It is worth adding that “weapons of mass destruction” is so much sloppy language used to draw an equivalence between poison gasses, which Sadam had used in the form of cyanide and may have used in the Iraq-Iran war, biological agents, primarily anthrax and small pox, and nuclear bombs. They are three different systems each presenting a different threat. Lumping them together just allows the probable possession of poison gasses, which while dangerous are not all that easy to deliver half way around the world, and nuclear bombs, something that rightly ought to scare the hell out of us and would seem to require some response. Trouble is that, based stuff like the yellow cake from Nigier, we can conclude that the government knew that Saddam had no nukes and was not close to having them.
This I submit is the same sort of part truth, what some call a non-lie, we have seen from this Administration from the beginning. It is right in line with the Vice-president’s insistence that there is some sort of Saddam-Terrorist connection without bothering to say whether the connection is with AlQida, the Palestinian Resistance, the Hesbulah, the Irish Republican Army, or the Aryan Nation. It is the same sort of thing that allows the Secretary of Defense to defend our treatment of prisoners in Iraq (and maybe at Gitmo and other places as well) as being less abhorrent than the decapitation of kidnap victims without bothering to mention that the United States is a civilized Western nation state while the kidnapers/terrorists are lawless bandits and…well, terrorists.
I tell you there is a distinct lack of critical thinking around here.
[QUOTE=Scylla
]
8. The war is against militant fundamentalist Islam and it serves our purposes to wipe it out, wipe out its allies, and it’s potential allies, and free the people who it has enslaved, so that in time and not without difficulty, they may thrive and aid us.
Saddam was a symbol of defiance, that you could defy the US. attack us or our allies, thwart the UN and survive by politicking and gamesmanship. We destroyed the symbol and sent the message that we are not playing games.
[/QUOTE]
This is beyond unreasonable. This borders on pathology. “Wipe out its allies, and its potential allies”!? Now I realize you require some flexibility to stretch a war on Islamic fundamentalism to include Saddam ("…in order to stop Rasputin, we shoot Lenin…") but I cannot but hope this is but an ill considered outburst. “Potential allies” to be wiped out include, at least in theory, the entire Muslim world!
You * can’t* be serious!
As to point 9, it could be said that we made the point that we are “not playing games”. Littering the area with corpses is, indeed, widely recognized as a grimly serious undertaking. But we sent another message as well, the consequences of which have escaped your blithely shallow overview.
And that is that we cannot be reasoned with. That when GeeDubya (Praise the Leader!) says he will exhaust every possible means to avoid war, it means D for diddly squat.
Which means that a potential enemy, faced with a first-strike scenario, has all the more reason to go for it. In our enemies council of war, we should like cooler heads to prevail, the kind of men we ourselves scorn as “appeasers”. But our actions cannot help but empower and solidify the “war party” in whichever of our “potential enemies” becomes a truly hostile nation.
It is hardly helpful that a potential adversary regards us as “serious” if they cannot regard us as “sane”.
Bush = lower taxes, more money for me, will grow the economy etc
Bush = strong leader, unwavering, blah blah blah
However simplistic and ridiculous these notions may be (and #2 IMO is definitely silly if you consider Bush’s own frequent changes in positions that have been sometimes based on political expediency much like the average politician), they are working extremely well.
The climate of a terrorist threat adds to Bush’s potency.
Well, we’re certainly finding out why Bush gets support from some quarters, and unfortunately the Board’s mission statement apparently is not being accomplished fast enough to stop it.
Honestly, how can you take seriously anyone who presents this logic:
It’s bad that Saddam Hussein was defying UN resolutions
So we’ll invade Iraq and kill a whole mess o’ people
Even though the UN - the organization whose resolutions were being defied, remember
DIDN’T want to invade
But that’s okay because the UN is an ineffective bunch of boobs and we shouldn’t bother with them while we’re…
… Enforcing all-important UN resolutions!!
Here’s the truth: Supporting Bush is strongly correlated with ignorance. People who want to vote Bush are far, far likelier to be colossally, woefully ignorant of the facts that people who want to vote for Kerry. Bush supporters are vastly more likely to believe lies like that Iraq had big WMD stockpiles, or that they used them in the war (!!!) or that IRaq was behind 9-11. Just refer to my cite on Page 1. He’s winning in the polls because he’s getting a huge, huge majority of votes from the ignorant.
