Just amazing. In the Nader thread, you browbeat us for not going into detail about what’s wrong with Bush, and feigned ignorance to the fact that it’s already been discussed ad nauseum, even though there are a plethora of threads on the subject. But then in this thread, when people do go into detail about Bush, you say you won’t bother to address it.
Obviously a ploy on your part in the Nader thread - you never really wanted to discuss it at all.
blowero,
You know, debate can be so much more than you are making of it. It doesn’t have to be an eternal and empty game of oneupsmanship. Sure it’s competetive but the competition can drive us to seek new insights, spur us to new understandings, even to help us grow as people. When I see yet another of your “Gotcha!” posts I don’t think, “Score one for blowero!” I just feel bad for you. I feel like you are missing out.
Instead of firing off a kneejerk reaction maybe you can take a step back and think about what you are doing. Maybe think about your goals. Maybe deal with some insecurities. Maybe grow a little. Or maybe I’m clueless and should keep my amateur psychology to myself. Who knows? In any case I hope you don’t take this as an attack on you because I don’t intend it that way.
RickJay,
You paint a disturbing picture. Particularly disturbing for me because I can’t disagree. I’m less sure now about the proposition I offered in the OP. Perhaps the idea of things getting a lot worse during a 2nd Bush Administration isn’t so far fetched.
I am utterly terrified by the prospect of Four More Years. Yes, it could get worse, it could get a whole lot worse. George W. Bush is . . . not like us. (Not like most of us, anyway.) I think the creep really, truly believes he’s on a mission from God or some shit. And if he gets a second term he will take that as carte blanche to lead us into as many more wars as he likes: Cuba, Syria, Iran . . . maybe even :eek: China! And in the past two years I hope we have learned that winning a war can be almost as dangerous as losing one . . .
Which should I address? The claims that 2sense has already dealt with fairly effectively? Or the crackpot “Bush will start a war with Iran the minute he’s elected” (sarcasm, for those who are unfamiliar) type?
I never feigned ignorance - I asserted that in these threads (and this one is no different) those that attack Bush do so without taking into account that what he does is done with the approval of congressional Democrats. If these actions are so intolerable, then there is more than one man to blame, and you are trying to elect one of those who deserve as much blame as any other.
I chose not to address the topics in this thread out of respect for the conditions layed out in the OP. I felt that I could not argue effectively with those restrictions on my avenues of approach.
Facts are such ugly things!
A lot of his actions have not been done by the approval of congressional Democrats. For example, most of his rollbacks on the environment haven’t had much Democratic support. His most nutso nominations to the courts haven’t had much Democratic support. (Although unlike the Republicans under Clinton, the Dems have only blocked the craziest ones rather than allowing the most extreme members of their party to basically block nominations single-handedly.) His irresponsible tax cuts didn’t have much Democratic support. The original vote on Iraq was, as I recall, a fairly close split within the congressional Democrats and that was a vote to give the President maximum leverage in dealing with Iraq (getting inspectors in, etc.)…Stupid, yes, of the Democrats to put their trust in Bush. But, a far cry from actually going ahead and initiating the invasion.
You are too generous, friend Jshore. The Democrats were, by and large, craven and spineless in the face of popular emotion. The American people were being misled, and to stand athwart that misleading would have probably meant a resounding defeat in the midterm elections. The late lamented Sen Wellstone was one of the few to stand up on hind legs and bark back.
But if they win, they will continue to press their campaign to transform a temporary political advantage into permanent institutions. They still want to play poker, but they will get seven cards, we get five, and all ours are face up.
- Print this thread out.
- Put it away somewhere for four years.
- Take it out.
- Have some good laughs.
- Repeat every four years.
No, you just favor state-run churches and anti-American attitudes.
Tomato, tomato.
Hm, that doesn’t work very well in print.
First of all, do we really need two threads about basically the same topic?
Secondly, I don’t see any sort of useful purpose to a thread like this, other than doing one of the following: allowing the already converted to vent stuff they’re already venting in other threads, scaring the bejeezus out of the same, causing opponents to shake heads and groan, or causing such misery and despair if the “worst” happens that nothing will get done (except maybe fleeing). I mean, the sort of “debate” with a topic slanted this way doesn’t seem to me to be very meaningful. If you really agree with the OP, and you’re really terrified enough at the prospect of reelection that you really think what you’re predicting will actually happen, I recommend either casting a magic spell to turn the election the way you want, or moving RIGHT NOW.
Not like who exactly? Take a look around Great Debates. See how many posters here believe things just because it is convenient to do so. Bush is exactly like us because he is us. We are all people and humans are the rationalizing animal. I don’t claim to be free of this type of selfdelusion; it’s easy to fall into. That’s why I come here. Y’all help me with my blindspots. Sometimes more gently than others.
