Crossroads of a nation-Why we need Bush to win

This guy is selling the same blather that Bush and his cronies are. And that is fear. There is a hell of a lot more at stake in this election than Iraq. Which I can only term as Bush's folly? Kerry will do just as well as Bush, no better than Bush regarding terrorism and Iraq. And a hell of a lot better on the economy, civil rights, health care and for the middle class and working America.

I see it from the other side. Right now the terrorists and Kim Jong IL's of the world might think that Bush is just a dangerous nut without mandate. If we re-elect him, come November 2nd, they will have to come to terms with the fact that he speaks for the unparalleled superpower that is the United States of America. That, must be a little scary, even for our allies. :wink:

The guy has one thing right.

This is an important election.

But everything else is pure ideology...and completely off the mark.

A vote for Bush is a vote in a decidedly wrong direction...the wrong direction Bush and company have already started treading.

I wish Kerry were a candidate who lit the fire of more people...but he is what he is...a thoughtful, intelligent, competent person...traits that put him in stark contrast to Bush.

I think Kerry is going to win...and I think that is the salvation of America. He more than likely will be a one term president, because the mess the incompetent Bush administration has made will be almost impossible for anyone to clean up...and we are in for lots of grief no matter if Jesus Christ were elected.

Why the nation should re-elect Bush ... Hmmm ... Gimme a chance; I'm thinking. Foreign policy (disaster). Nope, not that. Terrorism (disaster). Nope, not that. Education (disaster). Nope again. Economy (disaster). Ditto. Ya know what? There in't no good reason to vote for Bush. ELECT JOHN KERRY, PLEASE.

Any issues related to demestic policies, take a back seat for many people in this country, Democrats amoung them.. If you think there's fear involved, you are right. You Bush haters don't get it. We live in the most dangerous time of our lives and to say it's the ideology of just Bush supporters you are mistaken...

Our country used to stand for liberty, anywhere in the world for one reason. Fighting communism and terrorist regimes overseas is the only way we will keep our country safe. If we just said forget it, we would end up being the ONLY country left and they'd be knocking on our door in no time at all!!! Protecting us at home, always started by protecting those abroad.. This is lost in this new generation. They somehow idolize the "Vietnam war protesters". Not to say they didn't have a right, but with the help of John Kerry (who lied about the atrocities) it turned our military into something other that heroes. This is Kerry's legacy...........

I found that article laughable, expecially this line...


That line would apply to Bush, and it should read the next 100 years, because his first term has already covered the first 50.

John Kerry for President
by the Editors of THE NEW REPUBLIC

Post date 10.21.04 | Issue date 11.01.04

There was a time, in the aftermath of September 11, when this magazine liked what it heard from George W. Bush. He said America was at war--not merely with an organization, but with a totalitarian ideology. And he pledged to defeat Islamist totalitarianism the same way we defeated European totalitarianism, by spreading democracy. For a publication that has long believed in the marriage of liberalism and American power, this was the right analysis. And its correctness mattered more than the limitations of the man from which it came.

Three years later, it has become tragically clear that the two cannot be separated. The president's war on terrorism, which initially offered a striking contrast to his special interest-driven domestic agenda, has come to resemble it. The common thread is ideological certainty untroubled by empirical evidence, intellectual curiosity, or open debate. The ideology that guides this president's war on terrorism is more appealing than the corporate cronyism that guides his domestic policy. But it has been pursued with the same sectarian, thuggish, and ultimately self-defeating spirit. You cannot lead the world without listening to it. You cannot make the Middle East more democratic while making it more anti-American. You cannot make the United States more secure while using security as a partisan weapon. And you cannot demand accountable government abroad while undermining it at home.

And so a president who promised to make America safer by making the Muslim world more free has failed on both counts. This magazine has had its differences with John Kerry during his career and during this campaign. But he would be a far better president than George W. Bush.