Bush has not lowered taxes. He has borrowed money from future taxes to pay for today. We will be paying interest on this debt forever. We are still paying interest, which comes in the form of taxes, on the Reagan deficit. Hell, some people right now are paying taxes and weren’t even alive when Reagan was President, but are still affected by Reagan’s tax burden.
Your taxes may be lower at the moment, but inevitably taxes will have to be raised to pay for the interest on Bush’s spending spree. Otherwise, the country will go bankrupt. And of course, Democrats will have to take the fall by actually working out a balanced budget, which must include higher taxes due to the Republican spending sprees in the past 25 years.
Why stop there? Thanks to our good buddies in Riyadh, the United States is an ally of fundamentalist Islam. We’re on the list.
As for “potential allies” - think about that and ask what countries don’t fall under that category. I guess Israel is safe but everyone else is on the table.
In answer to the OP: a lot of Americans are evil. Bush has that vote tied up.
Now in case anyone forget of the kin of Scylla try to slip it by you again. Q What reason did Bush claim for starting a war against Iraq?
A oh yeah, because they had WMD.
Wrong!
Bush claimed Iraqi wmd posed a real and unacceptable threat to the US. The absence of WMD is simply the irrefutable way of proving Bush’s stated reason false.
Q Why is the difference important?
A Because Bush did not make the claim of a real threat in good faith. Nobody was advising Bush that the weapons did pose a real threat, a grave or gathering danger to the US. Quite the contrary, even should such weapons have existed. He simply made it up, root and branch to deceive you folks.
But the flim-flam men will seize on anything to back their boy.
Perhaps this is why the Administration did not seem to place higher priority on securing potential WMD sites in the Iraqi invasion, although ironically I think any intelligent person would realize that those weapons are more dangerous in the hands of some looters or whoever than in the hands of Saddam. The CIA analysts knew it would be quite absurb that a dictator like Saddam, used to absolute control, would give up control of WMD to someone like Osama Bin Laden. That would mean tying his fate to Osama’s whims. Besides which, it is not like Osama doesn’t have a history of turning viciously against those who gave him support and aid in the past.
OK. Accepting that as true, are you still satisfied with our method of selecting a President, given the huge, huge majority of ignorant voters out there, each of whom in your state has a voice equal to your own?
I mean, in all honesty, I think it’s better to let people elect a leader based on misconceptions than it is to not give them a vote. Whatever the case may be in this specific circumstance, in general, nations that elect their leaders democratically are better places to live than nations that do not. And just giving the vote to a subset of people (e.g. making people take literacy tests or something) is just not a good idea; such things are usually perverted by those with power to disenfranchise others for the purpose of benefiting one party or another.
Actually, for a long time, no I have not. Plato wrote about the dangers of Democracy some two millenia ago and we’ve added some new twists in more recent years. The current administration has done an excellent job of demonstrating Plato’s belief that Democracy will eventually be used by would-be tyrants via the mechanism of fear. The fear here has not only been the obvious and powerful one of terrorism (and what a choice, since it can NEVER be entirely defeated!), but also domestic fears - somehow, while busily chipping away at our rights, the current administration has also instilled fear in many of the more libertarianly inclined that the Democrats are the ones who want to control you!
I’ve felt for a long time that, while our structure of government, with its tripartate set of checks and balances, was excellent, our means of choosing the participants was lousy. We’d do better by picking people by lottery, from a pool of qualified (i.e. functionally literate and capable of basic arithmetic) citizens, with legal hedges in place to prevent the chosen ones from simply using their offices to economically benefit themselves and their families. This would also result in a far more representative government, in the sense that people from every ethnic group, religion, and walk of life would be in government. No more tyranny of the majority, and no more government run for the sake of being re-elected (the sole motivation almost all elected politicians currently share). When handed huge responsibility, most people will rise to the occasion, and for the occasional loony who got into office, well, we’ve got those terrific checks and balances. One of the problems with democracy is that the nation can elect an entire set of loonies simultaneously when manipulated property (say, by fear). Then the checks and balances don’t work.
It’ll never happen, and I’d be pilloried for ever publicly suggesting that democracy, despite its faults, wasn’t the best form of government available. But IMHO, that would be the way to go.
