There's that one-line, content-free post I was hoping for from the liberal camp. Nice work! Where's the *logic* you have to offer?
Yeah, you're not a flaming liberal or anything. Instead of this mindless garbage, let's see a rebuttal -- if you are capable that is.
To illustrate the absurdity of the liberals' claims (Batman Jones in particular) of having a legitimate chance of making it a close race next November, please read the article posted below. Most voters are unable to name *even one* Democratic candidate. What happened liberals? According to your 'analysis', the liberals were gaining momentum. According to your flawed logic, "the tide has turned". I know that desperate people will attempt to distort the truth in hopes of reconvincing themselves that what they are saying may have a nugget of truth in it, but what the liberals have been advancing on this board has just been exposed as pure lies. The Democrats are on suicide watch right now. They are truly a party in disarray with a field of candidates no one has even heard of. CNN.com, in their true-to-fashion liberal bias, threw in the obligatory misleading statistics at the bottom of the page. Even the most extreme liberal can recognize that their choice of words "definitely be re-elected" for Bush and "can win" for the Democrats, will lead to the answer than they want. The bottom line is this: If no one has even heard of your candidate, then you stand ZERO chance of winning. Good luck boys in 2004 -- you'll need every bit of it to win a state or two. =============================================== CNN.com Poll: Many voters unable to name any Democratic candidates Monday, September 1, 2003 Posted: 2:38 AM EDT (0638 GMT) (AP) -- There's no shortage of Democrats running for president, but most voters don't know who they are, according to a new poll. The poll, released for the Labor Day weekend -- the traditional start of the campaign season -- showed two-thirds of the people surveyed couldn't name one of the nine candidates seeking the Democratic presidential nomination. When pollsters supplied the names, Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman, Missouri Rep. Dick Gephardt and former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean topped the field, although with relatively low numbers that suggest the race remains wide open. Lieberman with 14 percent, Gephardt with 11 percent, and Dean with 10 percent were the only three in double digits in support among registered Democrats, said the poll. Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry was at 5 percent after being in double digits in national polls most of the year. Kerry will try to spark his campaign this week with the formal announcement of his candidacy. Al Sharpton had 5 percent, Florida Sen. Bob Graham 4 percent, North Carolina Sen. John Edwards 2 percent, former Illinois Sen. Carol Moseley Braun 2 percent and Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich registered zero percent in the survey calculation. Four in 10 registered Democratic said they were satisfied with the current field of nine candidates, while half said they would like more choices. When all potential voters were asked whether President Bush will definitely be re-elected, 38 percent said yes, but 50 percent said they think a Democrat can win. When voters were asked the same question about Bush's father in October 1991, 66 percent said yes, but that number dropped 20 points in the next month. The first President Bush lost to Bill Clinton. The poll of 775 registered voters was taken Aug. 26-28 and has a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points, larger for subgroups like Democratic voters.
I don't see Republicans doing much aside from some minor sniping for awhile. In the 1992 election, they were in a similar situation and tried to knock Clinton out early. He withstood the blows and had time to recover. I suspect they've learned the lesson and will hit Dean hard and late.
Who is next in line to provide their economic analysis? Joan Baez? Cheech & Chong? Janis Joplin? Prove your hypothesis that Bush's tax cuts, which are intended to provide fiscal stimulus to our improving economy, will "cripple" the country. Prove that 9-11 could have been prevented.
Jorge, the 'tide is turning' stuff was a reference to support for Bush and for the Iraq war dropping precipitously. I don't recall insinuating it reflected a new movement toward any specific 'liberal' -- only that it signaled the end of Bush's seeming invulnerability. Of course people don't know the Democrats yet. Labor Day is the traditional launch of the campaign season and, aside from political junkies, the average American isn't paying attention yet. You'll find similar polling for any like period (including ones where popular incumbents like Bush I were ousted). It was no more than a couple weeks before I posted the polls showing Bush's vulnerability that both the board and the broader conventional wisdom assumed he was a lock for 2004. You were fond back then of saying that the Democratic Party was dead and had no chance in the coming elections. Current polls show that the country is now evenly split on giving Bush a second term. The latest one I saw showed 49% preferred someone new and 43% wanted him back. When the question turned to 'would you vote for Bush or a Democrat' it was 43 to 43. Yeah, I'm sticking with my assertion that the tide is turning. As for answering texxx's post, come on. We've argued abortion, affirmative action, foreign policy, etc. for hundreds of BBS pages. texxx says abortion=murder and AA=racism and we're supposed to jump right up and have the arguments again? We know the standard GOP line on these issues and you know our answers to them. Using capital letters in a post is neither compelling nor a new argument. Try again.
