Another endorsement
Christopher Hitchens has endorsed Kerry, as follows:
I am assuming for now that this is a single-issue election. There is one's subjective vote, one's objective vote, and one's ironic vote. Subjectively, Bush (and Blair) deserve to be re-elected because they called the enemy by its right name and were determined to confront it. Objectively, Bush deserves to be sacked for his flabbergasting failure to prepare for such an essential confrontation. Subjectively, Kerry should be put in the pillory for his inability to hold up on principle under any kind of pressure. Objectively, his election would compel mainstream and liberal Democrats to get real about Iraq.
The ironic votes are the endorsements for Kerry that appear in Buchanan's anti-war sheet The American Conservative, and the support for Kerry's pro-war candidacy manifested by those simple folks at MoveOn.org. I can't compete with this sort of thing, but I do think that Bush deserves praise for his implacability, and that Kerry should get his worst private nightmare and have to report for duty.
Right. A single-issue election. And I'm glad such a soused neo-flake is using this landscape of casualties and fictive WMD's as an occasion for irony. [via Low Culture]
In other pointless news: 24 new papers that endorsed Bush in 2000 are endorsing Kerry this year.
posted by Mark D. @ 1:11 AM |
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6 Comments:
Well there's no denying that the endorsements are rolling in for Kerry! Here's another:
The Army of Ansar al-Sunnah, of hostage beheading fame, issued this press release~
Praise be to Allah, it increased the joy in our hearts that John Kerry, the presidential candidate criticized the Bush government for taking so long in making this declaration.
The one who may be president of America [John Kerry] is already struck with terror by our brothers from the Tawheed wal-Jihad Movement [Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's group].
The repeated atacks that have targetted the evil Bush are now echoing on Kerry, even though he is not yet a president.
This is what Allah means when he commands us to 'terrorize your enemy and the enemy of Allah."
Oops, forgot to provide a link:
http://www.globalterroralert.com/ansarsunnah1004-4.pdf
All of these endorsements have really energized Kerry for President activists too!
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20041027-121030-7792r.htm
Terrorists hope to defeat Bush through Iraq violence
By Borzou Daragahi
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
BAGHDAD — Leaders and supporters of the anti-U.S. insurgency say their attacks in recent weeks have a clear objective: The greater the violence, the greater the chances that President Bush will be defeated on Tuesday and the Americans will go home.
"If the U.S. Army suffered numerous humiliating losses, [Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John] Kerry would emerge as the superman of the American people," said Mohammad Amin Bashar, a leader of the Muslim Scholars Association, a hard-line clerical group that vocally supports the resistance.
Resistance leader Abu Jalal boasted that the mounting violence had already hurt Mr. Bush's chances.
"American elections and Iraq are linked tightly together," he told a Fallujah-based Iraqi reporter. "We've got to work to change the election, and we've done so. With our strikes, we've dragged Bush into the mud."
Hitchens endorsing Kerry... now that one I didn't see coming.
[Swiftee: yeah, and Iran endorsed Bush. Who cares? Or, what... you are against having an election, because terrorists might try to affect the outcome? Ahh, I see the terrorists have already won in your mind.]
The best breakdown of the election so far (IMO) from the NY Times:
Hunting the Tiger
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: October 21, 2004
I'm sure that experts would tell us there are many reasons that the presidential race is too close to call, but I would argue that it all comes down to this one simple point: We still don't know which man used the debates to overcome his biggest liability.
Let me explain. I believe there are two things troubling the soul of America today. One of them is: We really do have enemies out there. The other is: We are really on the wrong track.
Whether they are watching the news from Iraq, where hooded men are sawing off the heads of Americans and blowing up Iraqi civilians who are standing in line to join the Iraqis' own police force, or they are contemplating the suicide bombings from Bali to Istanbul, or they are merely reflecting on 9/11 and the applause that attack still receives in certain quarters, nearly all Americans do feel in their gut that we really do have enemies out there.
John Kerry's most important challenge in this election campaign is to connect up with that gut fear in the American soul and pass a simple threshold test: "Does this man understand that we have real enemies?" Mr. Kerry, wrongly in my view, tried to use his heroic Vietnam War record to pass that test by implication. He did not make the sale.
In the debates, he tried to both criticize the Iraq war and to look voters in the eye and say: I know we have enemies and I will confront them, albeit in a different and wiser manner than George Bush has.
How did that go over? I believe that Mr. Kerry presented himself as an articulate, informed and credible commander in chief - but did he make the sale to the great American center? Not clear. My own free advice to Mr. Kerry is if he is unsure about this, he should drop everything else - health care, deficits and middle-class tax cuts - and focus on this issue. Everything else is secondary.
