Why I'm voting for George W. Bush

[dude1394]

This eloquent writer in the Esquire serves up serious thought.

bush

[quote]
The Case for George W. Bush
i.e., what if he's right?

by Tom Junod | Aug 01 '04

It happened again this morning. I saw a picture of our president—my president—and my feelings about him were instantly rekindled. The picture was taken after his speech to the graduating seniors at the Air Force Academy. He was wearing a dark suit, a light-blue tie, and a white shirt. His unsmiling visage was grim and purposeful, in pointed contrast to the face of the elaborately uniformed cadet standing next to him, which was lit up with a cocky grin. Indeed, as something more than a frozen moment—as a political statement—the picture might have served, and been intended to serve, as a tableau of the resolve necessary to lift this nation out of this steep and terrible time. The cadet represented the best of what America has to offer, all devil-may-care enthusiasm and willingness to serve. The president, his hair starting to whiten, might have represented something even more essential: the kind of brave and, in his case, literally unblinking leadership that generates enough moral capital to summon the young to war. Although one man was essentially being asked to stake his life on the wisdom of the other, both were melded in an attitude of common purpose, and so both struck a common pose. With the cadet bent slightly forward and the commander in chief leaning slightly back, each man cocked his right arm and made a muscle. They flexed! I didn't know anything about the cadet. About President George W. Bush, though, I felt the satisfaction of absolute certainty, and so uttered the words as essential to my morning as my cup of Kenyan and my dose of high-minded outrage on the editorial page of the Times : "What an asshole."

Ah. That feels better. George W. Bush is an asshole, isn't he? Moreover, he's the first president who seems merely that, at least in my lifetime. From Kennedy to Clinton, there is not a single president who would have been capable of striking such a pose after concluding a speech about a war in which hundreds of Americans and thousands of Iraqis are being killed. There is not a single president for whom such a pose would seem entirely characteristic—not a single president who might be tempted to confuse a beefcakey photo opportunity with an expression of national purpose. He has always struck me as a small man, or at least as a man too small for the task at hand, and therefore a man doomed to address the discrepancy between his soul and his situation with displays of political muscle that succeed only in drawing attention to his diminution. He not only has led us into war, he seems to get off on war, and it's the greedy pleasure he so clearly gets from flexing his biceps or from squaring his shoulders and setting his jaw or from landing a plane on an aircraft carrier—the greedy pleasure the war president finds in playacting his own attitudes of belligerence—that permitted me the greedy pleasure of hating him.

Then I read the text of the speech he gave and was thrown from one kind of certainty—the comfortable kind—into another. He was speaking, as he always does, of the moral underpinnings of our mission in Iraq. He was comparing, as he always does, the challenge that we face, in the evil of global terrorism, to the challenge our fathers and grandfathers faced, in the evil of fascism. He was insisting, as he always does, that the evil of global terrorism is exactly that, an evil—one of almost transcendent dimension that quite simply must be met, lest we be remembered for not meeting it . . . lest we allow it to be our judge. I agreed with most of what he said, as I often do when he's defining matters of principle. No, more than that, I thought that he was defining principles that desperately needed defining, with a clarity that those of my own political stripe demonstrate only when they're decrying either his policies or his character. He was making a moral proposition upon which he was basing his entire presidency—or said he was basing his entire presidency—and I found myself in the strange position of buying into the proposition without buying into the presidency, of buying into the words while rejecting, utterly, the man who spoke them. There is, of course, an easy answer for this seeming moral schizophrenia: the distance between the principles and the policy, between the mission and "Mission Accomplished," between the war on terror and the war in Iraq. Still, I have to admit to feeling a little uncertain of my disdain for this president when forced to contemplate the principle that might animate his determination to stay the course in a war that very well may be the end of him politically. I have to admit that when I listen to him speak, with his unbending certainty, I sometimes hear an echo of the same nagging question I ask myself after I hear a preacher declaim the agonies of hellfire or an insurance agent enumerate the cold odds of the actuarial tables. Namely: What if he's right?

As easy as it is to say that we can't abide the president because of the gulf between what he espouses and what he actually does , what haunts me is the possibility that we can't abide him because of us—because of the gulf between his will and our willingness. What haunts me is the possibility that we have become so accustomed to ambiguity and inaction in the face of evil that we find his call for decisive action an insult to our sense of nuance and proportion.

