No, I didn't. High voter turnout implies people who usually don't bother to vote will vote. People who don't usually bother to vote tend to be stupid (or apathetic), and if it benefits Democrats... you do the math.
The fact of the matter is the Supreme Court has ruled that unborn babies are de facto property. That's the basis for the RvW decision, otherwise their argument (as flimsy as it is) does not hold.
In other words, it seems to assume the non-personhood and therefore the ruling can be made based on the right to privacy, which is itself a fairly lower case 'l' liberal reading of the Fourth Amendment (I'm not aruging against it, mind you).
I know you mentioned it, but I don't recall the basis you used for claim the Constitution cannot grant citizenship to the unborn. This is not the argument they used for throwing about abortion laws (although it would have actually made far more sense...). I would assume that given the lack of a definitive statement, it falls the states, which is how it was treated before 1973.
See that's the thing... Kerry talks the talk when it suits him, but he seems far too willing to adjust his position as the situation dictate. The President and especially the Vice President have spun their pre-war rhetoric retroactively, (essentially because they dumbed down their arguments for war for mass consumption and overplayed their hand), but they haven't materially changed their position. Everything they are saying today they HAD said before the war, just not as much as the smoking gun issues they were trying to produce. I still have to say that if the U.N. were worth the parking tickets it gathers in New York, this whole Iraq thing would have never happened. It's also funny how Clinton didn't get U.N. approval (as I understand it) to go to Kosovo, but no one criticizes him for it. Maybe because it wasn't expensive enough in money and lives.
p.s. Kerry may have raised his daughters on NFP, but he apprarently didn't teach them not to show off their boobies at Cannes.:-P
Of course. The problem is that the people who are most likely to get involved tend to be the ones most likely to allow themselves to be blinded by ideology, which is a short jump from being willing to break the law for your candidate.
But by the same token, people running around saying a million blacks (and similar nonsense) were disenfranchised are just sowing dissent, and trying to trash our democracy for the sake of politics.
Those are the leaders heading up the various insurgencies.
I understand that, but I never thought that these kinds of folks never had more than a small minority following them. It's always been my understanding is that most folks just want to be left alone to get on with their lives.
If I claim Bigfoot exists because someone took a picture of him (shown to be fake) and someone else has hair samples (determined to be from a dog) am I telling the truth or a lie when I say that I have evidence that Bigfoot exists?
Well, then it's a matter of semantics, if I understand you correctly. You cannot be lying unless you are deliberately saying something incorrect and you know it is. By that definition, you are not lying when you say Bigfoot exists... except that what you really should be saying is that ytou believe Bigfoot exists. It's a semantic difference that we usually ignore.
Kerry's argument is that the Constituation defines birth as the point in time that a human becomes a citizen and gains personhood. And he's right about that.
I realize I was mischaracterizing Kerry's position, but I completely disagree with his assertion that his belief is religious in basis.
What reasonable person expects to have to check and recheck that they can actually vote?
No one, but that was the way the law was. Like I said, the whole system was horribly screwed up. I hope (but am far from certain) that people have learned a good lesson from this.
Never attribute to malice what can adequetely explained by stupidity.
It's my corrollary to Occam's Razor. It makes much more sense to assume the system was broken (which is undeniable) than some villianous scheme to disenfranchise blacks.
The director of the Division of Elections failed to ensure that the list generated by the contractor (DBT) was consistently and thoroughly checked for errors across each county. The county election supervisors each did their own thing or nothing at all. Florida state law at the time placed the onus of verifying eligibility to vote on the voter. If you weren't allowed to vote, it was your responsibility to straighten it out. It was a broken system that failed at every level.
Trust me, there's more than enough blame to go around.
The supervisors of elections for each county decide what the ballots will look like, and those were largely Democratic. These voting procedures are subject to review at the county level, and were approved by members of both parties, as well as review by the Secretary of State, who was far from alone in approving questionable procedures.
