Interesting site I found

[gldstwmn]

Originally Posted by ShangriLaTroubl

I do think it would be kind of hard for the Democrats to try to impeach Bush on Iraq, when most of them voted to give him the authority to use for force..and while we all know that is much diff than what he actually did with that authority, most ppl. seem to think it's the same
Chris

The point is not to impeach but to draw the articles of impeachment.

[strandinthewind]

Originally Posted by gldstwmn

The point is not to impeach but to draw the articles of impeachment.

Explain please. If you mean do what they did to Clinton, impeach with no effect, IMO why bother. Unless it gets him out of office, which I think will never happen because the R's control the Senate, I am uninterested in it.

[SuzeQuze]

Originally Posted by strandinthewind

Well, not really. Essentially that same info was used by Clinton to send ,missles over to Iraq. That same info was used by Clinton to perpetuate the Oil for Food Program, which was as we now know a sham and illegal money making device that cost thousands of lives. So, to say that the D's were innocent of knowing of this false information is factually innacurate. They had been relying on it for years to do essentially the same thing and also to try and get SH overthrown by his own people. Then, when W changed that policy to one of we were going to overthrow SH using our military in a direct invasion, again based essentially on the same info., the majority of the D.'s went along. Thus, it is hard to have your cake and eat it too. It really just amazed me how no one wants to attribute any fault to the D's in this. I mean if Diss and anyone who read anything knew that the Iraq info was mostly bogus before the war, don't you think the D's know

Sorry for the rant - but it just bugs me when people act like the D's would never ever do anything like what W did, when the facts show they went, for the most part, hand in hand with him and had been sentencing Iraqis to death for years before W ever took power

Again and so there is no confusion, I think W is a horrible person and am sad he is in office. But, that does not change the fact that the D's are horrible as well.

Clinton isn't president and wasn't when we went into Iraq and had nothing to do with that vote. Why are you bringing him up? Not once have I said the Democrats are angels or completely without blame. You've made assumptions based on a brief post. However, am I laying most of the blame for this war with the president? Yes, because he intended to go into Iraq before 9/11 and leveraged it as a way to go in there, even though the terrorists were mostly Saudis. Are you saying the dems also intended to go into Iraq before 9/11?

Honestly, I do not know the details of the oil for food program and so cannot make a comparison. It just isn't the same thing as getting rid of an entire regime. These seem to me to be two separate situations.

[strandinthewind]

Originally Posted by SuzeQuze

Clinton isn't president and wasn't when we went into Iraq and had nothing to do with that vote. Why are you bringing him up?

Because it is impossible to consider Iraq in the contect of only what happened in the Bush Administration. Regardless of who was Pres. in the 90's - the fact of the matter is the US attacked Iraq in more than one way throughout the 90's. So, to suddenly fault W for following the natural extension of that policy after 9/11 is a little disingenuous, esp. considering most of the D's have been right there with him.

Originally Posted by SuzeQuze

Are you saying the dems also intended to go into Iraq before 9/11?

They did. The no fly zones effectively established a US presence in most of Iraq. Also, the Oil for Food program, which is estimated to have killed more than the entire current war, was also a way in which the US put its presence their to a detrimental effect

Originally Posted by SuzeQuze

Honestly, I do not know the details of the oil for food program and so cannot make a comparison. It just isn't the same thing as getting rid of an entire regime. These seem to me to be two separate situations.

Here are some of the dtails on it

http://www.globalpolicy.org/security...1/sanclook.htm

http://www.reason.com/0203/fe.mw.the.shtml

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines/072100-03.htm

http://mediamatters.org/items/200502160007

I mean I think even Diss will agree with me that the Oil For Food was the biggest non-war war there ever was. It was a horrid thing that a handful of realy rich people made a ton of money on. It also was a tool SH used to stay in power.

In the end and as I mentioned before, W must share most of the resp. for the invasion of Iraq. But, my point is the D's will never impeach him because they were right there with him and in the years before W had advocated killing Iraqi's on essentially the same info. and they gave W the power to invade and would had to have been horse's assess not to have known what W was up to.

On edit - I see little difference between starving around 500,000 children to death and sending deadly missles over based on the WMD info. and a well supported by both sides all out invasion in the sense that both kill and were based on false stuff. So, if I fault one, I have to fault the other

[dissention]

Originally Posted by ShangriLaTroubl

That was a pivitol point in the election for sure...showing that Kerry didn't even know why he voted to give him the authorization to use force.. And while I knew he was just misspeaking, and couldn't really explain these difficult Senate votes in plain words--I knew Americans wouldn't buy it, atleast not enough of them...

