Kerrys polished, but can't make his case
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| Mon, 10-04-2004 - 10:19am |
And yes, it's true, if you hadn't been following the election campaign closely till Thursday night, Kerry wasn't as pompous or boring or even as orange as some of us had led you to believe, though his lipstick was a slightly distracting shade and he would have been better advised to ease up on what was either his simultaneous signing for the deaf or an amusing impression of the stewardess pointing out the track lighting leading to the emergency doors.
But none of that matters. If John Kerry is so polished and eloquent and forceful and mellifluous, how come nobody has a clue what his policy on Iraq is? As he made clear on Thursday, Saddam was a growing threat so he had to be disarmed so Kerry voted for war in order to authorize Bush to go to the U.N. but Bush failed to pass ''the global test'' so we shouldn't have disarmed Saddam because he wasn't a threat so the war was a mistake so Kerry will bring the troops home by persuading France and Germany to send their troops instead because he's so much better at building alliances so he'll have no trouble talking France and Germany into sending their boys to be the last men to die for Bush's mistake.
Have I got that right?
Oh, and he'll call a summit. ''I have a plan to have a summit. . . . I'm going to hold that summit ... we can be successful in Iraq with a summit . . . the kind of statesman-like summits that pull people together ...'' Summit old, summit new, summit borrowed, summit blue, he's got summit for everyone. Summit-chanted evening, you may see a stranger, you may see a stranger across a crowded room. But, in John Kerry's world, there are no strangers, just EU deputy defense ministers who haven't yet contributed 10,000 troops because they haven't been invited to a summit. And once John Kerry holds that summit all our troubles are over. Summit time and the livin' is easy, fish are jumpin' and the cotton is high, your daddy's rich and your ma is good-lookin' ... No, hang on, your wife is rich and your manicure's good-lookin' ...
In his prebaked soundbite of the night, Kerry said: ''Well, you know, when I talked about the $87 billion, I made a mistake in how I talk about the war. But the president made a mistake in invading Iraq. Which is worse?''
Interesting question. The play-by-play pundits thought it brilliant. But I beg to differ. It would have been a better line if he'd said, ''But the president's made a mistake in how he's fighting this war. Which is worse?'' There may be a majority that thinks post-Saddam Iraq has been screwed up; there's not a clear, exploitable majority that thinks toppling Saddam was a disaster, and Kerry can't build one in the next month. But it would still have been a lousy line for this reason: ''Talking about'' stuff is all Kerry's got. He's no executive experience, he's never run a state, never founded a company, built a business, made payroll. Post-Vietnam, all he's done is talk and vote. For 20 years in the U.S. Senate: talk, vote, talk, vote. So, if his talking and voting are wrong, what else is there?
Speaking as a third-rate hack, I'd say that as a general rule articulacy is greatly over-rated. It's not what it's about: Noel Coward would run rings round Mike Tyson in the prematch press conference, but then what? But, if articulacy is the measure, how come Kerry can't articulate an Iraq policy any of us can understand? By contrast, for an inarticulate man, Bush seems to communicate pretty clearly. He communicates the reality of the post-9/11 world, a world where you can't afford to err on the side of multilateral consensus and Hague-approved legalisms and transatlantic chit-chatting and tentativeness and faintheartedness about the projection of American power in America's interest.
A majority of the American people -- albeit not as big a majority as it ought to be -- get this. John Kerry still does not. Which means he lost the debate. He got a technical win on points from the pundits, but this election won't be won on points. It's primal. The pundits keep missing this. They thought Kerry was good in the debate, just as he was good in his convention speech, because on both occasions he was tactically artful. But that's not going to cut it. We're post-Clinton: you can't triangulate your way to victory.


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Have you read the Patriot Act? Can you show me where in the Patriot Act it states that anyone can be arrested and held indefinitely without charges (unless they are an enemy combabtant)?
This is a very good website where anyone who wants the facts about the Patriot Act can read the full text, as well as explanations of the various myths surrounding it. Yes, before you laugh and guffaw it is put out by the Justice Department, nevertheless it is informative.
http://www.lifeandliberty.gov/subs/u_myths.htm
I'm talking about the ability to lock US citizens up for months or years at a time with no charges.
Jose Padilla, a US citizen, has been held without charges for over 2 years. He does "appear" to be possibly linked to terrorism. I'm not saying he's innocent.
But he has been denied the right to hear charges against him, to hear the evidence, to be able to defend himself against that evidence, to have a speedy trial, to be able to call witnesses, to be tried by a jury of his peers, his rights to due process all gone. GONE.
The reason we have due process is because governments have been known to abuse such powers.
If he was a relative of yours, would you approve of the label "enemy combatant" being put on him & all his due process rights being taken from him?
Isn't this what happens in dictatorships, they lock you up & that's it?
None of which has to do with the Patriot Act. Has to do with the fact that he has been classified as an enemy combabtant. Enemy combatants could be held without charges long before there ever was a Patriot Act. I believe a court has recently ruled that he can no longer be classified as such and must be charged with a crime or relaesed, if I'm not mistaken, but I don't have time to look it up right now. In any case, there is nothing in the Patriot Act that pertains to his case.
Um, if there was evidence that he was planning to (or hoping to)build a radioactive device to detonate in the US for al quaeda, yes, I would approve. They didn't arrest this guy for no apparent reason, and the reason they haven't charged him yet is that as an enemy combatant i.e. prisoner of war they can continue to try and press him for information and possibly capture the big fish who put him up to this.
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,262917,00.html
"It must have been one of Jose Padilla's proudest moments. He had spent his life chasing respect but rarely earning it—marking a dreary passage from a Chicago gang to juvenile detention to grownup prison to a Florida fast-food job and, finally, to a new life as a Muslim in the Middle East. And there he was, somewhere in Pakistan just six months after the Sept. 11 attacks, allegedly presenting an ominous proposal to Abu Zubaydah, Osama bin Laden's operations chief.
Padilla, 31, had prepped hard for his meeting, but his ambition outstripped his guile. Senior U.S. officials tell Time that Padilla, conducting research on the Internet, had come across instructions for building a nuclear bomb—"an H-bomb," as a top official described it. The instructions were laughably inaccurate—more a parody than a plan—but not recognizing that, Padilla took them to Abu Zubaydah and other al-Qaeda planners and said he wanted to detonate such a weapon in the U.S. "He was trying to build something that would attain a nuclear yield," says a senior Bush Administration official monitoring Padilla's case. In response, Abu Zubaydah apparently cautioned his eager job applicant to think smaller—to get some training and attack America with a so-called "dirty bomb," a conventional explosive packed with radioactive waste that would spew when the bomb blew up. "They sent him to the U.S. to see what he could do—plan and execute," the official says. What he did was get arrested as soon as he stepped off the plane on May 8, having come full circle, back to Chicago, the site of his first encounters with the law."
The guy went to al quaeda to apply for the job of nuclear terrorist. He was obviously an incompetent aspiring terrorist but that doesn't mean he was an innocent civilian. Where you get out of all this that anyone can be arrested for no reason I really can't grasp. Yes he's an American citizen, an American citizen plotting to fight against us. Therefore an enemy combatant.
But we can debate whether he is an enemy combatant if you want, as I said I believe a court has already ruled that he can't be held as one so the American justice system is doing it's job if he's not. Still has nothing to do with the Patriot Act.
Edited 10/4/2004 10:02 pm ET ET by kellybelly2
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