Bush to wage ideological campaign

[NewGuy]

http://www.washingtontimes.com/functions/print.php?StoryID=20040601-122125-2987r

President Bush's re-election strategists plan to portray the November election as the first since the Reagan era to offer voters a stark choice between liberalism and conservatism.
It also is the first time in years that Republicans appear to be depriving Democrats of their traditional advantage in grass-roots politics.

"Conservatives have for a generation yearned for an election in which there would be a very clear choice on the issues and a strong focus on grass roots," said Bush campaign manager Ken Mehlman.

"This election will represent a clear choice, an ideological choice on the issues. And this campaign is totally committed to grass roots.

"So if you're a conservative Republican," he added, "this campaign is doing what you wanted."
The ideological differences between Mr. Bush and Democratic candidate Sen. John Kerry, rated by the nonpartisan National Journal magazine this year as the most liberal member of the Senate, appear more pronounced than in recent presidential contests.

In 2000, for example, Vice President Al Gore was widely portrayed as a centrist Democrat and Mr. Bush was playing up the compassionate side of his "compassionate conservatism."
In 1992 and 1996, Bill Clinton positioned himself as a centrist in his contests against President George H.W. Bush and Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas. Both Republicans were considered less conservative than the current president.

Although Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, the Democratic nominee in 1988, was considered a staunch liberal, the elder President Bush was disparaged by even some Republicans as "Reagan Lite."
The Bush campaign's effort to play up the ideological differences between the president and the Massachusetts senator comes at a time when the president's job-approval ratings are at record lows.

Still, Republican strategist David Winston, president of the Winston Group, said the outlook for Mr. Bush is bright.
"The endless doom-and-gloom stories from Iraq have taken a toll in terms of voter confidence," he said. "But if this is the worst of times for the Bush administration -- and some would argue it is -- then Kerry's inability to surge to a strong lead in this ripe environment bodes ill for a November victory."

Meanwhile, the Bush campaign says it has an ace up its sleeve -- a formidable grass-roots organization to get out the vote on Election Day. That represents a dramatic change from the 2000 campaign, when Democrats still enjoyed a historical advantage in getting voters to the polls.

The closeness of the 2000 election prompted the Republican Party to begin an ambitious, nationwide return to shoe-leather politics. The Bush campaign has assembled an army of volunteers that swung into action months before the Kerry campaign.
Democrats acknowledge the Kerry campaign was slow in setting up field offices in key battleground states like Ohio, but they plan to match or surpass the Bush campaign's grass-roots effort by Election Day.

 

[nycflasher]

This coming election will offer the American people the opportunity to vote for John Kerry, or a man who along with his cohorts runs an administration whose idea of bipartisanship is akin to date-rape.

 

[insein]

Originally posted by nycflasher
Thus coming election will offer the American people the opportunity to vote for John Kerry, or a man who along with his cohorts runs an administration whose idea of bipartisanship is akin to date-rape.

Correct me if i am wrong but wasnt it Bush who offered a Bipartisan approach to the Dems in his Campaign of 2000? Wasn't it Bush that extended his hand to Ted Kennedy to help write the No child Left behind Act? When have the Democrats extended anything to help out republican policies? Hell they won't even allow any of Bush's judges to go through thanks to their hardcore partisan nature.

So don't give me that BS about Bush being partisan and the Dems being bipartisan.

 

[5stringJeff]

Originally posted by insein
Correct me if i am wrong but wasnt it Bush who offered a Bipartisan approach to the Dems in his Campaign of 2000? Wasn't it Bush that extended his hand to Ted Kennedy to help write the No child Left behind Act? When have the Democrats extended anything to help out republican policies? Hell they won't even allow any of Bush's judges to go through thanks to their hardcore partisan nature.

So don't give me that BS about Bush being partisan and the Dems being bipartisan.

 

[Avatar4321]

Originally posted by insein
Correct me if i am wrong but wasnt it Bush who offered a Bipartisan approach to the Dems in his Campaign of 2000? Wasn't it Bush that extended his hand to Ted Kennedy to help write the No child Left behind Act? When have the Democrats extended anything to help out republican policies? Hell they won't even allow any of Bush's judges to go through thanks to their hardcore partisan nature.

