Today at the Forum: More Bush/Kerry, no thanks

Thursday, November 02, 2006

More Bush/Kerry, no thanks

"Knock, knock. "

"Who's there?"

"Senator John Kerry."

"Run!"

OK, bad joke.

But Democrat candidates (including U.S. Rep. candidate Victoria Wulsin, and Harold Ford, who is running for the U.S. Senate) are denouncing Kerry's words and dodging him faster than a country squirrel in city traffic.

Kerry has become to Democrats what an unpopular President Bush has become to many Republican candidates who have distanced themselves from him.

9 Comments:

at 7:17 PM, November 02, 2006

Anonymous said...

Yeah, well, but there's a major difference between avoiding someone not running for any office whose bad joke-telling is twisted by the opposition and avoiding someone who starts a war on false pretenses that has killed 3000 Americans. Maybe not to the Cheney-Rumsfeld-Bush troika, but to the rest of the world.

at 10:14 PM, November 02, 2006

Anonymous said...

Umm . . . .

President Bush this week: “The Democrat approach in Iraq comes down to this: The terrorists win and America loses. That's what's at stake in this election.”

Where is your "Today at the Forum" post about those words?!

But, given what Kerry said, you'd be surprised by this "liberal media" which isn't giving more coverage to the outrageous Bush comments! The Enquirer dropped the ball on it completely, although I'm sure the editorial board would shamelessly endorse Mr. Bush for a third term if their advertisers demanded it. . .

at 10:15 PM, November 02, 2006

Anonymous said...

How can the public much less newscasters be so stupid as to twist this stupid blunder into a real issue? Are people really that lame?

at 10:53 PM, November 02, 2006

Anonymous said...

Not at all comparable. Kerry is just one of 100 senators; Bush is President and symbolic head of his party. Running away from the latter is much more significant than running away from the former.

BTW, please extend my congratulations to Peter Bronson for his column on Kerry today, an instant classic of straw-man argumentation, one which will no doubt be laughed at in logic classes for decades to come. And his reliance on stats from the right-wing Heritage Foundation is the icing on the cake!

at 11:20 PM, November 03, 2006

Anonymous said...

President Cut-n-Run-From-Our-Troops and the Republican Spawns of Satan are so "concerned about our security" they post instructions for nuclear bombs on the Internet:

NY Times
November 3, 2006
Web Archive Is Said to Reveal a Nuclear Primer
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
Last March, the federal government set up a Web site to make public a vast archive of Iraqi documents captured during the war. The Bush administration did so under pressure from Congressional Republicans who had said they hoped to “leverage the Internet” to find new evidence of the prewar dangers posed by Saddam Hussein.

But in recent weeks, the site has posted some documents that weapons experts say are a danger themselves: detailed accounts of Iraq’s secret nuclear research before the 1991 Persian Gulf war. The documents, the experts say, constitute a basic guide to building an atom bomb.

at 10:44 AM, November 04, 2006

Anonymous said...

Peter Bronson will never do a blog because he cannot defend his disengenuous claims with facts. Shine a light on his silly metaphors and biased claims and he is revealed to be nothing but a partisan hack. George Will may be a conservative columnist, but he is not a hack.

Bronson is definitely in the Viet Nam era demographic. Had he served I am sure we would have heard about it ad nauseum. Like William Kristol who was finally unmasked by Stephen Colbert who actually followed through with the
"how old are you" question, proving that Kristol was not as he claimed "too young" please tell us why we should listen to war mongering chicken hawks like Bronson who constantly disparage veterans such as Murtha, Kerry and Wes Clark just because they are "liberal, liberal, liberal".

The Enquirer audience tends to be provincial so I will leave you with a Vanity Fair article on the Neocons thoughts on our current foreign policy debacle some like to call the War on Terror.