The people who dislike George W. Bush have convinced themselves that opposition to his presidency is the most compelling moral issue of the day. Well, it's not. The most compelling moral issue of the day is exactly what he says it is, when he's not saying it's gay marriage. The reason he will be difficult to unseat in November—no matter what his approval ratings are in the summer—is that his opponents operate out of the moral certainty that he is the bad guy and needs to be replaced, while he operates out of the moral certainty that terrorists are the bad guys and need to be defeated. The first will always sound merely convenient when compared with the second. Worse, the gulf between the two kinds of certainty lends credence to the conservative notion that liberals have settled for the conviction that Bush is distasteful as a substitute for conviction—because it's easier than conviction.


IN 1861, AFTER CONFEDERATE FORCES shelled Fort Sumter, President Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus from Philadelphia to Washington and thereby made the arrest of American citizens a matter of military or executive say-so. When the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court objected to the arrest of a Maryland man who trained troops for Confederate muster, Lincoln essentially ignored his ruling. He argued that there was no point fixating on one clause in the Constitution when Southern secession had shredded the whole document, and asked, "Are all the laws but one to go unexecuted, and the government itself go to pieces, lest that one be violated?" During the four-year course of the Civil War, he also selectively abridged the rights of free speech, jury trial, and private property. Not that the war went well: His army was in the habit of losing long before it learned to win, and Lincoln did not find a general to his liking until he found Ulysses S. Grant, whose idea of war was total. He financed the bloodbath by exposing the nation to ruinous debt and taxation, and by 1864 he had to contend with an antiwar challenge from Democrats and a political challenge from a member of his own Cabinet. On August 23, 1864, he was motivated to write in a memorandum that "it seems exceedingly probable that this administration will not be reelected," and yet his position on peace never wavered: He rejected any terms but the restoration of the union and the abolition of slavery. The war was, from first to last, portrayed as his war, and after he won landslide reelection, he made a vow not only to stay the course but to prosecute it to the brink of catastrophe and beyond: "Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said 'the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.' "

Today, of course, those words, along with Lincoln's appeal to the better angels of our nature, are chiseled into the wall of his memorial, on the Mall in Washington. And yet if George Bush were to speak anything like them today, we would accuse him of pandering to his evangelical base. We would accuse him of invoking divine authority for a war of his choosing, and Maureen Dowd would find a way to read his text in light of the cancellation of some Buffy spin-off. Believe me: I am not comparing George W. Bush to Abraham Lincoln. The latter was his own lawyer as well as his own writer, and he was alive to the possibilities of tragedy and comedy—he was human —in a way that our president doesn't seem to be. Neither am I looking to justify Bush's forays into shady constitutional ground by invoking Lincoln's precedents with the same; I'm not a lawyer. I am, however, asking if the crisis currently facing the country—the crisis, that is, that announced itself on the morning of September 11, 2001, in New York and Pennsylvania and the District of Columbia—is as compelling a justification for the havoc and sacrifice of war as the crisis that became irrevocable on April 12, 1861, in South Carolina, or, for that matter, the crisis that emerged from the blue Hawaiian sky on December 7, 1941. I, for one, believe it is and feel somewhat ashamed having to say so: having to aver that 9/11/01 was a horror sufficient to supply Bush with a genuine moral cause rather than, as some would have it, a mere excuse for his adventurism.

We were attacked three years ago, without warning or predicate event. The attack was not a gesture of heroic resistance nor the offshoot of some bright utopian resolve, but the very flower of a movement that delights in the potential for martyrdom expressed in the squalls of the newly born. It is a movement that is about death—that honors death, that loves death, that fetishizes death, that worships death, that seeks to accomplish death wherever it can, on a scale both intimate and global—and if it does not warrant the expenditure of what the self-important have taken to calling "blood and treasure," then what does? Slavery? Fascism? Genocide? Let's not flatter ourselves: If we do not find it within ourselves to identify the terrorism inspired by radical Islam as an unequivocal evil—and to pronounce ourselves morally superior to it—then we have lost the ability to identify any evil at all, and our democracy is not only diminished, it dissolves into the meaninglessness of privilege.


