2004 Presidential Election

Hangdawg, what say you to this?Remember, Hamdi is an American citizen. This message has been edited by schrafinator, 10-17-2004 08:54 AM

This was on Nightline :What Happened in Kerry's Vietnam Battles? - ABC NewsIt is corroboration from the Vietnamese that Kerry's version of the battle where he earned his silver star is correct and that the swiftboat vets are just flat wrong and lying. Read the whole article. Print it out and show it to those who will not willingly look at it otherwise. This is a funny thing about truth: you can find other evidence to show what is true. Any bets the other film crew was the sinclair investigation hmmm?By contrast, when you think of profiles in courage, do you think of ... Bush in a little school chair?Kennedy sat in the Whitehouse night after night while the Cuban missile crisis was underway - a crisis that had nuclear warheads aimed at the Whitehouse on missiles that would take under 20 minutes to hit from World IQ, Definition of Cuban Missile Crisis (click for full article).I remember that time — 1962 — as I was in High School at the time. He did not inspire fear but courage, in a much more fearful time: the capacity of multiple major warheads aimed at multiple major US cities is way more deadly than the capability of any terrorist plot, and the political uncertainty also meant that it would be but a prelude to a much greater war and conflagration that could devastate the earth and civilization itself.Bush pales by comparison, to a rather jaundiced shade of sickly green. Bush’s behavior has been consistently one of running away, imho. He ran from Nam, he ran from the ANG and he ran from his job as commander in chief. It was his duty to take charge, NOT to sit in a chair.Anti-war protestors showed and continue to show more courage than Bush has shown. AND more patriotism.

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we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand RebelAAmerican.Zen[Deist
{{{Buddha walks off laughing with joy}}}

