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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jlallen who wrote (463045)	9/22/2003 5:25:25 PM
From: Thomas A Watson	Respond to of 769670

Mr. Allen, read this and I defy you to tell me why dems are not in a quagmire. Best of the Web Today - September 22, 2003 By JAMES TARANTO Being and Nothingness Last Thursday Democratic presidential candidate Wesley Clark said he "probably" would have voted in favor of the congressional resolution authorizing the liberation of Iraq. But on Friday, as the Associated Press reports, he said: "Let's make one thing real clear, I would never have voted for this war." So Clark is pro-war on Thursdays and antiwar on Fridays. And that's just in September. On Mondays in October, it turns out, he favors a rush to war. In the Oct. 14, 2002, issue of Time, Clark said the U.S. should "take the time to plan, organize and do the whole job the right way. This will only take a few more weeks, and it's important." Had President Bush followed Clark's advice, America and its allies would have liberated Iraq by Thanksgiving, not dawdled until the spring. Some, including the left-wing media watchdog group that styles itself Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, accuse Clark of being inconsistent. Clark's defenders will no doubt argue that this charge is unfair and smacks of religious bigotry. As Slate notes, Clark is Catholic and has a Jewish father. Is it "inconsistent" to eat meat on Thursday and fish on Friday, or to spend Saturday at the synagogue and Sunday watching football? Seriously, though, why is Clark's disordered thinking on Iraq big news to begin with? After all, in 1991 Bill Clinton took a similarly weaselly position on the Gulf War, saying: "I guess I would have voted with the majority if it was a close vote. But I agree with the arguments the minority made." Yet when Clinton ran for president, no one much cared. The difference is that George W. Bush, unlike his father, has somehow managed to become the dominant figure in the Democratic Party. The party's entire foreign-policy debate centers on an issue Congress resolved in the president's favor nearly a year ago. Clark and his fellow candidates are fighting over whether a vote to authorize war was a vote to wage war or just a bluff. The whole argument is over Bush's policies; the closest thing any Dem has to a policy for dealing with Iraq is the argument that the U.S. should bring in more international troops and money to support the reconstruction effort--which happens to be just what Bush is attempting to do. It's the same story on economic policy. The debate is all about the Bush tax cuts, the norm against which all the Dems measure their own positions. Some favor repealing them, while others want to repeal only parts of them. Every time they talk about it, they remind the voters that President Bush cut their taxes. Thanks, President Bush! To be sure, a few Democrats have their own positions largely independent of Bush. But they're all on the lunatic fringe. If the Democratic Party were a carnival, Al Sharpton would be the barker, and Bob Graham and Dennis Kucinich would be sideshow geeks. The other seven candidates would all be fun-house mirrors--only when you look at them, you see a distorted image not of yourself, but of George W. Bush. When was the last time you heard Dick Kerry or Howard Clark say anything that wasn't about Bush, his policies or his "lies"? Without Bush, these guys are nothing. Which means that if by some chance one of them were to defeat Bush next November, the incumbent would become an irrelevancy, rendering the victor a nullity. The implications of all this are worrying for Democrats. If Bush's opponents depend on Bush for their very existence, then to say that any of them can beat him is to say no one can beat him. Unless all this is a vast conspiracy to get Hillary to run, Bush's re-election is a logical certainty.