Which is why I can't understand everyone saying he will run again in 08, seems to me the same questions of his words will come again and be rehashed again..the swift boat idiots will come out again--seems like he would be a losing uphill battle in 08

Had Kerry never voted to let Bush use force, things wouldve been much easier..but in reality the whole thing was a lose-lose.. Had he not voted YES, he would have been called a wimp, yadayada, and had he not voted to for the funding (the first time) he would have been accused of trying to fail to support the military

Chris

Have you ever read Andrea Dworkin's piece on why she was voting for Kerry? If not, you can now because I searched high and low for it just for you, dear. It's a good read, but I liked Dworkin, anyway. I can hear Jason laughing his ass off right now at that little confession, too.

My Gamble
Given the choice between two dud candidates, Andrea Dworkin doesn't usually bother to vote. But this time, with a heavy heart, she's going for Kerry.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0...340476,00.html

I live in Washington, DC now, after nearly 30 years of living in New York City. Washington is built on swampland, literally, an origin that signals its character. It was designed to look like Paris. There are boulevards, monuments, museums, along with a dangerous, desolate, and impoverished inner city, still not rebuilt from the 1968 riots triggered by the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Citizens of Washington, DC do not have any voting representatives in Congress. There was and is no state entity as such. Washington is a district, not quite a city, sleepy and southern in its habits, not fully enfranchised. We are not so much citizens as members of a colony, like Guam or Puerto Rico.

Yet this is a swamp devoted to politics. The players in this company town live on political barter, while amassing personal fortunes for themselves. I am not a player. I experience instead an adumbrated form of democracy, articulated most eloquently by the invitation every four years to vote for a president and vice-president.

I accept the vote as a primitive expression of democracy out of respect for my suffragist foremothers. They fought so hard for women's civil and economic equality and ended up settling for the vote. I measure this up against a rape or an honour killing and I don't think it counts for much.

Anyway, I am supposed to vote for one or the other of two men who are differentiated by style, not by policies. They have more in common with each other than either has with me. They also both lie.

I'm voting for John Kerry, and I'm not happy. In 1972, during the Vietnam war, I refused to vote for anti-war candidate George McGovern, even though I had spent most of my young adult life in opposition to the war, because he was anti-abortion. I refused to vote for über-liberal, pro-civil rights, all-around good guy Hubert Humphrey because he did nothing while demonstrators were being beaten up by police in Chicago at the 1968 Democratic Convention. In 1976, while my feminist colleagues organised for Jimmy Carter, I refused to sign petitions or vote for him because he was anti-abortion. The first thing Carter did when elected was to have his health secretary end all federally funded abortions, which was the only access poor women had. (Yes, my sisters learned something. Now the legality of abortion, not access, is the feminist litmus test - too little, too late).

In 1984, I couldn't bear Geraldine Ferraro as the first woman vice-presidential candidate because her husband, John Zaccaro, owned a warehouse filled with pornography. The Washington Post reported that year that Zaccaro refused to comply with requests for full income and tax disclosures. I voted the first time (in 1992) for Bill Clinton because, on a lecture tour in Texas, I heard George HW Bush - known fondly in retrospect as 41 (George W being 43) - accuse Clinton of un-American activities, which he inferred from a trip Clinton had made to Moscow when he was at Oxford as a student. In 2000, I voted for Ralph Nader. I don't recommend myself as a model for citizenship, except to say that I have always abhorred the lesser-of-two-evils philosophy, and Al Gore let himself be dressed by Naomi Wolf.

I couldn't be bothered to vote most of the time because it was almost always a choice between the corrupt and the more corrupt. There is the primordial sludge and then the more pristine amoeba. My guy's the amoeba; the other guy's the sludge. This is a recipe for madness, otherwise known as the American president.

Of course, who could have imagined September 11, 2001, and Bush, the war president? And if one were to strike out against state sponsors of terrorism, who could imagine mistaking Iraq for Iran, even though in English they appear nearly the same? This is a George W kind of error.