October 17, 2004
John Kerry for PresidentSenator John Kerry goes toward the election with a base that is built more on opposition to George W. Bush than loyalty to his own candidacy. But over the last year we have come to know Mr. Kerry as more than just an alternative to the status quo. We like what we've seen. He has qualities that could be the basis for a great chief executive, not just a modest improvement on the incumbent.We have been impressed with Mr. Kerry's wide knowledge and clear thinking - something that became more apparent once he was reined in by that two-minute debate light. He is blessedly willing to re-evaluate decisions when conditions change. And while Mr. Kerry's service in Vietnam was first over-promoted and then over-pilloried, his entire life has been devoted to public service, from the war to a series of elected offices. He strikes us, above all, as a man with a strong moral core.There is no denying that this race is mainly about Mr. Bush's disastrous tenure. Nearly four years ago, after the Supreme Court awarded him the presidency, Mr. Bush came into office amid popular expectation that he would acknowledge his lack of a mandate by sticking close to the center. Instead, he turned the government over to the radical right.Mr. Bush installed John Ashcroft, a favorite of the far right with a history of insensitivity to civil liberties, as attorney general. He sent the Senate one ideological, activist judicial nominee after another. He moved quickly to implement a far-reaching anti-choice agenda including censorship of government Web sites and a clampdown on embryonic stem cell research. He threw the government's weight against efforts by the University of Michigan to give minority students an edge in admission, as it did for students from rural areas or the offspring of alumni.When the nation fell into recession, the president remained fixated not on generating jobs but rather on fighting the right wing's war against taxing the wealthy. As a result, money that could have been used to strengthen Social Security evaporated, as did the chance to provide adequate funding for programs the president himself had backed. No Child Left Behind, his signature domestic program, imposed higher standards on local school systems without providing enough money to meet them.If Mr. Bush had wanted to make a mark on an issue on which Republicans and Democrats have long made common cause, he could have picked the environment. Christie Whitman, the former New Jersey governor chosen to run the Environmental Protection Agency, came from that bipartisan tradition. Yet she left after three years of futile struggle against the ideologues and industry lobbyists Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney had installed in every other important environmental post. The result has been a systematic weakening of regulatory safeguards across the entire spectrum of environmental issues, from clean air to wilderness protection.The president who lost the popular vote got a real mandate on Sept. 11, 2001. With the grieving country united behind him, Mr. Bush had an unparalleled opportunity to ask for almost any shared sacrifice. The only limit was his imagination.He asked for another tax cut and the war against Iraq.The president's refusal to drop his tax-cutting agenda when the nation was gearing up for war is perhaps the most shocking example of his inability to change his priorities in the face of drastically altered circumstances. Mr. Bush did not just starve the government of the money it needed for his own education initiative or the Medicare drug bill. He also made tax cuts a higher priority than doing what was needed for America's security; 90 percent of the cargo unloaded every day in the nation's ports still goes uninspected.Along with the invasion of Afghanistan, which had near unanimous international and domestic support, Mr. Bush and his attorney general put in place a strategy for a domestic antiterror war that had all the hallmarks of the administration's normal method of doing business: a Nixonian obsession with secrecy, disrespect for civil liberties and inept management.American citizens were detained for long periods without access to lawyers or family members. Immigrants were rounded up and forced to languish in what the Justice Department's own inspector general found were often "unduly harsh" conditions. Men captured in the Afghan war were held incommunicado with no right to challenge their confinement. The Justice Department became a cheerleader for skirting decades-old international laws and treaties forbidding the brutal treatment of prisoners taken during wartime.Mr. Ashcroft appeared on TV time and again to announce sensational arrests of people who turned out to be either innocent, harmless braggarts or extremely low-level sympathizers of Osama bin Laden who, while perhaps wishing to do something terrible, lacked the means. The Justice Department cannot claim one major successful terrorism prosecution, and has squandered much of the trust and patience the American people freely gave in 2001. Other nations, perceiving that the vast bulk of the prisoners held for so long at Guantnamo Bay came from the same line of ineffectual incompetents or unlucky innocents, and seeing the awful photographs from the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, were shocked that the nation that was supposed to be setting the world standard for human rights could behave that way.Like the tax cuts, Mr. Bush's obsession with Saddam Hussein seemed closer to zealotry than mere policy. He sold the war to the American people, and to Congress, as an antiterrorist campaign even though Iraq had no known working relationship with Al Qaeda. His most frightening allegation was that Saddam Hussein was close to getting nuclear weapons. It was based on two pieces of evidence. One was a story about attempts to purchase critical materials from Niger, and it was the product of rumor and forgery. The other evidence, the purchase of aluminum tubes that the administration said were meant for a nuclear centrifuge, was concocted by one low-level analyst and had been thoroughly debunked by administration investigators and international vetting. Top members of the administration knew this, but the selling went on anyway. None of the president's chief advisers have ever been held accountable for their misrepresentations to the American people or for their mismanagement of the war that followed.The international outrage over the American invasion is now joined by a sense of disdain for the incompetence of the effort. Moderate Arab leaders who have attempted to introduce a modicum of democracy are tainted by their connection to an administration that is now radioactive in the Muslim world. Heads of rogue states, including Iran and North Korea, have been taught decisively that the best protection against a pre-emptive American strike is to acquire nuclear weapons themselves.We have specific fears about what would happen in a second Bush term, particularly regarding the Supreme Court. The record so far gives us plenty of cause for worry. Thanks to Mr. Bush, Jay Bybee, the author of an infamous Justice Department memo justifying the use of torture as an interrogation technique, is now a federal appeals court judge. Another Bush selection, J. Leon Holmes, a federal judge in Arkansas, has written that wives must be subordinate to their husbands and compared abortion rights activists to Nazis.Mr. Bush remains enamored of tax cuts but he has never stopped Republican lawmakers from passing massive spending, even for projects he dislikes, like increased farm aid.If he wins re-election, domestic and foreign financial markets will know the fiscal recklessness will continue. Along with record trade imbalances, that increases the chances of a financial crisis, like an uncontrolled decline of the dollar, and higher long-term interest rates.The Bush White House has always given us the worst aspects of the American right without any of the advantages. We get the radical goals but not the efficient management. The Department of Education's handling of the No Child Left Behind Act has been heavily politicized and inept. The Department of Homeland Security is famous for its useless alerts and its inability to distribute antiterrorism aid according to actual threats. Without providing enough troops to properly secure Iraq, the administration has managed to so strain the resources of our armed forces that the nation is unprepared to respond to a crisis anywhere else in the world.Mr. Kerry has the capacity to do far, far better. He has a willingness - sorely missing in Washington these days - to reach across the aisle. We are relieved that he is a strong defender of civil rights, that he would remove unnecessary restrictions on stem cell research and that he understands the concept of separation of church and state. We appreciate his sensible plan to provide health coverage for most of the people who currently do without.Mr. Kerry has an aggressive and in some cases innovative package of ideas about energy, aimed at addressing global warming and oil dependency. He is a longtime advocate of deficit reduction. In the Senate, he worked with John McCain in restoring relations between the United States and Vietnam, and led investigations of the way the international financial system has been gamed to permit the laundering of drug and terror money. He has always understood that America's appropriate role in world affairs is as leader of a willing community of nations, not in my-way-or-the-highway domination.We look back on the past four years with hearts nearly breaking, both for the lives unnecessarily lost and for the opportunities so casually wasted. Time and again, history invited George W. Bush to play a heroic role, and time and again he chose the wrong course. We believe that with John Kerry as president, the nation will do better.Voting for president is a leap of faith. A candidate can explain his positions in minute detail and wind up governing with a hostile Congress that refuses to let him deliver. A disaster can upend the best-laid plans. All citizens can do is mix guesswork and hope, examining what the candidates have done in the past, their apparent priorities and their general character. It's on those three grounds that we enthusiastically endorse John Kerry for president.This message has been edited by schrafinator, 10-17-2004 09:19 AM