Neo Culpa
As Iraq slips further into chaos, the war's neoconservative boosters have turned sharply on the Bush administration, charging that their grand designs have been undermined by White House incompetence. In a series of exclusive interviews, Richard Perle, Kenneth Adelman, David Frum, and others play the blame game with shocking frankness. Target No. 1: the president himself.

by David Rose VF.COM November 3, 2006 Richard Perle.

I remember sitting with Richard Perle in his suite at London's Grosvenor House hotel and receiving a private lecture on the importance of securing victory in Iraq. "Iraq is a very good candidate for democratic reform," he said. "It won't be Westminster overnight, but the great democracies of the world didn't achieve the full, rich structure of democratic governance overnight. The Iraqis have a decent chance of succeeding." Perle seemed to exude the scent of liberation, as well as a whiff of gunpowder. It was February 2003, and Operation Iraqi Freedom, the culmination of his long campaign on behalf of regime change in Iraq, was less than a month away.

Three years later, Perle and I meet again at his home outside Washington, D.C. It is October, the worst month for U.S. casualties in Iraq in almost two years, and Republicans are bracing for losses in the upcoming midterm elections. As he looks into my eyes, speaking slowly and with obvious deliberation, Perle is unrecognizable as the confident hawk who, as chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee, had invited the exiled Iraqi dissident Ahmad Chalabi to its first meeting after 9/11. "The levels of brutality that we've seen are truly horrifying, and I have to say, I underestimated the depravity," Perle says now, adding that total defeat—an American withdrawal that leaves Iraq as an anarchic "failed state"—is not yet inevitable but is becoming more likely. "And then," says Perle, "you'll get all the mayhem that the world is capable of creating."

According to Perle, who left the Defense Policy Board in 2004, this unfolding catastrophe has a central cause: devastating dysfunction within the administration of President George W. Bush. Perle says, "The decisions did not get made that should have been. They didn't get made in a timely fashion, and the differences were argued out endlessly.… At the end of the day, you have to hold the president responsible.… I don't think he realized the extent of the opposition within his own administration, and the disloyalty."

George W. Bush. Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.
Perle goes so far as to say that, if he had his time over, he would not have advocated an invasion of Iraq: "I think if I had been delphic, and had seen where we are today, and people had said, 'Should we go into Iraq?,' I think now I probably would have said, 'No, let's consider other strategies for dealing with the thing that concerns us most, which is Saddam supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorists.' … I don't say that because I no longer believe that Saddam had the capability to produce weapons of mass destruction, or that he was not in contact with terrorists. I believe those two premises were both correct. Could we have managed that threat by means other than a direct military intervention? Well, maybe we could have."

Having spoken with Perle, I wonder: What do the rest of the pro-war neoconservatives think? If the much caricatured "Prince of Darkness" is now plagued with doubt, how do his comrades-in-arms feel? I am particularly interested in finding out because I interviewed many neocons before the invasion and, like many people, found much to admire in their vision of spreading democracy in the Middle East.

I expect to encounter disappointment. What I find instead is despair, and fury at the incompetence of the Bush administration the neoconservatives once saw as their brightest hope.

To David Frum, the former White House speechwriter who co-wrote Bush's 2002 State of the Union address that accused Iraq of being part of an "axis of evil," it now looks as if defeat may be inescapable, because "the insurgency has proven it can kill anyone who cooperates, and the United States and its friends have failed to prove that it can protect them." This situation, he says, must ultimately be blamed on "failure at the center"—starting with President Bush.

Kenneth Adelman, a lifelong neocon activist and Pentagon insider who served on the Defense Policy Board until 2005, wrote a famous op-ed article in The Washington Post in February 2002, arguing: "I believe demolishing Hussein's military power and liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk." Now he says, "I just presumed that what I considered to be the most competent national-security team since Truman was indeed going to be competent. They turned out to be among the most incompetent teams in the post-war era. Not only did each of them, individually, have enormous flaws, but together they were deadly, dysfunctional."

