My problem right now is that I feel you aren’t taking my posts seriously.
:rolleyes:
In order to serve you better, we need to know how big a deal something needs to be before it is a “prob” - it is your thread, you should define that, since you don’t consider things like global hatred of America to be a problem.
I’m afraid that reply did nothing to convince me of your sincerity.
shrugs Whatever.
Lets see.
Abortion would be made illegal.
Mass protests, but does Bush care? No.
Social Security will be looted entirely to pay for the military we NEED for all those countries which “sponsor” terror.
Or…
The rapture actually happens; Bush is taken; America realizes there IS a God and He did them a HUGE favor and peace reigns forever.
Isn’t realizing that Bush was a good president a little like “realizing” that the sky is green?
how are you getting That from my post? 
The rather obvious possible drawback of four more years of Bush is four more years of not winning the war on terrorism.
Maybe I’m the only one who’s noticed, but Bush has failed to capture Osama bin Laden and has failed to win the war in Afghanistan (not that the media likes to talk about it, but that war’s not going all that well, ya know) - both in part because he started a second war before winning the war on terrorism. The single most important issue of his administration has thus far been a quite obvious failure. The world’s most dangerous terrorist is at large, a country that was a terrorist breeding ground is still a lawless terrorist breeding ground - what’s been accomplished? Nada.
vanilla,
No lesser court can overturn Roe v Wade for the nation; only the Supremes. The President can not appoint judges to life terms or loot Social Security unilaterally. He needs the consent of 60 Senators to appoint an anti-Roe Supreme Court Justice and the same plus a majority of the House to eliminate Social Security. These things are not likely to happen.
I don’t disagree with you. In fact, I am firmly in the “Bush has made terrorism more of a threat” camp. But as I argue in the OP that damage is already done. Four more years of groping towards eptness isn’t as good as having effective leadership but it’s not invading Iraq all over again. Bush has radicalized the Muslim world. We have to deal with that problem no matter what. I wouldn’t say that putting off taking responsibility for another four years is a good thing but it’s not the end of the world either.
Zagadka, I think “no prob” means “no probability”.
“More tax cuts for the rich? No prob.” -> I think 2sense means “More tax cuts for the rich? Ain’t gonna happen.”
I hope this is right and that you can come back to the discussion…
(Emphasis added.)
Depending on who you believe, Iran has the second or third largest petroleum reserves in the world.
About Iraq, I’ve always been of the opinion, “Get the occupation out”.
Want to halve the insurgent attacks on occupation troops? Simple. Just draw down the 160,000 occupation troops to 80,000.
Now, finally, this insight seems to be slowly starting to spread, at last.
So turning to the OP, and remembering how much the Bush administration has had to backtrack already on Iraq so far, I think a second Bush term would see a good chance of getting the troops out sooner rather than later.
As the rest of the quoted article notes, this would be a relatively good outcome of a Bush 2 administration.
I also agree with 2sense generally, that Bush has generated so much opposition, that there is relatively little new harm left that he could realistically expect to inflict.
Sorry for saying this, seeing as this thread is not interested in comparing a Kerry term, but I’ll add that a second Bush term might well be less bad overall than a Kerry term. The real cause of all evil in America is the monopoly on political power and government held by the two corrupt political parties.
Ah, a typical blithe, sarcastic, overly simplistic response from pervert. No thread would be complete without one.
Read the papers much, there - pervert? Happen to catch the conclusions of a little gang called the 9/11 Commission? Saddam and Osama weren’t cooking up anything. Trying to say they had some “other” kinds of links is just grasping at straws. What, did they happen to use the same brand of toilet paper or something?
You mean not cooperating with “We will attack you no matter what”? Bush’s “American lead effort to end terrorism” was to attack Iraq. There was never any doubt in his mind, never any question. It was something he was dead set on doing since his first day in office. “Standing up to terrorism” means attacking a country that has less to do with terrorism than any of the other countries around it? And I guess “cooperating” means pretending to be best buds with Bush and funding al Qaeda behind his back, like the Saudi royal family. That’s a pretty piss-poor “effort to end terrorism”.
So it’s not about terrorism at all, is it? It’s about “cooperating” with the U.S. All this talk about “fighting terrorism” has nothing to do with it. We aren’t any closer to busting up al Qaeda after all the U.S. soldiers who have died in Iraq. If anything, the situation is worse.
Oh, I see. So we go back in time 12 years for Iraq, but that criteria only applies to Iraq. Don’t forget to mention he tried to kill Bush’s daddy, too.
2 sense… some of your “no prob” I might agree… shockingly so.