YEAH, YEAH, I KNOW: Nobody who opposes Bush thinks that terrorism is a good thing. The issue is not whether the United States should be involved in a war on terrorism but rather whether the war on terrorism is best served by war in Iraq. And now that the war has defied the optimism of its advocates, the issue is no longer Bush's moral intention but rather his simple competence. He got us in when he had no idea how to get us out. He allowed himself to be blinded by ideology and blindsided by ideologues. His arrogance led him to offend the very allies whose participation would have enabled us to win not just the war but the peace. His obsession with Saddam Hussein led him to rush into a war that was unnecessary. Sure, Saddam was a bad guy. Sure, the world is a better place without him. But . . .

And there it is: the inevitable but . Trailed by its uncomfortable ellipsis, it sits squirming at the end of the argument against George Bush for very good reason: It can't possibly sit at the beginning. Bush haters have to back into it because there's nothing beyond it. The world is a better place without Saddam Hussein, but . . . but what ? But he wasn't so bad that we had to do anything about him? But he wasn't so bad that he was worth the shedding of American blood? But there are other dictators just as bad whom we leave in place? But he provided Bush the opportunity to establish the doctrine of preemptive war, in which case the cure is worse than the disease? But we should have secured Afghanistan before invading Iraq? But we should have secured the cooperation of allies who were no more inclined to depose Saddam than they—or we, as head of an international coalition of the unwilling—were to stop the genocide in Rwanda ten years before? Sure, genocide is bad, but . . .

We might as well credit the president for his one great accomplishment: replacing but with and as a basis for foreign policy. The world is a better place without Saddam Hussein, and we got rid of him. And unless we have become so wedded to the politics of regret that we are obligated to indulge in a perverse kind of nostalgia for the days of Uday and Qusay, we have to admit that it's hard to imagine a world with Saddam still in it. And even before the first stem-winder of the Democratic convention, the possibility of even limited success in Iraq has reduced the loyal opposition to two strategies: either signing up for the oversight role they had envisioned for the UN, or else declaring the whole thing a lost cause, in their own war of preemption.

Of course, Iraq might be a lost cause. It might be a disaster unmitigated and unprecedented. But if we permit ourselves to look at it the way the Republicans look at it—as a historical cause rather than just a cause assumed to be lost—we might be persuaded to see that it's history's judgment that matters, not ours. The United States, at this writing, has been in Iraq fifteen months. At the same point in the Civil War, Lincoln faced, well, a disaster unmitigated and unprecedented. He was losing . He didn't lose, at least in part because he was able to both inspire and draw on the kind of moral absolutism necessary to win wars. Bush has been unable to do the same, at least in part because he is undercut by evidence of his own dishonesty, but also because moral absolutism is nearly impossible to sustain in the glare of a twenty-four-hour news cycle. In a nation incapable of feeling any but the freshest wounds, Bush cannot seek to inspire moral absolutism without his moral absolutism becoming itself an issue—indeed, the issue. He cannot seek to engender certainty without being accused of sowing disarray. And he cannot speak the barest terms necessary for victory in any war—that we will stay the course, through good or through ill, because our cause is right and just, and God is on our side—without inspiring a goodly number of his constituents to aspire to the moral prestige of surrender.


THERE IS SUPPOSED TO BE a straight line between Bush's moral absolutism—between his penchant for calling our enemies "evildoers" or even, well, "enemies"—and Guantánamo, and then between Guantánamo and the case of Jose Padilla, and then between Padilla and the depravities of Abu Ghraib. More than a mere demonstration of cause and effect, the line is supposed by those opposed to a second Bush presidency to function as a geometric proof of the proposition that the American position in Iraq is not only untenable but ignoble. It's supposed to prove that victory in any such enterprise is not worth the taint and that withdrawal is tantamount to victory, because it will save the national soul. In fact, it proves something quite different: It proves that just as the existence of the animal-rights movement is said to depend on the increasing American distance from the realities of the farm, the liberal consensus on the war in Iraq depends on the increasing American distance from the realities of soldiering. All Abu Ghraib proves is what Lincoln made clear in his writings, and what any soldier has to know from the moment he sizes up another soldier in the sight of his rifle: that war is undertaken at the risk of the national soul. The moral certainty that makes war possible is certain only to unleash moral havoc, and moral havoc becomes something the nation has to rise above. We can neither win a war nor save the national soul if all we seek is to remain unsullied—pristine. Anyway, we are well beyond that now. The question is not, and has never been, whether we can fight a war without perpetrating outrages of our own. The question is whether the rightness of the American cause is sufficient not only to justify war but to withstand war's inevitable outrages. The question is whether—if the cause is right—we are strong enough to make it remain right in the foggy moral battleground of war.

