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Not really. Kerry gets a Republican house and senate. How much can he do? Then you have this stuff http://www.safesearching.com/billmaher/print/t_hbo_realtime_030504.htm"SMILEY: There's an old adage - there's an old adage, Bill, that says very simply, it's not what you call me, it's what I answer to. When you flip that, what you realize is that those of us who are left of center in our ideology have allowed the right to define the debate. We've allowed the right to define the terms. It's not that this country has become more conservative. It's that those of us who are left of center are a bunch of wimps, and we let them decide what these definitions are. And John Kerry is going to have to deal with Ralph Nader this time around as he should. With all due respect - with all due respect to Barbara Boxer and Terry McAuliffe, I'm glad Ralph Nader is in this race, because somebody--
MOORE: I gave him two thousand bucks!
SMILEY: Somebody - somebody has got to remind--
MOORE: I'm glad he's in the race.
SMILEY: Somebody has got to remind - you know, Karl Rove is happy, but I'm happy as well, because somebody has got to remind the Democrats what it means to stand up for those folks who are socially, politically, economically disenfranchised on the left, not run from the debate and define the terms."
http://tompaine.com/blog.cfm/ID/9942
Kerrorism Cont'd. link
My posting on John Kerry's national security speech to the firefighters drew some angry responses. Some readers seem to think that Kerry's speech was a parallel to President Clinton's program for adding 100,000 cops on the streets. (Of course, a lot of liberals made valid criticisms of Clinton's anti-crime programs, too, since they were clearly an effort to outflank the Republicans with a pro-death penalty, tough-on-crime stance.) Kerry's idea of funding 100,000 firefighters was directly tied to anti-terrorism, not some Smokey the Bear thing about fighting forest fires. He didn't even call them firefighters—he calls the First Responders, which is anti-terrorism jargon for the people who get to the scene of a terrorism incident first. And the whole speech was about President Bush's alleged failure to spend enough on battling terrorism. The Democrats—some of them anyway—are all the time calling for more funding for the Department of Homeland Security. Kerry went waaaay overboard attacking Bush for failure to wage the war on terrorism at home; if you don't believe me, read the speech .
March 17, 2004 | 4:54PM
Kerrorism link
Chin jutting out, Tough Guy John Kerry says (incredibly) that Bush isn't doing enough in the Global War on Terrorism. "I don't fault George Bush for doing too much in the war on terror, as some do," said Kerry, according to The New York Times. "I believe that he's done too little." Speaking to the firefighters, who endorsed him for president, Kerry suggested that Washington needs to fund the hiring of 100,000 more firefighters to combat terrorism. Now maybe Kerry has information that Al Qaeda plans to set thousands of fires around the country, but since 9/11 there hasn't been the need for a single fireman to snuff out a fire in garbage can set by terrorists.
link
Bush may be trying to scare us about terrorism (see following item), but he's certainly scared the Democrats. The Dems haven't found their voice on this issue, and they sure won't if they let Hillary Clinton and Joe Lieberman speak for them. Clinton, Lieberman et al. seem to think that Democrats can win by accusing Bush of being soft on terrorism.
Come again?
Bush is Mr. Global War on Terrorism, and the Democrats ought to be saying that the GWOT is a crock, not urging Bush do to more. (One of the most misguided Democratic critiques of the war on Iraq is that it took needed energy away from the GWOT.) Yet here is today's Progress Report , from the Center for American Progress, trying lamely to take the terrorism issue away from Bush.
First, the Progress Report touts a speech at Brookings today by Hillary Clinton, calling the Department of Homeland Security a bureaucracy inadequate to its task. Clinton actually goes so far as to say the Department "has no single division exclusively focused on WMD." Is Hillary saying the terrorists actually have WMD? No credible terrorism expert thinks so. And—earth to Hillary—we didn't find them in Iraq, either.
Second, the Progress Report accuses Bush of a "lack of focus on cyberterrorism." Cyberterrorism? Has there ever been any? Anywhere? By anyone?
And third, the very worried Progress Report notes that Bush initially opposed the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. Well, in my mind, score one for Bush. Creating that department was a dumb idea in the first place, and we can thank Lieberman for that. I'm for abolishing it."
http://antiwar.com/orig/pilger.php?articleid=2089
2004: Choose Your Favorite Pro-War Candidate
by John Pilger
A myth equal to the fable of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction is gaining strength on both sides of the Atlantic. It is that John Kerry offers a world-view different from that of George W Bush. Watch this big lie grow as Kerry is crowned the Democratic candidate and the "anyone but Bush" movement becomes a liberal cause celebre.
While the rise to power of the Bush gang, the neoconservatives, belatedly preoccupied the American media, the message of their equivalents in the Democratic Party has been of little interest. Yet the similarities are compelling. Shortly before Bush's "election" in 2000, the Project for the New American Century, the neoconservative pressure group, published an ideological blueprint for "maintaining global US preeminence, precluding the rise of a great power rival, and shaping the international security order in line with American principles and interests." Every one of its recommendations for aggression and conquest was adopted by the administration.
