If Bush's flaws are so blindingly obvious... why is he even in the running?

Great Debates
61

there are obviously myriad reasons that people support bush in spite of what i consider to be the horrible and even dangerous performance he’s given so far. a lot of people have probably fleshed these out better than i could, but if you take your single-issue voters, your rabid partisans, your poorly informed majority (sure it occurs on both sides, but the question is why are people divided, not why is everyone pro-bush), and your people who actually agree with bush in good faith, it adds up to a sizable percentage of the american populace.

to me, the biggest reason of all why bush stands a chance in this election is the overwhelming success of the “republican propaganda machine”. it’s been discussed in various other threads, but the republicans are currently running a much better campaign than the democrats. as an example, i’ll discuss where i was incredibly impressed by their ability to woo votes, and where the democrats have been thus far severely lacking: let’s consider the swift vote veterans ads. the ads came out, and any reasonable and informed person knew these people were rabid partisans out for blood, with little or no basis in actual fact. as tends to happen, however, a lot of people did believe what they were saying. if the bush campaign came out and condoned the ads, they would’ve appeared to be mudslingers and negative campaigners, as many people undoubtedly consider the sbvft to be. if, however, the bush campaign condemned the ads, a lot of people who actually believed them might’ve rejected them as lacking credibility, and remained on the fence. what the campaign did was absolutely perfect for them, though. bush called on kerry to reject that sort of ad entirely, yet he did not directly condemn the sbvft ads for their lack of verity or for their smear tactics. at that point, the damage to kerry had been done, and wouldn’t be undone, due to the lack of condemnation from the bush campaign. asking for his kerry to join him in condemning all those sorts of ads serves a two-fold purpose: any time one candidate tries to get the other to agree with him, the american public can view the candidate who doesn’t agree as bitter and partisan, and getting kerry to condemn the ads would’ve allowed bush to remain one up in that field of play. the result was that bush retains a clean image and can’t be painted as a mudslinger, and that the damage done by the ads remains done and gives bush a point or two in the polls. i have yet to see anything even close to this innovative competition from the democrat side, and i think it hurts them a lot.

at the end of the day, even kerry supporters think he’s a “flip-flopper”, without knowing the facts behind those claims, and it’s all because of a really strong republican campaign. if the majority of americans regularly checked up on things like factcheck.org and kept abreast of the news and the truth behind various claims made by both sides, i think there would be a lot fewer bush supporters. again, i agree that there is a significant portion of the american people on both sides who are badly misinformed, but this election is pretty evenly split, and i have to believe that if people knew the truth behind the various soundbytes and talking points that they hear, a lot more of those who might be on the fence or slightly in favor of bush would be in favor of kerry.

i personally wish i knew of a way to ensure that the american people who voted were informed of the facts and cared enough and were skeptical enough to verify the claims made by each side. i think we’d see a lot cleaner campaigns run by everyone, a lot fewer deliberate attempts to misinform people, and we’d all be stronger for it. i can’t, however, come up with a solution to the “sheeple” problem.

62

Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it was balanced by the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, who believe that The Corporate Tax Code is Responsible for Shipping Jobs Overseas or that the Economy [is] Producing Mostly Bad Jobs.

Errors abound on both sides of the aisle. If you can’t admit that, then there really is nothing you have to add this debate.

63

And be true to your logic: “The ends always justify the means.”

To stretch your analogy:

  1. The fire, although terrible, had been contained and smouldering for over a decade.
  2. The fire department was in another country thousands of miles away and acted against the world’s international governing body to step in and “fight the fire.”
  3. The fire department moved in on unsubstantiated allegations of arsonists that could possibly strike back against us.
  4. The fire department fabricated claims of arson to justify going in to fight the fire.
  5. The fire department circumvented not only international law but began re-writing the laws of our own country to give itself more power to “fight arsonists.”
  6. While fighting the blaze, thousands of people, both the residents and the firefighters themselves, have died.
  7. The central blaze is lessened but is by no means completely contained, and additional blazes have sprung up in surrounding areas.
  8. The fire department manipulated and continues to manipulate fear of arsonists in its own country in order to achieve its own political goals.

