[deMolay]

Good insight into the workings of Obama's world. "To Know Me Is To Love Me. http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/ ... tml?page=1

[Ibon]

Could their exist a politician that early on in his career didn't fall in love with what he saw in the mirror?

[deMolay]

Imagine anyone such as Obama, with zero real accomplishments, yet at 32 yrs of age writing an autobiography. He is without a doubt a bigger Bullshitter than Richard Milhouse Nixon. Someone should resurrect the old Nixon posters with Obama's face on them captioned. "Would You Buy A Used Car From This Man". He is the best used car saleman that the USA ever produced without a doubt.

[Mesuge]

It's beyond me, how the "allowed" establishment critics, like Michael Moore are still placating him, like there is a hope as he can turn around the Titanic in last minute and deliver the goods. In comparison, even TV clowns like Bill Maher, tend to call him now out as another weak/fake Democract bullshit, i.e. completely writing him off even as of now Q42010, brr quite humiliating. I guess he doesn't care, since he agreed to act as puppet POTUS in the first place.

Bold prediction, unless the new ambassador from the Federation of planets lands next Monday in DC, and orders 50M copies of GM Volts in massive contract for several decades, the Obama person is toast, and likely won't even attempt to run again as the main "left" candidate in 2012.

disclaimer:
gauging the public mood from silly TV shows may skew your data output

[Sixstrings]

Imagine anyone such as Obama, with zero real accomplishments, yet at 32 yrs of age writing an autobiography.

Well.. that's the prime age to write a book. Most writers start younger than that.. he thought he had an interesting story to tell and wrote a book, so what? From what I gather it was a cathartic thing; he was conflicted between two worlds, black and white. An African father, father issues in general, and then raised in a white family but never quite fitting in with whites. So he wrote a book to help figure all that personal stuff out, nothing wrong with that. That's what smart people do, they write it out.

If nothing else by the way, you have to at least respect the fact the man is ABLE to write a book on his own, no ghostwriter needed. The last author president was Teddy Roosevelt (yes the others "write" books but they have help and ghostwriters).

He is without a doubt a bigger Bullshitter than Richard Milhouse Nixon.

I would give that award to Clinton -- he was the best BS'er hands down. He had that Southern evangelist / salesman charm; the man won elections just looking into the eyes of a jobless woman, tearing up, and telling her "I feel your pain." Brilliant stuff.. the guy knows what women want to hear, that a man "feels her pain." And then he turns around and offshores more jobs and dismantles social safety nets for the poor.

Republicans are full of it too by the way, but they actually believe the stuff that comes out of their mouth.

[Timo]

Funny. Clinton lied about having sex with an intern. Bush lied about the reasons to invade Iraq. Clinton's lie didn't cost anything other than Republican investigations into the matter, while Bush's lie has cost hundreds of billions of dollars, and counting.

Still, we should all lower our standards when we elect a president. We wouldn't want anyone remotely competent running the country. Instead, let's elect some guy we'd see routinely down at the local bar.

[PrestonSturges]

A narcissist is angry and that anger goes into a psychotic frenzy if he's rejected.

Did we see that from Obama after the midterms? Did we see that when he filleted the Republicans at the GOP lunch in Baltimore last year?

Conservatives are still trying to paint Obama as the "angry black man," and that does force him to be cooler than he needs to be.

I love it that the GOPers call Obama "thin skinned" while Bush is still whining on television that Kanya West disrespected him. Bush is a simpering coward, a Bible thumping alcoholic frat boy whose daddy can pay for private doctors for his girlfriends abortions, a guy who has never had to play by the rules that apply to regular people, and failed at everything he touched because he is a pathetic pipsqueak hollow shell of a man. And while he claims to have kept us safe, Bush did more damage to America than Al Quada could have done with a nuke, we would have been better off surrendering to Bin Laden than being "protected" by Bush.

[Sixstrings]

A narcissist is angry and that anger goes into a psychotic frenzy if he's rejected.

