Re: Todays Republican!

From: GMCarter (fiar_at_verizon.net)
Date: 11/03/04 

Date: Wed, 03 Nov 2004 11:58:19 GMT

On Tue, 02 Nov 2004 11:49:30 -0500, John M. Williams
<jmwilliams@enforcergraphics.f2s.com> wrote:

>GMCarter <fiar@verizon.net> wrote:
>>
>>Excuse me. You want to go out and be a macho man, why not enlist and
>>get your ass to Baghdad?
>
>If I were still young enough that they would take me, I would.

They'll take you. Go enlist.

Or are you so old you're content to let younger men and women die for
you and a set of lies and deceptions? Convenient.

>>If you so believe in that quagmire, stand up
>>for your beliefs.
>
>Ah, there goes the AFLAC duck again: "Quagmire! Quagmire!" Is there
>a little wind-up key sticking out of your back?

But ya are, Blanche.

Here's one of your conservative buddies on Bush. Yep, he might win. So
the horrific wreck he has created is his.

                George M. Carter

**
American Conservative Magazine
November 8, 2004 issue

"Kerry's the One"

By Scott McConnell

There is little in John Kerry's persona or platform that appeals to
conservatives. The flip-flopper charge - the centerpiece of the
Republican campaign against Kerry - seems overdone, as Kerry's
contrasting votes are the sort of baggage any senator of long service
is likely to pick up. (Bob Dole could tell you all about it.)

But Kerry is plainly a conventional liberal and no candidate for a
future edition of Profiles in Courage. In my view, he will always
deserve censure for his vote in favor of the Iraq War in 2002.

But this election is not about John Kerry. If he were to win, his
dearth of charisma would likely ensure him a single term. He would
face challenges from within his own party and a thwarting of his most
expensive initiatives by a Republican Congress. Much of his presidency
would be absorbed by trying to clean up the mess left to him in Iraq.
He would be constrained by the swollen deficits and a ripe target for
the next Republican nominee.

It is, instead, an election about the presidency of George W. Bush. To
the surprise of virtually everyone, Bush has turned into the most
radical American President we have had since the 19th century. Because
he is the leader of America's conservative party, he has become the
Left's perfect foil-its dream candidate. The libertarian writer Lew
Rockwell has mischievously noted parallels between Bush and Russia's
last tsar, Nicholas II: both gained office as a result of family
connections, both initiated an unnecessary war that shattered their
countries' budgets. Lenin needed the calamitous reign of Nicholas II
to create an opening for the Bolsheviks.

Bush has behaved like a caricature of what a right-wing president is
supposed to be, and his continuation in office will discredit any sort
of conservatism for generations. The launching of an invasion against
a country that posed no threat to the U.S., the doling out of war
profits and concessions to politically favored corporations, the
financing of the war by ballooning the deficit to be passed on to the
nation's children, the ceaseless drive to cut taxes for those outside
the middle class and working poor: it is as if Bush sought to
resurrect every false 1960s-era left-wing cliché about predatory
imperialism and turn it into administration policy. Add to this his
nation-breaking immigration proposal-Bush has laid out a mad scheme to
import immigrants to fill any job where the wage is so low that an
American can't be found to do it-and you have a presidency that
combines imperialist Right and open-borders Left in a uniquely noxious
cocktail.

During the campaign, few have paid attention to how much the Bush
presidency has degraded the image of the United States in the world.
Of course there has always been "anti-Americanism." After the Second
World War many European intellectuals argued for a "Third Way" between
American-style capitalism and Soviet communism, and a generation later
Europe's radicals embraced every ragged "anti-imperialist" cause that
came along. In South America, defiance of "the Yanqui" always draws a
crowd. But Bush has somehow managed to take all these sentiments and
turbo-charge them. In Europe and indeed all over the world, he has
made the United States despised by people who used to be its friends,
by businessmen and the middle classes, by moderate and sensible
liberals. Never before have democratic foreign governments needed to
demonstrate disdain for Washington to their own electorates in order
to survive in office. The poll numbers are shocking. In countries like
Norway, Germany, France, and Spain, Bush is liked by about seven
percent of the populace. In Egypt, recipient of huge piles of American
aid in the past two decades, some 98 percent have an unfavorable view
of the United States. It's the same throughout the Middle East.

