Clarification/Follow-up by Itsdb on 09/10/04 1:04 pm:
Voiceguy,

I'm surprised the number is that high, but I don't live in a major metropolitan area. But then again maybe I should, I live 20 miles from a major nuclear weapons facility. Nah...I'd rather try and enjoy life than worry about being a victim.

Steve

Clarification/Follow-up by Chouxxx on 09/10/04 2:37 pm:
VG:: The Republicans and their operatives started the 2004 Smear Campaign against Kerry, so the Dems are retaliating with the Bush National Guard scandal. Dirt is dirt, and it hurts *everyone*.

9-11-01 is not headline *news* on 9-11-04! Battles in Fallajuah(sp) and American *casualties* are!! [just an example]}

Cordially, Choux

Clarification/Follow-up by tomder55 on 09/11/04 2:08 am:
Choux, you know as well as I that the Dems were trashing Bush a year ago in the primary season long before Bush was even paying attention to the campaign.Moveon.org brought up Bush's Guard record back in Feb.

Clarification/Follow-up by tomder55 on 09/11/04 2:18 am:
VG,

Zawahiri's appearance on the video after the Beslan massacre has led to some speculation that OBL has not only relinquished control of al-Qaeda to his second in command ,but has indeed finally kicked the bucket. Rita Cosby of Fox news reported in July that he had surgery in a hospital in Pakistan for his kidney illness. Or maybe he is buried in a pile of rubble in Tora Bora ,and they finally ran out of fresh audio tape of his voice to splice together .

Related to the point of your post: Michelle Malkin's latest column raises the question this way :

The mainstream media pounded President Bush for trying to explain that the War on Terror is unwinnable in a conventional sense. The mainstream press itself proves the president's point every time its reporters disguise the deadly fanatical nature of our opponents in this global war. How are we to win a war against blood-spattered enemies whom our own free press continues to protect through politically correct sanitization?

It wasn't no-name militants or wayward guerrillas who have butchered, beheaded and slaughtered thousands of innocents over the last three years alone. Anniversary reality check:

In the name of Allah, Muslim terrorists in Russia stabbed babies to death, shot toddlers in the back, forced children to eat rose petals and drink their own urine, raped teenage girls, executed their teachers and blew themselves up in a crowded school gymnasium. Death toll: 338.

In the name of Allah, Muslim terrorists in Spain detonated bombs on four commuter trains during Madrid's rush hour. Death toll: 190.

In the name of Allah, Muslim terrorists in Bali blew up a beach resort with an electronically triggered bomb at one bar and a car bomb hidden in a van at another nightclub filled with young Western tourists on holiday. Death toll: 202.

In the name of Allah, Muslim terrorists in Pakistan kidnapped and beheaded American journalist Daniel Pearl.

In the name of Allah, Muslim terrorists in Saudi Arabia kidnapped and beheaded American engineer Paul Johnson.

In the name of Allah, Muslim terrorists in Iraq kidnapped and beheaded American independent contractor Nick Berg.

In the name of Allah, Muslim terrorists in Iraq kidnapped and executed Italian security guard Fabrizio Quattrocchi.

In the name of Allah, Muslim terrorists in the Philippines kidnapped and killed American missionary Martin Burnham.

In the name of Allah, Muslim terrorists in Israel engineered near-simultaneous suicide attacks on two buses, killing at least 15 people.

In the name of Allah, Muslim terrorists in Morocco waged suicide bombing attacks in Casablanca.

In the name of Allah, Muslim terrorists in Turkey bombed synagogues and the British consulate.

In the name of Allah, Muslim terrorists in America hijacked and incinerated three planes full of men, women and children, trapped pregnant women and firefighters in smoke-filled stairways, and forced office workers to leap 99 stories to their deaths after saying final prayers from the ledges of the World Trade Center on a peaceful September morning. Death toll: 3,000.

They tell us to "never forget." First, let's stop misremembering.

Clarification/Follow-up by tomder55 on 09/11/04 4:10 am:
One more followup before I head out for the 9-11 memorial that will be held in my village.

Dan Rather and CBS have drawn a line in the sand . They are not backing away from their story at all;claiming that there is a "preponderance of evidence" to back up their claim.

An interesting strategy to take. They could've taken a less harder line and stalled by saying they will conduct an investigation to determine if ideed they were duped.John Batchelor last night said that they were "declaring thermo-nuclear war" on the blog-sphere.

