BearcatCarl Wrote:5. This one really shows your true colors. AGAIN, YOU'RE ESSENTIALLY SAYING JOHN KERRY USED THE 87 BIL IN FUNDING FOR THE TROOPS AS A POLITICAL TOOL TO REPEAL TAX CUTS? He dangled the safety of our troops in front of the President in order to gain currency on the domestic front? This from a self described "war hero"? AND YOU THINK THAT'S "INNOVATIVE"?????
We will just have to agree to disagree here.
In my view, the easy way out is to just spend and spend and spend and just leave the financial mess to our children. That is the George Bush way.
John Kerry came up with a way to pay for the $87 billion. You may disagree with the way he proposed to pay for it. But he did come up with a way, and I think he deserves some credit for that.
War is, supposedly, a time of shared sacrafice. We know many poor and working class families are sacrificing. Their kids' boots are on the ground in Iraq.
How are families sacrificing in the top tax brackets?
They aren't. Their kids aren't in Iraq.
Quote:EVERYONE agreed that Saddam Hussein was an imminent threat that needed to be dealt with.
I'm not even sure you know what "imminent threat" means.
I am reasonably confident that the Bush administration never asserted Saddam Hussein was an
imminent threat. In fact, with some digging, I'm pretty sure I could find administration officials flatly denying they ever described Saddam Hussein as an imminent threat.
Philosophically, the whole point of this doctrine of pre-emption was to come up with a loosier, goosier standard for going to war than the "imminent threat" standard.
Back to your point: Everyone did *not* agree Saddam Hussein was an imminent threat. If you look at the record, you will see plenty of House and Senate members who voted against authorizing Bush to take action.
I wish Kerry had joined those dissenting Democrats.
It's possible that Kerry -- like many Democrats -- was fearful of the political consequences of not voting to give Bush a green light.
Such fears weren't unreasonable. Look what the Republicans did to Max Cleland. They compared him to Osama bin Laden, even though he gave two legs and an arm for his country.
A real climate of fear existed in this country in 2002. Most Americans thought Saddam Hussein bore some responsibility for the Sept. 11 massacre. And there was a reason for that: The Bush administration wanted it that way.
Bush continually blurred the issue. He continually made nonsensical comparisons between Saddam Hussein and the terrorists responsible for 911.
In other words, Bush preyed upon our fears of terrorism to push America into war against Iraq, a country that never attacked us, that had no plans to, that had nothnig to do with 911 and was not collaborating with terrorists with designs on America.
I believe that climate of fear cowed many Democrats into voting with him even quite a few of them, deep down, did not agree at all.
Others seem to have taken the Bush administration's terrible misinterpretation of intelligence at face value. It is clear that the Bushies looked only for intelligence that supported their case and dismissed intelligence that suggested a contrary point of view. But that obviously wasn't known then.
Kerry says he's in this camp, and the many statements he made in support of action at the time seem to back this up.
Personally, I wish Kerry would have stood up to George Bush on the war from the start.
But the question for me is this: Was Kerry's sin in voting to authorize action worse than Bush's broadbased effort to mislead us into an unnecessary war?
It isn't even close.
I will never, ever forgive George Bush for this war. He scares the hell out of me.