Wednesday evening quarterbacking
I don’t often write about politics, but I feel that the United States has just witnessed a fairly historic election. Even after all the extreme vitriol and outright seething hatred of Bush by the Democratic Party and its supporters, the Democrats still couldn’t pull off a victory. In my estimation, the 2004 general election will be viewed, depending on the Democrats’ next steps, as either the death or rebirth of the Democratic Party.
If you believe the left-leaning weblogs, then I am among the uneducated, oblivious, easily manipulated, and downright evil masses who willingly and/or ignorantly invited the destruction of the American way of life by inciting terrorists and simple-mindedly handing over our democracy to fascist Nazis that are chomping at the bit to reward their corporate cronies through war profiteering.
In reality, I am an educated, well-informed, thoughtful voter who weighed the candidates’ views on a variety of subjects and found that while both Bush and Kerry hold positions that I strongly disagree with, my disagreements with Kerry were unacceptable and my disagreements with Bush were tolerable (if only just barely).
I am a registered Republican, but if there were a candidate that more closely matched my views, then I’d be happy to vote for him/her. Case in point: although I voted for Bush here in Illinois (despite his steep odds in my state), I would have rather gnawed my own arm off than vote for Keyes over Obama. Keyes is a nutjob of the highest order, and voting against him was almost as strong of a motivation to get to the polls as voting for Bush was.
So how do the Democrats get back on track? How do they rebuild? I have a simple, 4-point plan for the Democratic Party chairman that would make the Democratic party more attractive to me (and, I suspect, a great many others).
1. Security and Foreign Policy
Forget what Clinton told you; there is no “peace dividend”. Asymmetrical threats like Al Qaeda require as much time, money, and vigilance as cold wars, and additionally a large conventional force is required to intervene in destabilizing regional conflicts, to quell genocide or support other peacekeeping efforts, and to act as a deterrent against would-be enemies of the American homeland - especially if there’s more than one of these threats at any given time.
As commander-in-chief, don’t let domestic or foreign politics compromise military operations. The President is empowered to set military objectives and - on a grand, strategic level - military priorities. Once that’s done, get the hell out of the way. Let the military do its job. Don’t force them to accomplish their goals with rules of engagement that place a higher priority on protecting America’s alliances and PR status than on protecting American soldiers (as Clinton did in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Somalia, and pretty much everywhere else). Don’t punish American soldiers who are deployed in a war zone by voting against $87 billion in desperately needed funding just because of the way the political winds are blowing domestically (like Kerry did). Kerry repeatedly criticized Bush for not sending enough troops to Iraq, but Bush listened to the military leadership’s requests and then gave them everything they asked for - U.S. military doctrine has been trending toward smaller, faster troop deployments for the past 20 years, and technology (especially communications) has finally caught up to the point where the senior military leadership could make it work (which it did, in such spectacular fashion that we didn’t have enough time to plan for the aftermath). Bush’s level of trust in the military’s judgment and professionalism is in stark contrast to Clinton’s distrust and compulsion to have non-military political operatives micromanage military operations. This is why the best military professionals love Bush and sought early retirement in droves under Clinton.
When it comes to foreign policy, quality beats quantity. Countries who share our core democratic values and with whom we have a vigorous and mutually beneficial cultural and economic exchange - countries like Australia, Germany, Japan, and the UK, among others - are always more important than rabble-rousers who are at best suspicious and at worst resentful of the United States’ role in the world. Don’t get me wrong; the support of as many countries as is practical is always preferable to no international support when the U.S. acts outside its own borders, but it is by no means required if America or its allies are threatened. The U.N. has neutered itself into irrelevance by refusing to enforce its own resolutions, and most voters are not really interested in being lectured by France, a country whose rabid anti-Semitism invalidates any moral superiority they claim with respect to human rights and whose ridiculous and unwarranted vanity brought you such classics as “Paris Mean Time” to replace GMT and the legal requirement to use the term “courriel” (since “e-mail” sounds too Anglicised).
2. Economics
Grand social programs (you know, the ones where the government knows best and will take care of everything because the masses are clearly not altruistic or smart enough) are deader than Dillinger. That kind of thinking only reaffirms the general populace’s belief that the Democrats are a bunch of cultural and intellectual elitists. Insulting your electorate by not-so-subtly saying “we’re going to take a bigger share of your money because we know better” doesn’t win a lot of votes.
