03 April 2003 ~ Toms, on war...

CRUISE [actor]: If Bush, as I believe, has reliable information on the fact that Saddam Hussein is making weapons of mass destruction, I cannot support the policies of his government.

[in a later, separate interview]: I was actually misquoted on that.

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DASCHLE [Senate Minority Leader, Democrat, South Dakota]: I'm saddened, saddened that this president failed so miserably at diplomacy that we're forced to war, saddened that we have to give up one life because this president couldn't create the kind of diplomatic effort so critical for our country.

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DeLAY [House Majority Leader, Republican, Texas]: America must preempt threats before they damage our national interests.

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MORELLO [musician, of Rage Against the Machine]: The broader issue is the one that's most important. The Bush administration is looking for a pretext, any pretext, to invade Iraq, in the name of controlling oil reserves and concealing Bush's horrendous domestic record. Forty million Americans live below the poverty line; 50 million are without health care, a lot of them children; corporate crime is at an all-time high -- this is the Enron presidency. And far more damage will be done to the environment in the next twelve months than during the entire Reagan administration. We wouldn't want any of those things on the front page, now, would we? Glorious stories of beheading mustachioed dictators would make far better copy -- and that's just what George W. intends to do.

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RIDGE [Secretary/"Homeland Security"]: "Stash away the duct tape — don't use it!"

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ROBBINS [novelist]: Quite probably the worst thing about the inevitable and totally unjustifiable war with Iraq is that there’s no chance the U.S. might lose it. America is a young country, and intellectually, emotionally, and physically, it has been exhibiting all the characteristics of an adolescent bully, a pubescent punk who’s too big for his britches and too strong for his age. Someday, perhaps, we may grow out of our mindless, pimple-faced arrogance, but in the meantime, it might do us a ton of good to have our butts kicked. Unfortunately, like most of the targets we pick on, Iraq is much too weak to give us the thrashing our continuously overbearing behavior deserves, while Saddam is even less deserving of victory than Bush.

Don’t get me wrong—I don’t want American soldiers killed. But I don’t want Iraqis killed, either. I’m just not one of those people who believes that American lives are more valuable than the lives of others.

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TOMORROW [cartoonist]:

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The above is a rather non-scientific experiment to explore the number of people who oppose United States action in Iraq, and those who are for it. The basis of this experiment (which has really been TERRIBLY unscientific) was to take a common name (Tom), and type it into a search engine along with words like, "war," and "Iraq." I omitted those pages that required me to pay, pages where I could not find any mention of "Tom," and pages on which it was unclear who "Tom" was. After skimming through approximately ten pages of search engine Toms, I have the above to offer you.

Don't you think it's weird how, according to the above horrifically unscientific data, people named Tom tend to fall into a category of opposition to the war, or else they come off as sounding pretty damned stupid??? I don't mean "ignorant," or "uninformed," but actually "STUPID." Like somebody who might hang out with Dan Quayle on the playground sometimes? (The -Cruise and -Ridge quotes particularly amuse me...) Of course, we can't draw any logical conclusions from any of this because the data is terribly unscientific.

This is also probably how Gallup gets its data.

*wicked grin*

Love,
~Helena*