AKA regulation of EVERY SINGLE medical procedure performed in this country. After it has gone on for 435 years, we can talk. Right, Democrats want to be seen as "soft" in foreign policy. You conservatives seem to think you have the market cornered on foreign policy when there is no evidence that a Democratic president would have seen chaos reign after 9/11. If taxes are to be cut, they should favor the middle class, the people who actually spend that money and stimulate the economy. The Bush tax cuts are reckless, unproductive dividends to rich people. I know you may like that, having voted for Bush specifically for that purpose, but the rest of us (the ones getting screwed by higher insurance rates, property taxes, fees, and cuts in services) are seeing no benefit from these tax cuts. How about a plan from the current president, first. Social Security COULD have been shored up with the surplus we had a scant three years ago but the Bushies needed to pay the people that put them where they are. We could have begun retiring the debt, reducing the amount of money going to interest and eventually providing the necessary funds for the baby boomers, but the dividend program was too important. Sure, just like we did under Clinton with Gore as the VP, right? You can use your scare tactics all you like, but "encouraging" green energy is not code for destroying the energy industry as we know it. The rising death toll in Europe because of the unprecedented heat wave needs to wake us up right now before we wind up on Arrakis. Dean, while espousing universal health care early in his career, has backed off and limited his proposal to people under the age of 25, a population that is sorely underinsured in our society. It is good to know that you have some semblence of a heart and support health care for the young. I agree with you that throwing money at the school systems does not generally work. That being said, any education policy is better than the vacuum that exists at DoE these days.
To illustrate the absurdity of the liberals' claims (Batman Jones in particular) of having a legitimate chance of making it a close race next November, please read the article posted below. Most voters are unable to name *even one* Democratic candidate. What happened liberals? According to your 'analysis', the liberals were gaining momentum. You do realize this is ALWAYS the case for the non-incumbents, except in rare cases of a famous challenger (GW Bush), right? From your own article: <I> When all potential voters were asked whether President Bush will definitely be re-elected, 38 percent said yes, but 50 percent said they think a Democrat can win. When voters were asked the same question about Bush's father in October 1991, 66 percent said yes, but that number dropped 20 points in the next month. The first President Bush lost to Bill Clinton. </i> Geez, you're really getting desperate to make points these days. Even your own articles conflict with your attempted spin. <B>CNN.com, in their true-to-fashion liberal bias, threw in the obligatory misleading statistics at the bottom of the page. Even the most extreme liberal can recognize that their choice of words "definitely be re-elected" for Bush and "can win" for the Democrats, will lead to the answer than they want. </B> Of course, they asked the EXACT SAME QUESTION in 1991 to make the results comparable, but hey ... keep trying to distort, dude. <B>The bottom line is this: If no one has even heard of your candidate, then you stand ZERO chance of winning.</B> No one had heard of Bill Clinton at this point in 1991 either .. in fact, I don't think he had even joined the race yet. Anyone who thinks the race is in any way decided or potentially decided now simply knows nothing about politics, elections, or campaigns.
No, I am not a liberal at all. I am a fiscal conservative with a sense of social justice. I would not call what bigtexx spewed forth as a rebuttal, it was a diatribe of shouted one liners that Ann Coulter would have been proud of. In other words, he didn't have any logical arguments, so he resorted to spin doctoring, name calling, and yelling.