That’s not to say that Democrats need to go crazy with personal or corporate tax cuts and loopholes, but not raising taxes unless the public gives you a clear mandate to create a new spending program or improve an old one is a good start. The dirty little secret of fiscal conservatives and even Libertarians is that most of them (the ones who aren’t anarchists, anyway) don’t actually want zero government spending; that’s simply an exaggeration to contrast with what we’re typically faced with. They just want targeted, efficient government spending on things that are of clear utility to society and are areas that the government has a legitimate right and interest to be involved in. Liberal doesn’t have to mean “monolithic socialized medicine program with no choice”, it should stand for liberty. Speaking of which, liberty is a decent segue into…
3. Social Issues
This is the area where Democrats can really stand out. Instead of getting stuck, like the Republicans, with a platform dictated by a religious and moral code that not every American agrees with, the Democrats have an opportunity to be the party that stands for personal freedom and humanistic values.
The tricky part about personal freedom is that you have to be consistent. You have to stick up for all personal freedoms, not just the ones acceptable at Ivy League cocktail parties. Yes, that includes the right to own a gun if you don’t use it to hurt anyone. And the right to choose your own doctor.
With respect to humanistic values, the Democrats should be decidedly pro-people in their agenda and their spending. Don’t be beholden to environmental groups if there’s a compromise between environmental protection and preserving people’s jobs. Don’t be a slave to PETA if animal testing will advance medical research. Now this doesn’t mean you should slash, burn, pollute, and dump cosmetics into rabbits’ eyes just to see what happens, but find a prudent balance. In general, if you’re spending money intelligently on protecting people’s rights (defense, crime prevention, enforcing civil liberties, etc.) or sustaining/improving society (infrastructure, education, research, health care, retirement, etc.) while maintaining a maximum amount of personal choice and freedom, then you’re probably doing the right thing.
4. Understanding Your Constituents
After Kerry conceded the 2004 presidential election, the reaction from the Democrats was brutal. Move to Canada! No, secede from the Union! No, armed revolution! We can’t possibly live with the ignorant yokels who gave Bush a mandate!
A little tip - slinging names at the people who voted against your candidate, accusing them of being too stupid to know what they were really voting for, etc. is not the way to win people over to your cause. Insulting swing voters instead of seeking to understand why they preferred the other candidate and modifying your platform to be more inclusive is poor politics. Truly centrist voters already think that your pompous attempts to engineer society to become some New England/west coast politically correct utopian standard is just as offensive as the Republicans trying to engineer society to an evangelical Christian standard. Break that perception. Reach out to new voting blocks.
Anyhow, that’s my $0.02. Like Coldforged, I’m taking a long break from further political blogging if I can help it.
November 3rd, 2004 at 9:45 pm
Your points about mouthbreathing are well-taken. I’m not one to accuse Bush-backers of stupidity because I know too many of them, but I’m certainly reading that perspective from a lot of people. So I can’t claim that those people are stupid, but I also can’t help but feeling like I’m watching some game show on which there’s some guy I know playing, and he gets to the million dollar question, and it’s some question about his favorite band’s lead singer, and I remember talking with him about that very thing five days ago, yet he’s there saying, “Uh, man, Chuck, I just don’t think I know this one. I just don’t think I have any idea,” and I’m over here on the couch yelling, “DUDE!!! WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG? YOU KNOW THIS!! I KNOW YOU KNOW THIS. WHAT THE FUCK?”
What I don’t know, from any of the intelligent people I know who voted for Bush, is why it’s okay that we were blatently deceived into going into this war, and that then it was okay to sort of slide the reasons for us having gone there around.
To me that is such a towering, massive, impenatrable issue that it’s very difficult not to feel like I live on a completely different planet from the ones who support it.
November 4th, 2004 at 1:37 pm
Pretty good points all.
In my mind, I don’t think the Democrats “reinventing” or “refocusing” is going to make me any happier, because I’m still quite conservation in a lot of my views. I hope that I’m not destined to never have a candidate, but it seems that this might end up being the case.
I am not nor do I intend to be a member of the Christian conservatives. But then, neither am I or do I intend to be a liberal. I am some swarthy amalgamation of beliefs that have coalesced from various sources, and trying to paint me on either side of the traditional two-party spectrum simply doesn’t work.