So don't give me that BS about Bush being partisan and the Dems being bipartisan.

Well put. But then you are dealing with the guys who seem to think we took a unilateral action in Iraq with our friends Great Britain, Spain, Poland, Australia, and a bout 40 or 50 others nations.

 

[Annie]

Thus coming election will offer the American people the opportunity to vote for John Kerry, or a man who along with his cohorts runs an administration whose idea of bipartisanship is akin to date-rape.

NYC flasher

What do you mean by this?

 

[Said1]

Originally posted by Avatar4321
Well put. But then you are dealing with the guys who seem to think we took a unilateral action in Iraq with our friends Great Britain, Spain, Poland, Australia, and a bout 40 or 50 others nations.

I thought they bribed, threatened and/or manipulated

 

[nycflasher]

Originally posted by Kathianne
NYC flasher

What do you mean by this?

This is a quote from a former governor, but I happen to agree with it.

Their idea of bipartisanship is: we can work together, but only if we get our way.

 

[Annie]

Originally posted by nycflasher
This is a quote from a former governor, but I happen to agree with it.

Their idea of bipartisanship is: we can work together, but only if we get our way.

I'm afraid I still don't get your point. But I do get this:

http://belmontclub.blogspot.com/

Tuesday, June 01, 2004

Memo to Osama
Peace be unto you and Allah willing may we tread on the bones of our enemies in final triumph. You have asked me to examine, in as frank a way as possible, how this final victory is to be achieved. Permit me to retrace the old ground, familiar to you, which contains certain aspects which yet bear on the problem and have never been resolved.

Victory for the Jihad in operatorional terms means engineering the collapse of the infidel West. The alternative strategy, that of overtaking them in temporal power, was attempted in the 1950s and 60s by those among us who became enamored of Marxism. They believed Kruschev when he said, "we will bury you", and like Nasser, imagined that by building a few dams, some factories and dispatching a few dozens to study at Institutes in Moscow, we could surpass them in science, industry and wealth. But we found it was Ronald Reagan and not the Kruschev who did the burying. Still, while the House of Islam could not overbuild the House of the Infidel, if the world of the enemy could be reduced to ashes then it would be brought low; and we, while not growing a single inch in stature, would nevertheless grow high by comparison.

You were among the first to understand how possible this bold strategy was, that of bringing the West low, seemingly improbable to those overawed by it gleaming cities. Indeed, you understood how natural this strategy was. Having lived among them and killed many of them, peace be unto you!, you understood that the West on three occasions just barely escaped destroying itself. Whether in the muddy trenches of the Great War; or in the global bloodbath of the Second World War; or the Cold War, lived in the shadow of thousands of nuclear warheads, you understood the West was like a man who had escaped suicide thrice only through great good fortune.

This yearning for the death of the West comes from Shaitan himself and is proof of their accursed nature, and explains why we will eventually be victorious despite our material weakness. The desire for self-death is embodied in what is called the Left, the unnamed shadow motivating the carnage of the last century. We must remember its name, for we will invoke it again when deciding on how best to pursue the Jihad.

But if the West is like a stone balanced on a precipice, wanting to fall yet held back by those among it who wish to live, still its final plunge requires a lever, some instrument of power which by tipping it the decisive inch will unleash the self-destructive tendencies of the infidel; let them yield to the spirit that haunts them, "the spectre haunting Europe" and like the Gadarene swine of their scripture, hurl themselves into the precipice. That lever will be provided by Islam.

Our experience in Afghanistan brought to a choice of ways. We could, on the one hand, focus our energies upon expanding the idea of Jihad throughout the Muslim world, enlarging our forces without provoking a final confrontation with the most dangerous remaining element of the West, the United States. Or, we could on the other hand, use the forces already at our disposal to tip the rock over the cliff. Since you have instructed me to be frank, I will say Brother Osama, killer of many infidels, peace be unto you, that you were mistaken in your appraisal of American weakness. The lever that we had, the special operation sent to destroy three precious enemy targets in his heartland on September 11, was not enough to move the stone. We would have been better served had we waited patiently, until the network by brother A. Q. Khan had disseminated the P2 centrifuges to a number of Muslim, I will not say Islamic, states. In retrospect even you will agree that had we focused our energies on seizing Pakistan or even Saudi Arabia and acquired nuclear weapons during the time America slumbered, for Europe was always asleep, our position today would have been immeasurably stronger! For one, America even had we attacked them like September 11 would not have dared invade Afghanistan, any more than they would hazard invading North Korea, which has but a handful of fission devices.