The rules were clearly flawed, but you can't change the rules during the game if you want the game to be fair. Repeating selective recounts to achieve a desired goal is about as fair as hosing down Black voters to keep them from reaching the polls. Besides, the impartial recounts after the fact confirmed that Bush won Florida fair and square. The rest is FUD.
Maybe Florida needs to stop electing morons to the state legislature. Here in Virginia we use paper ballots that are machine-countable and they couldn't be clearer or simpler to fill out with a little black marker. Pretty obvious design if you ask me.
It seems Florida's election running machinery, which is largely run Democrats by the way, would rather make up some labyrinthine system that people can't understand, screw the whole thing up and then blame Republicans when they can't change their stupid rules mid-game. That's what they did in 2000 anyway. How hard is it to make a simple voting procedure?
I still don't see how electronic voting actually helps anyone but Diebold. You still need to have a piece of paper with the vote recorded on it when you're done. Typical U.S. reaction... throw a bunch of expensive technology at it rather than use something simple and proven like pencil and paper.
Oh well, it keeps people like me happily employed...
you don't realize that every paper has the same news articles from the AP or Knight Ridder)
Maybe so, but that talking car sure gets around...
Part of it is just getting the word out. If the blogs are copying each other on information you would not have otherwise seen, then they have served their purpose. The thing about the New Media isn't that there are so many more people investigating (although that has increased), it's that it's so much easier to get the word around.
Yeah, but that didn't make for a funny joke. It seems to me that bomb-sniffing dogs would have to be docile because you are not using them for their aggression, but for their ability to sense and communicate.
What's worse is if they pull you out of the line because of a false positive, and then bring out those big, nasty bomb-sniffing dogs and YOU smell like MEAT.
Yikes!
Now I can't take bacon on planes. Oh well, it's for security.
I appreciate someone willing to take the time to check the facts. Most people around here just parrot the appropriate party talking points.
With regard to the religious leaders gaining power in Iraq, are these the people that the Hadid Sixpack would vote for? I'm still convinced that Iraq can turn out like Turkey, or like it was back in the 60's before Saddam, which is a modern democracy. That is, assuming we don't cut and run before things can be more stabilized.
And yet the sanctions still were not lifted.
They would have been eventually... the biggest effect they were having was a lack of food and medicine for the citizens. This is why I think sanctions don't work against a country that doesn't care about its citizens. The leader sits in his palace in comfort while the country starves. See Cuba.
Just for the record, the only relevent bit you quote is actually on page 13 of the Nuclear section.
I know. I wanted to preemptively defuse criticism that I was taking things out of context.
I still don't see how you can say Bush "lied", since everyone else in the world was saying the same thing. This doesn't mean you can't argue the war was not the right thing to do, or that the timing wasn't right, but I can't help but recall Senator Kerry calling for the removal of Saddam Hussein from Iraq, unilaterally if necessary. Of course, this was when Clinton was president. I can't help but recall Senator Kennedy warning about the threat of Iraq's WMD, something that no one was arguing he didn't have. This was around the time the inspectors were kicked out and wouldn't return for 5 years.
All this talk about yellowcake makes me hungry for dessert.
Um. Apparently you didn't read my post, because I said that if that was the case, then that seems fair.
Your attempts to confuse this issue with false fears of imagined chicanery are disingenuous. We both know that high voter turnout benefits Democrats. I suspect that is what has you up in arms.
No, I'm just hearing lots of reports of problems on both sides. I am amused because your last statement seems to imply that stupid people tend to vote Democrat though.
I'm not up in arms about anything that's fair and legal.
Please don't confuse me with the Rush Limbaugh guy above.
But as usual, this seems to be opening the door for possible fraud, since it seems you could only verify that each person voted once after the fact, unless there is some kind of centralized electronic database of whether or not each registered voter in Ohio voted or not.