That’s the whole problem with global politics; you have to actually take a step back and look at the big picture every once in a while, instead of clinging to minor “victories.”

64

That Republicans are more easily misinformed?

65

And yet, many if not most of these same folks would say that Social Security should remain a government program and that programs like Medicare should remain to ensure that the elderly had access to affordable health care; at any rate, opinion polls continually bear that out. Many people really don’t understand the implications of what they say they want; they don’t get that you can’t have a social safety net without taxation.

66

What are you talking about?

This administration’s policy in the Middle East is that the proper use of the US military is to secure Israel and the supply of oil. Everyone knows it.

Why the hell didn’t Bush just come out with it in days after inauguration and go for it in Iraq.

Was it ‘quick and forceful’ to wait until after the happy opportuity afforded by September of his first year. Waiting a full year and then some, until taking action against Iraq?

Hardly seems quick to me. Although I suppose one can argue as to the reach of ‘forceful’?

Not that I believe Kerry would be dictated to by Likudniks in the manner Bush has been. So on reflection I suppose an ‘unlikely’ attack does trump an ‘eventual’ one. It is still clumsy to phrase is as ‘quick and forceul’ though.

67

…an ** ‘eventual’** attack does trump an ** unlikely** one. …

68

Doper Democrats would do well to note this (as would those proposing any argument). The vituperation aimed at non-Democrats puts the Democrats at an immediate disadvantage. Just look at Airman Doors’ recent thread in the Pit. I wonder how many lurkers have left because of this?

69

Here’s a perfect example of how good the Republican political machine has been:

This thread shows a man who agrees with Kerry and disagrees with Bush on almost every point, and yet he will be voting Republican, mostly because of the garbage the so-called SBVFT having been spewing.

70

It works for Koko

71

Ah, dear Koko. Gorilla my dreams!

72

A few words about debate:

Sometimes it’s possible to put more than one interpretation on a debate adversary’s words. There are lots of ways to resolve the ambiguity.

One is to simply ask the other person which way they meant their words.

Another is to list the obvious interpretations, and deal with each of them in turn.

A third is to note the different interpretations, point out the strongest one, and address that one.

Fourth and finally, one can choose the weakest one, shred that, and pretend one has actually done something.

I consider that last to be the functional equivalent of a strawman, if the stronger interpretations are fairly obvious. Which in this case, they were.
Here’s what Stoid said:

To take the content out of it, let’s reformulate:

By Standard A, it doesn’t make sense to deal with X unless you’re also going to deal with Y.

Two obvious ways to interpret this:

  1. By Standard A, X and Y are both problems, so we shouldn’t deal with X unless and until we’re ready to deal with all the Y’s that are problems per Standard A.

  2. By Standard A, X and Y are both problems, but by that standard, Y is a much bigger problem than X. So if A is our standard, it makes no sense to address X but not Y.

#1 is such a pathetic, airheaded argument that it barely qualifies as thought, let alone argument. #2 uses that everyday human tool, comparison and prioritization. Nothing brilliant about it; it’s a standard argument from the standard toolkit.

You could have asked, you could have dealt with both, you could have dealt with #2 alone, or you could do as you did - pretend that Stoid must’ve meant #1, and have fun destroying that strawman.

Welcome back.

73

To continue the tutorial, observe the word ‘if’.

(From a standpoint of fact, it’s impossible to determine what this Administration’s actual foreign policy goals were, in going into Iraq. Paul Wolfowitz, the #2 man in the Defense Department, has stated that the principals had a variety of reasons for going into Iraq; the threat of Saddam’s WMDs falling into the hands of terorists and being used against us was put forth publicly as the justification, because that was the one they could all agree on. But apparently different principals had different agendas. )

There were a number of possible justifications for the war in Iraq. Refer to my previous post. To set down a number of the obvious possible justifications and deal with them in turn is not setting up a strawman, unless I’ve overlooked the stronger justifications in favor of the weaker ones. You are welcome to show how I’ve done that.

