the RNC Day 4,
or.... Dear Mr. President:
I watched your speech last night with some hope and anticipation. After three straight days of watching your party denigrate and disrespect the Democratic Party and their nominees for President, I wondered what you would say. From Mr. Cheney to Mr. Miller your minions spread their twisted facts and outright lies about your opponent and what he stands for.
But you know what? I think in the end you think you are a pretty good guy. A man of the people. Though markedly anti-intellectual this is not a horrid thing. You come from a patrician, but very nice family, and I actually liked your Dad, though like you he was not the greatest President.
You may recall I sent you an "open" letter after the Supreme Court gave you the election in 2000 regarding your cutting of all funding for any sort of family planning in the third world. This was right after you had run as a "compassionate conservative", and a moderate.
Then I wrote you another "open" letter when it appeared that your entire foreign policy revolved around two things: Ronny Regan’s discredited "Star Wars" idea, and anything-that-Bill-Clinton-did-we-want-no-part-of. I urged you to examine what was happening in the Middle East and Korea and do something about it.
So I was aware that just maybe, your policies were not going to be the sort of moderate path your speeches of the 2000 election portrayed.
Then came that horrible day in September. I still remember watching the buildings fall down with shock. What American didn’t? You rolled into action, gone was the stuttering man who mispronounced words, in his place a man of action, on the spot and in their face. I also remember you staying in that classroom to finish reading to the kids as planes streaked towards the White House and the Pentagon. I remember almost crying when I heard how some men had taken over the plane bound for the White House and crashed it to save our symbol of the Presidency.
The nation came together, and you were our leader. The world cried with us, and was behind us all the way. You announced that we would invade Afghanistan to hunt down the people that had done this, and the world said "we will help". But then something happened. You didn't find the main bad guy, bin Laden, right away. But that was ok, cause we knew it was going to take time.
All of a sudden, things got real weird. Suddenly, Iraq was the hotbed of Al Queda, not Afghanistan. Or Iraq was supporting Al Queda. Or Hussein was making bombs to drop on America. Or basically anything you could come up with.
Because none of that mattered did it? From before 9/11 your people, especially Wolfowitz and Perle, had decided you were going to do finish your Dad's work and eliminate Hussein. Your administration was planning this from before you were in office. Were you aware of this? Sometimes I wonder, I really do. The horrid tragedy of 9/11 provided an excellent focus for this.
So off your administration went, gathering the intelligence you needed to sell the American people and Congress on this new war, the one to take the attention off the old war, which wasn't working exactly according to plan.
Thing is youre people didn't like the intel you were getting originally did they?
Enough articles have been written, and I'm sure the second intelligence report which comes out after the election (coincidence?) will show, that your people kept asking the CIA to go back to the trough until they gave you something you liked. And when that didn't work completely you went through Mr. Chalabi, who of course had no vested interest in the facts...
But we were convinced, we went to war, we took out Saddam Hussein, and you were a great hero. Very Macho by the way.
Then things began to unravel didn't they? Turns out that there was no WMD program. Turns out that there was no connection between Al Queda and Iraq. These are not my accusations Mr. President, these are the findings of committees whom you first opposed, and then stacked with conservatives. Still they found that the entire basis of your argument to the American people was false. Though they didn't blame you of course.
In the mean time, you inherited the biggest economic hangover in many decades, from the go go years of the 90's. The tech boom had bust before you became President, and it was laid in your lap. Not your fault.
So what did you do with the biggest federal surplus in modern history? Did you put it away for a rainy day?
No you spent it. And you spent it. And you spent it. Your spin-doctors like to call the Democrats the Tax and Spend party. At least they create funding for new iniatives, even if it is out of the pockets of the American People.
You however have a whole new idea. The deficit doesn’t matter. Tax-cut and spend is the new way of the nation! So you created the biggest handout out to the rich in modern history, and then began to create more bureaucracy and spending programs. And lo and behold the economy was mired in one of the longest recessions in the last 35 yrs.
So here we are, 3.5 yrs into your Administration, involved in a war, that however justifiable, you lied about to get us into. Mired in a recession that, though you like to say otherwise, economic data suggests is going to last quite a bit longer. And you want us to return you to office for another four years?????
Ah but we fought the terrorists you say. Did we Mr. President? Where is Mr. Bin Laden Mr. President? You say 75% of the leaders of Al Queda are captured or dead, but you don’t talk about how they have been replaced already by new blood.
I do think it's just wonderful that Mr. Hussein is rotting in a jail somewhere. I think a large majority of Americans do. If you read my blog you would know that I called for his removal by violent means long before you went to war. But I called it for reasons that were justifiable, not created out of forged intel.
So with this, we come to your speech last night. Would you apologize for anything? Would you have a plan for the next four years? And you know what I got?
Aside from your chest thumping about what you did around 9/11 I got a speech that you could have done in 2000.
First let me get something off my chest. You were expected to go to ground zero and support the emergency workers. You were expected to hunt down and find the perpetrators of this horrid deed. You were expected to give moral support to the families of the lost. You are our President. It’s your job Mr. President! So don't expect a pat on the back for doing your job Sir.
Don't have your minions spend four days thumping their chests as to how great you were because you did your job. Don't expect the American people to make you some sort of hero because you did the job you were elected to do.
