I must admit, “Bush Lied; And Your Children Died” ought to be easy enough to apprehend and digest. But it’s not getting through, now, is it.
It does appear the Republican sheeple are astonishingly immune to the obvious when it contradicts their ideology, and I can think of no good solution to that problem. The truth will out, but does anyone see it if they can will themselves not to? That is an important ponderable when one votes strategically.
My decision’s not about Team Bush so much as it’s about the electorate. What it would take for the electorate to hold these kinds of thinsg in contempt. That’s the crux of the biscuit in this instance. Unless there’s a change in the attitude of the electorate en mass then I think the sort fabulist policies we’ve seen will continue to be supported to our further detriment. The only way I see to reach enough people is for the consquences not to become apparent, but to become undeniable. If they do not become undeniable sooner, then they will do so later. The longer it takes, the higher the price will be. As bad as it looks things will be in the four years following a Bush victory, they’ll be even worse if Kerry et al take the fall for the past four years. The same worms will work their ways back into the power structures and do even greater damage.
Something has to change the rationality of ignorance and apathy re the goings on in DC. The Prince of Darknes is a presidential advisor on national security and foreign policy for jumpin jiminy.
I don’t think anything short of undeniable disaster can do it. I think that the disasters are coming one way or another (cause that what happens when you engage in a tricky procedure w/o paying attention). The question is how bad will we let it get.
Sheeple are not rationally ignorant. They are faithful.
I guess it is possible major scandals implicating the President and the top brass could be shrugged off by those in Congress and the GOP who supported them. I just find it unlikely. I think that if there is a meltdown that it will trickle-down to many/most of the GOP. The lower levels don’t get the kind of press coverage and sound bytes that the president and top brass do. They’ve got less opportunities to weasel and spin to avoid the shit coming down on them. If the shit is coming down in such a torrent that the master weasels on top can’t avoid it I just don’t see a way for the lesser weasels, who get less opportunities to establish plausible deniability/weasel in front of decent sized audiences, to avoid the shitstorm.
I guess we’ll see, although to be honest I’d rather not have to face the situation at all.
Enjoy,
Steven
The study I mentioned earlier, but couldn’t open, is the The 1974 National Election Study. Some sort of registration process seems necessary to get access. Nevertheless, the Republican party did experience blowback across more than the presidential levels after Nixon. According to Encarta’s entry on Gerald Ford.
So it seems that blowback from a major scandal, instead of reigning in the extremists who were responsible for it, actually drove the parties to more extremes.
Enjoy,
Steven
Hey! Is this sort of a feed the beast strategy?
Did I just come up with the slogan?
If things haven’t become undeniable now, I don’t know when they will. Honestly. If there is another big terrorist attack, for example, there will be even stronger desire on the part of people to lash out recklessly and irresponsibly.
Like someone said above, this burning down the village in order to save it theory is just really dicey in my book.
Doing this sort of “strategic voting” is sort of like trying to time the market…It will likely only screw you in the end.
Truly you have a dizzying intellect. 
Enjoy,
Steven
Maybe a 'Give ‘em Enough Rope’ strategy?
Certainly not “Feed the Beast a Rope. He likes it!” That would just be sick.
Since we’re playing reverse thinking… I’d like to add my pet theory…
I think in a wierd way Bush might actually be good for the environment !
Not only are americans more aware of how Middle East and oil politics are nasty and expensive… but the way Bush has helped tense up the region and the consequent high price of oil is a major booster to alternative energy sources. If Bush keeps the Middle East and the oil supply a mess… expect ever more investments in non-oil energy sources. Oil dependency will drop if we get 4 more years !
Put me in the “Bush has only gotten started with screwing the U.S.” camp. I think there’s a lot more he can do with Four More Years.
I think we have to assume that if Bush wins, Congress also remains in Republican hands.
As Stoid and others have pointed out, Bush is likely to appoint multiple Supreme Court justices. I’m assuming at least two - O’Connor is generally believed to have wanted to retire after 2000, but postponed it due to the matter of her having effectively chosen the person who’d choose her replacement, if she retired before this election. Except for Silent Clarence (56), none of the Justices are spring chickens. Souter’s 65, Breyer’s 66, Kennedy and Scalia are 68, Ginsburg’s 71, O’Connor’s 74, Rehnquist turns 80 next week, and Stevens is 84. We’d be lucky if Stevens made it through a second Bush term without a health problem more or less forcing his retirement.