In 1861, Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus, and historians today applaud the restraint he displayed in throwing thousands of American citizens in jail. By the middle of 2002, George W. Bush had declared two American citizens enemy combatants, and both men are still in jail at this writing, uncharged. Both presidents used war as a rationale for their actions, citing as their primary constitutional responsibility the protection of the American people. It was not until two years later that Congress took up Lincoln's action and pronounced it constitutionally justified. Our willingness to extend Bush the same latitude will depend on our perception of what exactly we're up against, post-9/11. Lincoln was fighting for the very soul of this country; he was fighting to preserve this country, as a country, and so he had to challenge the Constitution in order to save it. Bush seems to think that he's fighting for the very soul of this country, but that's exactly what many people regard as a dangerous presumption. He seems to think that he is fighting for our very survival, when all we're asking him to fight for is our security, which is a very different thing. A fight for our security? We can handle that; it means we have to get to the airport early. A fight for our survival? That means we have to live in a different country altogether. That means the United States is changing and will continue to change, the way it did during and after the Civil War, with a fundamental redefinition of executive authority. That means we have to endure the constitutional indignity of the president's declaring Jose Padilla an enemy combatant for contemplating the still-uncommitted crime of blowing up a radioactive device in an American city, which seems a constitutional indignity too great to endure, unless we think of the constitutional indignities we'd have to endure if Padilla had actually committed the crime he's accused of planning. Unless we think of how this country might change if we get hit again, and hit big. In defending his suspension of habeas corpus, Lincoln sought to draw the distinction between liberties that are absolute and those that are sustainable in time of war. Bush seems to be relying on the same question, and the same distinction, as an answer to all the lawyers and editorial writers who suggest that if Jose Padilla stays in jail, we are losing the war on terror by abrogating our own ideals.

Losing the war on terror? The terrible truth is that we haven't begun to find out what that really means.


I WILL NEVER FORGET the sickly smile that crossed the president's face when he asked us all to go shopping in the wake of 9/11. It was desperate and a little craven, and I never forgave him for it. As it turned out, though, his appeal succeeded all too well. We've found the courage to go shopping. We've welcomed the restoration of the rule of celebrity. For all our avowals that nothing would ever be the same, the only thing that really changed is our taste in entertainment, which has forsaken the frivolity of the sitcom for the grit on display in The Apprentice . The immediacy of the threat was replaced by the inexplicability of the threat level. A universal war—the war on terror—was succeeded by a narrow one, an elective one, a personal one, in Iraq. Eventually, the president made it easy to believe that the threat from within was as great as the threat from without. That those at home who declared American moral primacy were as dangerous as those abroad who declared our moral degeneracy. That our national security was not worth the risk to our soul. That Abu Ghraib disproved the rightness of our cause and so represented the symbolic end of the war that began on 9/11. And that the very worst thing that could happen to this country would be four more years of George W. Bush. In a nation that loves fairy tales, the president seemed so damned eager to cry wolf that we decided he was just trying to keep us scared and that maybe he was just as big a villain as the wolf he insisted on telling us about. That's the whole point of the story, isn't it? The boy cries wolf for his own ends, and after a while people stop believing in the reality of the threat.

I know how this story ends, because I've told it many times myself. I've told it so many times, in fact, that I'm always surprised when the wolf turns out to be real, and shows up hungry at the door, long after the boy is gone.

[reeds]

Why I am NOT....

I almost did not want to write an entry on George W. Bush because it seems everyone already has. Instead of writing a fact sheet on Bush, I am simply going to state my thoughts.

First off, I would like to state I have not seen the Michael Moore film, Farenheit 9/11. I do plan on seeing it, but am reluctant simply because he bothers me. Yes, I strongly support what he is trying to do with this film: prevent the reelection of Bush. This is extremely important so the ends do justify the means. Even though I personally think Mr. Moore is a whiney, biased, individual who is screaming for attention, (oh somebody like me. somebody fear me. please) I respect what he is doing. That being said, I must admit slight hypocrisy, because the only reason I am writing this entry, is to help sway a few votes away from Bush as well. This page is not a documentary (fahrenheit 9/11 is not either).