Did we see that from Obama after the midterms? Did we see that when he filleted the Republicans at the GOP lunch in Baltimore last year?.

Good point. You're exactly right, he can't be a narcissist if there's no anger upon rejection.

But.. if anything, his faults are that he's too detached, too cool calm and collected. He's not feeling the country's pain in a genuine way, it doesn't wear on him like it did Lincoln and FDR. We're in troubled times, and our president is the aloof ivory tower professorial type. And that's why he'll lose in '12.

[PrestonSturges]

A narcissist is angry and that anger goes into a psychotic frenzy if he's rejected.

Did we see that from Obama after the midterms? Did we see that when he filleted the Republicans at the GOP lunch in Baltimore last year?.

Good point. You're exactly right, he can't be a narcissist if there's no anger upon rejection.

But.. if anything, his faults are that he's too detached, too cool calm and collected. He's not feeling the country's pain in a genuine way, it doesn't wear on him like it did Lincoln and FDR. We're in troubled times, and our president is the aloof ivory tower professorial type. And that's why he'll lose in '12.

Well there is an essential part of propaganda - it needs to be senseless so it provides a loyalty test to Party members, like George Orwell described in 1984. Obama is a radical bomb throwing Muslim and a country club elitist and an African tribesman and seizing control of American industry and giving them bailouts. It's all "doublethink," and "doublespeak."

[deMolay]

American Narcissus
The vanity of Barack Obama
Nov 13, 2010, Vol. 16, No. 10 • By JONATHAN V. LASTSingle Page Print Larger Text Smaller Text Email
Why has Barack Obama failed so spectacularly? Is he too dogmatically liberal or too pragmatic? Is he a socialist, or an anticolonialist, or a philosopher-president? Or is it possible that Obama’s failures stem from something simpler: vanity. Politicians as a class are particularly susceptible to mirror-gazing. But Obama’s vanity is overwhelming. It defines him, his politics, and his presidency.

It’s revealed in lots of little stories. There was the time he bragged about how one of his campaign volunteers, who had tragically died of breast cancer, “insisted she’s going to be buried in an Obama T-shirt.” There was the Nobel acceptance speech where he conceded, “I do not bring with me today a definitive solution to the problems of war” (the emphasis is mine). There was the moment during the 2008 campaign when Obama appeared with a seal that was a mash-up of the Great Seal of the United States and his own campaign logo (with its motto Vero Possumus, “Yes we Can” in Latin). Just a few weeks ago, Obama was giving a speech when the actual presidential seal fell from the rostrum. “That’s all right,” he quipped. “All of you know who I am.” Oh yes, Mr. President, we certainly do.

My favorite is this line from page 160 of The Audacity of Hope:

I find comfort in the fact that the longer I’m in politics the less nourishing popularity becomes, that a striving for power and rank and fame seems to betray a poverty of ambition, and that I am answerable mainly to the steady gaze of my own conscience.
The American Narcissus (cont.)
Obama and Cameras
The Odds on Obama II
So popularity and fame once nourished him, but now his ambition is richer and he’s answerable not, like some presidents, to the Almighty, but to the gaze of his personal conscience. Which is steady. The fact that this sentence appears in the second memoir of a man not yet 50 years old—and who had been in national politics for all of two years—is merely icing.

People have been noticing Obama’s vanity for a long time. In 2008, one of his Harvard Law classmates, the entertainment lawyer Jackie Fuchs, explained what Obama was like during his school days: “One of our classmates once famously noted that you could judge just how pretentious someone’s remarks in class were by how high they ranked on the ‘Obamanometer,’ a term that lasted far longer than our time at law school. Obama didn’t just share in class—he pontificated. He knew better than everyone else in the room, including the teachers. ”

The story of Obama’s writing career is an object lesson in how our president’s view of himself shapes his interactions with the world around him. In 1990, Obama was wrapping up his second year at Harvard Law when the New York Times ran a profile of him on the occasion of his becoming the first black editor of the Harvard Law Review. A book agent in New York named Jane Dystel read the story and called up the young man, asking if he’d be interested in writing a book. Like any 29-year-old, he wasn’t about to turn down money. He promptly accepted a deal with Simon & Schuster’s Poseidon imprint—reportedly in the low six-figures—to write a book about race relations.

