Politics

For you locals, there’s a potentially interesting talk tonight at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco: U.S. Health Care in Crisis, by the two Time Magazine investigative journalists who just wrote Critical Condition: How Health Care in America Became Big Business — And Bad Medicine. The interview on KQED’s Forum was good — if I can somehow make it to The City in time I’ll probably attend…

From an interview with Donna Ducarme of Democrats Abroad, in the November 5th issue of The Amsterdam Times:

I’m physically wiped and sore all over and mentally tired. I’m so angry I can hardly breathe. Those of us who fought for Kerry are very disappointed and frightened that he lost. We’re worried for the future of America. I’m so angry that he conceded before all the votes were counted.

My thing was to register all the voters we could possibly register; one of the reasons we got them registered is that we promised that their votes would matter and then he conceded before any of our votes had been counted. Kerry has created a problem amongst individual members but he’s also cut us overseas voting activists off at the knees because not only will potential voters not believe Kerry anymore, they won’t believe us.

I personally believe he has disenfranchised every overseas voter. We’re all voting by post and, when he conceded, all of our ballots were still sitting there in the boxes waiting to be counted. It’s a betrayal of a sort I’ve never experienced in my political life. We galvanized voters who’d not been involved in politics since the Vietnam years because they thought they could make a difference. Are we supposed to wait another thirty years before we rally those troops again and what happens to our country in the meantime?

I remember back when Reagan was running against Carter the word mandate meant a clear sign from the people that they supported a candidate, but it seems the word has eroded to the point that today it means “squeaked by with a 3% margin.” But at least he got more votes than the other guy this time, so I suppose that’s at least a mini-mandate. The question is, what’s it a mini-mandate for?

I’m pretty sure it’s not a mandate for:

• torturing and sodomizing our prisoners-of-war
• borrow-and-spend economic policy
• having a choice of if and when to go to war, but going in without proper planning anyway
• lying to cover your ass instead of admitting a mistake and moving on
• US imperialism

I expect most Bush supporters would agree on those points, though they may take offense that I’d even bring the topics up. I’m not nearly as certain it wasn’t a mandate for these other points though:

• the erosion of First and Fourth amendment rights in the name of security
• weakening of environmental regulations
• putting an end to the supression and misery long endured by the rich and powerful
• imprisonment or just plain “disappearing” people without trial, again in the name of security
• isolationism wrt Europe & the UN
• nation-building (ironically enough) wrt the Middle East
• discrimination against gays
• giving tax money to religious organizations

Electoral-Vote.com has a nice pictoral map of how the states came out, normalized by population. Makes me feel a little less outnumbered than the traditional map, especially considering California is over 12% of the nation’s population…

I’d also like to point out to those who keep talking about “Liberal California” that the split was only 54.6% to 45% for Kerry — lower than Hawaii or Illinois. It’s a big state, we contain multitudes.

Brief random musing: People always seem to see Republicans/Conservatives as macho, gunslinging, no-holds-barred, get-the-job-done-whatever-it-takes and see Democrats/Liberals as lovey-dovey, unwilling-to-hurt-anyone-or-take-a-stand… regardless of whether they’re actually that way or not.

Try this on for size: take Arnold Schwartzneger, George W. Bush and John Kerry. When it comes to having macho cred, what seperates the Democrat from the two Republicans?

Answer: Kerry is the only one to have personally killed a man with his own two hands. That’s an easy image to have of Schwartzneger of course — just rent it from Blockbuster. But picture it in your head for a second: Kerry’s hands soaked in blood, the gunshots still ringing in his ears. To me the image feels oddly out of context given his more professorial style now. But for some reason it’s easy to imagine buzz-boy-Bush with that macho image… even though I can’t quite bring myself to imagine it as it happens. Every time I try the image in my head always jumps to a vision of Bush and I having had too many drinks at the bar and he’s telling the same old story of how he got his scar… the one we never get tired of hearing ’cause it gets better with every telling.

DocBug Exclusive — with just a day before polls open, Fox News has declared George W. Bush the winner of what has proven to be the most contentious presidential election since four years ago. CNN, CBS and NBC took only minutes to jump on the breaking story with their own announcements of the Bush victory, but it was over an hour after the victory that ABC‘s Peter Jennings finally called the election for Bush. “We hadn’t finished designing our title-bar logos,” explained Jennings. Among broadcasters, NPR remains the sole hold-out to insist on waiting till the polls at least open before declaring a winner. Most major newspapers have also reported the Bush victory, except for the Chicago Daily Tribune, which has declared a victory for Thomas E. Dewey.

