Kerry: 'I Can Fight More Effective War on Terror'

You do realize, PittsburghAfterDark, that many of the people on these boards are brainwashed college students. Many, or at least some, will learn the shortcomings of socialism as they grow older.

Oh yeah, of course Kerry will be able to fight the war on terror better. He will be able to do everything better than Bush. He just never tells us how exactly he is going to do it.
 
I know most are students. That's why the world is viewed through an abstract as opposed to absoultes by the majority of them. When Jesus wanted to do his work he went to be with the sinners not the saints.

If I just get one I am indeed a fisher of men.
 
[quote name='hulk409']You do realize, PittsburghAfterDark, that many of the people on these boards are brainwashed college students. Many, or at least some, will learn the shortcomings of socialism as they grow older.
[/quote]

Why? Do we all eventually become greedy warmongers?
 
That's right! Because the world *is* divided into absolutes! You're either with us, or against us! Good or evil! Nuance has no place in our lives, and consideration of complex points is moral relativism! Bad liberals! Bad!

Seriously. Hilarious, you guys are.

And yes, I was a college student at one point. I consider it a point of pride that I was in an environment where I met a tremendous diversity of people whose experiences were radically different than my own. I met people of different ethnicities, backgrounds, economic strata, and sexual orientation. And strangely, bizarrely, I became a better person for it. I mean, brainwashed.

Brainwashed.

Must... eat... brains.

*lurches forward all zombie-like*

Brains...

seppo
 
[quote name='hulk409']You do realize, PittsburghAfterDark, that many of the people on these boards are brainwashed college students. Many, or at least some, will learn the shortcomings of socialism as they grow older.

Oh yeah, of course Kerry will be able to fight the war on terror better. He will be able to do everything better than Bush. He just never tells us how exactly he is going to do it.[/quote]

after i graduate could someone remind me to bomb this guys house, after all, thats what adults do in this world with people they dont agree with...right? :roll:
 
[quote name='PittsburghAfterDark']I know most are students. That's why the world is viewed through an abstract as opposed to absoultes by the majority of them. When Jesus wanted to do his work he went to be with the sinners not the saints.

If I just get one I am indeed a fisher of men.[/quote]

Bush = Christ

:roll:
 
Oh, just to be clear - "socialism" isn't what we're going for, here. But I suppose framing the issue that way puts up a straw man for you, so you call it whatever you want. I mean, I could say, "The majority of right-wing nutcases are just uneducated morons, but they'll grow out of it with exposure to the world. People who undergo a real diversity of experience eventually grow out of Nazism."

Ah, but you're not Nazis, you say! Congratulations, now you see my point.

seppo
 
[quote name='PittsburghAfterDark']I know most are students. That's why the world is viewed through an abstract as opposed to absoultes by the majority of them. When Jesus wanted to do his work he went to be with the sinners not the saints.

If I just get one I am indeed a fisher of men.[/quote]

Jesus really meant to say "Do unto others before they do unto you."
 
[quote name='punqsux']
after i graduate could someone remind me to bomb this guys house, after all, thats what adults do in this world with people they dont agree with...right? :roll:[/quote]

No, see, it's too late. You should have known that he *would* have grown up to be a twit, and killed him several years ago. We can't wait for the smoking gun, which might be a mushroom cloud, after all!

Pre-emption now!

seppo
 
[quote name='helava'][quote name='punqsux']
after i graduate could someone remind me to bomb this guys house, after all, thats what adults do in this world with people they dont agree with...right? :roll:[/quote]

No, see, it's too late. You should have known that he *would* have grown up to be a twit, and killed him several years ago. We can't wait for the smoking gun, which might be a mushroom cloud, after all!

Pre-emption now!

seppo[/quote]

yeah i didnt read that memo, it came over spring break...
 
[quote name='PittsburghAfterDark']
If I just get one I am indeed a fisher of men.[/quote]

Ok, so I'll give you an opportunity to throw out a "hook," PAD, and I'll ask you a pretty simple question, placed in some context:

Why should I support Bush/Cheney?

1.) They have extolled the PNAC's neocon philosophy, which the Iraq war has proven to be wrong on nearly every point, from the "fall" of Iraq, to the ease with which a democratic society would rise. Every point the neocon philosophy has expounded has been proven wrong by our actions in Iraq.

2.) The tax cut has provided orders of magniture less job growth than was predicted, and despite giving away so much money we could have created more jobs by using that money to simply employ people at a reasonable wage on public works, we're millions of jobs in the hole, and even the good months of job creation have barely kept up with the growth necessary to break even given population growth.

3.) The tax cut has forced a substantial cut in services, which in many cases, negates any effect of a middle class tax cut, as middle class families must now pay for these services out-of-pocket.

4.) The Bush administration has strongly moved to actually explicitly amend our Constitution to exclude certain segments of our population, giving them *less* equal rights, rather than more.