Dick Cheney. Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.
Fearing that worse is still to come, Adelman believes that neoconservatism itself—what he defines as "the idea of a tough foreign policy on behalf of morality, the idea of using our power for moral good in the world"—is dead, at least for a generation. After Iraq, he says, "it's not going to sell." And if he, too, had his time over, Adelman says, "I would write an article that would be skeptical over whether there would be a performance that would be good enough to implement our policy. The policy can be absolutely right, and noble, beneficial, but if you can't execute it, it's useless, just useless. I guess that's what I would have said: that Bush's arguments are absolutely right, but you know what, you just have to put them in the drawer marked can't do. And that's very different from let's go."

I spend the better part of two weeks in conversations with some of the most respected voices among the neoconservative elite. What I discover is that none of them is optimistic. All of them have regrets, not only about what has happened but also, in many cases, about the roles they played. Their dismay extends beyond the tactical issues of whether America did right or wrong, to the underlying question of whether exporting democracy is something America knows how to do.

I will present my findings in full in the January issue of Vanity Fair, which will reach newsstands in New York and L.A. on December 6 and nationally by December 12. In the meantime, here is a brief survey of some of what I heard from the war's remorseful proponents.

Richard Perle: "In the administration that I served [Perle was an assistant secretary of defense under Ronald Reagan], there was a one-sentence description of the decision-making process when consensus could not be reached among disputatious departments: 'The president makes the decision.' [Bush] did not make decisions, in part because the machinery of government that he nominally ran was actually running him. The National Security Council was not serving [Bush] properly. He regarded [then National-Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice] as part of the family."

Donald Rumsfeld. Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.
Michael Ledeen, American Enterprise Institute freedom scholar: "Ask yourself who the most powerful people in the White House are. They are women who are in love with the president: Laura [Bush], Condi, Harriet Miers, and Karen Hughes."

Frank Gaffney, an assistant secretary of defense under Ronald Reagan and founder of the Center for Security Policy: "[Bush] doesn't in fact seem to be a man of principle who's steadfastly pursuing what he thinks is the right course. He talks about it, but the policy doesn't track with the rhetoric, and that's what creates the incoherence that causes us problems around the world and at home. It also creates the sense that you can take him on with impunity."

Kenneth Adelman: "The most dispiriting and awful moment of the whole administration was the day that Bush gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom to [former C.I.A. director] George Tenet, General Tommy Franks, and [Coalition Provisional Authority chief] Jerry [Paul] Bremer—three of the most incompetent people who've ever served in such key spots. And they get the highest civilian honor a president can bestow on anyone! That was the day I checked out of this administration. It was then I thought, There's no seriousness here, these are not serious people. If he had been serious, the president would have realized that those three are each directly responsible for the disaster of Iraq."

David Frum: "I always believed as a speechwriter that if you could persuade the president to commit himself to certain words, he would feel himself committed to the ideas that underlay those words. And the big shock to me has been that although the president said the words, he just did not absorb the ideas. And that is the root of, maybe, everything."

Condoleezza Rice. Photograph by Annie Leibovitz.
Michael Rubin, former Pentagon Office of Special Plans and Coalition Provisional Authority staffer: "Where I most blame George Bush is that through his rhetoric people trusted him, people believed him. Reformists came out of the woodwork and exposed themselves." By failing to match his rhetoric with action, Rubin adds, Bush has betrayed Iraqi reformers in a way that is "not much different from what his father did on February 15, 1991, when he called the Iraqi people to rise up, and then had second thoughts and didn't do anything once they did."

Richard Perle: "Huge mistakes were made, and I want to be very clear on this: They were not made by neoconservatives, who had almost no voice in what happened, and certainly almost no voice in what happened after the downfall of the regime in Baghdad. I'm getting damn tired of being described as an architect of the war. I was in favor of bringing down Saddam. Nobody said, 'Go design the campaign to do that.' I had no responsibility for that."

