Not quite.
More like “believes what Bush, Bill Clinton, Hilary Clinton, Madeleine Albright, Al Gore, and practically every other politician in captivity says, but only as long as it is politically convenient and not a second longer, and also doesn’t believe (apparently) that Saddam invaded Kuwait”, and that wouldn’t fit on my bumper.
Regards,
Shodan
Convenient that it wouldn’t fit on your bumper (guess you don’t drive an SUV, huh? ;)), given that it doesn’t remotely square with the facts. At least, not with any facts that I’ve heard. Wanna back it up?
Daniel
If you like. You really never heard what the Dems were claiming about Saddam when Clinton was President? They took it as gospel that Saddam was neck-deep in WMD when Clinton was trying not to get impeached. They seem to have changed their tune rather sharply nowadays. Wonder why? 
The part about Kerry not believing that Saddam invaded Kuwait comes from the fact that he voted against the resolution authorizing force to expel him. Then he lied about doing so.
So he believed Bush (and Clinton and Albright and Clinton et al.) about the threat posed by Iraq, so he voted in favor of the resolution using force against Iraq. But he voted against the resolution in favor of using force to kick Saddam out of Kuwait, so he must not have believed the invasion of Kuwait really happened.
Or maybe, as I have mentioned before, Kerry is a complete dolt when it comes to foreign policy.
Regards,
Shodan
Maybe because the evidence indicates that he doesn’t have them? Evidence that could’v been gathered by inspectors, had Bush not insisted on a war instead? Yeah, I’ve heard those quotes before, and they’re just as insignificant here as they’ve been before.
Perhaps I misspoke, then: on your bumpersticker, “Kerry is stupid” would mean, “Kerry believed the same thing everyone else believes, prior to there being evidence to the contrary.”
You’re better than that, Shodan. Please tell me you’re better than that. It’s an outright lie to say that Kerry didn’t believe that Saddam invaded Kuwait, and you know it. All your cite mentions is that he voted against allowing Bush Sr. the authority to go to war over the issue, preferring to let sanctions work instead. This is the sort of bullshit “you’re with us or you’re against us” that Republicans at their worst just love to trot out.
As for the apparently contradictory letters–why, if I excerpted two paragraphs from two different letters written by the staffers of other congresspeople, I betcha I could find contradictions, too. Without seeing those paragraphs in context, it’s impossible to verify that there’s a contradiction there, much less a lie.
On the bright side, this is the sort of lame nonsensical deceptive attack that’s gonna lose your side the election, so I’m hapy to see that it’s the best you got.
Daniel
Sure. Except that you would need to add “…and every Democrat who says that Kerry only believed it because Bush lied is being deliberately disingenous”. Also too long for a bumper sticker.
Am not!
Of course it is. But it is an extension of the logic used to justify Kerry’s vote in favor of the war in Iraq.
You and others are arguing that Kerry only voted in favor of the Iraqi war resolution because he was misled. If he had only known, he would have changed his vote (apparently). In the same way, he must have been misled in voting against the first Gulf War. But, yes, it is political hyperbole to say that he didn’t believe that Saddam invaded Kuwait, and that was certainly not his real motivation for the vote.
His real motivation was that he is a foreign policy dolt. And he believed that twelve years of sanctions without a successful expulsion of Iraq from Kuwait was going to stop Saddam from his goal of a Greater Iraqi Empire. (And to put an end to the WMD programs that Saddam definitely had earlier, and his efforts to develop nukes.)
Which is a notion almost equally stupid as the idea that Saddam didn’t invade Kuwait. And my reason for mocking Kerry’s half-witted waffling.
That would depend on what your definition of the word “is”, is.
Feel free to parse “I have strongly and unequivocally supported President Bush’s response” as “I voted against it” if you like. See how far it gets Kerry in the polls.
I guess we will see about the elections. Considering that Bush has gone from five points behind to three points ahead in the latest CNN polls, I wouldn’t necessarily be as confident as you seem to be. Cite available on request.
And this is by no means the best we have. Let’s see - Kerry is all bent out of shape about intelligence and its failures. Perhaps he was “strongly and unequivocally supporting” better intelligence when he tried tocut funding for intelligence by $1.5 billion two years after the first attack on the WTC.
Or perhaps, as I mentioned, he is a foreign policy dolt, to the point that nobody else in the Senate was dumb enough to co-sponsor the bill. And he is no leader, so the bill went nowhere - fortunately.
Regards,
Shodan
Given that this is even weaker than your prior silly charge, I disagree: the previous remains the best you got. I dance a happy little dance: when Administration prevarications are so transparent, it’s a good day.
As for the rest of your post, I’m not gonna bother with it. Your extension of logic from 2002 to 1991 is frankly incoherent, and without seeing the surrounding letter on those two paragraphs, we can’t possibly know what the context was.
On another note, surely an apologist for Bush isn’t mocking other people for using weasel words. I couldn’t possibly have just seen that, could I have?