Let me tell you about my amoeba, Kerry. He voted for the Iraq war. Asked if he, knowing then what he knows now (no weapons of mass destruction, no nuclear arsenal), would have voted differently, he said no. He is vaguely committed to putting more soldiers on the ground. He showed up for his political convention as a Vietnam war combatant, not as an anti-war protester, which he was, with honour. He is a multi-millionaire married to a multi-billionaire. His running mate, John Edwards, is more pro-war than he is, less ambivalent and less ambiguous. Edwards is also a multi-millionaire.

My amoeba talks about the middle-class; he has conveniently forgotten about the poor. (Edwards used to talk about poverty before he was absorbed into Kerry's attempted seduction of the middle class.)

My amoeba calls prostitution a "nuisance" instead of a crime against women. Some 25 years ago my amoeba was a prosecutor. He prosecuted at least one rape case, which he won. He was responsible for setting up counselling for rape victims. This was precocious and superb.

Fast forward: two weeks before the election, my amoeba recognised that American women make 76 cents against every male dollar and decided to draw attention to this fact. Such is the gratitude of women that my amoeba beats the primordial sludge by as much as 10 percentage points among women in the subsequent polls. He is especially popular with single women who, needless to say, have to support themselves.

My amoeba promises improvement. He will support pay-equity legislation. (Have I been in a deep sleep? Is this 1970?) In the parlance of his campaign, he has a plan. He keeps the specifics to himself. He will also raise the minimum wage over several years from $5.15 an hour to $7 an hour which, his campaign reckons, will give 9.2 million women another $3,800 a year. How pathetic is that? He has a plan for health insurance and another plan to produce jobs and a plan to protect social security, that tiny safety net that older Americans, especially women, have against utter poverty. In any other year, this wouldn't be enough to differentiate him from the primordial sludge, because mostly it is not true. It's either the Iraq war or health care, not both.

Now look at what George W offers me. First, he gives me his middle initial: "W is for Women". I don't want his initial inscribed on me. I find the idea repugnant. He does not recognise the pay differential between men and women. On the other hand, he is against sex trafficking and has said so when addressing the UN. He has strong evangelical support for this position. He is for bringing equality to women in the Arab and Islamic world. I may want it and work for it in the US, but he and his most anti-feminist rightwing advisors, including David Frum and Richard Perle, want women's liberation in the Gulf region, and I do not mean the Gulf of Mexico. Anywhere but here seems to be the general plan.

And what is the price for these women's rights? It's a small one. Many bombs must fall and many innocents must die.

The Bush/Cheney argument for reelection comes down to this: in Iraq we have created a new site for terrorists and they are so busy there that they won't come here. Vote for us and you'll be safe. Vote for Kerry/Edwards and you'll likely die. One has a choice between massacres there or here. Vote Bush/Cheney. Choose there.

Despite the American disdain for irony, electoral politics in the US is nothing if not a lesson in irony. Richard Nixon the anti-communist went to China and ended the Vietnam war. Clinton, prince of Democratic post-liberals, joined with Republicans - in fact, led them - to get African-American single mothers kicked off welfare and to create political cover for those politicians abandoning the poor. He then had the honour of being proclaimed, by Toni Morrison no less, the first black president. And, in this land of political hallucination, maybe he was. He also may be the only black president.

What Kerry will do is this: he will get European and even Arab allies to pony up in Iraq; he will intensify the war there; he will bring in more troops. This policy will make it impossible for the Democratic candidate who follows him, or he himself if he runs again, to have anything but a pro-war policy. A rightwing Republican, maybe even a woman, plain-spoken and Reaganesque (or Thatcheresque), will triumph by promising an end to the Iraq war either four or eight years from now. He or she will deliver because the war will be over and the US and its many allies will have lost. This will be another generation's Vietnam with the blame having a certain global quality. As at his convention, Kerry the combatant will have trumped Kerry the anti-war protester.

So why is it that I'm voting for Kerry? Oh, right, it's because my Massachusetts amoeba is better than Texas primordial sludge. Make no mistake: I have regional emotions. When someone from Massachusetts, the centre of abolitionist activism, and someone from Texas, in our day and age a symbol of the Confederacy, mix it up, our civil war is being refought. Kerry represents those brilliant abolitionists - and he does it badly. Shame on him.

The thing is that I'm scared to death that Bush will win. If Bush wins, we get more terror, charmingly diverted to countries not the United States. I call that a plan. I admire its simplicity. Who said that boy is stupid? Oh, I did, a few paragraphs up: the whole Iraq/Iran confusion. Of course, being dyslexic is not the same as being stupid.