What's to stop me from crossing the state and going into to every poll and state "Oh, my! I am in the wrong place. Please let me vote, anyway because my bunions hurt and I could not possibly wait in line again"? If there is a reasonable way to verify people can only vote once, and a reasonable chance that someone who tries to vote twice will be convicted of voter fraud (that is illegal isn't it?), then this seems fair. If the provisional ballots are different and identifyable then I guess this would be true.
Any time the voting procedure is changed these days I'm suspicious that it is driven by the desire to disenfranchise voters of one party or inapproapriately enfranchise those of the other. Maybe it's all the hype, but it seems everyone is going out of their way to cheat.
Regardless of how it falls, I hope it's by a big enough margin that we don't see a repeat of 2000, because it's a good bet the state legislatures haven't learned the lessons of Florida in 2000.
A sigh of relief rose from the collective pirates of the world, who realized they would not have to spend the extra half-hour hacking Microsoft OS activation for machines with multi-core processors and could instead catch a Simpsons rerun.
I celebrated the conception day of my son just last month!
We likewise knew within a day or so for each of our kids. It's not hard really.
I think the humanity of the unborn can adequately be proved without resorting to any Declarations, religious doctrine or even science. All you need to do is simply ask, if the unborn child is not a living person, than what is she, and why? Can you define when and how, besides conception, you could have someone who is a person, but was not five minutes prior.
Going down that route, you can only conclude one of two things:
1. The definition of what is human is arbitary and malleable (such as the parent post's ludicrous assertion), which logically leads in the extreme to the conclusion that murder is simply not immoral. You cannot be guilty of murdering that which is not human. Anything you define to be not human, therefore, cannot be murdered. This stance is a very popular rationalization for all kinds of evil down through history.
or,
2. The definition of what is human depends on how much money you have. I draw this conclusion because the only truly decisive point between conception and birth is viability, which depends on your access to technology and therefore money. It will probably be possible to fully raise humans to term ex utero in the next several decades. This will cause lots of problems for some people's thinking.
I've thought about this a lot over the years, and there is simply no hole in the concept that human beings are living human beings from conception. The irony about the abortion issue is that it seems that more and more pro-abortion people (like John Kerry) are realizing they cannot win the "unborn babies aren't human" argument and are simply stating that "yeah, they're human, but I don't care". We all know where this slippery slope goes. This goes to show the lengths to which people will go to reach their foregone conclusions. John Kerry, in particular, deliberately confuses Natural Law with religious doctrine to justify a contradictory political stance. His stance necessitates that his claim of the humanity of a newly conceived person is merely a label, and not a fact, and suggests a position of relativism on Catholic doctrine, which may fly in political circles, but does not cut it for someone who claims to be a good Catholic. In the end, it boils down to grubbing for votes.
This is different from the morality concerning capital punishment, which is not absolute and unchanging. In Catholic terms, capital punishment, as described by the Cathechism, is permissible when no other alternative exists to maintain safety and order. I believe this is consistent with the doctrine of just war and the right to self-defense. However, I believe it is difficult if not impossible to argue that here in the United States (or perhaps anywhere in the world) there is ever a situation that would necessitate such a sentence. However, this is at least arguable and is not a complete absolute. Even without that I would base my oppostion to capital merely on the grounds that I don't think it does any good. Any safeguards that must be in place to even pretend that a wrong conviction won't occur will prevent capital punishment from ever being a true deterrent. A convict can simply play the system indefinitely (if he can afford the lawyers, that is).
Not past age 30- there's some real proof that once your brain cells begin to die of old age, you can't really form new behavior patterns.
Nonsense. People do it all the time.
Well, to me the very definition of all that is good in social conservativism is the Pope as head of the Roman Catholic Church
The is perhaps the only time the Pope has ever said anything that I didn't agree with... and here's why: The Pope seems to think we should treat the U.N. as what it's supposed to be, and not what it is, which is ineffectual, vascillating and corrupt. His theory is completely valid, but the application to this latter day League of Nations will only lead to more death and destruction. If there were any chance we could have relied on the U.N. for anything other than finger-waving, I would have been against the war.
