Rebutting Liberal Myths
>> Tuesday, October 05, 2004
A friend of mine is a self-described liberal and a volunteer for the Kerry campaign. Talk about opposites. We manage not to hurt each other though. While briefly discussing the war one day, he managed to bring up many of the (big L) Liberal's myths about Bush, the war, and the economy. I'm dedicating this post to addressing many of these myths via fact.
- EPA Report: Eastern States Cut Air Pollution with NOx Cap-and-Trade Program
NOx levels are down 30% since 2002 and down 70% since 1990. - Clean Air Rule of 2004
- Despite the uproar, reports of the death of U.S. environmental regulation are premature. The apparent increase in toxic releases resulted from emissions reported by a single copper smelter. The facility shut down in 2002, and the dismantling of the plant created "waste" that was required to be reported in the TRI. Excluding that one facility, toxic releases actually declined by 3 percent in 2002. Toxic releases increased by about 10 percent between 1996 and 1997, on President Clinton's watch.
- Particulate levels in the United States are lower than at any time since the industrial revolution. Particulate matter in the air has declined more than 80 percent since the early 1900s. PM2.5 is down 40 percent over the past 20 years and 10 percent in the past four years, according to EPA statistics. In 1980, about 80 percent of the nation exceeded the PM2.5 standard now in place. Today, that rate is down to 18 percent.
EPA has two PM2.5 standards--a 24-hour standard for short-term PM2.5 levels and an annual-average standard. Virtually the entire nation--99.6 percent of the monitoring sites--already attains the 24-hour standard, in most cases with plenty of room to spare. Non-attainment is limited almost solely to annual-average PM2.5 levels. Of the few non-attainment locations, 60 percent could reach compliance with PM2.5 reductions of less than 10 percent, and another 23 percent of locations would need 10 to 20 percent reductions.
Environment
The Liberal Myth is that Bush hates the environment and his policies are devastating to the Earth.
- Kerry won't divulge how many people work for him, but Bush campaign totally open
- Go to the White House web site and look at any of Bush's speeches. There you will see speeches covering every issue and policy of any importance. See President Bush's words for yourself and then come back and tell me he's hiding anything he's doing.
Most Secretive Administration Ever
- The persistent Myth of the Stolen Election
The Florida Election 2000
The Liberal Myth is that Bush stole the election in Florida.
- The libertarian case for war
- This is a straw man argument. Bush declared war on those that seek to harm us and those that sponsor, succor and aid said terrorists. Saddam has been repeatedly proven to be bad for American security, bad for Mid-East peace and bad for the Iraqis themselves. Saddam paid the families of suicide bombers, he set up training centers for various terrorists groups and protected terrorists on Iraqi soil. What more do you want?
- Iraqi intelligence documents, confiscated by U.S. forces and obtained by CNSNews.com, show numerous efforts by Saddam Hussein's regime to work with some of the world's most notorious terror organizations, including al Qaeda, to target Americans. They demonstrate that Saddam's government possessed mustard gas and anthrax, both considered weapons of mass destruction, in the summer of 2000, during the period in which United Nations weapons inspectors were not present in Iraq. And the papers show that Iraq trained dozens of terrorists inside its borders.
- Well, it turns out there were links after all.
- On WMD, terrorism and Oil for Food
- More ties to WMD
- More ties to terrorism and WMD's
- UPDATE:From the 9-11 Commission - the most thourough link of the bunch.
- UPDATE2:LeanWRITE has an excellent recap
- UPDATE3:BBC's change in WMD coverage from before Operation Iraqi Freedom to post
No ties between Saddam and terrorists
- My very own post - if you take the number of people employed today and subtract the number employed in January 2001, you will find that 3.7 million more people are employed now. I don't know about you, but I don't know how you can characterize more people working now a job loss.
- Mortimer B. Zuckerman talks about the economy
Jobs
The Liberal Myth is that there is a big job loss under President Bush's administration
- Data belie liberal myth about tax burden on poor
- Income Mobility Belies Liberal Myth
- The Legend of the Squandered Sympathy
- Junk science in the news
Random Liberal Myths:
Please help me out here. What are some other Liberal Myths that need to be addressed? Can you come up with some more facts to help me refute these Liberal Myths?
UPDATE: Postabagle has an excellent insite!
16 comments:
You are a hard worker, and thorough. I am certainly glad you are campaigning for the same candidate that I am.
No weapons of mass destruction found in Iraq and no Saddam-Al Qaeda ties? I destroy this myth right here.
CNS News has a few more links to WMD
Gary, here's where you and I disagree; I look at the last page of the CEA document and see that the goal was to create 1.4 million jobs by the end of 2004. As of the last jobs report 1.7 million jobs have been created in the past year. That's 300,000 jobs more than the goal and the year is not over yet.
The only difference between the model and reality is that the most of the growth actually occurred in a couple spurts rather than a steady gain. Still, we are ahead of the projection. Thank you for the link, I hadn't seen that one yet.
As to the job growth needs, I haven't really studied it, but I do understand that there are more Boomers retiring than native-born reaching employment age. That means that the population growth is from immigration.
Most of the legal immigrants around Des Moines fall into 3 broad categories; high skill workers like physicians and programmers, refugees from Yugoslavia, Vietnam, Sudan and others, people who scraped together the made it to America anyway they could.
The high-skill workers are usually fully employed so lets talk about the other two categories. The refugees usually work in low skill jobs. The Des Moines Register profiled several Bosnian families who scraped by in order to give their children a better life. Any life in America is preferable to what they left.
