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| 5/24 |
| 2004/10/25-26 [Politics/Domestic/Election, Politics/Domestic/President/Bush] UID:34337 Activity:low |
10/25 The New Yorker magazine endorses a presidential candidate for the
first time in its 80-year history. Who? George W. Bush! Not!
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/?041101ta_talk_editors
"As a variety of memoirs and journalistic accounts have made plain,
Bush seldom entertains contrary opinion. He boasts that he listens to
no outside advisers, and inside advisers who dare to express unwelcome
views are met with anger or disdain. He lives and works within a
self-created bubble of faith-based affirmation. Nowhere has his
solipsism been more damaging than in the case of Iraq. The arguments
and warnings of analysts in the State Department, in the Central
Intelligence Agency, in the uniformed military services, and in the
chanceries of sympathetic foreign governments had no more effect than
the chants of millions of marchers."
\_ has any major media outlet endorsed bush except
the new york post and the washington times?
\_ I was stunned that The New Yorker would would endorse Kerry.
Stunned, I tell you. And I was so sure that they were pro-Bush too.
\_ The American Conservative magazine endorses Kerry:
http://www.amconmag.com/2004_11_08/cover1.html
"Bush has behaved like a caricature of what a right-wing
president is supposed to be, and his continuation in office
will discredit any sort of conservatism for generations."
\_ which part of "major media outlet" did you not understand?
\_ you funny guy! that comment posted OUTSIDE this thread,
and AFTERWARDS. Americans so fucking illiterate!
\_ Right. This is a mucher stronger endorsement. I would lead
with this and mention The New Yorker in an OBTW.
\_ The take-home message is that Dubya is perceived to be so
bad (IMO, he is that bad) that sources that have
traditionally sat it out or endorsed the Republican are
endorsing Kerry or not endorsing any candidate.
\_ Now, if only we can get David Duke or some other Klan guy
to endorse Kerry because Bush has behaved like the caricature
of a racist... |
| 5/24 |
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| www.newyorker.com/talk/content/?041101ta_talk_editors home COMMENT THE CHOICE Issue of 2004-11-01 Posted 2004-10-25 This Presidential campaign has been as ugly and as bitter as any in Ameri can memory. The ugliness has flowed mostly in one direction, reaching it s apotheosis in the effort, undertaken by a supposedly independent group financed by friends of the incumbent, to portray the challengerwho in his mid-twenties was an exemplary combatant in both the Vietnam War and the movement to end that waras a coward and a traitor. The bitterness h as been felt mostly by the challengers adherents; This is one campaign in which no one thinks of having the band strike up Happy Days Are Here Again. The heightened emotions of the race that (with any luck) will end on Nove mber 2, 2004, are rooted in the events of three previous Tuesdays. On Tu esday, November 7, 2000, more than a hundred and five million Americans went to the polls and, by a small but indisputable plurality, voted to m ake Al Gore President of the United States. Because of the way the votes were distributed, however, the outcome in the electoral college turned on the outcome in Florida. In that state, George W Bush held a lead of some five hundred votes, one one-thousandth of Gores national margin; i rregularities, and there were many, all had the effect of taking votes a way from Gore; and the states electoral machinery was in the hands of B ushs brother, who was the governor, and one of Bushs state campaign co -chairs, who was the Florida secretary of state. Bush sued to stop any recounting of the votes, and, on Tuesday, December 12th, the United States Supreme Court gave him what he wanted. Bush v G ore was so shoddily reasoned and transparently partisan that the five ju stices who endorsed the decision declined to put their names on it, whil e the four dissenters did not bother to conceal their disgust. There are rules for settling electoral disputes of this kind, in federal and stat e law and in the Constitution itself. By ignoring themby cutting off th e process and installing Bush by fiatthe Court made a mockery not only of popular democracy but also of constitutional republicanism. A result so inimical to both majority rule and individual civic equality was bound to inflict damage on the fabric of comity. But the damage woul d have been far less severe if the new President had made some effort to take account of the special circumstances of his electionin the compos ition of his Cabinet, in the way that he pursued his policy goals, perha ps even in the goals themselves. According to Bo b Woodward in Plan of Attack, Vice-President Dick Cheney put it this w ay: From the very day we walked in the building, a notion of sort of a restrained presidency because it was such a close election, that lasted maybe thirty seconds. We had an agenda, we ran on that agenda, we won the electionfull speed ah ead. The new Presidents main order of business was to push through Congress a program of tax reductions overwhelmingly skewed to favor the very rich. The policies he pursued through executive action, such as weakening env ironmental protection and cutting off funds for international family-pla nning efforts, were mostly unpopular outside what became known (in Engli sh, not Arabic) as the base, which is to say the conservative movement and, especially, its evangelical component. The Presidents enthusiasti c embrace of that movement was such that, four months into the Administr ation, the defection of a moderate senator from Vermont, Jim Jeffords, c ost his party control of the Senate. And, four months after that, the Pr esidents political fortunes appeared to be coasting into a gentle but i nexorable decline. September 11, 2001, brought with it one positive gift: a surge of solidar ity, global and nationalsolidarity with and solidarity within the Unite d States. This extraordinary outpouring provided Bush with a second oppo rtunity to create something like a government of national unity. Again, he