In addition, Kerry is very much a social conservative privately
Or so he says. If he believes life begins at conception, and yet he supports abortion, he is in effect condoning the murder of innocents. This is inconsistent and hypocritical beyond belief. Like so much of what Kerry says, if you put it together, you get the most bizarre or illogical results. I don't buy his social conservatism for a minute, and regardless, it's irrelevant because it does not dictate how he would govern, that's what the polls are for. Kerry's entire candicacy was built on contradicting Bush. He's a cypher... which is not surprising since the Democrats are simply capitalizing on the polls from 2002 that showed Bush would lose against an unnnamed Democrat.
people like Bush until they can hear him
Funny, I felt better about him after each debate. Kerry announced his "global test" concept and then spent the next two debates back-pedalling from it. Everything else he had to say was 10-figure give-aways and a bunch of empty platitudes or descrptions of best-case scenarios posing as some kind of "plan", oh yeah, and cheap shots. I don't even think he's even pretending that anything he's offering is even realistic any more. Meanwhile, his snake-oil salesman shyster veep candidate is promising more miracles than Easter Sunday. I'm surprised he hasn't tried channelling Christopher Reeves... or raising him from the dead. The VP debate was a joke. It was like watching a professor debating a puppy.
Slashdot Mirror
No, I didn't. High voter turnout implies people who usually don't bother to vote will vote. People who don't usually bother to vote tend to be stupid (or apathetic), and if it benefits Democrats... you do the math.
Mod up as funny! Or maybe disgusting... I'm not up on prison double-entendres.
Funny you should mention that. Here's a recent comment I posted on the topic (elsewhere in this thread, you might have seen it):
5 70808
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=126268&cid=10
The fact of the matter is the Supreme Court has ruled that unborn babies are de facto property. That's the basis for the RvW decision, otherwise their argument (as flimsy as it is) does not hold.
In other words, it seems to assume the non-personhood and therefore the ruling can be made based on the right to privacy, which is itself a fairly lower case 'l' liberal reading of the Fourth Amendment (I'm not aruging against it, mind you).
I know you mentioned it, but I don't recall the basis you used for claim the Constitution cannot grant citizenship to the unborn. This is not the argument they used for throwing about abortion laws (although it would have actually made far more sense...). I would assume that given the lack of a definitive statement, it falls the states, which is how it was treated before 1973.
:-P
See that's the thing... Kerry talks the talk when it suits him, but he seems far too willing to adjust his position as the situation dictate. The President and especially the Vice President have spun their pre-war rhetoric retroactively, (essentially because they dumbed down their arguments for war for mass consumption and overplayed their hand), but they haven't materially changed their position. Everything they are saying today they HAD said before the war, just not as much as the smoking gun issues they were trying to produce. I still have to say that if the U.N. were worth the parking tickets it gathers in New York, this whole Iraq thing would have never happened. It's also funny how Clinton didn't get U.N. approval (as I understand it) to go to Kosovo, but no one criticizes him for it. Maybe because it wasn't expensive enough in money and lives.
p.s. Kerry may have raised his daughters on NFP, but he apprarently didn't teach them not to show off their boobies at Cannes.
Of course. The problem is that the people who are most likely to get involved tend to be the ones most likely to allow themselves to be blinded by ideology, which is a short jump from being willing to break the law for your candidate.
But by the same token, people running around saying a million blacks (and similar nonsense) were disenfranchised are just sowing dissent, and trying to trash our democracy for the sake of politics.
Those are the leaders heading up the various insurgencies.
I understand that, but I never thought that these kinds of folks never had more than a small minority following them. It's always been my understanding is that most folks just want to be left alone to get on with their lives.
