the_good_news M.W. OK, I know a lot of my Democrat friends need some cheering up right now, (and hell, I need it too over the marriage amendments all over the country), so I thought I'd post some unabashed good things about Bush's re-election. 1) No one has to hear Michael Moore crowing over a Kerry win. No one I know, on any side of the fence, likes this man. Admit it, Dems, you were all wincing in anticipation of the river of tripe he'd spit out when his candidate won. Just the blessed release from hearing about him or from him for a few weeks is reason enough to celebrate. 2) No self-promoting "we helped the president win, look how important we are" speeches from Hollywood, the Dixie Chicks, Madonna, Cameron Diaz, or any of the other celebrites with overinflated egos who think their vapid ramblings can actually affect how anyone thinks. Maybe we won't even have to listen to them the next time around, since they didn't seem to produce much of a result. 3) MTV's "get out the vote" and Puff Daddy's "Vote or Die" campaigns failed utterly to get the groundswell of young-voters-who-watch-MTV-religously into the booths. This is bad news for the country, but good news for those of us who want to be snide to the late teeners who think their generation is more politically laudable than ours. Plus, maybe their efforts will be a little less STUPID next time around. 4) We don't have to hear about Vietnam or anyone's 30-year-old war record again for a good long time. 041103 ... birdmad Look, thanks to Bush's massive incompetence, even the good news sucks a giant load of ass right now. Because i just know that terrorists wil hit us on our own soil again, but this time the stupid fuck won't be able to shift the blame to anybody else and expect to be believed. I hoped people in this country would snap out of the well-milked Fear state that these people have been exploiting for the last trhree years, but i was afraid thay wouldn't. I hope i'll be wrong about us getting hit by terrorists again on some massive scale, but i'm afraid i won't be. i've never had a fear that didn't come to fruition 041103 ... gloom Yes, because Clinton's complacancy was working sooo well. Yeah, that stopped them from attacking us. The terrorist only attacked on september 11th because they didn't like Bush. How come I never saw this? You must be a genius man! Oh, the revelations! 041103 ... birdmad Complacency? I seem to recall that every time CLinton did take any sort of action against terrorists in the Middle East the same people who are now rabid Bush apologists decried it as an attempt to distract the country from the all important and ever-dangerous issue of the blowjob. If republicans went after Osama bin Laden with the same zeal they went after Clinton, he'd be dead by now, but of course as long as he makes for a convenient boogeyman to scare the kiddies, he's gold to these fucks. Every time Clinton gave the order to launch a cruise missle up someone's ass, the cry of "Wag the dog" came up from the peanut gallery of apocalyptic ingnuts, mouth-breathers and the allegedly liberal media, and additionally it wasn't Clinton who took boatloads of vacation time and ignored the warnings that something was up. Neither was it Clinton nor Carter who thought that providing arms and training to Islamic militants in Afghanistan was a really bright idea. Same with Saddam Hussein and Iran-Contra. I don't remember CLinton or Carter bankrolling a Stalin-inspired dictator to fight a war against a county whose state-sponsored terrorist arm (Hezbollah) was also doing business with our government. Prime examples of how frequently people who claim to be strong defenders of America will sell out our national security interests in the name of a quick buck for their corporate cronies. so step the fuck back. 041103 ... () (it is my studied opinion that they acted because of opportunity, not out of some relative like or dislike. that romantic notion of the mastermind moving piece on the board of history is a form of conceit. i believe that they have general goals and seek broad openings. it is clear that a major part of their effort is symbolic, but that is mitigated by circumstance as much by intent. Yes september 11th took planning, but of a general sort. i think they operated on flexible, heuristic guidelines, not through a chain of command. I think birdmad is right. i was there. things fell out of the sky on me and changed my life for the worse.) 041103 ... stork daddy The basic rhetorical trick Bush pulled in giving everyone a false choice between complete hegemony with his policies and impending doom at the hands of the terrorists was amplified verbatim by the media and forcefed to a populous who most likely didn't have the time to sort out the issues themselves. I say this because despite the fact that most people have misgivings with the Iraq war, those polled still seem to be under the impression we're safer with Bush. Well those that weren't more concerned with "moral issues." Now of course responsibility lies with the voter ultimately, but there was a time in this country when journalists held themselves to a higher standard than parroting opinions. These tertiary reasons for America sucking, however, do not remove the disdain, utter utter disdain I have for Bush due to the misdirection he engaged in, which amounted to an extreme misfeasance in his duties as president. Bringing up his record on terrorism is pointless when you consider that almost all politicians would have increased homeland security and went after Osama Bin Laden if they were in office during 9/11. What only the incompetent or malicious would