Thanks, Soz for that link. It helps put it all in perspective.
Quote:Mrs Heinz Kerry quickly apologised for her remarks.
"I had forgotten that Mrs Bush had worked as a school teacher and librarian, and there couldn't be a more important job than teaching our children," she said in a statement.
"As someone who has been both a full-time mom and full-time in workforce, I know we all have valuable experiences that shape who we are.
"I appreciate and honour Mrs Bush's service to the country as First Lady, and am sincerely sorry I had not remembered her important work in the past."
President Bush's advisors were quick to capitalise on Mrs Heinz Kerry's mistake.
Be sure to catch that last part. Political hay........that's all.
OCCOM BILL wrote:Heinz Kerry:
"Well, you know, I don't know Laura Bush. But she seems to be calm, and she has a sparkle in her eye, which is good. But I don't know that she's ever had a real job -- I mean, since she's been grown up. So her experience and her validation comes from important things, but different things."
This is what all the fury is about?
DeMint's utterly primitive remarks can be dealt with in just the one single sentence, immediately itself turned into a weapon to bash the other side with - like, "oh yeah thats wrong hope they say something against it but then you people got bad folks too and you would never say something about it" - but
this one here deserves paragraph after paragraph of outraged moral indignation?
Man, are these elections getting to you people or what.
Raising children is indeed "important things". It's real work. Teresa Heinz-Kerry knows - after all, she has raised three sons herself. It's also really different from working in a paid-job business environment - just like the latter is quite unlike anything like child-raising.
Thats the name of the game, nimh. Back and Forth. Its all irrelevant in the end. He said/She said bullshit. Its policy that matters. I would vote for a brick if it had good policy.
The Dems blast Bush over Iraq.
The Reps blast Kerry over something Theresa said about Laura.
The Dems blast Bush over heading into another draft.
The Reps blast Kerry over something he mentioned about Dick's daughter.
The Dems blast Bush over flu shots ...
Are you as intimidatedly impatient to find out what line of retort the Reps will choose next? Are we seeing a pattern here?
Truth be said, yesterday the MSNBC site was headlined something like "Bush calls Kerry's health care plan too expensive". Fair enough - I disagree, but at least they're talking a relevant point here. Vice versa, when Kerry blasted Bush on heading for a reinstated draft, I disagreed. I mean, if your own position on taxes depends on having told the debate audience, addressing them directly: "I promise you there won't be etc", then it's not so smart to blast your opponent for something he flat-out promised the audience he would never do. But at least it was about something. This stuff over Mary, Theresa, Dick and Laura is just soap-opera chatter, meant to distract people into the trivial.
You gotta wonder why they want to do that. I can't help the impression that Bush will talk about anything except his record as a President. Most all of the plans and actions he initiated as a President are at worst, deeply impopular and at best, received ambigously. His popularity almost entirely depends on what happened to him - 9/11 - and how he coped with that (according to most voters: well, at least inititially). Iraq, Medicare reform, the debt and deficit, environmental policy, even the tax cuts are valued ambiguously at best - he chose to accord the biggest tax cut in decades, but because of how he did it and whom he gave it to he is now about tied with Kerry in the polls when it comes to who's more trusted with tax policy. That's pretty damning, to squander a political opportunity like that.
Normally, a race like this is a referendum about the incumbent. How do you like his record? Do you agree or disagree - do you want more of it or do you want it to stop? That's how most incumbents campaign, too - except for Bush, who has spent almost all his campaign focusing the discussion on Kerry, making it a referendum on the challenger, instead. Why is that? GWB is hiding from his record, and he wants all of us to talk as much as possible about anything except his record.
Well, as they say, you can run, but ...
or will they get away with it?
They might, nimh. On another thread, I just posted part of DiIulio's letter to Suskind (from Esquire) once again, and was reminded of how astute were this religious conservative's observations of his time with this White House...
Quote:"there is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: complete lack of a policy apparatus. Besides the tax cut, which was cut and dried during the campaign, and the education bill, which was really a Ted Kennedy bill, the administration has not done much, either in absolute terms or in comparison to previous administrations at this stage, on domestic policy. What you've got is everything, and I mean everything, being run by the political arm. It's the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis. [They] consistently talked and acted as if the height of political sophistication consisted in reducing every issue to its simplest black-and-white terms for public consumption, then steering legislative initiatives or policy proposals as far right as possible." The former White House director confides, "I heard many, many staff discussions but not three meaningful, substantive policy discussions. There were no actual policy white papers on domestic issues. There were, truth be told, only a couple of people in the West Wing who worried at all about policy substance and analysis ... Every modern presidency moves on the fly, but on social policy and related issues, the lack of even basic policy knowledge, and the only casual interest in knowing more, was somewhat breathtaking: discussions by fairly senior people who meant Medicaid but were talking Medicare; near-instant shifts from discussing any actual policy pros and cons to discussing political communications, media strategy, et cetera ."
And yet, so many of the people we read here cannot make the leap past partisan membership, regardless of what this administration gets caught at doing. They fall into the dynamic of the personal attack and think it has meaning. They think it reflects an accurate picture of the superior character of the administration! Scary.
