Mock Election

[StevenNick]

I supposed I count as an independent, maybe...I vote for Kerry b/c I don't think he'll be able to mess up the war on terror too badly, both due to domestic pressures and b/c I think the physical threat from terrorists is sinking fast. And I don't trust Bush, he and the conservative Republican wing is too scary for me...

I have a few major issues with Bush:

1) He's blurring the line between chucrch and state, and he would like nothing more than to christianize this country.  His religous-ness is way too over the top for me.  

2) He's very right wing, and very pro-big business, even ones like Enron that screwed hundreds of people.  

3) I think tax cuts for the rich are illogical and stupid.  They don't need a tax cut, that's what makes them the richest 1%

4) He's totally out of touch with what happens in normal people's lives.

5) He seems to think the republican party has a monopoly on values and morals.  

6) He's a liar.

7) He's easily manipulated by the people around him.

He knew there were no WMDs in Iraq.  Our intellengence is too good to say theres million when there were'nt even 1.  I guess he felt his reelection was worth 573 American lives.  

No doubt, he's one of the worst presidents we've ever had.  Unfortunately (from the looks of it) the Dems have put up their worst canidate I've ever seen.  I'll say it again.  They nominate Edwards, its a landslide.  

So many foolish statements, so little time to refute them.

1)  There no such thing as separation of church and state.  The first amendment says only that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion..."  The only thing this does is restrict the legislative branch of the government from establishing an official state religion, nothing else.  So long as congress doesn't establish a state religion, they are free, constitutionally, to pass any laws in support of any religious institutions they wish.  

Plus, since the foundation of the republic, every leader of this country has invoked God, usually in the specifically Christian sense of God, in speeches and statements.  The Declaration of Independence puts God at the forefront of the argument for separation from England.  The idea that the government was ever supposed to be "separated" from religion is a myth (and a particularly stupid one at that).

2)  How you can say that George W. Bush is "very right-wing" is a mystery to me.  He has increased the size of government more than any president since LBJ.  Yes, he is conservative on social issues.  But he certainly hasn't governed very conservatively.  He signed the medicare entitlement bill, he signed campaign finance reform, he established the office of Homeland Security, he established steel tariffs, and he wants to liberalize immigration laws.  These are not the actions and policies of a man who is "very right-wing."

I don't see how you can connect GWB's policies with the Enron debacle, but I admit that Bush is very pro-business.  I don't see anything wrong with that.  Business create jobs.  To paraphrase the occassionally intelligent John Kerry, you can't love jobs but hate the businesses who create them.

3)  This whole charge about tax cuts for the rich is one of the dumbest things I've ever heard in my life.  First of all, the entire bottom 50% of income earners don't pay federal income taxes.  You can't give income taxes to people who don't pay income taxes.  The other thing is that many of the people who are the top 1% of income earners are small business owners whose business income is counted as personal income.  The vast majority of workers are employed by small business owners.  To give tax cuts to small business owners helps those they employ.

But beyond the economic argument for tax cuts "for the rich", is it moral to tax one group of people at a higher rate than everyone else.  Why should the government, the richest, most intrusive monopoly in existence, be able to arbitrarily decide that I will pay a certain percent of my income to them and my next door neighbor will pay a different rate.  I firmly believe that the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment forbids the federal government from establishing anything other than a flat income tax.

4)  You think democrats are in touch with normal people's lives?  The average donation to the DNC is much higher than the average donation to the RNC.  Among millionaires, democrats outraise republicans by about 2-1.  Ever since campaign finance reform, which banned unlimited soft money donations to political campaigns, republicans have had a considerable financial advantage over the dems.  Why?  Because dems always got more in large soft money donations as compared to republicans who have always gotten the majority of their money from small, hard money donations.

Look at the two big democratic heroes of the twentieth century.  FDR and JFK.  You think those two were common people?  You thing they understood common people?  Do you think John Kerry is going to understand regular people more than George W. Bush does?

5)  The republican party DOES have a monopoly on values and morals.

6)  Don't make a ridiculous charge unless you have the evidence to back it up.

7)  I don't understand how first you and you're type can accuse Bush of being this evil, malevolent devil who lies to the American people and then turn around and say that he's a dunce who's manipulated by the people around him.  Which is it?

And again, don't make ridiculous charges unless you have evidence to back them up.

 Saddam may not have had WMD at the time of the invasion.  We know for a fact that he had them during the Iran-Iraq war and in the period of the Shiite rebellion after the first Gulf War because he used them.  He gassed Iranians.  He gassed Kurds.  He gassed Shiite Muslims.  We know for a fact that he had a variety of other WMD at that time because we found some of them.