do, however, is strain our resources by launching a war in Iraq barely nominally related to the threat of terrorism, and to gain support for this war using reasoning which was clearly false at the time (and which they've yet to recant even in the face of widely revealed conflicting evidence). Then on top of that, once the war was underway, all plans were made with near delusional optimism. The amount of controversy stemming from our troops' over-militance with prison populations including civilians, and under-militance with weapons depots, is enough to show that there hasn't been complete competence demonstrated by our "commander in chief." And to bring up Clinton's complacency has little bearing on what Kerry would've done. It also isn't such a stretch to suggest terrorists hate Bush, or if not Bush, then the policies Bush, and those advising him have traditionally stood for as regards the Middle East. I'm not even going to go into all of the history of Iran, and Iraq etc. I won't even mention his other ridiculous policies that serve to eviscerate rather than bolster the primary consumers, the middle class. There simply isn't a reason since we've seen as in the debates that when some people are given the choice between succinct and valid reasoning or propoganda and repitition comforting in its simplicity, they choose the propoganda. So let's forget that Cheney was outraged when Kerry called his daughter a lesbian, but didn't mention it when Alan Keyes suggested she was a selfish hedonist. Forget that Bush has as questionable record as anyone, but accepted all of the enrichment that came from the questioning of Kerry's. Forget that the same thing happened with McCain's record in the 2000 primaries. Forget that Bush will likely negotiate with North Korea while we are mired in Iraq. What was different between Iraq and North Korea? I think links to terrorism has been shown to be decisively not the answer. Oil's a good answer though. Oh and North Korea actually had weapons of mass destruction and a nuclear program. I also won't talk about how frustrating it is to me that Bush was so quick to, execute prisoners when he was governor of Texas, despite the fact that the quality of defense attorneys given to those too poor to afford one was ranked 51st by Amnesty International. In short, the brashness of Bush is frustrating. It makes him seem arrogant, it makes him seem as if he lacks compassion. That may make you god damn thick skulled non opposable thumbed fuckers feel safer, but it doesn't make me feel safer. The fact that he's going to appoint new judges to the Supreme Court who will likely be prone to twist reasoning so they can find that the god in "under god" refers to a loveable mascot not a religion, or that intelligent design deserves an equal share of time in our education system with evolution...is also frustrating. I could go on. I really could. But I don't care. I can't care. I have to let the morbid historian in me take over. If Rome is going to fall, grab some popcorn and enjoy it right? I don't think it will be that drastic, but to be honest, I don't know, because I bought everyone's consolations four years ago that it's not going to make a huge difference who's in office and those consolations turned out to be false. I mean if I actually were to admit those feelings I have that America is based on informed democracy, and should never be in the grips of anyone not as representative of the divisions in the populace as they are the unity (if by uniter he meant he'd marginalize and silence the opposition then yes, he's a uniter), then I'd have to follow my conscience and protest in the streets. If I were to actually believe that the basic rights of the constitution form a discernible and suggestive theme of protection of non-invasive, non-harmful liberties, well then Bush even proposing an amendment banning gay marriage would be a call to riot. In short there really isn't much consolation, because it's gotten near the departure point beyond which reasonable minds can no longer differ. I don't really like Michael Moore sensationalism, I don't really like Sean Combs (as an artist anyways)...but if you think that this election is as superficial as that, and that our qualms can be belittled by those "benefits", you deserve to choke on shit. I know you don't think it's a big deal, since you've been hoodwinked into thinking the country will be great with Bush at the helm, but to us Bush means America itself is being threatened. And I honestly hope it all works out for the better. But I don't want to hear anyone making the "after this, therefore because of this" mistake. There is already enough evidence to suggest that Bush has done some seriously incompetent at best and malicious at worst things. Winning the lotto doesn't make you smart. You're still dumb for buying the ticket. And that's how I feel about republicans at this point. This was a rant, but any points you'd like to make in rebuttal, I foresee and pre-emptively (pre-emptive being something you no doubt would approve)respond with "god (mascot god, not God god) you're a fucking idiot" 041103 ... birdmad That we will be hit again is an inevitability and likely will not have been preventable by the actual second Bush term or theoreticak Kerry administration Condoleeza Rice's base of knowledge as an expert on the Soviet Union does not apply to something as amorphous flexible as the modern, multi-celled terrorist organization. This administration's Cold War mentality when approaching the enemy cn not be expected to remain as lucky as it has so far. While George Bush took his eye off the ball long enough to stroke his Saddam