In domestic policy, Bush has been Newt Gingrich without the candor. Like Gingrich, he envisions stripping away many of the welfare-state protections that shield economically vulnerable Americans from the vagaries of the free market (while insulating corporations ever more from those same forces). But, rather than explicitly opposing popular government programs, as Gingrich did, Bush has pursued a more duplicitous strategy: He is eviscerating the government's ability to pay for them. His tax cuts, while sold as short-term measures to revive the economy, actually represent long-term assaults on the progressive tax code. If allowed to fully take effect, they will substantially shift the tax burden from unearned wealth to income, dramatically increasing inequality. And they will produce what Bush's former Treasury secretary, Paul O'Neill, has privately called a "fiscal crisis"--a collapse in government revenue just as the baby-boom retirement sends Medicare and Social Security costs skyrocketing. This crisis will sap America's ability to wage the war on terrorism--since government will lack the funds to adequately safeguard homeland security or expand the military. It will create enormous pressure to eviscerate the government protections that guarantee poor and middle-class Americans even the meager economic security they enjoy today. And it will be entirely by design.

The tax cuts are typical of a president who cloaks a relentlessly ideological domestic agenda in moderate, problem-solving language--and gets away with it by distorting the facts. In 2001, Bush presented his policy on stem cells as a pragmatic compromise--in which research on preexisting stem-cell lines would be funded but research on new ones would not. But the supposed compromise was based on a falsehood. Bush vastly exaggerated the number of viable preexisting stem-cell lines, thus pretending he was facilitating the medical research most Americans support while actually crippling it in obeisance to his conservative Christian base.

On prescription drugs, the story is similar. With elderly Americans demanding that the government cover their prescription-drug costs, Bush endorsed a bill that administered such coverage not through Medicare but through the private sector in which his administration harbors a near-theological faith. Since private insurers had to be lured into the market with large subsidies, Bush's plan offered less coverage, at greater cost, than it would have under Medicare. But, when Medicare's chief actuary tried to estimate the bill's true cost, his superiors threatened to fire him. Only after the legislation passed did the Bush administration admit that it would cost $134 billion more than it had previously acknowledged.

By contrast, John Kerry has a record of fiscal honesty and responsibility that continues the tradition of Bill Clinton and Robert Rubin. Unlike most Democrats, he supported the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings deficit-reduction plan. Unlike most Republicans, he supported Clinton's 1993 deficit-reduction package. And, unlike President Bush, he supports the "pay as you go" rules that, in the 1990s, helped produce a budget surplus.

It is true that, in this campaign, Kerry has proposed more spending than his partial repeal of the Bush tax cut will fund. But he has also said that, if the repeal does not bring in enough revenue, he will scale back his proposals. In fact, one of the virtues of Kerry's health plan is that, unlike Clinton's, it can easily be broken down into modest reforms. Even if Kerry merely makes good on his pledge to dramatically expand Medicaid and schip, programs that offer health coverage to poor children and adults, he will have done more to help struggling Americans than Bush has in his four years.

In foreign policy, Kerry's record is less impressive. His vote against the 1991 Gulf war suggested a tendency to see all American military action through the distorting prism of Vietnam. And his behavior in the current Iraq debate has not been exemplary. To be fair, his position has been more consistent than his detractors give him credit for. Republicans mock him for "voting for the war" before opposing it. But Bush himself urged congressional authorization for war as a way to force U.N. inspectors back into Iraq and to disarm Saddam Hussein peacefully. It was reasonable to believe that only a credible U.S. threat of force would produce an intrusive new inspections regime (which it did). And Kerry is right that, if Bush had allowed those inspections to continue, they would have eventually revealed that Saddam lacked weapons of mass destruction and eviscerated the rationale for war.

Kerry's greater failure was his vote against the $87 billion supplemental to equip American troops and rebuild Iraq. He was right to support funding the supplemental by repealing part of the tax cut (particularly since Bush officials like Paul Wolfowitz had shamelessly suggested that the war would cost America virtually nothing). But, once that effort failed, he should have supported the legislation anyway, as Senator Joseph Biden did. Building "firehouses in Baghdad"--a notion Kerry has repeatedly mocked--is not only something we owe the Iraqi people, it stems from the fundamentally liberal premise that social development can help defeat fanaticism. Abandoning that principle under pressure from Howard Dean is the most disturbing thing Kerry has done in this campaign.