5.) The Bush administration has shunned the NAACP, becoming the first Presidency in many, many years to fail to address the group at all during a term in office.

6.) The Bush administration inflated claims of WMD in Iraq, they failed to pursue Osama bin Laden, they have peddled knowingly false information, they have been duped by a supposed spy for Iran (where is Chalabi in the news these days, anyway?), and gotten more than 900 of our people killed in a war that was based on entirely false pretenses. Say what you will about Hussein being a bad man, we have historically not "liberated" countries from bad people, except in cases of genocide.

I could go on, but I've gotta get back to work. Still left - the Kyoto Protocol, the damage done to our alliances around the globe, the dissolution of the Israel/Palestine peace process, the weakening of our environmental protections, the recess appointment, circumventing the review process, of extremist judges, etc.

Anyway - the question is pretty simple. Why would you support Bush, knowing what you know about how he has conducted his term in office?

seppo
 
[quote name='hulk409']You do realize, PittsburghAfterDark, that many of the people on these boards are brainwashed college students. Many, or at least some, will learn the shortcomings of socialism as they grow older.

Oh yeah, of course Kerry will be able to fight the war on terror better. He will be able to do everything better than Bush. He just never tells us how exactly he is going to do it.[/quote]

I was trying to stay somewhat neutral and consider both sides equally, but when I read that quote both you and PAD lost all credibility.

What a great argument you have there. Basically "You don't know what you are talking about because you aren't old enough" stalemate.

Also, that quip about Jesus. Personally I think using Jesus in such a political debate is wrong, but since you insist on including him. The reason he chose 'sinners' to work with is because those in power i.e. the rich were too egocentric to change their ways. Jesus desired to flip this status quo.

I find it interesting that one of the biggest arguments against Kerry is 'What will he do to make things better?'. Yet you can ask that about Bush as well. This country desperately needs change; obviously in today's world the rich will stay rich and the poor will stay poor for the most part. That won't change and I'm not advocating revolution, but maybe we can mix up the status quo by voting in someone else besides Bush.
 
[quote name='PittsburghAfterDark']1. The balanced budget isn't the act of a President. The President can't spend a dime. The President can't raise one dime of revenue. All in flow and out flow of government funds is conrolled by Congress. Therefore the balanced budget was the result of the actions of Congress, a Republican Congress at that. Since you don't know how government spending is controlled and revenues are raised I suggest you familiarize yourself with Article I of the U.S. Constitution.

2. The ban on assault weapons. Not permanent. In fact that law is up for renewal because it was only a 10 year law. This law outlawed many weapons of foreign manufacture but allowed their domestic counterpart stay legal. AK-47's and Uzi's were outlawed the AR-15 could remain legal. This law was terribly flawed and again... not permanent and will not be renewed in September.

3. The Oslo Accords may have been monumental as the Camp David Accords were for Carter. However Yasser Arafat completely destroyed any adoption of them therefore they're nothing more than an interesting historical "what if".

Ikon's 3

1st off clinton was excellent with dealing with foreign allies. He worked well in the middle east and in Europe both eastern and western.

I wouldn't call diplomacy an accomplishment. I wouldn't even call Bush 41's ability to put together a coalition for Desert Strom a Presidential accomplishment. It's what the outcome of those alliances did that was historical. I'll give you half a point on this but nothing specific was given, just a general "we all got along" type of thing.

2nd Restricting the sale of hand guns.

Which was already addressed and is actually a detrimental thing as it abridges the second ammendment. These gun laws are going to be sunsetted this fall FYI.

3rd He helped both the WTO and NAFTA come together.

I'll give you this. Even though both treaties were long negotiated they were enacted under Clinton. A very non-leftist claim to fame but I agree entirely.[/quote]


The budget gets submitted to Congress by the president. Congress votes on it. The budget that was submitted by Clinton that balanced the budget did not get one Repub vote.
 
If the Clinton budgets were not voted on by one Republican they could not have passed for executive signature. Why? Republicans controlled both houses of Congress from 1994-2000. So um.... wrong. I'll address the other 6 points that helava presented in order.

1.) They have extolled the PNAC's neocon philosophy, which the Iraq war has proven to be wrong on nearly every point, from the "fall" of Iraq, to the ease with which a democratic society would rise. Every point the neocon philosophy has expounded has been proven wrong by our actions in Iraq.

I'm also going to tie your 6th statement into this.

6.) The Bush administration inflated claims of WMD in Iraq, they failed to pursue Osama bin Laden, they have peddled knowingly false information, they have been duped by a supposed spy for Iran (where is Chalabi in the news these days, anyway?), and gotten more than 900 of our people killed in a war that was based on entirely false pretenses. Say what you will about Hussein being a bad man, we have historically not "liberated" countries from bad people, except in cases of genocide.