One year later, the Progressive Policy Institute, an arm of the Democratic Leadership Council, published a 19-page manifesto for the "New Democrats," who include all the principal Democratic Party candidates, and especially John Kerry. This called for "the bold exercise of American power" at the heart of "a new Democratic strategy, grounded in the party's tradition of muscular internationalism." Such a strategy would "keep Americans safer than the Republicans' go-it-alone policy, which has alienated our natural allies and overstretched our resources. We aim to rebuild the moral foundation of US global leadership . . ."
What is the difference from the vainglorious claptrap of Bush? Apart from euphemisms, there is none. All the leading Democratic presidential candidates supported the invasion of Iraq, bar one: Howard Dean. Kerry not only voted for the invasion, but expressed his disappointment that it had not gone according to plan. He told Rolling Stone magazine: "Did I expect George Bush to f*** it up as badly as he did? I don't think anybody did." Neither Kerry nor any of the other candidates has called for an end to the bloody and illegal occupation; on the contrary, all of them have demanded more troops for Iraq. Kerry has called for another "40,000 active service troops." He has supported Bush's continuing bloody assault on Afghanistan, and the administration's plans to "return Latin America to American leadership" by subverting democracy in Venezuela.
Above all, he has not in any way challenged the notion of American military supremacy throughout the world that has pushed the number of US bases to more than 750. Nor has he alluded to the Pentagon's coup d'etat in Washington and its stated goal of "full spectrum dominance." As for Bush's "preemptive" policy of attacking other countries, that's fine, too. Even the most liberal of the Democratic bunch, Howard Dean, said he was prepared to use "our brave and remarkable armed forces" against any "imminent threat." That's how Bush himself put it.
What the New Democrats object to is the Bush gang's outspokenness – its crude honesty, if you like – in stating its plans openly, and not from behind the usual veil or in the usual specious code of imperial liberalism and its "moral authority." New Democrats of Kerry's sort are all for the American empire; understandably, they would prefer that those words remained unsaid. "Progressive internationalism" is far more acceptable.
Just as the plans of the Bush gang were written by the neoconservatives, so John Kerry in his campaign book, A Call to Service, lifts almost word for word the New Democrats' warmongering manifesto. "The time has come," he writes, "to revive a bold vision of progressive internationalism" along with a "tradition" that honors "the tough-minded strategy of international engagement and leadership forged by Wilson and Roosevelt . . . and championed by Truman and Kennedy in the cold war." Almost identical thoughts appear on page three of the New Democrats' manifesto:
As Democrats, we are proud of our party's tradition of tough-minded internationalism and strong record in defending America. Presidents Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D Roosevelt and Harry Truman led the United States to victory in two world wars . . . eventually triumphed in the cold war. President Kennedy epitomized America's commitment to "the survival and success of liberty."
Mark the historical lies in that statement: the "victory" of the US with its brief intervention in the First World War; the airbrushing of the decisive role of the Soviet Union in the Second World War; the American elite's nonexistent "triumph" over internally triggered events that brought down the Soviet Union; and John F Kennedy's famous devotion to "liberty" that oversaw the deaths of some three million people in Indo-China.
"Perhaps the most repulsive section of book," writes Mark Hand, editor of Press Action, the American media monitoring group, "is where Kerry discusses the Vietnam war and the antiwar movement." Self-promoted as a war hero, Kerry briefly joined the protest movement on his return from Vietnam. In this twin capacity, he writes: "I say to both conservative and liberal misinterpretations of that war that it's time to get over it and recognize it as an exception, not as a ruling example of the US military engagements of the 20th century."
"In this one passage," writes Hand, "Kerry seeks to justify the millions of people slaughtered by the US military and its surrogates during the 20th century suggests that concern about US war crimes in Vietnam is no longer necessary . . . Kerry and his colleagues in the 'progressive internationalist' movement are as gung-ho as their counterparts in the White House . . . Come November, who will get your vote? Coke or Pepsi?"
The "anyone but Bush" movement objects to the Coke-Pepsi analogy, and Ralph Nader is the current source of their ire. In Britain, seven years ago, similar derision was heaped upon those who pointed out the similarities between Tony Blair and his heroine Margaret Thatcher – similarities which have since been proven. "It's a nice and convenient myth that liberals are the peacemakers and conservatives the warmongers," wrote the Guardian commentator Hywel Williams. "But the imperialism of the liberal may be more dangerous because of its open-ended nature – its conviction that it represents a superior form of life."
Like the Blairites, John Kerry and his fellow New Democrats come from a tradition of liberalism that has built and defended empires as "moral" enterprises. That the Democratic Party has left a longer trail of blood, theft and subjugation than the Republicans is heresy to the liberal crusaders, whose murderous history always requires, it seems, a noble mantle."
Then you have these Ted Rall toons ( and I'm not sure I can link to them, so I will give dates and titles)
http://www.msnbc.com/comics/editorial_content.asp?sFile=tr040313
The New Democrats 3/13/04
During the 90's the Democrats wallowed in lethargy, 3/06/04
And a couple more going even further back.
Their main point is all the Democrats are running on is Any Democrat But Bush.
No real platform or vision.
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