Month: January 2007

Posted on Democrats, Iraq, Liberals

who said this?

fire up the delorean and check out this blast from the past.

The United States favors an Iraq that offers its people freedom at home. I categorically reject arguments that this is unattainable due to Iraq’s history or its ethnic or sectarian make-up. Iraqis deserve and desire freedom like everyone else. The United States looks forward to a democratically supported regime that would permit us to enter into a dialogue leading to the reintegration of Iraq into normal international life.

My Administration has pursued, and will continue to pursue, these objectives through active application of all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions. The evidence is overwhelming that such changes will not happen under the current Iraq leadership.

yes, that was the golden child of the left, president bill clinton, in a 1998 statement on H.R. 4655, also known as the “iraq liberation act”.  so even as far back as 1998, there was support for regime change in iraq. president clinton said nothing different than some of bush 43’s past statements. president clinton came out in favor of freedom for the iraqis, believed that it was possible regardless of ethnic or sectarian conflicts, and even suggested that iraq’s leadership needed to change. it’s easy to question whether clinton did this out of political calculation instead of genuine belief that saddam was a threat.  i’m giving him the benefit of the doubt in the case, since he ordered U.S. strikes on iraqi military and security targets on december 18th, 1998. it should be a serious consideration for any US president to order military strikes, and i would hope that the same was true back then.

there have been previous posts by me and by other bloggers documenting past statements by democrats which show that this “bush tricked me” meme is absolute nonsense.  hillary shouldn’t be allowed to get away with this line. the right doesn’t buy it. neither does the left.

i suppose that senator clinton could be forgiven for not believing anything her husband had previously said or written about iraq, but that’s not what she said to codepink in 2003. (yes, i know it’s a link to rush limbaugh’s website…i would be happy to provide an alternate link if i had one.)

There is a very easy way to prevent anyone from being put into harm’s way, and that is for Saddam Hussein to disarm. And I have absolutely no belief that he will. I have to say that this is something I have followed for more than a decade. If he were serious about disarming, he would have been much more forthcoming. I ended up voting for the resolution after carefully reviewing the information, intelligence that I had available, talking with people whose opinions I trusted, trying to discount political or other factors that I didn’t believe should be in any way a part of this decision. I would love to agree with you, but I can’t, based on my own understanding and assessment of the situation.

she did her own homework.  she consulted with people she trusted. she carefully reviewed the information.  if she got it wrong, i don’t see how she can blame bush for that.  besides, we are in a different place now in the iraq debate.  second-guessing isn’t useful to the current debate on what to do next in iraq. maybe that’s the point for all these revisionist democrats. they want to keep dealing with the past so they can avoid dealing with the future.

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2 Comments Posted on Editorials, Iraq, Moonbats

cause confused

it’s fun to mock the dimbulbs who are usually the voices of the anti-war protests. cindy sheehan, jane fonda, the code pink(os), various hollywood celebs like sean penn, and clueless politicians like dennis kucinich (who once proposed a department of peace)…all of these people have credibility problems because of their statements about our president and about this country. stupid protest chants, over-the-top-signs, and various weirdness are all part of their exercise of our right to free speech. so bully for them.  they have had their say.  now it is our turn to speak our minds, and reject this image that the left wants to paint of the american people and their elected president.

we are not imperialists.  we are not fascists.  those who would say so are blinded by hatred and rage for president bush, and they are no longer able to think rationally about what should happen next in iraq. the anti-war crowd doesn’t really want to know what this country would look like if it were ruled by a dictator who would never be subject to a vote on his job performance.  they don’t want to know what it would be like trying to exercise their freedom of speech in a place where you could lose limbs if you ticked off the wrong person. 

i do not deny that there are valid reasons to oppose the iraq war. we should be able to have this discussion in a calm, rational manner without trying to score political points and without throwing out wild unsubstantiated accusations about the character of this country and about our president. can’t we disagree with the president’s policies without impugning the man’s character? apparently that’s too much to ask from these anti-war protestors.