The origins of the information and how it went wrong will be debated for years as the CIA, MI6, the French DGSE and Russian successor to the KGB were all in agreement that Iraq had WMD.

Your questions about Chalabi are well founded. I too would like to know how heavily we relied on his information and that off the INC and if he had any ties with Iranian intelligence.

We haven't ever liberated a country because of genocide. We didn't make war on Germany due to the Holocaust we made war on Germany because they declared war on us. If we were in the business of liberating countries from genocidal governments we would have been in Rwanda, the Sudan today, Cambodia in the 70's and in Russia in the 30's. We have not launched wars for this purpose.

The "ease" of democracy and how would be achieved in Iraq is questionable. I never thought it would be easy and haven't really been privvy to any high level reports about what expectations were to achieving a transitional government into a full fledged working democracy that the Iraqi's were running unquestionably.

I look at today's bombing that killed 70 Iraqi's as a watershed. Not one foreign person was killed. This was someone and some organization clearly making war on the native population. I never expected that and I don't even think the most cynical American observers expected that kind of level of bloodshed not directed at American or foreign forces. I still think there's more to the "uprising" or "rebellion" than has be uncovered.

I may be wrong though. I bought into the 60 Minutes and NY Times stories about how credible Chalabi was.

2.) The tax cut has provided orders of magniture less job growth than was predicted, and despite giving away so much money we could have created more jobs by using that money to simply employ people at a reasonable wage on public works, we're millions of jobs in the hole, and even the good months of job creation have barely kept up with the growth necessary to break even given population growth.

We didn't really "give" away money. This supposes that tax cuts need to be paid for. This supposes that all money is governments and whatever they don't take means what is left and all money in the economy is only there because government hasn't claimed it.

We are down jobs from 2000. Every time this comes up I'm amazed at the basic failure to acknowledge the economic impact of 9/11 which is estimated at $1 trillion. We're about an $11 trillion dolllar economy so let's say 9/11 impacted us by a negative factor of 9%. If the American work force contains 100,000,000 full time jobs, which is low, that means that for a comparable loss we should have lost 9 million jobs due to economic impact. We didn't. We lost a peak of 2.8 million jobs and are a net million down from 2000.

That of course though depends on the reporting methodology you use to gague employment. There are some that factor in work from home, small business and not company payroll jobs that estimate we're actually ahead of where we were when Bush took office. I'm of the belief that we're about 300,000 down from the start. Incidently, we have the same unemployment percentage as when Clinton ran for his second term.

Last but not least tax cuts are a lagging way of cutting unemployment. They will take more than two years to work from legislation to being reflected in employment numbers.

3.) The tax cut has forced a substantial cut in services, which in many cases, negates any effect of a middle class tax cut, as middle class families must now pay for these services out-of-pocket.

What services? What was cut? What programs went through a true cut? Government "cuts" are 95% curbs in the rate of growth. Not cuts. This statement is really too ambiguous for me to attempt to tackle.

4.) The Bush administration has strongly moved to actually explicitly amend our Constitution to exclude certain segments of our population, giving them *less* equal rights, rather than more.

Obviously in reference to gay marriage. Gay marriage is overwhelmingly rejected by the majority of Americans. Without making this an endless gay marriage debate the measure if ever presented to the states would likely pass as having 36 states come out against gay marriage would happen quite easily. Even liberal and tolerant California's proposition to support straight marriage passed by a 60-40 vote.

You can't pin this issue on the president or administration and say it's just them because it's not. The majority and overwhelming majority of the country is against gay marriage.

5.) The Bush administration has shunned the NAACP, becoming the first Presidency in many, many years to fail to address the group at all during a term in office.

I think the last president to not address the NAACP was Harding. However the NAACP is a hatchet job liberal group that has criticized the President in harsh terms for four years.

The African American community supports the Democrats in elections 8 to 1. Despite that George Bush went to the National Urban League convention last week addressed the group that included Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton and asked very poignant questions about blind support for one party and point blank asked for the black vote.

There are many groups that represent black Americans and the NAACP is just one of them Bush has also spoken to the Congress of Racial Equality too if I'm not mistaken. To say ignoring one is ignoring 12% of the population is patently absurd. One group does not represent an entire ethnic group.
 
"I never expected that and I don't even think the most cynical American observers expected that kind of level of bloodshed not directed at American or foreign forces."

Really? That's odd. A lot of people knew, prior to invasion, that the Sunnis and the Shiites would be in a pretty violent power conflict if the existing goverment were uprooted. I dunno why you & Bushco didn't know that, but if you even had a marginal understanding of the pre-existing balance of power in Iraq, the fact that destabilizing the region would cause power struggles like this was pretty obvious.

seppo
 
"I bought into the 60 Minutes and NY Times stories about how credible Chalabi was."