Kenneth Adelman: "The problem here is not a selling job. The problem is a performance job.… Rumsfeld has said that the war could never be lost in Iraq, it could only be lost in Washington. I don't think that's true at all. We're losing in Iraq.… I've worked with [Rumsfeld] three times in my life. I've been to each of his houses, in Chicago, Taos, Santa Fe, Santo Domingo, and Las Vegas. I'm very, very fond of him, but I'm crushed by his performance. Did he change, or were we wrong in the past? Or is it that he was never really challenged before? I don't know. He certainly fooled me."

Eliot Cohen, director of the strategic-studies program at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and member of the Defense Policy Board: "I wouldn't be surprised if what we end up drifting toward is some sort of withdrawal on some sort of timetable and leaving the place in a pretty ghastly mess.… I do think it's going to end up encouraging various strands of Islamism, both Shia and Sunni, and probably will bring de-stabilization of some regimes of a more traditional kind, which already have their problems.… The best news is that the United States remains a healthy, vibrant, vigorous society. So in a real pinch, we can still pull ourselves together. Unfortunately, it will probably take another big hit. And a very different quality of leadership. Maybe we'll get it."

David Rose is a Vanity Fair contributing editor.

at 11:31 AM, November 04, 2006

Anonymous said...

Reality vs. spin...

But it is page A23

Kerry Trips Over an Economic Truth

By Uwe E. Reinhardt
Saturday, November 4, 2006; A23

There is no question that Sen. John F. Kerry owed our men and women in the military and their families the apology he offered this week. Even in clumsy jest, if that is what his remarks were, they could not have come across as anything but insulting.

Truth be told, however, economics professors routinely instruct their students on the virtue of the all-volunteer army in language that comes dangerously close to Kerry's uncouth remark.

Here, for example, is how University of Rochester economics professor Steven E. Landsburg made the case for the volunteer army in his textbook "Price Theory and Applications." Under a military draft, he writes, "the Selective Service Board will draft young people who are potentially brilliant brain surgeons, inventors and economists -- young people with high opportunity costs of entering the service -- and will leave undrafted some young people with much lower opportunity costs. The social loss is avoided under a voluntary system, in which precisely those with the lowest costs will volunteer."

Only slightly more crudely put, the central idea underlying this theorem of what economists call "social welfare economics" is that if a nation must use human bodies to stop bullets and shrapnel, it ought to use relatively "low-cost" bodies -- that is, predominantly those who would otherwise not have produced much gross domestic product, the main component of what economists call "social opportunity costs." On this rationale, economists certify the all-volunteer army as efficient and thus good.

Small wonder, then, that even college students who ardently supported the invasion of Iraq and just as ardently favor "staying the course" in Iraq argue smugly that, instead of serving their country in uniform, they can serve it so much better in law school or by trading bonds for Goldman Sachs. I personally have heard this argument many times from hawkish undergraduates at Princeton University who would never dream of fighting in uniform for the nation they profess to love.

Small wonder, too, that it became national news when Doris Kearns Goodwin's son, a Harvard undergraduate, decided to join the military and serve in Iraq. After all, how many Ivy League graduates today make that risky choice?

There is ample evidence that the elite now running America has grasped the economists' dictum. To be sure, the officer corps is drawn from the ranks of college graduates, and a tiny minority of college graduates do heed that call. On the other hand, it is well known that to fill the ranks of enlisted soldiers, sailors and Marines, the Pentagon draws heavily on the bottom half of the nation's income distribution, favoring in its hunt for recruits schools in low-income neighborhoods. Certainly few if any of Kerry's elitist critics on the right, all of them self-professed patriots, have served their country in uniform, let alone in battle; nor have many of their offspring.

snip

at 11:33 AM, November 04, 2006

Anonymous said...

i'm listening to wlw this morning.

I happy to see that they are dealing with diet issues.

What about disclosing the plans to an atom bomb?

at 11:49 AM, November 04, 2006

Anonymous said...

SHHHH! If Karl wants the Enquirer editorial board to know about that, he'll wake them up and tell them.

Previous Posts

Thursday, November 02, 2006

More Bush/Kerry, no thanks

9 Comments: