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Banned
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Originally Posted by ^Ice_Bat^
Ok so you'd rather have someone who has absolutely NO idea of what he's doing and needs Clinton's team to tell him what to do instead of a guy who at least has a plan, an idea of how to run a country, and results which show that he can make the critical decisions in times of crisis? We have one of the strongest GDP growths in a long time. Looks to me like you've been listening to one too many Michael Moore documentaries. 
I also love how with such hatred toward Americans that thrive in countries like Iraq (which existed BEFORE this war even started), we want to pull out of the country. With each behedding, some people blame Bush, blame America, or blame our troops in combat. One look at the Berg behedding, or any other behedding can tell you why we need to take a stand and stop cowaring in the face of this scum of the earth. Oh... and need I mention God is used to justify these beheddings when obviously it's something that's immoral? On second thought... maybe we do need a "kinder, gentler war on terror".  |
Kerry has realized, belatedly, just who he is running against, and it ain't Bush!
^Ice_Bat^, who would you utilize, if you hoped to sucessfully counter Rove,
if you ruled out the team of political strategists who have a recent resume
of achieving results in a presidential race against an incumbent Republican
president? I would criticize Kerry if he didn't enlist Carville et al in his fight
against Bush! A sign that you are a victim of Rovian strategy is that you
apparently believe that Bush, (the guy who demonstrated by his performances in the 2004 debates #1 and #2 that he is clearly not only unqualified and inadequate, intellectually and emotionally to be president of the U.S., let alone have a "plan" that he, and not Rove, conceptualized, crafted, and conveyed to the American people, who can not even pass himself off as a mature, 58 year old adult American male,) is capable of being
the leader of the free world with a better plan than Kerry's for our future?
Are you serious?
Quote:
Posted on Sun, Oct. 10, 2004
Karl Rove's world
By Wayne Slater
The Bush-Cheney campaign and the Republican National Committee are populated by skilled operatives who occupy time on cable television. They are the face of the campaign, but insiders know who's really in charge.
That man is Karl Rove. As George W. Bush seeks re-election in a squeaker of a presidential race, Rove is the architect in every sense. The man who recruited Bush to run for governor. The man who directed his election as president in 2000. And now, the man the president is relying on to win a second term in the White House.
For non-believers, there is perhaps no better evidence of Rove's influence than this: By January 2002, the central theme of this year's presidential campaign had already been established. By Rove.
At a luncheon for GOP leaders in a hotel ballroom in Austin, the memory of Sept. 11 still fresh in everyone's minds, Rove took the stage and announced that the party could run to victory on the war against terror.
``We can go to the country on this issue because they trust the Republican Party to do a better job protecting and strengthening America's military might and thereby protecting America,'' he said. ``Americans trust the Republicans to do a better job of keeping our communities and our families safe.''
Eleven days later, in his State of Union address, President Bush warned Iraq and the other members of the ``axis of evil'' that ``our war on terror is only beginning.''
Does that mean that Rove told the president to go to war in Iraq? No. But it does mean that whenever the president decided to oust Saddam Hussein, Rove was there -- as he always is -- advising the president on the political implications of his policy.
In the war on terror -- which the administration says includes the war in Iraq -- Rove saw a political upside. So far, he has been right.
Despite the lackluster economy and the troubles in Iraq, which would have doomed many incumbents, polls indicate a close race, with Bush maintaining a tangible lead over Sen. John Kerry when voters are asked who would do better handling terrorism and homeland security.
``Karl is like a chess master,'' said Texas political consultant Ken Luce. ``He's so strategic, always six steps ahead of everything. His mind works at a different level.''
His critics see something more than political genius. They describe a darkly effective political opportunist with a history of dirty tricks and questionable tactics.
They see in the recent campaign waged by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth parallels to Rove campaigns of the past in which the pattern is always the same: astonishingly effective whisper campaigns or devastating attacks from surrogate groups targeting Rove's opponent, but never evidence that Rove was involved.
Political operatives in Texas who have watched him close up for years call it ``The Mark of Rove.'' Attack, and leave no fingerprints.
Rove is White House senior political adviser, but his portfolio is much broader. In a place where workaholics thrive, friends say Rove works harder than anyone, is smarter than anyone and immerses himself in every detail of politics and policy.
Political insiders, including some inside the White House, are quick to see Rove's hand in myriad decisions about both policy and politics. The list includes siding with farmers over the salmon in Oregon and imposing steel tariffs -- anathema to Bush free traders -- to woo union workers in politically important West Virginia and Pennsylvania. It also includes the bigger, and decidedly chancier, decision to market Bush as a ``war president.''
