JOHN KERRY FOR PRESIDENT
(caution: this endorsement, like the candidate it ensorses, could get long-winded)
George Bush likes to go out on the campaign stump and crack wise about John Kerry using the two-word phrase “global test” in the first Presidential debate. Surely he distorts Kerry’s meaning—in fact, he interprets it as the exact opposite of what Kerry meant—but that’s beside the point.
There is a test in the 2004 Presidential election. But it’s not the “global test”. Simply enough, it’s the “competence and seriousness” test, and that test must be passed BEFORE a candidate’s preferred set of policies can ever be taken seriously. With the glaring holes in the security of our homeland, the crass and reckless politicization of the 9/11 attacks, and certainly the bungling of the war in Iraq at every step, George Walker Bush does not pass that test, and is therefore not qualified to continue serving as our Commander in Chief.
Nearly every problem currently affecting our efforts in Iraq can be traced directly to the incompetent actions of the Bush administration. It is in Iraq where Bush’s incompetence has created a Perfect Storm, one that has taken many forms.
Oversimplification: Bush’s stubborn insistence on total “debaathification” created an instant 50%-plus unemployment rate in Iraq, fueling frustration and giving the insurgency a steady flow of potential recruits.
Politics trumping counter-terrorism: Bush asked Tommy Franks to work on plans for Iraq at the exact time that Osama bin Laden was hiding in Tora Bora, planning his unnecessarily-easy escape. The administration concluded long ago that Osama was there, and now George and Dick lie about that fact on the campaign trail. Three separate plans were drawn up to take out Zarqawi and his terrorist camp in eastern Iraq, but were nixed because the administration worried doing so would undermine their case for invading Iraq; now Zarqawi may be behind the murders of hundreds of American troops in the country.
Destruction of America’s moral authority: The Bush administration’s cavalier attitude toward the Geneva Conventions led directly to Pentagon policies that allowed widespread torture to take place at Abu Ghraib prison.
Lies: WMD. Forty-five minutes. Reconstituted. Operational ties. Prague. “Africa.” Mushroom cloud. Ahmed Chalabi and the stovepiping of intelligence. OSP. Do you know how many times Clinton, or even Gore, would have been impeached by now?
Arrogance: The administration thought it was more useful to whip up anti-“Old Europe” sentiments for domestic political purposes than to stick with UN negotiations for just a few more weeks, which could have yielded a coalition with tens of thousands of French and German troops. But at least Poland was not forgotten.
Just plain bad planning: The administration’s insistence on Rumsfeld’s “less is more” philosophy of troop levels in wartime led directly—directly—to the looting of nuclear energy sites and explosive caches like Al Qaqaa.
Any one of the above items would be grounds for sending Bush back to his livestock-free ranch in Crawford. The fact that all of the above apply can lead me to only one conclusion: Bush and his buddies are fundamentally unfit for command, and I don’t need to lie about their military records to say that.
Many of these same phenomena can be found in George Bush’s domestic record, which does not stack up well next to his predecessor, to say the least.
On the environment (sadly, the issue talked about least in the campaign proportional to its importance), Bush’s entire policy is a farce, with foxes guarding every conceivable henhouse imaginable, and kickbacks to enviro-rapists masked with Orwelian names like “Clear Skies” and “Healthy Forests”. Cap-and-trade schemes have only served to transfer higher levels of pollution often to the immediate vicinity of the less fortunate among us. His record is so bad that in 2003 he resorted to taking credit for increased salmon populations in commercial fish-farms as a positive plank in his environmental record. As Bill Maher put it, tomorrow you should “vote your lungs”. (attn Nader-2000 voters: The guy who would have been President wrote Earth in the Balance)
Bush’s economic policies are a case study in how conservative dogma consistently comes before sound policy in this administration. To him, a tax cut is a good thing, in and of itself, it is an end that is justified by any means, and a mechanism that can create any desired end. Especially if the tax cut is tilted heavily toward the richest 1-2%. All he has done with his tax cuts is to divide America further, put more financial strain on state governments, and put money into the pockets of millionaires and billionaires without creating jobs.
