Re: Will Obama win Iowa ?


"Rumpelstiltskin" <PleaseDoNotReplyByEmail@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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On Fri, 4 Jan 2008 14:23:32 -0600, "John Galt"
<whoisjohngalt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


"Rumpelstiltskin" <PleaseDoNotReplyByEmail@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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On Fri, 4 Jan 2008 07:23:11 -0600, "John Galt"
<whoisjohngalt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


"Rumpelstiltskin" <PleaseDoNotReplyByEmail@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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On Fri, 04 Jan 2008 06:52:05 -0500, Gary <none@xxxxxxx> wrote:

On Fri, 04 Jan 2008 01:07:28 GMT, Rumpelstiltskin
<PleaseDoNotReplyByEmail@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Thu, 03 Jan 2008 15:45:02 -0500, Gary <none@xxxxxxx> wrote:

<snip>


I wish Edwards would invite Colin Powell to run as his VP. I bet
that
would cause some Republican stuff to hit the fans. And it would be
a
winner.


I don't think it would be a winner. Colin Powell is
dead meat now, after his performance at the UN in
support of the Iraq war. He'll never live that down.

It depends on how he presents it. If he claims he was right -- then
he is dead meat. If he claims that Bush lied to him -- and caused him
to lie to the American people -- he could win the election and
salvage his tattered reputation along with it. All he needs do is
put Bush on trial. That's where that mop headed goof from
Massachusetts screwed up in 2004. He to tried present himself as a
slightly more moral version of Bush. THAT the American people didn't
need.


I could be wrong, but I think he's dead meat forever, no
matter what he does now. Bush lied to all congress, and
they all went along with him when he told them he had
secret information, but Colin Powell took an active role.
That's a whole nother level of being a sucker, and there's
a limit to how much of a sucker somebody can be and
still be presidential material, I'd say. I could be wrong
though. After all, nearly half the country got hopelessly
suckered by GWBush - twice.

I like one thing I happened to catch Obama saying,
that he intended to win by such a big margin that nobody
would be able to steal the election from him. That is
pretty much what's required now.

Kerry's problem was that he wasn't a complete rat,
and he didn't have enough experience dealing with
complete rats within the United States. I think everybody
who's running against the Republicans this time has a
better idea by now of who they're going to be dealing
with, and are going to be on the alert against
approaching swiftboats.

The GOP blogs are saying the same thing. If you look at the DNC page,
they're painting Huckabee as "more of Bush", even though just last week
Huckabee was on the GOP hot seat for distancing himself from Bush on
policy
matters.

Please don't be so naive as to think that one party plays more "fair"
than
the other.




The swiftboating was in a class of dirty tricks all by itself, I'd
say. Not even "Tricky ***" came up with anything like that.

Richard Daley exeeded that bar in the 1960 election, but that's besides
the
point -- the point is that politics is a full body contact sport played
without a helmet.


That was kind of before my time, I was only 15 in 1960.
If you mean the former mayor of Chicago as I expect you
do though, he was a crook and yes I know he was a
Democrat. I was speaking of Presidential races though,
and though he did swindle Chicago for Kennedy, he had
his own empire and wasn't exclusively tied to Kennedy's
election as are the Bush team people of whom I was
speaking.

Granted, but I was using the incident to make the point that dirty tricks
are not the purvey of a single party.>>>



Kerry, I'd say, just couldn't believe
any strategy team behind a presidential candidate could
be so completely dishonest as the Swiftboat affair and get
away with it. That was his big mistake. They could, and
did, get away with it.

We have different perspectives.


Did you catch the episode of "Nightline" in which
six or seven of the guys spoke who were actually with
Kerry in the incident the Swiftboaters were focussing
on? They all said that they might have been dead
if it weren't for Kerry's actions. These were not guys
thousands of miles away, these were the guys who
were actually getting shot at along with Kerry.

There were also six or seven guys who served with Kerry who were with of
the
Swifties. Deuce.


No, they weren't at the scene. They may have served
with him elsewhere or just met him once, but they weren't
in the swift boats getting shot at. All the guys on the
nightline segment WERE in the swift boats with him.

Not deuce, just another piece of the swift boat lying.

Others differ on this reality. Besides, the Swifties had more than just one
issue, IIRC.




That said, I'll agree that Kerry came across as a
popinjay when he was running for president, but
that's not a crime, and it doesn't justify an organized
scheme of lies about his actions in Vietnam.

Do you really think the Swifties think they have been lying, all those
years?

Yes. They weren't lying about hating him, and they
weren't lying that they felt he didn't deserve his medals,
but they were lying about his actions where they weren't
present.

Your choice.


I don't. I have no idea to what extent what they contend is true,
but I have no doubt that Kerry pissed some people off MAJOR LEAGUE back
then
by some sort of behavior, to the extent that they've never forgotten it.


Yes, of course, we all know why. He came back from
Vietnam convinced that the war was unjust, said so
publicly, and testified to that effect. That made a lot of
people who supported the Vietnam War hate him.
There's no mystery about that.





