One thing I find extremely interesting in this Presidential election...most of the people I've talked to that are voting for Kerry are doing so not because they like Kerry, but because the don't like Bush. I wish the national media would run a poll asking voters that question. My gut feeling is that a very high percentage of voters nationwide will give the same reasons my small poll has.

>Without getting into the 2000 election, I find it amusing that those who scream the loudest about "Big Bucks Bush" and the "stolen" election have no problem with ( or more likely no awareness of ) the facts of the 1960 primaries when Joe Kennedy had Sam Giancana send Skinny D'Amato to West Virginia with a suitcase with $75,000 in cash which was enough to buy the WV primary and make JFK the candidate over Humphrey.
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>Mayor Daly stole Cook County for the democrats against Nixon later that year, but they probably didn't have to bribe him - he just did it out of habit :-0
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>I would have no problem finding historical references to Republicans stealing elections ( though they usually did it differently and never had the machines like Tammany)
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>Florida was just a close election. Somebody who ran a campaign as badly as Al Gore should have been embarrassed to whine. If he could have carried his own home state FL would not have been an issue.
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>One thing I learned a long time ago about zealots - it's not the concentration camps they object to - it's simply who is on which side of the wire.
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>( the following is an unpaid political screed )
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>Personally, if I thought we had a grownup to run national security and defense I might be able to vote for Kerry - or for that matter Dean. In a lot of ways I'm probably more liberal - or at least libertarian - than both of them. I disagree with Bush about more things than I agree with him on. But I agree with him on the life and death stuff. I want to see married gay pilots with great health care for their kids bombing the the Afghan border regions. I want the Arabic language department of a culturally and ethnically diverse university a hundred years from now to be explaining how "Fallujah" became the Arabic word for "radioactive".
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>Kerry voted against the first Gulf War for heaven's sake - one that met all the conditions he said GWB should have met for the Iraq War. He was a joke on the intelligence committee. He voted against everything that won the cold war and laughed at RR for calling the Soviet Union an "evil empire". (so did every right thinking member of the intellectual elite) But Reagan was right about that ( Maggie knew it ) and putting the Pershings in Europe ( Senator Kerry - NO) was the right thing to do and we put Stalin's old empire on the ash heap of history and that means all the sacrifices made since 1945 by some very special people were worth it. The people who didn't laugh were the people who danced on the wall when it came down. They knew the meaning of evil.
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>After the towers fell the grown-ups did what had to be done. Ignoring all the hand-wringing, and what did we do wrong, and why do they hate us and what will the French think and the dire warnings of quagmire, they sent some truly extraordinary people who will only go into history books as nicknames to do amazing things and 100 days later the Taliban was gone. ( the French, it turns out, were thinking about the big payday in Baghdad. )
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>The loss of life in Iraq is tragic. War always is. But by any standards of warfare, defeating a militarily oriented country with a population of 40 million with 175,000 troops in a few weeks and then occupying it for 19 months with a total of less than 1,000 combat related deaths is unheard of in the history of warfare. In the Battle of the Somme the Brits lost 20,000 killed and 40,000 wounded in a few hours and accomplished nothing. (of course they had the French to help them.)
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>Tracy, if you haven't read Woodward's two books - Bush at War and Plan of Attack I think you might really enjoy them. Particularly watch for the name Cofer Black - he is head of counter-terrorism at the agency now. Definitely one of those who would be characterized as "forward leaning" :-) He is one of the preeminent watchers on the wall.
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>Letting the bribed French and Russians and the wildly corrupt UN get the sanctions lifted would have meant Saddam eventually misbehaving in a way that would have caused another premptive strike from Israel, a very large war in the middle east and possible nuclear disaster. Our sacrifices in Iraq probably saved more Arab lives than we can imagine now. In the next Arab-Israeli war there won't be an ambiguous outcome.
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>But if Iraq can someday be Turkey, Iran will go back to being a rational society, Syria will get the message ( as Libya has already ) and we'll finally clean out the Bekaa.
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>Wahhabism is the most dangerous force on earth today. But Saudi Arabia could not be pressured or dealt with until Iraq was stable. And about half of the House of Saud - including the certifiably crazy Prince Naif the interior minister - should be afraid - very afraid.
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>"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."
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>oops - I think it is time for my medication. I can't get very excited about stored procedures or killing the Foxpro apostates or petitioning Microsoft to make my life better, but when it comes to national security I really believe there are things that matter.
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