Obama missed his deadline. No matter. His agent quickly secured him another contract, this time with Times Books. And a $40,000 advance. Not bad for an unknown author who had already blown one deal, writing about a noncommercial subject.

By this point Obama had left law school, and academia was courting him. The University of Chicago Law School approached him; although they didn’t have any specific needs, they wanted to be in the Barack Obama business. As Douglas Baird, the head of Chicago’s appointments committee, would later explain, “You look at his background—Harvard Law Review president, magna cum laude, and he’s African American. This is a no-brainer hiring decision at the entry level of any law school in the country.” Chicago invited Obama to come in and teach just about anything he wanted. But Obama wasn’t interested in a professor’s life. Instead, he told them that he was writing a book—about voting rights. The university made him a fellow, giving him an office and a paycheck to keep him going while he worked on this important project.

In case you’re keeping score at home, there was some confusion as to what book young Obama was writing. His publisher thought he was writing about race relations. His employer thought he was writing about voting rights law. But Obama seems to have never seriously considered either subject. Instead, he decided that his subject would be himself. The 32-year-old was writing a memoir.

[deMolay]

American Narcissus
The vanity of Barack Obama
Nov 13, 2010, Vol. 16, No. 10 • By JONATHAN V. LASTSingle Page Print Larger Text Smaller Text Email
Obama came clean to the university first. He waited until his fellowship was halfway over—perhaps he was concerned that his employers might not like the bait-and-switch. He needn’t have worried. Baird still hoped that Obama would eventually join the university’s faculty (he had already begun teaching a small classload as a “senior lecturer”). “It was a good deal for us,” Baird explained, “because he was a good teaching prospect and we wanted him around.”

And it all worked out in the end. The book Obama eventually finished was Dreams from My Father. It didn’t do well initially, but nine years later, after his speech at the 2004 Democratic convention made him a star, it sold like gangbusters. Obama got rich. And famous. The book became the springboard for his career in national politics.

Only it didn’t quite work out for everybody. Obama left the University of Chicago, never succumbing to their offers of a permanent position in their hallowed halls. Simon & Schuster, which had taken a chance on an unproven young writer, got burned for a few thousand bucks. And Jane Dystel, who’d plucked him out of the pages of the New York Times and got him the deal to write the book that sped his political rise? As soon as Obama was ready to negotiate the contract for his second book—the big-money payday—he dumped her and replaced her with super-agent Robert Barnett.
The Odds on Obama II
We risk reading too much into these vignettes—after all, our president is a mansion with many rooms and it would be foolish to reduce him to pure ego. Yet the vignettes are so numerous. For instance, a few years ago Obama’s high school basketball coach told ABC News how, as a teenager, Obama always badgered him for more playing time, even though he wasn’t the best player on the team—or even as good as he thought he was. Everyone who has ever played team sports has encountered the kid with an inflated sense of self. That’s common. What’s rare is the kid who feels entitled enough to nag the coach about his minutes. Obama was that kid. His enthusiasm about his abilities and his playing time extended into his political life. In 2004, Obama explained to author David Mendell how he saw his future as a national political figure: “I’m LeBron, baby. I can play on this level. I got some game.” After just a couple of months in the Senate, Obama jumped the Democratic line and started asking voters to make him president.

