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Brainbell Jangler wrote:
Insulting Our Intelligence
by Thomas Friedman

George Bush, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld think you're stupid. Yes, they do.

They think they can take a mangled quip about President Bush and Iraq by John Kerry--a man who is not even running for office but who, unlike Bush and Cheney, never ran away from combat service--and get you to vote against all Democrats in this election.

Every time you hear Bush or Cheney lash out against Kerry, I hope you will say to yourself, "They must think I'm stupid." Because they surely do.

They think they can get you to overlook all of the Bush team's real and deadly insults to the U.S. military over the past six years by hyping and exaggerating Kerry's mangled gibe at the president.

What could possibly be more injurious and insulting to the U.S. military than to send it into combat in Iraq without enough troops--to launch an invasion of a foreign country not by the Powell Doctrine of overwhelming force, but by the Rumsfeld Doctrine of just enough troops to lose? What could be a bigger insult than that?

What could possibly be more injurious and insulting to our men and women in uniform than sending them off to war without the proper equipment, so that some soldiers in the field were left to buy their own body armor?

And what could be more injurious and insulting than Don Rumsfeld's response to criticism that he sent our troops off in haste and unprepared: Hey, you go to war with the army you've got--get over it.

What could possibly be more injurious and insulting to our men and women in uniform than to send them off to war in Iraq without any coherent post-war plan for political reconstruction there, so that the U.S. military has had to assume not only security responsibilities for all of Iraq but the political rebuilding as well?

And what could possibly be more injurious and insulting to our men and women in Iraq than to send them off to war and then go out and finance the very people they're fighting against with our gluttonous consumption of oil? Sure, George W. Bush told us we're addicted to oil, but he has not done one single significant thing--demanded higher mileage standards, imposed a gasoline tax or even used the bully pulpit of the White House to drive conservation--to end that addiction. So we continue to finance the U.S. military with our tax dollars, while we finance Iran, Syria, Wahhabi mosques and al-Qaida madrassas with our energy purchases.

Everyone says Karl Rove is a genius. Yeah, right. So are cigarette companies. They get you to buy cigarettes even though we know they cause cancer. That is the kind of genius Karl Rove is. He is not a man who has designed a strategy to reunite our country around an agenda of renewal for the 21st century--to bring out the best in us. His "genius" is taking some irrelevant aside by John Kerry and twisting it to bring out the worst in us, so you will ignore the mess the Bush team has visited on this country.

And Karl Rove has succeeded at that in the past because he was sure he could sell just enough Bush cigarettes, even though people knew they caused cancer. Please, please, for our country's health, prove him wrong this time.

Let Karl know that you're not stupid. Let him know that you know that the most patriotic thing to do in this election is to vote against an administration that has--through sheer incompetence--brought us to a point in Iraq that was not inevitable but is now unwinnable.

Let Karl know you think this is a critical election, because you know as a citizen that if the Bush team can behave with the level of deadly incompetence it has exhibited in Iraq--and then get away with it by holding on to the House and the Senate--it means our country has become a banana republic. It means our democracy is in tatters because it is so gerrymandered, so polluted by money and so divided by professional political hacks that we can no longer hold the ruling party to account.

It means we're as stupid as Karl thinks we are.

I, for one, don't think we're that stupid. Next Tuesday, we'll see.

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StarvinMarvin wrote:
Why the American public gave Bush a second term is one of those imponderable mysteries that will likely never be solved. What were you people thinking?

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