He won’t have carte blanche. He is restrained, as I have said, by the ambition of his subordinates ( who do the actual work ), by the ambition of his party, and by the ambition of his family. Plus the incentives for starting another war are lessened when you are already fighting one. ( One that is troubling enough all by itself. )
Nor have we learned anything about winning in the past 2 years since we haven’t won any wars in that time. The war isn’t over just because you proclaim “Mission Accomplished”. A war is over only when one side gives up. So far neither America nor the Iraqi insurgents have had enough. I’m afraid it’s buckets of blood until somebody blinks.
I agree with the first part of your post but this gives the Dems too much credit. They knew damn well that Bush would be invading Iraq. They voted for the resolution because the midterm elections were looming and they were well aware of the long American tradition going back to the Mexican War of kicking doves out of office in wartime. I’m not sure how many Dems voted against it but I imagine it’s much less than half and most of them from districts that heavily favor their party. Anyone got the cite?
Pish! This is an extremely weak attempt to misrepresent my beliefs.
Whoops, I forgot to reply to Leaper. I opened the thread to explore my idea. And it helped me, thank you very much. I’m sorry it didn’t do the same for you. I guess it’s not for everyone.
Well, I’m glad you found it helpful. It’s just that I believe that it’s very hard to get useful stuff out of a thread that pretty much asks people “how evil and stupid do you think Bush is?” - it tends to mainly produce either venom, abject terror, or contempt. Just complaint after complaint (either towards Bush or against those complaining about Bush), if you get my meaning.
But again, I’m glad you managed to get something useful out of it. Since it’s your thread, I think that made it generally worthwhile.
I won’t disagree with your and elucidator’s analysis of how the Democrats caved. It would be nice to have an actual opposition party in Congress! I will only note however that being pressed by political expediency to going along with doing wrong things doesn’t suggest one would actually initiate these wrong things.
As for the vote, here is a CNN article and here is the House roll call. To summarize, amongst Democrats the vote in the Senate was 29-21 in favor while in the House it was 81-126 (i.e., more Dems in the House voting against than for it). So, in fact, Democratic opposition was much stronger than you believed.
More specifically, in the Senate, the total vote was 77-23 with 29 Democrats voting for it and 21 against. The other two in opposition were Jeffords (independent, but voting mainly with the Dems on most issues) and the lone intelligent Republican, Lincoln Chafee. In the House, the vote was 296-133 with 81 Democrats supporting it and 126 Dems and 6 Republicans (and 1 Independent) voting against it.
Sorry, 2sense, about the hijack. Some day I will learn not to jump into these threads that are sure to be partisan pile-ons.
Aren’t they though. How many Democrats in the Senate? How many to effect a filibuster? Hell, they don’t even have to do anything anymore to filibuster something - no reading the Washington DC Phonebook, no urinating into a bucket while someone shields it from view with a suit jacket, nothing.
If his actions are so bad why didn’t they stop them? In the Senate, especially one so closely divided, it owuld be failr easy for Dems to block anything they feel is dangerous. But they don’t.
Agreement and approval are not necessarily the same thing. Allowing an action to be taken is, at the least, a tacit approval of it.
That’s the point, that they have the power to block them. I would argue that several of those who were blocked were far from crazy (rather they were blocked because they failed to meet Dems ideological standards on one or more issues), but for this discussion that is irrelevant. If they could block these nominees, why didn’t they block the other “bad” ones?
[quote\His irresponsible tax cuts didn’t have much Democratic support.[/quote]
He had enough Democrats supporting them, though, that they became law. I did not claim that all Democrats marched lockstep with Bush, just that he couldn’t have done any of the “bad things” without their (at least tacit*) approval. Again, quibbling over adjectives like irresponsible is pointless, but I’m sure you know others would argue that point.
And the Dem presidential nominee voted for it.
Please, you don’t authorize military force unless you are willing to have it used. No one in their right minds would think that Saddam would blink just because Congress said the President could use force. We’ve been bombing Iraq off-and-on since the end of the Gulf War. We’ve been flying over their country with armed warplanes almost continously. The threat of force had always been there, and it had done nothing. Everyone who was paying attention knew that, and knew that if authorized, force was more than likely going to be used.
*I don’t believe I included that qualifier here, but it was included in my comments in the Nader thread (about which blowero made his comments).
akennett, you get more respect around here when you just admit you are wrong rather than continuing to throw out B.S. Your original statement was made in the context of what it would be like under 4 more years of Bush as opposed to an alternative, to which you said:
Showing that there were some issues where the Democrats could not, or chose not to maintain a filibuster (which requires 40 votes out of the Democrats numbers of 49-50) is far from showing that having a Democratic President would have produced the same result, or even that the Democrats as a whole approved in any way, either tacitly or directly. All one needs is for Zell Miller and a few other conservative Democrats to abandon the cause. Apparently, you are of the notion that if a bill gets the support of 10 of the ~50 Democrats, then this constitutes the approval, or at least, tacit approval of the Democrats in general.