Well, I was just explaining how the Bush supporters think. I see the “lower taxes=better” argument as being naive as well. A family of four can do the math and calculate how much of the $600 (or whatever the Bush tax cuts gave them back) is consumed by increases in local taxes, state sales taxes, school levys etc.
If this indeed is true (and to a certain extent, I do believe that Bush’s popularity owes itself to voters not paying enough attention), the flaw in the system is not necessarily within democracy itself, but rests mainly with the opposition parties. It is Kerry’s campaign, which cannot fight the Bush campaign effectively. And, now, after taking a beating from a bunch of exaggerated claims made by a 527 (The Swifties), the Kerry camp is thinking of shifting the debate to the economy. Big, big mistake. Terrorism should be (and rightfully so) the #1 issue of this campaign. This issue encompasses the war on Iraq and the Bush doctrine, which is misunderstood by many Americans to mean “We will not be slaves to the UN, and will kick anyone’s ass who dares threaten us harm”. No wonder this has resonance with the masses.
So, IMO, the Kerry campaign needs to do a much better job of pointing out what they think are the flaws of Bush’s policies and explaining how they would do things differently. The apathy and sound-bite driven electorate is a challenge they need to surmount.
I hate to join the chorus that says the majority of Bush supporters are just plain ignorant of the issues, but from what I can see that is the truth. A lot denial rooted in partisanship plays a big role too.
Listening to CSPAN one day, I heard a Bush-supporter say they’d seen actual news footage of Iraqis shipping WMD’s across country lines, “so people saying that Iraqi didn’t have WMDs are lying!”
These same kind of people think it somehow makes perfect sense that we attacked Iraq in response to 9/11, even though just a cursory glance at Hussein and Bin Laden’s personalities will tell you that an alliance between the two is highly unlikely. They don’t seem to realize that, although Saddam was a tyrant, he was one of the more secular leaders of the region. Bin Laden is the antithesis of that. Saddam may be a laundry list of shitty things, but he is not an Islamic fundamentalist.
These folks are also willing to pardon the prison abuse scandal because “the other side does much worse”. They are quicker to condemn the kid who brought the pictures to light than they are the people responsible for the abuse.
They believe that AQ attacked us because “they hate our freedoms”. When you mention other possible reasons, like our foreign policy and our encroachment into their culture and space, the response from many Bush-supporters is that anyone who considers those as possible reasons simply “hate America.”
France is not to be trusted. Kerry is a flip-flopper. Bush is strong on terror. Saddam is a madman. Edwards is a ruthless trial lawyer. Why? Uh, ‘coz that’s what duh TV tol’ me. The analysis goes no farther than the soundbites that hit the airwaves.
People are happy about their tax cuts, but aren’t able to grasp the fact that sooner or later that money is going right back to Uncle Sam, with interest. It’s funny what a little money will do to man’s ability to reason.
People think we are winning the War on Terror because we haven’t been hit with another terrorist strike. Never mind the fact that every week it seems a new terrorist event is being reported in the world. Like Sudan. Where millions of lives have been threatened with extermination due to race and religion. But for some reason that doesn’t count. Right.
Kerry is unfit for office because he may have exaggerated a wound to get a medal. During a war. But Bush is perfectly suited even though he may have been the ANG’s equivalent to AWOL. While the same war was going on. Right.
The list goes on and on. You tell me, Bricker, what do you think I should think? Is it arrogant to belief the other side is simply ignorant or in denial, even when there is solid basis for this belief?
We have a boatload of threads in which the merits of each individual position are debated.
What I’m asking in this thread, I remind you, are two questions. You addressed the first - in a manner of speaking - but didn’t really answer the second:
In words, accepting for the purposes of argument the concept that there is “solid basis for [the] belief” that “the other side is simply ignorant or in denial,” does this lead you to any further opinion about the method in which we choose our President? How can we solve the problem that seems a natural consequence of the fact that so many ignorant people are given exactly the same vote as the relatively few informed and enlightened people that see through the lies and deceit of the Bush administration?
If Kerry’s flaws are so blindingly obvious… why is he even in the running?
A lot of Republicans think he is a useless piece of liberal shit, among other things.
