Why is the President Lying ... again?

Spoken like a creationist, where constancy of dogma is more important than accuracy.Reasonable people, on the other hand, know that a good leader revises conclusions in the light of additional data. I'd rather have a leader who was right, as opposed to one who was "consistent". Consistency is bad when it means always "staying the course", even if you're about to drive off the cliff. Have fun on the way down. The rest of us are going to find a leader who's not afraid to change course when it's obvious we're on the wrong path.

Do you believe that, if the actions of the President had made things worse in America and the world, that it would be possible to ascertain those effects? Or do you believe that there's no objective way to determine if things are worse or better? Well, just off the top of my head - terrorism is getting worse, the economy hasn't recovered, more Americans than ever lack sufficient wages to meet their needs, our national security is compromised by a vast troop committment to an irrelevant war, the government has turned billions in surplus into billions in debt, the tax burden has been shifted from the rich to the middle class and the poor, government transparency and accountability is the least its ever been, and for the first time, the IRS is focused more on auditing people like you and me than in uncovering corporate tax cheats, which cost the government billions every year.Look, I'm no knee-jerk liberal. I voted Bush in 2000. But I've looked at the numbers, and it's pretty clear that Bush is taking us in a direction that I don't want to go; one that you would have to be very foolish indeed to suggest was a positive one for our country.Bush's record sucks. Maybe you've noticed that he hasn't been running on it, this election? Why do you think that might be? Relevancy, please? I didn't vote for Clinton. Somehow, Clinton's sexual pecadillos make Bush's behavior ok? I don't understand that logic.

Actually it hasn't, ever. You're thinking of socialism.Communism has never been implemented on any kind of national level. It's been successful, I am led to understand, on local levels.

C'mon, C. Even the State Department admits that terrorism around the world has increased. It's almost doubled since we went to war with Iraq. In the meantime, our air marshalls are poorly trained and screened, our docks are critical security holes, and we're doing nothing about tightening the borders. Job creation, tax revenue, spending indexes, interest rates, pretty much everything. I guess luxury item sales is up, but that's pretty much a function of the rich getting richer, not any kind of economic revival. Data from the US Census Bureau, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and others. Let me refresh your memory. It's only been "out of control" since this guy has been in office. Bush inherited a significant budget surplus, remember? I'm talking about everything. This administration has denied the most Freedom of Information Act requests since the act was, uh, enacted. There's been a stupendous restriction of government openness, ostensibly for security, but generally in regards to things that have nothing to do with terrorism or likely terror targets.Again, I'm not saying that the government needs to tell us literally everything, but keeping government accountable is the only way to keep government responsible. Did you know that almost 60% of corporations pay no income tax whatsoever? But even the IRS admits they're going after low-income families instead of corporate tax cheats:

quote:

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Published on Wednesday, August 6, 2003 by the Associated Press
Prove It: IRS Targets Low-Income Earners with Increased Scrutiny
by Mary Dalrymple

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WASHINGTON - The Internal Revenue Service said Tuesday that 25,000 low-income earners will be asked to bolster their tax returns with proof that they qualify for a tax credit designed to lift the working poor out of poverty.

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Yet:

quote:

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IRS Audits of Corporates Down
Marie Leone, CFO.com
April 15, 2003

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Tax prosecutions resulting from IRS investigations are about half of what they were 10 years ago, according to new research released yesterday by Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC). In 1993 the IRS was the lead agency for 1,064 tax prosecutions. By 2002 that number had shrunk to 512. The report notes that if current trends continue, the number of annual tax prosecutions for 2003 is likely to fall to 360the number of civil suits filed by the IRS dropped even further: from 2,172 in 1993 to 575 in 2002.

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I don't think we can afford to have Bush reform the tax code. And why do we need to bother? It worked just fine four years ago, when we had that huge surplus. What costs the government billions is not erroneously paid low-income credits; it's the billions in lost corporate revenue from not tracking down these big tax cheats.

I nodded like I was listening to something my wife was saying yesterday, but really I was reading web comics.As a direct result of my lie, thousands of people died in the middle east.Everybody chime in! How did you kill thousands of people in the middle east today?

How is that substantially different than most of their comics?

Well, Al-Queda doesn't draw any distinction between acts against American citizens and acts against our occupying soldiers, so why should we?When the Cole was bombed, didn't we consider that terrorism?

I don't see that this is anything but beside the point - Bush's actions have exposed more people to terrorism than before. It doesn't matter if they're in uniform or not.If Al-Queda shoots 100 people here instead of 50 there, does it matter that the 100 were soldiers but the 50 weren't? Do we say that there's 50 less victims of terror, as a result?That's a specious moral caluclus. Dead is dead. I don't see that it matters what counts as terror, or what doesn't - it's all a result of Bush's actions.

Maybe I don't understand your point, then. If we both agree that the activities of Al-Queda, etc., are on the increase, then what exactly is under discussion? I'm not particularly interested in addressing what "technically" constitutes terrorism or not, because that's not of interest to me, nor do I see it as relevant to the topic. I know, and those remarks aren't directed at you, but rather, serve to place my arguments in the context of the thread. Ok, I see that now, but that was the discussion I was having with Creationistal, and that's the discussion I'm interested in. I'm not interested in discussing what constitutes terror or not; I'm happy to use whatever definition Bush supporters care to use when I'm talking to them, or whatever definition you prefer when I'm talking to you.I'm sorry that I "strung you along" without realizing that we were having a discussion I wasn't interested in. I am, truly. If you feel I've wasted your time then I do apologize; it was purely through my own error and not malice.This message has been edited by crashfrog, 10-06-2004 11:27 AM