But I’ve included the one you mentioned, because it was where we started our discussion. It’s also worth mentioning that in the absence of WMDs, the lack of any operational cooperation between Saddam and al-Qaeda, the overwhelming evidence that the Iraq war has made the War on Terror much more difficult for us to attempt to prosecute, and the hopelessness of the goal of using Iraq as the platform for reforming the Middle East in a positive way, the humanitarian argument is seemingly the ‘last man standing’ in terms of arguing the question, “in retrospect, is the war in Iraq justified?”

74

Now, this is a strawman, by any standard whatsoever.

I never made that ‘point’; you’re putting words in my mouth. My ‘point’ was about the use of comparison and prioritization as part of the standard mental toolkit, and that your choosing an interpretation of Stoid’s words that couldn’t even be called an argument was the essential equivalent of setting up and knocking over a strawman.

I have not claimed, anywhere, anytime, that the Bush Administration has put forth humanitarian reasons as “the whole reason for going to war.”

I will ask that you stop putting words in people’s mouths. Including mine.

75

RT:

Asking Stoid is fruitless for me. She does not acknowledge my existence. What you say about your interpretation may be right. However, when she says “I have three words,” I take that as a dismissal of the possibility of multiple causes, speaking the queen’s English as I do, and lacking a telepathic bond.

I’ll continue the primer on debate. Debating by proxy is absurd. Presumably Stoid can defend her own assertions without an interpreter. Or not.

76

That eliminates one of the three respectable options.

Lacking a telepathic bond as well, I can still read her preceding words, which say:

which indicates that her remarks are in response to one specific justification, and do not attempt to rebut (or dismiss the existence of) other justifications given for the war.

Well, sure. But I wasn’t debating the issue of whether our presence in Iraq was justified. That didn’t seem to be the point of Bricker’s OP, although it was clear from the beginning that people would eventually wind up re-debating that in this thread - as they have. So I’m hardly debating by proxy; I’ve just been pointing out your use of strawmen.

Now that I’ve added my clarifications, I’ll leave her to do that.

77

No…That is why I didn’t support the invasion. And, I knew that it would reduce the U.S.'s standing in the world. And, yet I never dreamed that the U.S. would be implicated in the abuse and torture of prisoners, that Americans would still be dying at the rate of a few a day 1 and 1/2 years later, and that there wouldn’t even be a little bit of WMDs found…at least enough to provide a flimsy pretext.

I also never dreamed that, as has been reported, we would do such a bad job of securing potential WMD sites that we are in fact lucky that he didn’t have them since if he did our invasion would have almost definitely increased the probability of the weapons ending up in terrorist’s hands. In fact, this last point is completely incomprehensible to me…Without it, I am willing to believe that the deception that the Administration perpetrated was largely self-deception and a willingness to lie (or really, really, really deceive themselves) about how good their evidence was and how sure they were about WMDs. But, I am willing to believe that they really thought they were going to find stockpiles of WMDs. And, yet, to this day I can’t reconcile that with the idea that they didn’t make it Priority #1 to get those damned sites secured pronto. (And, I am also disappointed that this angle has not been followed up significantly by the “liberal media”.) As SimonX says, “Mendacity or incompetence (mind-boggling incompetence, I might add)…We report, you decide.”

I’m not sure why you are so surprised on the military part. Maybe it went a little faster than I’d have expected in the urban centers like Bagdad. But, hell, we could have marched into Baghdad in Gulf War I and that was when Saddam had a much more formidable military capacity. Basically, the fact that we were able to defeat his military so easily gave the lie to our claims that he posed any real threat to us…at least in any military sense. (The idea that he could pose a non-military threat by giving WMDs to terrorists relied on his having WMDs and on his being willing to give them to terrorists, the latter of which the CIA analysts considered to be extremely unlikely for obvious reasons.)

78

I’m a former Bush supporter, who now hates him because of Iraq. This is how I see things:

[ul][li]Bush is a strong leader. In contrast, Kerry seems to be weak and indecisive.[/li][li]The two big issues in this election, national security and the economy, are issues that traditionally favor Republicans. Democrats have a history of cutting the military and raising taxes, neither of which is something that we need to be doing now.[/li][li]Bush has a homespun “Good Ol’ Boy” attitude about him. Kerry, OTOH, has all the charm and charisma of a mafia pall bearer. He really is a scary-looking dude.[/li][li]There is a huge pool of disenchanted conservatives, such as myself, but Kerry has done little or nothing to reach out to us. If he isn’t willing to go after my vote, why should I give it to him?[/li][li]Kerry is a liberal, from a state that has a reputation for being quite a bit more “progressive” than the nation as a whole. This doesn’t score him any points with people such as myself.[/li][/ul]

It’s really not that suprising that Bush is still in the lead. Kerry hasn’t done much to establish himself as a credible alternative.