The Bush/Cheney plan is the equivalent of a moral sewer. I don't want to roll in that dirt. It's someone else's blood and it doesn't wash off (cf the Scottish play).

We dream, some of us, of being able to be good in a better world. The morally reprehensible - the Bush/ Cheney strategy - smacks us between the eyes; and then, and only then, do we vote for the lesser of two evils. But don't forget that they are two evils. Sick to my stomach because he will stay in Iraq, I'm voting for John Kerry.

[ShangriLaTroubl]

That was a great read..thanks so much...My favorite line was this :

"Vote for us and you'll be safe. Vote for Kerry/Edwards and you'll likely die"

I love that lol..so typical

Chris

[dissention]

Originally Posted by ShangriLaTroubl

That was a great read..thanks so much...My favorite line was this :

"Vote for us and you'll be safe. Vote for Kerry/Edwards and you'll likely die"

I love that lol..so typical

Chris

I love this passage:

So why is it that I'm voting for Kerry? Oh, right, it's because my Massachusetts amoeba is better than Texas primordial sludge. Make no mistake: I have regional emotions. When someone from Massachusetts, the centre of abolitionist activism, and someone from Texas, in our day and age a symbol of the Confederacy, mix it up, our civil war is being refought. Kerry represents those brilliant abolitionists - and he does it badly. Shame on him.

Preach it, sister. For all of her bluster and dirt-kicking, she was a smart cookie. A pornographer herself, but still one helluva smart individual. I think she went a little insane during the last few years of her life, but that piece proved she hadn't totally lost it.

[ShangriLaTroubl]

I'm watching a video of Senator Clinton speak on cspan.org at the the 2005 Democratic Farmer Labor Party's Hubert H Humphrey Dinner in Minneapolis.

Some good quotes from her speech :


"we continue to try to make sure that PROGRESS occurs in the congress and we stand against the reactionary radical right wing agenda of the Congress and the White House!"


"I know I dont need to tell you how important it is that we fill Mark Dayton's seat in the Senate, with the right kind of person..we CANNOT fill that seat with someone who will mindlessly rubberstamp the agenda of this administration...we DO NOT NEED anymore members of Congress who act like extras in the move 'I Robot' ..we need leaders who will stand up against the special interests, and stand up for the public interests.. "

"they control the levers of power, they flaunt that power, they adhere to a rigid ideology that is well outside the mainstream of American politics, it's an ideology that ignores some of the most basic priniciples of our founding fathers..like the accountability of checks and balances in government...now their determination to do this I think has taken a lot of Americans by surprise..it seems so out of sync with where we believe our country should be..so no wonder so many Americans now believe that we are on the wrong track. "

"we find ourself in a struggle against terrorism..and yet we see our nation alienating many of our allies, by a prideful unilateralism..and we find our government is not planning for the future.."

"we cannot just believe that America can just decide what we want to do, and direct the rest of the world to follow our orders, merely because we said so!"

" at a time when we need to recognize our connection to the world, this administration, is pursuing both an international and domestic agenda that veers to the right, and threatens to just literally knock our country off course.."

"for five years they had no domestic agenda, people are now finding out what they really have in mind for us, and i think you will see Democrats coming back starting in 2006 and beyond."

"take this battle over social security..at its root is an idealogical rejection of the whole idea of government sponsered insurance.. we must not be fooled, this is not a legitimate debate over which policy course to take....to safegaurd the future of Social Security. what they intend for social security is part and parsol, of what they intend of a whole range of policy...they are working to push our govt and society furthur to the right..and working to consolidate power in away i've never seen.."

[strandinthewind]

LOL - I voted for Kerry for essesntially the same idea - I realize that makes me a hypocrite - but the lesser of two evils is better than nothing I guess. Thanks for posting that.

[dissention]

Originally Posted by strandinthewind

LOL - I voted for Kerry for essesntially the same idea - I realize that makes me a hypocrite - but the lesser of two evils is better than nothing I guess. Thanks for posting that.

You're welcome. I think that piece is one of the best and most brutally honest about the last election. A lot of people wouldn't admit that they were voting Kerry because he wasn't Bush, nor would they admit that Kerry was essentially Bush-lite. Leave it to that brilliant quack and The Guardian to print that.

I read a lot of her books when I was in college (though Mercy was a bit too much for me to read) and always thought that if she had dropped the extremity of her anti-porn schtick and concentrated more on politics, she would have been much more effective.

"The First Amendment was written by slave traders!"