hard-on to make daddy proud, Osama bin laden with al Qaeda and its minions are still out there and two countries who really were threats have now upgraded to NUCLEAR (not nukular) threats Additionally, Bush's campaign rhetoric of supposedly Wanting to completely eliminate terrorism is predicated on the tragically laughable concept that this is a "Zero-sum" game, that is the belief that if you kill X number of terrorists, bingo, problem solved, no more terror. This, of course, fails to take the concept of Collateral Damage into account. Which side do you think the surviving kin of "collateral Damage" victims usually come out on when their grief has had time to ferment into anger? The people who called in the airstrike? not bloody fucking likely. For example, the pending assault that the "Coalition" is planning to let loose on Falluja and Ramadi isn't going to pacify the region because it will be viewed as a form of collective and indiscriminate punishment. It's gonna make shit a whole lot worse. But then this is what happens when you tell your enemies to "bring 'em on" About the only way a Zero sum game of that nature is anything resembling "winnable" involves something akin to outright genocide and i really don't think that would go over very well at all except with the people who think Ann Coulter has a fucking clue So long as our country continues to push an overly aggressive foreign policy where we show no qualms about supporting other regimes that are not much different from those we call enemies in order to acheive our goals, we will continue to engender new threats 041103 ... bird Oh, man... don't get me started on the "moral issues" rap. i've known junkies with more morals than this lot. 041103 ... kx21 * Moment_of_truth * 4_more_years in the "Mood" of 911 041103 ... Moment_of_Truth. 4_more_years... 041103 ... . * a_point_in_time - June 23, 2004 * "Bush told he is playing into Bin Laden's hands ..." 041103 ... stork daddy well i love how it isn't considered a moral issue when you crusade for better treatment of workers or other forms of social justice. that's apparently not sufficiently moral. 041103 ... 3 Nov 2004 Latest headlines: · Iraq Gunmen Seize Second American in Week AP - 4 minutes ago · Fortified by victory, Bush now faces unfinished business in Iraq AFP - 20 minutes ago 041103 ... gloom So Birdmad, are you saying that complacancy is not the answer? You seem to be expressing some angst about Clinton's inefectiveness due to his oposition's criticism. Screw it. Who cares? Your whole answer was just a smoke screen becuase you'd rather blame Bush than admit that the terrorist are going to strike again no matter who the president is. The hornet's nest has already been stired up. But by who? Was stired up by Bush when he stuck his nose in Afganistan and Iraq? No, it was the terrorists who stired up a hornet's next when they attacked the United States of America. You need me to step back? Then next time don't step up. Or is it just that you're the only one who gets to rant around here? 041103 ... gloom One more thing! This was obviously started by some one who was trying at a little tounge in cheek humor about the election results and you just wanted to piss all over it because you're feeling bitter about losing. If you want to act like that just don't be surprised when some one else does it to you. 041103 ... unhinged oh you fucking idiot i'm usually kinder than that but GODDAMN you are a fucking idiot. who stirred up the hornet's nest of terrorism? maybe it was the fuckers that sold them the guns and then told them that their governments and religions were useless and wrong. i will stop now because i am being nowhere near as intelligble as bird and stork daddy and have nowhere near as many concrete facts to back myself up, but if you can honestly believe that it wasn't the republicans and their capitalist expansionist take all now foreign policies that stirred the hornet's nest that they built by guzzling up most of the world's wealth to further opress the rest of the world economically, you are a fucking idiot. get your head out of your ass and use what little common sense you have to see that hate has to be founded on something. even irrational hate is founded on something; some action, person, religion, money, jealousy. the increasingly global community has led to an increasingly global hate for those who are hoarding the wealth and thereby reducing the quality of life for the rest of the world. if you lived in a desert with no food, clean water and heaven-forbid no AIR CONDITIONING you might be a little cranky too when every media image being projected from our country including mtv shows america as an unimaginable fantasy to people who live in those conditions. people are allowed to hate us you know. and where did that hate come from? oh and by the way, america has not gone to war since the civil war without a republican as president. osama is a smart man. i'm sure he knew that. slanted as our history books may be, that's no fucking secret. fucktards 041103 ... unhinged uummm...and by the way, you happened to be the one that turned this topic into what it is now a la your first post; birdmad's first post was just an extension albeit a gloomy one of the original topic. 