If I claim Bigfoot exists because someone took a picture of him (shown to be fake) and someone else has hair samples (determined to be from a dog) am I telling the truth or a lie when I say that I have evidence that Bigfoot exists?
Well, then it's a matter of semantics, if I understand you correctly. You cannot be lying unless you are deliberately saying something incorrect and you know it is. By that definition, you are not lying when you say Bigfoot exists... except that what you really should be saying is that ytou believe Bigfoot exists. It's a semantic difference that we usually ignore.
Besides, Bigfoot stole my wife.
Skin holds in the molecules in question?
Kerry's argument is that the Constituation defines birth as the point in time that a human becomes a citizen and gains personhood. And he's right about that.
I realize I was mischaracterizing Kerry's position, but I completely disagree with his assertion that his belief is religious in basis.
What reasonable person expects to have to check and recheck that they can actually vote?
No one, but that was the way the law was. Like I said, the whole system was horribly screwed up. I hope (but am far from certain) that people have learned a good lesson from this.
Never attribute to malice what can adequetely explained by stupidity.
It's my corrollary to Occam's Razor. It makes much more sense to assume the system was broken (which is undeniable) than some villianous scheme to disenfranchise blacks.
++ Say to Elrond "Hello.".
I see no Elrond here.
Who illegaly DQ'ed 50,000 ex felons
The director of the Division of Elections failed to ensure that the list generated by the contractor (DBT) was consistently and thoroughly checked for errors across each county. The county election supervisors each did their own thing or nothing at all. Florida state law at the time placed the onus of verifying eligibility to vote on the voter. If you weren't allowed to vote, it was your responsibility to straighten it out. It was a broken system that failed at every level.
Trust me, there's more than enough blame to go around.
The supervisors of elections for each county decide what the ballots will look like, and those were largely Democratic. These voting procedures are subject to review at the county level, and were approved by members of both parties, as well as review by the Secretary of State, who was far from alone in approving questionable procedures.
The rules were clearly flawed, but you can't change the rules during the game if you want the game to be fair. Repeating selective recounts to achieve a desired goal is about as fair as hosing down Black voters to keep them from reaching the polls. Besides, the impartial recounts after the fact confirmed that Bush won Florida fair and square. The rest is FUD.
A lot of people think of dogs like that as really ill-tempered, aggressive animals,
;-)
In other words, people think dogs are like people.
Maybe Florida needs to stop electing morons to the state legislature. Here in Virginia we use paper ballots that are machine-countable and they couldn't be clearer or simpler to fill out with a little black marker. Pretty obvious design if you ask me.
It seems Florida's election running machinery, which is largely run Democrats by the way, would rather make up some labyrinthine system that people can't understand, screw the whole thing up and then blame Republicans when they can't change their stupid rules mid-game. That's what they did in 2000 anyway. How hard is it to make a simple voting procedure?
I still don't see how electronic voting actually helps anyone but Diebold. You still need to have a piece of paper with the vote recorded on it when you're done. Typical U.S. reaction... throw a bunch of expensive technology at it rather than use something simple and proven like pencil and paper.
Oh well, it keeps people like me happily employed...
you don't realize that every paper has the same news articles from the AP or Knight Ridder)
Maybe so, but that talking car sure gets around...
Part of it is just getting the word out. If the blogs are copying each other on information you would not have otherwise seen, then they have served their purpose. The thing about the New Media isn't that there are so many more people investigating (although that has increased), it's that it's so much easier to get the word around.
it was condescending and insulting to the journalists
That wouldn't be because most journalists are morons, now would it?
Yeah, but that didn't make for a funny joke. It seems to me that bomb-sniffing dogs would have to be docile because you are not using them for their aggression, but for their ability to sense and communicate.
What's worse is if they pull you out of the line because of a false positive, and then bring out those big, nasty bomb-sniffing dogs and YOU smell like MEAT.
Yikes!