What I think would be appropriate is some middle-ground party, neither liberal nor necessarily conservative (nor having some of the radical elements of the Libertarians). Fiscally conservative, efficiently-sized government, controlled spending, low deficit, morally and socially compassionate, non-welfare state, privatized health care, torte-reformed, alternative energy policies, environmentally sound, internationally respected and admirable foreign policies, a strong, mobile, efficient, technologically advanced military… and a pony. Tall order, probably impossible. But a party for moderates.
Your suggestions for the Dems are good, I think. Obviously they as a party must do something… they have nothing right now. Maybe in four more years we’ll have a candidate that actually does unite people… from some party.
A good parting shot, Dan.
November 4th, 2004 at 1:51 pm
You had me up until the pony.
Seriously, though, it sounds like you and I are pretty much on the same page politically, so I ask: do you really think we’re moderates, or do you think we have mixed views?
“Moderate”, to me, seems to imply a position where you’re between right and left on the issues. I think of my views as mixed - I am definitely pretty conservative on economic issues, for example, but my views on what people should have the right to do in the privacy of their own home (as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone) are probably to the left of the ACLU.
I don’t know what difference it makes, but I think there’s a distinction there.
November 4th, 2004 at 2:32 pm
Squub, you pose a good question - why do people give Bush a pass on his publicly stated motivation for invading Iraq when it was clearly either a lie or a mistake?
For me, the answer is pretty simple. I think that Iraq needed to be dealt with for a lot of reasons, not just weapons of mass destruction. Clearly the administration thought so too. But in order to simplify things down to soundbyte politics, WMD was given as the primary justification. I assume it was picked because it was a sexy hot-button issue and there was some (now proven to be incorrect) meaty intelligence behind it.
I think, fundamentally, the people who support Bush’s Iraq policy believed as he did - that Iraq was never going to play nicely with the world community and was always going to be a rogue state. The Middle East also needed a functional and successful democracy in order to inspire other nations in the region to think about democratic reform - something that would be required to “drain the swamp” (i.e. actually try to fix the root causes of extremist Muslim terrorism). When we got a pretty good excuse via the WMD intelligence (and when that intelligence was corroborated by the UK), then we could kill two birds with one stone - get rid of a rogue state immune to sanctions and diplomacy, and set up a successful democracy.
Long story short, I guess the people who seem to turn a blind eye to Bush’s justification for going to war:
• feel like Iraq, while not related to al Qaeda, was still a threat for a great number of reasons and that his alleged WMD program was the metaphorical last straw;
• understand that WMD was easy to package for the requisite media oversimplification and was the most flagrant violation of UN resolutions - this made it easy to focus on but wasn’t the only reason;
• trust that Bush was offering the WMD justification on bad intelligence and that he wasn’t actually lying;
• are happy that Hussein is out of power and feel that the dismantling of his regime and the establishment of a democracy in the region was worth the cost.
It’s important to note that this doesn’t mean Iraq is a precedent for dealing with North Korea or Iran - they haven’t ignored as many pleas from the international community for as long as Iraq did, and due to their geographies, internal situations, etc. have to be dealt with in different ways.
November 4th, 2004 at 4:00 pm
> do you really think we’re moderates, or do you think we have mixed views?
You should go take the questionnaire at politicalcompass.org. if you want the answer to that one. Their division of views into social and economic axes instead of a single left vs. right axis seems reasonable - and explains why so many people say they’re neither left nor right wing.
HTH.
++Clamatius
November 5th, 2004 at 12:18 pm
Dan:
I don’t know if I can convey how much you just helped me out. I have suspected, quite a few times, that what you’ve just presented is what goes on in the minds of a lot of Bush supporters. The intelligent Bush supporters; maybe even it’s unfair to say the intelligent ones, leaving the rest in the non-intelligent category; let’s just say the ones who actually thought about it and didn’t vote based on emotion or party unity.
I can grapple with the situation you’ve presented; it’s got unquestionable logic. Of course it takes us back out of the world of black-and-white and into the shades of gray. I’m always comfortable when I can understand what parts of the spectrum we’re arguing around, as opposed to having to deal with the pig-headed presentation that many Bush supporters want to present. (And yes, there are many pig-headers amongst the anti-bush side, too.)
I think this opens a huge can of worms that I’m eager to dive into. Maybe I’ll start here and then jump out before I write a book in your comments.
The issue that I’m most concerned about given this scenario is the fact that it not only accepts that the general public should be manipulated in order to achieve goals, but it also assumes that the ends in this case justify those means.