Yet you don’t have to delve deep into armchair psychology to see how Obama’s vanity has shaped his presidency. In January 2009 he met with congressional leaders to discuss the stimulus package. The meeting was supposed to foster bipartisanship. Senator Jon Kyl questioned the plan’s mixture of spending and tax cuts. Obama’s response to him was, “I won.” A year later Obama held another meeting to foster bipartisanship for his health care reform plan. There was some technical back-and-forth about Republicans not having the chance to properly respond within the constraints of the format because President Obama had done some pontificating, as is his wont. Obama explained, “There was an imbalance on the opening statements because”—here he paused, self-satisfiedly—“I’m the president. And so I made, uh, I don’t count my time in terms of dividing it evenly.”

There are lots of times when you get the sense that Obama views the powers of the presidency as little more than a shadow of his own person. When he journeyed to Copenhagen in October 2009 to pitch Chicago’s bid for the Olympics, his speech to the IOC was about—you guessed it: “Nearly one year ago, on a clear November night,” he told the committee, “people from every corner of the world gathered in the city of Chicago or in front of their televisions to watch the results of .  .  . ” and away he went. A short while later he was back in Copenhagen for the climate change summit. When things looked darkest, he personally commandeered the meeting to broker a “deal.” Which turned out to be worthless. In January 2010, Obama met with nervous Democratic congressmen to assure them that he wasn’t driving the party off a cliff. Confronted with worries that 2010 could be a worse off-year election than 1994, Obama explained to the professional politicians, “Well, the big difference here and in ’94 was you’ve got me.”

In the midst of the BP oil spill last summer, Obama explained, “My job right now is just to make sure that everybody in the Gulf understands this is what I wake up to in the morning and this is what I go to bed at night thinking about: the spill.” Read that again: The president thinks that the job of the president is to make certain the citizens correctly understand what’s on the president’s mind.

[deMolay]

Obama the Greatest Used Car Saleman ever to come out of the USA. Flip, Flop and Fly. Idiot Savant. A Pompous Sack of Shit that is getting his ass handed to him by the American Voters in record numbers.

American Narcissus
The vanity of Barack Obama
Nov 13, 2010, Vol. 16, No. 10 • By JONATHAN V. LASTSingle Page Print Larger Text Smaller Text Email
Obama’s vanity is even more jarring when paraded in the foreign arena. In April, Poland suffered a national tragedy when its president, first lady, and a good portion of the government were killed in a plane crash. Obama decided not to go to the funeral. He played golf instead. Though maybe it’s best that he didn’t make the trip. When he journeyed to Great Britain to meet with the queen he gave her an amazing gift: an iPod loaded with recordings of his speeches and pictures from his inauguration.

On November 9, 2009, Europe celebrated the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was kind of a big deal. They may not mention the Cold War in schools much these days, but it pitted the Western liberal order against a totalitarian ideology in a global struggle. In this the United States was the guarantor of liberty and peace for the West; had we faltered, no corner of the world would have been safe from Soviet domination.

President Obama has a somewhat different reading. He explains: “The Cold War reached a conclusion because of the actions of many nations over many years, and because the people of Russia and Eastern Europe stood up and decided that its end would be peaceful.” Pretty magnanimous of the Soviets to let the long twilight struggle end peacefully like that, especially after all we did to provoke them.

So Obama doesn’t know much about the Cold War. Which is probably why he didn’t think the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall was all that important. When the leaders of Europe got together to commemorate it, he decided not to go to that, either. But he did find time to record a video message, which he graciously allowed the Europeans to air during the ceremony.
The Odds on Obama II
In his video, Obama ruminated for a few minutes on the grand events of the 20th century, the Cold War itself, and the great lesson we all should take from this historic passing: “Few would have foreseen .  .  . that a united Germany would be led by a woman from Brandenburg or that their American ally would be led by a man of African descent. But human destiny is what human beings make of it.” The fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the Cold War, and the freedom of all humanity—it’s great stuff. Right up there with the election of Barack Obama.