There are so many reasons why I dislike Bush as a president that I scarcely know where to begin. The war in Iraq is the most obvious fault of his presidency. I am an American. I am proud to be one. Capitalism and democracy are two ideals I hold to be absolute truths. Bush proved that he does not agree when he decided to be a wild cowboy and invade Iraq. Make no mistake. He did not make this decision to spread the wonderful benefits of democracy. He did so to satisfy selfish motivations. If he were so interested in spreading democracy why not help all countries ruled by dictatorships?

I can not venture a guess if Mr. Bush (he is not my president) did know at the time of invasion that there were no weapons of mass destruction. I will not even claim his reasons for invasion was oil. There are simply too many variables in this equation. He could have done it because he thought it was a appropriate response to 9/11. In actuality, it could have been a strong deterrent against terrorism. He could have also simply been a cowardly cowboy with fantasies of revenge. Who knows, but I think it has clearly been demonstrated that it was the wrong decision. Now it seems like the entire world feels the United States of America is trying to rule the world under the regime of Dictator Bush. The hostility towards the U.S. seems to grow stronger every day.

Secondly, he seems to be an inept economist. My problem with Mr. Bush’s economic policies is that they make no sense.

Economists seem to have proven over and over again that his tax cuts do not make add up. Personally, I believe in laissez fair. The less government intervention and the less taxes the better. Unfortunately, this is unrealistic and until a new system is developed (I am working on an extensive paper on a new tax system) not much can change. I personally felt no emotional distaste for the cuts, but as I said, it simply does not add up.

A less obvious economic ignorance is his science policies. I am a staunch supporter of all science. Science leads to more productive lives, and productivity is the true driving force of any economy. Bush wants to spend billions to resurrect NASA. This decision was largely political in my opinion. I am sorry to say, but NASA is antiquated. NASA was once one of the greatest American institutions. Now, it is a problem ridden mess.

Furthermore, economics show us that markets are the best way to organize resources. If opportunities are available in space exploration (and they are) then businesses will emerge catering around them. One of the first examples of this entrepreneurialism is Space Ship One which plans to have commercial tourism flights to space.

More importantly there are better ways to spend such a large sum of money on science. How about medicine? Nothing would help make our society more productive then curing diseases. Instead of devoting attention to such a cause he has in fact stifled its attainability by not providing funds. He has even limited federal funds to such to some research, such as stem cell research.

These examples point to one central problem with George W. Bush. He is not an intelligent man. I am simply not comfortable being smarter than the man who holds more power than any other man in the world. I will be voting for John Kerry. Not because I think he is a particularly good candidate. Instead, I will vote for him, because George W. Bush, to put it bluntly, is an idiot.

[mavsman55]

Secondly, he seems to be an inept economist. My problem with Mr. Bush’s economic policies is that they make no sense.

Reeds, with all due respect, you are an American citizen. Most citizens don't know a whole lot about the US economy and trickle-down policy and things like that. Unless you are an economist for a living than saying this about G.W.'s policy would be kind of unfair. It's be just like me, never having played real golf in my life, saying that Tiger Woods' golf strategy sucks.

[reeds]

It's be just like me, never having played real golf in my life, saying that Tiger Woods' golf strategy sucks.

You should start playing golf...when I was your age, my friends always begged me to go out golfing, I always refused...thought the sport was boring..once I started playing, I really loved it...but thats for another thread...

Bush must go!!lol

[Drbio]

Kerry is the golf equivalent to a snowman.


Dubya the proverbial ace in the hole.



edit: a snowman is an 8 stroke hole in golf for those (like one dimocratic poster here who asked [img]i/expressions/face-icon-small-wink.gif[/img] )didn't know.

[LRB]

Actually reeds I think all republicans will rest better knowing that you aren't a Bush supporter.

[reeds]

"Actually reeds I think all republicans will rest better knowing that you aren't a Bush supporter. "


Yes, you are correct...as all democrats will rest better knowing this board arent Kerry backers...Is Texas a separate country all together? Its sure seems to be

[Drbio]

Originally posted by: reeds
"Actually reeds I think all republicans will rest better knowing that you aren't a Bush supporter. "


YIs Texas a separate country all together? Its sure seems to be

We should be so lucky.

