Yet the democratic congress’s approval ratings have been consistently lower than Bush’s and they do not support Bush’s foreign policy or the war. I haven’t figured out yet why that is either. 
One thing missing, Johnny. If all ths wonderful stuff is happening, and the media is hushing it all up so us dumfuks don’t find out…who told you?
I have a lot of sources, some being the Wall Street Journal, Neil Cavuto, etc… and I don’t pay attention to opining partisan reporting. I completely black it out. I need facts, not political opinions or manipulating spin slants to the real story. And some papers/news sources won’t even report positive economic trends. So I’ll hear about it from one source, and it will never show up on another source. That is clearly slanted and partisan reporting with a political agenda.
Oh, my God…that’s the single funniest thing I’ve heard in ages. I really wish this thread were somewhere else so I could actually say what I think of that sentence…
It’s because they haven’t done what we sent them to Congress to do…stop this goddamn idiotic useless wasteful fucking war! It’s because they apparently don’t have the spines to stand up to the fucking minority Republicans who are so slavishly attached to W’s asscheeks that they have to wipe their mouths every time he farts. It’s because everyone is sick and tired of sternly worded letters and wants them to get to the subpoenas and frog-marches and actual investigations with teeth to expose the utter criminality of this administration.
That’s why.
So, Fox News and the WSJ editorial page. The TASS for our times. How…informative…
Right, the last time a Democrat was in the White House the economy was rotten. :rolleyes: Historically the economy has done better under Democrats. The "a tax cut is the cure for every problem: answer has been tried, and it doesn’t work. (Except for the rich - works great for them.) The middle class has finally seen through the Republican lies, and wonder if the economy has been so damn great they aren’t seeing any more money.
Your faith in right wing economics is touching, but it goes against reality in the same way as creationism.
where did I say I just read the editorial page? Or are you just assuming. Yes, very informative, indeed. I’m sure if you’ve ever bother to view Fox Financial Network or read a WSJ, you would know this.
So you’re the one that watches FFN? I’ve got to ask you a question-Is it true that if you call and tell them you won’t be able to watch that day, they go ahead and schedule reruns for the rest of the day?
double post
they’ve only got eight programs lined up so far which is pretty weak. But they’re new, so I’m sure they’ll catch up to and even surpass CNBC’s eleven or so programs.
The “or so” would be 33, by the way.
Getting back to the OP; Mr. Enigma, I’m honestly curious (forgive me for singling you out, but so far you’re the only representative of your tribe in this thread). Is the economy (as defined by the Wall Street Journal) you only concern, or do you care about other aspects of our nation’s well-being? If not, well okay then; but otherwise, what do you think about the foreign and domestic policy initiatives of the Bush administration? Specifically:
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Doctrine of preventative war. (Sometimes mistakenly called “pre-emptive war”.) Seems insane to me, but I’d like to hear what you think.
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Invasion of Iraq.
a) War (2003)
b) Occupation (2003 - Present and foreseeable future, possibly for many years) -
Guantanamo Bay.
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Espoused principle that the President can lock up any citizen he wants to, forever, without a charge and without having to present any evidence against him.
This is just scratching the surface of the badness most of us have come to see in this administration; the more you dig down, the more corruption appears; it’s been a bad and harmful administration in every single domestic and international arena in which a President can be influential. If you like all these things the way they are, or want to argue against our perception of what’s going on, that’s fine. But please be specific and be willing to back up any argument with facts and logic.
And, welcome to our midst.
I voted for Bush in 2000 and 2004. In 2000, as I said in the other thread, I had modest expectations of moderate conservatism and bipartisan effectiveness. Those expectations had not been entirely dashed by 2004, but my vote was not cast with enthusiasm. I thought then and still think that Kerry was dismal candidate who would have made a horrible president. I’m not a big fan of attacking other countries without direct provocation, so the Iraq war was a move that disturbed me.
Two things that happened in 2005 are what really caused me to abandon all hope that I had made correct choices with my votes: the Harriet Miers nomination, and the Brownie and Katrina show. I know that Bush has done far worse things in the eyes of many, and appointing a clueless hack and nominating an unqualified crony are fairly standard political foibles, but those two things iced it for me.
It’s an old idea, but read on for more about why it applied in this specific case and not, say, North Korea.
My only problem is that I wanted the occupation after the war to be pushed with more vigor. I think the DoD badly OVERestimated the ability to Hussein to resist, and did not think we’d be in Bagdad for several months, with long fighting there, and continuing resistance in western Iraq. Thus, we’d have had more time to pacify areas. That didn’t happen, and the quick collapse led to overly optimistic initial hopes.
That said, we were counting on one insurgency. We weren’t counting on three seperate movements to deal with. But of course we DID “win hearts and minds” (gah, I hate that phrase) and Iraqis do want
Most people seem to labor under the mistaken impression that we went to war with Iraq because of WMD’s. That was never the reason; it was the casus belli (ok, that technically translates as cause for war but you know what I mean). The reason was that we needed a strong democracy in the Middle East which ordinary Arabs could look at.
