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I’d love for someone, anyone, to explain to me why Iraq was the main breeding ground for terrorism that we had to tackle. Weren’t the terrorists who attacked our country mainly from Saudi Arabia? Isn’t the leader of Al-Qaeda the scion of a wealthy Saudi family? Don’t the Saudi people deserve liberation from the monarchists who are looting the oil wealth of their country? Of course, the deep economic relationships between the Bush family and the Saudi royal family couldn’t have influenced our foreign policy.
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Why has no one in the administration spoken about the fact that they guaranteed that there were weapons of mass destruction? The weapons that were our primary justification for starting the war aren’t there. Why has this become a non-issue? I’d have a lot more respect for the administration if they would at least say, “Hey, our intelligence was bad. I guess we made a bit of a mistake.”
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See my first point. Would the “Death Tax” have been repealed if the media referred to it over and over as the “Millionaire Death Tax”? would the “Clean Air Act” have passed if it were called the “Dump More Pollution in the Air Act”? <p>
Do I support our troops, or do I oppose the war? Both. It’s not an either or proposition.
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Folks, they are flim flamming us by <a href="http://www.rockridgeinstitute.org/perspectives/simple_framing">framing the words</a> used in public debate. They are smart enough to know that the “liberal” media will gobble up everything they say (remember the questioning reports about the justification for the war before it started…oh yeah, there wasn’t any), and regurgitate it in all of their reporting.
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The democrats are in many cases spineless, and I’ll be voting for Kerry with not a little bit of a bitter taste in my mouth. At the same time, I’m scared of what Bush will do with four more years in power. In four years he’s managed to alienate much of the free world, had us go from having a surplus to having a deficit through tax cuts for the very rich and 129 Billion on a purposeless war, and even gotten tons of Americans to participate in the unmitigated stupidity of “Freedom Fries”. <p>
Freedom fries! When did we slip into the bizarro world where our allies aversion to a war without provocation means that we should hate them? Is that the America we want to see? Last year, I made my first trip to Europe, including a week long stay in France. Everyone I met was nice, and most had nothing but great things to say about the US and NY in particular.
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Hating other people for having a different opinion is just plain stupid. News flash! There are tons of hard-working, patriotic, family people who are liberal and against the war in Iraq. There are tons of hard-working, patriotic, family people who are neo-conservatives and in favor of the war. Few of us want to let terrorists attack our country and kill our friends and family. Few of us think that our troops don’t deserve our support regardless of our opinions on the justifications for the war.
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The divisive political atmosphere in this country is disheartening, and I blame the administration for leading us off into this wilderness. Not because I disagree with their policies, but because they encourage and support the ugliest parts of the human spirit to push their policies through.
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Being closed to any opinions contrary to your own, including not being interested in reading newspapers, is not resolve or any other value that should be lauded. Real life is all about compromise and the exchange of ideas.
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War on terrorism? How do you have a war on a concept? You can’t. What you can do is turn people’s justifiable fears into irrational willingness to give up their rights. Giving up our civil liberties doesn’t make us safer, it makes us into the kind of society that we’ve always prided ourselves on being different than.
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I could go on and on, but their are much smarter and more informed people who you should be reading if you’ve made it this far.
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Btw, you’re free to agree or disagree with what I’ve written here. Either way, make sure you vote. I’ve never voted, because I’ve always thought the election was a sham run by two corporate puppet groups. Actually, I still think that. At the same time, I can’t help wondering how much of a better safer world we might have if all of the people who felt like I do had voted in 2000.
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