God, what I wouldn’t give to have some better candidates to choose from.

79

[QUOTE=Diceman]

[list][li]Bush is a strong leader. In contrast, Kerry seems to be weak and indecisive.[/li][/QUOTE]

I don’t see the advantages of a strong leader if he leads in the wrong direction. And, I wonder what makes you think that Kerry is weak and indecisive. By all accounts of people actually serving under him (and his superiors accounts at the time), he wasn’t weak and indecisive when he led his Swift Boat in Vietnam, and he wasn’t weak and indecisive when he spoke out against the war afterward, and he wasn’t weak and indecisive when he worked on the Iran-Contra investigation, led the BCCI investigation that skewered such Democratic luminaries as Clark Clifford, and co-led (with John MCain) the investigation on Vietnam POWs/MIAs. I also don’t see where he has been weak and indecisive in his voting from what I can tell, unless you consider it weak and indecisive to vote to give the President maximum leverage in dealing with Saddam Hussein while at the same time expecting the President to use war only as a last resort, or if you consider it weak and indecisive to vote against the final authorization of $87 billion on Iraq to protest the fact that there was no attempt to explain how we were going to pay for it (and, in fact, the President had deceptively withheld this supplementary appropriations request until after his second round of tax cuts past, much as he purposely withheld information on a revised estimate of how much his welfare bill for the pharmaceutical industry, I mean medicare drug benefit bill, would cost).

And, this is how the President explains how he makes decisions: “So I had a choice to make: Either take the word of a madman, or defend America. Given that choice, I will defend America every time.” I mean, this statement is screwed up on so many different levels that it boggles the mind! I would hope it even causes Bush’s supporters here on the SDMB to wince. With decisiveness like this, we’re in deep trouble!

80

A few thoughts in response to Scylla’s post.

I’ll certainly grant he was resistant to the UN resolutions. But they had been in effect for ten years and the evidence found after the fact indicats they were working. There was hardly a “clear and present danger” involved.

He had WMDs prior to 1991. There were plenty of people saying that he know longer had them and offering evidence in support of this. The Bush administration didn’t say they “believed in good faith” Iraq had WMDs; it said they had conclusive evidence that outweighed the contrary evidence and presented it as a proven fact. It might be forgivable to have acted out of ignorance. But willfully ignoring the evidence because it isn’t supporting the conclusion you want is not good faith.

Absolutely granted. This was one of the reasons I supported the war. If Bush had stepped forth and used this as his primary reason for invading Iraq, he’d have my support.

Again there was no “clear and present danger” - there was no more danger in 2002 than there had been. The resulting invasion and occupation has cost us more than the enforcement did and shows no signs of ending soon.

Saddam had been effectively neutralized. We were able to eliminate the Taliban regime in Afghanistan with no interference.

Unfortunately this cuts both ways. If North Korea, Iran, or Cuba were capable of attacking us, couldn’t they justify doing so by saying they had been threatening by the “Bush regime”. Iraq had a history of invading Kuwait; the US now has a history of invading Iraq.

As others have pointed out, the terrorist connection in Iraq was weaker than it was in many other countries. The United States had ties to Osama bin Laden.

Except that Iraq was never a fundamentalist Islamic regime. Iraq was ruled by one of the most secular governments in the region.

Unfortunately the Iraq invasion has come to symbolize a number of things, many of them unfavorable to the United States. We should make sure we are sending the messages we intend.
As I said above, I supported the invasion of Iraq. But I am disappointed that the President felt the need to make a false case to justify a war. War is serious; the reasons for going to war should be clear.

I also feel that wars should be won, or at least fought as well as possible. This is not the case here. The Bush administration has handled the running of this war poorly. When Americans are being killed, that is unacceptable to me.