Middle-Class Going Democratic

“I don’t care if I vote for Happy the Clown, just so it’s not who’s there now,” said Mary Nyilas, 51, an independent voter from Cologne, N.J. She said she would do everything she could to “vote against the powers that put us in this situation” in Iraq.

vote against the powers that put us in this situation

Look in the mirror, sister.

People want to blame the leadership of this country, but if 50 Million people had marched against the Iraq war back in 2002 instead of 1 Million, I guarantee the administration would’ve taken notice.

It was clear from the get-go that invading Iraq was a bad idea - people let themselves be washed along in a river of jingoism, false patriotism, and hysteria. It’s like the guy who wakes up with a hangover and is pissed at the bartender.

The arguments were compelling and convincing in the begin and a lot of people felt that it was justified based on what was presented to them. The problem was what they presented as “evidence” turned into horse shit.

You most certainly can blame the administration for using inaccurate intelligence and selling it to the people so that they would get support for the war.

So I can’t blame the Bartender for the hangover EXCEPT that he swapped out my top shelf bottle of Absolute Vodka with some cheap crap that would burn a hole in the floor. Now he’s responsible for my hangover so I’m blaming him.

That’s one way to look at it.

The other way is that it was clear from the get-go that Bush wasn’t giving sanctions/inspections/diplomacy time to work. The global community did not support his actions. And millions of Americans opposed the war enough to march in the streets against it. Given all that, you’d think a reasonable person might have been skeptical.

If you are sitting at the bar, and the bartender hands you a drink, and other people at the bar are saying “don’t drink it, man, it’s poison” and you drink it anyway…you have to figure you really wanted to drink it. Yeah, the bartender holds some blame, but he also didn’t blindfold you to the evidence around you, hold you down, and force the drink down your throat either.

True enough. In the beginning I watched Colin Powell and all the maps, drawings, etc. and I was pretty well convinced that they had something. Powell was compelling & sincere, you HAD to believe him. I also felt that we were rushing things and that we needed to “Stay the course” in Afghanistan first.

In any case, Change is good. Let’s give the Dems a crack at it because the Reps have been on it for years and we’re stuck\stagnant.

Well, that’s sort of the point, isn’t it. Nobody had to believe Powell at all. And there were plenty of voices raising perfectly justifiable doubts during the entire time Bush & Co. were madly marching your country to war. Bigdruid’s point is that the electorate - or, at least, not enough of the electorate - didn’t want to listen. You can only blame Bush so far; the rest of the blame lies squarely on the shoulders on the majority of the American people.

The polling for invading Iraq never got above 53% or something, if I remember correctly.

I doubt any number of marchers would have stopped Bush; the only thing that might have stopped him would be taking heavy 2002 congressional losses for advocating it. Didn’t quite work out that way.

It’s very easy to forget that there wasn’t a groundswell of support from the public for the war in Iraq at all. Hell, that’s why Powell got trotted out in front of the UN in the first place because, believe it or not, public opinion demanded there be international consensus for the need to go to war. It wasn’t the first choice and, actually, flew in the face of the neocon desire to try and completely sideline the UN on all American activities. That’s what the whole dog and pony, “International Coalition”, show was about too. Convincing the American public the world was with us.

And there was plenty of reporting at the time, if not always stuck on the front pages, that our intelligence community wasn’t at all happy with the assumptions trumpeted as facts by the administration. I was reading it. It’s one reason I found Powell’s presentation less than compelling at the time. Most of it was based on questioned intelligence or was so open to interpretation as to be useless if you didn’t take the Secretary at face value. I can understand why many Americans did, that’s why the Administration picked Powell - he had huge favorability ratings, but if you’d been keeping informed and were reasonably skeptical there’s no reason why you’d leap to the conclusion the Iraq invasion was a good idea.

Madkevin, this was the guy that everyone trusted from the first war. He packed so much clout and respect and used it. Anyone that remembered the first believed the guy couldn’t be wrong.

No, nobody had to believe him, but based on his previous performance, he was extremely credible.

