Posted on 03/29/2006 5:08:54 PM PST by GretchenM
The president met with Nigeria's president Obasanjo in the Oval Office, and discussed freedom in Iraq with an audience in Freedom House (D.C.), reminding the people that Saddam Hussein, not continued U.S. involvement in Iraq, is responsible for ongoing sectarian violence that is threatening the formation of a democratic government.
He is heading to Cancun, Mexico to meet with the leaders of Mexico and Canada for two days.
Welcome to SANITY ISLAND!
QUOTE: "The argument that Iraq was stable under Saddam and that stability is now in danger because we removed him is wrong. While liberation has brought its own set of challenges, Saddam Hussein's removal from power was the necessary first step in restoring stability and freedom to the people of Iraq."
At Freedom House: "In our history, most democratic progress has come with the end of a war. After the defeat of the Axis powers in World War II and the collapse of communism in the Cold War, scores of nations cleared away the rubble of tyranny and laid the foundations of freedom and democracy.
"Today, the situation is very different. Liberty is advancing not in a time of peace, but in the midst of a war, at a moment when a global movement of great brutality and ambition is fighting freedom's progress with all the hateful violence they can muster. In this new century, the advance of freedom is a vital element of our strategy to protect the American people, and to secure the peace for generations to come. We're fighting the terrorists across the world because we know that if America were not fighting this enemy in other lands, we'd be facing them here in our own land."
Dose going up.
Welcome to Pragmatic Warrior.
Pls wait to post or repost photos till the All Clear.
Thank you!
Hi GM
Greetings!
Taylor was being flown back to his homeland Wednesday after being arrested on the run in Nigeria, days after escaping custody while awaiting trial on war crimes charges. The White House had suggested the meeting might be canceled if Nigeria's leader did not have some answers for Bush about Taylor's disappearance. 
Here!
Thanks, Gretchen!
I will attempt to explain the press taking credit for Andy Card's departure. My theory: word got out that a change was coming, the press jumped on it, started calling for a shake up in Bush's staff, then took credit for forcing the president to do what had already decided to do.
Press interpretation:
Cheney is eyeing the president's job; things are really growing unstable at the top of this White House.
Today:
Rice and O'Connor participate in a panel discussion on topics ranging from Iraq to international policies on torture to relations with other countries like Russia in Washington. The panel was hosted by the American Society of International Law.
Before a Senate appropriations committee yesterday
I find this absolutely hilarious. From yesterday. Senator Leahy, scrapbooking.
U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy takes a photo of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice prior to her appearance before a Senate Appropriations Committee.
I might have lost some photos when I hit a glitch.
Please feel free to post any I might have missed that are worth seeing.
Thanks for all your work preparing the Dose tonight, too!!!
In the last photo of the series, is Dr. Rice saying, "Well, Duh!!!!! Hellooooo!!!!!????????"
I wish I could be a fly on the wall when he meets with Fox. See my tag line.
Thank you!
Condi and Class - two words that DEFinitely go together.
Thank you Gretchen. Some wonderful pix tonight & some great ones of Condi & the VP also.. appreciate you!
Great idea!
I have a question for y'all. On one of my internship applications, there's a question I don't know how to answer. "What do you consider your most significant accomplishment? Why?" I have NO idea how to answer that.
Hi, Gretchen!
I remember you when you had another name (smile)
Isn't the press just too much.
The DMN had an editorial today saying that it was past time for a shakeup in the Bush administration.
And just when I was thinking it was time for a shakeup at the Dallas Morning News -- that paper is going down the tubes fast.
Those are some of the absolute best photos I've seen of Condi.
I wonder how many women find themselves blooming in their 50's the way she is. !!
Only you can answer that...whatever you've done in your life that you're the most proud of....school, scholarship, job donating time/charity work...etc
I would think that through your answer they are trying to see if you have high goals, are a team player, and still feel you have more to achieve with your life. Say something that lets them deduce those things. IMHO
I just feel like whatever I put, it's gonna be wrong. I'm so worried about these applications. I feel like I'm at a disadvantage because I don't really have any connections.
We're watchin' history people. We're right smack dab in the middle of something really huge.
Thank you Lord, for putting W at the helm, and allowing us to be here, at this time in history.
I think you've hit the nail on the head about the press taking credit for something they caught a whiff of, Gretchen.
The president looks very tired today; I worry for him. It's a good thing he's a fitness nut because it gives him the stamina required for the job.