2 Comments Posted on George W. Bush

SOTU: is anyone still listening?

i liked much of what president bush had to say last night. unfortunately for him, i think that many americans have decided that nothing the president could say would change their minds about him and about his iraq policy.  so they are tuning out everything he says, no matter what the subject is. the president’s state of the union address was about more than just iraq.  here’s one subject where the president and i disagree:

on illegal immigration(he still doesn’t get it):

Extending hope and opportunity in our country requires an immigration system worthy of America — with laws that are fair and borders that are secure. When laws and borders are routinely violated, this harms the interests of our country. To secure our border, we are doubling the size of the Border Patrol — and funding new infrastructure and technology.

pardon my skepticism…but there’s no guarantee that the infrastructure will ever be built, including that border fence. it’s nice that we are going to have more border patrol agents, but how about supporting the ones who are already there trying to do their jobs?  republican rep. tom tancredo of colorado(another possible presidential candidate) is also skeptical: “I am disappointed but not surprised that the president has once again chosen to trot out this same old pig, albeit one with a slightly new shade of lipstick.”  what he said.

Yet even with all these steps, we cannot fully secure the border unless we take pressure off the border — and that requires a temporary worker program. We should establish a legal and orderly path for foreign workers to enter our country to work on a temporary basis. As a result, they won’t have to try to sneak in — and that will leave border agents free to chase down drug smugglers, and criminals, and terrorists.

We will enforce our immigration laws at the work site, and give employers the tools to verify the legal status of their workers — so there is no excuse left for violating the law. We need to uphold the great tradition of the melting pot that welcomes and assimilates new arrivals. And we need to resolve the status of the illegal immigrants who are already in our country — without animosity and without amnesty.

Convictions run deep in this Capitol when it comes to immigration. Let us have a serious, civil, and conclusive debate — so that you can pass, and I can sign, comprehensive immigration reform into law.

like i’ve said previously, the president will now have the ability to pass the kind of comprehensive immigration reform that he’s always wanted, thanks to his new friends the democrats. 

it was a fairly ambitious speech, with new proposals on health care, setting new targets for emissions standards, and decreasing gasoline consumption by 20% in the next ten years. maybe senator mccain was on to something when he embraced david cameron’s tories as ideological twins with the current republican regime. i sure don’t see that much difference between cameron’s views on climate change and the president’s new-found belief in global warming. the tories aren’t looking much like maggie’s tories these days, and the party of reagan has now become the party of compromise, navigating by polls rather than by the strong convictions and principles held by its non-congressional members.

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2 Comments Posted on '08 Election, Democrats, Liberals

another WHO? candidate

governor bill richardson of new mexico thinks he wants to be president of this country, and so he’s going exploring with his committee.

why not bill richardson for president?

i’m serious. i really am. he’s certainly got the right kind of experience for the job. besides being the governor of new mexico, his resume includes a stint as a former congressman, as well as a UN ambassador and an Energy Department secretary. that’s a quality mix of foreign and domestic policy experience. i will leave it to policy wonks smarter than myself to determine his effectiveness at said positions, but it’s not a bad place to start for a candidate. a factor certainly not lost on governor richardson is that he would also be a candidate who could get significant support from the same pool of voters that obama could possibly draw from. minorities would have several choices of who to support on the democratic side. he’s a relative unknown to most of america, and that will be a major hurdle to overcome with the three major players (hillary, barack obama, and john edwards).

another daunting challenge for him would be fundraising, especially in a competition with so many big dogs clamoring for every last bone. somehow i just don’t see how richardson can get enough money to make himself a contender.

governor richardson is a quality addition to the democratic presidential race, even with the obstacles he faces. only time will tell whether he has the charisma and the political savvy to take some ground from the frontrunners. i hope he does.

(i’m not endorsing any democrats and do not intend to…i just think they should take a serious look at this guy before rejecting him as their candidate.)

