Silence, America!:
 Silence, America!: for Silence, America!. Other Bump Lists at: Free Republic Bump List Register |
Posted on 12/10/2003 7:39:21 PM PST by ambrose
I asked an accountant a question one time and ended up in a audit when I took his advice. I think an ox has been gored and it hurt.
I mean no disrespect whatsoever. I've seen a few times when I was'nt sure if I would live to see the sun set or vice-versa. So, not much of this gets me too upset.
We all need to take a deep breath and realise our President is a great man and have faith he won't lead us astray. He is one of the few truely decent Presidents this country has ever had.
Keep the faith and help me protect our "Commander in Chief" from all harm including verbal.
I would gladly go back into battle for him at any moment and I'll defend him to the bitter end! "Espirit De Corps!"
Silence, America!:
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Silence, America!: for Silence, America!. Other Bump Lists at: Free Republic Bump List Register |
As much as it pains me,I believe that you are correct.
Everything points in that direction.
Nuff said.
L
You're quite correct. There are some DU asshats who come over here and try to make Dean look like a "reasonable" alternative to conservatives. In point of fact, Howard Dean would be an unmitigated disaster as a wartime President. Think of Neville Chamberlain remaining PM during the summer of 1940. If you want the dead on take on Dean, go to David Brooks' column in the NYT yesterday:
My moment of illumination about Howard Dean came one day in Iowa when I saw him lean into a crowd and begin a sentence with, "Us rural people. . . ."Dean grew up on Park Avenue and in East Hampton. If he's a rural person, I'm the Queen of Sheba. Yet he said it with conviction. He said it uninhibited by any fear that someone might laugh at or contradict him.
It was then that I saw how Dean had liberated himself from his past, liberated himself from his record and liberated himself from the restraints that bind conventional politicians. He has freed himself to say anything, to be anybody.
Other candidates run on their biographies or their records. They keep policy staff from their former lives, and they try to keep their policy positions reasonably consistent.
But Dean runs less on biography than any other candidate in recent years. When he began running for president, he left his past behind, along with the encumbrances that go with it. As governor of Vermont, he was a centrist Democrat. But the new Dean who appeared on the campaign trail — a jarring sight for the Vermonters who knew his previous self — is an angry maverick.
The old Dean was a free trader. The new Dean is not. The old Dean was open to Medicare reform. The new Dean says Medicare is off the table. The old Dean courted the N.R.A.; the new Dean has swung in favor of gun control. The old Dean was a pro-business fiscal moderate; the new Dean, sounding like Ralph Nader, declares, "We've allowed our lives to become slaves to the bottom line of multinational corporations all over the world."
The philosopher George Santayana once observed that Americans don't bother to refute ideas — they just leave them behind. Dean shed his upper-crust WASP self, then his centrist governor self, bursting onto the national scene as a mysterious stranger who comes out of nowhere to battle corruption.
The newly liberated Dean is uninhibited. A normal person with no defense policy experience would not have the chutzpah to say, "Mr. President, if you'll pardon me, I'll teach you a little about defense." But Dean says it. A normal person, with an eye to past or future relationships, wouldn't compare Congress to "a bunch of cockroaches." Dean did it.
The newly liberated Dean doesn't worry about having a coherent political philosophy. There is a parlor game among Washington pundits called How Liberal Is Howard Dean? One group pores over his speeches, picks out the things no liberal could say and argues that he's actually a centrist. Another group picks out the things no centrist could say and argues that he's quite liberal.
But the liberated Dean is beyond categories like liberal and centrist because he is beyond coherence. He'll make a string of outspoken comments over a period of weeks — on "re-regulating" the economy or gay marriage — but none of them have any relation to the others. When you actually try to pin him down on a policy, you often find there is nothing there.
For example, asked how we should proceed in Iraq, he says hawkishly, "We can't pull out responsibly." Then on another occasion he says dovishly, "Our troops need to come home," and explains, fantastically, that we need to recruit 110,000 foreign troops to take the place of our reserves. Then he says we should not be spending billions more dollars there. Then he says again that we have to stay and finish the job.
At each moment, he appears outspoken, blunt and honest. But over time he is incoherent and contradictory.
He is, in short, a man unrooted. This gives him an amazing freshness and an exhilarating freedom.
Everybody talks about how the Internet has been key to his fund-raising and organization. Nobody talks about how it has shaped his persona. On the Internet, the long term doesn't matter, as long as you are blunt and forceful at that moment. On the Internet, a new persona is just a click away. On the Internet, everyone is loosely tethered, careless and free. Dean is the Internet man, a string of exhilarating moments and daring accusations.
The only problem is that us rural folk distrust people who reinvent themselves. Many of us rural folk are nervous about putting the power of the presidency in the hands of a man who could be anyone.
There it is folks. Dean in a freaking nutshell. Howard Dean's positions have been moving back and forth because all he has is his ability to stoke the angry base. That was why he came out with that 9-11 smear against Bush on Diane Rehm's show a couple of weeks back.
See, Dean looks like the Young Jesus now because Bush and Rove haven't started in on him yet. But they will, because Dean has given them so much to work with. Dean doesn't have convictions. He has attitude and shrewdness. His free ride is about to end.
When you think of Howard Dean, remember what Gertrude Stein said about the City of Oakland: "There's no there, there."
Be Seeing You,
Chris
You want "reality"? OK, how's this: you also can't win if you're in a no-win situation.
I return to the analogy I offered yesterday, of the battered wife. If she keeps returning to the place where she's been beaten up and humiliated she's only enabling the abuser and prolonging her misery. Yet there are many who do so. They promise themselves that things will get better, but do they ever?
Walking out on the party that betrayed us is not a solution for victory a year from now, but so what? I trust you & I aspire to a political horizon somewhat further out than that. It's a real bid for change, and is most decidedly not "doing nothing".
If I have to decide between "winning" (on terms set by our philosophical adversaries) and the Constitution, the choice seems clear to me. Time for some tough love, Jim.
Sorry, Romulus. If you lose, you...lose. I will go with the horse that brung me, the Republicans.
I will tell you once again what Common Tator so ably pointed out. If you want to change things, you have to convince most of the people that your principles are the correct ones and get them on your side. It does no good to bitch and moan that the sheeple will not see the light. Democrats don't make those mistakes, they understand that power goes to he who can get fifty percent plus one of the vote.
What matters are not your principles nor my principles. What matters is what a majority of voters believe in on Election Day.
Our job as conservatives is to move the principles as far to the right as possible, taking some defeats along the way.
Be Seeing You,
Chris
Man that's scary. I'm willing to compromise, but not to vote for machines. I'm willing to vote for incrementalism, but not corruption. The day the Republicans have the kind of power the dems had for fourty years, and start using it the way the dems did, I'm outta here.
I really believe in term limits. Politicians should have to live in the world they make.
Getting a conservative majority on the Supreme Court is vital. I think Bush is zeroed in on that day.
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