041103 ... kx21 * a_point_in_time - 111 * Osama's_reward_to_Bush_1_percent_of_Kerry's_vote 041103 ... . kx21 Can Bush win this election without Osama"s Reward (1%)? Absolutely_NOT!!! 041103 ... . iLink:- Bush_victory 041103 ... pete good news... Saskatchewan is close to becoming the 7th jurisdiction in Canada to make gay marriage legal.. by a court vote, of course, ruling that denying the right to marriage is unconstitutional, which it is.. :) 041103 ... bird Afghanistan, as i have long maintained for anyone who is or has been paying any fucking attention, was the right call. not finishing that job, was the first fuck-up Iraq was the second, pure and simple. By not pursuing the al Qaeda problem to it's conclusion (Capture/killing of OBL and Ayman al Zawahri at least for psychological advantage) in order to settle personal scores, Bush has made sure what was once just a moderate probability into an extreme likeelihood. the decision to populate the CPA with partisan fuctionaries with no real diplomatic skills and the decisions to regularly ignore the concerns and advice of experienced military commnders just served to compound that fuck-up in that arena Bush's support of the Karimov regime in Uzbekistan and his support of Musharraf in Pakistan are cases where it makes all of the rhetoric about freedom and democracy into a total sham considering that Musharraf ascended to power by overthrowing a legitimately elected government and that Karimov is a serial human rights violator on par in sadism if not by volume with Saddam Hussein. Saudi Arabia, anyone? What i am trying to say is tht between our country's most baldly hypocritical policies and stances and our ridiculously aggressive ones, this administration has magnified the likeihood of another catastrophic attack from simply likely to damn near(if not absolutely) inevitable. And why should i not be able to pin the blame on a president who in addition to ignoring the problem until it was too late once, staffed his administration with functionaries who were responsible for creating these problems when they served under his father and under Reagan? Cheney, who argues that sanctions against Iraq weren't working as his justifcation for that invasion in spite of the fact that while he was the CEO of Halliburton he was actively trying to undermine or work around those sanctions as well as doing business through Haliburton's foreign subsidiaries with enemy nations (Iran, cheifly) Donald Rumsfeld, Ronald Reagan's special envoy to Iraq. I've covered this ground repeatedly and am tired of having to point it out to those who are willfully history-impaired and content to partake of the kool-aid. The aggressive policies of this administration have served to alienate our country from most of our strongest allies and also served to increase the number of people who would call us enemies, in addition, the strategic failure of the decision to invade and occupy Iraq has made sure that in the event of a real threat, our military is stretched thin, force-readiness is at an all time low, the fact that many of our emergency-services/first-responders are also military reservists who have been or will be called to active duty overseas means that unless there IS a draft to shore up the numbers, we may well be unprepared to successfully deploy our military in another engagement if it should beco e necessary. Now maybe my grasp of "strategery" isn't so hot, but i know better than to try to use one set of pieces on more than one chessboard. understand? 041103 ... bird and as is typical of the kool-aid set, being a snide ass on one side is "tongue in cheek humor" but reacting to it as warmly as it deserves os somehow beyond the pale? fuck that. 041103 ... () (In the time after September 11th. the Neo Con administration, newly in the white house and supported by a majority in congress and the senate, made a lot of critical mistakes. Chief among them is letting their ideology filter their observations, guide their thinking and ultimately rule their actions. Nothing is more dangerous (as we have seen in the past few years) than a government that seems to believe it's own rhetoric. Given the pattern of ostensibly baseless assertions, unsupported accusations and conclusions that amount to an infinite regress of therefores, I feel certain that if the facade was ripped from this administration, it would reveal a guiding principle of stark arbitrariness. I believe Bush when he says that his relationship to God guides his decisions. I think it is comforting to this middle aged, alcoholic, underachiever in shcool and the oil business with an early history of rebellion and an unclear record in the air national guard, to have and enact certainty in his life. I applaud people who are able to trancend the difficulties that many of us face in modern life. But misapplying that certainty, that narrow view in the role of president, is the issue here. The world is filled with nuance, uncertainty, and complexity. It requires intellectual rigor, broad mindedness, egalitarianism and the willingness to examine ones own assumptions, to wrestle with ones own conclusions and emerge with a greater truth. Let us not forget that the office of the President of The United States is a public one. The President is a public servant working in the service of, for the benefit of and representative of the will of the people. Idealism, with all of it's positive (if some what unrealistic) associations, is really the central issue for me. It clouds judgment, obscures issues and exaggerates description. It also tends to obscure intimacy. Any public servant should embrace the most simple form of intimacy: empathy. An informed political life is based in great part on the cultivation of empathetic perceptions, the ability to embrace a person's experience, and concerns. Now confront the effect that a lack of this trait would have if applied to the policies of a President. Sound familiar? Dis-inclusion, insularity, secrecy, disavowal, stonewalling, dis-information and an ostensible lack of respect for the principles of transparency and responsibility are hallmarks of the current administration.) 