell, but usually
they talk fine.
He says Bush had better academic scores all across
the board than Gore. Since that isn't true in his other examples,
I'll take a wild guess and say Bush didn't do
better in 'high school' than Gore. If those prep schools have released
those records, there wasn't any mention of it
in articles comparing their two overall records generally.
Bush didn't have better SAT scores than Gore.
His brutally low verbal aptitude score in the low 400s kept his
total below 1100, despite a much better math
score around 600. Nobody but a legacy gets into Yale with those
kind of SAT totals. Gore beat him by a buck fifty
or better.
College performance, Bush didn't outperform Gore.
Bush averaged 72 throughout his Yale years. Gore had a year
like that, with a couple of 67s or something,
but then turned it around. He got his degree with honors, cum laude,
requiring a respectably high grade point . He
averaged that bad year up enough to earn honors by getting very
good grades for a couple of years subsequently.
As evidence for their different records, Bush
was turned down for admission by the University of Texas
law school (at Austin?), while Gore was admitted
to graduate school in religion at Vanderbilt, the Harvard
of the south. He viewed it as a place to go awhile
and decide what to do with his life, and after a year or two,
deciding he preferred to go to law schol, he
blew off his last semester, didn't complete his final course work
or final tests, and, left incomplete, that made
his grades 0 or Fs. He was admitted to Vanderbilt's law school,
and was passing his courses just fine, when a
Congressional seat came open, and he ran and won that seat
in the House. Both of these changes in plans
and withdrawing from school have been mischaracterized as Gore's
flunking out of graduate school twice, and as
proving he was thrown out from bad grades. He didn't, and he wasn't.
Bush got into the Harvard MBA program because
it isn't nearly as selective as the UT law school, or maybe
some other reason. His 72 average didn't help.
His grades at Harvard don't show much, because they are just
pass or fail. The famed case study method the
Harvard program is known for is a collaborative team effort,
and the team is graded, allowing for weaker members
to coast and draft on the others.
There is simply no evidence of Bush's doing anything
well in his academic career. Remember, this was a time
in which Bush was drinking heavily, and partying
hardy other ways with his fellow Dekes, where he was chapter
president at Yale. What do Dekes do beside partying?
Their other primary function is helping brother members
cheat on exams, get papers written, whatever
it takes to pass. It's an industry. There are many Dekes at Harvard
to help their brother members as well. There
is no reason to believe Bush even (barely) earned either of his
degrees in his party down days, boozing and snorting.
He did enough in extracurricular activites to get criminally
arrested twice or more (the Bush people won't
clarify how many times Bush has been arrested). (...been to the
finest schools... but you know you only used
to get juiced in 'em).
Like Gore, Bush ran for a House seat. Unlike Gore,
Bush lost, as his opponent pointed out he was born and
raised in Connecticut, went to Philips Exeter
and Yale, and was no Texan. Bush cannot ride a horse, and only
bought his ranch in late 2000 as a stage prop.
His private home before had been a luxury Houston condo.
Bush is a phony Texan, a phony president, and
has the phoniest Harvard MBA every awarded. He has a
phony Texas driver license number, 0000000000018
or something, changed to hide the previous number and
the criminal record of that license. His favorite
airplane is the same top of the line Air King Wellstone died in,
but Bush's used to be the personal plane of the
Medellin cartel's smuggler, Barry (Barriman) Seale.
Lastly, on the offer of OBL to Clinton three times.
That happens to be true, but without the context, it's very
misleading. One time, the offer was to turn him
over to a third party, and one couldn't be convinced to take him.
The Saudis flatly refused, as did the others
we approached. The other times, there wasn't anything that could
be legally done to OBL. Yes, we could have indicted
him, but we had no evidence, and bringing nothing to court
and having him acquitted would not have been
a productive exercise. At the times he was offered by Sudan,
we were having such disputes with them that we
even questioned whether that was in good faith or a ruse.
And in the Sudan, OBL had many factories and
infrastructure of support, whereas in Afghanistan, he had
none of that. It was thought he'd be far weaker
in Afghanistan. And at that time, that he had been so
involved was not known, and barely suspected.
When it became known, Clinton authorized 5 CIA
operations tasked to eliminate OBL. He had a team of
infiltrator assassins trained in Pakistan, to
go in and take him out. He had an unmanned drone in constant
surveillance overflight to find him, and a nuclear
powered submarine offshore specifically waiting to launch
cruise missiles at what the drone might find.
And his missile attack on the training camp missed OBL only
because of incomplete intelligence. Clinton
tripled the anti-terrorism budget, his National Security
Counsel held 'principles' meetings' (the highest
level officials) on a weekly basis explicitly on OBL,
and Clinton formally proposed the findings
of the Gore Commission on terrorism and transportation
safety, which the GOP blocked on behalf of
their airline industry contributors. Clinton asked for
power to go after off shore accounts, and
the GOP blocked him.
When Bush came into power, he cancelled the drone
surveillance. He ordered the submarine off station.
Despite being warned of OBL as the primary security
threat, Bush's NSC never met on the subject until
September of 2001. His FAA banned pilots from
having guns in the cockpit, as had been allowed for 37 years.
He shelved the Hart/Rudman Commission's recommendations
on anti-terrorism, and blocked the Congress
which had begun work on them. His CIA station
chief in Dubai visited OBL at the American Hospital there,
and then flew back immediately to Washington,
with OBL allowed to leave in his private jet. The Taliban
themselves offered OBL to Bush, first, directly
to him, and after 9/11, to a third party. Bush wasn't interested
then, or now. Despite promising to get OBL dead
or alive, he now says he never emphasized getting him,
and that it is something the reporters are promoting.
Bush's tactics at Tora Bora left open a back door,
through which OBL and Al Qaeda escaped. Later,
US military transport airlifted senior Al Qaeda and
Taliban out of Afghanistan to Pakistan.
This record shows Clinton did a lot, and Bush should be impeached as a menace to the nation.
...phil