Originally posted by milefile
So how do you feel about Bush now? A simple yay or nay please. Of course we all want to read your comments but please take the time to vote.
Very simple (or, not so simple):
What can he do? France is win-win here - they don't need to send troops in at all, and if they do, it will be only after getting what they want. And at the end of the day, France looks good no matter what happens. No?
President Bush is exactly the opposite. The death toll is enormous. He's made two mistakes - declaring war over on 1 May, and not having any sort of a plan for post-war Iraq. I think it's obvious he had no plan, now, but I think his reasoning was that he thought the was would take much longer - five to six months, whereas it really took just 40 days. Either way, before attacking a country, you should have a plan for every possible situation - now the case is daily troop attacks. We can do nothing to stop them; we're completely powerless.
He declared combat over on 1 May. Since then, there have been more US troop deaths in Iraq than fighting the war. That alone makes me vote nay - why the hell would he say combat is over when it so obviously isn't? It just shows the fact that the man (or, to his credit, his advisers) had no concept of what post-war Iraq was going to be like. Where's the plan!?
It is interesting, though - what the hell is President Kerry going to do differently than President Bush? He can't pull troops out at the risk of major terror attacks and he can't keep them in Iraq in good conscience because of his campaign statements. The only thing he truly can do - and it's what he'll say when asked by the press - is get "unilateral support." Very vague - and they keep it that way. If any candidate ever silps up and says, "I've got a plan," the press will start asking what it is - soon headlines will read "Kerry has secret plan." Then he'll have to devise something! As I say if he keeps it vague, and people will think he knows what he's talking about.
Re the economy - it's all cyclical. Clinton inherited the country at the beginning of a wonderful business boom thanks to the beginning of the dot-com world. It was cooling off as he was getting out of office - it always does cool off after a huge boom, because then people start realising the true situation (Amazon wasn't as profitable as everybody thought, there's lots of credit card debt, etc.). President Bush has little to do with the downturn - he got elected after the '01 budget was signed and sealed, meaning he didn't make any budgetary decisions until fiscal-year '02, whose budget would've been post-September 11. If we want a good economy, again, we need another dot-com-like phenomenon. Even if you elect a Democrat, they're still faced with the same issues (see above) and I don't see how they're going to do a damn to help. Even if they do the same job as Bush, they're pushing universal healthcare, the entire concept of which scares the hell out of me.
See? Simple.
Is Howard Dean a socialist meglomaniac or what?
"Or what." Dean's a good candidate, but second to Kerry. Too early to speculate on anything else, except that Gephardt, Edwards, and Lieberman shouldn't be wasting their money.
Does Clark's candidacy matter? Does he make you think twice about the Democratic party?
Wesley Clark is only making a big stink about presidency because when a Democrat is elected he wants a prominent staff position - think Secretary of Defence or Secretary of State. He doesn't truly want to be president.
Will Bush get re-elected?
The American people like a president who will give them hope - we loved Kennedy, we liked Reagan, and Clinton was
from Hope. President Bush no longer gives us hope, and he will only be re-elected if there's another major terrorist attack on the United States. The economy is in a position for the Democrats to attack (though don't ask them what they'd do differently, because they really don't know) and the Iraq was has been horribly mis-handled by the entire administration. Summing up, barring a 9/11-sized terrorist attack (and a huge, unforseen, basically impossible recovery), the answer is
no.
