Rather Vindicated!

Excellent. The preponderance of evidence is now overwhelming. Dan must be so happy. Courage!

 

They didn't even have "pong" then....

.... but the fake letter is, well - very, very, very funny!!!! LOL!

 

Of course the question remains - if the documents are forged, were they planted by the Dems or the Repubs? If they were planted by the Dems, then that points to stupidity, since there seems to be "genuine" evidence supporting their position. A plant by the Repubs is downright clever, and it fits their MO with Lewinsky, Whitewater, and on and on.

I vote for the Repubs as the culprits.

The back and forth by both parties has reached the "sickening" level.

Now that Kerry is attacking the Bush Viet Nam record, the Republicans are whining about bringing up old stories that are 35 years old with no credibility. blah blah blah. Hmm, exactly the sort of response from the Dems re the Swift Boat nonsense. Nov. 2 can't come quickly enough so that we can put this idiocy behind us.

 

Puhleeze! You've got to be kidding!

 

Actually a Democrat who has a beef with President Bush is behind the letter.

What amazes me the most is that the documents were Faxed to CBS from a Kinkos in Texas and CBS ran with the story.

Hope you have better luck voting in November.

 

If John Kerry could stop talking about Vietnam (which he apparently can't do), it might be possible to move past it.

I suggested in another thread that both sides should just declare each other's service as honorable, and move on from there.

The huge problem with my suggestion is that John Kerry would then be forced to run on his record in the US Senate, where he has been the most liberal member for the last 19 or so years.

Ted Kennedy is less liberal than John Kerry, according to their Senate voting records. Think about that for a minute.

Maybe I'm crazy, but I'm much more concerned with what John Kerry has done in his 20+ years as an elected official than what he did during his abbreviated 3-month stint in Vietnam.

 

Actually Bush has taken the high ground here. He called Kerry's service honorable and said Kerry's service was more dangerous than his.

Kerry has spent more time talking about Vietnam than his length of service.

 

What exactly was the MO of the Republicans with regard to Lewinski? How dare Republicans bring to light the fact that our married President was catting about the White House, seeking out hideaways where he could insert objects into a girl just a few years older than his daughter!

You know what's funny?--this post stands a better than even chance of being jerked because it contains a basic description of that which our President actually did! And we have Democrats who've managed to spin the whole putrid episode into being the fault of the Republicans--astonishing!

The worst of it all is the fact that our President allowed himself, through his libido, to become a target for anyone who might wish to blackmail him and extract state secrets or influence public policy--why hasn't anyone mentioned this outrage? In fact, how can we be so certain that it didn't happen? The truth is, we can't; the guy was more than willing to perjure himself over his dalliances and risk--and receive--disbarrment, what's the bright line between that and tipping his hand with some top secret data?

 

I have a church member who declares Lewinsky was a GOP plant. I told here that even if Monica was a GOP operative it was STILL President Clinton's choice to cheat or not.

 

Some GOP plant--she of the generations of leftward-leaning sophisticates; Monica Lewinski is about the least likely GOP plant one can imagine. The paranoia of some on the left is reminiscent of the paranoia of the radical right in Europe around the turn of the 20th century with the rumors of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" and the like--and we know where that got us. Some on the left believe that the Republicans were behind or are behind:

1). The World Trade Center attacks;
2). The Lewinski scandal;
3). The crash of Paul Wellstone's plane (Garrison Keillor referred to this in a nationally-sydicated column);
3). And, of course, the latest CBS News document hoax.

This is utter insanity, and does not bode well for the Democratic party. It always used to be the lunatic fringe was on the right--or perceived to be--and the left was full of harmless peace-loving hippies. Not so today, there's a growing hardness and paranoia on the far left that's downright frightening.

 

Can you blame Kerry for continuing to talk about Viet Nam as long as he is continually attacked by the right wing in the form of the SBVFT crap?

I'm with you on both sides declaring the other's service as honorable. Bush has said as much in person, but no one seems able to stop the SBVFT. Although Bush COULD stop it if he spoke out against it specifically.

The right doesn't want to leave Viet Nam either, because then Bush would have to defend his record on the War and the economy, and jobs. Not exactly positive stuff.

You mention Kerry's "liberal" record in a pejorative sense. I guess to the right it is. Not a problem for the left, of course. However it highlights the right's strategy of demonizing the left as being "soft" on terrorism, "cowards", and somehow "anti-American." All of this, of course, is a load of crap.

In other words, if you're not for the use of the military in evey political issue, and if you even begin to question the road we're going down, then you are a Communist, a Socialist, or a Terrorist. Electing such a person invites a terrorist attack, according to Cheney. This is hogwash, and fear-mongering claptrap at its worst. Of course, Cheney can't begin to make such a statement, since he really has no idea when a terrorist attack might come, even under his own Administration. Think about it, this is essentially the right's strategy. They are campagining on hypothetical increased safety under Bush-Cheney. This from an Administration that lists vague Orange and Red alerts, but at the same time, they can't really tell you what to do, or what it means. And yet, he "knows" what will happen under Kerry as President. If you swallow this reasoning, then you're not thinking critically.

If you had to guess, would you say the U.S. is more hated and mistrusted around the world since Sept. 11, or has it gotten better. What about since the Iraq invasion? Worldwide polls say it's gotten worse. And so are we safer now?? The point is no one really knows, including Cheney. And all this from a guy who said, “Reagan proved deficits don't matter.”