In 1998, Saddam Hussein kicked out the UN inspectors because they were getting too close to discovering more stockpiles.  How were we to know what he had after 1998, when no inspectors were allowed in.  Even in 2002, when inspectors were allowed back in, Saddam was not being forthright in allowing them full and unfettered access to the country.  They were not able to interview Iraqi scientists without government minders present.  If Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction, why didn't he allow the inspectors full access?

The other thing to remember is that every other government in the world concurred with our intelligence that showed that Saddam had WMDs.  We didn't always agree on what weapons he had, or how much he had, but no one denied that he had WMD.  Not France (who sold Iraq a nuclear reactor once upon a time), not Russia (who was supplying Iraq with countless types of missiles, planes, tanks, etc.), not Germany (who had supplied Saddam with some of the mechanisms to produce biological weapons), and not the United nations (Who was receiving a third of their overall funding from Iraq's oil for food program).  Not even Saddam Hussein denied that he had weapons of mass destruction.

You could certainly nominate George W. Bush for worst president ever if you're really so foolish, but FDR, LBJ, JFK, Clinton, and Carter will have to fight him for the prize.

[StevenNick]

5)  The republican party DOES have a monopoly on values and morals.

Steven, this could be one of the most ridiculous statements I've read on here.  The party that brought us Teapot Dome, the McCarthy trials, Watergate, and Iran-Contra has a monopoly on values?!?!?!

You could certainly nominate George W. Bush for worst president ever if you're really so foolish, but FDR, LBJ, JFK, Clinton, and Carter will have to fight him for the prize.

Oh yeah ... FDR was a horrible President ... pulling America out of the Depression ... guiding America through WW II ... creating numerous Social Security (which saved generations of senior citizens from poverty).  Oh yeah .... FDR was just horrible.

The democratic party is the party of slavery, abortion, communist appeasement, terrorist appeasement, Monica Lewinsky, Whitewater, the Vietnam War, a stolen election (1960), Kennedy's lies about Addison's disease, affirmative action, gay marriage, the welfare state, pornography, and rabid secularism.  No political party is perfect, but you guys have elevated state-sanctioned depravity to the level of an art form.

As far as FDR is concerned, he didn't get us out of the depression.  He got us further in it by raising taxes, raising the minimum wage, and letting labor unions run amock.  Social security is an embarrassment to the welfare state, which really says something.  It takes money from young, productive workers and gives it to members of the single richest segment of the American populace.  The vast majority of seniors do not need social security.  Unless social security is reformed--and by reformed I mean privatized or abolished--FDR's legacy will be the bankrupting of the entire U.S. government.  FDR did lead us through WWII, but at the same time he was fighting the Nazis, he was instituting a very similar set of policies here in the U.S.  Don't forget, FDR is the president who signed an executive order to intern the Japanese.  

What a president!

[StevenNick]

The democratic party is the party of slavery, abortion, communist appeasement, terrorist appeasement, Monica Lewinsky, Whitewater, the Vietnam War, a stolen election (1960), Kennedy's lies about Addison's disease, affirmative action, gay marriage, the welfare state, pornography, and rabid secularism.  No political party is perfect, but you guys have elevated state-sanctioned depravity to the level of an art form.

As far as FDR is concerned, he didn't get us out of the depression.  He got us further in it by raising taxes, raising the minimum wage, and letting labor unions run amock.  Social security is an embarrassment to the welfare state, which really says something.  It takes money from young, productive workers and gives it to members of the single richest segment of the American populace.  The vast majority of seniors do not need social security.  Unless social security is reformed--and by reformed I mean privatized or abolished--FDR's legacy will be the bankrupting of the entire U.S. government.  FDR did lead us through WWII, but at the same time he was fighting the Nazis, he was instituting a very similar set of policies here in the U.S.  Don't forget, FDR is the president who signed an executive order to intern the Japanese.  

What a president!

StevenNick99, your views are a little extreme.

I agree that Roosevelt's policies did not really get us out of the depression.  Because of his class warfare and anti-business approach, as well as his tax increases, business did not pick up significantly until the war boom of the 1940s.  And he had to abandon some of his more onerous anti-business policies in 1940 in order to entice business to make the investment that would be necessary to gear up war production.

With respect to social security, at the time, the elderly were the poorest population group, and people without an opportunity to save for their own retirement had to work until they dropped, or rely on family to take care of them.  At this point, programs for the elderly have done their job almost too well.  The elderly are the richest population group, and they're always demanding more.  But that doesn't mean that the vast majority of them don't need social security.  Social security needs to be privatized in my opinion so that the politicians don't have the ability to use the money to buy votes.  But that doesn't mean that social security wasn't the right idea in Roosevelt's time.