NordP's onto the main thing, I believe.
Try drafting a list, several times if need be, that shows what you, PERSONALLY, look back on in your life with the most pleasure. Next to each thing (for your own purposes) note if it is an individual accomplishment or a team achievement. Also note why you are pleased with each thing.
Lay it aside for a day; go back, repeat.
The thing here is go for the truth about yourself, not what you think they might want to hear. When you know what is topmost, I suggest doing as NordP did -- phrase the accomplishment so that the reviewers can see what went into your achievement.
When I was hiring, I didn't want someone who was given a task and they couldn't run with it...solving problems (within their pay grade) along the way.
Let them see that in you via your answer.
Bless you. =)
It will be right, because it is an accomplishment, and YOU did it ;-)
Gotta go have dinner now. Bye for a bit.
I am very dull right now, sort of on mental overload; need to lie down for a while. Be back later though -- bless you all.
Thanks, y'all. I guess I'm just kinda freaking out. I didn't think about how much work was going to have to into these applications.
Gretchen! These are wonderful - thanks so much! A dose for what ails me!
HEADS UP:
Hannity&Colmes will broadcast (at least part) of VP Cheney's speech to the Correspondents(?) Dinner . . . the speech is supposed to be lighthearted -- I wonder if Hannity will keep quiet long enough for us to hear the VP speak?!
MUST READS:
FOR MUCH NEEDED PERSPECTIVE READ THE FOLLOWING . . . THE UBER CONS CRITICISED REAGAN RELENTLESSLY AS WELL!
The American Spectator
April 2006
A BUSH CRACK-UP?
We've been here before.
By: R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.
THANKS IN PART TO THE INTRUSIVE REPORTAGE of modern mass media, thanks in part to America's preeminent role in world politics, the chronicle of the American presidency from the Kennedy administration to the present is a concatenation of cliffhangers. From the early 1960s the news from the White House has been news of one horripilation after another. There are the sensational stories that every leader occasions -- war, economic setback, political upheaval -- and there are the sensational stories that only a leader beset by a mass media could occasion -- the president slept through a late-night aerial battle with Libyan jets, the president fell asleep during late-night phone sex with an intern, the vice president peppered a hunting companion with birdshot on a remote ranch and the White House did not report it promptly to "the networks."
A horripilation that in terms of seriousness ranks about midway between war and the vice president's hunting accident is the news report that the president has lost the support of his base. This particular news story is, for whatever reason, a hardy perennial during conservative presidencies. In this issue of AmSpec we may glean from Al Regnery's publisher's note and the pieces of William Rusher, Robert Novak, Angelo Codevilla, Stephen Moore, and Quin Hillyer that President George W. Bush is adrift from his conservative base. Reading through these manuscripts before forming my own opinion and interviewing other conservatives, I recalled that I had heard this song before.
I heard it during the Nixon administration, of course; but I heard it also during the administration of the conservative president whom we now revere, Ronald Reagan. The song was pretty much the same as the complaints we hear today, even on the question of government growth.
In December of 1987 after President Reagan, now recognized as the slayer of the Soviet beast, signed the INF treaty, columnist George Will was adamant. Writing a couple of days after he had listened to a Van Cliburn recital and dined with the Gorbachevs and the Reagans, Will lamented: "December 8 will be remembered as the day the Cold War was lost." He accused the president of being a party to America's "intellectual disarmament." Collaborating with Will was Howard Phillips, who was less gentlemanly, describing the Old Cowboy as "a useful idiot for Soviet propaganda." Bill Buckley admonished his old friend for abandoning Western Europe to the Red Army.
This horripilation took place toward the very end of the Reagan administration, and we might dismiss it with the thought that in modern times a presidency after a few years wears thin with elites. Yet the surprising thing about the dissatisfaction that we conservatives voiced during the Reagan administration is that it began within months of his inauguration.
After the president unveiled his economic plan to Congress on February 18, 1981, Human Events grumbled that "President Regan's economic package" was "less bold than many of his supporters would have wished." Reagan had just laid out a tax-cutting strategy that would soon sweep the civilized world. In 1981 it conditioned America for a span of economic growth unsurpassed in world history. It was not just Reagan's putative economic timidity that dissatisfied many of us in 1981. The estimable Bill Rusher questioned the conservative bona fides of our leader's personnel appointments in an article headlined "Is Reagan Ignoring Activists?"