Uh yeah, as long as you have eight years of a fiscally and monetarily astute Democratic administration and an historic bull market to bail you out.

Cheney is a classic luck versus skill confuser. When he's lucky, he thinks it's his skill; when something bad happens, it's random bad luck, or it's the Democrats fault.

 

Conspiracy crap

Speaking of stupid conspiracy crap, have you seen this one about the pentagon being struck by a missle, not a plane.

http://www.freedomunderground.org/memoryhole/pentagon.php#Main

 

Kerry made his Vietnam service the entire focal point of his campaign. If he'd stop talking about it, the Swift Boat Vets would eventually fade away. The problem is, he can't stop talking about it, since he apparently has nothing else to say.

I really think the voters should hear about Kerry's accomplishments in his 20+ year career in elected office, rather than beating to death his 3-month abbreviated tour in Vietnam over 30 years ago.

 

It is not out of the question that the right is behind the document hoax. It's brilliant, in fact.

"...and the left was full of harmless peace-loving hippies."

Uh, could you perhaps generalize a little more next time. This is not even close to an accurate description of the left. This is not even a good description of Berkeley in the sixties and seventies, and I was there.

If it seems that the left is getting paranoid, you might be right. But I see it as a reaction to the "lunatic fringe" on the right, which has somehow been adopted as policy by the mainstream right. The right has taken to fear mongering and to turning PC-ness on its head (you're anti-American if you don't support the War, for example) in an effort to scare voters into supporting the right.

Propoganda is how a democracy controls its voters, of course. The right has to resort to more and more extreme versions of it to counteract a demography that is moving farther and farther away from them.

Their argument becomes increasingly untenable: how do you convince a populace that is becoming more and more defined by lower class immigrants that what they want coincides with what largely upper class whites want?

Answers: 1) you scare them. 2) you tell them that the left will reach into their pocket and steal their money. 3) you give them a meaningless tax refund that somehow convinces them they are partaking of the American "dream." 4) you pray that no one takes the time to really think about what path we're going down.

 

Thank goodness that "fically astute" Democratic administration had 6 years of a Republican-controlled Congress that was spending all the money, keeping them in check and squelching their plans to socialize medicine, raise taxes, et. al. And for that matter, can you tell me those policies of the Clinton Administration that were astute economically that weren't merely examples of Republican fiscal conservatism anyway? And you alluded to this, but don't you think the lower deficits of the 90's had about 99% to do with the American economy, the tech boom, and Bill Gates rather than Bill Clinton?

As for the world liking us, the Islamic Extremists who attacked us hate us no more or less than they did before 9/11--they've hated us or anyone who aids Israel in any way for about 3,000 years; it's not likely to stop if John Kerry heads over to the Middle East as President and kisses Arafat's feet--they'll hate us all the same. The only ones who now hate us who didn't before are those who are no help nor hindrance to us in any event--the left in Europe who are vaguely antisemitic, appeasers of terrorists, and resentful of our position as the world power. Post-Soviet Union, it seems to offend their egalitarian notions that there might be one nation that predominates militarily and economically, and in their envy and resentment, they love to hate us.

Note: This should not be read to apply to Europeans generally or even the European left generally, so as not to unduly offend Euro members of this forum.

 

That's classic. What are we spending, like 7 million an hour on simultaneously destroying and rebuilding Iraq? It's time to stop saying Republicans are fiscally conservative. Actions speak louder than words.

 

Money well spent, consider the alternative if we do not stop those who aid terrorists or are terrorists--Saddam did both: he'd already used WMDs on his own people (remember the Kurd slaughter?), unilaterally attacked a neighbor (Kuwait), lobbed missles into Israel, paid incentives to the families of suicide bombers who destroyed innocents in Israel, and may--or may not, perhaps we'll never know--have had WMDs hidden away. The world has changed, and if we do not spend money to stop that which seeks to destroy and destabilize it, we'll pay more later. That knocking under the hood: either take action against it now or turn your car into 4,000 lbs of useless metal later. Preventative world maintenance is fically conservative. Example: had FDR and other world leaders had the foresight to stop Hitler when he was a small but loud maniac in the early to mid 1930s, the world would have prevented enormous losses economically and in human lives.

 

If Bush were around then he would have seen the clear and present danger of Hitler and attacked Mussolini. If he had oil.

 

Well, Mussolini would've been start.

And of course, we all know that no Republican ever goes to war but for oil--will you analyze that comment for a moment, and tell me, where is all this oil that we're now absconding with from Iraq? If we really did just cynically want oil, don't you think we could invade Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, UAE, etc and kill their leaders, take their oil and break up the cartel? Of course we could, great powers throughout history have done so with impunity: Babylonians, Persians, Romans, Egyptians, the Spanish of centuries past, the English of centuries past, the German efforts of the 20th century--I suppose you'd like to lump us in with all of them, but you can't and maintain a shred of intellectual honesty. We don't just ride in, take over and take all that we want. We're not perfect, but we're different, almost unprecedented in world history.

In any event, you haven't really responded to my comment but to cutely remark about "poor 'ol bumbling W"--what about it, does not the world warrant preventative maintenance for terrorists and those who encourage, aid or sponsor them? Is that not fiscally conservative in the long run when you consider the alternative of cautiously making "statesmanlike" moves so as not to offend our friends across the ocean, while the terrorists are gleefully dismantling our republic and our economy?