Besides which, as I pointed out, there were a fair number of things that the Democrats did block with filibusters, including the energy bill and several court appointments. (And, you seem to be unable to decide whether you think they ought to have blocked more of them or fewer. Or more precisely, you think they blocked ones they shouldn’t have but then are still willing to blast them as giving tacit approval to Bush because they didn’t block more. In other words, you are damning them either way.)
(1) Well, in fact Iraq did blink and allowed very intrusive inspections. These inspections were making quite a bit of progress…In fact, Hans Blix now says that while he was initially inclined to believe the Bush Administration’s claims on WMDs (because they seemed to be so cock-sure), he had by the March become increasingly skeptical because the places that U.S. intelligence was telling him to search were simply not panning out to have what the Americans claimed they would. And, he expressed these doubts to the Adminstration (Rice, in particular, I believe). [This is presumably in Blix’s book, or you can go to NPR’s Fresh Air and find the interview with him in their archives and listen to it, as I did.] Alas, it didn’t do any good because the inspections were not about finding out if Iraq had WMD; they were about providing a pretext after which we could invade.
(2) It is extremely disingenuous to claim that the bill that was passed was the equivalent of the President’s decision to actually go ahead with the invasion when in fact the President tried to claim in getting the bill passed that force would be his last option after he had exhausted the diplomatic alternatives. The real stupidity on the Democratic side was believing a President who by that time they should have know was a compulsive liar. (I’m not sure if they believed him as much as felt forced politically to pretend they believed him.)
Oh yeah, plus, you seem to have ignored the fact that the majority of House Democrats voted against Bush on the Iraq thing.
By way of correction, I think (but am not sure) that one actually needs 41 votes, not the 40 that I stated, to filibuster since 60 votes is apparently sufficient to invoke cloture on the debate.
I’ve read all the posts and there seems to be little to no mention of the economic catastrophes we’ll endure under 4 more Bush years.
The national debt is out of sight, so is the trade deficit.
We are exporting jobs to cheap overseas labor at an alarming and ever increasing rate. (The frightening thing about this, is I doubt Kerry has a clue about how to ameliorate job losses. )
With 4 more years of Bush, won´t these - and other economic issues - reach tragic proportions?
By the way, since you phrased this inevitable use of force as the result of Iraq’s intransigence, answer me the following very simple hypothetical question: What, in your estimation, of the stuff related to WMDs that we have actually discovered in Iraq since our invasion if presented by Saddam to the U.N. and all would have been sufficient to make Bush decide Iraq was complying and not invade?
I’m concerned about the implications increasing the nation debt. At what point will congress or the American people decide that we have to seriously address this problem? Once we decide to address this issue, the president must help set a course of action.
If Bush and company sits in the white house for another four years, they can either ignore this problem, like these past four years, or they can act. Given the option of raising taxes (repealing tax cuts) or cutting spending, Bush may choose the latter. I don’t see the money being cut from military. Bush would most likely push for severe cuts in social programs, such a social security, welfare and public education.
I’m not sure if Bush wants to help our government to implode or give corporations all the power. In either case, I can’t afford another four years of Bush.
Please show me where I said that having a Dem President would have produced the same result. I did point out that Kerry was one of the Dems who did vote for the use of force, but that was a statement of fact, not an assertion of his hypothetical actions as Pres.
Again, please quote where I claimed Dems “as a whole” or “in general” approved.
Which shows that if they feel sufficiently alarmed at the President’s decisions they will take actions against them. I fail to see how this weakens my argument.
Actually, this is totally irrelevant to the discussion at hand. I can question their judgement without damning the process.
So, since there is no apparent culpability with those who vote to authorize military force, should we just get rid of that process entirely? What means should have been used that weren’t? Asking Saddam pretty please can we have unfettered access to the sites we want to see? If Blix’s inspections were so effective we would have had more proof one way or the other as to the disposition of the WMDs in Iraq (I’ll feign shock that he would present his own efforts in the best possible light). The UN refused to act, many of our so-called allies were in bed with Saddam, and much of the world was even against the embargo imposed on Iraq. I fail to see any other diplomatic solution.
I really dislike hypotheticals that have nothing to do with reality. If Saddam had opened up and shown his (hypothetically empty) hand, then there would not have been any support at home for a war on the WMD charge. If he had shown a working WMD program, I don’t think we would be having this debate (rather, this part of it at any rate). What level in between those two would spark a war? I honestly don’t know, and I doubt that you do either. As it was, he refused to play along with the demands placed upon him after his last overt act of agression, so the whole question became moot.