Early days
To understand how he has amassed such influence and why the president holds him in such confidence is to understand this: Rove knew Bush would be president before he did.
In the spring of 1990, while working on some political races in Texas, Rove told fellow consultant Luce about a candidate who was not a candidate at all: George W. Bush, a man who had never held public office and was managing general partner of the Texas Rangers baseball team.
Rove had met Bush some years earlier while working for Bush's father. As a College Republican, Rove and fellow collegian Lee Atwater had gotten into trouble for conducting seminars on campaign dirty tricks. Rove could lecture about dirty tricks, because he'd already pulled some, like the time he stole stationery from an opponent and faked fliers -- ``Free beer, free food, girls'' -- to get homeless people to show up and disrupt the opening of the rival's campaign office.
The elder Bush, who was chairman of the Republican National Committee, investigated, but concluded the matter did not merit further action. Shortly thereafter, he hired Rove as his special assistant.
Rove's job in those days included giving the car keys to the son, then a student at Harvard, whenever he visited Washington on weekends.
In George W. Bush, Rove saw everything he was not: handsome, easygoing, the son of a political family with the burnished look of those frat boys who sail the gilded edges of Republican politics. In Rove, Bush saw his complement: driven, wonkish, a brilliant strategist with a penchant for smash-mouth politics.
Luce remembers how Rove sat at a table in the Austin headquarters of a political candidate in 1990 and, adjusting his glasses, set out a detailed plan to make Bush governor of Texas, then president of the United States. And in the decade that followed, he did exactly that.
Typically, political consultants seek out and exploit an opponent's weakness; Rove took a different route.
``Look,'' he told a reporter in a revealing moment a decade ago, ``I don't attack people on their weaknesses. That usually doesn't get the job done. Voters already perceive weakness.
``You've got to go after the other guy's strengths. That's how you win.''
Texas governor's race
In 1994, when Bush ran for governor, incumbent Ann Richards' strength was her inclusiveness and diversity. Richards had increased the number of women in her administration and appointed minorities in unprecedented numbers. She also appointed many gay people.
A whisper campaign emerged in east Texas, a socially conservative, solidly Democrat region. Reporters visiting the area were struck by the scope and virulence of the rumors -- that Richards surrounded herself with gays and, by implication, might be a lesbian herself.
Shortly before the election, the Bush campaign's east Texas chairman publicly questioned Richards for naming ``avowed and activist homosexuals'' to positions of authority.
Bush and Rove denied any involvement, but the technique -- an attack either anonymously or through political surrogates targeting an opponent's strength -- became a pattern.
Four years ago, Bush faced a serious challenge in the Republican primary from Sen. John McCain. McCain's valorous service as a prisoner of war in Vietnam was his strength. In South Carolina, a group of veterans questioned whether McCain had the temperament to be president -- code for whether his POW experience had made him crazy.
Two years later, Democrat Sen. Max Cleland, a veteran who lost three limbs in Vietnam, was targeted by his Republican opponent in a TV ad that featured Osama bin Laden and questioned Cleland's patriotism because of his stance on a Department of Homeland Security. (Cleland actually supported such a department, but opposed Republican attempts to suspend civil service job protections in the new agency.)
The Georgia Senate race was a key one in an aggressive White House bid to boost GOP congressional strength. Cleland, who lost, blames Rove for the ad; Rove denies involvement.
This year, an independent group, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, targeted Kerry's most conspicuous credential, his military record, in TV ads that proved very effective.
A Republican apparatus had assembled itself around the organization -- early funding from Texas contributors with long ties to Rove, coordination from a Dallas public-relations executive with connections to the Bush family, legal assistance from the Bush campaign's general counsel. The Swift Boat Veterans' accusations have been largely discredited, including the accusation that Kerry did not deserve his Vietnam medals.
The Kerry campaign was quick to see a pattern, even as Rove and Team Bush denied there was one.
``This town is built on myths,'' Rove told Fox News. ``And I've become a convenient myth.''
While there is no smoking gun connecting Rove to the low-road tactics that are routinely employed against his opponents, those who have worked with him over the years speak in awe of his total involvement in every aspect of a campaign, from the big-picture strategy to the wording on a direct-mail appeal in Sioux County, Iowa. Nothing escapes his attention, no detail is too small.
Behind the scenes
So when, say, a Houston home-builder whom Rove recruited two decades ago to help bankroll the Republican Party in Texas turned out to be the early money behind the Swift Boat Veterans, it seemed unlikely Rove would not have known.
Rove's mission at the moment is Bush's re-election, but his dream is bigger.
