[Ramona_A_Stone]

That was a good show Gutrguy, if you'd like to have a go at the rest of that little document or just get the real flavor of some of its more questionable horn tooting which scoob left out, you can find it in it's entirety here.

edit: Oops, I forgot to post this. (It's late and all and I forgot I was in the wartime thread, all the political threads kind of look the same.)

Technically, no war is new. It's all a continuation...

The history of wartime presidents is a mixed bag but it seems the more unpopular the war, the less chance of reelection. True, the war with Iraq was quite popular for about the ten minutes it took to write 153 country songs about it, but I think most people have matured into an ambivalence about it if not a realization that we went in over heads on several levels. One thing is pretty much for certain, even though deposing Hussein was super peachy, most intelligent supporters of the war now know they were talking out of their asses pretending it was a magic bullet to "fix" Iraq (or protect anyone but Iraq and its immediate neighbors from terrorism--which is at best still an untested statement at this point), and if Georgey Porgey is reelected, four more years will never probably see this goal. They keep officially pushing back the time for the proposed elections in Iraq, but it's my opinion that either they know better and aren't admitting it or they're in abject denial. (Its got to be a grim situation for a president when you've said you want to give power to the people but the people hate you and aren't as easily led around by the nose as the average American.)

So far we've only served to destabilize the situation. I get tired of listening to Americans argue about whether this is good or bad, it's like arguing about the score of the dice before they've come to rest. We wanted to play doctor, but so far all we've done is pick a few scabs. The patient itself still complains more than ever. And its "contagious diseases" are not one iota closer to being contained.

I'm an optimist, I like to think it's obvious to just about everyone except for about five rabid guys on this board that US foriegn policy is about freeing markets, not people. This may well be an unavoidbale and omnipresent aspect of americanism but what has made the Bush administration particularly intolerable has been their dishonesty about it--and that this dishonesty has been so infuriatingly effective.

While all Kerry's (and all other contenders) talk-talk about the war (or whatever you'd like to call the situation we are creating) is pretty much indecipherable campaign claptrap at this point, I think the word "occupation" still looms large with many Iraqis and I think a new administration would be capable of making more appropriate gestures--to Iraqis as well as the world at large.

republicans vote republican

lol, too true. Sometimes I think if we gave Hussein a bath and a haircut, a good Christianized, hardass, liberal-bashing-masquerading-as-conservatism-spiel and ran him on the republican ticket a lot of them would probably go for it.