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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Rascal who wrote (4712)	8/17/2002 10:23:42 AM
From: surfbaron	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 89467

Hey wascal: the main diff is Bush knows these guests very well. and not one frikked up damnecrat spoke up about Sir Schlongmeisters guests.

To: Rascal who wrote (4712)	8/18/2002 2:41:37 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 89467

Junior Gets a Spanking By MAUREEN DOWD Columnist The New York Times 8/18/02 WASHINGTON — Oedipus, Shmoedipus. Why cite a Greek hero when we can cite the president's favorite British hero? In "Goldmember," Austin Powers has "Earn Daddy's Respect" on his To Do list. So the teary but still groovy spy confronts his prodigal father, played by Michael Caine. "Got an issue?" Daddy breezily responds. "Here's a tissue." Tissue issues between the two Bush presidents spilled into public view on Thursday when that most faithful family retainer, Brent Scowcroft, wrote a jaw-dropping op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal headlined "Don't Attack Saddam." Mr. Scowcroft gave the back of his hand to conservatives' strenuous attempts to link Saddam to 9/11. Bellicose Bushies have yet to offer a sustained and persuasive rationale for jumping Saddam, beyond yammering about how "evil" he is, as if he had a monopoly on that. In the Journal, Mr. Scowcroft, one of the team that drew that fateful line in the sand a decade ago, ticked off all the reasons why invading Iraq makes no sense: it would jeopardize, and maybe destroy, our global campaign against terrorism; it would unite the Arab world against us; it would require us to stay there forever; it would force Saddam to use the weapons against us or Israel. "Scowcroft is now more critical of Bush's foreign policy than Sandy Berger, which is mind-boggling," says Bill Kristol, a Bush I veteran who edits The Weekly Standard. No one who knows how close Mr. Scowcroft is to former President Bush — they wrote a foreign policy memoir so symbiotic they alternated writing paragraphs — believes he didn't check with Poppy first. Did 41 allow his old foreign policy valet to send a message to 43 that he could not bear to impart himself? The father is hypersensitive about meddling and reluctant to give advice. He doesn't want his pride to get in the way of his son's making up his own mind on what's right. "It's a very strange relationship," a former aide to the father says. "He's so careful about his son's prerogatives that I don't think he would tell him his own views." But Bush the elder must be fed up with being his son's political punching bag. On everything from taxes to Iraq, the son has tried to use his father's failures in the eyes of conservatives as a reverse playbook. It must be galling for Bush père to hear conservatives braying that the son has to finish the job in Iraq that the father wimped out on. His proudest legacy, after all, was painstakingly stitching together a global coalition to stand up for the principle that one country cannot simply invade another without provocation. Now the son may blow off the coalition so he can invade a country without provocation. Junior could also have made the case that Dad's tax increase, which got him into so much trouble, led to 10 years of prosperity. Instead he has philosophically joined the right-wingers who erroneously think that the tax increase caused a recession. But W. has spent his life running from his father's long shadow, trying to usurp Dad's preppy moderate Republicanism with good ol' boy conservative Republicanism. Poppy bequeathed his son, a foreign affairs neophyte, his own trusted Desert Storm team, with Dick Cheney as surrogate father. But Mr. Cheney brought in Don Rumsfeld, an old rival of Poppy's, and he was joined at the Pentagon by Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle. This group is far more conservative, unilateral, ideological and belligerent than the worldly realists: 41, Scowcroft, Colin Powell and James Baker. "The father and Scowcroft were about tying the coalition and the New World Order with a neat little bow," a Bush I official said. "Wolfowitz and Perle are: `We're the new sheriff in town. We'll go it alone.' " The Bush I moderates worry that the Bush II ideologues will use terrorism as an alibi for imperialism. Bush II thinks Bush I is trapped in self-justification. Mr. Kristol writes in the upcoming Weekly Standard that Mr. Scowcroft and Mr. Powell are "appeasers" who "hate the idea of a morally grounded foreign policy that seeks aggressively and unapologetically to advance American principles around the world." What does that make the old man? The Chamberlain of Kennebunkport? Who needs a war plan? We need family therapy. nytimes.com

To: Rascal who wrote (4712)	8/18/2002 3:15:47 AM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 89467

