First Door on the Left

Growing Pessimism on Iraq

A growing number of career professionals within national security agencies believe that the situation in Iraq is much worse, and the path to success much more tenuous, than is being expressed in public by top Bush administration officials, according to former and current government officials and assessments over the past year by intelligence officials at the CIA and the departments of State and Defense.

While President Bush, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and others have delivered optimistic public appraisals, officials who fight the Iraqi insurgency and study it at the CIA and the State Department and within the Army officer corps believe the rebellion is deeper and more widespread than is being publicly acknowledged, officials say.

Another son of a former Republican president has decided that George W. Bush is not the right man for the job.

Why I will vote for John Kerry for President
by John Eisenhower

The Presidential election to be held this coming Nov. 2 will be one of extraordinary importance to the future of our nation. The outcome will determine whether this country will continue on the same path it has followed for the last 3½ years or whether it will return to a set of core domestic and foreign policy values that have been at the heart of what has made this country great.

Now more than ever, we voters will have to make cool judgments, unencumbered by habits of the past. Experts tell us that we tend to vote as our parents did or as we “always have.” We remained loyal to party labels. We cannot afford that luxury in the election of 2004. There are times when we must break with the past, and I believe this is one of them.

As son of a Republican President, Dwight D. Eisenhower, it is automatically expected by many that I am a Republican. For 50 years, through the election of 2000, I was. With the current administration’s decision to invade Iraq unilaterally, however, I changed my voter registration to independent, and barring some utterly unforeseen development, I intend to vote for the Democratic Presidential candidate, Sen. John Kerry.

The fact is that today’s “Republican” Party is one with which I am totally unfamiliar. To me, the word “Republican” has always been synonymous with the word “responsibility,” which has meant limiting our governmental obligations to those we can afford in human and financial terms. Today’s whopping budget deficit of some $440 billion does not meet that criterion.

Responsibility used to be observed in foreign affairs. That has meant respect for others. America, though recognized as the leader of the community of nations, has always acted as a part of it, not as a maverick separate from that community and at times insulting towards it. Leadership involves setting a direction and building consensus, not viewing other countries as practically devoid of significance. Recent developments indicate that the current Republican Party leadership has confused confident leadership with hubris and arrogance…

Sen. Kerry, in whom I am willing to place my trust, has demonstrated that he is courageous, sober, competent, and concerned with fighting the dangers associated with the widening socio-economic gap in this country. I will vote for him enthusiastically.

I celebrate, along with other Americans, the diversity of opinion in this country. But let it be based on careful thought. I urge everyone, Republicans and Democrats alike, to avoid voting for a ticket merely because it carries the label of the party of one’s parents or of our own ingrained habits.

Read the whole thing.

I keep hearing this ridiculous notion that George Bush is the candidate that most people would want to sit down and have a beer with. Okay, first of all, that is a ridiculous way to pick a president; and second of all, he can’t. He’s a recovering alcoholic, remember? We don’t want him falling off the wagon until at least after January 20th.

However, this man can sit and enjoy a beer with you…

(Uh-oh, I think we just lost the Mormon vote. Probably never had it anyway.)

CNN is reporting that the television networks are balking at the rules set out by the Kerry and Bush campaigns for tomorrow night’s debate…

Although the Bush and Kerry camps have meticulously crafted an agreement on the rules for this year’s presidential debates, the television networks broadcasting them refuse to go along with the plans.

Specifically, the networks object to provisions in the agreement that place limits on their cameras, including prohibitions on shots of one candidate while the other is answering questions.

I imagine this rule was insisted upon by the Bushies. They had good reason.

Al Gore: How to Debate George Bush:

The debates aren’t a time for rhetorical tricks. It’s a time for an honest contest of ideas. Mr. Bush’s unwillingness to admit any mistakes may score him style points. But it makes hiring him for four more years too dangerous a risk. Stubbornness is not strength; and Mr. Kerry must show voters that there is a distinction between the two.

If Mr. Bush is not willing to concede that things are going from bad to worse in Iraq, can he be trusted to make the decisions necessary to change the situation? If he insists on continuing to pretend it is “mission accomplished,” can he accomplish the mission? And if the Bush administration has been so thoroughly wrong on absolutely everything it predicted about Iraq, with the horrible consequences that have followed, should it be trusted with another four years?