Still before Bush I really thought any Brazilian president wouldn’t be so different… or any US president wouldn’t be so different from others. Maybe a bit more competent or a bit more militant. The idea that overall constitution and congress would rein in excesses… How mistaken we were !
I think Bush can still do damage… and a lot of it. From religious initiatives to new military adventures. If he does win he will have very little leeway though as compared to his first term. Osama Bin Laden will be forthcoming though to help his main propaganda booster… and expect to see more from the “war” president then.
Iraqis also will not stop insurgents from acting while Bush is in office... once he is out its harder for insurgents to justify themselves ?
Hopefully Kerry will use the goodwill of the world once he takes over to heal US relations and help Iraq get on its feet.I’d like to think that the Iraqi resistance would ease up once Bush was out of office, but I suspect that may be naive. If my country was occupied by enemy troops, and I had a basement full of bombs, I’d be roadside bombing the hell out of my occupiers, whether their president was Bush, Reagan, Lincoln, or Bozo the Clown.
Saddam may have hated Bush I, but I really don’t think most Iraqis take it that far. I think we’ve pretty much taught them to hate Americans in general, for the most part. Perhaps the more intelligent folks there would agree that the Bush Administration is to blame, but the average guy – in Iraq as in America – is only so bright.
I like what this guy has to say in The Village Voice with his plan to winnow out the voters. All my wishes in one place.
Oh no, I did mean “no problem”. Still, your take is actually a more accurate reflection of my meaning. The problem I refer to is not for the world but for my thesis that Bush is unlikely to do as much damage in a 2nd term as in his first. I do think additional major tax cuts would be a big problem but as you say it is unlikely to occur and thus that possibility doesn’t cause problems for the argument I put forth in the OP.
What I was objecting to was Zagadka’s simplistic misrepresentation of my position. What I wanted was for him to make a substansive effort to reply to my arguments. In the process it would have become clear to him that his assertions that I favored theocracy and terrorism are absurd.
Of course, they are absurd on their face and yet he posted them anyways. This leads me to believe he is interested in something other than open and honest debate. You say you hope he will return to the discussion. I am all for that so long as he conducts himself in a responsible manner. Sniping isn’t debate.
Ouch! Thanks for the correction. This complicates matters. The oil reserves aren’t at risk in an attack but the production of 3.9 million barrels per day certainly is. America might still stomp Iran; they would just have to be a lot more careful about collateral damage. And the world would have to suck it up as uncertainty over oil drove the price way up.
I don’t know how things work down there but here the constitution and national legislature do reign in the president. Unfortunately for the rest of the world that restraint is geared toward domestic abuses and not international affairs. Americans are very selfcentered. Few of us think globally. That includes me. I spend more time thinking about American problems and even tend to approach global problems from an exclusively American perspective. If the chaos were here in the USA people would be calling for Bush to be strung up by his testicles but brown people dying halfway around the world is another story. Every issue of the USAToday faithfully totals the American servicemen who have died in Afganistan and Iraq to date. Only the Americans. They don’t keep track of coalition casualties every day and I have never seen them estimate the Iraqi body count.
This is turning out to be a time bomb in the federal service. However, because there is so much widespread animosity towards government workers, the public doesn’t care. By the time they might care, considerable and long-term damage will occur.
Source: http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/07/10/park.police.chief/index.html
This story is only the tip of the iceberg. It is going to get much worse.
Four more years of concentrating on easy wars while ignoring the war on terrorism is certainly worse than the alternative - winning the war on terrorism. Saying it can’t get any worse doesn’t change the fact that the status quo is quite a bit worse than stopping al-Qaida.
And anyway, I can’t agree that it won’t get worse. Bin Laden and his cronies could be deriving enormous benefit from what’s going on; I’m not sure the situation could possibly be better. The USA is almost TRYING to hand bin Laden this war on a platter; they’ve started a pointless second war that has the dual effects of recruiting more terrorists to the al-Qaida cause while doing little to hurt al-Qaida and spreading the U.S. armed forces too thin. Consequently they’re losing the war in Afghanistan, the one war that actually DID matter in the war against terrorism. And by fighting the war illegally, both in terms of starting the war and in terms of the way they’re fighting it (torturing and murdering people in dungeons is not a way to impress people with a moral cause) the USA is alienating its allies and drudging up even more new al-Qaida recruits. If this continues, al-Qaida or their various lookalikes absolutely will be better off in four years. And that’s bad.
No kidding. Some of the ideologies of former presidents have been fairly good, but get them into office and watch out!
I don’t have anything productive to add to the thread, and I’m not going to bother to address the unbelievable claims some have made. I am just amazed at how two people coming from as different a pair of poltical starting points as possible can see things as similarly as we do - both from this thread and the Nader one.