We overreached and in a far more fundamental way than America is being accused of overreaching in Iraq because our actions on September 11 irretrievably committed us to the fork in the road that we now wish to forsake. It bars a return to the crossroads where we might choose the road not taken, the road that we now know leads to victory. But if that is impossible then we must discover victory on the road we are on. Here I will examine the prospects in both directions and point out the pitfalls and promises of each.

The fundamental problem preventing a revival of the strategy of consolidating our strength within the Islamic world is the American occupation of Iraq. It presents a dual threat. First, it serves as an object lesson to those Arab states who would shelter us. Do this and you share Saddam's fate. But second, and most important, it has given the United States possession of a great Arab state, perhaps the greatest of them all. It is not the money they care for. You know the statistics. The gross national product of all the Arab states combined do not amount to that of a single medium-sized European country. What they covet is the human resource that Iraq provides. Its Mukhabarat, its limitless pool of Arab-speaking potential traitors, its secret files whose contents not even you, O Osama, may know. What they covet is its central physical location which makes it possible to project secret teams all over the Arab world.

But as you know, our successes in Iraq have been entirely inflated by the press. Objectively speaking, we have endured an unbroken string of defeats. We could not get the UN to stop the American attack; we persuaded Turkey to withhold cooperation, but it did not matter. The country fell to the invader and although we have called every Jihadi at our disposal into the theater, with Syrian and Iranian help, we have not been able to delay the American timetable of handover by June 30 so much as a single day. But worse, it has forced us into coalition warfare. I know how sick you are, as I am, of the Persian apostate mullahs and the greedy Syrians. The Americans can kick their ally France like a dog, but we alas, must endure the humiliations of dealing with the Assads and the Ayatollahs with a smile. It must now be accepted, than even if John Kerry wins, that we will not be able to seize a state like Pakistan, Saudi Arabia or even Afghanistan again within a five year horizon. The return to the crossroads is barred, at least for the foreseeable future. It is sad, but a fact.

That leaves us with this tantalizing question. Having gone so far on September 11, can we not go further? Will one more push topple the rock? The answer is yes, but only if the push is sufficient and it leaves the Left which is the spirit of suicide, in control. This latter condition is essential. The fundamental fact is that the triumph of the Jihad must be momentarily preceded by the ascendance of the Left. Only the Left will pick up the gun, put the barrel to the temple of the Western mind and pull the trigger without hesitation. But their ascendance will only be momentary, and I for one delight in imagining how we will kick them as they squeal about their rights and their sexual entitlements once there is no one left to protect them.

In this respect, I must warn our brothers against wooing the Western Left too ardently. For it is the reality that the average Western man still recoils from the sight of the bearded believer or the veiled woman. He would much rather trust the eccentric English professor in rumpled tweeds with bad teeth. We must ensure that these types are always in ample supply. Already the Jihad is siphoning away their younger members, those who have grown tired of Solidarity Marches and dancing in the streets without their trousers, and who want action of the sort that the Left can no longer provide. It is useless to remind them that their physical contribution to the fight will be paltry. It is their propaganda they do best and we should leave them alone to imagine us innocuous, misunderstood and exotically dressed victims even while we prepare to kill them in their millions. The Left will find a way to blame the dead themselves, a job at which they are surpassingly brilliant.

The hard part then, is to kill those millions. The Al Qaeda has survived the onslaught by decentralizing itself and relying on what Western analysts prefer to call 'affiliates' -- local groups of brothers, underground societies in individual countries -- allies really, for they must be controlled by cajolery, bribery and intimidation, rather than explicitly follow orders like brother Mohammed Atta of old. But relying on affiliates has also meant a lowering of our operational standards. None of our actions since September 11 has come close to matching its technical sophistication. The operation against the Oasis apartment in Riyadh is, professionally speaking, a botched job. Killing Indian janitors, Filipino cooks and Sri Lankan utility men is not exactly what fighters in the top class can do. Our cell in Madrid merely got lucky. In truth, they were a bunch of released detainees with a history of petty crime. We will need much higher caliber professionals, a secure base for rehearsal and deep penetration American support cells to deliver a devastating blow to the United States before this fall.

