The Republicans Scare Me…Really.
Here is a portion of a comment I recieved from my favorite commenter on the left, John:
Unfortunately polls are suggesting that these ads are working. Bush denied any connection with the swift boat group but then the Bush campaign attourney resigned after it was revealed that he was repressenting the swiftboat group.
Sinking to perhaps a new low, the Bush campaign is now exploiting the olympic games in an political ad. Scumbag.
Oh please. The guy is a scumbag but not because he’s “exploiting” the “sacred” Olympic games. I don’t see what’s so bad about pointing out that it is only because there is a Bush administration that there is an Iraqi Olympic team that isn’t going to be fed into a plastic shredder when they don’t medal. That’s effective political advertising.
My fear of the Republicans goes back to their latest moves in the whole Swift Boat Veterans for Truth controversy.
Much worse than their obviously false denial about being involved in the swift boat ad campaign is the new move by Bush/Cheney to capitalize on this whole thing by advocating the ban of all 527 groups. Effectively this would revoke what little is left of our first amendment rights to political free speech since McCain/Feingold passed. They are now pushing to enforce the portion of that aforementioned piece of crap legislation that makes it illegal for independent groups to combine their money for the purchasing of political ads. Everyone should be scared of this. Many fools were convinced that McCain’s campaign finance reforms were a good idea because the system is so complex it was hard to understand what was actually being reformed but this is really obvious…or at least it should be. People should be outraged.
Bush has got McCain campaigning with him now in an effort to force the Federal Election Committee to make it illegal for people to get together to buy a political ad denouncing any politician running for office. The whole point of the first amendment was to prevent something like this from happening. We’ve completely warped that amendment. Now it protects the right of an actor to say the F word on TV or a pornographer to have his product easily available at the local public library while ignoring the right to free speech of a group of people who want to make a political statement.
Bush is behind this outrage because he knows that right now the Democrats can’t fund their campaign directly under the current system as well as the Republicans can. The Democrats are far more dependent on the 527s to get their message out. For a little temporary political gain the Republicans are selling out the last vestiges of our right to political free speech.
There’s something for you to be outraged about John…or you could go back to worrying about the politicization of the Olympic games…oh the horror! It would be nice if libertarians could count on you leftists to be outraged about the real problems the Republicans cause as much as you are about things that cause your candidate to lose a few points in the polls.
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Outraged about real problems? So you want to talk about real problems now? Because I’m just following your lead in commenting on political ads and what they say about the character of the candidates. That’s your topic remember?
How about all the American soldiers who have died and continue to die for an unjustified, unnecessary war? How about the fact that the president used information known to be inaccurate in taking us to war? We continue to dump billions of dollars into Iraq with only minimal progress. Meanwhile, here in America the number of Americans living in poverty and without health insurance rose for the third straight year. The child poverty rate rose to 17.6 percent in 2003. Forty-five million Americans have no health insurance.
How about Bush’s inconsistent, incomprehensible foreign policy. Speaking about WMDs in North Korea and Iran he recently said “I don’t think you give timelines to dictators.” Huh?
How about the Bush administration’s complete disregard for science as noted in a statement released earlier this year by 62 leading scientists including 20 Nobel laureates? Bush’s foolish restriction on stem cell research “has severely curtailed opportunities for U.S. scientists to study the cell lines that… represent invaluable models of human disease” according to the New England Journal of Medicine. It scares me to have a president who, in making policy, generally ignores the conclusions of science.
How about letting private corporations write energy policy behind closed doors? Cheney is still battling in court to prevent the release to the public of documents pertaining to the formulation of our energy policy. I think the 527 issue which you comically refer to as “the last vestiges of our right to political free speech” falls back pretty far on the list of things to be concerned about.
Comment by john — August 31, 2004 @ 12:09 am
A couple more thoughts. Shouldn’t a good libertarian really be scared by the huge government handout to drug companies and The Farm Security and Rural Investment Act of 2002 which The Wall Street Journal called “a 10 year, $173.5 billion bucket of slop”? Shouldn’t libertarians everywhere be mad as F about the inclusion in the Rebuplican Party Platform of a constitutional amendment to ban abortion and gay marriage? You’ll probably have the John Kerry sign up after hearing that. Or the libertarian candidate’s sign. Hey who is the libertarian candidate anyway? Why are the libertarians so silent in this race? Let them be heard! I’m sure the dems would be happy to sign the petition to get ‘em on the ballot.
Comment by john — August 31, 2004 @ 12:48 am
You posted a comment in regards to my global warming post over at the “Life, Liberty, and Property” site. You suggested that the global warming report I mention above is “dreck” because it comes from a government beaurocracy. I thought I’d post my response here as well ’cause I know you wouldn’t want to miss it.
I did not suggest that you should trust the report (see my link above) because it comes from the party you support. You should trust the source because the bias of this administration has been in the other direction. Bush is beholden to mega-contributers in the fossil fuel industry. The tendency, therefore, has been to try to cast doubt on the science of climate change and the conclusion that global warming has been driven by human activity. I suggest that you can trust the report based on this lack of bias toward its findings.
You should read the report and judge it on it’s merit. You dismiss it because it came from a “government beaurocracy” without even considering its content. Keep in mind that it is in agreement with a wide body of science literature not derived from government beaurocracy. You describe the report as “dreck” without any attempt to even look at its substance. This clearly reveals your lack of objectivity.
Comment by john — September 12, 2004 @ 11:01 pm