Is there anything more offensive about political parties than their insistence upon boiling complex truths down to a bumper sticker? You say parties don’t do that? The hell they don’t. That’s what they’re all about — simplifying things so that voters don’t have to think. Just pull the lever, and go back to stuffing your face in front of the tube…
At the moment, one of the parties is running a bumper-sticker contest. Sorry, but it’s a bit late to have your own submissions considered. They’re down to four finalists, which you can see here.
Sure, this time it’s the Democrats, but Republicans — who as I recall stuck "Don’t Blame Me; I Voted for Bush" on their bumpers before Bill Clinton even took the oath of office in 1993 — have no room to talk here.
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Of course they do. When things get complicated most people either lose interest or blame those who are explaining the complications for it being complicated. Very few will ask, and ask again until they understand. That’s one reason I think that Mr. Bush was elected. He kept it very simple, and invoked ‘that old time religion.’ I think that he believed that what he said was true. Unfortunately this world is not that simple.
While I agree with your point, you can’t tell me you didn’t chuckle at “About Dem Time.”
Dem’s da breaks
For taxpayers’ backs.
I’d hate to see our prospects Dem.
He kept it very simple, and invoked ‘that old time religion.’ I think that he believed that what he said was true. Unfortunately this world is not that simple.
-Karen
Maybe in the 2000 election Bush believed what he said. He had me fooled. I thought he would be a compassionate conservative. (His attacks on McCain turned me off enough that I couldn’t vote GOP though. I was a Nader voter in 2000. I foolishly bought into the ‘Al Gore is a nut’ spin).
But I don’t believe he actually felt Saddam was the big threat his administration claimed in late 2002. I believe that was just a big cover story to go in. The real reasons were much more pie-in-the-sky (along with a bit of revenge factor). Bush and company believed we could march in and transform the country into a pro-US democracy that would somehow serve as a beacon of democracy for the entire region. But he simply flat-out lied about the threat Iraq posed to U.S. interests. The Downing Street memo is the smoking gun on this whole sordid affair.
Bottom line: Bush lied us into a war thinking it would be easy and everyone would quickly forget the false pretenses for going in. Those false pretenses were nothing but a ruse to drum up support. And we’re still seeing this ruse today. With false claims about the success of the “surge” the Decider is still playing the deception card in order to run out the clock on his term.
From MSNBC:
Recent estimates by the media, outside groups and some government agencies have called the military’s findings into question. The Associated Press last week counted 1,809 civilian deaths in August, making it the highest monthly total this year, with 27,564 civilians killed overall since the AP began collecting data in April 2005.
The GAO report found that “average number of daily attacks against civilians have remained unchanged from February to July 2007.”
-MSNBC
So much for the success of the “surge”. Ron Paul was the only GOP candidate on last night’s debate who made any sense on the occupation issue. All the others could talk about was “the need to win” or “we need to honor the fallen soldiers”. Can’t we have a coherent discussion about national security instead of these worn out neo-con cliches?
Bud, First of all I think Bush believed his “truths” about nation building and spreading democracy. They did a fine job of masking his desire for revenge and his grandiose ambitions. And they were simple. The world was and remains more difficult. He cherry picks his “truths” great and small. Likewise, those hackneyed phrase about needing to win and honoring our fallen are simple truths taken out of context and used as mantras. We already won when we toppled Saddam. And how does it honor our fallen soldiers to have a few, or many, more fall because they are caught in the middle of an insurgency and a civil war that we made possible? How many more men, women, and children have to die to support Mr. Bush’s ‘simple truths’?