A student of history, Rove is fond of talking about William McKinley, whose election in 1896 began a 30-year run of near-exclusive Republican rule in the White House, ending only with Franklin Roosevelt and another fundamental realignment.
It is a model Rove would like to duplicate in a new century. Rove already had success at the state level; over 20 years, he was instrumental in turning Democrat-dominated Texas into a state where the GOP today holds every statewide office and both Senate seats, as well as dominating the courts and the Legislature.
Now he's on the national stage. In Rove's world, there would be a period of 20 or 30 years of Republican domination of Congress and the White House and statehouses and legislatures, guided by 1,000 Karl Roves.
During the Republican National Convention, Rove was greeted as a conquering hero at a late-day reception at a midtown bar sponsored by College Republicans, the group that got him started. Students clapped and jubilantly jumped up and down.
Eric Hoplin, chairman of the College Republicans, said a generation of GOP activists on campus see Rove as a role model.
They all want to be Karl Rove. And if his most famous client wins Nov. 2, they'll all have an opportunity to join his latest revolution.
WAYNE SLATER is the co-author of ``Bush's Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential'' and is senior political writer for the Dallas Morning News. He has reported on Karl Rove for 20 years. He wrote this article for Perspective. <a href="http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/editorial/9883580.htm?1c">http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/editorial/9883580.htm?1c</a>
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If the most powerful force ever to be assembled, invaded your country,
destroying all systems that maintained order and internal security in the
process of invading, and then did nothing while looting and lawlessness then
filled the gap created in the invasion, what would your reaction be?
Beheading is a gruesome tactic. Have you also considered the devastating
effects of U.S firepower that inadvertently kills and maims noncombatant
Iraqis?
Can you justify as necessary and moral, an elective war with all
new reasons for it's instigation and continuing prosecution, now that
Bush and Cheney's original and urgent reasons have been exposed as
empty, misleading, and contrived rhetoric. Could you ever contemplate that
"your president" is a war crminal who launched a pre-emptive war without
justifiable provocation? This is a reasonable and growing argument, whether
you have it in you to consider it, or not.
Bush, himself declared that he would not want to live in a country that was under occupation. You are incapable of looking at what happened in Iraq from any other perspective than that of an unquestioning, partisan supporter of
Bush and his puppetmaster, Karl Rove. Viceroy Paul Bremer revealed last
week that allowing looting and lawlessness in Iraq immediately after the
invasion is a root cause of the current violence there. Do you believe that
the enemy kiling our troops and civilian contractors in Iraq now, are foreign
fighters, streaming across vast, impossible to guard borders? Our military
commanders counter this notion. Bush's failed and misleading "war on terror"
are the catalyst for the beheadings that pique your myopic outrage, and
the creation of a hostile, Iraqi insurgency:
Quote:
Insurgents Are Mostly Iraqis, U.S. Military Says
Tue Sep 28, 7:55 AM ET
Add to My Yahoo! Top Stories - Los Angeles Times
By Mark Mazzetti Times Staff Writer
WASHINGTON — The insistence by interim Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi and many U.S. officials that foreign fighters are streaming into Iraq (news - web sites) to battle American troops runs counter to the U.S. military's own assessment that the Iraqi insurgency remains primarily a home-grown problem.
In a U.S. visit last week, Allawi spoke of foreign insurgents "flooding" his country, and both President Bush (news - web sites) and his Democratic challenger, Massachusetts Sen. John F. Kerry (news, bio, voting record), have cited these fighters as a major security problem.
But according to top U.S. military officers in Iraq, the threat posed by foreign fighters is far less significant than American and Iraqi politicians portray. Instead, commanders said, loyalists of Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s regime — who have swelled their ranks in recent months as ordinary Iraqis bristle at the U.S. military presence in Iraq — represent the far greater threat to the country's fragile 3-month-old government.
Foreign militants such as Jordanian-born Abu Musab Zarqawi are believed responsible for carrying out videotaped beheadings, suicide car bombings and other high-profile attacks. But U.S. military officials said Iraqi officials tended to exaggerate the number of foreign fighters in Iraq to obscure the fact that large numbers of their countrymen have taken up arms against U.S. troops and the American-backed interim Iraqi government.
"They say these guys are flowing across [the border] and fomenting all this violence. We don't think so," said a senior military official in Baghdad. "What's the main threat? It's internal." .........<a href="http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&u=/latimests/20040928/ts_latimes/insurgentsaremostlyiraqisusmilitarysays">http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&u=/latimests/20040928/ts_latimes/insurgentsaremostlyiraqisusmilitarysays</a>
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