brushed the opportunity aside, choosing to use the political capital handed to him by Osama bin Laden to push through more elements of his un mandated domestic program. A year after 9/11, in the midterm elections, he increased his majority in the House and recaptured control of the Sen ate by portraying selected Democrats as friends of terrorism. Is it any wonder that the anger felt by many Democrats is even greater than can be explained by the profound differences in outlook between the two candid ates and their parties? The Bush Administration has had success in carrying out its policies and implementing its intentions, aided by majoritiespolitical and, apparent ly, ideologicalin both Houses of Congress. Substantively, however, its record has been one of failure, arrogance, andstrikingly for a team tha t prided itself on crisp professionalismincompetence. In January, 2001, just after Bushs inauguration, the nonpartisan Congres sional Budget Office published its budget outlook for the coming decade. It showed a cumulative surplus of more than five trillion dollars. At t he time, there was a lot of talk about what to do with the anticipated b ounty, a discussion that now seems antique. Last years federal deficit was three hundred and seventy-five billion dollars; Even this seven-trillion-dollar turnaround underestimates the looming fis cal disaster. In doing its calculations, the CBO assumed that most of the Bush tax cuts would expire in 2011, as specified in the legislation that enacted them. However, nobody in Washington expects them to go awa y on schedule; they were designated as temporary only to make their ulti mate results look less scary. What has the country received in return for mortgaging its future? The Pr esident says that his tax cuts lifted the economy before and after 9/11, thereby moderating the downturn that began with the Nasdaqs collapse i n April, 2000. Its true that even badly designed tax cuts can give the economy a momentary jolt. Most of the tax cuts went to low- and middle-income Americans, Bush said dur ing his final debate with Senator John Kerry. This is falsea lie, actua llythough at least it suggests some dim awareness that the reverse Robi n Hood approach to tax cuts is politically and morally repugnant. But fo r tax cuts to stimulate economic activity quickly and efficiently they s hould go to people who will spend the extra money. Largely at the insist ence of Democrats and moderate Republicans, the Bush cuts gave middle-cl ass families some relief in the form of refunds, bigger child credits, a nd a smaller marriage penalty. Citizens for Tax Justice, a Washington research group whose findings have proved highly dependable, notes that, this year, a typical person in the lowest fifth of the income distribution will get a tax cut of nin ety-one dollars, a typical person in the middle fifth will pocket eight hundred and sixty-three dollars, and a typical person in the top one per cent will collect a windfall of fifty-nine thousand two hundred and nin ety-two dollars. These disparities help explain the familiar charge that Bush will likely be the first chief executive since Hoover to preside over a net loss of American jobs. This Administrations most unshakable commitment has been to shifting the burden of taxation away from the sort of income that re wards wealth and onto the sort that rewards work. The Institute on Taxat ion and Economic Policy, another Washington research group, estimates th at the average federal tax rate on income generated from corporate divid ends and capital gains is now about ten per cent. The President promises, in a second te rm, to expand tax-free savings accounts, cut taxes further on dividends and capital gains, and permanently abolish the estate taxall of which w ill widen the widening gap between the richest and the rest. Bush signalled his approach toward the environment a few weeks into his t erm, when he reneged on a campaign pledge to regulate carbon-dioxide emi ssions, the primary cause of global warming. His record since then has b een dictated, sometimes literally, by the industries affected. In 2002, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed rescinding a key provision o... |
| www.amconmag.com/2004_11_08/cover1.html November 8, 2004 issue Unfortunately, this election does not offer traditional conservatives an easy or natural choice and has left our editors as split as our readersh ip. In an effort to deepen our readers and our own understanding of the options before us, weve asked several of our editors and contributors to make the conservative case for their favored candidate. Their piece s, plus Takis column closing out this issue, constitute TACs endorseme nt. The Real Deal Kerrys the One By Scott McConnell There is little in John Kerrys persona or platform that appeals to conse rvatives. The flip-flopper chargethe centerpiece of the Republican camp aign against Kerryseems overdone, as Kerrys contrasting votes are the sort of baggage any senator of long service is likely to pick up. In m y view, he will always deserve censure for his vote in favor of the Iraq War in 2002. If he were to win, his dearth of charisma would likely ensure him a single term. He would face challen ges from within his own party and a thwarting of his most expensive init iatives by a Republican Congress. Much of his presidency would be absorb ed by trying to clean up the mess left to him in Iraq. He would be const rained by the swollen deficits and a ripe target for the next Republican nominee. It is, instead, an election about the presidency of George W Bush. To th e surprise of virtually everyone, Bush has turned into an important pres ident, and in many ways the most radical America has had since the 19th century. Because he is the leader of Americas conservative party, he ha s become the Lefts perfect foilits dream candidate. The libertarian wr iter Lew Rockwell has mischievously noted parallels between Bush and Rus sias last tsar, Nicholas II: both gained office as a result of family c onnections, both initiated an unnecessary war that shattered their count ries budgets. Lenin needed the calamitous reign of Nicholas II to creat e an opening for the