Name calling. Prove your hypothesis that tax cuts to the rich will cure the economy. Please prove it with historical facts rather than unproven theories. Can't prove it, but there were FBI reports of arabs at flight schools and other reports of plans to crash airplanes into buildings. Personally, I do not blame Bush, I blame the FBI, CIA, NSA, and other agencies that failed to put it all together for him. Besides, we will never be able to prove that 9/11 could have been prevented with the administration not allowing an inquiry into the events leading up to the disaster.
Sept. 11 was absolutely preventable. Had the Bush Administration listened to numerous reports from the (close mind in three, two, one) Clinton Administration, they would have known that a terrorist attack using commercial airlines was coming very soon. But they chose to ignore them, and instead focused on missile defense and reorganizing the military structure. Clinton National Security Advisor Sandy Berger sent numerous reports to Condeleeza Rice, and even met with her. Clinton mainstay Richard Clarke told the administration a major terrorist attack was coming. The Bush team, to their credit, kept Clarke onboard. Clarke met with numerous high-ranking White House officials (Cheney's chief of staff, the DOD, the FBI and the State Department) and said Osama bin Laden was organizing a huge terrorist attack, and should be assassinated. Clinton, by the way, sent out an order to assassinate bin Laden in 2000, and tripled the country's anti-terrorist resources. But the Bush Administration ignored everything Clarke said. The Hart-Rudman Commission (which came out in Feb. 2001) reported that a terrorist attack was coming, and that communication problems between the CIA, military and FBI would be a major problem. The Bush Administration instead focused on missile defense. Rumsfeld said the administration would veto any anti-terrorist package that took funding from missile defense. Terrorist network "chatter" in the week before the attacks led many officials to believe a big event was forthcoming. But, because of lapses in communication between the CIA, the military and the FBI (which could have been prevented had the Bush Administration approved funding for anti-terrorist work, instead of threatening a veto because it took away from missile defense), nothing was done. In hindsight, everything is 20/20. But everything that was needed to prevent this horrible catastrophe was there. The Bush Administration didn't have the flight number for these attacks, but they had everything they needed to at least investigate. And they didn't.
I disagree with your opinions, but respect that you went to the source to make them. If more people did that, this country would be in much better shape.
You're better off not responding to the game playing and saving your valuable time for more productive engagements. Trust me. Bama and the others simply want to live in the past with their robber barons and pinkertons. They're aspiring to what we already know doesn't work.
It is a bit vexing at times talking to people (not just conservatives, but liberals, too) who choose not to learn the lessons that history has taught us. I generally don't have a problem with trying something new because that type of action gives us a baseline, more history from which to draw when making decisions about our future. For this thread, the history is that politicians will do anything and say anything to make sure that their views are seen and heard widely and that their power does not wane. This is, in part, why the EPA was created. We needed an agency that was as independent from the political process as we could make it so that it could concentrate on the mandate we gave it: protect the environment and the people that live in it first and foremost. Apparently, that isn't the case anymore.
I would just like to point out that from the position of the rest of the world, Howard Dean´s ideas do not seem extreme at all. I won´t go into what I would agree with or not if I was an American citizen, they just don´t seem extreme - a lot of those ideas reflect the reality in the rest of the world (e.g., Europe). E.g., we pay about $ 5 per gallon.
Yes..... I really don't like the whole label business, but it's like my high school football team. We were a classic run and shoot (back in 1985 no less!) running four and five wides 90 percent of the time. You could only call us a passing team because we threw the ball 80 percent of the time ( a whole lot of fun!). Same thing with Dean. 90 percent of his positions fall under the liberal (in the American political spectrum) ideology, making him.....a liberal. But as far as Bush is concerned, he is more of a centrist (with his positions split about 60/40 between conservative and liberal) than Dean! Calling Dean a centrist is like calling my football team "balanced." It just is not factually correct.
Are you sure you aren't comparing them to YOUR political leanings? Bush has proven himself to be 100% Republican (conservative on some issues and uber-conservative on others) based on his record as President. How can you possibly say it is a 60/40 split? Dean is a liberal, but what do you expect? He is a Democrat for Pete's sake. The question I look forward to having answered during the primary process is "who can beat Bush in the general election." That is a rhetorical question at this point, so you don't need to answer that bama, I know your answer.