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Posted on '08 Election, Democrats, Republicans

follow the yellow brick road

the road to oz sure is getting crowded. on the democrat side so far we have edwards, obama, kucinich, dodd, (maybe richardson), and a few others. lining up for the republicans so far we have giuliani, romney, mccain, duncan hunter, possibly mike huckabee, possibly newt gingrich, and TBA(to be announced). i’m yawning. you can’t see it, but trust me, it’s happening.

saturday we had two more entrants in the political sweepstakes that the presidency of the United States has become.

senator sam brownback (who?) (r-ks) is now in:

My family and I are taking the first steps on the yellow brick road to the White House…

give him points for originality and a clever kansas reference. social conservatives will find much to like about senator brownback on issues of concern to them. it should also please a few people that he opposes the president’s iraq troop surge. is he too far right to gain support of the rest of the republican party who may not take such a hard line on abortion, gay marriage, embryonic stem cell research, and other such cultural issues? maybe. he does support amnesty for illegals, which isn’t a very popular position to hold in today’s republican party. the bottom line for me is that i want someone who can beat hillary. i just don’t think brownback is that guy.

senator rodham also let slip the worst-kept secret in DC relating to her future plans:

I’m in. And I’m in to win.

Today I am announcing that I will form an exploratory committee to run for president.

And I want you to join me not just for the campaign but for a conversation about the future of our country — about the bold but practical changes we need to overcome six years of Bush administration failures.

I am going to take this conversation directly to the people of America, and I’m starting by inviting all of you to join me in a series of web chats over the next few days.

the great hillary wants to chat with us mortals. she is even allowing one lucky soul to have the chance to write a guest post at her new campaign blog. i am so tempted to write something, but i will leave it to more talented bloggers than myself to take advantage of this priceless opportunity. does she really want to know what the average american thinks? i guess we will find out.

just a word of advice to john edwards and barack obama…watch out for the flying monkeys.

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4 Comments Posted on '08 Election, Democrats, Liberals

amusing

there is so much depressing hard news out there that should be ignored, so that we can focus on something a little more entertaining to those on the right – bashing john kerry.

jonah goldberg:

Don’t let John Kerry run again.

Yes, yes, it’s true: I am biased. I have never been kind to the Brahmin Lurch. After his “botched” joke suggesting that American troops are uneducated losers, I wrote that Kerry “is an awful politician, a human toothache with the charisma of a 19th-century Oxford Latin tutor.” In response, countless readers wrote in to complain that I’d been unfair to Latin tutors.

But balancing out my personal animosity is my professional self-interest. As a conservative columnist, there is nothing I should want more than to see Kerry whack his forehead against the concrete wall of history one more time. Why? Because attacking Kerry is always good copy. And, if my North Star were the GOP’s good fortune, I would light a candle every night at my Lee Atwater shrine in prayer that the Kerry baloney leap once more into the grinder.

After all, he’s the most beatable of Democrats. His political instincts are duller than a prison-cafeteria spork. And never in my lifetime have we seen a presidential candidate with a more thumbless grasp of the way average Americans talk or live…

not bad. read it all here.

even better is the follow-up to that column by mark steyn:

I agree with Jonah’s column on the general ghastliness of the Botoxicated Brahmin, but it’s hard not to see that the Goldberg disparagers also have a point. If Kerry was so unlikeable, why was it so close? If Karl’s Rovebot laboratory had spent years constructing the perfect candidate to run against, it would have looked pretty much like John F Kerry – a vain thin-skinned self-regarding tone-deaf francophile insecure not-quite-blue-blood incoherent anti-war war-hero from a Swiss finishing school with nothing to show for 20 years in the Senate other than getting wrong every foreign policy question of the day and so alien to the habits of his electorate he’s unable to engage in as routine a photo op as eating a hot dog without looking like a Grand Duchess dropping in on the village idiot’s hovel.

ouch. because i know a few democrats (and actually like them), i hope for their sake that kerry gives up any idea that he has of running for president in ’08. it won’t be as close next time if kerry should surprise everybody(including me) and win the democratic nomination. i don’t think that the democrats have anything to worry about here, although i do see a leadership void with the current ’08 candidates that needs to be filled by somebody. who will it be?