For fifty years, they’ve lived among the worst tyranies on earth. You want action at the root causes of terrorism? There you go. Millions of men and women caught in a net of broken dreams and low ceilings, and no hope. Note that global terrorism, particularly in Al Quaeda, has revolved around western-educated individuals, AND that their closest political goals don’t involve Israel or whatnot, but re-establishing a Caliphate. They’ve seen wealth and power, and yet their own societies are incapable of producing it. Their goal (enforce Islamic Totalitarianism) is moronic, but the initial idea (existing society is broken) is perfectly correct.
Now, odds are the MidEast isn’t going to fix itself. There’s absically been either anarchy or tyranny there at all times since the dawn of man. There are simply too many peoples with too many grudges. Now, oddly, Iraq was perfect for these purposes. It had had a brief decade of effective democracy before a coup carried Saddam’s men into power. It had three semi-balanced ethnic/cultural groups, a sort of microcosm of the MidEast itself. It had seen the worst forms of tyranny. And we really, really didn’t like Saddam. As it turned out, we overestimated his ability to prpduce chemical weapons, but underestimated his existing stocks. Fortunately, his military organization was as bad as his generals.
Now, in the case of NoKo or Iran, we have other reasons for not atacking now or in the future. NoKo has nukes, and honestly we’d rather ignore it, since it’s a strategic backwater right now. We can’t really improve NoKo’s situation as long as Kim Jong Il is in power (although recent developments indictae that diplomacy and patience was successful in aniling him to the wall), so waiting it out seems to be a better option. In the case of Iran, we’ve been hoping and praying that the young will finally push the old from power. So far, we’ve had some success; the Mullachcracy has had its political grip tighten but its social one weaken badly. If it can’t keep the economy from crashing, as seems reasonably likely in the future, they are in deep trouble.
But in Iraq, we had the option of demonstrating that democracy could flourish in the MidEast, and that everyone could participate. That’s pressure no amount of diplomacy could accomplish. It’s also ironic. Al-Quaeda hated us for our influence on their society (and showing how weak and pathetic they were). So they hurt us in the name of some freakish cultural manifesto. In response, we smack them around and… start working our culture into the MidEast. Ha!
Leftists don’t seem to understand that legally speaking, we can’t do much to the people held there. They aren’t criminals. They have committed no crime. We have no charges and no ability to charge them with a crime. It’s not a crime t attack America or Americans or to plan on doing so, and frankly, those prisoners’ other options pretty much include being executed by a foreign government.
In several cases, we have very cunning, rich, well-connected terrorists. We have no purely legalistic method or holding them. We can’t put them in prison, because we have no laws to hit them with. And while American law does provide some limited extraterritorial jurisidiction over Americans, we have none over foreigners on foreign soil (unlike, say, British law, which has a few peculiarities).
Finally, since they don’t wear uniforms, we’d be fully justified in just killing them on the spot when captured.
So if you don’t like it, what do you want? Show trials, where we simply pretend our laws apply and find them guilty in a sham legal process? That would prove the worst that anyone could say about us (I despise the Nuremburg trials). Immediate execution in the field? Release them all when captured? (Which means our soldiers won’t make any effort to capture them in the future). Turn them over to vengeful or duplicitous foreign governments? (Which amounts to either execution or release) If the later, who would get jurisidiction?
So far, no leftist has actually given me any kind of straight answer on the matter. In fact, most simply pretend the issue (“What to do instead of Guantanamo Bay”) doesn’t exist, which tells me an awful lot.
I’m not happy with this. I recognize that in the case he excercised it in, he was not incorrect. At the same time, there was ample evidence to convinct the citizen of an actual crime, so it was a foolish political battle which accomplished nothing.
At the same time, this has been an issue since Lincoln’s day, and he imprisoned American citizens by the dozens, maybe hundreds, all without trial, until he decided to release them. And few complained.
And that is the problem. At this point, our views are so wildly and frangrantly opposed that we cannot come to any agreement. Since we start from different positions. At this point (and no, I’m not Godwinizing here), you’re basically saying that Bush is a worse leader than Adolf Hitler. Even Hitler had his successes and his enemies had to admit them; he was even Time’s Man of the Year. However, Bush’s enemies don’t even seem to recognize any correlary. They believe he’s as bad as can be. They also want to believe he’s so incompetent that he can’t do anything at all. Finally, they want to believe he’s so maliciously competent as to manage to successfully ruin everything all the time.
Perhaps he does so - for them. Odd thing is, he keeps winning. Push come to shove, the democrats lose virtually every time they spar with him over policy, and generally wind up in retreat so devastating that they lose all credibility on the issue. And he does genuinely take the long view; he doesn’t care what the opinion polls are today or even a century from now.