I have to believe Bush will appoint more like Thomas: politically correct (from a right-wing perspective) judges who are young enough to skew the court for a couple of generations.
Then there’s the things Voyager mentioned:
If Bush gets another term, the possibility that the political game will continue to be rigged increases. Has the White House expressed any concern over the problems with the reliability of electronic voting machines? If so, it’s sure slipped my notice. And the redistricting business, ditto. I see nothing to make me believe these guys actually believe in democracy.
And the whole nuclear-proliferation business - this should be regarded as a crisis far more scary than al-Qaeda, yet it seems to be on this Administration’s back burner. They’ve cut back on efforts to help secure Russia’s nuclear materials, they’ve vacillated on North Korea and Iran - and our invasion of Iraq has given both nations the best of all reasons to go full speed ahead. Their main approach to Iran seems to be saber-rattling; it’s hardly definite that they might do more than rattle, if given another term, but one has to think some sort of military response would be their towards the top of their playbook.
Meanwhile, they will likely ignore proliferation as a global problem; chances are that while we’re dealing with Iran, some other country or countries will make significant steps towards going nuclear - as Brazil already is.
And then there’s the matter of the US economy. Krugman has noted repeatedly that our economic situation is a lot like a poorly-run, debt-ridden Third-World country - massive debt with no attempt to bring it under control, massive trade imbalances - and that so far, only our size and indispensibility has prevented the chickens from coming home to roost.
In another four years, that could happen. We’re up to 40% of our debt being held by furriners, with China playing a particularly large role. The day will come when they want something in return for continuing to prop us up, and it won’t be pretty when it happens.
Or worse yet, creditors may stop refinancing our debt; our T-bills may be regarded as a bad investment. There are nervous-making signs that this is starting to happen already.
Even if the Democrats as a party get screwed in the process, we need a Democratic Administration, now, to clean up after the elephants. Or in four years, we might be in bigger trouble than we can easily get out of.
I thought the mention of Brazil as a bit off… I’m not just defending my country… but there is no political reasons or motivation here to get nukes. We’re bigger than all our neighbors and have no external threats.
If we ever wanted to develop nukes it would of course just be a case of throwing money at it… the technical aspects aren’t that big. We wouldn’t have means of delivery though.
Still I guess the point is that Iran won’t be the last country to make “significant steps towards going nuclear”. In other threads I’ve pointed out that either you get a general solution that helps to keep the nuclear pandora in the box… or your bound to face one nuclear wannabe after another.
That was really my point; sorry if I was clumsy about making it - it’s pretty obvious to me that Brazil has no real advantage to be gained from possessing nukes, and has better things to spend the money on.
Like you say, what we need is a general, global answer to nuclear proliferation. Dealing with each new potential nuclear power on an ad hoc basis is kinda like treating the problem like a global game of Whack-A-Mole, and no matter how many moles we whack, more will keep popping up.
Nobody’s used a nuke as a weapon since WWII, thank goodness. But the more countries that have them, the more likely it becomes that our luck will run out - either by one of those countries lobbing a nuke at another, or by a nuclear weapon ‘falling into the hands of terrorists’, as the saying goes.
Given that I can’t see why we should expect George W. Bush to be any more attentive to the problem of proliferation in a second term than he’s been in his first, I think it would be a healthy development for the U.S. and the world if regime change were to begin at home, even if losing this election made it more likely for the GOP to win future elections.
Interesting thread and while reading I imagined what comments it would get if I had made a similar OP.
OP, you hate the USA because you are jealous, you hate democracy, you hate freedom. You are an AQ member. You are a terrorist. You are a Saddam supporter. You want to destroy The Country of The Free and its Way of Life. You are a threat to Peace and Freedom.
Ok, this said… I can see where you come from.