Bush has accomplished this by giving the U.S. a novel foreign-policy
doctrine under which it arrogates to itself the right to invade any
country it wants if it feels threatened. It is an American version of
the Brezhnev Doctrine, but the latter was at least confined to Eastern
Europe. If the analogy seems extreme, what is an appropriate
comparison when a country manufactures falsehoods about a foreign
government, disseminates them widely, and invades the country on the
basis of those falsehoods? It is not an action that any American
president has ever taken before. It is not something that "good"
countries do. It is the main reason that people all over the world who
used to consider the United States a reliable and necessary bulwark of
world stability now see us as a menace to their own peace and
security.

These sentiments mean that as long as Bush is president, we have no
real allies in the world, no friends to help us dig out from the Iraq
quagmire. More tragically, they mean that if terrorists succeed in
striking at the United States in another 9/11-type attack, many in the
world will not only think of the American victims but also of the
thousands and thousands of Iraqi civilians killed and maimed by
American armed forces. The hatred Bush has generated has helped
immeasurably those trying to recruit anti-American terrorists-indeed
his policies are the gift to terrorism that keeps on giving, as the
sons and brothers of slain Iraqis think how they may eventually take
their own revenge. Only the seriously deluded could fail to see that a
policy so central to America's survival as a free country as getting
hold of loose nuclear materials and controlling nuclear proliferation
requires the willingness of foreign countries to provide full, 100
percent co-operation. Making yourself into the world's most hated
country is not an obvious way to secure that help.

I've heard people who have known George W. Bush for decades and served
prominently in his father's administration say that he could not
possibly have conceived of the doctrine of pre-emptive war by himself,
that he was essentially taken for a ride by people with a pre-existing
agenda to overturn Saddam Hussein. Bush's public performances plainly
show him to be a man who has never read or thought much about foreign
policy. So the inevitable questions are: who makes the key
foreign-policy decisions in the Bush presidency, who controls the
information flow to the president, how are various options are
presented?

The record, from published administration memoirs and in-depth
reporting, is one of an administration with a very small group of six
or eight real decision-makers, who were set on war from the beginning
and who took great pains to shut out arguments from professionals in
the CIA and State Department and the U.S. armed forces that
contradicted their rosy scenarios about easy victory. Much has been
written about the neoconservative hand guiding the Bush presidency-and
it is peculiar that one who was fired from the National Security
Council in the Reagan administration for suspicion of passing
classified material to the Israeli embassy and another who has written
position papers for an Israeli Likud Party leader have become key
players in the making of American foreign policy.

But neoconservatism now encompasses much more than Israel-obsessed
intellectuals and policy insiders. The Bush foreign policy also surfs
on deep currents within the Christian Right, some of which see
unqualified support of Israel as part of a godly plan to bring about
Armageddon and the future kingdom of Christ. These two strands of
Jewish and Christian extremism build on one another in the Bush
presidency-and President Bush has given not the slightest indication
he would restrain either in a second term. With Colin Powell's
departure from the State Department looming, Bush is more than ever
the "neoconian candidate." The only way Americans will have a
presidency in which neoconservatives and the Christian Armageddon set
are not holding the reins of power is if Kerry is elected.

If Kerry wins, this magazine will be in opposition from Inauguration
Day forward. But the most important battles will take place within the
Republican Party and the conservative movement. A Bush defeat will
ignite a huge soul-searching within the rank-and-file of
Republicandom: a quest to find out how and where the Bush presidency
went wrong. And it is then that more traditional conservatives will
have an audience to argue for a conservatism informed by the lessons
of history, based in prudence and a sense of continuity with the
American past-and to make that case without a powerful White House
pulling in the opposite direction.

George W. Bush has come to embody a politics that is antithetical to
almost any kind of thoughtful conservatism. His international policies
have been based on the hopelessly naïve belief that foreign peoples
are eager to be liberated by American armies -a notion more grounded
in Leon Trotsky's concept of global revolution than any sort of
conservative statecraft. His immigration policies - temporarily put on
hold while he runs for re-election - are just as extreme. A re-elected
President Bush would be committed to bringing in millions of low-wage
immigrants to do jobs Americans "won't do." This election is all about
George W. Bush, and those issues are enough to render him unworthy of
any conservative support.