His biggest fault is over-loyalty, and no, that’s not a backhanded compliment. Bush has been overly loyal in rewarding his supporters and protecting them, often a political cost to his administration.
I don’t want to get too far in the weeds on this. I think I have a pretty clear track record here.
In general, even if this particular president or certain Republican congressmen might screw up, my general response is to try to make the Republican Party better and more electable. I am very active in my party at the local level, have served as a delegate in a state gubernatorial convention, and have even worked in legislative politics when I was younger.
Except for certain particular races where it comes down to a couple of candidates, I don’t regard the answer as voting Democratic or supporting Democrats, as they will in office do things I’m opposed to.
I won’t respond in the other thread, but the same answer applies there.
Easy. It’s because, while they vocally oppose, they haven’t done anything about it.
I’ll say one other thing here. I just saw an article written by Thomas Edsall and posted on the Huffington Post:
Will the GOP Blindside the Democrats on Terror Issues?
Now, the biggest issue we face is the war and terrorism - yet the Democrats want to talk about the economy, and just that. In no sane party would terror issues be a “blindside” yet it is seen by many Democrats as just that.
If it is a blindside, it is because Democrats are blind on that side. And that isn’t the Republicans’ fault - Democrats put the stick in their own eye on that one.
For about forty years now, the Republicans have done an awful lot of heavy lifting on international relations and defense theory - even coming up with competing theories. Now, maybe their conclusions were wrong (personally, I don’t think so), but you cannot accuse them of ignoring these issues.
Democrats, however, did ignore these, because studying these in any serious way magnified huge divisions within their party between hawks and doves, realists and human-rights activists. So good policy never was fleshed out in either sphere - everything was done on the fly. And the think tanks and thinkers of the Democratic establishment devoted their time to economics and race, which were seen as issues that could help them.
For as many reasons I cannot be a Democrat, this is a huge one.
If “we” were counting on a single insurgency, then “we” were utter fools. There were posters on this message board pointing out the fractured and fractious nature of Iraqi society and politics in then months prior to our idiotic invasion.
The neo-cons were so in love with Wolfowitz’s term paper that they failed the primary task of any management: that of due diligence.
Right. WMD’s were never the cause. They were clearly the lie told to get popular support for the neo-con pipe dreams. That those pipe dreams had no basis in reality, either, is just something we should shrug off or pretend were real, anyway.
You must really have liked Wolfowitz’s term paper.
Three “semi balanced” ethnic groups? That is a clear indicator that a disrupted society will fracture further.
Desire for the Caliphate? Only among a tiny number of loons. (Most of thje Caliphate supporters are scattered elsewhere in the region.)
You claim the MidEast will not “fix itself,” but your idea that some outside force can wander in with tanks and rifles and “fix” it has no historical precedent. Wolfowitz wanted to believe that Germany and Japan in 1945 set the trend. However, he based his entire paper (and the neo-cons based their entire philosophy) on a handful of shallow similarities while ignoring every other possible fact about the situations. Germany and Japan were nations; Iraq was an artifice stretched over multiple tribal societies. Germany and Japan had mutual cultural ties extending back over a millennium rather than strongly conflicting ethnic rivalries. Iraq was an artificial construct with barely ten years of (tenditious and stumbling) representative government that accepted a coup because it was more in keeping with their world views. Beginning in the 1850s (Germany) and 1860s (Japan), Germany and Japan had established their forms of representative government themselves–without having it imposed on them from the outside–over the course of several decades (and attendant conflict), so that when the U.S. imposed some new rules, it was on an existing framework under which the citizens were already used to living. While strategic policy had been set by the groups that had siezed power prior to WWII, the local laws and ordinances were still in the hands of the Reichstag and Diet and much of the strategic goals carried out were enacted through legislation that was enacted by elected representatives. Germany and Japan were also not riven by multiple ethnic divisions, a point that Wolfowitz deliberately ignored despite the evidence strongly indicating that such were a serious stumbling block to any exterrnally imposed solutions.
If you want to see a MidEast country that is moving toward true representative government, then look to Iran. There is no reason to believe that the theocrats will be able to hold on forever and the day-to-day functioning government is actually an elected one. Even the games that the theocrats have played in recent years (in direct response to GWB’s sabre-rattling) have not quenched the desire of the people to rule themselves and a bit more patience and more carrot-and-stick interactions with Iran would quite possibly have led to the ouster of the theocrats, leaving behind a large, stable nation with a good economy and a representative government.
Invading Iraq with too few troops, on trumped up excuses, in violation of the UN Charter that we wrote, in the face of massive protests across the Middle East was very nearly the worst approach even if one actually believed in the Wolfowitz term paper.
It possibly could have happened already if GWB hadn’t included Iran in the “Axis of Evil” in his State of the Union address after 9/11.