Daniel
If I may come out of lurking for a moment and join this two person debate…
I don’t see the contradiction here. The first quote says that he voted to give economic sanctions more time to work and against giving Bush Sr. immediate authority to go to war. The second quote states “From the outset of the invasion, I have strongly and unequivocally supported President Bush’s response to the crisis and the policy goals he has established with our military deployment in the Persian Gulf.”
To me this says that he felt that economic sanctions should have been given more time but once the invasion occurred he supported it. He didn’t object to invading at some point, he just disagreed over the timing. Admittedly the tone and emphasis of the letters were slanted in different directions in response to what I assume were two different letters but that’s standard politics. They were not, however, contradictory.
On this point, I have to side with Shodan.
Or, at least if he is, we haven’t seen much of it lately in his defenses of Bush or attacks on Kerry.
I think you’re splitting hairs. I suppose it’s possible that he changed his mind to fully supporting the invasion once it was taking place. I just 1) find it highly unlikely since I am unaware of anything that changed at the instant the invasion took place, other than political expediency and principle (support our troops while in battle, etc.); and 2) think it’s a difficult line to draw between supporting the invasion in fact, but not supporting it in principle. Especially when one was so recently against it both in fact and in principle.
To clarify, I understand that a line can be drawn between the two, it’s just a very, very narrow line that Kerry is standing on.
Sorry, but this cracked me up. I don’t think I have ever seen you cite to anything, elucidator. Isn’t your criticizing someone else for failing to provide cites somewhat like Bush criticizing someone for deficit spending?
Now will you people listen! Now?? How many more will be struck down in the prime of thier cupidity by Cognitive Dissonance, the number one threat to the Republic! How many more Shodans? How many before we take action!
When your CD volunteer comes calling, think of AQA and give, and give generously… Give, that others might think!
I think he meant the invasion of Kuwait. I can’t believe that even Kerry would have characterized the US driving Saddam out of Kuwait as an “invasion”.
Bush Sr.'s response to the invasion of Kuwait was US military build up in the region. His goal was to drive Saddam out of Kuwait. Kerry voted against using the miitary build up to achieve the goal. I doubt that it is plausible to pretend that Kerry was stating any version of the truth in saying that he supported what he didn’t.
And, as I mentioned earlier, the idea that sanctions would have worked against Saddam without his defeat in Kuwait is an idea that could only have come from someone with no real grasp of geopolitics.
Regards,
Shodan
Count me as a registered libertarian who has always voted republican, who will vote democrat for the first time this year. Basically for the same reasons everyone else mentioned.
:smack: You’re right of course; I totally misunderstood what I was reading. Too little sleep and too much SDMB I guess. I’ll just crawl back into lurking mode now…
While I’m certainly sympathetic to this consternation, I can’t really see it as being accurate. If all your dollars would do is replace dollars that a candidate already would have out of someone else’s pocket, then why do candidates have different size war chests? Why wouldn’t Kerry wave his magic special interest wand and grant himself 100mil and +2 dexterity to match Bush? Seems more like he needs every single dollar he can get, and when it’s all come in, he still won’t have all he’d want to spend.
So I can’t seriously agree that money given to candidates has no effect on helping their campaign. In fact, I think it generally helps their campaign more than voting for them, depending on which state you live in.
I agree, sort of. It would be nice, and people like Sharpton and Kuchinich do pretty well for themselves doing just this. But remember that debates are not in any sense any sort of civic legal obligation: they are essentially arranged by media interests. And in general, nobodies don’t get much airtime even if they have cool things to say anyway, so I’m not sure what’s changed just because the debate involves political candidates.
I’d argue that at least pulling things in what you see as the better direction is still better than just giving up because you can’t find a common ground.
That’s nice and all, but the reality is that there are two parties, and the issues are clumped together into two wads that contain pulls in all sorts of various directions. I can still ask: on net, would you like to see things go this way or that?
It would be great if there were more levers to pull, but there aren’t, and third party candidates just aren’t relevant solutions unless they have any actual hope of winning elections. And for that they’d need to compromise… which leaves you right back where you didn’t want to be.
As incompetent as I think the Libertarian Party candidates usually are, I think that blaming them entirely for their failure to win is wrongheaded. Especially so since you peg them as holding extremist positions. The LP platform is rather mainstream and reflects an ideal America that I believe most people would find desirable, even inspiring. There is a very real two-party stranglehold on the whole process, from getting on the ballot to getting press exposure to getting in the debates, that insures a monopoly in perpetuity over the American democratic process. Anyone who thinks that the Bush people or the Kerry people are somehow less bizzare than the Libertarians or Greens has bought into the two-party propoganda hook, line, and sinker.
[QUOTE=Road RashIf Richard Nixon was still around, he may be accused of being a liberal in today’s political climate.[/QUOTE]
Nixon WAS a liberal, plain and simple. Had he not self-destructed, he probably could have taken the GOP (and the country) in a much more positive direction.
Gosh, wouldn’t it be nice if you could know for sure what he meant – maybe if, for example, I dunno, the paragraphs weren’t taken out of context?
Daniel
I respectfully disagree that their platform is mainstream:
There are arguments to be made for these proposals, sure, but I’d scarcely call them mainstream proposals.
Daniel