041104 ... stork daddy it is interesting to note that the past criticism of liberals and their quest for social justice often was that they were "ivory tower" intellectuals with no sense of the reality of the situation. How interesting that the clearest "ivory tower" unrealistic ideals are coming from the neo-cons who control our foreign policy. 041104 ... . dots for y'all 041104 ... birdmad you cannot bring peace and stability to a historically volatile region by forcibly trying to shove the_democracy_fairy up people's asses and hoping they like it 041104 ... dratkuf Democrats: "Duh... Wha' hoppen? Duh.. Me no get it... TV say we winnahz. Me luv TV..." Democrats: "Duh... Oh no... me fohgot to swear... (bleep - bleep)" Republicans: " Bush won the popular vote, and the electoraly college, and recieved more votes than any president since Reagan! So, whatever is influencing your decisions is obviously not affecting the rest of the country." Well - That about settles that! Republicans are the VICTORS! And even though there's NOTHING a democrat can do about it now, let's listen to them whine and complain, like infantile brats who just got thier first spanking, a little more, shall we... Go ahead! 041105 ... p2 democrat: "there's adam clymer, major league asshole from the New York Times" oops, my mistake, that was president dubya your stereotyping of democrats as brainless, cursing morons shows you to be someone who is incapable of having an intelligent conversation about any possibility that you haven't already accepted as fact. you've got your view, and everyone who disagrees with you is stupid, right? duh, yourself. 041105 ... tungniw emwolb "Four more years of American soldiers being used as cannon fodder. Four more years of scientific decisions being made by people who believe in a ghost in the clouds. Four more years of debt that our children and grandchildren will have to pay off. Four more years of racists and lunatics for judicial appointments Four more years of looting the treasury and squandering it on corporate cronies. Four more years of making enemies faster than we can kill them. Four more years of fear and darkness and racism and hatred and stupidity and guns and bad country music. I look at the big map and all of the red in flyover country and I feel like I've been locked in a room with the slow learners. We have become the country that pulls a dry cleaning bag over its head to play astronaut." H.L. Mencken once said that no-one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people. The London Daily Mirror echoes Mencken's sentiments with the headline on their cover "How Could 59,459,765 be so DUMB?" By the way, slappy, you need to get your facts and figures straight, Reagan won his re-election by a very large landslide 1n '84 (Mondale only garnered his home-state of Minnesota in the electoral vote and lost the popular vote by a margin of SEVENTEEN MILLION votes), but even then it was a testament to the willingness of poeple to look past the ugly realities of what his administration was really all about so long as the people who could sell the image to America were making their money Kerry, in defeat, garnered more poular votes than Ronald Reagan in his '84 landslide Since both men individually garnered more popular votes than Reagan did, your attempt to spin Bush's popular vote count as some sign of some great, sweeping mandate comes across as pretty idiotic. All it means now is that the overall voting population of the country is both larger and more mobilized on both sides of the partisan divide than it ever has been. 041105 ... birdmad Apparently "dratkcuf" has never read the flailings and droolings of the right-wing nutjobs on free republic or at the (incredibly apropos) Yahoo message boards 041105 ... birdmad "You fucking son of a bitch. I saw what you wrote. We're not going to forget this." --- George W. Bush, confronting journalist Al Hunt in a diner in front of Hunt's wife and 4 year old son in lieu of Hunt's prediction of who would take the 1988 presidential nomination. "Go Fuck Yourself." --- Dick Cheney to Sen. Pat Leahy "We don't want fasggots in the White House" ---Bush Supporter yelling at a Kerry Supporter in Columbus Ohio i can find more, but i know there's no reasoning with kool-aid drinkers, so i won't bother. 041105 ... stork daddy i really think that the person posting those things would have to be a fucktard to think that something so serious is to be given such a superficial and incendiary treatment 041105 ... silentbob for the record: i like michael moore. i would have been happy to hear how self-important celebrities thought they were. it isn't about the media for me. it kind of disappoints me that we really felt like we were doing a good job, felt like we were doing something important and we failed. they failed. i failed you. all of you. I would much rather hear annoying celebrities boast than have this fucking country go into the fucking shitter and take away more rights for honest americans. jesus fucking christ. don't you realize how fucked we are now? and this is what you're posting about. how annoying the dixie chicks are. 041105 ... () (they will call us shrill. i feel shrill.) 041105 ... () (only 2 years to mid term elections. look forward not back.) 041105 ... unhinged god yes, please let's change at least the partisan make-up of congress in efforts to stop the unabashed pushing through the federal government of unconstitutional republican law-making agendas. 041105 what's it to you? who go blather from