Yet you should read and consider the posts made by Steven once again because he is completely right. And yes, you also overlook the fact that when it comes to the mess in Iraq, the UN and the Iraqis themselves already get the blame. This already and utterly hypocritical and twisting rethoric shall only be further exploited and shall be swallowed willingly by a completely apathic US public.
If you see how they swallowed eveything previously to this shameless invasion and ongoing mass murdering, if you see how they do not even care one bit about the shameless way they were misled to believe the lies of Bush and his criminals, if you see their complete apathy and even the defence of decisions that undermine the very society they say they are so proud to be part of…
Then you must be utterly optimistic or utterly naïve to come to the idea that 4 more years of this shall make a difference in the minds of the general US public.
One thing a next Bush Reign most certainly shall bring you is the complete and utterly disgusted disbelief of the entire world. Then I don’t even talk about the ME and Muslims in general. I don’t even talk about how terrorism shall exploit it to recrute - and they are recruting now already with no problem at all, thanks to the Bush Hero and his bunch of devoted criminals.
I don’t even talk about how Israel shall applaud the approval of the US electorate of the crimes of Great Friend Bush. An other 4 years where nothing can bring a change in their ignoring of UN resolutions, their WMD program, their threatening of other nations.
I don’t even talk about the Bush criminals taking this clear agreement of their electorate with their crimes as an encouragment to plot and proceed with further breaches of International law and Geneva conventions (not that they seek such encouragement since Bush thinks to be mandated by God, but clear approval of his crimes by common humans is something even a Just Prophet like Bush shall take with a flattered and very big smile).
If these criminals get an other 4 years, I sincerely hope that Iran actually develops WMD and in fact I would hope that the whole ME gets them as soon as possible.
Because if clear lunaticism comes to reign - holding the destruction of the world under its fingertips - and when the occasion to cut it off only brings the opposite result, one can only support the lunaticism coming from the other side in order in order to create the very much needed counterbalance.
I think if Bush gets such a clear approval of the US electorate of his criminal invasion and occupation of the sovereign nation Iraq, one should consider to invest in the speedy development and growth of nuclear science in my region of the world. (This should be done anyway. Oil resources don’t last for ever and the devastating brain drain to the developped world most urgently needs to stop in any case).
Salaam. A
Only if you followed up your hypothetical OP with some nonsense such as:
or:
Let’s get this straight: If Bush wins in November, the only thing a reasonable person could do would be to **SUPPORT **groups like Al Qaeda? Can you clarify what you consider to be the “other side”, if you don’t mean AQ and/or simillar organizations?
Let’s get this straight:
So you say that you consider the whole ME to be terrorists? ( = hence you say also that I am a terrorist. Your problem, not mine.)
And you say that when the criminals that govern the USA are rewarded for their crimes by the US citizens in the form of getting an other 4 years to proceed with their lunaticism, that a situation where the whole ME would have nuclear weapons would not not be the best way to avoid these criminal lunatics to create even more havoc and instability in the region then they are doing right now?
The USA would not even be in Iraq if these lunatic criminals would have been sure of it that Hussein actually had a nuclear bomb. Same counts for Afghanistan.
Salaam. A
No, I didn’t say that. Nor did I ever call you a terrorist. I askd you a question. Who are you referring to as the lunatics on “the other side”? I read that to mean AQ and groups like them. But you were unlcear about who you actually meant, so I asked you for clarification.
The ME is most certainly full of Lunatics In Power.
Some of them are sheltered and supported under the US umbrella.
Others are considered to be outlaws in the US way of thinking that the US actually makes, rules, controls the world’s laws and hence has a right to act as if The US Way must be embraced by the rest of the globe.
Since there are among the Lunatics in Power in the ME quite a few who don’t see reason to act as if the US has that right, this makes them part of the non-sheltered by the US umbrella Lunatics on “the other side” of the popular Bush rethoric “you are with us or you are against us” and the other idiotic rethorical line “axis of evil”.
Personally I find - for example - quite a few among the Iranian Lunatics in Power truly deserving the label Lunatic. Yet since they are “on the other side” I would applaud it if they get The Bomb to scare the US lunatics (and the Israeli lunatics equally) off in case the Bush criminal gets re-elected. However, I don’t think they possibly can get it soon enough.
Salaam. A