But Kerry's critics are wrong to cite his opposition to the Gulf war--and his criticism of the current Iraq war--as evidence of his supposed reluctance to forcefully wage the war on terrorism. It is conceivable that, in the coming years, the United States might need to launch military action against another Muslim regime (though, given how greatly Bush has overextended the military, it is hard to see how we would do so). But the war on terrorism is far more likely to require military action within states, to secure lawless areas that terrorists have exploited.

The Bush administration's misguided tendency to see Al Qaeda as the instrument of rogue governments made it more willing to use force against Iraq but less willing to use force in Afghanistan after the Taliban fell. Kerry, by contrast, seems inclined to use American power where it could genuinely damage Al Qaeda. Even during the Democratic primaries, he attacked the Bush administration for not sending U.S. troops into Tora Bora to destroy Al Qaeda and Taliban remnants in the waning days of the Afghan war. He has proposed doubling U.S. Special Forces for operations just like that. And he has proposed strengthening America's capacity to act--including even militarily--to prevent nuclear proliferation, an issue on which the Bush administration has proved astonishingly passive.

Kerry's apparent willingness to act within states is particularly important because the U.N.'s obsession with sovereignty renders it impotent in such circumstances. His support for the Kosovo war, waged without U.N. approval, is encouraging in this regard, as is his openness to using U.S. troops--presumably without the Security Council's blessing--in Darfur, Sudan. These encouraging signs counterbalance his worrying tendency to describe multilateralism--and U.N. support--as an end in itself rather than instrument of American power. If elected, this tension will likely be a theme of his presidency, as it was of Clinton's.

Critics also call Kerry a narrow realist uninterested in battling Al Qaeda in the realm of ideas. But he has suggested an ambitious effort to support democratic civil society in the Muslim world. And, while we don't know whether Kerry would actually carry out such a campaign, we know that Bush--for all his grand rhetoric--has not. The administration's Greater Middle East Initiative, supposedly its signature effort to promote democracy in the Muslim world, was gutted after protests from the very autocracies President Bush pledged to reform. And, while the Iraq war was supposed to inspire liberals throughout the region, it may be doing the opposite. Anti-Americanism has reached such toxic levels that dissidents in Muslim countries seem increasingly fearful of any association with the United States. This is the bitter fruit of an occupation conducted with such shocking arrogance and carelessness that it calls into question whether the Bush administration's pledge to turn Iraq into a model democracy was ever really sincere.

But the war against Islamist totalitarianism is not merely a struggle for Muslim minds; it is a struggle for American ones as well. In the weeks after September 11, Bush presided over a country more united--with more faith in its government--than at any other time in recent memory. He has squandered that unity and trust for the cheapest of reasons. His administration has used the war on terrorism as a bludgeon against congressional Democrats and has implied that its critics are aiding the enemy. And it has repeatedly misled the public--touting supposed evidence of Iraq's nuclear program that American intelligence analysts knew was highly dubious, rebuking General Eric Shinseki for telling the truth about how many troops it would take to occupy Iraq successfully, and firing Lawrence Lindsey for saying how much it would cost.

The result is a country bitterly divided, distrustful of its government, and weaker as a result. The next time an American president tries to use force in the war on terrorism, he will not merely lack the world's trust, he will lack much of the American people's as well. That may be Bush's most damning legacy of all. He has failed the challenge of these momentous times. John Kerry deserves a chance to do better.

thoughtful, intelligent, competent person


thoughtful:
Attentive; careful; exercising the judgment; having the mind directed to an object; as, thoughtful of gain; thoughtful in seeking truth.

in·tel·li·gent :
Showing sound judgment and rationality: an intelligent decision; an intelligent solution to the problem

com·pe·tent:
Able to distinguish right from wrong and to manage one's affairs.

