I’d not characterize Bush as an idiot, but he has shown a complete lack of intellectual curiosity. He didn’t know things, and didn’t care enough to dig a little for answers. To Lance, on the rapist vs. murderer issue, I’d point out that it’s a level of outrage issue, rather than actual damage. A murder leaves a body and possibly a bereaved family. A rape leaves a live victim who can continue to suffer where we can see them, possibly with the bonus of an emotional family. Throw in your kidnapping example, and that one (if we get the kid back safely) just ends happy in the public eye. The kid might be badly damaged, but we’ve stopped caring by then.

Moving along, the problem with trying to defend the President is that he has consistently shown a fairly strong dislike of (and consequent disrespect for) the Constitution. If he simply managed badly, or even started the Iraq War with no real evidence, or WAS an idiot, I could see defending him. Unfortunately, he has combined that with a major assault on science, abuses of power, and an incredibly secretive administration that looks like it’s trying to strip away our civil rights. Lance makes, I think, the appropriate point here; that President Bush is currently considered bad by the general public, and thus trying to do anything other than run from him at this point would likely just be suicide.

All that being said, I think I should point out that Bush seems to be actually turning things around on a number of fronts (but especially foreign policy) in the last year. Which leads me to the War on Terror point (which is a name that has always bothered me). We need to take out groups like Al Qaeda, yes. But we need to do it in an intelligent fashion. Invading Afghanistan: good. Invading Iraq: vaguely incomprehensible. We need to invest in building strong alliances, rather than having a go-it-alone mindset. We need to do a “hearts and minds” campaign, as Petraeus has done in Iraq. People don’t become terrorists for the cash bonuses, but because their lives suck, and someone who has twisted a Holy Book (really, it could be any, but we’ll use the Koran for this instance) tells them it’s all the West’s fault, but mostly America’s. We need to start using a law-enforcement approach to dealing with terrorists. One reason suicide-bombing is so popular is that it makes you a martyr, and people carry signs with your picture around. These same people swiftly forget about the guy in a blaze-orange jumpsuit being frog-marched through a courtroom.

Finally, to Lance on the topic of Sarah Palin: She is the single biggest reason I have not to vote for McCain. For McCain to make his campaign be “EXPERIENCE” and then pick the least experienced person available is perplexing to me. Also, her policies scare me. Especially things like combining “No Abortions” with “Abstinence Only Sex-Ed,” which is a great formula to create a lot of teen mothers who will mostly never go anywhere with their lives.

I seem to have gone on for a bit, so I’ll go away now.

I always feel like the devil’s advocate when trying to make left-wing arguments, but since I seem to be the only verbal liberal here, ill give arguing a try!

“It’s just common “knowledge,” after all, that Bush is an idiot. People who are drug dealers and child rapists know they’re inherently better than the President, and aren’t afraid to say so loudly. ”

It always strikes me as odd that child rapists are held as somehow worse than murderers. Indeed that we {society} would consider a paedophile who rapes or abuses a child once, to be more evil than say….. A kidnapper, who keeps a child in solitary confinement for a month until her ransom, strikes me as a twisted logic. The trauma to the child would be greater in the second instance. Yet while we would consider the kidnapper to be ruthless, the child-abuser is the lowest of the low. Unforgivable (in the eyes of many) and disgusting blemish on society.

I digress hugely there… but what I’m trying to say is that if you consider the Iraq war to be unjust then the thousands of civilian deaths on Iraqi soil rest on the head of the American commander in chief who was , after all, it’s chief instigator. If you accept this then a child-rapist or drug dealer is a moral saint by comparison. Just a thought….

“The mistake has been failing to defend the President, and buying into the mainstream conviction that everything he’s done is awful and every single thing wrong with the world is his fault.”

If you accept, as you do, that the “mainstream conviction” is that George Bush is evil, wouldn’t it be political suicide to support him??? After all, do you really think people could be persuaded that he’s really a saviour? In time for the election?

“Real leadership involves telling the public there are things they don’t understand and grossly oversimplify.” Who wants to be told that they are ignorant? Isn’t it that kind of attitude that leads to the policy-free character debates that seem to be dominating this election? I heard a vox-pop (street survey) in an American city, in which 4 middle aged women were asked what they thought of Sarah Palim, to which they answered “I think she is a hard working woman with family values and I like her”. They were then asked “what policies do you like of hers”, to which they all replied that they didn’t know of any of her policies, but they were sure she agreed with them. Being the working mother that she is.

Just some thoughts :P. The blog is looking great!