Just in case you were tempted to believe the spin that the HMX, RDX and PETN explosives at Al-Qaqaa had already disappeared when our troops arrived:

Dick Cheney:

It is not at all clear that those explosives were even at the weapons facility when our troops arrived in the area of Baghdad.

Bush campaign spokesman Scott Stanzel:

The weapons were not there when the military arrived, making John Kerry’s latest ripped-from-the-headlines attack baseless and false.

Tom Brokaw:

Last night on this broadcast we reported that the 101st Airborne never found the nearly 380 tons of HMX and RDX explosives. We did not conclude the explosives were missing or had vanished, nor did we say they missed the explosives. We simply reported that the 101st did not find them.

For its part, the Bush campaign immediately pointed to our report as conclusive proof that the weapons had been removed before the Americans arrived. That is possible, but that is not what we reported.

Associated Press, 5 April 2003 (emphasis mine):

Closer to Baghdad, troops at Iraq’s largest military industrial complex found nerve agent antidotes, documents describing chemical warfare and a white powder that appeared to be used for explosives.

UN weapons inspectors went repeatedly to the vast al Qa Qaa complex, most recently on March 8. But they found nothing during spot visits to some of the 1,100 buildings at the site 40 kilometres south of Baghdad.

Col. John Peabody, engineer brigade commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, said troops found thousands of five-centimetre by 12-centimetre boxes, each containing three vials of white powder, together with documents written in Arabic that dealt with how to engage in chemical warfare.

A senior U.S. official familiar with initial testing said the powder was believed to be explosives. The finding would be consistent with the plant’s stated production capabilities in the field of basic raw materials for explosives and propellants.

Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (emphasis mine):

RDX stands for Royal Demolition eXplosive. It is also known as cyclonite or hexogen. The chemical name for RDX is 1,3,5-trinitro-1,3,5-triazine. It is a white powder and is very explosive.

(Props to Media Matters, and to comments from Omri for prompting me to look for it.)

Latest two conservative publications to endorse Kerry: The New Republic and The Financial Times.

I’m not sure what to make of this. It’s apparently old-news, though new to me, but after the Madrid attack the terrorists who claimed credit for the Madrid bombing actually endorsed Bush:

A week after the Madrid attack, the Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades, which claims to act on behalf of al-Qaida, claimed responsibility for the bombing and declared a truce in Spain to see if the new government would withdraw its troops from Iraq, but warned that it was gearing up for new attacks.

This part of the declaration was widely reported. However, very few mentioned the more ominous part of that declaration, short of excerpts which were reported by the BBC and Reuters.

The declaration turned its attention to President Bush, saying:

“A word for the foolish Bush. We are very keen that you do not lose in the forthcoming elections as we know very well that any big attack can bring down your government and this is what we do not want.

“We cannot get anyone who is more foolish than you, who deals with matters with force instead of wisdom and diplomacy.

“Your stupidity and religious extremism is what we want as our people will not awaken from their deep sleep except when there is an enemy.

“Kerry will kill our nation while it sleeps because he and the Democrats have the cunning to embellish blasphemy and present it to the Arab and Muslim nation as civilisation.

“Because of this we desire you [Bush] to be elected.”

The logic makes sense to me, though I’m skeptical about their assessment of Democrat cunning. Bush supporters will no doubt claim it’s a double-bluff, and that “The Terrorists” really fear Bush. I think the scarier question is whether “The Terrorists” realize that a terrorist attack would mean a landslide for Bush? Could that be why there’s no evidence of an attack being planned before Nov. 2nd? [edit: what I mean is, if they do want Bush, will they lie low thinking an attack will have a Madrid-style effect, or try something thinking that will shore up Bush’s support? Ditto for if they’d like Bush out. This is why I was never good at poker…]

IAEA: Tons of Iraq explosives missing:

The explosives — considered powerful enough to demolish buildings or detonate nuclear warheads — were under IAEA control until the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003. IAEA workers left the country before the fighting began.

So we went in ostensibly looking for weapons of mass distruction, then didn’t even secure the sites we knew about? Why do people feel safe under this administration? For all the bickering about what mistakes they’ve made so far, what scares me is what mistake they’ll make next…