First, the premise is sound to me in that it seems, though I won’t say it’s a definite thing, but it seems like there’s no way the “public,” as a unit, is ever going to understand anything complicated. The more complications allowed into a situation, the more oppurtunity for small skirmishes to become divisive within otherwise like-minded groups.
But beyond that what this attitude was used for, in this case, is something possibly horrible. American lives are being lost now, innocent Iraqi lives are being lost now, in an effort to get a strategic foothold in the middle-east. Simplified what I think this is then is nation-building, or empire-building, or whatever the hell that’s called. Granted: there is an aspect, probably a very large aspect, of this thing that’s really about protection of our interests at home. The fact that Saddam wasn’t playing nice was unstabalizing the region, and the possible consequences of that region’s becoming further destabalized could be… vast. But those consequences were (are) nothing that could be quantized. We didn’t and don’t know what might happen. The neocons in power, I think, have a huge problem with not knowing. The Patriot Act is a good reflection of that here. We don’t need all of our civil rights if it means there’s shit we can’t know.
These people need to be in control of the situation. They’re willing to sacrifice a small number of lives now because to them being in control of the situation is the only way to stave off the possible consequences of not being in control.
Some of you Bush supporters think the same way, then. We’re sitting ducks if we let the public make this decision, because the public can’t make this decision. Because it’s too complicated. We’ve got this oppurtunity to convince the public and we use it. We’ve got political capital and we spend it.
And this is a gray area. Like I said, I agree that the public making a complicated decision based on all or most of the information is an unlikely thing. When the possible cost is this high, weighed against all the complications involved in the description of the problem, the cost is going to be the heavy there, in most cases.
Yesterday Bill O’Reilly was talking about how Democrats and Liberals aren’t able to capture the public because the dems and liberals so obviously look down their noses at the “regular people.” What he was saying resonated. Smart people, or those of us who think we’re smart, sometimes can’t help but think “regular people” are pretty stupid.
What gets me is that to me all along I’ve seen that smirk on Bush’s face and said, “He thinks we’re all beneath him. We’re all stupid.” Some of you guys were winking back at him.
(I didn’t mean for this to get angry. It sounds angry, I’m pretty sure. I’m still trying to discuss this. I’m sure in my stream-of-consciousness there I took some liberties… so here’s hoping we can continue this discussion without your writing me off as a pompous ass.)
November 5th, 2004 at 1:37 pm
Squub -
Your comment didn’t sound angry to me, but as I’ve tried to make clear, I’m not trying to cast myself in the role of Bush apologist. I just happen to think he’s right when it comes to national security. So I didn’t take it personally - no harm, no foul.
Regarding oversimplification of the administration’s reasons for going to war, I think the National Security Council had a pretty complex set of reasons to take action. The blame for overfocusing on WMD was partially the administration’s fault for playing it up politically and partially the media’s fault, as they probably heard the administration say “words words words words words WMD words words” and made that “WMD!” on the TV news and in the newspapers.
As challenging as it may be, think of it from the administration’s perspective - NY and DC have just been attacked by Muslim extremists. Your intelligence tells you that Iraq was probably only involved in the most tangential of ways, but they’ve invaded neighbors and harbored terrorists repeatedly in the past, they’ve attempted the assassination of a US president, and they pay the families of suicide bombers in Israel. They’ve essentially told the UN to fuck off with no consequences and actively hampered weapons inspectors. Hiding your weapons sites from the international community (especially when not hiding them gets sanctions against you lifted) is a lot like pleading the 5th when you’re not guilty - you might be standing on principle, but you’re probably just guilty as hell. Then all of the sudden you get intelligence information, corroborated by your best friend and the next-best intelligence apparatus in the world (the UK), that says Saddam’s cooking bombs - which, thanks to your sanctions, he’s hard-up enough to sell to the same extremists that want to wipe you and Israel from the face of the Earth (despite the fact that as a secular leader, he wasn’t exactly best buddies with those extremists). You’ve got what ought to be the perfect emergent excuse to eliminate Saddam. Plus, your intelligence agencies are telling you that the roots of Muslim extremism are based in young, devout Muslims feeling marginalized and unrepresented. Well, thinking back on your high school history text and the Boston Tea Party, you think, “hey, maybe democracy can fix that” and all the sudden you’ve got a two-fer - get rid of Saddam AND set up a democracy in the Middle East to show everyone how well it can work, and you just might relieve the anger and marginalization of those who would be terrorists. What would you do?