Bolsheviks. Bush has behaved like a caricature of what a right-wing president is supp osed to be, and his continuation in office will discredit any sort of co nservatism for generations. Add to this his nation-breaking immigration proposalBush has laid out a mad scheme to import immigrants to fill any job where the wa ge is so low that an American cant be found to do itand you have a pre sidency that combines imperialist Right and open-borders Left in a uniqu ely noxious cocktail. During the campaign, few have paid attention to how much the Bush preside ncy has degraded the image of the United States in the world. After the Second World War man y European intellectuals argued for a Third Way between American-style capitalism and Soviet communism, and a generation later Europes radica ls embraced every ragged anti-imperialist cause that came along. In So uth America, defiance of the Yanqui always draws a crowd. But Bush has somehow managed to take all these sentiments and turbo-charge them. In Europe and indeed all over the world, he has made the United States desp ised by people who used to be its friends, by businessmen and the middle classes, by moderate and sensible liberals. Never before have democrati c foreign governments needed to demonstrate disdain for Washington to th eir own electorates in order to survive in office. In countries like Norway, Germany, France, and Spain, Bush is liked by about seven percent of the populace. In Egypt, recipient of hug e piles of American aid in the past two decades, some 98 percent have an unfavorable view of the United States. Bush has accomplished this by giving the US a novel foreign-policy doct rine under which it arrogates to itself the right to invade any country it wants if it feels threatened. It is an American version of the Brezhn ev Doctrine, but the latter was at least confined to Eastern Europe. If the analogy seems extreme, what is an appropriate comparison when a coun try manufactures falsehoods about a foreign government, disseminates the m widely, and invades the country on the basis of those falsehoods? It i s not an action that any American president has ever taken before. It is the main reason that peop le all over the world who used to consider the United States a reliable and necessary bulwark of world stability now see us as a menace to their own peace and security. These sentiments mean that as long as Bush is president, we have no real allies in the world, no friends to help us dig out from the Iraq quagmir e More tragically, they mean that if terrorists succeed in striking at the United States in another 9/11-type attack, many in the world will no t only think of the American victims but also of the thousands and thous ands of Iraqi civilians killed and maimed by American armed forces. The hatred Bush has generated has helped immeasurably those trying to recrui t anti-American terroristsindeed his policies are the gift to terrorism that keeps on giving, as the sons and brothers of slain Iraqis think ho w they may eventually take their own revenge. Only the seriously deluded could fail to see that a policy so central to Americas survival as a f ree country as getting hold of loose nuclear materials and controlling n uclear proliferation requires the willingness of foreign countries to pr ovide full, 100 percent co-operation. Making yourself into the worlds m ost hated country is not an obvious way to secure that help. Ive heard people who have known George W Bush for decades and served pr ominently in his fathers administration say that he could not possibly have conceived of the doctrine of pre-emptive war by himself, that he wa s essentially taken for a ride by people with a pre-existing agenda to o verturn Saddam Hussein. Bushs public performances plainly show him to b e a man who has never read or thought much about foreign policy. So the inevitable questions are: who makes the key foreign-policy decisions in the Bush presidency, who controls the information flow to the president, how are various options are presented? The record, from published administration memoirs and in-depth reporting, is one of an administration with a very small group of six or eight rea l decision-makers, who were set on war from the beginning and who took g reat pains to shut out arguments from professionals in the CIA and State Department and the US armed forces that contradicted their rosy scena rios about easy victory. Much has been written about the neoconservative hand guiding the Bush presidencyand it is peculiar that one who was fi red from the National Security Council in the Reagan administration for suspicion of passing classified material to the Israeli embassy and anot her who has written position papers for an Israeli Likud Party leader ha ve become key players in the making of American foreign policy. But neoconservatism now encompasses much more than Israel-obsessed intell ectuals and policy insiders. The Bush foreign policy also surfs on deep currents within the Christian Right, some of which see unqualified suppo rt of Israel as part of a godly plan to bring about Armageddon and the f uture kingdom of Christ. These two strands of Jewish and Christian extre mism build on one another in the Bush presidencyand President Bush has given not the slightest indication he would restrain either in a second term. With Colin Powells departure from the State Department looming, B ush is more than ever the neoconian candidate. The only way Americans will have a presidency in which neoconservatives and the Christian Armag eddon set are not holding the reins of power is if Kerry is elected. If Kerry wins, this magazine will be in opposition from Inauguration Day forward. But the most important battles will take place within the Repub lican Party and the conservative movement. A Bush defeat will ignite a h uge soul-searching within the rank-and-file of Republicandom: a quest to find out how and where the Bush presidency went wrong. And it is then t hat more traditional conservatives will have an audience to argue for a conservatism informed by the lessons of history, based in prudence and a sense of continuity with the American pastand to make that case withou t a powerfu... |