All presidents are hostage to self-confidence. But not since Babe Ruth grabbed a bat and wagged his fat finger at Wrigley’s center-field wall has an American politician called his shot like Barack Obama. He announced his candidacy in Springfield, Illinois, on the steps where Abraham Lincoln gave his “house divided” speech. He mentioned Lincoln continually during the 2008 campaign. After he vanquished John McCain he passed out copies of Team of Rivals, a book about Lincoln’s cabinet, to his senior staff. At his inauguration, he chose to be sworn into office using Lincoln’s Bible. At the inaugural luncheon following the ceremony, he requested that the food—each dish of which was selected as a “tribute” to Lincoln—be served on replicas of Lincoln’s china. At some point in January 2009 you wanted to grab Obama by the lapels and tell him—We get it! You’re the Rail Splitter! If we promise to play along, will you keep the log cabin out of the Rose Garden?

It’s troubling that a fellow whose electoral rationale was that he edited the Harvard Law Review and wrote a couple of memoirs was comparing himself to the man who saved the Union. But it tells you all you need to know about what Obama thinks of his political gifts and why he’s unperturbed about having led his party into political disaster in the midterms. He assumes that he’ll be able to reverse the political tide once he becomes the issue, in the presidential race in 2012. As he said to Harry Reid after the majority leader congratulated him on one particularly fine oration, “I have a gift, Harry.”

But Obama’s faith in his abilities extends beyond mere vote-getting. Buried in a 2008 New Yorker piece by Ryan Lizza about the Obama campaign was this gob-smacking passage:

Obama said that he liked being surrounded by people who expressed strong opinions, but he also said, “I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m gonna think I’m a better political director than my political director.” After Obama’s first debate with McCain, on September 26th, [campaign political director Patrick] Gaspard sent him an e-mail. “You are more clutch than Michael Jordan,” he wrote. Obama replied, “Just give me the ball.”

In fairness to Obama, maybe he is a better speechwriter than his speechwriters. After all, his speechwriter was a 27-year-old, and the most affecting part of Obama’s big 2008 stump speech was recycled from Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick, with whom he shared a campaign strategist. But it’s instructive that Obama thinks he knows “more about policies on any particular issue” than his policy directors. The rate of growth of the mohair subsidy? The replacement schedule for servers at the NORAD command center? The relationship between annual rainfall in northeast Nevada and water prices in Las Vegas?

What Scott Fitzgerald once said about Hollywood is true of the American government: It can be understood only dimly and in flashes; there are no more than a handful of men who have ever been able to keep the entire equation in their heads. Barack Obama had worked in the federal government for all of four years. He was not one of those men. More important, however, is that as president he shouldn’t be the chief wonk, speechwriter, and political director.

David Remnick delivers a number of insights about Obama in his book The Bridge. For instance, Valerie Jarrett—think of her as the president’s Karen Hughes—tells Remnick that Obama is often bored with the world around him. “I think that he has never really been challenged intellectually,” Jarrett says. “So what I sensed in him was not just a restless spirit but somebody with such extraordinary talents that they had to be really taxed in order for him to be happy.” Jarrett concludes, “He’s been bored to death his whole life.”

With one or two possible exceptions, that is. Remnick reports that “Jarrett was quite sure that one of the few things that truly engaged him fully before going to the White House was writing Dreams from My Father.” So the only job Barack Obama ever had that didn’t bore him was writing about Barack Obama. But wait, there’s more.

David Axelrod—he’s Obama’s Karl Rove—told Remnick that “Barack hated being a senator.” Remnick went on:

Washington was a grander stage than Springfield, but the frustrations of being a rookie in a minority party were familiar. Obama could barely conceal his frustration with the torpid pace of the Senate. His aides could sense his frustration and so could his colleagues. “He was so bored being a senator,” one Senate aide said.

Obama’s friend and law firm colleague Judd Miner agreed. “The reality,” Miner told Remnick, “was that during his first two years in the U.S. Senate, I think, he was struggling; it wasn’t nearly as stimulating as he expected.” But even during his long, desolate exile as a senator, Obama was able to find a task that satisfied him. Here’s Remnick again: “The one project that did engage Obama fully was work on The Audacity of Hope. He procrastinated for a long time and then, facing his deadline, wrote nearly a chapter a week.” Your tax dollars at work.

