50 reasons to vote for President Bush
>> Sunday, October 31, 2004
50 reasons to vote for Bush, a photo essay
UPDATE: More from VariFrank. Be sure to check out this essay from VariFrank too.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
6 comments:
Clinton had 6 years to get bin Laden and he didn't. Worse still, Clinton's half-assed attempts at assasination and outright pulling out of Somalia emboldened terrorists to attack us further. Bush has taken the battle to the terrorists, of which bin Laden is just one. OBL has been turned into a Saturday Night Live skit while terrorists flock to their deaths in Iraq.
Afghanistan has had it's first free election ever. Women are not only allowed out of the house now, they are allowed to vote. In January, Iraq will also hold their first democratic election.
Libya has pre-empively surrendered. The government of Pakistan no longer actively supports the Taliban and is fighting terrorists on their own soil. The infant democracies to the left and right of Iran are causing the people there to agitate for more freedoms. North Korea has entered multi-lateral talks that may take months to work through.
If Arafat and Castro would both perish in the hospital, Cuba and Arab Palistinians would have hope for a better future.
It took 20 years for the FBI to catch the Unibomber, and he was living in a small shack in the woods outside of town. His brother turned him in.
Bin Laden has an advantage of hiding in mountainous terrain and caves but there will be a slipup sooner or later, or the $50 million bounty on Osama's head will bee too great for one follower.
The New York Post chimes in with:
WHEN John Kerry tries to spin the bin Laden tape to his own advantage, he is fond of saying that the ghoul's message just serves to indicate that he is still around because Bush failed to get him "when he was surrounded" in Tora Bora.
Kerry's attack misses the fundamental point: If Osama bin Laden, who once sent hijacked airplanes into buildings, has been reduced to mailing tapes to TV stations instead, it means that his capacity for terrorism is being effectively neutralized as he hops from cave to cave in Pakistan.
And we need to understand who is to blame for failing to get bin Laden — for America blew at least three opportunities during the 1990s, when he was there for all to see in Afghanistan. And the reasons why we failed don't speak well of a potential Kerry administration.
Our first shot at bin Laden came in Feb. 13, 1998, when President Bill Clinton's aides scuttled a CIA plot that had been eight months in the planning to kidnap Osama, using local Afghan tribesmen and to ferry him to the United States to stand trial. Why did they torpedo the mission? Because they worried that bin Laden might be killed!
To quote the 9/11 Commission report: They worried that "the purpose . . . of the operation would be subject to unavoidable misinterpretation and misrepresentation — and probably recriminations — in the event that bin Laden, despite our best intentions and efforts, did not survive." The kidnapping was blocked because the Clinton people worried that it might be perceived as "an assassination." That is the real reason terrorists felt that they could attack America with impunity. Under Bush, that is no longer so.
You've got 50 reasons for George W. Bush...I've got 100 reasons not to vote for him.
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20041108&s=facts
Most of the posts there are reasons to vote for President Bush.
. The Bush Administration has spent more than $140 billion on a war of choice in Iraq. Thank God we are going after a major terrorist supporter that has murdered hudreds of thousands of people, some with WMDs. The price tag is a thousand times less than the financial losses of 9-11-01.
2. The Bush Administration sent troops into battle without adequate body armor or armored Humvees. What a cannard. Second tier troops were never targeted like they have been here. Once the leaders in Iraq figured out the terrorists' strategy, they requested more body armor, hence the request for $87 billion that Kerry voted against. When I was in the Infantry, we hated body armor, it's heavy, cumbersome, and doesn't protect you from military rounds, just shrapnel. Movement was a much better protection.
3. The Bush Administration ignored estimates from Gen. Eric Shinseki that several hundred thousand troops would be required to secure Iraq. Gen. Shinseki was retired at the time he gave this estimate. More importantly, Gen. Franks thought he had the right number of troops, as he's the one that approved the force structure. Not only that, we won! Hey, how about that, we much have had the right number of troops there. Now, we are training the Iraqis to handle their own security and they comprise the largest force in the theater today and taking 90% of the casualties.
4. Vice President Cheney said Americans "will, in fact, be greeted as liberators" in Iraq. We were. Not in every area, but in the north and in the south, we were.
5. During the Bush Administration's war in Iraq, more than 1,000 US troops have lost their lives and more than 7,000 have been injured. Every soldier's life is precious, but how many more people would be dead had the terrorists been allowed to operate freely in America, as they were under the Clinton administration? Terrorists are flocking to their deaths in Iraq rather than attack us here. A large majority of Iraqis support the coalition and a free Iraq. Once Iraq has their elections, the terrorists will have lost twice.
6. In May 2003, President Bush landed on an aircraft carrier in a flight suit, stood under a banner proclaiming "Mission Accomplished," and triumphantly announced that major combat operations were over in Iraq. Asked if he had any regrets about the stunt, Bush said he would do it all over again. We toppled Saddam's regime and controlled the country. That says "Mission Accomplished" to me. If we could go back in time, I would want to do it all over again too. Except I would recommend not wasting time with the UN.
7. Vice President Cheney said that Iraq was "the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault for many years, but most especially on 9/11." The bipartisan 9/11 Commission found that Iraq had no involvement in the 9/11 attacks and no collaborative operational relationship with Al Qaeda.What's the discrepancy? Al Qaeda could use Iraqi training camps, hide out in Iraq, receive intelligence info from Saddam, and receive money and arms from Saddam. Although the 9-11 Commission doesn't characterize that as an "operational relationship", it sure smells like one to me. And no, Saddam had nothing directly to do with 9-11. He did however provide money, a hideout and training to terrorists. And his Oil for Food program allowed him to bribe the UN, France, and Russia.
8. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said that high-strength aluminum tubes acquired by Iraq were "only really suited for nuclear weapons programs," warning "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." The government's top nuclear scientists had told the Administration the tubes were "too narrow, too heavy, too long" to be of use in developing nuclear weapons and could be used for other purposes.The point is that we didn't know anything before going in. The IAEA thought that Saddam could have had nukes by 1995. Yes, the tubes could have been used for something else, but they could also be used for making WMD's.
9. The Bush Administration has spent just $1.1 billion of the $18.4 billion Congress approved for Iraqi reconstruction.I don't get the point of this one. Newspapers complained about a no-bid contract (the same no-bid contract Clinton approved in the Balkins, by the way), then complain that things aren't happening fast enough. Do you think the building will be made with blocks of dollar bills? No, a government bid process takes a while and then the contractors don't get paid up front, but only after specific milestones have been met. That figure is old, as more and more projects have been completed recently.
10. According to the Administration's handpicked weapon's inspector, Charles Duelfer, there is "no evidence that Hussein had passed illicit weapons material to al Qaeda or other terrorist organizations, or had any intent to do so." After the release of the report, Bush continued to insist, "There was a risk--a real risk--that Saddam Hussein would pass weapons, or materials, or information to terrorist networks."Again where's the discrepancy? Duelfer says that Saddam didn't give WMD's to terrorists, yet. Bush said that that was a real threat. And it was, as Saddam had used WMD's in the past, just ask the Iranians, Kurds and Marsh Arabs.
11. According to Duelfer, the UN inspections regime put an "economic strangle hold" on Hussein that prevented him from developing a WMD program for more than twelve years.But Saddam had programs in place to produce weapons at a moment's notice. Much better to remove a threat before it develops into a much bigger cancer than Saddam already was.
Okay, got to go to work now, but I'll get back to this when I can.
A Vote for John Kerry is a Vote for OBL. Period! :)
Post a Comment