That’s another thing: jobs. The Bush administration will be the first to oversee a net job loss since that of Herbert Hoover. Bush sold his 2003 round of tax cuts (the ones on dividends, the most top-heavy tax cut pretty much in the history of modern democracy, and the only wartime tax cut in the history of, well, Earth) as a employment stimulus package, yet the job market has substantially hovered far below his own predictions.
Bush’s job record is so bad that in the third debate, when he struggled to verbally promote his policies on jobs, he told America’s unemployed that “when you think about it, the No Child Left Behind act is really a jobs bill”. I’ll let that stand for itself.
The rest of Bush’s domestic policy is nothing but the usual conservative deception we’ve come to expect. Chicken-Little talk on Social Security, a program that would be solvent for another 40 years if we did absolutely nothing, which we wont anyway. An energy policy written in the shadows by Enron executives and their buddies, with bogus claims that drilling in the Artic National Wildlife Refuge would make us more independent of Saudi oil, even though we wouldn’t see a drop of oil from there for years. A policy on science that puts the arrival at Republican-Jesus-approved conclusions above actual empirical study and evidence. Administration members who have the audacity to tell inconvenient truths are shown the door. The list goes on and on…
Electing John Kerry as our next President would arrest the anti-progress of the “Mayberry Machiavellis” in Bush’s administration. Kerry, who as a Senator voted for the 1993 deficit reduction package and the balancing of the budget, would restore fiscal sanity to our nation, no matter how many bloated, misleading statistics Bush can conjure about his voting record. Despite its hidden status in the campaign, Kerry will make protecting the natural environment a high priority, and will not have coal and lumber executives making decisions for us.
Kerry may be very well off, both on his own and through his marriage, yet his understanding of the needs of middle and working class Americans is genuine, and can be seen through his economic policies; he seeks to move the tax burden back away from the middle class, to which Bush has done his darnedest to shift it. As it was put in Gladiator, it is more important to be a man for the people than a man of the people. By comparison, Bush’s populism is a pageant of brush-clearing, photo-ops and bait-and-switch policies.
The area where John Kerry is most superior to Bush is as a Commander in Chief. He offers precisely what Bush lacks: seriousness and competence. Bush called Kerry’s Iraq strategy one of “retreat and defeat,” but the reality is that of the two candidates, John Kerry is the only one that has any chance in hell of achieving our goals in Iraq. It’s not that Kerry’s plan is radically different from Bush’s policy-wise, it’s that Kerry brings a much higher level of credibility with our traditional allies and others to the situation. He has a much better chance of securing cooperation, and perhaps troop commitments, from the very countries the President shunned in 2003. (These countries seek to hedge their bets in this election, and are therefore not yet endorsing sending troops) Bush’s mismanagement of the war may have destroyed our efforts in Iraq beyond repair, but at least Kerry gives us a chance.
If, however, Kerry is unsuccessful at improving the situation in Iraq, he is more likely than Bush to realize this, recognize a mistake when he sees it, and change course. There is a difference between steady leadership and stubborn leadership, and Kerry embodies the former. Kerry’s experience in Vietnam is pivotal, for it gave him the humility and the understanding necessary to view war as something more than a Pentagon-run video game.
Kerry will bring the same seriousness and competence to the effort to stop Al Qaeda from future terrorist attacks. He will be forceful and strong in the effort, no matter what Bush’s apologists say; consider that the Bush campaign has had to use John Kerry’s votes to cut the defense and intelligence budgets at the end of the Cold War—when pretty much everyone, Cheney and Porter Goss included, was voting that way—to paint him as soft on national security. It’s very telling.
Finally, while the Democratic Party is as energized and mobilized as it has ever been, it sometimes seems as if enthusiasm for Kerry himself doesn’t quite measure up. If such is the case—and I think this phenomenon is far overstated—then perhaps it is because mainstream Democrats have been spoiled by Bill Clinton. (Interestingly enough, Kerry will probably be a more liberal President than Bill) But more than that, it was always going to be this way: This election was always going to be, in large part, a referendum on Bush’s performance in his first term, and to say that this indicates a reluctance among Democrats to fully fall for Kerry is an invalid conclusion to draw.
So in short: Seriousness, competence, fiscal sanity, the restoration of America’s reputation around the world, and principled leadership. For all of the above, The Facts Machine endorses John Forbes Kerry for President of the United States.
