Sounds like you and I could start our own party and agree on the platform.

I just don't find political parties have much to say to me. I am an uber hawk on defense and national security. I believe gay marriage is a constitutional right. I am opposed to race based affirmative action but have no problem if it is applied to economic class or other tangible disadvantage ( white appalachian sharecropper's kid gets preference over Colin Powell's kid - all else being equal ) I am opposed to higher taxes unless I really believed they would result in more social justice. In my youth I believed a big, benevolent government could fix things. I have come to realize that enlightened capitalism is more likely to do a good job of it and if you don't take people's money away in taxes a lot of them will use some of that money for good things in helping others. I find the idea of abortion distasteful, but I find government regulation of a woman's reproductive processes distasteful as well. It is troubling, but as you say, it seems to be a matter of personal conscience. I do understand and respect those who consider it a moral cause. I would hope someday contraceptive science will be evolved to where there were no unwanted pregnancies. I would certainly like to live in a world where there were no unwanted - or unloved or uncared for - children.

I think what offends me in today's America is the demonization of political opponents. If you compare George Bush to Hitler, to whom do you compare Saddam or Pol Pot or Bin Laden? I don't agree with Kerry ( or Bush or Teddy Kennedy or Newt Gingrich ) about a lot of things, but I don't consider them evil or stupid. We disagree, period. The posturing of Michael Moore and Tom Delay and Robert Byrd and Trent Lott is just silly.

A lot of people in government (and the private sector) have a lot of control over things like health care, education, the economy, social issues - but when it comes to national security, if the president ( Jimmy Carter, Lyndon Johnson e.g. ) does not see the world clearly we are in trouble.

>Uh oh, you may want to 'duck' after writing that one! :o) *G*
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>I agree with most of what you wrote and yes, I have Woodward's books. Just want to add that I cannot envision Kerry's wife as the First Lady! That is a scary thought! :o)
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>Since this is the chatter section, I will state a small part of my political views. My political views are a mixture of the liberatarian/democrat/constitution/republican parties. However, the one thing I REALLY agree with George Bush on is national security. I strongly believe in U.S. sovereignity and I will never agree with giving the power of U.S. security over to any other nation or group of nations. I will never agree with any international court having jurisdiction over an american citizen before the U.S. courts. However, I believe in the absolute right of every woman to choose (I believe it is a religious decision between her and her god) and I believe in stemcell research. I believe in fewer taxes and a smaller government and more incentives for small businesses.
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>Right now, since there is not a single candidate that I agree with completely, it is a question of which issues I feel are the most important today and which ones I am willing to put aside for now if necessary. To me, there is no question on that.
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>I better stop there before I get myself into trouble. I've probably offended over half the membership already!
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>Tracy
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>
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>>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.
>>
>>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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>>
>>>Ok, while I have to agree on some levels with your employment statement (although personally I believe that each term is a reflection of the previous term's policies since it takes at least 2 years for policies to have an effect on the economy) you might want to see:
>>>
>>>http://zfacts.com/p/529.html
>>>
>>>I really would like to see some proof of this statement:
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>>>>Of course, I voted last time, but Big Bucks Bush got the vote overturned.
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>>>How did he manage that and whose vote did he overturn? Yours? My experience (and yes I did vote) was that the Supreme court ruled that the recount must stop because it was being conducted in an unconstitutional manner. The state did not demonstrate that it had sufficient safeguards in place as well as a statewide standard. Seven Justices of the Supreme Court agreed that there were constitutional problems with the recount that was in progress. The question became what was an appropriate remedy. The court did NOT rule that a recount should not be done, but only that it could not be done in a constitutionally sound method before the deadline. Six of the justices believed that the hand-counts were legal and could be done but all nine justices agreed that punch card ballots could produce a number of ballots whose intentions could not reliably be decifered. It was agreed that the florida supreme court should have adopted adequate statewide standards for determining what is a legal
>>>vote.