Why I will vote for John Kerry for President, By JOHN EISENHOWER
Recent developments indicate that the current Republican Party leadership has confused confident leadership with hubris and arrogance.
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Sen. Kerry, in whom I am willing to place my trust, has demonstrated that he is courageous, sober, competent, and concerned with fighting the dangers associated with the widening socio-economic gap in this country. I will vote for him enthusiastically.
New Republic’s Noam Scheiber says the “security mom” phenomenon is bunk, and he’s got a convincing set of numbers from public polls. He even gets CBS’s Kathy Frankovic to note that Bush’s lead among women in her post-convention poll, which fueled the “security mom” craze, was a short-lived… But what about the private polls of the candidates? They tend to be more expensive and elaborate than public polls–and the Kerry advisers quoted in this NYT piece (even Scheiber’s hero, fellow debunker Diane Feldman) don’t seem wildly confident that they aren’t losing more women than men.
Mickey, I thought you couldn’t rely on the NYT to get so much as a quote right, and you’re reading something like “doesn’t seem wildly confident that they aren’t….” into an NYT piece?
The Washington Times has a story about Kerry supposedly saying pre-emptive action in Iraq was ok in 1997:
During a 1997 debate on CNN’s “Crossfire,” Sen. John Kerry, now the Democratic presidential nominee, made the case for launching a pre-emptive attack against Iraq. “We know we can’t count on the French. We know we can’t count on the Russians,” said Mr. Kerry. “We know that Iraq is a danger to the United States, and we reserve the right to take pre-emptive action whenever we feel it’s in our national interest.”
(via Powerline, who casts some doubt on the veracity of the quote.) Anyway, even if it’s true, it’s idiotic. There’s a difference between “pre-emptive action” (bombing known weapons sites in 1998, which is what he was taking about), and invading another country without a plan or reasonable path to establishing a peaceful resolution there. More wingnut nonsense.
BEYOND BELIEF: I’m going to wait till after next week’s national security debate to make a final assessment of John Kerry on the war, but this statement by Joe Lockhart about Ayad Allawi is just vile:
“The last thing you want to be seen as is a puppet of the United States, and you can almost see the hand underneath the shirt today moving the lips.”
This is the same Joe Lockhart who calls nutjobs in Texas at the behest of CBS. Look, Bush’s war-management deserves ferocious criticism, but the notion that Kerry is fit to wage this war is getting more and more untenable as the days go by. He has sent signals that he wants to withdraw troops soon; he disses our allies; he shows contempt for a man risking his life to bring democracy to Iraq. We’re in a war, senator. Fight the enemy, not our friends.
Joe Lockhart’s phone number was given to a nutjob in Texas by CBS (and, I’ll point out, despite all the conspiracymongering, that Lockhart only talked to Burkett long after the documents were given to CBS. Why would he beg CBS for Joe’s phone number if the DNC was behind the memos? This is easily disproven spin.)
Secondly, it’s NOT in Allawi’s best interests to come across as a puppet, to stand next to Bush (who is incredibly unpopular across the entire Muslim world), to bolster his credibility with the Iraqis. And that’s what Lockhart is saying. What he’s getting at (and you can hardly tell given the fact that they take just one sentence of his for the entire article) is that this is Bush calling in a political favor from Allawi for his own campaign. Making Allawi into a Bush partisan is not in Iraq or Allawi’s best interests, especially if he’s trying to gather aid from the rest of the world, or if Kerry wins this election. It makes him look weak and dependant. And it’s disgraceful of the Bush administration to call this in (or even allow it to happen, even if it was Allawi’s idea).
Not to mention how tired and empty the “blame the media” cliches sound, coming from Bush or from Allawi. Oh, those evil TV screens, showing us the violence that’s going on daily. Who are you gonna believe, a man who lives inside an armed compound in Iraq or your lyin’ eyes?
Poll shows conclusive results: Klingons Support Kerry. Find Bush’s Iraq War “dishonorable”.
“It scares me when a president says he won’t support stem-cell research because it goes against God,” Ventura said. “I have news for you. If you’re waiting for God to cure Alzheimer’s, then we are going to be waiting a long time.”
Dan Froomkin, author of the the Washington Post’s White House Briefing, is soliciting suggestions for the presidential debates, for one or other candidate, at NiemanWatchdog.org.
My question: Mr. President, before the Iraq War, you named Jay Garner as the postwar civilian administrator of the country. According to an interview he gave earlier this year1, he says he favored holding early elections and putting Iraqis in charge of their own destiny as soon as possible. However, the day he arrived in Baghdad, he was fired and replaced with Paul Bremer. Can you tell us why Jay Garner was fired?
1 – “General Sacked By Bush says he wanted early elections”, The Guardian, 2004-3-18
Salon interviews Sy Hersch.
This is a dynamite must-read.
Is there someone who is the Henry Kissinger in this administration?
Oh, believe me, I pray for one [clasps his hands and looks beseechingly upward]. Wouldn’t it be great if the reality was that they were lying about WMD, and they really didn’t believe that democracy would come when they invaded Iraq, and you could go to war with 5,000 troops, a few special forces, a few bombs and a lot of American flags, and Iraq would fold, Saddam would be driven out, a new Baath Party would emerge that’s moderate? Democracy would flow like water out of a fountain. These guys believe it. They believe WMD. There’s no fallback with these guys. These guys are utopians. They’re like Trotskyites. They believe in permanent revolution. They really believe. They believe that they could go in with few forces. They believed that once they went in it would happen quick. Iran would get the message. What they call occupied Lebanon would get the lesson. Even the Saudis would change.
An old but good article on the number of links the current administration has to people who have behaved badly in the past. Sigh.
Reading this stuff makes me think of the recent case of Sandy Berger, and makes me wonder why more people don’t realize that the modus operandi of these liars if you keep throwing stones, nobody thinks you live in a glass house.