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Posted on Democrats, Liberals

the left is right (and they are angry)

the democrats will not stop this war, or limit the prosecution of it in any significant way. those who were expecting this to happen will be sorely disappointed. surely the left shouldn’t be surprised about the way the democrats are dealing with iraq, but they are.

here’s one guy, terry michael from the washington times, calling out senator biden:

It’s hard to get out of a deal with the devil.

That’s the congressional Democrats’ dilemma, as they continue to treat the Iraq war as a speed bump on their pathway to the perks of restored power, rather than as a moral question to which voters loudly demanded a moral answer two months ago.

Take Sen. Joseph Biden of Delaware. “There’s not much I can do about it,” responded the Democratic “leader” on foreign policy, when asked on one of the Sunday venues for pompous pontificators how he would respond to any attempt by President Bush to escalate the war in Iraq (or “surge,” if you prefer it in Orwellian newspeak).

This is a man who sees a future president during his morning look in the mirror. Sadly, the glass reflects an empty suit who embodies the congressional Democrats’ decision to reduce action on Iraq to a political calculus appropriate for the highway appropriations bill, rather than as a moral imperative to challenge a policy that has sent thousands of twenty-somethings to their deaths in the desert…”

You certainly can do something about it, Senator. It’s called leadership. You rise on the Senate floor. You say you were out of your mind to write a blank check for this hideous misprojection of American military power. And then you propose immediate withdrawal, just slow enough to maximize the safety of the 135,000 mostly young men and women you helped put in harm’s way by your collusion with this elective war. You do what Republican Sen. Gordon Smith of Oregon had the guts to do last month, stopping just short of accurately labeling this public policy obscenity a criminal enterprise…

good luck with that, mr. michael. most congressional democrats, even though they may agree with him that the iraq war was a dreadful mistake, still have to deal with the consequences of whatever actions they take. that’s why the democrats could never vote for immediate withdrawal of our troops from iraq. even though they may be skeptical of the president’s surge plan, immediate withdrawal is still an undesirable alternative.

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Posted on '08 Election

another question for senator biden

why isn’t biden promoting HIS iraq plan(pdf) now that the dems are in charge? if he really believes that it would work, this would give him a major edge over all the other democratic presidential candidates. kind of makes you wonder, doesn’t it? the question for the ’08 contenders should be how they would deal with external threats to our country and what steps they would take to ensure the safety and security of this nation. i’m looking for someone who takes this seriously, understands the nature of the enemy we face, and can sell their strategy for the war on terror…which will not be over when president bush leaves office.biden has the most experience of the dem candidates on foreign policy (and in running for president), but he hasn’t proven that he has any staying power or the charisma that kerry lacked. is he more likable than kerry? well, yes…but that wouldn’t take much. do we really want another east coast liberal as the democratic nominee? maybe the conventional wisdom is overrated in this case. even though i am skeptical about biden’s chances, i still think he would be the smartest pick from the current field of democratic candidates.

take a look at these candidates. hillary is not as strong as the media wants her to be. obama-mania will fade at some point. people will soon remember why they rejected john edwards the first time. kucinich and sharpton (if he should decide to run) will provide some laughs, but not much else. there could be others jumping into the pool, but at the end, it won’t matter much.

this is not to suggest that the republican field has a much stronger group of candidates. there’s something to dislike in all the frontrunners and there are serious questions about each one. for some reason, conservatives hate mccain. right resume, wrong messenger. giuliani is far from a social conservative, but he can claim some successes from his tenure as “america’s mayor” and his leadership after 9/11. he also has previously supported a guest worker program for illegal immigrants, which will earn him no points with the “no amnesty” crowd, and has argued for providing city services for them while mayor of new york city. then there’s romney, who may or may not persuade conservatives that he is conservative enough for them, and he’s a mormon on top of that. i still contend that the question of romney’s conservatism will be more important to republican base voters than his religion. the only reason that his conservatism or lack of it should matter is that the next president could get to make a few judicial nominations, including the supreme court, and it would irk social conservatives if he nominated someone who was pro-choice.

as for the second and third tier possibilities, the most you can say for them is that they definitely are more conservative than the top three contenders (who have actually announced that they are running). what these gentlemen might want to keep in mind is that while you can generate buzz by being single-issue candidates, it would help to be more well-rounded for a presidential run. i like what i have heard from sam brownback and mike huckabee. however, i don’t know whether they could get enough name recognition to be serious contenders. same goes for duncan hunter, although he might be the strongest candidate on this level.

then there’s always the possibility of newt….what will he do? he will have a great deal of influence on the outcome of the ’08 election, even if he decides not to run.

