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

To: KLP who wrote (467244)	9/30/2003 12:17:15 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 769667

Clark vs. Bush ______________________________________ Imagine Bush, the warrior president, addressing the delegates at the Republican convention in New York in September 2004, saying that on behalf of the American people, he has fought terrorists at home and abroad, claiming that he won two wars against states that sponsor terrorism, claiming that because of his efforts, the American people are safer than they were three years ago and that - and here he finds the resonating Dubyan chord - "there is sunshine ahead." Then he stops and, reverting back to himself, says, "Now tell me. What Democrat can go up against that?" Answer: the Democrat who can ask George Bush questions he doesn't want to hear, questions he's afraid of. The Democrat who has been trained to ask those questions. The Democrat who has made asking those questions a way of life. On August 21, 2003 on CNBC's "Scarborough Country," Howard Fineman, editor and chief of Newsweek, said Bush's decision to go Iraq my be his undoing and "Wesley Clark is in." "The retired general and Rhodes Scholar increasingly looks like a seer for his pre-war comments. Go back and read what he had to say in the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq. (Any of the Clark for President grassroots Web sites will do.) Clark, who was leaning toward running in any case, almost certainly can't now resist the chance to say "I told you so." And, more than any other possible Democratic candidate (with the exception of John Kerry), Clark could brush off the soft-on-defense rhetoric that GOP oppo experts are preparing to throw at the Democratic Party." One is from the meritocracy, one from the aristocracy; one served, and one found ways not to; one worked in government all his life and, despite the inevitable frustrations, ultimately believed it worth fighting and dying for, while the other's proper dream of government is to make it beholden to business and religion. They are polar opposites in nearly all ways, except one: They have both brought the overwhelming force of the United States armed forces to bear. Indeed, although the general can go into any fight with Bush claiming to have done what Bush has done, Bush can claim to have done what the general has done, in spades. What is the difference between the two men, then, in matters of war? The answer is that the Bush administration has liberated war from the yoke of NATO, the UN, and international alliances; the general, though constrained by that yoke when he was Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, prefers it to the alternative: war unleashed, war unbound, war that becomes too easy to fight and to tolerate and to rely on. "We read your book," a Bush administration official told him once. "No one is going to tell us where we can or can't bomb." To the general's mind, however, the difficulty of allowing NATO ministers to tell you where to bomb is offset by the power and legitimacy that international support confers. What is galvanic about the prospect of an electoral contest between the general and the president is that it becomes a referendum on the future of war and-since we are going to be at war for the foreseeable future-a referendum on the future of this country. The importance of having served in the military has much less to do with the courage required for combat than it does with the courage required for full accountability. President Bush was the Commander in Chief during the greatest security failure in this nation's history. He has not had the courage to be held accountable and indeed has done his best to prevent even a review of what happened on that day. And yet he wears a flight suit with COMMANDER IN CHIEF on the front and claims prestige as a warrior president? It is something no soldier could countenance. And it makes him vulnerable to a candidate in whom the value of accountability is ingrained and for whom the question the Commander in Chief doesn't want to hear-the question of what he knew about 9/11 before 9/11 even happened-is the question that must be asked as a matter of military honor. Portions of this composition were taken from The General by Tom Junod (Esquire Magazine - August Issue) studentsforclark.com