Would be a POTM if it were not a quotation from a newpaper. Still a fine endorsement of why Bush needs to go. I have to restrain my (liberal biased) self, to not have the admin mode spin the message off as its own topic.Couple of other semi-random thoughts:1) Are political advertisements exempt from the "Truth in Advertising Laws?" So it would seem. I don't think businesses could get away with the flawed type information being presented (by both sides).2) One of the recent Bush advertisements resurects the "Tax and spend liberal" line, against Kerry. While there may be substantial truth there, the counter-line would be that the Republicans are "Don't tax but still spend conservatives". Pay as you go vs. borrow from the future. Solid responsible economics vs. "voodoo economics".Love that "voodoo economics" term. Source: George H.W. Bush; Used against Ronald Reagan in the primary race back in 1980. The follow up phrase, when GHWB was asked about it after he became RR running mate - "God, I wish I had never said that".Moose

Thank you, Shraf, for providing me with an excellent example of what I meant by "using evdidence to support whatever the heck you want."I read this and felt bad for mr. Hamdi. I thought, how could anyone be so cruel to an innocent man who was minding his own business at college. From the article you would think they had just picked Mr. Hamdi up off the street and thrown him in jail for three years. And doubtless that's what anyone, perhaps even yourself, would believe had this article and others like it been the only source of information on Mr. Hamdi.However, I suspected there was more to the story than this. At the very least, I figured that there must be intelligence on this man that cannot be released for security reasons, so naturally we aren't getting the whole story. I also thought I remembered something about a man named Hamdi captured with the Taliban. I googled Hamdi. I saw many articles similar to this one equating Bush to a heartless cowardly tyrant with no regard for the constitution.Finally, I found some older articles that presented the whole story. Mr. Hamdi was attending a school in Saudi Arabia when in 2001 he decided to go to Afghanistan to attend a Taliban run Islamist terrorist training camp to "strengthen his resolve" and "get his head straight to live in a strict Islamic environment with other young men like himself,"(quote taken from: U.S. Releases Saudi-American It Had Captured in Afghanistan - The New York Times )Mr. Hamdi was captured along side other taliban who were killing our troops. Mr. Hamdi was a radical muslim and very likely a traitor. Mr. Hamdi is lucky to be alive. The only reason he is alive is because he was never actually seen shooting anyone and because he was lucky enough to survive when his taliban military unit was destroyed by our forces.This article is undeniably deceitful. It's author purposely left out half the story and included rhetoric painting a picture of Bush as a religious hypocrite and aimed at exciting people's hatred of Bush.What say you shraf? Did you know the whole story when you posted this, or were you duped by the author as were hundreds of other people who's memory is too short to remember these essential facts which I have recalled to your mind?Of course this information probably doesn't matter to you. I'm sure you trust the plea of innocence from the man who attended an Islamist taliban terrorist training camp who was found living with the same militant group that opposed us rather than the intelligence officers assigned to his case.And no matter how you slice it this says nothing of Bush's character, policy, or ability to lead. A leader is not consumed with the innumerable minutia that go on at the lowest level of government operation. He is supposed to be concerned with the big picture and only stick his nose in to an individual subordinate's business when something outrageous is brought to his attention. In this case Bush, or rather Powell working for Bush, did step in and have Hamdi released on the condition he goes back to Saudi Arabia and loses his citizenship, a fairly merciful treatment if you ask me. This I find so ironic considering America has the plushest prisons on the face of the planet... but ya know murderers are people too... whatever.I also find it ironic that Kerry is quoting scripture to win votes. During one of his speeches a while back he quoted John 3:16 several times, "For God so loved the world,..." only he cited it as John 16:3, which says, "They do these things because they do not know the Father or Me."What is this nation coming to that men like Kerry and Gore can be so close to becoming President?Anyway, I'm done. Have a good day.