(caution: this endorsement, like the candidate it ensorses, could get long-winded)
George Bush likes to go out on the campaign stump and crack wise about John Kerry using the two-word phrase “global test” in the first Presidential debate. Surely he distorts Kerry’s meaning—in fact, he interprets it as the exact opposite of what Kerry meant—but that’s beside the point.
There is a test in the 2004 Presidential election. But it’s not the “global test”. Simply enough, it’s the “competence and seriousness” test, and that test must be passed BEFORE a candidate’s preferred set of policies can ever be taken seriously. With the glaring holes in the security of our homeland, the crass and reckless politicization of the 9/11 attacks, and certainly the bungling of the war in Iraq at every step, George Walker Bush does not pass that test, and is therefore not qualified to continue serving as our Commander in Chief.
Nearly every problem currently affecting our efforts in Iraq can be traced directly to the incompetent actions of the Bush administration. It is in Iraq where Bush’s incompetence has created a Perfect Storm, one that has taken many forms.
Oversimplification: Bush’s stubborn insistence on total “debaathification” created an instant 50%-plus unemployment rate in Iraq, fueling frustration and giving the insurgency a steady flow of potential recruits.
Politics trumping counter-terrorism: Bush asked Tommy Franks to work on plans for Iraq at the exact time that Osama bin Laden was hiding in Tora Bora, planning his unnecessarily-easy escape. The administration concluded long ago that Osama was there, and now George and Dick lie about that fact on the campaign trail. Three separate plans were drawn up to take out Zarqawi and his terrorist camp in eastern Iraq, but were nixed because the administration worried doing so would undermine their case for invading Iraq; now Zarqawi may be behind the murders of hundreds of American troops in the country.
Destruction of America’s moral authority: The Bush administration’s cavalier attitude toward the Geneva Conventions led directly to Pentagon policies that allowed widespread torture to take place at Abu Ghraib prison.
Lies: WMD. Forty-five minutes. Reconstituted. Operational ties. Prague. “Africa.” Mushroom cloud. Ahmed Chalabi and the stovepiping of intelligence. OSP. Do you know how many times Clinton, or even Gore, would have been impeached by now?
Arrogance: The administration thought it was more useful to whip up anti-“Old Europe” sentiments for domestic political purposes than to stick with UN negotiations for just a few more weeks, which could have yielded a coalition with tens of thousands of French and German troops. But at least Poland was not forgotten.
Just plain bad planning: The administration’s insistence on Rumsfeld’s “less is more” philosophy of troop levels in wartime led directly—directly—to the looting of nuclear energy sites and explosive caches like Al Qaqaa.
Any one of the above items would be grounds for sending Bush back to his livestock-free ranch in Crawford. The fact that all of the above apply can lead me to only one conclusion: Bush and his buddies are fundamentally unfit for command, and I don’t need to lie about their military records to say that.
Many of these same phenomena can be found in George Bush’s domestic record, which does not stack up well next to his predecessor, to say the least.
On the environment (sadly, the issue talked about least in the campaign proportional to its importance), Bush’s entire policy is a farce, with foxes guarding every conceivable henhouse imaginable, and kickbacks to enviro-rapists masked with Orwelian names like “Clear Skies” and “Healthy Forests”. Cap-and-trade schemes have only served to transfer higher levels of pollution often to the immediate vicinity of the less fortunate among us. His record is so bad that in 2003 he resorted to taking credit for increased salmon populations in commercial fish-farms as a positive plank in his environmental record. As Bill Maher put it, tomorrow you should “vote your lungs”. (attn Nader-2000 voters: The guy who would have been President wrote Earth in the Balance)
Bush’s economic policies are a case study in how conservative dogma consistently comes before sound policy in this administration. To him, a tax cut is a good thing, in and of itself, it is an end that is justified by any means, and a mechanism that can create any desired end. Especially if the tax cut is tilted heavily toward the richest 1-2%. All he has done with his tax cuts is to divide America further, put more financial strain on state governments, and put money into the pockets of millionaires and billionaires without creating jobs.
