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[Steven Champeon <schampeo AT hesketh.com>]

on Mon, Mar 08, 2004 at 01:48:42AM -0500, Don Rua wrote:

<a bunch of stuff I was fairly sympathetic to, until...>

> And Bush had to take that call. He had to deal with something that
> almost no other president has had to wake up to. And he made his
> choices, and immediately went to work. He made appearances that gave
> confidence to many.

Actually, IIRC, it was several days before we saw him again. And of course
Cheney just /disappeared/ for months on end, in hiding at an "undisclosed
location".

> He made huge changes to address the new reality that we may need more
> dedicated homeland security.

Um, no. This is one of my big complaints. Instead of actually doing
something about the problem, he appointed one of his political cronies,
the hapless Tom Ridge, to a post in the biggest enlargement of the USG
in recent memory, which has so far had a pretty dismal record, planted
gun-toting Marines in airports, arrested (admittedly annoying) lefty
morons like Nancy Oden, harrassed corporate CEOs whose name happened to
be "middle eastern sounding", etc. etc. etc. And that name - /homeland/
security. *shudder* I thought the whole fricking point of the USA was that
we /all came from somewhere else/. This isn't a homeland, it's a set of
executive apartments ;)

> He made bold and dangerous moves to deal with terrorism.

Like what? Invading Afghanistan? Toppling Hussein? Whoop-de-do. He's also
antagonized (with little effect) Iran, North Korea, NATO, Venezuala, etc.

I'm not saying we aren't better off today than we maybe were on 9/12. I
think it's obvious to the point of being ludicrous that the people of
Iraq are better off, that the people of the middle east will be better
off if they can learn from Iraq, and that we really didn't have a choice
WRT dealing with corrupt France and cowardly, cynical Germany. But we sure
as hell had choices WRT how many boots we put on the ground in Iraq, what
that meant for the development of an Iraqi resistance (and whose idea was
it to /abolish the Iraqi army/? Send home tens of thousands of Sunnis all
of whom had guns and were probably pretty embarrassed by the war?)

I, too, think that most of the reaction to Bush has been nonsensical,
more driven by knee-jerk emotion than by honest reflection. And I
/really/ didn't like the way he took power in the states, with his gucci
wearing Republican thugs and their tactics, so I am not a Bush fan by a
long freaking shot. I've given him a chance, I've tracked what he's been
doing, and I think it's time for him and his administration to go. 

I only wish I knew what the Democrats' platform was. Maybe the small-gov't
Republican party will split off from the religious nut wing and the rest
of the folks who Dubya seems bent on catering to, and we can have a real
election instead. That'd be fun - I wonder what the proportions are? How
many Greens, versus old-school Federalists, versus mainstream Democrats,
versus right-wing nutballs?

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