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Politics : Don't Blame Me, I Voted For Kerry -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: American Spirit who wrote (45847)	8/31/2004 8:14:59 AM
From: JeffA	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 81568

ROTFLMAO!! By electing Kerry and letting him do his magic So THAT is what Kerry is basing his platform on!! MAGIC! AS, you are a piece of work.

To: American Spirit who wrote (45847)	8/31/2004 8:59:40 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 81568

Human Cost of Iraq War Erodes Support for Bush ___________________________ by Ron Fournier Published on Monday, August 30, 2004 by the Associated Press NEW YORK -- War is hell on a presidency. And it plays havoc with presidential campaigns. President Bush led the nation through the Sept. 11 attacks, against the Taliban and into Iraq -- three defining moments that have brought his political fortunes full circle to the same middling job approval rating he held Sept. 10, 2001. At the opening of his nominating convention, supporters can't help but wonder how much stronger Bush would be politically had he kept the war on terrorism out of Iraq. "War is hard," Bush adviser Karen Hughes says. "Even when it's right, it's difficult. It takes a political toll." The numbers show it: By a 3-to-1 margin, people think the war in Iraq increased rather than decreased the threat of terrorism. Six in 10 say Bush does not have a clear plan for bringing the Iraq war to a successful resolution. A total of 969 U.S. Military members have died in Iraq, including 831 since Bush stood before a "Mission Accomplished" sign and declared an end to major combat on May 1, 2003. Nearly 40 percent of the dead soldiers came from political battleground states. In the 20 states where Bush and his rival, Sen. John Kerry, focus their time and money, each death has been a dominant story in the local news media. In the three most critical states to the president's re-election bid -- Pennsylvania, Florida and Ohio -- 128 service members have died in Iraq, or about 13 percent of the total. "I'm just not sure I can trust him anymore," said Chris Flaig, a Philadelphia rental car agency worker who voted for Bush in 2000. Flaig says he knows two soldiers in Iraq and is friends with somebody who knew a slain soldier. Such few degrees-of-separation stories come up in nearly any conversation with swing voters such as Flaig. "This war colors everything," he says. "It may tip my vote against him." But it may not, because like many voters, Flaig says he's unimpressed with Kerry's stand on Iraq. He doesn't understand it because the Democrat hasn't always been consistent. Kerry, a four-term Massachusetts senator, voted against the 1991 Persian Gulf War led by Bush's father. In the late 1990s, he favored the ouster of Saddam Hussein, citing evidence that the Iraqi dictator had weapons of mass destruction. Gearing up for a presidential run, Kerry voted in 2002 to give Bush the authority to invade Iraq, when about 60 percent of the public supported the president's job performance, the war on terrorism was politically popular and Democrats didn't want to look weak on defense. As the invasion approached, Kerry accused Bush of rushing to war without the backing of allies. Advisers said he felt political pressure from rival Howard Dean, who had tapped a deep vein of antiwar sentiment in the Democratic Party. Months later, at the height of his primary fight against Dean, Kerry voted against an $87 billion aid package for Iraq and Afghanistan. At nearly every campaign stop, Bush tweaks Kerry for saying he voted for the funding bill before voting against it. "That's not the way they talk here in the Panhandle of Florida," Bush said Aug. 10. The Republican incumbent wants to raise doubts about Kerry's strength and credibility, particularly among voters who say they are open to persuasion. In Associated Press-Ipsos polling, two-thirds of persuadable voters disapprove of Bush's handling of Iraq. Yet, those same up-for-grabs voters are just as likely as other Americans to find Bush to be strong and honest. Although they concede Iraq has hurt Bush politically, his advisers say the war has focused voters on national security, an issue that favors Republicans and incumbents, rather than traditionally Democratic issues such as education and health care. In Pew Research Center polling, 51 percent of Americans approved of Bush's job performance just before the Sept. 11 attacks. The approval rating climbed to the 80s in the days after the attacks and during the war in Afghanistan. It was in the low 60s when Congress gave him approval to oust Saddam; the mid-50s just before the invasion; the mid-60s and 70s when the war began and Baghdad fell, then a steady slide as the death toll mounted. As he stands before a divided nation, accepting the Republican nomination four miles from ground zero, the president's job approval rating is where it was just before the attacks. About half the nation approves and about half doesn't. Both candidates have sustained collateral damage from the war. Bush now acknowledges that he miscalculated how fiercely insurgents would fight after the initial "catastrophic success" of U.S. troops. He could have heeded the words of his father, who pushed Saddam out of Kuwait in 1991 but decided against pushing toward Baghdad to oust the Iraqi leader. "Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land," the elder Bush wrote in a book published before his son became president. "It would have been a dramatically different -- and perhaps barren -- outcome." © 2004 Associated Press commondreams.org

