First Door on the Left

Here is just a small part of the RNC’s most recent mass mailing to voters…

The Blue Lemur has the whole thing.

I don’t know about you, but it makes me sad. I’m sad that they have to peddle fear in this manner. This country has so much more to offer than fear. At least it used to.

The Democrats could respond with something like this…

but they won’t. There is still, at least on the part of some people, a thing called decency.

Update: You have to read this story. It’s unbelievable. This is happening in the United States of America!

In Madison, Wis., Senator John Kerry appeared with Bruce Springsteen at a rally that reportedly drew 80,000 people.

Looking out at 10,000 faces at a Bush rally, failed GOP presidential candidate Bob Dole said, “I couldn’t get a crowd like this in 1996.”

Heck, Howard Dean was drawing more than 10,000 to his rallies during the primaries!

All anybody seems to want to talk about is the explosives missing from Al Qaqaa in Iraq. George Bush and his team want you to believe that either they were moved by Saddam (or the Russians (?!)) prior to the invasion or that it is the fault of our soldiers in Iraq that they went missing. Baloney. Bush blew it big time. ABC News has the video.

In his column today, Paul Krugman reminds us that there is so much more going on besides just Al Qaqaa…

It’s remarkable that the right-wingers who dominate cable news and talk radio are still complaining about a liberal stranglehold over the media. But, that absurdity aside, they’re missing a crucial point: Al Qaqaa is hardly the only tale of incompetence and mendacity to break to the surface in the last few days. Here’s a quick look at some of the others:

Letting Osama get away – Just before the story about Al Qaqaa broke, the Bush-Cheney campaign was frantically trying to debunk John Kerry’s statement that Mr. Bush let Osama bin Laden get away when he was cornered at Tora Bora. That getaway, Mr. Kerry asserts, was possible because the administration “outsourced” the job of closing off escape routes to local Afghan warlords.

In response, Gen. Tommy Franks claimed that we don’t know that Osama was at Tora Bora, and, anyway, we didn’t outsource the work of catching him. Dick Cheney called Mr. Kerry’s claims “absolute garbage.” But multiple reports from 2001 and early 2002 confirm Mr. Kerry’s version. As Peter Bergen, a terrorism expert, writes, Mr. Kerry’s charge is “an accurate reflection of the historical record.”

Letting Zarqawi get away – On Monday The Wall Street Journal confirmed an earlier report that in 2002 the military drew up plans for a strike on the base of the terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in an area of Iraq not under Saddam’s control. But civilian officials vetoed the attack – probably because they thought it might undermine political support for the war against Saddam. So Mr. Zarqawi, like Osama, was given the chance to kill another day.

The situation in Iraq – Dick Cheney is telling supporters that Iraq is a “remarkable success story.” But the news from Iraq just keeps getting worse. After 49 Iraqi National Guard recruits were killed, execution style, even Ayad Allawi, the Iraqi prime minister – who usually acts as a de facto spokesman for the Bush-Cheney campaign – accused coalition forces of “gross negligence.” It’s now clear that the insurgency is much larger than U.S. officials initially acknowledged, and that Iraqi security forces have been heavily infiltrated.

$70 billion more – Earlier this week The Washington Post reported that administration officials were planning to seek an additional $70 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan after the election. Whatever the precise number, it has long been obvious to knowledgeable observers that this was coming, but the news will come as a shock to many people who still don’t realize how deep a quagmire Mr. Bush has gotten us into.

All of these stories would be getting more play right now if it weren’t for the Al Qaqaa mess. Still, one can understand why the right is so upset.

Click here to read the entire column.

George W. Bush is not the person we want (or need) as our commander in chief.

Bush Wanted To Invade Iraq If Elected in 2000

Two years before the September 11 attacks, presidential candidate George W. Bush was already talking privately about the political benefits of attacking Iraq, according to his former ghost writer, who held many conversations with then-Texas Governor Bush in preparation for a planned autobiography.

“He was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999,” said author and journalist Mickey Herskowitz. “It was on his mind. He said to me: ‘One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief.’ And he said, ‘My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it.’ He said, ‘If I have a chance to invade….if I had that much capital, I’m not going to waste it. I’m going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I’m going to have a successful presidency.”

Herskowitz said that Bush expressed frustration at a lifetime as an underachiever in the shadow of an accomplished father. In aggressive military action, he saw the opportunity to emerge from his father’s shadow. The moment, Herskowitz said, came in the wake of the September 11 attacks. “Suddenly, he’s at 91 percent in the polls, and he’d barely crawled out of the bunker.”

That President Bush and his advisers had Iraq on their minds long before weapons inspectors had finished their work – and long before alleged Iraqi ties with terrorists became a central rationale for war – has been raised elsewhere, including in a book based on recollections of former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill. However, Herskowitz was in a unique position to hear Bush’s unguarded and unfiltered views on Iraq, war and other matters – well before he became president.