Kerry balsted Bush on heading for a reinstated draft? The only people to Propose a draft were Democrats. A Republican has never uttered the word except in response to the proposed legislation of Charles Rangle(D) New York. I kinda lost you after that. Youll have to simplify it for this Arizona redneck.
Remember, promises mean nothing in politics. Kerry promised not to raise taxes on people below 200k, but he also espoused alot of other stuff; 2,000,000,000,000 dollars worth. Two trillion dollars!!!! Where will it come from? The wealthy 1%? My prediction: Kerry will raise taxes, nothing will get done. Pandering is the name of the game.
Soap opera chatter... exactly.
Simplification -- Bush's current wars and his "Bush doctrine" strongly indicate that the already-overextended armed forces need more of a fresh infusion of troops than a volunteer army can provide.
Withraw troops from Germany and elsewhere. That 50,000+ more troops at least. Will North Korea attack South Korea if we withdraw troops from SK? Doubtful. They arent stupid.
Stakes seem too high for "doubtful" to be sufficient, stoplearning...
nimh wrote:OCCOM BILL wrote:Heinz Kerry:
"Well, you know, I don't know Laura Bush. But she seems to be calm, and she has a sparkle in her eye, which is good. But I don't know that she's ever had a real job -- I mean, since she's been grown up. So her experience and her validation comes from important things, but different things."
This is what all the fury is about?
Don't look at me, dude. I'm not on board for this one. No fury here. Heinz-Kerry, making an ass of herself, should surprise no one. It won't get 50 pages because she
admitted she was wrong and apologized for it.
May have been different if the Kerry campaign had said; "that was 27 years ago... Laura Bush's work history is 'fair game'". :wink:
Fortunately, they seem to have learned their lesson about that.
NK isn't really a troop issue, Soz. They're badly out numbered there anyway. Just tell the North Koreans if they cross that line, they'll have no homes to go back to, and if Bush is still in power, they'll believe it.
I have no idea what I'm talking about, I just really liked the idea of steering away soap opera chatter and towards something of substance. :-)
If as stoplearning says there are 50,000 troops there, that sounds significant. If it's not 50,000, withdrawing them won't make much of a difference.
If Kerry's in power, they'll believe it too.
sozobe wrote:Stakes seem too high for "doubtful" to be sufficient, stoplearning...
North Koreans arent quite the nuts that the terrorists are. North korea can be bought. China won't sacrifice themelves to protect NK. North Korea will show no agression because they are too small and contained. Any aggressive action on NK's part would be met with superior force. Iraq and the Middle East are different. They are religious nut without any regard for life ours or theirs. Its all Allah and 72 virgins to them.
thank you nimh for that quotation. I hadn't seen or heard it yet...........wow, what a bunch of commotion over that? Really..........let's move on now.
stoplearning wrote:
North Koreans arent quite the nuts that the terrorists are. North korea can be bought. China won't sacrifice themelves to protect NK. North Korea will show no agression because they are too small and contained. Any aggressive action on NK's part would be met with superior force. Iraq and the Middle East are different. They are religious nut without any regard for life ours or theirs. Its all Allah and 72 virgins to them.
On the contrary -
North Korea has amply demonstrated that they cannot reliably be bought. They took the money offered them by the Clinton Administration and boldly proclaimed their intent to ignore the agreement.
North Korea has only recently been contained. The neighbors of North Korea (including China, Japan, and South Korea) would like nothing better than to make this a U.S. problem, while they play nice with Kim Jong Il. Happily, the Bush administration has made it very clear that this is a regional problem, not the problem of the U.S.. If North Korea starts to misbehave, Japan can develop nuclear weapons, China can learn to live with both, and South Korea, with half again as many people as North Korea and an economy at least ten times larger, can learn to solve its own problem.
Pay no attention to the charlatans behind the curtain... generating political sleight-of-hand and slight-of-mouth.
" Mayberry Macchiavellis"... heh!
On the contrary -
North Korea has only recently been contained. The neighbors of North Korea (including China, Japan, and South Korea)would like nothing better than to make this a U.S. problem while they play nice with Kim Jong Il.[/quote]
The neighbors of North Korea would like to see them with nuclear weapons, well thats news to me.
Oh, and North Korea didn't withdraw itself from the program until Bush started invading countries without any semblance of a cause. Kim Jong Il must have gotten a little nervous, being included in the axis of evil and all, and decided to speed up the program, and develop a nuclear deterrent while the US was tied down in Iraq. A sound decision if you ask me.
Einherjar wrote:
The neighbors of North Korea would like to see them with nuclear weapons, well thats news to me.
I didn't say that. I said the neighbors of North Korea would prefer to lie low and let the United States solve the problem.
Einherjar wrote: Oh, and North Korea didn't withdraw itself from the program until Bush started invading countries without any semblance of a cause. Kim Jong Il must have gotten a little nervous, being included in the axis of evil and all, and decided to speed up the program, and develop a nuclear deterrent while the US was tied down in Iraq. A sound decision if you ask me.
I think you have your facts wrong. North Korea admitted it had NEVER complied with the agreement struck with the Clinton administration. Their violations began even as they were receiving payments from the previous administration.