Looking at this American Narcissus, it’s easy to be hammered into a stupor by the accumulated acts of vanity. Oh look, we think to ourselves, there’s our new president accepting his Nobel Peace Prize. There’s the president likening his election to the West’s victory in the Cold War. There’s the commander in chief bragging about his March Madness picks.



Yet it’s important to remember that our presidents aren’t always this way. When he accepted command of the Revolutionary forces, George Washington said,

I feel great distress, from a consciousness that my abilities and military experience may not be equal to the extensive and important Trust. .  .  . I beg it may be remembered, by every Gentleman in the room, that I, this day, declare with the utmost sincerity, I do not think myself equal to the Command I am honored with.

Accepting the presidency, Washington was even more reticent. Being chosen to be president, he said, “could not but overwhelm with despondence one who, inheriting inferior endowments from nature and unpracticed in the duties of civil administration, ought to be peculiarly conscious of his own deficiencies.”

In his biography of John Quincy Adams, Robert Remini noted that Adams was not an especially popular fellow. Yet on one of the rare occasions when he was met with adoring fans, “he told crowds that gathered to see and hear him to go home and attend to their private duties.”

And Obama? In light of the present state of his presidency, let’s look back at his most famous oration:

The journey will be difficult. The road will be long. I face this challenge with profound humility, and knowledge of my own limitations. But I also face it with limitless faith in the capacity of the American people. Because if we are willing to work for it, and fight for it, and believe in it, then I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on earth. This was the moment—this was the time—when we came together to remake this great nation so that it may always reflect our very best selves and our highest ideals.

The speech was given on June 3, 2008, and the epoch-making historical event to which “this moment” refers throughout is Barack Obama’s victory over Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries.



A senior writer at The Weekly Standard, Jonathan V. Last covered the Obama campaign in 2008.

[Mesuge]

From what I gather it was a cathartic thing; he was conflicted between two worlds, black and white. An African father, father issues in general, and then raised in a white family but never quite fitting in with whites.

Hm, this is exactly the part which catapults your so-so resume directly to the top, when the deep state agencies are hiring, and that's exactly the path Obama's career has been shaped up. Father figure conflicted, psychologicially/sexually abused as kids/youngsters, those are the best adepts for these kind of jobs. Read up on the declassified Langley stuff..

For a delegated presidency you need either a flatout moron like W., B/C-rate actor like Reagan, or damaged goods psyche establishment proped up puppet like Obama.

When genuine south negro, peacnik from NW, or navy veteran/local gov. populist like Ventura gets into presidential office, that's democracy. And that has not been the case for a lot of past decades.

[Timo]

Geeze! If you hate America that much, why don't you just emmigrate to ................hmmmm.........China seems to be the only country that doens't elect idiots as their leader.

[Timo]

Who here has ever run for office with the intent to undo everything that you all complain about here on this site? Everyone is so quick to judge, but are chickensh*t when they're asked to take any level of responsibility for the things that bother them so much. Throwing meaningless insults is so much easier than actually taking responsibility for making meaningful change.

[Oneaboveall]

Who here has ever run for office with the intent to undo everything that you all complain about here on this site? Everyone is so quick to judge, but are chickensh*t when they're asked to take any level of responsibility for the things that bother them so much. Throwing meaningless insults is so much easier than actually taking responsibility for making meaningful change.

For me, it's less being "chickensh*t" and more the feeling that I can't really change anything.

[Crazy_Dad]

I wonder how this will go down in 2011 as the Australian austerity begins?

http://www.news.com.au/money/money-matt ... 5955261174

We have the same bull crap here, and also a need for the Australian Tea Party movement.
I often wonder if we are already in a world government situation. Wherever you look the ruling elite is doing the same thing.