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1 Comment Posted on Iraq

no surrender

you can agree or disagree with the specifics of the president’s plan for iraq that he explained to us last night. it’s hard to say whether this will work or not, but i have confidence that we will hold up our end of the deal, at least as long as president bush is in office. the rest is up to the iraqis.  that is the strength and the weakness of this plan. it is time for some hard choices to be made by the iraqis, and i’m not sure their government has the courage and political will to make those decisions. i hope i’m wrong about that. even though i want this plan to succeed, there’s only so much we can do in supporting the iraqi government. it’s easy for us to insist that the iraqis should get past old sectarian conflicts and move forward together, but that hasn’t been their history. while i believe that sending more troops to iraq is the right thing to do, it is only part of a solution that must come with political and some economic concessions by the maliki government.

quite a few democrats (and several republicans) oppose the troop surge.  fair enough. there are convincing arguments to be made on both sides. there are some democrats, like ted kennedy for example, who actually propose de-funding this troop surge. talk is cheap. at least kennedy is actually acting on his convictions. that’s more than his democratic colleagues will do. cindy sheehan and her fellow anti-war pals will be sorely disappointed by the performance of the new democratic majority if they believe that anything serious will get done about bringing the troops home now.  oh sure, there will probably be investigations and threats.  as far as voting to bring the troops home now, or any proposal to withhold funds for reinforcements for the military men and women already in iraq — the democrats are all hat and no cattle.  it won’t happen.

now that the president has presented his plan, it’s the democrats’ turn. the american people gave them an opportunity to provide leadership and a new direction in iraq, and they don’t even put it at the top of their list of priorities, instead focusing on prescription drugs and the minimum wage.  the consequences of losing iraq are more serious than a black mark on president bush’s legacy.  i hope the democrats understand this, and that they will act in the best interests of our country when considering what’s next for iraq.

 

4 Comments Posted on Democracy

neil boortz calls us out

Can our love of freedom be rekindled? Frankly, I doubt it. We’re too lazy. Too used to the good life. We love living as adult children with our mommy and daddy, in the form of government, taking care of our basic needs while we sit around worrying who the next Falcons head coach will be and who is going to be the next American Idol.

I guess in a few years from now some young people will look at me and think to themselves “He’s old! Yeeechhhhh.” Yeah, maybe so. But I knew America when freedom was precious. I knew America before the war on the individual. I knew America before political correctness. I knew America when individual accomplishment was celebrated, not derided; when grades meant something and when the mother of a functionally illiterate child didn’t drive around with a “My child is an honor student” bumper sticker on her car….

Can America be saved? Can we be rescued from politicians who are more interested in their positions of power and the perks that come with membership in the congress? Perhaps … but I don’t see it happening. I don’t see it happening as long as CNN can travel to the sidewalks and find some young bimbo who will proclaim that she doesn’t want to manage any part of her own retirement plans — that she would rather have the government do it all for her. I don’t see it happening as long as people look to the government to set their wage rates. And I certainly don’t see it happening as long as the American people remain blissfully unaware of the threat of Islamic fascism.neil boortz

read it all here.

he’s right. when will we realize that giving more control to the government means that the average american has less control of his or her own life? we have gotten soft, and in the world we live in today, apathy is a luxury we cannot afford to keep for very long. america faces external threats. those demand the attention of the united states government, and rightly so. it also faces internal threats which also threaten to destroy our civilization from within. we cannot allow this to happen.

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