Exactly. Unless another dragon attacks, people may very well believe it’s the salt. That’s not to say that I personally believe that Bush can take credit for anything. But I believe a lot of folks in this country are not asking themselves “Which candidate has a better track record on the environment?” but rather “Who can better protect us from the terrorists?” Given that there have been no further attacks on our soil since 9/11… that’s what I believe will tip the scales for Bush.
There are a lot of issues last night in which I thought Kerry came across as the “winner”: the environment, the unemployment figures, the supreme court question, abortion. However, at the end of the day, I think these issues are completely overshadowed by the big elephant sitting in the middle of the living room called terrorism.
If, God forbid, there is an attack prior to the election, then I’d say that people might very well turn to Kerry. If not, I think Bush will edge out a victory. Just my HO. Feel free to ask me to eat my words on November 3rd.
Quite the opposite. If there is an attack, I believe the sheeple wil be spooked into staying the course in a desire to maintain a veneer of stability in a dangerous world. If there is no attack, they will feel less threatened, and more likely to make a change to Kerry who holds out the hope of improvement in in the economy and Iraq.
Isn’t that what I said? He didn’t actually explicity say, “I will federally fund abortions”, but he did imply it. Hence my words, “distinction without a difference”. I don’t get what your point of disagreement is.
The D.U.B. doesn’t have a lock on dirty pool. This, from Josh Marshall:
Great strategy. Have your lies been revealed? Just put them on ice, and trot them out again at a time when there isn’t enough time for anyone to research and expose them.
By 83%-10%, Republicans thought Bush won the debate.
By 87%-8%, Democrats thought Kerry won the debate.
By 53%-37%, Independents thought Kerry won the debate.
IOW, Kerry did well with respect to all three groups. Especially the independents, obviously, and that’s where the election’s going to be won or lost. But we also know that Republicans poll much more uniformly for Bush than Democrats do for Kerry. (For instance, the last Pew poll gave Kerry an 85-9 edge among Dems, and gave Bush a 90-3 edge among Pubbies.) So seeing Dems a bit more confident than GOPers that their man won the debate is also a favorable indicator.
Gallup’s sample for this poll had 38% Republicans to 32% Democrats, hence the closeness of the overall total.
Question 3 wound up being a general Iraq question. I thought Kerry did particularly well with his mention of three things he hadn’t brought up before:
That the DoD had shut out our allies who weren’t part of the Coalition from the reconstruction. (He should have taken this farther, though: a lot of Iraqi state industries used equipment from countries like Germany, Russia, and France, and after the war, they desperately needed spare parts. But they couldn’t get the parts, on account of our policy.)
The meeting of the North Atlantic Council, where the possibility of a total takeover of Iraqi troop training was discussed, but the US was silent.
King Abdullah’s statement that Iraq was too chaotic for elections.
He also got more detailed about Hagel’s evaluation of our Iraq situation, and that was good.
Bush, OTOH, said that Kerry’s plan should sound familiar, because it was the Bush plan. Then he criticized it! He also reiterated that we’d caught 75% of the AQ leadership (too bad they keep on finding new leaders).
This was Kerry’s last opportunity in the debates to point out that only about 8000 of the 100,000 Iraqi troops and police we’ve trained have had the ‘full’ 8-week training; unfortunately, he missed it. Too bad; if there’s a single vignette that shows the hollowness of the Administration’s claims on Iraq, I think that’s it.
A couple questions later, Bush got off this zinger:
Maybe in BushWorld, the Duelfer report said that. But to the rest of us, it said the inspectors would have found what they were finding when we pulled them out - little reason to believe Saddam had anything approaching a WMD program.
What do you do when the President of your country apparently lives in an alternate universe? I think the answer is, we give him his walking papers, so he can live there full time, without the burden of having to hold office in this universe.
Question 6 was the one on the draft, and it was also the one where Bush advanced threateningly on Charlie Gibson. And it was the one where Kerry pointed out (1) that countries are leaving the coalition, and (2) if Missouri were a country, it would be the third-largest in the coalition, after the US and the UK.
Reading comprehension failure, again. The lies are coming from the Swifties. Not you. “Have your lies been revealed” is what we refer to as a “rhetorical question” (you could look it up). The “your” in that sentence doesn’t actually refer to you. I guess that’s the part that confused you.
I guess my reading comprehension is failing this morning, too, because I don’t understand this post at all. What’s “the two step?” Do you mean, “planning a last minute smear campaign?” If so, some evidence, please? And which of my lies are you referring to? A cite would help. And you’re lumping me in with the Swifties? On what basis? Give me something to work with!
Is that what the media is referring to when they keep bringing up the “security moms”? I really didn’t understand it before. Thank you for explaining the view. I don’t agree, vehemently, for a number of reasons - but at least now I know what they’re talking about. Very interesting.
We’re up to Question 7 now - initially about why no terrorist attacks since 9/11, but having diverged as usual. Bush says:
Well, yeah. And exactly when did the Administration even hint at this risk when we were considering going to war? Seems somebody overlooked something somewhere. (But I guess it wasn’t a ‘mistake’. :rolleyes: ) It wasn’t like civil war in postwar Iraq was a particularly farfetched possibility, given the Sunni-Shi’ite-Kurd divisions, and any internal conflict would let the terrorists in.
