Sometimes I forget how personally some people take politics.
The #1 guaranteed thing you can do to make any Democrat's head explode is link to these two Senate role call votes.
Those votes are for PATRIOT and the Iraq war, respectively, both of which were supported by Kerry and Edwards. Both passed with a large bipartisan majority, and the former passed with only a single opponent.
Now, the problem for the Democrats is that their candidates look identical to the Republicans on these issues. How, then, do people who are opposed to those two items now in good faith support Kerry, who voted for them?
Kerry is not the anti-Iraq-war candidate, and he has no way to turn himself into that. He lets his lapdogs like Kennedy (one of the few who actually did vote nea) talk tough about it, but Kerry just dodges the issue and lets people get whatever impression they want out of it. To Kerry supporters who support the Iraq war, he voted for it! To Kerry supporters who don't support the Iraq war, some Democrats are against it!
This bullshit is sure to get Kerry in trouble in the long term. How long can he really play both sides? He can't have his damn cake and eat it too.
Or can he? The fact is, even though Kerry himself was for the war, some people in his party were against it. This makes him, in the minds of the anti-war crowd, not quite as bad by association. Wow, what a great condition to be in.
PATRIOT is a whole other hot potato, that no Democrat is willing to even talk about. This is probably even more odious, as both sides have managed to keep PATRIOT a non-issue. But then, of course it's a non-issue - everybody in both parties supported it, so why bother talking about it to the voting public? If everybody in Congress agrees, then surely it must be in our best interests.
So, let's get the facts straight. Senate Democrats (Kerry and Edwards in particular) supported the war in Iraq and they supported PATRIOT. If you object to Bush based on these issues, then you effectively don't have a candidate - thanks again to our lovely two-but-really-one-party system.
Of course, the anti-war, anti-PATRIOT crowd can always just ignore the facts and vote for a Democrat. That works, too.
Comments
Bad Mojo @ Wed Jul 28 10:09:32 -0400 2004
I think you are confusing "supporting the war" with "voting to not look like an un-American bastard". Let's face it, in today's world, not having a knee-jerk, uber-patriotic, flag-waving viewpoint after 9/11 was equivilant to committing political suicide. Or at least they felt that was the case. While I think that the pressure to get votes is driving the two parties into one single platform that suits the majority, I also think the media represents an either-or, passive-aggresive view of the world, including our government. Again, the fact is that after 9/11, a minority group of ZEALOTS passing themselves off as PATRIOTS decided to run our country into the ground and scream "terrorists!" at the top of their lungs. When everyone loves a country, it takes a zealot to look like a patriot.
And, yes, I realize this was rambling, STFU!