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

To: stockman_scott who wrote (20845)	6/22/2003 11:12:30 AM
From: Sully-	Respond to of 89467

<font size=4>.....there is the hypercharged tendency to believe the absolute worst about one's political opponents. In normal political debate, partisans routinely accuse each other of destroying the country through their misguided policies. But in the current liberal rhetoric it has become normal to raise the possibility that Republicans are deliberately destroying the country. "It's tempting to suggest that the Bush administration is failing to provide Iraq with functioning, efficient, reliable public services because it doesn't believe in functioning, reliable public services--doesn't believe they should exist, and doesn't believe that they can exist," writes Hendrik Hertzberg in the New Yorker. "The suspicion will not die that the administration turned to Iraq for relief from a sharp decline in its domestic political prospects," argue the editors of the American Prospect. In Harper's Thomas Frank calls the Bush budget "a blueprint for sabotage." He continues: "It seems equally likely that this budget document, in both its juvenile rhetorical tricks and its idiotic plans for the nation, is merely supposed to teach us a lesson in how badly government can misbehave." In this version of reality, Republicans are deviously effective. They have careful if evil plans for everything they do. And these sorts of charges have become so common we're inured to their horrendousness--that Bush sent thousands of people to their deaths so he could reap government contracts for Halliburton, that he mobilized hundreds of thousands of troops and spent tens of billions of dollars merely to help secure favorable oil deals for Exxon. Sometimes reading through this literature one gets the impression that while the United States is merely attempting to export Western style democracy to the Middle East, the people in the Middle East have successfully exported Middle Eastern-style conspiracy mongering to the United States.

To: stockman_scott who wrote (20845)	6/22/2003 11:16:08 AM
From: Sully-	Respond to of 89467

<font size=4>.....the Democratic mood is more pervasive, and potentially more self-destructive. Because in the post-9/11 era, moderate and independent voters do not see reality the way the Democrats do. Bush's approval ratings are at about 65 percent, and they have been far higher; most people do not see him as a malevolent force, or the figurehead atop a conspiracy of corporate moguls. Up to 80 percent of Americans supported the war in Iraq, and large majorities still approve of the effort, notwithstanding the absence so far of WMD stockpiles. They do not see that war as a secret neoconservative effort to expand American empire, or as a devious attempt to garner oil contracts. Democrats can continue to circulate real or artificial tales of Republican outrages, they can continue to dwell on their sour prognostications of doom, but there is little evidence that anxious voters are in the mood to hate, or that they are in the mood for a political civil war, or that they will respond favorably to whatever party spits the most venom. There is little evidence that moderate voters share the sense of powerlessness many Democrats feel, or that they buy the narrative of the past two and a half years that many Democrats take as the landscape of reality......

To: stockman_scott who wrote (20845)	6/22/2003 1:39:14 PM
From: Doug R	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 89467

Points made in that article go directly to the issue. I see you got 2 responses that are obvious and very weak attempts to sidestep and evade the issue. So...from that article: "Those of us who were saying before that the weapons of mass destruction claim was a false claim, that it was a bogus claim -- it wasn't because we never thought there could be any scrap of a weapon. There still could be. There may well be some scraps of some left-over weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. I'll say that right now just as I said it throughout the run-up to the war. But what we do know is there was nothing that was a viable strategic threat to the United States. That was a lie. That there were viable weapons was a lie. And the notion that we were right and they were wrong has not yet reached a level of outrage in the U.S. press, or among the U.S. public, it seems, in anywhere close to the level of outrage that it has sparked in the U.K. It wasn't only the American people who were lied to by our president. But it is the whole world that was led down the primrose path of lies and deceit by this administration, claiming evidence that they simply did not have. We don't know yet, we may never know, whether the evidence was simply ignored, made up or cooked. What we do know is they never had the evidence they claimed to have. We never had to go to war. The question is, are we going to be in a position in this country to hold our government responsible for those violations of international law as much as we hold it responsible for the violations of U.S. law? All of those things are important. If we allow our government to get away with this power grab, both domestically and internationally, we are setting the stage for a far graver loss of democracy, both in our country and around the world, than anything we have seen so far."