'middle class tax-cut bills'...,
2004-10-04 14:13:28
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First New York Press Quadrenni...,
2004-10-06 21:00:26
first time they've met:
and what a cute first date. I found it surprising how well the two talked completely past eachother's attacks, almost as if they had cotton in their ears, and got straight to their pre-scripted talking points.
They repeated eachother, virtually line for line, on Israel. This was a real Darth Vader/Luke Skywalker moment, when Luke holds his dying father in his arms and they find their mutual inhumanity in some grotesque Force that makes them the incoherent predestinators of all sentient life in the galazy. It was like a confrontation between Likud and APAIC spokepersons. That was pretty awesome. Let me be clear Chuck: this is no way to address the grievances that provide the foundation and support for Islamic anti-American terrorism.
Cheney kept dumping the "$25,000 to the families of suicide bombers" line, Edwards had no reply. It would be something if anybody ever pointed out on American television that Israel destroys all property those families have as part of a program of collective retribution for poor parenting. Saddam "had an established relationship with Al Qaida": that is, they had established a relationship of mutual destruction, so hence "this was the most likely nexus between the terrorists and weapons of mass destruction". This apparently means that the most likely nexus between terror and nuclear weapons was a country that had niether.
Dick Cheney lays awake at night thinking about what might happen if Musharraf is overthrown in a Pakistani Islamist coup. This he won't tell the American people. Khan, he knows, has never been brought to justice and Pakistan, he knows, remains the "most likely nexus". Maybe he bats an eye at the thought of Iran developing nuclear weapons: this he has demonstrated by recently batting an eye at the thought. I don't think he ever seriously entertained as remotely feasible the likelihood that Saddam might hand nuclear weapons Saddam didn't have to terrorists allies Saddam didn't have.
Bravo to the man who managed to squeeze the myriad problems facing the second largest continent in the world - the population of which is virtually facing extinction and a problem which in no small way dwarfs most other humanitarian concerns abroad - into three small words: "great moral crisis". That's that. Could have directed at the heart of Bush's Africa policy, what with the condoms are ineffective business, but didn't even try. Three words is all it takes to address that policy failure, the external threat that has no bearing on this administration but is a quandry for all others who themselves have no policy. Pretty awesome. Could we have set priorities any straighter?
Back to the war on terror: why the fuck can't the Kerry campaign make any mention of BCCI? Or any of Kerry's works against the systematic abuse of state power? Ya'd think that stuff would be a cornerstone in this campaign - solid populist, TR-esque credentials in fighting corruption. Never comes up with them. Is breaking up a center of terrorist financial networks in opposition to the leadership of both parties really that hard to explain? Electoral campaigns are no time to fight the Reagan hagiography, I guess. That's why this shit from Cheney about 'terrorists' preventing the Salvadorian elections (clue: he didn't mean the nazi fuckers he supported who were slaughtering anyone who attempted to make elections in El Salvador free and fair). Kick me in the skull, please.
Then there's Zarqawi: I heard nothing from Edwards respecting DoD plans to take out Zarqawi's operation prior to the invasion, which Bush/Cheney rejected. Much of Cheney's hyperludicrousatiousness likely would have been undercut by facing him with this particular failure to act with resolve because of their resolve to undertake a costly and unnecessary invasion of the entire goddam country. That's pretty weak.
I don't know, really, which lizard won. I know one lizard was more full of hamster shit than the other, and looked like he had a bad case of indigestion. The other lizard may have won clearly on more domestic issues, like how to properly squeeze the shit out of hamsters before you eat them, but all I'm really sure of is that the humans still lose.
