KerryEdwards vs. Bush...
Here's the case KerryEdwards is making as to why they should be the next Presidential tag-team:
1. Bush lied about WMD's - despite the fact that WMD's are being discovered almost weekly in Iraq, the other side keeps repeating this lie. They base this on the CIA's admission that it had faulty intelligence, conveniently forgetting the fact that every major western intelligence agency had the same information and was thinking the same things. Even when presented with evidence of WMD's, for example, the sarin and VX artillery shells unearthed by Polish troops recently, the argument becomes "yes, but those are not NEW WMD's" despite the fact that said weapons were never declared and never discovered by UN inspectors. The bottom line is that since Iraq purposely misled the UN and did everything in it's power to prevent verification of destruction of it's WMD programs, based on the track record and even the faulty intelligence, only an idiot (like Bill Clinton, for example) would sit on his hands.
2. No link between Al-Qaeda and Iraq - there sure as hell is. There are DOCUMENTED meetings between the Iraqi government, UBL's boys and direct evidence the Iraqis trained Al-Qeada operatives inside Iraq. The Czech intelligence service will tell you, until they are blue in the face, that they KNOW Mohammed Atta, of 9/11 fame, met with known Iraqi intel officers in Prague. There are 66 pages in the recently released Congressional report about intelligence failings prior to 9/11 that SPECIFICALLY point out all that is known about Iraq/Al-Qaeda contacts. Perhaps democrats can't read?
3. No International Support for the War - Hmm, let's see. Colin Powell and George Bush go the UN, hat in hand, and BEGGED the UN to enforce it own resolutions on Iraq (12 of them, I believe). They then go to NATO and ask for troops when the UN, predictably, sits on it's hands. As of this date, troops from Britain, Canada, Australia, Germany, the Phillipines, Japan, South Korea, Poland, Bulgaria, just to name a few, are in Iraq and Afghanistan with troops or lending whatever support they can to the War on Terror. I guess it's only a TRULY international force or alliance if the French are in it, and subsequently, undermining it at the same time.
4. Jobs - the hot-button issue these days is outsourcing, but Kerry misses the point. According to his view of economics, outsourcing is driven by the need to lower costs by screwing American workers in favor of slave-laborers overseas. Actually what drives it is the costs of providing benefits for workers: health care costs have skyrocketed for over two decades and it now costs corporations more to provide health coverage for employees than it does to actually PAY them. Despite 10 years of "12 out of 10 people in this country don't have adequate health care" talk from the democrats, they have done NOTHING about it. KerryEdwards also promises to create "5 million new jobs", although exactly HOW is never explained. The only way a President KerryEdwards could do that would be to make all 5 million of those folks government workers, or to destroy the concept of free-market capitalism by direct government intervention (read: nationalization) in business.
5. Tax Cuts - went to the wealthy only, don't you know. So, I wonder if KerryEdwards gave theirs back on principle? To their way of thinking, that was not taxpayer money, that was the gubmint's money --- hence all the talk about our "squandered surplus". In their minds, giving the money back to the people who actually CREATED and EARNED it in the first place is tantamount to a national disaster. We all KNOW government would have done the right thing with that money, like spend it on midnight bingo for our seniors or name another strip of deserted highway for Martin Luther King.
6. The Intelligence Factor -- Bush is an idiot, we're smarter. We engage in "nuance". Nusance is defined as talking out of both sides of your mouth and your anus simultaneously. Nuance is the ability to split hairs: yes, Saddam Hussein was a bad man, but he was OUR bad man and it was better to leave him in power (since we put him there anyway) than it was to "liberate" 20 million Iraqis. Especially when the French poo-pooed the whole idea. Nuance means you can vote for war today and them backpedal furiously dropping verbal raodblocks and making contradictory statements as you run away from it. And it's okay, not like the press is going ot hold you accountable for it. Bush, whether he posseses the same aggregate level of intelligence of KerryEdwards is at least a straight shooter. Your choice: subtle shades of verbal bullshit or simplistic sentences that get directly to the point.