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

To: Thehammer who wrote (478149)	10/19/2003 10:15:24 AM
From: PROLIFE	Respond to of 769667

DEAN'S FOREIGN POLICY FOLLY: Talk about preaching to the choir. Howard Dean had lunch with reporters and editors from the New York Times yesterday. In addition to drawing the wildly hyperbolic conclusion that President Bush is "setting the stage for the failure of America," Dean also expounded on the virtues of foreign policy. Here's the first key graf: President Bush, Dr. Dean said, is "particularly poorly suited" for foreign policy "because he has a black and white view of the world, and foreign policy depends on enormous understandings of nuances and trade-offs." There's little historical evidence to suggest that having a black and white view of the world makes any president "poorly suited" in matters of foreign policy. It worked pretty well for both Roosevelts, JFK, and especially Ronald Reagan. Furthermore, I'm not sure the American people feel a black and white world view is such a bad thing to have these days given the fact thousands of people around the world are plotting to kill us. And Dr. Dean, who has exactly zero experience in foreign policy matters, hasn't inspired any confidence by recently putting his foot in his mouth all the way up to the knee for not understanding the "nuances" of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Graf number two: "The most important criteria for whether you're going to be any good at foreign policy or not is judgment and patience, both of which are in short supply in this presidency." I suppose Dean is referring to President Bush's mad rush to war in Iraq. Regardless, if we've learned anything about Howard Dean over the past few months it's that he can be impatient, impertinent, and will occasionally lash out at his rivals with statements that eventually require an apology. In other words, judging him by his own criteria, Howard Dean as president would be a foreign policy failure. Finally, there is this: Dr. Dean refused to say how he would vote, were he in Congress, on the $87 billion financing proposal. "I'm not running for Congress, I'm running for president," he said. What does it say about Dean's leadership that when he's presented with a question on the single most important foreign policy issue facing the country today, he decides to take a pass? Why would Dean not be willing to say flat out that he'd support money for the reconstruction of Iraq and Afghanistan (not to mention our men and women in uniform), especially after he's on record saying this: "The greatest advance in American foreign policy in the last century was the Marshall Plan. Europe's 1,000-year history of nearly continuous war is instead today dominated by an economic union, which would not have been possible without the investment of billions of American taxpayers dollars. We have been paid back many times over in trade dollars, and more importantly, in American lives which have not been lost to yet another European war. Our long range foreign policy ought to embrace nation building, not run from it. The most successful countries are those with democracies bolstered by a strong middle class that embraces the full political and economic participation of women." Isn't this exactly what we're trying to accomplish in Iraq? And even if he didn't support the war itself, why would Howard Dean not jump at the chance to champion the values he's laid out as a central component of the foreign policy vision of his candidacy for president? Beats me. UNSTABLE SUPPORT: Sorry, but I couldn't resist putting up this quote I found while Googling for the last post. It comes from Dean supporter Becky Burgwin, explaining why she's all gung ho for the good doctor: "I thought, 'I wish we had somebody with some fire, some intelligence. Because these guys in this [Bush] administration, they're not just incompetent, they're sociopaths. I had gotten to the point where I had to go see someone because I was so depressed and so frightened by these guys. It was just eating me up. The kids were saying, 'Don't yell at the TV, Mom, it makes us all uncomfortable.' "What Howard Dean did for me is give me a voice. Here's someone who is as angry as I am, and then he was up there on the world stage saying these things." This, I'm afraid, goes a long way to redefining the term "lunatic fringe."