The biggest single difference between the debates this year and four years ago is that President Bush cannot simply make promises. He has a record. And I hope that voters will recall the last time Mr. Bush stood on stage for a presidential debate. If elected, he said, he would support allowing Americans to buy prescription drugs from Canada. He promised that his tax cuts would create millions of new jobs. He vowed to end partisan bickering in Washington. Above all, he pledged that if he put American troops into combat: “The force must be strong enough so that the mission can be accomplished. And the exit strategy needs to be well defined.”

Comparing these grandiose promises to his failed record, it’s enough to make anyone want to, well, sigh.

Jesse Jackson had a column published in The Chicago Sun-Times yesterday. It’s difficult for me to choose parts of it to quote here because I really want to post the entire column. I’ll try, but you really should go read the whole thing.

A Rather unfair burden

CBS anchor Dan Rather apologized this week. He admitted that CBS had been snookered by a source that lied and provided documents that were fake about George W. Bush’s service in the National Guard during the Vietnam years. Ironically, although the documents were fake, the story was true: Bush did use family connections to avoid the draft, ducked the war in the National Guard, and then shirked his responsibilities while serving in the Guard. Rather had the right facts, but the wrong source.

The right-wing chorus started baying immediately. Bill Bennett accused CBS of being guilty of ”corruption.” Others called for Rather to resign. No liberals came to the defense of Rather or CBS.

What a contrast with President Bush. We now know that everything he told us about the war in Iraq was false. There were no weapons of mass destruction. Saddam Hussein had no connections with al-Qaida and no involvement in Sept. 11. His regime was crumbling under sanctions and inspections. The war on Iraq wasn’t part of the war on terror, it was a distraction from it…

It is bizarre that the punditry should be in greater moral outcry over a news organization that rushed a story to print on the basis of forged documents than a White House that rushed a nation to war on the basis of lies, distortions, fake documents and false intelligence…

Now the president is simply ignoring reality, painting Iraq as verging on democracy, even as the military worries about our position collapsing. He claims the support of the Iraqi people when polls show the only thing that unifies Iraqis is their desire for the occupation to end.

He claims Iraq is an advance in the war on terror, when in fact his catastrophic debacle, by all independent assessments, has been a recruiting boon for al-Qaida, as bin Laden’s popularity soars across the Muslim world and the reputation of the United States plummets.

Why hold a TV anchor to a higher standard than a president? Is the press too intimidated to challenge the president’s distortions, depriving voters of the independent voice so vital to a democracy?

Go read the whole thing!

Crude Oil Prices Surpass $50 Per Barrel

Crude oil surpassed $50 a barrel for the first time and analysts said Tuesday that prices could keep rising because of a sharp rise in global demand, tight supplies and threats to output in petroleum-producing nations such as Iraq and Nigeria.

Wait a minute. I thought George Bush and the Saudi princes had a deal. Weren’t the Saudis supposed to increase production just before the U.S. election? Oh, they did…

Saudi Arabia, the world’s top oil producer, responded today with a pledge that it would raise production capacity to 11 million barrels a day, from 9.5 million.

How’s that working out for you, George?

Check out Steve Bates’ poem.

Perhaps we should not overly concern ourselves with the “elections” in Iraq and Afghanistan. According to a group of international observers we have our own problems to worry about, including:

• Slow implementation of the Help America Vote Act of 2002, which authorized $3.86 billion to replace outdated machines and reform election procedures.
• Poorly maintained voter registration lists and a hodgepodge of procedures for handling absentee and provisional ballots could result in voter disenfranchisement and postelection litigation. Provisional ballots are a new feature, meant to allow anyone who shows up at the polls to vote even if their name isn’t on precinct lists.
• The report criticized steps by states to allow military and overseas voters to fax rather than mail their completed ballots, calling them inconsistent “with the principle of the secrecy of the vote.”
• The observers said the scale of complaints about intimidation of minority voters was difficult to assess but that “such allegations were repeated by Democratic Party representatives, while the Republican Party officials did not seem to share these concerns.”

Hey, we’ve still got five weeks to fix all this. No sweat!

I’ve been wondering about the so-called elections scheduled in Afghanistan and Iraq. Who’s running? With the election in Afghanistan scheduled for next month and the one in Iraq scheduled for January, somebody must know who the candidates are. Can anybody actually name the people who are running for “president” of Iraq? With the election only about three months away, surely somebody can. Is there an opposition candidate? For that matter, who is the U.S. backing? Is Allawi a candidate?

Rahul Mahajan has obviously been wondering the same: “The Bush Definition of Democracy.”

This is powerful, and it likely would have slipped right past me had rock city not posted a comment on my previous post and had I not followed the link to his site where he posted about it.

Following links is not only fun, it can often turn out to be a wise thing to do.