[Dooby]

I can not venture a guess if Mr. Bush (he is not my president)

And that is when I tuned you out. I struggled to read the rest, but somehow managed to get through it.

Let me tell you something, mister. When I was 22 in 1996, I earned the equivalent to far less than the minimum wage. Me and my coworkers routinely got up at 5AM, strapped on jeans and a redwing boots and drove around the state of Texas lining up votes for various Republicans. To this day, there are still parts of Dallas that I can start with a highway and name every street for 20 blocks. I would work till 3AM in an unairconditioned building (they shut the air off at 6PM) stuffing and licking envelopes. I got 1 day off a week (Sunday, and I still put an average of 4 hours of work). I've met and spoken to just about every republican politician that ever ran or was elected to statewide office from 1994-1998 (including that man that is not your president), and then some.

Am I bragging? No. Does that even compare to the guys lugging 75 pounds of gear through Afghanistan as I type this? No. But it shows that I was as a committed Republican party guy as there was. The point is you never heard the stupidest cop out line in the world come out of my mouth or those of my coworkers or the people we were working for- "he is not <u>my</u> president."

Yeah, you heard that line a few times-from people that I considered morons.

So before you start spewing more coctail party logic and saying stuff like that or "the end justifies the means", take my advice-don't.

Aw crap. I promised myself I would never post in this forum again. That is twice in a week.

[reeds]

"Let me tell you something, mister. When I was 22 in 1996, I earned the equivalent to far less than the minimum wage. Me and my coworkers routinely got up at 5AM, strapped on jeans and a redwing boots and drove around the state of Texas lining up votes for various Republicans. To this day, there are still parts of Dallas that I can start with a highway and name every street for 20 blocks. I would work till 3AM in an unairconditioned building (they shut the air off at 6PM) stuffing and licking envelopes. I got 1 day off a week (Sunday, and I still put an average of 4 hours of work). I've met and spoken to just about every republican politician that ever ran or was elected to statewide office from 1994-1998 (including that man that is not your president), and then some.

Am I bragging? No. Does that even compare to the guys lugging 75 pounds of gear through Afghanistan as I type this? No. But it shows that I was as a committed Republican party guy as there was. The point is you never heard the stupidest cop out line in the world come out of my mouth or those of my coworkers or the people we were working for- "he is not my president."

Yeah, you heard that line a few times-from people that I considered morons.

So before you start spewing more coctail party logic and saying stuff like that or "the end justifies the means", take my advice-don't."

Glad to hear you are a hard worker- if you make under 250 grand in a year- you should vote Kerry- he cares more for the working class..now if you make more than that- I would vote bush in a second..he really does care for the rich..too bad the whole country isnt that rich- we would then be all treated like royality....

[LRB]

Originally posted by: reeds


Glad to hear you are a hard worker- if you make under 250 grand in a year- you should vote Kerry- he cares more for the working class..now if you make more than that- I would vote bush in a second..he really does care for the rich..too bad the whole country isnt that rich- we would then be all treated like royality....

What a moronic and substanceless statement. Who knows for sure how much Kerry or Bush care for anyone. Are you some kind of mind reader? Both have plans to benefit working class Americans, as all Americans. You may agree with Bush's plan more or you may agree with Kerry's plan more. That doesn't mean that the other cares more or less about a certain class of Americans.

And certainly you can't be stupid enough to infer that Kerry doesn't love his wife or his fellow Senator form Mass. can you? You do know that they are some of the wealthiest of the "rich" don't you? Hell if Kerry loves the working class so much why in hell doesn't he give away most of his personal wealth to help them? Could it be that it isn't just a requirement to give all you have to the working class to love them. Might that also mean that you don't have to follow just one certain political strategy to love them.

Further more I can't believe what a snob you portray yourself to be. You view people of a class as all being the same. Maybe you view all people of a race as being the same as well. I certainly hope not.

[Dooby]

Originally posted by: reeds

Glad to hear you are a hard worker- if you make under 250 grand in a year- you should vote Kerry- he cares more for the working class..now if you make more than that- I would vote bush in a second..he really does care for the rich..too bad the whole country isnt that rich- we would then be all treated like royality....

1. I make a hell of a lot less tha 250K a year.

2. $250k/year was the definition of millionaire used by the Clinton administration.