How do they reconcile that a substantial chunk of the country - perhaps even a majority (eventually) - doesn’t agree?
The problem lies with information, not with the election process.
The elephants has shown expertise in getting the messages it wants to the public in chewy, bite-sized pieces. The demographic group targetted by these messages don’t spend a lot of time debating positions on the internet, reading the viewpoints of the opposition, or verifying what is being told to them through unbiased sources. If they did, we would likely not see so much confidence and praise thrown at Bush. It’s easy to be confident in your position when you insulate yourself from other opinions, as we all know.
The donkeys have done a shabby job of penetrating the information force-field that the other team has set up. Whenever Kerry makes a statement about something (such as his goals in Iraq), what do we see? “Kerry has flipped-flopped AGAIN! Haw haw haw!” Which basically boils down to sticking one’s fingers in one’s ears. Whenever Kerry utters a sentence more than 10 words long, we get people saying he’s vague and not very clear, “Why doesn’t he just come out and say what he MEANS?!” Which basically boils down to, “My attention span is only so big; why can’t you cut up the meat and spoon feed it to me like Pappy Bush?”
So what can we do about it? Part of the blame goes to the ineptitude of the Democratic campaign. But to be fair, the Dems are at a inherent disadvantage. They are tasked with the job of changing the minds of those who believe lies, are in denial about undisputed facts, and who support a man just because he professes faith in God Almighty. Then on top of that, they have to convince the undecideds that just because Bush looks like a cool, down-to-earth guy doesn’t mean he should be president. Surprisingly and embarrassingly, it is rather difficult to do.
But the rules of the game should not be changed just so that Kerry wins.
The run of this thread is an explanation of why I am just flat depressed about this election, especially when I consider all the nearly permanent changes a second Bush Administration when coupled with a friendly or subservient Congress can make in this country. I suppose that there is some chance that Senator Kerry can turn it around in the debates but I also expect that, as in the past, debates will be structured so that the participants can get away with a repetition of meaningless slogans and avoid anything that vaguely resembles a defense of their policies and proposed policies – lets face it what I want is for both of these guys to face a hostile cross-examination. That will just not happen in the debates or in so-called public rallies where people wearing Kerry buttons are arrested for trespass on the public right-of-way (charge later amended to interference with official acts).
To his credit the President’s people play the game of ruthless and dirty politics very, very well. The President’s Brain has managed to pretty much render Senator Kerry’s two strongest attributes, distinguished service as a junior Naval officer and distinguished service in the Senate, non-starters. They have mobilized the three headed dragon of fundamentalist evangelical Christianity (no queers, no abortions and no secular education). They have kept the allegiance of the Second Amendment/NRA types. They have convinced a fair number of people that the invasion and occupation of Iraq has some connection with 9/11 and that the President is engaged in some sort of life and death struggle with Islamic terror in the Persian Gulf and that anything goes. They have convinced a fair number of people that the piddlie tax break they received is a major boon and that the obscenely wealthy are bearing an unfair tax burden. They have managed to run up an unprecedented national debt and create the impression that it is some how play money that never has to be paid back. They have convinced people that a drop in average household income is a good thing. They have convinced people that access to the courts is a bad idea. All this has been done with half truths and non-lies that President is never required to defend and no one is afforded the opportunity to challenge. They have managed to put a boogeyman scare job on the American public that would be the envy of William Randolph Hearst or the late junior Senator from Wisconsin.
So what has gone wrong here, for something has clearly gone wrong. Let me submit that the Democrat Party has watched Mr. Smith Goes to Washington once too often. My party is just not ruthless enough – it lacks the killer instinct, the impulse to grand larceny, that the President’s people learned in the knife fight of Texas politics and at the knee of Richard Millhouse Nixon. We would rather be right than in power.
It is my hope that the debates will work a great dropping of the scales from the eyes of the electorate but I’m not counting on it. It is a more firmly held hope that within the next four years the electorate will realize theat it is being played for a bunch of suckers and that the Democratic Party will develop a spine and a willingness to go tear its opponent’s throat out with its teeth. Remember Senator Kerry’s aside that he was up against a pack of crooks and liars – he was right. Clearly the best way to power is to have no scruples. We Democrats clearly suffer from too many scruples and will be stuck where we are, in a position of impotence, until we lighten ship by throwing some over board.