Excuse me, as there is a knocking downstairs at the door, probably Achmed, who I sent out for supplies. He may arouse suspicion if I do not answer it immediately. I am dispatching this email now and will dispatch the second part later.


posted by wretchard | Permalink: 12:37 PM Zulu

 

[rtwngAvngr]

Originally posted by nycflasher

Their idea of bipartisanship is: we can work together, but only if we get our way.

That's liberals who act that way. You guys are playing politics with national security to win an election. Now who's destructive and stubborn?

 

[DKSuddeth]

Originally posted by rtwngAvngr
That's liberals who act that way. You guys are playing politics with national security to win an election. Now who's destructive and stubborn?

thats both sides that act that way.

 

[rtwngAvngr]

Originally posted by DKSuddeth
thats both sides that act that way.

No conservative would ever badmouth his president during a time of war. internal politics used to end at the water's edge. Liberals are worse. Look at any liberal controlled forum, Conservative povs are not allowed. Liberals can't defend their points logically, and when they fail, they turn to personal attacks, wild strawmen, and shutting down the conversation. or they just say something like "Pot. Kettle. Black. ".

 

[KLSuddeth]

or they just say something like "Pot. Kettle. Black. ".

As a wife, I shouldnt laugh.
As a fellow poster, I have to.

:rotflmao:

(sorry dk) You have to admit - that IS funny!

 

[DKSuddeth]

Originally posted by rtwngAvngr
No conservative would ever badmouth his president during a time of war. internal politics used to end at the water's edge. Liberals are worse. Look at any liberal controlled forum, Conservative povs are not allowed. Liberals can't defend their points logically, and when they fail, they turn to personal attacks, wild strawmen, and shutting down the conversation. or they just say something like "Pot. Kettle. Black. ".

ouch, :

 

[freeandfun1]

Originally posted by nycflasher
This is a quote from a former governor, but I happen to agree with it.

Their idea of bipartisanship is: we can work together, but only if we get our way.

Sounds like the dems to me. They only consider things as being bi-partisan when the GOP agrees with them, not the other way around...

 

[NewGuy]

Originally posted by freeandfun1
Sounds like the dems to me. They only consider things as being bi-partisan when the GOP agrees with them, not the other way around...

Also sounds like Israel and the Palestineans.

 

[nycflasher]

Originally posted by rtwngAvngr
No conservative would ever badmouth his president during a time of war. internal politics used to end at the water's edge. Liberals are worse. Look at any liberal controlled forum, Conservative povs are not allowed. Liberals can't defend their points logically, and when they fail, they turn to personal attacks, wild strawmen, and shutting down the conversation. or they just say something like "Pot. Kettle. Black. ".

You're out of your fucking mind if you think that just because we are at war one cannot badmouth the President. It is our obligation as Americans. Stupid son of a bitch should never have been President in the first place

AS for election year politics, it's GWB that's been running the biggest game of all only I don't think his gamble is going to payoff...

 

[rtwngAvngr]

Originally posted by nycflasher
You're out of your fucking mind if you think that just because we are at war one cannot badmouth the President. It is our obligation as Americans. Stupid son of a bitch should never have been President in the first place

AS for election year politics, it's GWB that's been running the biggest game of all only I don't think his gamble is going to payoff...

But your criticisms are lies, distortions and trumped up bullshit. It would be different if it was something true.

Every recount showed Bush won. So stfu on that point, please.

His gamble? What is his gamble? Fighting terrorism?

Your brain is f#cked.

 

[SPIKESMYGOD]

Of course, it IS the obligation of every liberal to hate America & pull for our enemies.

Hell of a job you guys are doing. CONGRATS!

 

[nycflasher]

Originally posted by SPIKESMYGOD
Of course, it IS the obligation of every liberal to hate America & pull for our enemies.

Hell of a job you guys are doing. CONGRATS!

Go, Osama...
Go, Osama...