President Bush has a different problem. The threshold test that Mr. Bush had to pass was: "Does this man understand that we are on the wrong track?" Even though the situation is still salvageable, right now Iraq is a terrible mess because of the criminal incompetence of the Bush national security team, and we are more alone in the world than ever.
Conservatives profess to care deeply about the outcome in Iraq, but they sat silently for the last year as the situation there steadily deteriorated. Then they participated in a shameful effort to refocus the country's attention on what John Kerry did on the rivers of Vietnam 30 years ago, not on what George Bush and his team are doing on the rivers of Babylon today, where some 140,000 American lives are on the line. Is this what it means to be a conservative today?
Had conservatives spoken up loudly a year ago and said what both of Mr. Bush's senior Iraq envoys, Jay Garner and Paul Bremer, have now said (and what many of us who believed in the importance of Iraq were saying) - that we never had enough troops to control Iraq's borders, keep the terrorists out, prevent looting and establish authority - the president might have changed course. Instead, they served as a Greek chorus, applauding Mr. Bush's missteps and mocking anyone who challenged them.
Conservatives have failed their own test of patriotism. In the end, it has been more important for them to defeat liberals than to get Iraq right. Had Democrats been running this war with the incompetence of Donald Rumsfeld & Friends, conservatives would have demanded their heads a year ago - and gotten them.
Did the president, in the debates, answer these concerns? He barely tried. His strategy is to focus all his energy on fanning doubts about whether Mr. Kerry understands that we have real enemies, so voters will not focus on how much we are on the wrong track - with virtually no friends in the world and an Iraq that is now so insecure our own soldiers are afraid to drive certain roads.
In British politics there used to be a standard test for candidates for prime minister: Would you want to go on a tiger hunt with this person? That is, would this candidate kill the tiger or try to reason with the tiger? Graham Allison, the Harvard international relations professor who just published a book called "Nuclear Terrorism: The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe," said to me the other day that the tiger hunt is even more relevant in America today.
"The big question about Kerry is, Will he pull the trigger?" Mr. Allison said. "And the big question about Bush is, Can he aim? With Bush, we know he can pull the trigger, but it's like he shot himself in the foot - and the tiger is still out there. It's the tiger who needs to be shot, not us."
Ah Swiftee, you must be really proud of this endorsement. Nice to see some world leaders comming to BushCo's aid:
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20041019/ap_on_el_pr/iran_us_elections_2
Bush Receives Endorsement From Iran
Tue Oct 19, 6:33 PM ET
By ALI AKBAR DAREINI, Associated Press Writer
TEHRAN, Iran - The head of Iran's security council said Tuesday that the re-election of President Bush was in Tehran's best interests, despite the administration's axis of evil label, accusations that Iran harbors al-Qaida terrorists and threats of sanctions over the country's nuclear ambitions.
Historically, Democrats have harmed Iran more than Republicans, said Hasan Rowhani, head of the Supreme National Security Council, Iran's top security decision-making body.
"We haven't seen anything good from Democrats," Rowhani told state-run television in remarks that, for the first time in recent decades, saw Iran openly supporting one U.S. presidential candidate over another.
Though Iran generally does not publicly wade into U.S. presidential politics, it has a history of preferring Republicans over Democrats, who tend to press human rights issues.
"We do not desire to see Democrats take over," Rowhani said when asked if Iran was supporting Democratic Sen. John Kerry against Bush.
>>SNIP<<
"It is telling that this president has received the endorsement of member of the axis of evil," Kerry campaign spokeswoman Allison Dobson said. "But Americans deserve a president who will have a comprehensive strategy to address the potential threat of Iran's growing nuclear program."
>>SNIP<<
Iranian political analyst Mohsen Mofidi said ousting the Taliban and Saddam was the "biggest service any administration could have done for Iran."
And Bush, he said, has learned from his mistakes.
"The experience of two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the responsibility Bush had, will make it a very remote possibility for him to risk attacking a much bigger and more powerful country like Iran," he said.
Mofidi added that "Democrats usually insist on human rights and they will have more excuses to pressure Iran."
>>SNIP<<
"We should not forget that most sanctions and economic pressures were imposed on Iran during the time of Clinton," Rowhani said. "And we should not forget that during Bush's era — despite his hard-line and baseless rhetoric against Iran — he didn't take, in practical terms, any dangerous action against Iran."
= = = =
Just some snippets. How proud your side must be *grin*
All tongue and cheek, of course. No sensible person would try to make hay out of any of these terroristic endorsements. But if either side tries, there is plenty of fuel to go around for boths side to start a fire.
Flash
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