Click on the headline to read the entire article.

An estimated 100,000 Iraqis and over 1,000 American soldiers have died — all so George W. Bush could be seen as a “great leader.”

The Bush administration’s “October Surprise” has backfired on them, and I do not imagine they are very happy about it.

Alleged Terror Tape Gives ABC Pause

It has all the makings of an incendiary story: a chilling pre-election videotape featuring a supposed member of al Qaeda, declaring in English that “blood will run red in the streets of America.”

The problem, say ABC News executives, is that they can’t determine whether the tape, obtained by a producer, involves a real threat — or even the identity of the figure on it, a man wearing an ammunition belt and a headdress that obscures his face. The network enlisted the aid of the FBI and CIA but still can’t authenticate the 75-minute videotape.

“We’re not quite there to broadcast something that would be quite frightening,” investigative reporter Brian Ross said yesterday. “I’d love to have the exclusive, but first we’d like to get it right.”

ABC was put in the awkward position of defending its insistence on fully checking out the story after the Drudge Report posted a huge online headline: “ABC News Holds Terror Warning Tape.”…

Ross and other ABC staffers say they believe that a Bush administration official [ed: Karl Rove] leaked the story to Internet gossip Matt Drudge as a way of pressuring the network into airing the tape, which would heighten concerns about terrorism in the final week of the president’s reelection campaign. They note that whoever gave the information to Drudge had a transcript of the tape.

Fear, fear, fear. Be very afraid. That’s all they’ve got.

I still don’t understand how anybody believes that John Kerry could possibly screw up this “war on terror” any more than George Bush has.

I wholeheartedly agree with Eva…

“The biggest disappointment in all this is that they missed.”

EDITORIAL: FOR A STRONGER, SAFER, SANER AMERICA

Since its foundation in 1989, The Memphis Flyer has strictly adhered to a policy of not endorsing candidates for public office. Regular readers are aware of our unabashed support of progressive ideas and, by inference, the individuals who espouse them. But we have always felt we best serve the public interest by keeping an arm’s-length distance from political candidates in the run-up to elections.

This year’s extraordinary presidential campaign, however, requires our making an exception to our traditional non-endorsement policy. Four more years of George W. Bush is a potential disaster of such magnitude that we feel obliged to add our editorial voice to those of so many other newspapers around this country, and declare our support for John F. Kerry’s candidacy for the presidency.

The reason is simple: President Bush’s policies have failed this country on nearly every front, domestic and international. There is not room on this page to chronicle those failures in detail. Our relations with our allies are in shambles; our budgetary and trade deficits are out of control; corporate lobbies are setting environmental policy; our tax system is obscenely biased towards the rich; our civil liberties are at risk. The list goes on and on…

Senator Kerry has grown in stature during this presidential campaign. George W. Bush, meanwhile, has shrunk, especially in these final days, when his “message” to the American people is little more than an appeal to our rawest and most primitive emotions. As Marie Cocco noted recently in Newsday, “Fear is the president’s running mate.”

At the risk of irritating the always-irritable vice president, we concur. Senator Kerry, by contrast, appeals to our minds as well as our hearts, drawing upon our nation’s best instincts, not its worst. Most importantly, he offers the promise of redeeming George W. Bush’s famously unkept promise from the 2000 presidential campaign.

John Kerry has shown that he can be “a uniter not a divider.” George W. Bush has clearly proven that he can’t. Your vote for Senator Kerry next Tuesday will be a vote for a stronger, safer, and saner America.

Apparently, Yes, Bush Can has become “No, Bush Can’t!”

I have no way of knowing if this is for real, since I had no contact with the group while they were purportedly out campaigning for Mr. Bush. Can anybody validate?

I’m glad I found Blog Explosion. (Thanks, Daniel!) I am reading a lot of weblogs that I otherwise would never have read and seeing a lot of viewpoints that I otherwise would never have seen.

Sometimes, though, what I read kind of bothers me. Like this story I read a few hours ago and have been thinking about all night. Apparently Democrats are the only people who ever tear up campaign signs. Anyways…

This fellow went out one night to find his Bush-Cheney sign ripped to shreds and scattered all over his front lawn. He decided he wanted to teach his four-year-old son a lesson, so he called the police (even though he knew there was nothing they could do about it). While waiting for the police to arrive, his son asked him if he was going to shoot the person who tore up the sign. He replied that no, he was not going to waste a bullet on the “liberal-commie bastard.”

First, where would the kid get the idea that daddy would ever shoot anybody? Second, “liberal-commie bastard?” Nice lesson there, dad!

It sure is a good thing that George W. Bush has united us all like he has.