Mariner
Active Member
You're losing touch with reality. Bush is sitting pretty? Huh? The last president to have such sustained low approval ratings was Richard Nixon. Was Richard Nixon sitting pretty too?
By any measure, the economy is doing well? Huh? How about the Dow? Stalled. How about the last quarter's economic reports--flat. How about the U.S. trade deficit? Record high. How about the pending 50/50 chance that Ford and GM will go bankrupt? How about the flat wages most people are experiencing, even while Bush's new aristocratic class gets wealthier? The record number of Americans without health insurance? The increasing number of children in poverty? The failure of one pension plan after another, and gradual retreat of the private sector from providing pensions or health insurance? How exactly is the economy doing well? We're living on $3 BILLION a DAY in foreign investment. That stops, and we're dead. That's a rosy picture to you?
Clinton thought Saddam had WMD--yes, that was quite a while before Bush invaded, and therefore meaningless. Plenty of intelligence was gathered between the end of Clinton's presidency and the start of Bush's invasion. Kerry thought so? Yes, and we now know that Bush removed all sorts of qualifying information from the National Security reports that he shared with Congress, to strengthen his case. His statements that Congress had access to the same intel as he were lies--notice how he's stopped saying that since the news came out?
The Democratic response to war? Huh? Personally I think Kerry would have invaded Afghanistan but not Iraq. He'd have shared the Iraq intel with Congress better, and had real public discussion rather than saying "I have secret information that I won't tell you" as Bush did. We'd be way ahead, with our approval ratings remaining near 90%, as they were after 9/11 and remained after Afghanistan. They plummeted after Iraq, and that's Bush's fault--or maybe Rove's. It was interesting to read recently that 1.5 years before we invaded Iraq, Karl Rove gave a speech to Republicans advocating an invasion--not for security reasons but for political reasons. He reasoned, correctly, that leading a war would keep Bush's popularity high enough to win him a second term. Did you see the excellent PBS series on John Adams? It showed how he sacrificed his own second term by making peace with France when it would have been much more popular to start a war.
Mariner.
By any measure, the economy is doing well? Huh? How about the Dow? Stalled. How about the last quarter's economic reports--flat. How about the U.S. trade deficit? Record high. How about the pending 50/50 chance that Ford and GM will go bankrupt? How about the flat wages most people are experiencing, even while Bush's new aristocratic class gets wealthier? The record number of Americans without health insurance? The increasing number of children in poverty? The failure of one pension plan after another, and gradual retreat of the private sector from providing pensions or health insurance? How exactly is the economy doing well? We're living on $3 BILLION a DAY in foreign investment. That stops, and we're dead. That's a rosy picture to you?
Clinton thought Saddam had WMD--yes, that was quite a while before Bush invaded, and therefore meaningless. Plenty of intelligence was gathered between the end of Clinton's presidency and the start of Bush's invasion. Kerry thought so? Yes, and we now know that Bush removed all sorts of qualifying information from the National Security reports that he shared with Congress, to strengthen his case. His statements that Congress had access to the same intel as he were lies--notice how he's stopped saying that since the news came out?
The Democratic response to war? Huh? Personally I think Kerry would have invaded Afghanistan but not Iraq. He'd have shared the Iraq intel with Congress better, and had real public discussion rather than saying "I have secret information that I won't tell you" as Bush did. We'd be way ahead, with our approval ratings remaining near 90%, as they were after 9/11 and remained after Afghanistan. They plummeted after Iraq, and that's Bush's fault--or maybe Rove's. It was interesting to read recently that 1.5 years before we invaded Iraq, Karl Rove gave a speech to Republicans advocating an invasion--not for security reasons but for political reasons. He reasoned, correctly, that leading a war would keep Bush's popularity high enough to win him a second term. Did you see the excellent PBS series on John Adams? It showed how he sacrificed his own second term by making peace with France when it would have been much more popular to start a war.
Mariner.
