New American Dark Ages
News-Leader.com | True Ozarks | Bush: Economy stronger By Deb Riechmann
President Bush told Missouri voters Monday that new unemployment figures suggest “the economy is strong and getting stronger” ….
[U]nless 900,000 jobs are created in the next two months, Bush will be the first president since Herbert Hoover to lose jobs under his watch.
ECRI – Economic Cycle Research Institute
DodgeGlobe.com:Chalt: Cement sack, yes, but with concrete ideas By Jonathan Chalt
If [Kerry] can’t run a campaign, the argument goes, he would never have been able to run the White House.
That sounds reasonable enough unless you consider the fact that George W. Bush is a highly competent campaigner but a flaming disaster of a president. And it is exactly those things that make him so ruthlessly effective on the stump – centralized authority, party discipline, total disregard for the truth – that have created a hermetically sealed petri dish in which bad policies come to life and are carried out unchallenged. …
[A] president who struggles to enact decent policies is surely better than one who easily enacts awful policies.
War is peace SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER EDITORIAL BOARD
As U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said prior to Bush’s address, “Those who seek to bestow legitimacy must themselves embody it, and those who invoke international law must themselves submit to it.”
Despite Bush’s invasion of Iraq in what Annan now calls an illegal war, the president said yesterday that U.N. members must “do more” to help in Iraq.
“Each of us alone can only do so much,” Bush said. “Together we can accomplish so much more.”
For a president who waged pre-emptive war in Iraq in defiance of the United Nations, citing now disproved weapons threats and now discredited terrorist connections, it seems a lesson learned too late.
Why women are edging toward Bush By Linda Feldmann, Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
A growing group of ‘security moms’ puts national safety at the top of their list, weakening a traditionally Democratic base. …
[D]ata show the traditional breakdown between men and women. The latest American Research Group poll shows Bush beating Kerry 51 percent to 42 percent among men, while Kerry beats Bush 50 percent to 42 percent among women.
But no Democrats are resting easy, as long as some polls show Kerry with trouble retaining women’s votes. They know that in a race that remains close, they must turn out their base voters – and that there’s little margin for error. According to Lake, 66 percent of undecideds are women.
CAPTURE THE FLAG By Alexander Zaitchik
Can the GOP protect the national-security lie until November?
[T]he administration’s response to 9/11 has been “a catastrophe.”
If you think “catastrophe” is an overstatement, ask yourself a few questions: If Osama bin Laden were guiding the U.S. defense and homeland security budgets, how would he spend the money? Would he triple funds for the Nunn-Lugar Initiative, which seeks to put a firm clamp on loose nuclear materials in the ex-U.S.S.R., or would he pour billions into Cold War crap shoots like missile defense and spaced-based lasers? Would bin Laden have pumped steroids into our anemic human intelligence capability, or would he have pulled Arabic-speaking case officers out of Afghanistan in 2002, then overstretched the U.S. military by launching and escalating a hopeless counterinsurgency war and p.r. shitstorm in oil-rich Iraq? Would he have supported a vigorous investigation into how 9/11 happened and how it could have been stopped, or would he have stonewalled the project, then cut its funding at first chance?
If voters were forced to smell the Bush record up close, we’d be looking down the barrel of a 1964-style Kerry trounce in November, followed by several high-level prosecutions and a steep, generational decline in the fortunes of the Republican Party.
The latest in an uninterrupted stream of post-9/11 examples of backward GOP priorities came last week, when the Republican Senate blocked attempts to increase funding for more than a dozen programs in the 2005 Homeland Security spending bill.
Richard Perle, a top Iraq advisor in 2002 and 2003 – when he headed the Defense Advisory Board (Secretary Rumsfeld’s top advisory committee) – made this prediction one year ago today:
The problems in Iraq are ahead of us, but we’re doing better than people think. And a year from now, I’ll be very surprised if there is not some grand square in Baghdad that is named after President Bush. There is no doubt that, with the exception of a very small number of people close to a vicious regime, the people of Iraq have been liberated and they understand that they’ve been liberated. And it is getting easier every day for Iraqis to express that sense of liberation. Thanks.
[Applause.]