All I can tell you is that Powell’s performance looked a lot different from my perch up in Canada, then. To me, what with the whipping out of the vial of anthrax and all, it looked showy and desperate. As Brian says, anybody who was keeping themselves informed about the justifications for war remained as skeptical after Powell’s UN appearance as they were before.

I view the big failure as the press. They didn’t behave critically. They ‘reported’ but didn’t “question”. Even when inconsistencies showed up, and even if they noticed them, all they did was report them.

I remember the aluminum tubes thing that the Bush administration was harping on. Even CNN picked up some analyst who said those tubes could NOT be used for enrichment. Rockets, yes, enrichment, absolutely not. Other sources said the same thing.

And then…

Nothing happened. That story went away, and Bush kept brining up the aluminum tubes and the press said nothing. Why didn’t they challenge the assertion that Bush was making?

There were many inconstancies in much of what they said. There were out-right lies they were caught in. Yet did a single journalist say “You lied about X and Y. You ask us to trust you on Z. Why should we?”

I firmly believe a healthy democracy requires an inquisitive, critical press. How do you keep a group of politicians honest? You let them know they are being watched, and any funny business will become prime-time news.

The American press totally failed. Our democracy can not be healthy until our press starts doing their part. Hopefully people like Kieth Olberman and Jon Stewart are the start of a trend and not just aberrations.

For those of you who are thinking that I totally blame the press, I do not. The Bush administration deserves the lions share, but the next biggest helping of blame goes to our news services. The American people are third in line, but a distant third. Their biggest sin is gullibility and trust in both their elected officials and their news services.

“I don’t care if I vote for Happy the Clown, just so it’s not who’s there now,” said Mary Nyilas, 51, an independent voter from Cologne, N.J.

A strategy that worked so damn well for democrats last time around. It really put the GOP in its place, let me tell you.

LOLHAMSANDWICH.

Frankenzombie barely lost, shift. This time there are actually more candidates to vote on, and I’d be willing to bet 99% of them are better than Kerry.

I’ll take my ham sandwiches over your shit biscuits any day.

Now if there only was a middle class left…

Even if you believed Powell that there were WMDs (and, yeah, most people thought there were WMDs), that’s a far cry from “OMG, we must invade NOW - we cannot try diplomacy or sanctions or targeted bombings or…”

So people who “believed” Powell were missing the point anyway. The only “evidence” that Saddam’s WMDs were any imminent threat to us was the word of GWB and his posse - nobody else was worried.

The behavior of the American citizenry over the last 6 years can only be described as “dumbfuckery”. Everybody wants to point their finger at somebody else, whether it’s the administration (“Waaah, the administration tried to sway public opinion to support their policies!”), or the press (“Waaah, the press didn’t keep slapping us with truths we weren’t interested in hearing”), or congress (“Waaah, I’m unhappy, vote them all out”), or whatever.

Again, I say, look in the goddamn mirror, fellow citizens. The truth is freely available, and if you want to live in a democracy you have a responsibility to avail yourself of a healthy daily dose of reality.

Go back and re-read blogging around the time of the invasion.
There were plenty of Yahoo’s out ther who couldn’t wait to see the US wage war against Iraq, after all we were attacked…we had to invade somebody.

And the media?
…right…who owns the major news outlets? the same people who are benefitting from the war and this admin’s policies…not your average joe.

I have to think that the knee-jerk reaction of the American people to back the war initially was caused by a few things:

  1. We were pissed about 9/11, someone must pay!
  2. The “Evidence” was presented by someone with believability and credibility.
  3. There’s always been an unsettled feeling about Iraq since Desert Storm.

So by human nature I think that we wanted to believe that it would do some good to go over there and kick some middle-east ass. The problem is that we moved on before we finished the first job and then got in over our heads.

That’s the sticking point. Bush doesn’t believe that we’re in over our heads. We don’t have enough unilateral support from the UN to continue indefinitely. That’s a fact that he refuses to face were as most of the “Other” side of the aisle conceded that the plan was\is flawed and our approach to the situation needs to be re-assessed.

It’s time for change, hopefully for the best, but change is needed ASAP. The government is to far tilted and half of the Country no longer has a voice.

they used powell because people trusted him and powell went along. i believed him.