Republican Chuck Hagel on Kerry: "He's bright, very articulate, tough . . . the complete package," said Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.), a Vietnam vet who is personally close to Kerry. "He's the most difficult opponent we can face in November."
Smearing Kerry is a joke. If you want to attack Kerry, why don't you try criticizing his policies? Like this from conservatives on Bush:
"If the Americans go in and overthrow Saddam Hussein and it's clean, he has nothing, I will apologize to the nation, and I will not trust the Bush Administration again , all right?" Bill O'Reilly, March 18, 2003, on ABC's "Good Morning America
The Right Has Begun Standing a Little Less Behind Bush
nytimes.com
From the above article:
Peggy Noonan, the Reagan speechwriter , had this to say on Sunday in opinionjournal.com about Mr. Bush's "Meet the Press" interview: "The president seemed tired, unsure and often bumbling. His answers were repetitive, and when he tried to clarify them he tended to make them worse."
George Will, the conservative columnist , wrote in his syndicated column on Sunday, "It is surreal for a Republican president to submit a budget to a Republican-controlled Congress and have Republican legislators vow to remove the `waste' that he has included and that they have hitherto funded."
Bush's Political Base Seems Restive, Anxious
story.news.yahoo.com
Quoting:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Some of George W. Bush's conservative political supporters are increasingly restive and anxious about the president's economic policies as well as his attempts to justify the war against Iraq (news - web sites).
Popular conservative television news anchor Bill O'Reilly , usually an outspoken Bush loyalist, said on Tuesday he was now skeptical about the Bush administration and apologized to viewers for supporting prewar claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
GWB ON MTP [John Derbyshire]
nationalreview.com
"Just got through watching the President on Meet the Press. I thought it was a pretty dismal performance. I'll be voting for GWB in November, but let's face it, the Great Communicator he ain't. The tongue-tied blather was
coming thick and fast."
And another:
RE: "MEET THE PRESS" [Rod Dreher]
"I'm afraid I have to side with Michael on the Bush interview. I kept wincing as the president bobbled his answers. Even when he gave what on paper is a decent enough answer, he looked nervous, stumbly and intellectually unsure. He did himself no favors with this interview. I know Bush is not known for being eloquent, but it did strike me that we should be able to expect better than this from the President of the United States, at least after three years in office."
New Republic:
tnr.com
quoting:
"One simple, perhaps nit-picky, point: To the question "Why ... would you allow ... this kind of deficit disaster?" the president replies, "Sure." Sure? I think I know what the president means. It's a verbal place-saver, a pause. But it's surely worth pointing out that I know of no one who can reply to an allegation that he is about to deny with an actual affirmative. "Did you kill your wife?" "Sure. I never touched her." Who talks this way?
Then the president uses the phrase "if Congress is wise with the people's money." But the point is that, in the last three years, the Congress has, by any measure, been grotesquely unwise with the people's money. And the president vetoed not a single spending measure. In fact, his own budgets exploded spending on both war and homeland security and every other government department, from Labor to Agriculture, before the pork-sniffers in Congress even got started. Then the president simply reiterates, and doesn't explain, something no one believes, which is that the deficit can be cut in half in five years--before, as even he would have to concede, it heads into the stratosphere.
So, in one response, we have a one-word answer that means the opposite of what it should; we have an irrelevance; and we have a pipe dream. And the president expects the people to trust him with their money? If your financial adviser came up with such an answer, after a huge drop in your personal savings and massive loans coming due in a few years, you'd fire him. Back to Bush:
"I agree with the assessment that we've got some long-term financial issues we must look at. And that's one reason I asked Congress to deal with Medicare. I strongly felt that, if we didn't have an element of competition, that if we weren't modern with the Medicare program, if we didn't incorporate what's called health savings accounts to encourage Americans to take more control over their health care decisions, we would have even a worse financial picture in the long run.
I believe Medicare is going to not only make the system work better for seniors, but it's going to help the fiscal situation of our long-term projection."
OK, let me put this gently here. Is he out of his mind? The minor reforms to Medicare are indeed welcome in providing more choice and some accountability in the program. But the major impact of his Medicare reform is literally trillions of dollars in new spending for the foreseeable future. He has enacted one of the biggest new entitlements since Richard Nixon; he has attached it to a population that is growing fast in numbers; and the entitlement is to products, prescription drugs, whose prices are rising faster than almost everything else in the economy. Despite all this, the president believes it will "help the fiscal situation of our long-term projection"? Who does he think he's kidding? It's like a man who earns $50,000 per year getting a mortgage for a $5 million house and bragging that he got a good interest rate. |