I also think you're over the line in saying that Roosevelt instituted policies similar to those of the Nazis.  That's just not true.  As far as the Japanese internment is concerned, I think it's just too easy to criticize what was done when there was genuine fear of a Japanese invasion of the west coast.  Maybe it was wrong in retrospect, but I would not criticize Roosevelt too severely for it.  It was far milder than the treatment that other countries gave to those deemed a threat.

Much of what you said about the Democrats is true to a degree, and I have a deep-seated antipathy toward the current Democratic party.  But I would rather engage the Democrats on current issues than bring up their past support of slavery.  You should also remember that it was a Democratic president (Truman) who originally stood up to Soviet Communism, so while it is true that the Democrats largely went over to the other side in the last half of the Cold War, I don't think it's right to make a blanket indictment of them for appeasement of Communism.  At this point, the Democrats largely stand for appeasement of our enemies, and that is the issue on which we should engage them.

I, too, would rather engage the democrats on current issues.  I was merely responding to a post on the past evils of the republican party.  

As far as communism is concerned, I think you're giving Truman and the democrats far too much credit.  Truman didn't even pretend to be anti-communist until the republicans swept to victory in both houses of congress in the 1946 midterms.  The republicans won in 1946, in part by blaming the dems for the worldwide spread of communism.  Magically, Truman adopted the policy of "containment" in 1947.

Prior to 1947 Truman was still calling Stalin "Uncle Joe," and saying things like "Stalin was a fine man who wanted to do the right thing," and "[The Russians] have always been our friends and I can't see any reason why they shouldn't always be."

When Truman finally adopted some kind of strategy against the Soviets, it was the wussy, anemic "containment" policy.  Containment wasn't hawkish and aggressive, it was a copout.  And it appears Truman either didn't believe it himself, or was simply too inept to actually contain communism.  Under Truman, communists conquered China, Eastern Europe, and North Korea.  In another stunningly aggressive move, Truman fired Gen. Douglas MacArthur for, God forbid, actually trying to win the Korean war.

Truman was an impotent softy and so was his party.

And as far as FDR instituting the policies of the Nazis, it's true.  The nazis were socialists.  So was FDR.  One of the Nazi party's signature issues was a government pension plan for seniors.  What is FDR's lasting domestic program?  Social Security.  Both FDR and the Nazis were for massive expansion of government, higher minimum wages, et cetera.  Obviously there were many key differences.  FDR wasn't evil like Hitler.  Nazis and New Dealers had considerably different views on social issues (Nazis were pro-abortion, pro-euthenasia, green, eugenics fanatics, all of which New Dealers would have found repulsive had any American leader proposed them).

[StevenNick]

I should have been clearer that I was talking about economic policies.

[StevenNick]

...your mistake is saying that FDR imposed Nazi policies, it was rather Hitler implementing socialist policies, since the Nazi elemsnts is what sets Hitler apart from socialists.
 

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Nazi stood for NATIONAL SOCIALIST PARTY OF GERMANY!  Naziism was socialism by their own definition and party platform.  The only thing that was unique in Naziism was its fanatic nationalism which led to hatred of other nationalities, particularly Jews.

[StevenNick]

WMD's should have never been the crux of Bush's pro-war argument.  Regime change and the resultant shift in the politics of the region that might grow and expand into stability and shy away from the terrorist breeding grounds that exist today should have been the crux of the argument as it was the crux of the logical rationale.  Of course, I say we should have hit Saudi Arabia before Iraq, most 9/11 hijackers were Saudi's, but Iraq was on our list since Bush-1.  All the WMD's that Saddam has used were used when Reagan was in office, if that was the issue then we would have gone to war a while ago.

I agree with that completely.  The only reason Bush and co. started talking about WMD was because Tony Blair wanted UN approval for the war.  We never should have gone to the UN to begin with.  I was pro-war because I believed it was the right thing to do, both for humanitarian purposes, and because I believe that the only way to stop terrorism is to modernize the regions the seem to spawn terrorism.  The fact that Bush did pursue the WMD argument more than the other good arguments for war has meant that the entire legitimacy of the war has been called into question.  That's not a good thing.  If the American people (and the people of the world) decide that this war, and the Bush doctrine in general, is wrong, we will be unable to effectively combat terrorism.  

I think it would be dangerous to attack Saudi Arabia outright.  I think the best thing to do would be to drill in ANWR and establish energy independence from the middle east then we'd be free to pursue whatever policy we wished toward whatever country we wished.  If we didn't need middle eastern oil, we probably would have knocked off Saddam Hussein a long time ago and we probably would be able to take a more aggressive policy toward Saudi Arabia.