Now I can't take bacon on planes. Oh well, it's for security.
I appreciate someone willing to take the time to check the facts. Most people around here just parrot the appropriate party talking points.
With regard to the religious leaders gaining power in Iraq, are these the people that the Hadid Sixpack would vote for? I'm still convinced that Iraq can turn out like Turkey, or like it was back in the 60's before Saddam, which is a modern democracy. That is, assuming we don't cut and run before things can be more stabilized.
And yet the sanctions still were not lifted.
They would have been eventually... the biggest effect they were having was a lack of food and medicine for the citizens. This is why I think sanctions don't work against a country that doesn't care about its citizens. The leader sits in his palace in comfort while the country starves. See Cuba.
Just for the record, the only relevent bit you quote is actually on page 13 of the Nuclear section.
I know. I wanted to preemptively defuse criticism that I was taking things out of context.
I still don't see how you can say Bush "lied", since everyone else in the world was saying the same thing. This doesn't mean you can't argue the war was not the right thing to do, or that the timing wasn't right, but I can't help but recall Senator Kerry calling for the removal of Saddam Hussein from Iraq, unilaterally if necessary. Of course, this was when Clinton was president. I can't help but recall Senator Kennedy warning about the threat of Iraq's WMD, something that no one was arguing he didn't have. This was around the time the inspectors were kicked out and wouldn't return for 5 years.
All this talk about yellowcake makes me hungry for dessert.
Um. Apparently you didn't read my post, because I said that if that was the case, then that seems fair.
Your attempts to confuse this issue with false fears of imagined chicanery are disingenuous. We both know that high voter turnout benefits Democrats. I suspect that is what has you up in arms.
No, I'm just hearing lots of reports of problems on both sides. I am amused because your last statement seems to imply that stupid people tend to vote Democrat though.
I'm not up in arms about anything that's fair and legal.
Please don't confuse me with the Rush Limbaugh guy above.
But as usual, this seems to be opening the door for possible fraud, since it seems you could only verify that each person voted once after the fact, unless there is some kind of centralized electronic database of whether or not each registered voter in Ohio voted or not.
What's to stop me from crossing the state and going into to every poll and state "Oh, my! I am in the wrong place. Please let me vote, anyway because my bunions hurt and I could not possibly wait in line again"? If there is a reasonable way to verify people can only vote once, and a reasonable chance that someone who tries to vote twice will be convicted of voter fraud (that is illegal isn't it?), then this seems fair. If the provisional ballots are different and identifyable then I guess this would be true.
Any time the voting procedure is changed these days I'm suspicious that it is driven by the desire to disenfranchise voters of one party or inapproapriately enfranchise those of the other. Maybe it's all the hype, but it seems everyone is going out of their way to cheat.
Regardless of how it falls, I hope it's by a big enough margin that we don't see a repeat of 2000, because it's a good bet the state legislatures haven't learned the lessons of Florida in 2000.
Nothing is more pitiful than a fool who will vote for the guy who hands him his pink slip.
I'm the Vice-President, you insensitive clod.
What, do they run their billing software on an old Pentium?
SCO likewise will charge twice as much for Linux running dual-core processors, which means they will also receive 2 times 0 for each copy of Linux.
A sigh of relief rose from the collective pirates of the world, who realized they would not have to spend the extra half-hour hacking Microsoft OS activation for machines with multi-core processors and could instead catch a Simpsons rerun.
I celebrated the conception day of my son just last month!
We likewise knew within a day or so for each of our kids. It's not hard really.
I think the humanity of the unborn can adequately be proved without resorting to any Declarations, religious doctrine or even science. All you need to do is simply ask, if the unborn child is not a living person, than what is she, and why? Can you define when and how, besides conception, you could have someone who is a person, but was not five minutes prior.