Ok Kiddies shall we now use these 3 words in a referring to Mr Kerry?

1. Mr Kerry's decision to vote for use of force and not fund the soldiers he sent to war was?

How intelligent he is

2. John Kerry deciding to make himself an anti war candidate and a WAR hero, eventhough he wont realease his DD214, bashes people who did serve, and stabbed a knife into the back of those he served with and those serving now was?

How THOUGHTFUL of him



3. Flip flopping on issues to try and make everyone happy, in turn not knowing what he truly supports.

How competent of him

Everytime George Bush looked in his presidential "toolbox" all he saw was a big shiny hammer. He is a fool and he will be going down.

Latest effort on Bush's part -- Noah's Flood created the Grand Canyon. I mean honestly, folks, do you really want to support this administration?

So it will be different than last time how?

Bush was sitting pretty for Afghanistan, abroad and at home.

Iraq is where that changed.

Those who charge we oppose Bush out of hate misunderestimate our intent. Most could tolerate him if it were possible to embrace at least some of his policies. But he's left us with nothing. I supported him when he went into Afghanistan, although I would have prefered a better approach than the one taken. That was the closest I came to being able to support him. It all went away shortly thereafter.

Are you saying that last time this president didn't have the American people behind him? OH contrary to that, it was said that the polls gave Bush a 90% approval rate. Surely it was NOT from me though even *I* wanted to believe Bush at the beginning of his administration when he said he was compassionate, a uniter and would listen to us. Lord knows, he had no mandate -- NONE -- for what he has done.

As for the rest of the world... in the last debacle with which we are still firmly enmired, what Bush supporter would give a care as to the rest of the world? They don't mind going it alone so why care what other countries said? I don't believe that it has to be the USA against the world and I deeply resent being put in the position of, as an American, having to look like a bully. The world was sympathetic with us when we were attacked on 9/11/01. They were with us when we invaded Afghanistan... but the feelings of distrust became real when Bush & Co. decided to attack Iraq.

In the future, when Bush is gone, Americans will have a president who learns from the mistakes of the past, who realizes that plans MUST be made and adhered to with a good exit policy and a way to wage not just war, but peace. I look forward to a president who listens to and respects all his generals when they say that they need more troops. Not a president who gets rid of the generals who aren't "yes men."

And let me say, as the child of a military man, as the wife of a vet, and as the mother of a cadet, I am totally unable to see that any good has come from Bush's mishandling of the military service.

None of them should be stretched this thin. It is a ridiculous state to be put in and a crime to have the backdoor draft that's been instituted. Bush doesn't respect the military, despite his posturing; he isn't one of them, despite the hoopla; and he has denigrated the service record of a real member of the services. I am not alone in thinking this and there will be a reckoning from the blue states when this election is over.

Yes, honestly.

Kerry is a traitor to his Band of Brothers and should have been brought up on charges. He should have spent time in jail.

There will be a REAL draft is if Kerry gets elected. Nobody is going to want to serve under that man. He'll need the draft to fill the void.

_________________
He throws away someone else's medals.
He drives someone else's SUV.
He marries someone else's wife and
He inherits someone else's money.
Maybe someday he'll be president of someone else's country.

This poster is either very young or very misguided. If young, this post is perhaps understandable. If misguided, then a dangerous poison is seeping into our body politic.

The only dangerous poison is John Kerry.. TRAITOR! SHOULD BE IN JAIL!
How can anyone trust a man who cried for years about the threat of Saddam and changed his positions 10 times during his campaign? There will be no peace under Kerry, our "enemies" the terrorists know what a anti-war President he would be. After all he is a hero. The only problem is he was a hero to the Communist Vietnamese!

XENA -- DO you have anything else to say besides the poison you ooze? Why come to this forum with your agenda? Are you afraid that Bush isn't going to win... you should be. He is a disaster and more and more people learn that every day.

Yes Bill, and if Bush gets re-elected the rest of the world will know that America's drug problem and educational system is much worse than they had suspected.

The New Republic editorial says it all!