The ones that came to America any way they could, as a general stereotype, are entrepreneurs. They are the ones starting restaurants, laundries, tourist traps, and gas stations. They make their own way because they know they can. It’s this category that doesn’t always show up on the jobs report. That is the problem with the job report entirely, there are so many other ways to earn a living now, compared to even 10 years ago, that the statisticians are having trouble keeping up.
Before I post on the WMD's (lot's of meetings today), here's more from the Heritage Institute about the economy.
Gary said:
"- Promises to help Africans with AIDS. Instead, jacks up the costs and puts obstacles in the way of help. So, 1/3 of the way into the program, he has helped 25K on drugs. About 5% of where he should be by now."I found out that the US funds half of Donor Assistance To HIV/AIDS worldwide. That means that the US spends more to fight AIDS around the world than the UK (#2 on the list), Germany, Netherlands, Canada, Norway, France and a group called "Other DAC" combined.
Look at the numbers, the above link shows that the US spent $790 million on AID in 2002. In 2003, it went up to $1.1 billion, a $300 million increase. I know that must look like chump change to you, but the US spends as much as the rest of the world combined. I'd say we are more than doing our part.
Gary said:
"- Promises WMDs, nothing like the quantity promise found.
- Promises WMD production facilities. Turn out to be for balloons."This is one of the a favored redirection from Kerry diehards. The most favorite is saying that because Saddam didn't direct the highjackers personally on 9-11, there is no tie between Saddam and terrorism.
No, there weren't promises of WMD's. Bush and Blair shared our intelligence data. This was what we thought Saddam had, not a promise of what Saddam had. No, we haven't found the quantity that we, and the UN, know he had. Since there is no proof that Saddam had his stocks destroyed, we had to go on the assumption that they were still there. After all, he has used WMDs on numerous occations. Just ask the Iranians, Kurds or Marsh Arabs.
Not only did our intelligence services think that Saddam had the weapons so did:
Russia's President Putin warned Bush that Saddam would use WMD's if attacked.
The Australian government thought Saddam had WMDs.
An excellent recap from last year.
Another interesting tidbit is that they are still finding WWI era bombs and mines in French farm fields. It's been over 80 years since that conflict and we know where all the battlefields were, yet still finding ordinance. Most of the WMDs we need to be worried about can be put in small packages. That's why we need to worry about them to begin with. If I hide a 50 gallon drum somewhere in California, how quickly do you think you can find it? The only way we found Saddam's fleet of Mig-29's is because a soldier literally tripped over the tail fin while on patrol. A windstorm had uncovered a small portion of it, but not enought to tell what it was until you got close.
Dennis Prager asks, What would Zarqawi be doing if he weren't in Iraq? A very good question indeed.
From the last two paragraphs...
The claim that there are more, indeed many, terrorists in Iraq now is true. But the terrorists are there because they know that if America prevails in establishing a relatively free country where there once stood an America-hating terrorist-supporting Arab regime, they are ultimately doomed. Liberals love to find out the root causes of sociopathological behaviors. Well, one root cause of Islamic terror is the hermetically sealed Arab-Muslim world. Open that up to even some freedom, and the cesspool that produces the terrorist monsters begins to dry up.
That is why so many terrorists have moved to Iraq. They agree with President Bush -- the war on terror is taking place in Iraq.
2004 has had the lowest ozone smog levels since states began measuring the stuff back in the 1970s. Based on preliminary data from around the country, days exceeding EPA's tough new 8-hour ozone standard declined an average of about 50 percent below 2003, which was itself a record year.See the link for charts plotting the 30 year history of measuring smog.
Jason at Countercolumn ties the Duelfer report and accounts from an Iraqi insider and says "If Saddam had a centrifuge, then there is also no doubt that he could have ramped up production immediately after the inspectors left or the sanctions were lifted. Failing that, he could have sold his centrifuge to - well, anybody - in exchange for some of its product. The Ukraine comes to mind. As does Libya, the Sudan, any number of Southern and Central European countries. Or even Al Qaeda itself.
We further already know that Saddam's agents had had a series of contacts with Al Qaeda.
So John Kerry's brainless haranguing about "No WMDs have been found" is at once simple-minded, short-sighted, and a bald-faced lie."
Translated documents from Saddam's files prove links to terrorists.
Much of the funding came from the Oil for Food program. Enough said.
Link to the CIA's Duelfer report.
Some of these things simply aren't accurate, Doug.
Take "the most secretive goverrnment in history" one.
Did anyone say Bush was secretive because of his campaign?
Or is it a fact that Bush has classified more documents than any other post-WWII President?
A lot of this list is entirely misleading.
Bush has done exactly one thing for the environment, related to diesel engines in the wilderness. His clean air rules were all voluntary.
The number one environmental-law criminal IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD is Bush's #2 supporter in 2000, Koch Industries. Ken Lay, the BIGGEST KNOWN THIEF IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD, was Bush's #1 supporter.
The "Most secretive adminstration ever" doesn't refer to the campaign but the day-to-day operation. Could it be that there are so many classified documents because we don't want to give away our sources?
The environment is cleaner now than when Bush took office in 2001. It has more to do with technology and social awareness than any laws passed or enforced.
Enron is number 34 on the list of high donors for 2000 (or here) and well below several other Republican donors. Koch Industries isn't on the list.
You did a great job.
Post a Comment