Pehaps CBS doesn't realize that they are out gunned in this battle. There are hundreds of internet junkies who can dissect each of their claims and run them though one of the tightest quality contols.CBS cannot match the manpower time that the bloggers have at their disposal,and I do not think they can match in total the analytic skills of their opponents . Plus the advantage the bloggers have is that there could be material that some of them presents that can be debunked ,but all they have to do is throw enough spaghetti on the wall and some of it will inevidibly stick .If any part of CBS's claim is proven fraudulent then their whole case unravels.

Clarification/Follow-up by voiceguy2000 on 09/11/04 6:41 am:
So far Answerway has trashed two of my follow-ups here; let's see if this one works.

    1. I must respectfully disagree with the idea that the anniversary of the 9/11 attack is not newsworthy enough to warrant serious coverage. What nonsense! We regularly commemorate -- and properly so -- any number of anniversaries of significant events in national and world history.

    2. It is regrettable that 1,000 U.S. troops have lost their lives in Iraq in the last 18 months. It is regrettable that more than 50,000 people in the U.S. have lost their lives in highway fatalities over the last 18 months. We could debate which figure ought to carry greater news value.

    3. There is no "scandal" associated with George Bush's National Guard service. None. There are only persistent attempts by his political enemies to manufacture a controversy out of innuendo and half-truth. It is particularly disgusting to see an attack dog like James Carville suggesting cowardice on George Bush's part after Carville spent so many years as the head toady for a flat-out draft dodger.

    4. Another column in yesterday's Wall Street Journal, by Mark Helprin, made these observations about where the U.S. stands today:

Out of fear and confusion we have hesitated to name the enemy. We proceed as if we are fighting disparate criminals united by coincidence, rather than the vanguard of militant Islam, united by ideology, sentiment, doctrine, and practice, its partisans drawn from Morocco to the Philippines, Chechnya to the Sudan, a vast swath of the earth that, in regard to the elemental beliefs that fuel jihad, is as homogeneous as Denmark.

Too timid to admit to a clash of civilizations even as it occurs, we failed to declare the war, thus forfeiting clarity of intent and the unambiguous consent of the American people. This was a sure way, as in the Vietnam era, to divide the country and prolong the battle.

We failed not only to prepare for war but to provision for it after it had begun, disallowing a military buildup, much less the wartime transformation of the economy. In the First World War our elected representatives decisively resolved that “to bring the conflict to a successful termination all the resources of the country are hereby pledged by the Congress of the United States.” In the Revolutionary War we as a people pledged our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.

What is different now of course is that we are combating neither the British Empire nor Imperial Germany, but an opponent who is fundamentally weak militarily, economically, and, in the long run, ideologically. Still, he has by his near mastery of terrorism and asymmetrical warfare necessitated that we mobilize as if we were in fact fighting a great empire. And yet we have not done so, expending not even the average of 5.7% of GDP we devoted to defense in the peacetime years of the period 1940-2000, but, currently, only 3.6%--as if we were not at war, as if the military technological “revolution” could overcome insurgencies or occupy populous countries, as if China’s armed forces were not ascending, as if our territory were invulnerable, and as if terrorism, as some used to think and some still do, can simply be managed.

Clarification/Follow-up by tomder55 on 09/12/04 3:45 am:
CBS's case is unravelling .
Saturday, another retired Air National Guard officer came forward to attack CBSNEWS credibility. Retired Maj. Gen. Bobby W. Hodges, who was cited by a senior CBS official on Thursday as the network's trump card in verifying the documents, said in an interview that he was misled by CBS and believed the documents to be forgeries.

Hodges said that he was read only excerpts of the documents and never saw the documents.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/12/politics/campaign/12guard.html?ex=1095652800&en=07f4137e31e78a32&ei=5006&partner=ALTAVISTA1

Clarification/Follow-up by voiceguy2000 on 09/12/04 5:40 am:
It becomes clear that CBS was not so much interested in knowing the truth about these documents as in being able to point to some kind of "process" it had gone through prior to basing a story on them.

I just have to shake my head at the people who continue in denial about their obvious origin as modern Microsoft Word products. To claim that some insignificant corner of the Air National Guard would have had some sort of highly unusual, near-prototypical typewriter capable of making unusual characters back in 1971, and that someone typing such mundane memos would bother to use those unusual features, is to strain credulity. It is a case of stretching the long arm of plausibility nearly out of its socket. Yes, it is theoretically possible that little green men from Mars brought these documents... or, we could look at the most obvious explanation, and conclude that they were produced quite recently by someone using the world's most common and ubiquitous word processing program which had its default features turned on.

CBS? It is to laugh.