Well, the media really fell on their face on this one. A lot of the media sourced their stories on "senior administration officials" who were rarely named. Mostly, as it turns out, a lot of the reporting (particularly from the NYT) came from a single source - Chalabi himself. But it was pretty widely known that this guy was a crook, and was clearly pushing an agenda when feeding us information, PRIOR to our invasion. Again, I'm curious as to why people are so surprised.

seppo
 
I'd like to see a source that even marginally claims Bush's net job loss is anywhere close to breaking even. NOTHING I've read points to that, and though the economic impact of 9/11 is of course not insubstantial, the point is that our *current* job growth is ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE smaller than the tax cut people predicted, and his *best* month of job growth, even now, is a pretty s**ty month compared to the previous administration's record.

seppo
 
re: gay marriage - there's a difference between codifying it legally, and amending the Constitution to not only exclude it, but actively prevent states from recognizing it, or even conferring benefits of marriage to civil unions and such. The explicit wording of the amendment is a result of the Republicans in charge right now, and the explicit wording of the amendment was disgusting in that it was explicitly discriminatory.

seppo
 
"Despite that George Bush went to the National Urban League convention last week addressed the group that included Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton and asked very poignant questions about blind support for one party and point blank asked for the black vote."

I read the text of his remarks, and laughed out loud. Seriously. Poignant questions? What, exactly, has the Republican party *done* for the African American population? What have they done for gays? Other minorities? Other than lip service, that is? I'm not saying that the black support of the Democratic party is justified - the Dems have screwed the blacks by omission, in many cases, just as they've screwed any number of their constituents. But to say that the black population's support of the Democrats is "blind" is pretty stupid. Compare the two parties, and if you can come up with even a marginally cognizant and valid argument for why a black person, or hell, ANY minority should support the Bush administration, I'll be mightily impressed.

seppo
 
[quote name='PittsburghAfterDark']If the Clinton budgets were not voted on by one Republican they could not have passed for executive signature. Why? Republicans controlled both houses of Congress from 1994-2000. So um.... wrong.[/quote]

Check your facts, PAD. The Clinton budget that ended the deficit was passed in 1993. That was the one with the big tax hike that no Republican would support.

Of course, once they saw Clinton was on the right track and the economy was going gangbusters, the Repubs never tried to cut taxes for the rest of his presidency.
 
[quote name='helava']I'd like to see a source that even marginally claims Bush's net job loss is anywhere close to breaking even. NOTHING I've read points to that, and though the economic impact of 9/11 is of course not insubstantial, the point is that our *current* job growth is ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE smaller than the tax cut people predicted, and his *best* month of job growth, even now, is a pretty s**ty month compared to the previous administration's record.

seppo[/quote]

Another first for Bush: Under his watch, the income of Americans has decreased for two consecutive years (2001 & 2002) for the first time since the current tax code was enacted (sometime during WWII). 2002 is the most current information available, so I wouldn't be surprised if the situation was actually worse. This is mostly because of high paying jobs being lost and replaced with Wal-Mart-type jobs. I just can't understand why people want to give this guy another 4 years.
 
[quote name='PittsburghAfterDark']
Get back in your sperm suit.
capt.jey13d07271628.campaign_kerry_jey13d.jpg
[/quote]

You got something against astronauts? All of whom wear a "sperm suit"?
They are the smartest people in the country.

You are such an idiot, someone makes a good point and in response this is all you can come up wih?
 
[quote name='Quackzilla'][quote name='PittsburghAfterDark']
Get back in your sperm suit.
capt.jey13d07271628.campaign_kerry_jey13d.jpg
[/quote]

You got something against astronauts? All of whom wear a "sperm suit"?
They are the smartest people in the country.

You are such an idiot, someone makes a good point and in response this is all you can come up wih?[/quote]

The Repubs are just trying to pull a "Dukakis" on Kerry. Remember when they made fun of Dukakis for riding in a tank with that oversized helmet. It's a cheap shot, which makes it about on par with their usual tactics.

When they start laughing at that codpiece GW wore with his flight suit during "Mission Accomplished," then I'll be impressed.
 
In a way, I hope the republicans keep focusing on crap like this. It shows how low and desperate they really are. "Look! He's in a funny-looking suit! He can't possibly be president!" Please.
 
[quote name='PittsburghAfterDark']Why don't you come back after you've had a chance to discover the real meaning of "obstruction of justice" and do a little bit of history and see what happened to Richard Nixon when he lied under oath mmmmmmkay?[/QUOTE]

Yes, I dug up an old thread to see how events have changed in a year (mostly because I'm bored, waiting for a simulation that I'm running to get done). I found this statement on page 1 from PAD pertaining to Clinton most interesting. Will PAD flip-flop on this when the hammer of justice falls on Bush, Rove, & Cheney's staff?

As evidenced in the last post on page 1, suspicion was always on Scooter Libby.
 
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