IMO, the Swiftie issue getting pumped up by the RNC was blowback for the
Dems making Bush's service record a big deal (which in turn was blowback
for
the RNC making Clinton's lack of service record a big deal) and *really*
got
going when Kerry stuck his foot in his mouth by saluting and saying
"Reporting for duty" when accepting the nomination.


The difference is of course that Kerry served and Bush
managed to avoid combat, partly by getting transferred to
a "country club", at which his commanding officer there
didn't even recall ever having laid eyes on him, he never
even bothered to show up, apparently.

The difference is noted, and the behavior is not admirable, but is not all
that unusual, and similar behavior by Clinton was ignored by the same
people
castigating Bush for it. I personally think it's something you chalk up to
the idiocy of youth. Once you realize that the MPs aren't going to come
for
you and toss you in the stockade, kids will take advantage.

All true, but none of it pertinent to the hypocrisy of a
team supporting a dodging president that is throwing mud
at a decorated battlefront veteran. That's "disgraceful".







Hell, I was thinking of
voting for him until that moment, even though I agreed with Maureen
Dowd's
assessment that Kerry's real problem was that "every time he starts a
sentence, you don't care if he ever finishes it or not." (She tossed
that
one out on Imus one morning -- I nearly spit coffee all over my
keyboard.)


I must admit, she had a point!

So true.

As it stood, I sat out the election for lack of a decent candidate.

Ultimately, however, Kerry's big mistake was not releasing all of his
service records. One can talk about whether the Swifties were right, or
fair, or liars, until you're blue in the face,


Oh, they were liars. See above, about the Nightline show.


but the fact remains that
they (1) had been after Kerry since the day he entered politics, so the
DNC
couldn't raise the "where was all this for the last 25 years" objection,
and

Yes, they were mostly arch-right-wingers who were upset
with Kerry for his outspoken opposition to the war after he
came back from Nam. It was the Bush people who
financed them and gave them more attention than they
deserved, though.

That's politics as usual. Nothing a political party likes more than to
find
someone to fight a proxy war for them.

No, that's politics at an unusually low and despicable
level, even for politics.

It's reality, and why I mentioned Daley. What is more despicable than
stealing an entire election? How can you set the bar lower?



(2) the RNC pounced on the fact that for some reason, Kerry didn't want
to
make his service records public. Thus, the public had no choice but to
assume that he was hiding something, and therefore, *something* the
Swifties
were saying was true.

They should have watched the Nightline episode.
I never had any doubt that the swiftboaters were lying,
even before that episode. Their political views, and
therefore their motives, were obvious.

Kerry should have been better served by his
advisors, perhaps.

Possibly so, but the only way to refute was to release the service records
AND start talking about the matter publically. He didn't do the former,
and
if he had done the latter, the issue raised by Maureen Dowd would come
back
into play. You just couldn't listen to the guy for an entire paragraph.
(Remember, this was a presidential election between two C students from
Yale
who both got admitted on legacy grounds. Neither one is the brightest bulb
in the universe.)

I don't know much about these service records, but
Kerry's commanding officers supported him and did say
he deserved his medals, with one exception if I recall
aright. I agree it would have been wise for Kerry to
release the records, but I also feel he maybe didn't want
to give ammunition to a bunch of thugs who might use
it in unexpected ways against him. That's why most
people don't open up their affairs to the public even if
they have nothing in truth to hide.

His call, his funeral, as it turned out.





Kerry and Gore would have been,
and the current Democrats should be, well advised to
take a lesson from that experience, and heed what P.T.
Barnum said, , that "nobody ever lost money by
underestimating the intelligence of the American people."

You might argue that Kerry's being so suckered shows
a naiveté not advisable in a president, but the Bush team's
own sleaziness didn't protect them against being played
for suckers themselves, to the tune of billions and trillions
of dollars and thousands of lives and hundreds of
thousands of diminished quality of lives a senseless war,
by Chalibi.

BINGO. (However, Chalabi wouldn't have succeeded if there weren't people
in
the government who already wanted to go into Iraq; Chalabi just fed them
ammunition.)


Yes, but Congress depended on the integrity of the
administration, with the idea that the administration
knew some stuff it couldn't reveal for security reasons.
Big mistake, the administration was lying, and was
even releasing known lies to gain support. Let's hope
congress is never so foolish as to trust the presidency
again in questionable situations.

I think there were a lot more in Congress willing to play along than you
realize, and from both parties.


Yes, because they took the president at his word, and also
believed what he or his team said about the vote, that it was
to strengthen the president's hand in negotiations, and that
war would only be the last resort. Bad mistake to hand over
such power to a bad president. Bush effectively suspended
all negotiations once he had the power, cut off Hans Blix who
had already shown that the intelligence from America was
systematically wrong, and launched into preparation for war
without further ado.

"There's no good business with a bad man." Bush is a
bad man.

Every president is the Worst President Ever. Currently , we are in the
process of electing the next Worst President Ever. I'm used to it. The
desire to go into politics is genetically linked, it seems, with an
inability to do the job properly.

JG


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