To: American Spirit who wrote (45847)	8/31/2004 11:09:37 AM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 81568

Senator Kerry, Prepare for your Moment of Truth ________________________ by Roger K. Smith Published on Monday, August 30, 2004 by CommonDreams.org Memo to Senator John Kerry: whether you like it or not, the moment of truth in this campaign has arrived. You chose a flawed, phony script in Boston and beforehand. You left a glaring omission in the biography you presented to the electorate. Treating it as ballot-box poison, you forbade all of your champions on the Fleet Center podium to mention it, much less sing your praises for it. Now your worst enemies are forcing the issue to the limelight. This time you duck it only at your peril. You cannot obfuscate or equivocate any longer. It is time for you to admit, once and for all, that you were, and are, a Vietnam veteran who turned against the war. If you're worth the faith that we the people long to invest in you, you'll say it proudly, and remind us why that war was such a colossal crime. It is obvious to any person who has a passing regard for facts that those fellow Swift boat veterans who oppose you politically do not stand "for truth." We know the charges they have so far brought are scurrilous, specious and cruel, and their tactics straight from the Karl Rove playbook of dirty tricks. Yet the painful reality is, they have exploited the very large opening your efforts to bury your anti-war record created. For the Swift Boat group does have a serious point to make - and it's the one they haven't made yet. What these guys have against you, their real animus, has nothing to do with what you did in Vietnam, but what you did when you returned - your activism and testimony against the war. To these guys, you are "Hanoi John," a traitor. That is the heart of the issue. That is the charge you have ducked so far, and the one you need to answer. It's not about whether you shot yourself in the foot over there. It's about how you're shooting yourself in the foot now. Your anti-war stance of 1971 has become your greatest vulnerability, simply because you've been unwilling to embrace it. Yet for many of us who are familiar with your life story, it actually represents your greatest strength. Opposing that misbegotten war, putting on your uniform and telling the Senate why, required authentic, gutsy, true leadership. You have staked your candidacy on the claim that you can be trusted to guide the ship of state through dangerous waters. You cast this election, correctly, as a choice between a phony leader and a real leader. Yet by refusing to own up to this admittedly controversial example of your leadership, you have undermined your case. This is the most unkindest flip-flop of all. Fortunately, the Swift boat veterans are handing you a huge gift, if you will only perceive it as such - one last opportunity to demonstrate true leadership again. Remember that most of us still perceive the Vietnam war as the tragic colonial misadventure that it was. We need you to remind us, forcefully, of this truth our nation so painfully learned. And we need you to remind us that then and now, dissent is patriotic, not treasonous. This is true leadership - the right thing to do both morally and politically. I know I'm asking you to do something risky. And I know the reasons why you'll be tempted to duck the issue again - reasons relating less to the Vietnam war than to the Iraq war. But here as well, the traps that Rove and company have set for you are traps of your own making. I cringed to hear you refuse to rethink your vote for the Iraq war, to hear you say you would have voted yes even if the stream of lies coming from the White House had been exposed. You thought you were evading the trap this time, not taking the bait, denying them another chance to call you flip-flopper. But instead you were taking yourself, and all of us, deeper into the quagmire. Iraq is the reason you are afraid to answer the "Hanoi John" charges; Iraq is the reason you have tried to expunge 1971 from your biography. You know that the parallels between Vietnam and Iraq, while far from absolute, are considerable. You know we should not have gone into Iraq, and you know how hard it will be to get us out. And you know that ninety percent of the delegates in Boston, and the majority of the American public, now oppose this war. Yet you will not denounce it, you defend your vote to authorize it, and you promise only to try to persuade more allies to come aboard this sinking ship. You know these choices have alienated a crucial part of your base and done yourself out of what should be your strongest campaign issue. Your own personal Iraq quagmire is, in microcosm, the quagmire facing the nation as a whole. And we need you to steer yourself and all of us out of it in as swift a boat as you can command. It so happens that the way out of Iraq leads, once again, through Vietnam. That is the unenviable duty for which you have actually reported. It's also why you could be, should be, exactly the right leader for this historical moment - if only you would rise to the occasion and be the anti-war veteran that you are. When your views evolve as the truth slowly sets in, when you admit that you were wrong and plot a new direction to correct the error, that's not flip-flopping. That's courage. A much stronger and more mature courage than staying the course when it's a stupid course. We the people are ready for this message. In my view, this is the message that will lead to victory in November - not just victory, but victory with a mandate to bring meaningful change to our foreign policy and healing to our deeply troubled political culture. That's why the campaign bumpersticker on my car says: "How can you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?" The John Kerry who said those words is the John Kerry we need in the Oval Office. ___________________________ Roger K. Smith (rajakiml@yahoo.com) teaches journalism at the Roy H. Park School of Communication at Ithaca College. commondreams.org