You are thinking with your heart instead of your head. Bush wins with about 300 Electoral Votes.
Well put, Sam. This is also the reason that the Democratic primary voters keep electing nominees that get killed in the general election.
(Yes, democrats, Clinton won twice. He did so because he became a moderate after the elections of 1994. Gore was in the same mold and would be in the White House today but for Ralph Nadar).
I predict that Kerry will follow Humphrey, McGovern, Dukakis and Mondale down the path to defeat.
Try Ruy Teixeira or Chris Bowers.
Kerry’s speech on Iraq. This is more like it, I hope he keeps it up.
Don’t forget that Clinton never got a majority of the vote. Both times, especially the first, he won because the Republican vote was split.
No, he won 50.1% of the vote in re-election. Even if every Perot supporter in 1996 had voted for Dole, Dole still would have lost.
Still- an incumbent president during peace and with a strong economy winning re-election with just a hair above majority isn’t exactly resounding.
Bill Clinton won 49.234% of the vote in 1996. 47,400,125 votes out of 96,275,401.
Had all of Perot’s voters voted for Dole, he would have taken 47,284,157. The difference is the 1,591,119 that went to Nader, Browne and the really minor candidates.
I’ve just re-read it and it’s a goodspeech. And some pretty poor snideswipes at Bush
For a start, Arnie’s comment about the Soviet sector now becomes clear.
Kerry’s wrong: Bush did not lie to America. Saddam deceived the US - and almost everyone else - into thinking he had WMD, and the US acted on that. Hoist by his own petard. That said, Saddam might have had WMD and they might now be in Syria or Sudan if recent reports are to be believed. We believed Saddam had WMD - he himself may have believed it - but we haven’t found any, yet we have still removed a vicious dictator from power and are trying to replace him with a democratic government.
Kerry clearly doesn’t understand the difference between being liked and being respected.
Aside from those, it’s a good speech.
But Bush did lie … many, many times. He made false claims about attempts to obtain uranium in Nigeria which he KNEW to be false, because he’d sent Valerie Plame’s husband to Nigeria to check out the rumors about Saddam’s to obtain uranium yellowcake there and was told there was no, no, no truth to the rumors. Plame was subsequently outed as a CIA agent because Admin. officials were pissed off at him because he tried to correct Bush’s lies on this point.
Bush did lie … does lie … is a liar.
In other news, Kerry is FINALLY kicking Bush hard on the Iraq issue. Good for him!
Yeah…Saddam deceived everybody by saying that he didn’t have any WMD when he really didn’t have any WMD. Admittedly, he had lied often enough that people didn’t believe him this time (which is the same reason we shouldn’t have believed Bush back when he was making the case for war, as some of us pointed out at the time).
As for the idea that Saddam’s weapons may have ended up in Syria or Sudan, this is all idle speculation…plus you’d think someone credible within the former Iraqi government (or scientific community) would have said this by now if this was the case. After all, most of these folks are in our custody and presumably being interrogated. And, of course, if the weapons did manage to sneak out of the country, then one has to ask the question of whether we are safer now that the weapons are God-knows-where rather than in the hands of a dictatorial control-freak who the CIA thought was unlikely to give them to terrorists (thus giving up control and entrusting his future to folks he probably thinks are nearly as crazy as we think they are) or to use them in anything short of his imminent demise. (And, it also makes the point that if Saddam wasn’t willing to use the WMD against troops coming in to take him out, exactly when would he have used them?) See, you can’t just wave over all the internal contradictions in the War in Iraq policy with a bit of idle speculation!!!
But, as Evil Captor notes, there are plenty of things that Bush lied and deceived about in regards to Iraq…connections to al Qaeda, etc. There are also plenty of things he has lied and deceived about completely unrelated to Iraq, which is why those of us who were arguing before the war that neither Saddam nor Bush could be trusted were arguing that…although I for one kind of expected that the truth would end up falling somewhere in between and am still a little bit bitter about the fact that I would have been much closer to the truth if I had believed a ruthless dictator than if I had believed our president.
It is also worth noting that, although there may have been somewhat of a consensus that Saddam likely had WMDs:
(1) This belief was based at least in part in believing that the U.S. Administration would not be making this claim so assuredly if they did not have good evidence to believe it. (This is what Hans Blix, for example, notes entered into his thinking.)
(2) There were people who were outside of this consensus, like Scott Ritter.
(3) Even many of those who believed that he likely had WMDs weren’t willing to bet the farm on it. That is why they wanted to give the inspections more time. And, as the inspections went on, the possibility that Saddam did not have WMDs became more and more likely. As Hans Blix has noted, he himself was becoming more and more doubtful as he found that U.S. intelligence didn’t seem to be panning out. Of course, among the “true believers,” who were driven more by ideology than fact or logic, this was simply evidence of how diabolically clever Saddam was in hiding these things.
To the contrary…
Talking to some of my Democrat friends, Dubya is gonna get quite a few votes from Viet Nam vets that didn’t appreciate getting called war criminals by Kerry.