since you and i have beat the iraq war and bush's handling of it to a bloody soup over the past two years i'll digress on your points. at least now you're acknowledging some of bush's fcukups since they're so blantantly obvious that you can't ignore them, even though bush wants to ignore them. i know, he can't admit to his mistakes because he can't show any hint of weakness at this point and yadda yadda. anyway we could argue all of this for the next 10 pages like the old days, but you would lose the debate like you always do.
anyways since i feel like going off on a tangent, i'd like to take issue with this statement:
Originally posted by JaTo: Ultimately, this is akin to claiming that the US Civil war was about slavery, when ULTIMATELY it was about state's rights.
imo (and ULTIMATELY) the civil war WAS about slavery. you can try to say it was about state's rights but that's just the pr reason. if slavery wasn't in the US during that time would there have been a civil war?
of course the argument on states rights started way before the war came to play, but the argument on rights was directly/indirectly about the southern states rights to use a different set of laws towards non-whites, which in turn protected slave labor because their economy depended on it.
that conflict over states rights dates back to the argument over the Negro Seaman's Act which SC was using to bar black controlled ships from coming to port (or enslaving them if they did), in addition the Coasting Act was an issue because some states weren't recognizing the fed government's power to grant port access to any ship with the fed permit, which further raised tensions about fed regulating commerce. all of this was tied to interstate commerce....which was one of the main points the fed government felt they could regulate. the south feared that if the fed could regulate interstate commerce then they would be able to end slavery which was the lifeblood of southern economy.
