monsîeur lé kérry

"It's none of your business"

Presidential wannabe John F...ing Kerry responding to an
American Voter during a town hall meeting, March 2004

sandringham

Thank you for this proof of my claim that Bush supporters are
simple-minded, spouting lies and spin, and aren't interested in
context or ****ysis. You prove the point with your repetition of an
incomplete comment that Kerry made, without any context in which it
was said.

At Bush's campaign appearances, only Stepford-like supporters are
allowed access. With Kerry's speeches and Town Hall meetings, real
Americans of all political persuasions can attend – including plants
sent over by the GOP to hector and disrupt.

Kerry has a reputation for endless patience and a gentlemanly approach
with hecklers determined to needle him, disturb and disrupt his
rallies, speeches, meetings with constituents. Kerry has a long
history of being able to defuse situations. Diffusing situations
amongst people who are sincerely desirous of gaining understanding,
insight, and settling problems. The Bush plants' are sincere only in
desiring disruption, intimidation, bullying, peddling propaganda and
inhibiting information contrary to their beliefs from getting out.

The town meeting where this occurred was contentious, with 52-year-old
Cedric Brown, an admitted Bush supporter, continuously interrupting
Kerry and repeatedly pressing Kerry to name the foreign leaders whom
Kerry has said are backing his campaign.

"I'm not going to betray a private conversation with anybody,'' Kerry
said. As the crowd of several hundred people began to mutter and boo
the heckler, Kerry said, "That's none of your business.''

No thinking adult can doubt that the words of support for John Kerry
by some foreign leaders were told in strict confidence and had to be.
No thinking adult has any doubts at all that if Bush knew who they
were he would retaliate against them. These foreign leaders still
have to deal with Bush until he leaves office on 1/20/05. I have no
doubt that even Tony Blair is amongst them. Bush's is a mean,
dangerous and vengeful administration.

tempest

It's nice when they do your work for you, isn't it?


--
"The tyranny of a prince is not so dangerous to the public welfare as
the apathy of a citizen in a democracy."
- Baron de Montesquieu, 1748

vallecito

Negative ads are a pain in the ass, on that much we can agree. Too
bad Kerry started in with shit like "Bush went AWOL" or "Bush is a
moron" or "Bush is Adolf Hitler!" What did he expect with an attack
strategy like that? Did he think he was going to come out of it
unscathed? Typical liberal thinking. They attack, attack, attack,
then start whining when somebody finally reacts with a dose of their
own medicine.

sandringham

I challenge traveler to cite the source for Kerry saying that "Bush is
Hitler."

From the Washington Times, hardly a bed of liberalism, Bush went
negative first. That shows you what a thin skin Bush has. Kerry,
while the frontrunner, wasn't yet the presumptive nominee, and the
White House decided that it couldn't take the Democrats on-air primary
debate discussions of the facts of Bush's presidency - the failed
policies, the millions of lost jobs, escalating war casualties, rising
gas prices, environmental disasters making our food, water and air
supplies more dangerous. These are facts. Misrepresenting Kerry's
record (lying) only highlights that Bush has no defense for his
failing policies.

****ysis: Bush goes negative
WASHINGTON, March 12 (UPI) -- President George W. Bush is going down
and dirty, head-to-head with Sen. John Kerry in their ad war 7 1/2
months before the presidential election. It's an unusual and risky
strategy. But for him, it's the wise one.

The new ads come only a week after the controversy over using the
ruins of the World Trade Center on "9/11" in the president's previous
wave of campaign ads, and they mark a very different strategy. They do
not seek to elevate Bush as a wise and heroic "war president."
Instead, they cast him in a highly partisan light, an unusual tactic
for any in***bent president in a re-election campaign, especially this
early on.

The ads go strongly negative, another departure from the conventional
wisdom about where in***bent presidents should stand in re-election
races. They also mark an epochal departure from Bush's
long-established and hitherto highly successful strategy of remaining
above the fray -- even in his 2000 presidential race against then Vice
President Al Gore.

In the past, Bush, like his father, President George Herbert Walker
Bush, has had no compunction whatsoever about authorizing highly
negative, even dirty campaigns against his political foes: witness his
demolition of Arizona Sen. John McCain in South Carolina in 2000.

But both father and son always took care to appear to remain
personally above any unpleasantness, a pose that kept them both in
good stead. They continued to look like fine, upstanding gentlemen who
played by Marquis of Queensbury rules while their opponents got more
and more heated at the opprobrium they endured and finally lost their
cool.

But not this time: On Thursday, Bush rolled up his sleeves and hit out
directly at Kerry, his expected foe as the Democratic presidential
candidate. Bush accused Kerry of running a campaign of anger and said
his rival "hasn't offered much about strategies to win the war" on
terrorism.

