Even though cutting off your nose to spite your face is childish, un productive and stoopid...it wil be alnmost worth Bush until 2008 to see what his worshipers like McGentrix feel like when their God starts doing things that screw them up badly as well.
I've had the same thought, Bi, for a long time. But as time has gone by it's been interesting to note real energy among the non-Bushies, probably less (though growing) among Dems than among the genuine conservatives, the constitutionalists and libertarians who believed Bush and now recognize him as a consistent liar. They are definitely armed for bear. Oh, oops, excuse me, NOT POLAR BEAR! Perhaps I should say that they plan to beat around the bushes... I love listening to this opposition because these guys are compulsive, regular VOTERS and because they're saying, "And we thought Clinton was bad!!"
I should have added that on the radio this morning one of the Christian right talk show hosts who has turned against Bush has a new campaign referring to Bush as "The Satan," going into a diatribe about how Christ warned against Satan coming back looking like a christian. Hope that thought catches on...
Found the following in my local paper as an op-ed:
America's nightmare: is Iraq the new Vietnam?
June 18 2003
Come election time, Bush may have to justify the continuing deaths of US troops, writes Gwynne Dyer.
When US president John F. Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, American military deaths in Vietnam had just passed 50. At the present loss rate, US military deaths in Iraq since the war "ended" two months ago will pass that total before the end of June. Is this the start of an anti-American guerilla war in Iraq?
Not yet, but it isn't looking good. In the early days a lot of American soldiers' deaths were due to vehicle accidents and the like, but recently most US casualties have been caused by Iraqi resistance fighters, and they aren't just sniping at isolated checkpoints. They are ambushing US tank patrols with rocket-propelled grenades, making mortar attacks on command posts - even shooting down a helicopter.
So is Iraq the new Vietnam? Maybe, but one big difference is that so far US casualties are concentrated in the so-called "Sunni triangle" extending north and west from Baghdad, where Saddam Hussein's ruling Baath Party had the deepest roots. Sunni Muslims account for only about 20 per cent of Iraq's population. American deaths in this region have been running at five a week, which is bad but perhaps not unbearable.
Run that average forwards for 16 months, and George Bush would have a further 350 American combat deaths to account for at next year's US presidential election.
That would be awkward, but he might get away with it if he could persuade Americans that it was all part of the "war on terrorism". The bad news for Bush is that the fighting may well worsen in the "Sunni triangle" - and that the Shiite majority may start resisting the occupation too.
During the next three months, Iraq is too hot even for the Iraqis, but in much of the American-occupied zone there is still not reliable water or other public services. US viceroy Paul Bremer disbanded the entire Iraqi army last month with one month's severance pay, ensuring that many tens of thousands of experienced officers and NCOs, most of them Sunni Muslims, will have nothing to do this summer but nurse their resentment.
By last Saturday the two-week gun amnesty ended and every Iraqi possessing a gun without a permit can be arrested - but all rural Iraqis own guns, and by now, thanks to the rampant insecurity, so do three-quarters of urban Iraqi households.
Add to the mix an occupation force that is still starved of troops by Pentagon policy, and nervous American soldiers who use massive firepower whenever they feel threatened, and it may be a very long, hot summer.
By the end of it, Sunnis and US troops could be in the sort of worsening confrontation that has no exit - and it is a delusion to imagine that the Shiite majority are America's allies. They are waiting to see if they can win political power without fighting the US, but if they conclude that the Pentagon is determined to impose its pet Iraqi exiles on the country then they will fight too.
Iraq is not bound to become America's second Vietnam, but it is drifting rapidly that way.
This was always possible, given the vast gulf between Washington's declared motives for the invasion and what most Iraqis think America's real motives are, but it has been made more likely by the monumental incompetence of the postwar administration of Iraq.
Two months after his catastrophic Gulf War defeat in 1991, Saddam had done more to restore public order and public services in Iraq than the US occupation regime has achieved so far. The Shiites are still holding their fire, but it's hardly surprising that the Baathists, members of a communist-style organisation suited to guerilla warfare, are resurfacing in the Sunni parts of the country. Which explains what's happening now in the Baghdad suburb of Mansoor, where American missiles struck a restaurant where US intelligence thought Saddam was eating on the next-to-last night of the war. From that night until last week, long after the neighbourhood's families had retrieved the bodies of their dead, the site went unvisited and unguarded by US troops.