Question 8 was about importing drugs from Canada. Bush speaks:
Near the prescription counter in my drugstore, there’s a whole wall of bottles of pills that claim to be able to restore virility, sharpen your thinking, and all sorts of stuff. “Dietary supplements,” the legal snake oil of the turn of the millenium. Few of them do what they claim to do, and some are genuinely dangerous when taken in quantity. But because they were once folk remedies (in much weaker concentrations), Congress blocked the FDA from regulating them. (Thanks, Newt.)
You want to make sure that it cures us and doesn’t kill us, that government is doing everything it can to protect us, Mr. President, this is the place to start.
Question 10, about Federal spending, was the one where Bush told his whopper about having reduced the annual increase in non-defense discretionary spending from 15% down to 1%. That’s a baldfaced lie, but it’s been covered by others on this page; just scroll up.
He also mentions his ‘detailed budget’ to cut the deficit in half in five years. The details are: no new tax cuts, no extensions of any tax cuts already passed (which Bush wants to make permanent), no spending involving Iraq or Afghanistan, no fix of the Alternative Minimum Tax…IOW, his plan to cut the deficit in half is in total conflict with his actual plans.
Question 11 was Kerry’s pledge not to raise taxes on families earning under $200K a year. I thought his talking about scaling back plans for some of the programs he wants, due to the growing deficit, was pretty effective. Ditto the pledge to return to pay-as-you-go. (Note that Bush makes no similar pledge, but can only trash Kerry, with the bogus “he voted to break the spending caps over 200 times” bit. Geez, didn’t his dad use the same bogus numbers to try to smear Clinton in 1992? The real number usually turns out to be something like ‘five’. This is such a shopworn ploy, I assume its bogusness has filtered down to even those who don’t think about politics much.)
I thought that Kerry could have ripped Bush a new one on the environment question (#12), but I thought he did passably well in pointing out that Bush’s words and the reality are two different things. His strongest points were with (1) Bush’s air-quality chief resigning in protest, and (2) the absence of any attempt to ‘fix’ Kyoto.
At the time, the Administration had indeed pledged to come up with a more realistic alternative, so fixing it was in fact the Administration’s stated position. They have not lived up to it. Hopefully Kerry will point this out in the final debate.
Well, not to belabor the matter, but you did attempt to correct someone who said that Kerry would provide federal funding for abortions by saying that “he refused to say he’s against it.” I think explicitly saying that you are for something (which Kerry did) is a bit stronger than “failing to say you oppose it,” which is actually a mischaracterization of his statement. There is a difference in the distinction.
Yeah, I know: no one’s reading this thread anymore. I’m just doing this out of sheer cussedness at this point.
And so we finally get to Bush talking about Subchapter S corporations - which has to win the prize for This Year’s Most Obscure and Wonkish Debate Topic. And it’s the Bush/Cheney team that’s brought it into play. Both of them.
And if that isn’t surprising enough, they’ve taken opposite sides from one another. To Cheney the other night, Subchapter S was a sleazy, back-door way to avoid taxes that one fully ought to have paid. But to Bush, Subchapter S meant good, wholesome small businesses who shouldn’t be taxed a dime more - but if Kerry were elected, he surely would. Here’s the quotes.
Cheney, to Edwards:
Bush, Friday night:
I guess the answer is, Subchapter S is a wonderful tax status for small businesses, unless they’re owned by John Edwards, in which case it’s a slimey loophole.
That was in the discussion of Question 13, which was also when we found out Bush didn’t know what he reported on his tax returns. (“Need some wood?”)
Question 14 was about the Patriot Act, which Bush loves. Kerry pointed out that it was hardly flipflopping to decide it needs fixing, when you meet a man who was imprisoned under the Act for 8 months without even being able to see a lawyer.
Question 15 was about stem-cell research, and Kerry raised a basic point that Bush has no answer for: what do you do with all those frozen embryos that are the leftovers from fertility treatments? You can say you shouldn’t kill them, but if so, exactly what are you going to do with them instead?
Let’s face it, the pro-life movement may be ready to protest outside abortion clinics until we all die of old age, but they won’t be so popular - and they know it - if they start picketing fertility clinics.
Question 16 was about the Supreme Court. Dred Scott is winger shorthand for abortion. Bush was reminding his base (under the noses of the rest of us) that the payoff is finally coming, so they’d better vote for him. So he wins that point.
Question 17 was about abortion. I thought Kerry did pretty well with his “it’s not that simple” - by giving for-instances of exactly why it wasn’t that simple. After that, Bush’s ‘it seems pretty simple to me’ seemed lame and impotent.
And finally, in response to Question 18, Bush still hasn’t made any mistakes. He and Jesus really are close!
I’m not sure which thread you’re reading, but that’s not what happened at all.
Actually, spooje didn’t believe that Kerry did say it. So I pointed out to spooje that while Kerry didn’t explicitly say “I will federally fund abortions”, he did imply that that would be the case. So you have it exactly backwards. I was arging that yes, Kerry did favor federal funding for abortions.
And no, despite your claim, Kerry did not explictly say he would federally fund abortions. He did strongly imply it, and my point was that in effect, it’s the same as explicitly stating it. So we are in fact making the same point; you just fail to realize it. Here’s the quote from the debate, provided in an earlier post:
As you can see, there is no explicit statement that he will federally fund abortion, but there is a very strong implication. Which is why I said it’s a distinction without a difference.