DawgJust for the fun of it google 'Bush Boys'.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

Hangdawg, do you believe that it is OK for the government to indefinitely incarcerate an American citizen in solitary confinement for almost three years without:charging him with a crime
giving him access to any legal council
allowing access to any family member contact?Is this a precedent that you are comfortable with?If this happened to you, would it be OK?Let me be clear.I am not saying that Hamdi is a great guy, because he clearly is not.I am not saying, even, that he shouldn't have been captured at the time.What I am saying is that it is completely unacceptable in the supposed "most free country in the world" for us to be holding US citizens in this way for years at a time without charges or access to legal council.We are supposed to be setting an EXAMPLE for promoting human rights around the world, but instead we are sliding into a facist state.If your fear of terrorists have made you believe that the trampling of our precious civil rights is OK, then the terrorists have already won.This message has been edited by schrafinator, 10-17-2004 06:04 PM

I suppose we can be thankful FDR had less respect for French sensibilities about preemptive attacks (Vichy wasn't at war with the US at the time) than Kerry.Paisano,Can you explain what you believe Kerry’s position is on Preemptive Strike?

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This I find so ironic considering America has the plushest prisons on the face of the planet... but ya know murderers are people too... whatever.

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Did you know that the US has one quarter of the entire world's incarcerated people?Did you also know that the US has 5-10 times more people incarcerated as a percentage of our population compared to all other democracies?We LOVE to punish people by sending them to prison, but somehow, our violent crime rates are still much higher than other comparable industrialized, western democracies.

... and lose to someone like ... Bush?

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we are limited in our ability to understand
by our ability to understand RebelAAmerican.Zen[Deist
{{{Buddha walks off laughing with joy}}}

Just as I was hoping that you'd make more intelligent judgement on certain issues, you showed me how biased you are with your post there.The issue about Mr. Hamdi and others like him ain't how good or bad they are. The issue is that people have certain rights no matter what. Charles Mansion, Nazi war criminals, and many other evil people had the rights to legal council and trial even though they represent some of the worst criminal activities ever seen by human civilization. This is what our country is suppose to represent: EVERYBODY, not just the ones we like, not just the patriotic American, not just the typical good citizen, but EVERYBODY has certain rights that are not supposed to be taken away.If you really want to help your side, you really need to find better arguments than pointing out how much Mr. Hamdi deserved to have his rights taken away.

Don't forget that this isn't the first time America has adopted policies such as these - McArthy era, anyone? What pisses me off more is not the American Citizens held at Gauntanamo, but the UK ones. Not only does 'our Tony' back Bush to the hilt, devestating his personal support in our country and involving us in a war so unpopular that it bought out Britain's largest ever street protest but we don't even get decent treatment in return. Great job, Tony, great job.

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Paisano,

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Can you explain what you believe Kerry?s position is on ?Preemptive Strike??

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Don't hold your breath.

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Don't forget that this isn't the first time America has adopted policies such as these - McArthy era, anyone?

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The rounding up and imprisonment of Americans of Japanese descent during WW2, too.

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.. and lose to someone like ... Bush?

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...except that Bush lost to Gore.Of course, that's only if you count all of the votes.