Wacko In Waco: The Brunch Bushians Drink The Kool-Aid By Arianna Huffington syndicated columnist Filed August 15, 2002 At the behest of their charismatic leader, the cult members gathered in Waco, a hot, dusty town on the flat, featureless central Texas plain. They had been summoned to hear an endless series of droning sermons from the leader himself and his fellow fanatics. Thunderously denouncing all doubters, all those who didn't believe as the cult members did, the speakers put forward a bizarre religious vision, one that no sane person could accept. As the hours passed, the group became more and more isolated from the real world until it was incapable of dealing with it. The only thing missing was Janet Reno and her flamethrower. George W. Bush’s economic forum ended with the steady whoosh of departing corporate jets instead of a fiery apocalypse. This time the conflagration wasn’t in Waco but on Wall Street where one airline declared bankruptcy, another threatened to if it didn't get what it wanted, and a third announced a massive restructuring with 7,000 lost jobs. In Washington, meanwhile, Alan Greenspan declined to embarrass his boss by lowering interest rates -- although the Fed did assess the current economic outlook in unusually gloomy terms. But none of these inconvenient facts intruded on the President's revival meeting in the Lone Star State where discouraging words from non-believers were kept to the barest minimum. And while the President may have acknowledged that our economy is "challenged," an understatement akin to saying that David Koresh was "a tad kooky", the hallelujah chorus that was determined to drown out facts with blind faith clearly won the day. Like the Branch Davidians, the Brunch Bushians found comfort by withdrawing from a world that was confusing, complicated, and just a little too unfriendly of late. Appropriately convened at the Old Time Christian Religion venue of Baylor University, the administration orchestrated a full-blown extravaganza complete with stirring words, a parade of icons, and even marching music by John Philip Sousa, designed to dazzle the gullible and win new converts. Reason was banished. No one mentioned, for example, the expanding budget deficit or the exploding trade deficit and no one dared bring up the heresy of reconsidering the Brunch Bushians’ disastrous tax cut. Au contraire. "We heard a lot of really challenging ideas today," Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill intoned after the forum. And his idea of a challenging idea? "We had several people in my session tell us that not only should we make the tax cuts permanent, but we ought to accelerate the ones that are delayed." And there was no need to pass the hat at this gathering of the faithful. The CEO congregants crowding the front pews had already given, and given, and given. The economic forum gained added significance from the fact that the President took precious time away from his month-long vacation - though it's not like he had to travel very far. No, this time the mountain of true believers came to Mohammed. The President registered his concern (Seven cabinet members! Hearing from ordinary people! Taking a whole half-day off from his vacation! Recovery must be just around the bend!) but the message that came through was more one of faith, increasingly desperate faith, that powerful and mysterious forces, the Gods of the free market, will eventually pull the Dow out of its nosedive. But while the Burning Bush preached to the choir at Baylor, an ominous rumbling was coming from outside. This time, it was not ATF sharpshooters and tanks, it’s those ordinary citizens the Brunch Bushians pretended to include in Waco. They keep losing jobs and losing their savings while their president keeps telling them that, despite the increasingly grim realities of their daily lives, they still gotta believe in the Bushians’ Holy Trinity: more tax cuts, less regulation, and more domestic energy exploration. Pass the Kool-Aid, pardner. ____________________________________________________ Arianna Huffington is a nationally syndicated columnist and author of eight books. Originally from Greece, she moved to England when she was sixteen and graduated from Cambridge University with a M.A. in Economics. At twenty-one she became President of the famed debating society, the Cambridge Union. ariannaonline.com

To: Rascal who wrote (4712)	8/20/2002 3:46:46 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 89467

Bigger Peace Corps, Paltry Effort By Mark Shahinian Editorial The Washington Post Tuesday, August 20, 2002 ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast -- President Bush has proposed doubling the size of the Peace Corps -- to help, he says, "spread the good story" of American values and ideas to the Muslim world. From my perspective as a Peace Corps volunteer in a Muslim village in Africa, the plan seems whimsical at best. Expanding the Peace Corps gives Bush a carrot to use with his big stick that is the war on terrorism. But it's a paltry effort to win over hearts and minds, when what we really need to do is fill the stomachs and pocketbooks of the developing world. Doubling the size of the $275 million, 7,000-volunteer Peace Corps wouldn't do much to alleviate the poverty and hopelessness that foster terrorism. For, in reality, the Peace Corps does more to make us Americans feel good about ourselves than it does to fight that poverty. Instead, we need to change the economic policies that I often find punishing the very villagers I am trying to help. I am posted in a Muslim village in Ivory Coast -- one of about 150 Peace Corps volunteers in this West African country. My fellow volunteers and I weigh babies, set up Internet terminals and build latrines. We make friends with villagers during our two-year stay and share our experiences when we go back home. But I, as a lone volunteer, and we as a nation have failed to help the people of my village and villages like it across Africa achieve the general prosperity that they see as the real promise of America. Take, for example, the now-infamous farm subsidy bill signed by Bush in May. U.S. cotton growers already receive $3.4 billion in annual subsidies, and the farm bill will tack on hundreds of millions more. Meanwhile, a typical farmer in my village earns the equivalent of $900 from the sale of his cotton -- that's most of his income for the year -- and he supports a family of eight with that. Any extra income would help send children to school and buy meat for the family. Instead, these farmers have to sell their cotton into a market depressed partly by overproduction in the United States. To help the family buy food, women here walk the eight miles to town carrying 60-pound sacks of charcoal on their heads. They sell the sacks for the equivalent of $2. Their children still die of diarrheal diseases not seen in the developed world for many years. I can weigh all the babies I want, but in the end I'm not going to make much difference if families here have to fight the U.S. Treasury and the subsidies it doles out to American farmers. No, I don't think this continued poverty will encourage people in my village to turn to terrorism. But the poverty does create an underdog complex, by which people think their country can't develop because they just don't have what it takes. The few villagers I have met who support Osama bin Laden say they do so because he fights for the underdog. People living in more violent cultures might well decide to take up the fight, bin Laden-style, despite having Peace Corps volunteers in their countries. Indeed, volunteers have served in Libya and Afghanistan. As for Bush's evangelical call to "spread the good story" of American values, the president is only making clear his ignorance of how Peace Corps volunteers operate. The fact is, people in my village are mostly sold on American values and culture. They get excited about multiparty elections, talk about the rule of law and watch Clint Eastwood westerns. And where we don't see eye to eye -- as on the local practice of polygamy -- I have been told by Peace Corps administrators (and I happen to agree) that it is not my role to impose American values. Expanding the Peace Corps is a nice gesture. But if that's the sort of carrot we're using alongside the very big stick of U.S. economic and military might, it isn't much of a meal. ____________________________________________________ The writer, who has worked as a journalist, is a Peace Corps volunteer. The views here are his own. © 2002 The Washington Post Company washingtonpost.com