3. I guarantee you that is not the definition the democrats use when defining the middle class or the working class.

4. I don't have Kerry or Kennedy kind of money; I can't afford to be a democrat.

Now I remember why I promised not to come here anymore. It really is too bad nobody wants to have a civil discussion. I guarantee you I have a hell of a lot more insight into politics than anybody else you are going to run into on this board.

[sturm und drang]

Dooby,

The statement "Bush isn't MY president" isn't just partisan sour grapes over the fact that a Republican's in office. Indeed, it's a dig at the fact that he lost the popular vote – a historical anomaly. At least, that's the way I have always understood it. If the shoe were on the other foot, Republicans would be spouting the same phrase.

[Dooby]

Originally posted by: sturm und drang
Dooby,

The statement "Bush isn't MY president" isn't just partisan sour grapes over the fact that a Republican's in office. Indeed, it's a dig at the fact that he lost the popular vote – a historical anomaly. At least, that's the way I have always understood it. If the shoe were on the other foot, Republicans would be spouting the same phrase.

No. <u>I</u> wouldn't.

BTW, as late as a week before the election, there was a lot of talk that Gore could win the electoral college and lose the popular vote. People forget that. I heard nothing from anybody but how legitimate Gore would be and how it is what the founding fathers intended.

People forget that until the drunk driving thing came out, Bush was starting to pull away from Gore. Funny how things worked out the other way.

[LRB]

Originally posted by: sturm und drang
Dooby,

The statement "Bush isn't MY president" isn't just partisan sour grapes over the fact that a Republican's in office. Indeed, it's a dig at the fact that he lost the popular vote – a historical anomaly. At least, that's the way I have always understood it. If the shoe were on the other foot, Republicans would be spouting the same phrase.

And which wouldn't make it right even if they did. Saying that suggest that you do not believe in the constitutional system that is in place or that you wish to disavow your citizenship.

[sturm und drang]

Personally, I never question the legitimacy of Bush's presidency. I don't like it, but I certainly don't question his legitimacy.

All I'm saying is that you can't compare the situations in 1996 and 2004. Bush won the electoral vote but not the popular; thus, "He's not MY president" is more than just bitching. I'm not saying I agree, as stated above, I'm just arguing that you can't claim the moral high ground here.

And just because you wouldn't question Gore's legitimacy if the tables were turned doesn't mean a ton of other Republicans wouldn't. I'm quite sure you would hear all kinds of moaning from whichever party came out on the short end of the 2000 voting debacle.

[Dooby]

To which I will point out that Bill Clinton didn't get the majority of the popular vote in 1992. Which, at the time, was pertty unheard of. He didn't in '96, either.

[sturm und drang]

In 1992, Clinton got 44,909,889 votes compared to Bush Sr.'s 39,104,545
In 1996, Clinton got 47,402,357 compared to Dole's 39,198,755
In 2000, Al Gore got 50,999,897 compared to Bush Jr.'s 50,546,002

Due to third party participation, Clinton didn't garner the majority of all votes in 92 or 96 – but he thumped Bush and Dole, respectively.

In 2000, as we all know, Gore received over half a million more votes than Bush, but lost the presidency. I'm not saying I agree with the "He's not my president" statement – I've never used it myself. All I'm saying is that you absolutely cannot take the moral high ground here because Republicans didn't say that in the past. The situations are apples and oranges.

[LRB]

Originally posted by: sturm und drang
In 1992, Clinton got 44,909,889 votes compared to Bush Sr.'s 39,104,545
In 1996, Clinton got 47,402,357 compared to Dole's 39,198,755
In 2000, Al Gore got 50,999,897 compared to Bush Jr.'s 50,546,002

Due to third party participation, Clinton didn't garner the majority of all votes in 92 or 96 – but he thumped Bush and Dole, respectively.

In 2000, as we all know, Gore received over half a million more votes than Bush, but lost the presidency. I'm not saying I agree with the "He's not my president" statement – I've never used it myself. All I'm saying is that you absolutely cannot take the moral high ground here because Republicans didn't say that in the past. The situations are apples and oranges.

Whether Republicans did or did not say it in the past or whether a situation like this has every occured in modern times is immaterial as to whether it's morally right to say this. The Presidency is decided by the vote of the electoral college and not by popular vote. This was expressly put into the constitution. Saying "he is not my president" is saying the equivalent to I don't believe in the Constitution.

