Seasons

Do the people put our leaders into power, or do the spin doctors, speech writers, and media?

It's really hard to draw the line as far as who needs to be attacked and who doesn't. However, no leader should lie to his people to get them to approve of a war he wants to start. Especially when his real concern probably isn't safety or the well-being of the country in question at all.

Doubtless, our primary reason for taking out Hussein was our own security; you'll notice we haven't attacked communist China yet. But what did Bush lie about? Did he somehow have information about Iraq that the best American and British intelligence did not?

It's been stated (repeatedly) that there was no hard evidence that Iraq had WMD's prior to the invasion. Definitely nothing strong enough to act on. Now Bush may have convinced himself that the evidence was strong enough, since he was looking for an excuse anyway, but it was actually quite weak. So either Bush lied to himself to get the country to go to war, or Bush realized the evidence was weak and lied to the country. Take your pick.

One member of the CIA who appeared on the Daily Show interview portion after quitting his job and writing a book said that Bush came to the CIA at the beginning of his term saying that he wanted them to come up with a reason to attack Iraq. He apparently wanted that from the beginning.

And why Iraq and not Iran, Saudi Arabia (where most of the terrorists came from), China, North Korea, and the other threats? a) Iraq was weak, and b) it had oil.

and (c) he wanted to finish what his father started.

(Related question: I heard a rumor that Hussein had put a hit out on George Bush, Sr, just prior to W's decision to invade. I have no clue if this is true or not, and was wondering if anyone else knew.)

I don't believe it's even been proven that Saddam had anything to do with Osama bin Laden whatsoever (correct me if I'm wrong). If Bush wants to attack Iraq, fine, show up on TV and say "Saddam sucks, let's kill him." Don't appear on TV and say "Saddam is Osama bin Laden's gay lover and they're in this together, let's fry the bastard." He didn't tell us the truth, he told us what he wanted us to believe.

and still he was re-elected... amazing

It's being said that Rove's master stroke this time was getting the gay marriage ban on ballots in swing states, which united religious and homophobic people against Kerry. Fear is the game, folks. Every time the terror alert went up, so did support for Bush. It mattered little that he failed in almost every respect as a president- the economy, global relations, education, jobs, the environment, and so on.

I don't know if any of you like to draw, but I found a hilarious art game online.

www.monsterland.co.uk

You draw a "monster" in 3 parts. One person does the head, another does the body, and someone else does the legs. I just made a turkey with 3 wings earlier!

This is called Cadavres exquis ("exquisite corpse" in English), a game invented by the surrealists in 1926 that consists in making random verse from words that are written, by different players, unaware of the previous entries. The technique got its name from the results obtained in initial playing, "Le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau" ("The exquisite corpse will drink the young wine"). Later they used the same technique with drawings. It can be fun to use this principle in bots. I used it for Doll-379, she’s not very developed for the moment, but I hope some day I will find the time do work on this bot again.
You should take a look at this site too:

www.cadavre-exquis.net/eng

Here you can play in French and an English, and see the history of previous entries.

I love playing games like that! In fact, my wife and I invented a new version of that game last night- I cut a piece out of a paper bag, and then she cut something from it, and then me and then her and it ended up being this profile of a face with ponytail, eyes, mouth, etc.

But we also play with drawings- you can each start a drawing, and then trade them after a minute to add something new, and so on. But my favorite is the stories- you can do it where each person adds one, two, or three words at a time.