Is Saddam dead? Who cares?
But now the site is sealed off and American investigators are digging frantically in the rubble, hoping to find evidence that Saddam is really dead. As though that would change anything.
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based journalist, author and filmmaker.
MamaJ, good stuff, thanks.
maxsdadeo wrote:Quote:And he is never in situations where he has to answer unscripted, or unprotected by a phalanx to those paid to think for him
Name one politician who holds a federal office that differs from this.
Just one.
Jesus, Max- Are you really gonna try to take the position that Bush could carry off an unrehearsed debate? You really think the lack of press conferences and the absence of critical thought evident in his words means nothing?
Why, I'm shocked and a little bit honored that you would seek to flesh out my opinion on this, and taking advantage of the opportunity, I'll help you out.
It doesn't matter one bit.
The modern presidency is a composite and requires a myriad of different qualities.
Ever since TV, the ability to smile, look into the camera and talk pretty has been blown way out of proportion in importance in the mind of a lot of Americans (is that a hook I see coming out of YOUR mouth?) as it relates to the office of President.
No, Bush would be no ones choice for contemporaneous speaking engagements.
His ability to draw upon the knowledge and expertise of others to decide sophisticated and complex answers to endless questions is impossible to capture in a sound bite.
If he is re-elected, it will be for his success at that, not his eloqution skills.
Thanks for asking.
Max, Dubya is just as much a 'charismatic' front cover for neo-fascist politics as Ronald Reagan was. Both times George HW Bush was in charge.
And he ain't no laughing matter, I'm afraid.
max you confuse the ability to draw on the expertise and knowledge of others with having others do all the work because you don't know how and were never meant to in the first place, IMO.
It is certain that the Shrub has no elocution upon which to draw . . . if he is re-elected, it will have been the result of a triumph of scripted appeals to emotion over logic . . .
It could also be that people who lean to the left are a minority in America.
Gosh, it could be McG has found the reason why over half of American voters didn't vote for Bush... (?)
Oh! Right! That's why there is a republican majority in both houses of Congress...
Darn those details, McGentrix!
Sheesh -- even the Dems in Congress are behaving like Republicans these days and not getting respect even from their own party. Be that as it may, political analysts on both sides believe this will be a tight election which is why Bush is raising so much money. "Because the country is, at best, evenly divided." Worth some close attention...
As I've said a million times Bush has been successful because he is the QVC network president. America is too lazy to investigate and think about issues and the news when it is so easy to get it from Toby Keith, Fox Babes with big tits, frothing screamers like Bill O'Reilly and Rush limbaugh who appear to be the super tough guys that American men want to be. Wrap it up in red white and blue bunting and sell it.
A couple of things I've heard in my life that came from just regular people that I've never forgotten.
"If you put a stripe on a turd, everyone will want one. " Pat decuzzi, just a regular guy I once knew.
"Don't try to talk smart to people Steve, they're not paying attention. The smart people are at the library."
Stanley tesler successful businessman and nightclub owner in Fayetteville NC
To think an entire administration is in the process of bringing down the mightiest nation on earth by using this simple shithouse philosophy.
To think that over 100 million people have bought into it.
"'Don't try to talk smart to people Steve, they're not paying attention. The smart people are at the library.'
Stanley tesler successful businessman and nightclub owner in Fayetteville NC"
Tell your friend Stanley (who probably knows this already!) that he's right but there's an update. Smart people seem to be spending much of their time discussing, coalescing, contributing and acting, thanks to the internet. As one of those who is active in the rapidly growing membership of MoveOn as well as a political campaign, I'd like to note that smart people are developing some brawn in addition to their brains! Tuning in, not dropping out...
The conservatives are beneficiaries of an unusual amalgam.
There seems to be a core of true conservatives -- perhaps 10% of the voting population. Their ranks are fleshed out by a fairly substantial group of hardcore redneck, hate-mongering, reactionary slime -- and a significant cadre of religious conservatives who, although most of the conservative agenda is seriously at odds with their basic tenets, vote that way because of the single issue of abortion rights.
American conservatism carries the day almost by accident.
MY GUESS: The real majority of Americans lean neither right nor left -- but prefer a neutural central position.
Luckily, as an iconoclast, I am not part of the left, the right -- nor the center.
