The VP Debate
Ok, my thoughts, better than the first Presidential debtate. What I wonder about though is why certain points are never made that seem like such an easy response such as:
1. As to Halliburton: Why does Cheney not point out that only two compaines were able to perform the duties of the no-bid contract at issue, Halliburton and some French based company, given the lack of French support for going into Iraq, why do they get the job? Second, the Clinton admin had awarded several no-bid contracts to Halliburton as well, I never heard Kerry or Edwards complain about that.
2. As to Afganistan. Kerry/Edwards are trying to make it seem that we had Osama cornered in some little area and let him go. This is just wrong. The area they are talking about is very rough and steep mountains. Some up to 9,000 feet. Further it is my understanding that they cannot fly helicopters in many parts of it because of the mountains. It is a huge area that the afgan “warlords” knew better than anyone and thats why they were given the task of searching.
Those are two big points. I also wanted to mention that I think at times the canidates were talking over the heads of the general population. I am curious whether the general population understands what Cheney is talking about when he mentions that many individuals making over 200k gross are “s”corps. I see similar things every day. Another good example of people looking rich on paper is owner-operator truckers. These guys have regular gross income of at least 100k/yr of course they only pocket maybe 20% of that because of expenses.
October 6th, 2004
Yah, I’m getting tired of the Halliburton issue. I worked for years in government contracting, and know how things go. I can’t believe I was sitting around working and let you get the jump on me with the VP-debate post… :)
October 6th, 2004
On Afghanistan it’s always, “The Devil is in the Details”. You can say that we didn’t succeed, and say it was because of [fill in the blank] reason. I bet you can find some army commander who didn’t get a crack at Osama to complain that his boys weren’t given a chance, but it doesn’t follow that they would have had any more success.
I also like the argument that US forces would most likely have suffered loss if we tried to capture Osama, wouldn’t that raise the number of casualties (I believe it was 15 KIA US and 0 KIA coalition at the time)and associated percentage of US forces that died in the effort, but I think we were over 90% of coalition forces and 100% of casualties (a la Edwards, don’t count the local forces) so if you add, say 10 more, deaths that would make us around 100% of coalition casualties. ;-)
I’m still looking for someone to name the last war/police action we were in where we were not 90% of the forces.