Going down that route, you can only conclude one of two things:
1. The definition of what is human is arbitary and malleable (such as the parent post's ludicrous assertion), which logically leads in the extreme to the conclusion that murder is simply not immoral. You cannot be guilty of murdering that which is not human. Anything you define to be not human, therefore, cannot be murdered. This stance is a very popular rationalization for all kinds of evil down through history.
or,
2. The definition of what is human depends on how much money you have. I draw this conclusion because the only truly decisive point between conception and birth is viability, which depends on your access to technology and therefore money. It will probably be possible to fully raise humans to term ex utero in the next several decades. This will cause lots of problems for some people's thinking.
I've thought about this a lot over the years, and there is simply no hole in the concept that human beings are living human beings from conception. The irony about the abortion issue is that it seems that more and more pro-abortion people (like John Kerry) are realizing they cannot win the "unborn babies aren't human" argument and are simply stating that "yeah, they're human, but I don't care". We all know where this slippery slope goes. This goes to show the lengths to which people will go to reach their foregone conclusions. John Kerry, in particular, deliberately confuses Natural Law with religious doctrine to justify a contradictory political stance. His stance necessitates that his claim of the humanity of a newly conceived person is merely a label, and not a fact, and suggests a position of relativism on Catholic doctrine, which may fly in political circles, but does not cut it for someone who claims to be a good Catholic. In the end, it boils down to grubbing for votes.
This is different from the morality concerning capital punishment, which is not absolute and unchanging. In Catholic terms, capital punishment, as described by the Cathechism, is permissible when no other alternative exists to maintain safety and order. I believe this is consistent with the doctrine of just war and the right to self-defense. However, I believe it is difficult if not impossible to argue that here in the United States (or perhaps anywhere in the world) there is ever a situation that would necessitate such a sentence. However, this is at least arguable and is not a complete absolute. Even without that I would base my oppostion to capital merely on the grounds that I don't think it does any good. Any safeguards that must be in place to even pretend that a wrong conviction won't occur will prevent capital punishment from ever being a true deterrent. A convict can simply play the system indefinitely (if he can afford the lawyers, that is).
Not past age 30- there's some real proof that once your brain cells begin to die of old age, you can't really form new behavior patterns.
Nonsense. People do it all the time.
Well, to me the very definition of all that is good in social conservativism is the Pope as head of the Roman Catholic Church
The is perhaps the only time the Pope has ever said anything that I didn't agree with... and here's why:
The Pope seems to think we should treat the U.N. as what it's supposed to be, and not what it is, which is ineffectual, vascillating and corrupt. His theory is completely valid, but the application to this latter day League of Nations will only lead to more death and destruction. If there were any chance we could have relied on the U.N. for anything other than finger-waving, I would have been against the war.
In addition, Kerry is very much a social conservative privately
Or so he says. If he believes life begins at conception, and yet he supports abortion, he is in effect condoning the murder of innocents. This is inconsistent and hypocritical beyond belief. Like so much of what Kerry says, if you put it together, you get the most bizarre or illogical results.
I don't buy his social conservatism for a minute, and regardless, it's irrelevant because it does not dictate how he would govern, that's what the polls are for. Kerry's entire candicacy was built on contradicting Bush. He's a cypher... which is not surprising since the Democrats are simply capitalizing on the polls from 2002 that showed Bush would lose against an unnnamed Democrat.
people like Bush until they can hear him
Funny, I felt better about him after each debate. Kerry announced his "global test" concept and then spent the next two debates back-pedalling from it. Everything else he had to say was 10-figure give-aways and a bunch of empty platitudes or descrptions of best-case scenarios posing as some kind of "plan", oh yeah, and cheap shots. I don't even think he's even pretending that anything he's offering is even realistic any more. Meanwhile, his snake-oil salesman shyster veep candidate is promising more miracles than Easter Sunday. I'm surprised he hasn't tried channelling Christopher Reeves... or raising him from the dead. The VP debate was a joke. It was like watching a professor debating a puppy.