Now if you want to argue whether the Constitution should be amended when the popular vote and not the electoral college should decide who becomes President that is an entirely different argument. The Constitution made provisions in it where the document might be amended. Personally I'm all for an amendment which would change the Presidency to an election of popular vote versus the current Electorial college system. Our current system is antiguadated and does not adequately nor fairly meet our needs. However until an amendment is passed and ratified, I'll fully support our current system and the Constitution. To do otherwise is to undercut our system of the rule of law and advocate anarchy.

[dude1394]

I guarantee you I have a hell of a lot more insight into politics than anybody else you are going to run into on this board.

Now WAIT a minute!! [img]i/expressions/face-icon-small-smile.gif[/img]

[MavKikiNYC]

Snapping to Attention
By DAVID BROOKS

Published: August 3, 2004

A few years ago, while covering John McCain's presidential campaign, I noticed this weird phenomenon. When he spoke to veterans in South Carolina, they would greet him warmly but not effusively.

Then he'd go before a college audience in New Hampshire and everybody would be in rapture. For students, McCain was someone who had endured things they couldn't even imagine enduring. For them - and for us media types who had also never served-McCain's experience was practically supernatural.

In that campaign, as in this one, there was something hypercharged in the way we civilians regarded the military. Our attitudes seem bipolar: we're either at the military's throat or we're at its feet.

Sometimes the military is regarded as a bizarre, primeval institution dangerously at odds with enlightened American culture. We can't let ROTC programs corrupt our Ivy League campuses because the military is not nice to gays. We can't trust the Pentagon brass with their budget requests because they are part of a greedy military-industrial complex. We can't let our kids enlist because that's no way to get ahead. We can't let generals run our foreign policy because they are bloodthirsty warmongers or overly cautious pacifists (take your pick).

Then, at the flick of a cultural switch, the same people who were watching "Dr. Strangelove," "M*A*S*H" and "Platoon" are lining up to see "Top Gun," "Saving Private Ryan" and "We Were Soldiers." Suddenly the military is a bastion of the higher virtues - selflessness, duty and honor. Suddenly military service is practically a requirement for political office. If you haven't served in combat, you shouldn't be making policy in wartime.

We've just finished a Democratic convention, of all things, that was little more than a long military worship session. John Kerry's military heroism was celebrated while the rest of his career was nearly forgotten. Bill Clinton said it was more honorable to have served in Vietnam than to have evaded service, and the multitudes, many of whom had evaded, cheered madly. Middle-aged peace activists who had despised the military in the Westmoreland era now paid lavish homage to it in the Shalikashvili era.

I get the feeling these bipolar attitudes arise from a cocktail of ignorance, guilt and envy. First, there are large demographic chunks of the nation in which almost nobody serves. People there may not know what's bigger, a brigade or a battalion.

At the same time, they know there's something unjust in the fact that they get to enjoy America while others sacrifice for it, and sense deep down that there's something ennobling in military service. It involves some set of character tests they didn't get in summer internships. As Samuel Johnson piercingly observed, "Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier."

So we go through these cycles of contempt and romance. When the military is in ill repute, we ask too little of it. When it is admired, we ask too much. Now, for example, many people seem to think that military experience is the key to foreign policy judgment and national leadership.

But I can't help noticing that John F. Kennedy, who knew something about heroism, didn't look to military heroes when he was contemplating the crisis of his times. In his book "Profiles in Courage," he celebrated senators. The courage he investigated wasn't military courage at all. It was political courage, which requires a different set of traits.

Kennedy's exemplars were statesmen like John Quincy Adams and Robert Taft, who knew how to make up their minds and stand on principle, who knew when to serve constituents and when to serve conscience, who withstood furious public attacks for something they felt was right.

In other words, while Kennedy obviously admired military valor, he saw it as subservient to political leadership. We, on the other hand, are deeply cynical about political leadership and political life, and displace our hopes onto anything else.

My own instinct is that we need an ambitious national service program to demystify the military for the next generation of Americans. It also seems clear, looking at our history, that combat heroism is not an essential qualification for a wartime leader. It's much more important to have the political courage that Lincoln had and Kennedy celebrated. But don't listen to me. I never served.