Posted on 10/22/2004 6:28:36 AM PDT by Klickitat
LOL! Sorry but everyone already busted a gut over that endorsement earlier today...what a laughing stock it is. There's nothing American or Conservative about it.
"There's nothing American or Conservative about it."
I disagree, but my point is that there isn't much conservative about George Bush, and I'm getting tired of people who refuse to admit it. All the Bushbots want is someone who calls himself a Republican, and you'll swallow every BS thing that he says or does.
How many Americans would otherwise be alive today had we bombed Fallujah into obliteration when the 4 contractors were hung and burnt? Why is Bush afraid to crush these people? What happened to the Bush doctrine?
There's your problem. If you read the article and believe there is anything conservative about it you have difficults far greater then simply reading comprehension.
Without taking you too seriously, let's examine 2 issues derived from one point in the article.
A RAT President and a GOP Congress will stalemate legislation.
2 examples of how party opposition is good: Clinton's welfare reform and balanced budgets of the late 90's.
If Gore had won, I doubt we would have gotten "No child left behind" or the drug benefit. If you think welfare and federal funding of education are conservative ideas then I'm sure you'll be happy to vote for Jeb Bush or Giuliani in 2008.
Kerry’s the One (American Conservative Magazine – Bush “unworthy of any conservative support) The American Conservative ^ | November 8, 2004 issue | 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 an important president, and in many ways the most radical America has 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.
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Scott McConnell is a loathsome fool and there is nothing American or Conservative about the rag that published this.
Like I said, I'm voting for Bush but anyone who thinks this article is neither American nor conservative probably thinks George Bush is both.
You didn't refute my first point, so why continue any further?
The article refutes itself.
bump
HOW? Give me one or two examples of how/why the author is wrong given what he writes.
If you can't see it for yourself by reading that POS why waste my time?
I pointed out two clear examples of recent history which you cannot refute.
Bubba had to sign welfare reform, a conservative idea.
Budgets were being balanced and the debt was being paid down for 2 years, a fundamental principle of limited government and fiscal discipline.
All you can come up with is a reposting of someone else's words and an explanation that if I can't see it your way, you shouldn't bother explaining your position. Do you have a position of your own or are you just a GOP herd follower?
I'm sorry, but this Republican party is WAY too liberal for me, and they aren't hearing the message from those of us like me who are saying so.
"I'm sorry, but this Republican party is WAY too liberal for me, and they aren't hearing the message from those of us like me who are saying so."
Which is why the person you are citing endorses Kerry. LOL!
If you don't hold Dubya's feet to the fire BEFORE he gets re-elected, the result WILL be a lame-duck President flaunting amnesty all over the place. Anyone who does not believe this should remember that the Bushes are open-borders nutjobs; there is plenty of evidence to that end.
Not.
For whatever it's worth, I (though I'm sure I wasn't the first one) debunked this filthy lie quite some time ago: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1217171/posts?page=37#37
I hope you don't live in the Southwest.
More important, I live in 2004.
But you have a problem because it's not working. The days when race baiting could be used to intimidate people into silence on the immigration issue are over. People all over this country are fed up with the unrelenting flood of illegal aliens, and their numbers are growing every day.
"which is 99% pure BS."
I'm still waiting for you to demonstrate ONE example from this article which is BS.
You seem not to grasp WHY the author of this endorsement has chosen Kerry. Kerry is almost certain to fail, his lack of personality will be shown on tv day in and day out, and few if any of his big gov't proposals will get through. (Certainly fewer than if Bush stays in there.) Not to mention that one of his first statements was that the AmCon mag will vehemently work against Kerry from day one.
Also, in the meantime, "real" conservatives (Reagan/Buchanan/Goldwater types) will have a chance to rid the GOP of "neocons" and hopefully speed up the long term salvation of the party.
I guess you can't make a SINGLE logical point as to why this opinion is wrong.
With your inability to see that for yourself, and your calling buchanan a real conservative, you're going to have a long wait...reality is beyond your grasp.
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