[As an aside, the US military wasn’t guarding the oil wells in Iraq for imperialistic or profiteering reasons - they were guarding them because 1) it was a military operation, and it’s been military doctrine since WWII that whomever controls the fuel supply in a conflict has a strategic advantage, 2) the potential environmental damage, and 3) we need Iraq to be successful as a democracy - that means no burning off their main export commodity that will ensure their economy’s success.]
I don’t agree with your assertion that the administration invaded Iraq because it was a question mark and they couldn’t tolerate “not knowing”. On the contrary, I believe that the administration invaded Iraq because they thought they did know - they thought they knew that it was just a matter of time before Saddam did (or helped do) something terrible and they thought they knew that the new (albeit now exposed as bad) intelligence about his WMD program and the world’s sympathy from 9/11 provided a window of opportunity to do something about it.
I also think their domestic policies, when it comes to PATRIOT, et al. are horrible, but again I don’t think those policies are motivated out of a need for control. I think that they honestly believe that it’s a utilitarian philosophical issue - that if a few innocents’ rights get trampled in the pursuit of hunting and killing our enemies, then it’s ok because more people will have benefitted than were hurt. Obviously you and I don’t agree, and that’s what our duties as citizens will be under the second Bush administration - keeping him honest in that area. Getting rid of Ashcroft as attorney general (as he’s reportedly considering) is a good start. Petitioning the people who have to confirm Bush’s Supreme Court nominees to ensure any new justices aren’t nutjobs will be another major factor.
Hopefully I’ve addressed your points, but I’d be happy to continue…
November 5th, 2004 at 2:51 pm
You’re definitely addressing my points, and I greatly appreciate it. There are parts I don’t buy, though.
But first: as far as I can remember I’ve never thought this thing was about oil. I’m not one of those guys. I’m pretty much convinced it’s about the same thing you’re saying it’s about. I think Cheney and Rumsfeld have had a serious hard-on for Iraq for a long time, and I think it’s probably because they seriously think having something different going on there is in our best interest, security-wise. I do think that has a lot to do with control-issues, though.
One of my big disagreements though is that I don’t think the WMD thing was really a media thing. Or, let me rephrase. There are specific things that this administration said that really did paint this “evidence” as incontrivertible. I keep coming back to that because at my core I’m into logic. If you’re going to say something is absolute, you’d better damned well know it’s absolute; if not you’re either lying or you don’t understand logic. To me this is the sort of thing that happens on a smaller scale in a lot of criminal-type cases. Witnesses or law enforcement people KNOW that someone is guilty, and so they’ve got no qualms about saying, “Yes, I saw THAT MAN, RIGHT THERE, running away from the scene with blood on his hands.” When in fact what they saw was a man with a gray sweatshirt running down a dark alley. They’ve simply got themselves so convinced, for whatever reason, that the guy in the courtroom is guilty that they figure there’d be no harm in stretching the truth a little about this particular question. Otherwise that jury’s not going to be convinced, and the guy’s going to get away with it.
This sort of thinking twists the system too much for my liking, and it scares me that the administration did it. In my opinion the moral thing to have said, all along, would’ve been something like, “We have a lot of intelligence that seems to indicate Saddam’s got WMD or is close to having them. We think this is reason enough, given all of the other factors in this situation, to remove Saddam from power.” But when they crossed that line and realized that wasn’t going to work, and so stretched that “seems to indicate” to “we know for a fact,” I think they showed how dangerous they are.
November 5th, 2004 at 3:21 pm
Reasons for Iraq: you don’t have to guess. Look at this site:
http://www.newamericancentury.org/
which is the think-tank that Cheney, Rumsfeld, Feith, Wolfowitz et al belong to. They have been arguing that Iraq should be invaded since ‘98 and before.
I also do not think it was about oil in the short-term profiteering sense, but in a broader sense it partially was - the Middle East is strategically important to the US only because of oil and Israel.
++Clamatius
November 5th, 2004 at 3:38 pm
Regarding control issues, I think we’ll have to agree to disagree. Plus, while we might not agree as to the validity of the thinking, it seems like we’re in agreement that the administration believed it was acting in the best interest of the country.
I’ll grant you that somewhere along the line, what was probably an 80% certainty about the WMD intelligence seemed to get stretched into a 100% certainty. To be honest, I haven’t done all the necessary reading and research to form a solid opinion on where that occured. This was a human error. Did it happen when an junior analyst at CIA was trying to impress his/her boss after 9/11? Did it happen when the President got briefed and made up his own mind? Did it happen somewhere in between? We’ll probably never know.