That’s another thing: jobs. The Bush administration will be the first to oversee a net job loss since that of Herbert Hoover. Bush sold his 2003 round of tax cuts (the ones on dividends, the most top-heavy tax cut pretty much in the history of modern democracy, and the only wartime tax cut in the history of, well, Earth) as a employment stimulus package, yet the job market has substantially hovered far below his own predictions.
Bush’s job record is so bad that in the third debate, when he struggled to verbally promote his policies on jobs, he told America’s unemployed that “when you think about it, the No Child Left Behind act is really a jobs bill”. I’ll let that stand for itself.
The rest of Bush’s domestic policy is nothing but the usual conservative deception we’ve come to expect. Chicken-Little talk on Social Security, a program that would be solvent for another 40 years if we did absolutely nothing, which we wont anyway. An energy policy written in the shadows by Enron executives and their buddies, with bogus claims that drilling in the Artic National Wildlife Refuge would make us more independent of Saudi oil, even though we wouldn’t see a drop of oil from there for years. A policy on science that puts the arrival at Republican-Jesus-approved conclusions above actual empirical study and evidence. Administration members who have the audacity to tell inconvenient truths are shown the door. The list goes on and on…
Electing John Kerry as our next President would arrest the anti-progress of the “Mayberry Machiavellis” in Bush’s administration. Kerry, who as a Senator voted for the 1993 deficit reduction package and the balancing of the budget, would restore fiscal sanity to our nation, no matter how many bloated, misleading statistics Bush can conjure about his voting record. Despite its hidden status in the campaign, Kerry will make protecting the natural environment a high priority, and will not have coal and lumber executives making decisions for us.
Kerry may be very well off, both on his own and through his marriage, yet his understanding of the needs of middle and working class Americans is genuine, and can be seen through his economic policies; he seeks to move the tax burden back away from the middle class, to which Bush has done his darnedest to shift it. As it was put in Gladiator, it is more important to be a man for the people than a man of the people. By comparison, Bush’s populism is a pageant of brush-clearing, photo-ops and bait-and-switch policies.
The area where John Kerry is most superior to Bush is as a Commander in Chief. He offers precisely what Bush lacks: seriousness and competence. Bush called Kerry’s Iraq strategy one of “retreat and defeat,” but the reality is that of the two candidates, John Kerry is the only one that has any chance in hell of achieving our goals in Iraq. It’s not that Kerry’s plan is radically different from Bush’s policy-wise, it’s that Kerry brings a much higher level of credibility with our traditional allies and others to the situation. He has a much better chance of securing cooperation, and perhaps troop commitments, from the very countries the President shunned in 2003. (These countries seek to hedge their bets in this election, and are therefore not yet endorsing sending troops) Bush’s mismanagement of the war may have destroyed our efforts in Iraq beyond repair, but at least Kerry gives us a chance.
If, however, Kerry is unsuccessful at improving the situation in Iraq, he is more likely than Bush to realize this, recognize a mistake when he sees it, and change course. There is a difference between steady leadership and stubborn leadership, and Kerry embodies the former. Kerry’s experience in Vietnam is pivotal, for it gave him the humility and the understanding necessary to view war as something more than a Pentagon-run video game.
Kerry will bring the same seriousness and competence to the effort to stop Al Qaeda from future terrorist attacks. He will be forceful and strong in the effort, no matter what Bush’s apologists say; consider that the Bush campaign has had to use John Kerry’s votes to cut the defense and intelligence budgets at the end of the Cold War—when pretty much everyone, Cheney and Porter Goss included, was voting that way—to paint him as soft on national security. It’s very telling.
Finally, while the Democratic Party is as energized and mobilized as it has ever been, it sometimes seems as if enthusiasm for Kerry himself doesn’t quite measure up. If such is the case—and I think this phenomenon is far overstated—then perhaps it is because mainstream Democrats have been spoiled by Bill Clinton. (Interestingly enough, Kerry will probably be a more liberal President than Bill) But more than that, it was always going to be this way: This election was always going to be, in large part, a referendum on Bush’s performance in his first term, and to say that this indicates a reluctance among Democrats to fully fall for Kerry is an invalid conclusion to draw.
So in short: Seriousness, competence, fiscal sanity, the restoration of America’s reputation around the world, and principled leadership. For all of the above, The Facts Machine endorses John Forbes Kerry for President of the United States.
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