Strategically, Bush is doing exactly what he needs do, and indeed, he
has started doing it dangerously late in the day. For over the past
two months, the president has skidded in nationwide opinion polls
while Kerry's standings have sky rocketed. All this has happened while
Kerry and his surrogates have hammered the president without pause on
one key issue after another.

They have given Bush not a moment's respite. When he started the
Daytona 500 NASCAR race in Florida, they put out a broadside accusing
him of indifference to the major job losses in the Sunshine State
during his presidency. When Bush handed out quality awards for U.S.
business, the Kerry campaign gave him an award too: their "Herbert
Hoover Award" for the most jobs lost under a single president since
the Great Depression.

Up to now, Kerry has prospered by doing to Bush exactly what Bush's
father did to Kerry's old boss, former Massachusetts Gov. Michael
Dukakis, during the 1988 presidential campaign. He has trashed the
president and his record mercilessly while the Bush team has been
first silent, then unsure and ineffective in answering back.

Finally, the Bush team is hitting back. They are blasting Kerry for
being "wrong on taxes, wrong on defense."

Will it work? Quite possibly, though by no means for sure. It is
easily the best strategy the Republicans have come up with so far. In
many respects it makes complete sense.

Bush's efforts to take the high road and present himself as a
dignified national leader above the political fight and as a seasoned
and steady "war president" failed to take. He cannot run on a
resurgent economy as he expected to, because, although macroeconomic
indicators have been improving, they have failed to translate into any
significant rise in manufacturing jobs, especially in the major
industrial states of the Northeast and Midwest where the election will
be decided.

Initiatives to boost the president's support among blacks, Jews and
Hispanics have all foundered. And even the Medicaid reform that was
supposed to pull in the seniors is beset with doubts and problems.
Kerry, following Howard Dean's lead, is making mincemeat of it. What
else can Bush do except go negative?

But there are huge dangers to this strategy too. First, as noted
above, successful in***bent presidents simply do not do this kind of
thing. Dwight D. Eisenhower didn't in 1956, Richard Nixon didn't in
1972, Ronald Reagan didn't in 1984 and Bill Clinton didn't in 1996.

It worked of course for Harry S. Truman in the now legendary campaign
of 1948. But Bush is no "Give 'Em Hell Harry," a fiery heir of the
populist creed who was running in a time of unprecedented prosperity
and peace, however precarious.

Second, Bush, like his father, just doesn't do macho confrontations.
He didn't do them with Gore in 2000, when he prospered by appearing
genial and above the race as Gore floundered in a surfeit of facts and
tried to corner him in their presidential debates. He didn't even dare
to do it directly with McCain in the 2000 Republican primaries race.

Bush and his team have never faced an opponent like Kerry before. They
have no experience in how to deal with him. Further, the more negative
Bush goes, the more it will free up Kerry to punch even harder and
more often.

The conventional wisdom about how U.S. presidential elections are won
has just gone out the door, too. This is no race to the center with
each side outdoing the other to woo undecided moderates in this race.
It is about mobilizing the party bases, with each side hammering the
other as hard and as often as possible like two heavily armored old
Dreadnought battleships caught in a fight to the finish. It will be
long and it will be ugly. But it will be great to watch.

http://washingtontimes.com/upi-breaking/20040312-013453-6912r.htm

tempest

He can't because Kerry never said it.

George Soros, however, did.

And if anyone would know about Fascists, it would be Soros.

"George Soros was born in Budapest, Hungary on August 12, 1930. He
survived the Nazi occupation of Budapest and left communist Hungary in
1947 for England, where he graduated from the London School of Economics
(LSE)." http://www.civicua.org/soros/en/about.html

--
"The tyranny of a prince is not so dangerous to the public welfare as
the apathy of a citizen in a democracy."
- Baron de Montesquieu, 1748

zero

Excuse me, but your partisanship is showing.

If only you hadn't decided to put your blinders back on...oh well.

fredr

Yeah, speaking the truth aboud Bush desering the Air National Guard
is really "negative ads." Yep! Funny how the good guys have yet to
bring up Bush's cocaine addiction, his drunk driving, his stellar
family values with his criminal brothers and his cocaie-addled
drunken daughters. Yep!

Another clue: Look at Chelsey Clinton and compare her with Bush's
doper, drunken daughters. Note the difference.

---
Scientology tries to disrupt terrorist attacks relief efforts: http://www.cosvm.org/
Anti-War / Anti-Fascism protest: http://www.linkline.com/personal/frice/awp.htm
The United States: Freedom of religion -- as long as it's Christianity.
Facts are a liberal conspiracy! -- AF