I’m watching the debates right now, and I absolutely cannot believe how poorly the current sitting president is doing. He is debating exactly like he did 4 years ago, with lots of “I’m going to…”, “My administration will …” If you weren’t paying attention, you wouldn’t realize that this guy has already had 4 years at it. He’s debating as if he’s not the incumbent.
When presented with facts and specifics, his best response is to banter around with barely coherent name-calling. He seems kind of spastic and defensive, and you can feel him losing it. Thinking of this as a job interview, I wouldn’t hire him as the evening manager of a laundromat.
Right now, he is stating that the Patriot Act does not require citizens to give up their rights and does not weaken due process. I can see the guy who asked the question giving him the absolute skunk eye. You can see the President losing that guy right now. I hope that all of America feels that way.
Now he is supporting his position on stem cells, saying that you can’t ‘destroy life” for this research. So, let’s see – using frozen embryos to create stem cells for medical research is “destroying life” and not worth the potential gain in curing Parkinson, Alzheimers, spinal cord injuries et al. On the other hand, he considers a free Iraq important enough to be worth over 1000 America lives. So, I work out this algebra to mean that he considers Iraq more important than the health of Americans and that he considers frozen embryos more important than living adult American soliders.
Update: As Matt pointed out in a comment, the term “unfertilized embryos” is an oxymoron. I meant “frozen embryos” and have corrected this post.
What’s an “unfertilized embryo?”
I couldn’t agree more. Bush would have been able to hold his own except for one major problem: his administration is a complete and utter failure on virtually every front you can imagine. When you have no rhetorical skill and no accomplishments, it’s awfully hard to stand toe-to-toe with someone who at least has some rhetorical skill and keep from looking like a complete ignoramus. The part of the debate that I thought was telling was Bush (and Cheney, in other venues) trying to spin the Iraq Survey Group as somehow justifying military action in Iraq. While the report did say that Saddam was working to undermine the oil for food program, it also said that development of WMDs had ceased by 1998, and that the economic sanctions were effective: they had no WMDs to give to terrorist groups even if they wanted to. Bush stammered some claptrap about having to go into Iraq to prevent Saddam from giving terrorists these weapons, but the report and all available evidence says they DID NOT EXIST. Some of us are able to remember the war under Bush Sr. The Republican Guard had significant numbers, and were able to (among other things) launch missile attacks against Israel. The war under Bush Jr. went _too_ well, in the initial stages. That’s simply because they had no effective army: they had been starved out by the economic sanctions. It was only after “Mission Accomplished” that we began to see resistance (probably much of it from accross the border).
I’ve got to give it to the Republicans for chutzpah: running on George W.’s record is something I couldn’t do. At least without laughing.
Kerry is the real phoney in this election. In 19 years in the senate he has done absolutely nothing. What are his stances this week? Next week? Go back and listen this his positions on the war. It’ll make your head spin. The socialists in western Europe can’t stand Bush because he does what he says and take stands (like Reagan did). We’ll see what happens on election day. Hopefully it won’t be the mess we had 4 years ago. That’s one thing conservatives and liberals can agree on.