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/federa ... five-years

Meanwhile my paycheck buys less and less and will not go up even to meet CPI increase. CPI being a blunt propaganda tool anyhow.

[Timo]

Well, i know it's awfully frustrating to be relegated to an outside the box point of view. However, i have run for office, losing by 16 votes out of 6 thousand cast, and i grew up the youngest son of a local commissioner. She served 3 terms. When it comes right down to it, i'm glad i lost that election a decade ago. Still, during the campaign, i was honestly amazed that anyone can, in fact, run for a local office with a fair chance of winning. With the office comes the power to change certain things, if not immediately, then over time. Of the people, for the people, and by the people took on a whole new meaning for me. Cut to the chase here, all i'm saying is don't sell yourself short. You can make meaningful changes if your heart is in it, and if you can get support. Easier said than done, i know, but my mother did tell me that if you're not a part of the solution, then you're a part of the problem. I don't endorse that parable completely, but there is a lot of truth to it.

[vision-master]

Geeze! If you hate America that much, why don't you just emmigrate to ................hmmmm.........China seems to be the only country that doens't elect idiots as their leader.

China elects it's leaders? weeeee.....

[Vogelzang]

Bush did NOT lie. He was tricked into invading Iraq by the Democrats to facilitate their Cloward Piven strategy.

Democrat Quotes on Iraq Weapons of Mass Destruction


"One way or the other, we are determined to deny Iraq the capacity to develop weapons of mass destruction and the missiles to deliver them. That is our bottom line."
--President Bill Clinton, Feb. 4, 1998

"If Saddam rejects peace and we have to use force, our purpose is clear. We want to seriously diminish the threat posed by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program."
--President Bill Clinton, Feb. 17, 1998

"Iraq is a long way from [here], but what happens there matters a great deal here. For the risks that the leaders of a rogue state will use nuclear, chemical or biological weapons against us or our allies is the greatest security threat we face."
--Madeline Albright, Feb 18, 1998

"He will use those weapons of mass destruction again, as he has ten times since 1983."
--Sandy Berger, Clinton National Security Adviser, Feb, 18, 1998

"We begin with the common belief that Saddam Hussein is a tyrant and a threat to the peace and stability of the region. He has ignored the mandate of the United Nations and is building weapons of mass destruction and th! e means of delivering them."
-- Sen. Carl Levin (D, MI), Sept. 19, 2002

"We know that he has stored secret supplies of biological and chemical weapons throughout his country.
Poison gas and biological weapons were found in Iraq. Sadam used poison gas on the Kurds and against Iran."
-- Al Gore, Sept. 23, 2002



"Iraq's search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to deter and we should assume that it will continue for as long as Saddam is in power."
-- Al Gore, Sept. 23, 2002

"We have known for many years that Saddam Hussein is seeking and developing weapons of mass destruction."
-- Sen. Ted Kennedy (D, MA), Sept. 27, 2002

"The last UN weapons inspectors left Iraq in October of 1998. We are confident that Saddam Hussein retains some stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, and that he has since embarked on a crash course to build up his chemical and biological warfare capabilities. Intelligence reports indicate that he is seeking nuclear weapons..."
-- Sen. Robert Byrd (D, WV), Oct. 3, 2002

"I will be voting to give the President of the United States the authority to use force -- if necessary -- to disarm Saddam Hussein because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a real and grave threat to our security."
-- Sen. John F. Kerry (D, MA), Oct. 9, 2002

"There is unmistakable evidence that Saddam Hussein is working aggressively to develop nuclear weapons and will likely have nuclear weapons within the next five years ... We also should remember we have always underestimated the progress Saddam has made in development of weapons of mass destruction."
-- Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D, WV), Oct 10, 2002

"He has systematically violated, over the course of the past 11 years, every significant UN resolution that has demanded that he disarm and destroy his chemical and biological weapons, and any nuclear capacity. This he has refused to do"
-- Rep. Henry Waxman (D, CA), Oct. 10, 2002