This theme of conservative anxiety over the conservative president's actions continued. We questioned his court appointments, his budgets, his cuts in government programs, his response to the Soviet attack on Korean Air Lines 007 (George Will: "The administration is pathetic..."). In fact, few areas of Reagan's decision-making were exempt from our dyspepsia.
Not that our criticism was unwarranted. The president did surround himself with many unreliable aides. He did fail to cut government growth at a pace that satisfied his most ardent supporters. But on the big issues -- economic growth, national security, and judicial restraint -- the old man was a conservative genius.
The Gipper's conservative critics can take solace that they were never so far off the mark as the critics up there in the Kultursmog. Pronounced the Washington commentariat's most eminent sage, David Broder, at the outset of 1983: "What we are witnessing this January is not the midpoint in the Reagan presidency, but its phase-out. 'Reaganism,' it is becoming increasingly clear, was a one-year phenomenon...."
Read the entire commentary at
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1605589/posts
WHAT IS, AND MIGHT CONTINUE TO BE, THE "DEADLY" FALLOUT OF DEMOCRAT AND UBER-CON BASHING OF OUR PRESIDENT (AND HIS WAR ON TERRORISM):
'THE LAST HELICOPTER'
Mideast dictators try to "wait Bush out." They may be miscalculating.
BY AMIR TAHERI
Wednesday, March 29, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST
Hassan Abbasi has a dream--a helicopter doing an arabesque in cloudy skies to avoid being shot at from the ground. On board are the last of the "fleeing Americans," forced out of the Dar al-Islam (The Abode of Islam) by "the Army of Muhammad." Presented by his friends as "The Dr. Kissinger of Islam," Mr. Abbasi is "professor of strategy" at the Islamic Republic's Revolutionary Guard Corps University and, according to Tehran sources, the principal foreign policy voice in President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's new radical administration.
For the past several weeks Mr. Abbasi has been addressing crowds of Guard and Baseej Mustadafin (Mobilization of the Dispossessed) officers in Tehran with a simple theme: The U.S. does not have the stomach for a long conflict and will soon revert to its traditional policy of "running away," leaving Afghanistan and Iraq, indeed the whole of the Middle East, to be reshaped by Iran and its regional allies.
To hear Mr. Abbasi tell it the entire recent history of the U.S. could be narrated with the help of the image of "the last helicopter." It was that image in Saigon that concluded the Vietnam War under Gerald Ford. Jimmy Carter had five helicopters fleeing from the Iranian desert, leaving behind the charred corpses of eight American soldiers. Under Ronald Reagan the helicopters carried the corpses of 241 Marines murdered in their sleep in a Hezbollah suicide attack. Under the first President Bush, the helicopter flew from Safwan, in southern Iraq, with Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf aboard, leaving behind Saddam Hussein's generals, who could not believe why they had been allowed live to fight their domestic foes, and America, another day. Bill Clinton's helicopter was a Black Hawk, downed in Mogadishu and delivering 16 American soldiers into the hands of a murderous crowd.
According to this theory, President George W. Bush is an "aberration," a leader out of sync with his nation's character and no more than a brief nightmare for those who oppose the creation of an "American Middle East." Messrs. Abbasi and Ahmadinejad have concluded that there will be no helicopter as long as George W. Bush is in the White House. But they believe that whoever succeeds him, Democrat or Republican, will revive the helicopter image to extricate the U.S. from a complex situation that few Americans appear to understand.
Mr. Ahmadinejad's defiant rhetoric is based on a strategy known in Middle Eastern capitals as "waiting Bush out." "We are sure the U.S. will return to saner policies," says Manuchehr Motakki, Iran's new Foreign Minister.
Mr. Ahmadinejad believes that the world is heading for a clash of civilizations with the Middle East as the main battlefield. In that clash Iran will lead the Muslim world against the "Crusader-Zionist camp" led by America. Mr. Bush might have led the U.S. into "a brief moment of triumph." But the U.S. is a "sunset" (ofuli) power while Iran is a sunrise (tolu'ee) one and, once Mr. Bush is gone, a future president would admit defeat and order a retreat as all of Mr. Bush's predecessors have done since Jimmy Carter.
Read the rest of this IMPORTANT commentary at
http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110008154
"Whats up David Gregory, you want a piece of me!?"
I will laugh for DAYS over this!!!!! Great captioning!
The look on his face cracks me up! :D
Hi Gretch! Gotta say I love the smiley! LOL!
Condi's in her 50's?! I would have guessed late 30's early 40's...Wow!
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