The question, then, is can you live with the fact that the primary reason for going to war was exaggerated by the President - either intentionally or unintentionally - when the myriad additional (but less/not at all publicized) reasons for going to war were not overblown?
The answer, for me, is yes - because I do not believe the exaggeration was intentional or maliciously deceptive (many officials throughout the political spectrum here in the U.S. were fooled, not to mention the Brits), and because I think the additional reasons for war were very, very valid.
We’ve committed to establishing an oil-rich, successful democracy in the Middle East - a democracy that has the potential to show people that they can be heard and there is a way to coexist within a diverse population, thereby diffusing the underlying frustration that leads to suicidal terrorism in the region (or at least refocusing it at countries who aren’t following Iraq’s lead and undergoing democratic reform).
If you think about it, then you might say that this is a watershed event in American foreign policy - we have a politician in George W. Bush who is willing to make a choice that conventional wisdom would say hurts him and his party politically in the short-term but is for the good of the world in the long-term. That’s unprecedented to my knowledge, and in my mind it is worth the costs of the Iraq campaign and was worth rewarding with my vote on Tuesday.
November 5th, 2004 at 6:44 pm
My answer is no; because no matter what the outcome of what you call the administration’s exaggeration, and what I call the administration’s lie, in this case, the fundamental issue here for me is that he was willing to lie because he thought he knew what the best course of action was. Like I said, all of those other reasons for going to war are important, but they’re also ephemeral. None of this is guaranteed. There’s a strong case here, but that’s all it is: a case. It’s not a case of do-it-now-or-we’re-fucked.
Sure we agree that he’s doing what he thinks is best for the country. I’m willing to grant that, without of course there being any way to verify it. But I contend that there are a LOT of people who do what they think is best, what they BELIEVE is best, when, in fact, it isn’t. People are fallible, bigtime. I feel like, for one thing, Bush doesn’t accept that about himself.
Regarding the rest of what you said about the importance of trying to bring Democracy there, that’s all conjecture. I’m not saying it couldn’t work out that way; I’m saying that it’s experimental. It’s a different version of the sort of thing “Liberals” are often accused of trying to do (and demonized for in the process): bringing about societal change from the top-down.
One other thing that I’m not overlooking: all of the reasons for war we’ve been talking about revolve around our interest. We’re not talking about freeing the Iraqi people because they’re oppressed. We’re talking about freeing the Iraqi people because it’d be better for us if they had a democracy.
November 7th, 2004 at 9:49 am
I think here’s where our discourse starts to break down. You say Bush lied, and I disagree. Lying is an action of intent, and I don’t believe that Bush’s intent was to deceive.
You say that the administration’s desire to do something when it wasn’t an “act now or we’re fucked” scenario was a bad idea, but again I strongly disagree. Most people - Republicans, Democrats, our allies, etc. - thought that if Hussein could get the resources together to harass Israel, Kuwait, Iran, Saudi Arabia, any country in the Desert Storm coalition, etc. then he would have. If he was left unchecked, as the UN was content to leave him, then it would have only been a matter of time.
Personally, I think sitting around and waiting to react to the certainty of a scenario like a chemical weapons attack on Israel (which would almost certainly trigger a regional or world war) or the sale of nuclear material to terrorist organizations is irresponsible. The idea is to stop these things before they happen, isn’t it?
Also, I don’t think that the transformative power of democracy is “experimental”. I think it’s a pretty well-established trend. The difference between establishing a democracy and top-down societal change from the Democrats is that a democracy is about freedom and participating in direction of your country - it’s not “change your core values to believe in the politically correct ideals of your intellectually superior masters” like the change that the Democrats try to foist on us every election.
Finally, with respect to what’s good for the Iraqi people, I thought it went without saying… but of course a primary concern is what’s good for people everywhere. When it comes to advancing the concepts of freedom and democracy, it seems to me that Bush is somewhat of an idealist. That’s why I said in my first comment that Iraq isn’t a template for Iran or North Korea - we want those people to be free, too, but we can’t deal with them in the same way. I thought this was too obvious to mention, but apparently not.
January 17th, 2005 at 3:17 pm
I finally got a chance to check out your web page, and I must say that I’m impressed. Hope everything is going well. Take care!