In your speech one of the first things you said was that you would be "restraining federal spending, reducing regulation and making the tax relief permanent." All well and good. But then we got a laundry list of promises nearly identical to the ones you made us four years ago under the umbrella of the oxymoron "compassionate conservatism". Very few of these points have you accomplished in four years. And this with a Senate and a House under the control of your party. Good God man! How much more help do you need exactly to accomplish your goals?
Fact is that they are just empty promises. Talking points for you to convince people that you have a plan, and that you are a moderate. What is more disturbing is you then turned, after promising in effect to make the deficit even larger (this after promising to cut it in half in five years on the campaign trail leading up to the convention) and accused your opponent of the very things you are promising the American people. Promising Again. Four years later having promised them in 2000. Having not accomplished much of your "conservative compassion" agenda.
"No, wait a minute, wait a minute - to be fair, there are some things my opponent is for. He's proposed more than $2 trillion in federal spending so far, and that's a lot, even for a senator from Massachusetts. And to pay for that spending, he is running on a platform of increasing taxes, and that's the kind of promise a politician usually keeps. His taxes - his policies of tax and spend, of expanding government rather than expanding opportunity, are the politics of the past. We are on the path to the future, and we're not turning back."
So what are the politics of the future Mr. President?? Tax cut and spend? Your proposals outstrip the Democratic' nominees spending. Your figure of $2 trillion is of course made up out of thin air. All you have to do is actually read the democratic platform to know that he is in no way running on a platform of tax increases.
Unless you call rolling back the tax cuts to the rich and powerful and applying that to the middle class a tax increase. Well I guess you and your backers would call it a tax increase. But for the other 98% of America it will be a tax cut.
Mr. President I could probably go on for another five pages on a point by point with what you said last night, but that would be tedious.
I want to conclude with a few thoughts.
Your Party's pandering to New York and 9/11 emotions to get you re-elected borders on the revolting. To take such a tragic event and politicize it so completely is an insult to the memory of the people who died. And if you hadn't noticed, your actual monetary promises to New York State and City go woefully un fulfilled. So you come to my State, act like the returning hero, and then leave, the State none the better for security against the very thing you are claiming credit for.
ALL AMERICANS are patriots Mr. President. Because you simply did your job as our leader and President in your moral support of the people, and your military retaliation on Al Queda does not give you the moral high ground to claim your party has the corner on the ability to fight terrorism. In fact you gave up the moral high ground by doing something so heinous to the American Tradition that it alone calls for your removal. That of course is by lying to the American People about Iraq.
Your party tried to impeach the last President for lying about having consensual sex with another adult in the White House out of Wedlock. Can you imagine if the same standard was applied to your lies about Iraq, which have cost thousands of young American lives?
So I will be honest with you, though you were not wholly honest with us, I will be voting for Mr. Kerry come November. But I'm not just voting for Mr. Kerry, but against you and yours.
or.... Dear Mr. President:
I watched your speech last night with some hope and anticipation. After three straight days of watching your party denigrate and disrespect the Democratic Party and their nominees for President, I wondered what you would say. From Mr. Cheney to Mr. Miller your minions spread their twisted facts and outright lies about your opponent and what he stands for.
But you know what? I think in the end you think you are a pretty good guy. A man of the people. Though markedly anti-intellectual this is not a horrid thing. You come from a patrician, but very nice family, and I actually liked your Dad, though like you he was not the greatest President.
You may recall I sent you an "open" letter after the Supreme Court gave you the election in 2000 regarding your cutting of all funding for any sort of family planning in the third world. This was right after you had run as a "compassionate conservative", and a moderate.
Then I wrote you another "open" letter when it appeared that your entire foreign policy revolved around two things: Ronny Regan’s discredited "Star Wars" idea, and anything-that-Bill-Clinton-did-we-want-no-part-of. I urged you to examine what was happening in the Middle East and Korea and do something about it.
So I was aware that just maybe, your policies were not going to be the sort of moderate path your speeches of the 2000 election portrayed.
Then came that horrible day in September. I still remember watching the buildings fall down with shock. What American didn’t? You rolled into action, gone was the stuttering man who mispronounced words, in his place a man of action, on the spot and in their face. I also remember you staying in that classroom to finish reading to the kids as planes streaked towards the White House and the Pentagon. I remember almost crying when I heard how some men had taken over the plane bound for the White House and crashed it to save our symbol of the Presidency.
The nation came together, and you were our leader. The world cried with us, and was behind us all the way. You announced that we would invade Afghanistan to hunt down the people that had done this, and the world said "we will help". But then something happened. You didn't find the main bad guy, bin Laden, right away. But that was ok, cause we knew it was going to take time.
All of a sudden, things got real weird. Suddenly, Iraq was the hotbed of Al Queda, not Afghanistan. Or Iraq was supporting Al Queda. Or Hussein was making bombs to drop on America. Or basically anything you could come up with.
Because none of that mattered did it? From before 9/11 your people, especially Wolfowitz and Perle, had decided you were going to do finish your Dad's work and eliminate Hussein. Your administration was planning this from before you were in office. Were you aware of this? Sometimes I wonder, I really do. The horrid tragedy of 9/11 provided an excellent focus for this.
So off your administration went, gathering the intelligence you needed to sell the American people and Congress on this new war, the one to take the attention off the old war, which wasn't working exactly according to plan.
Thing is youre people didn't like the intel you were getting originally did they?
Enough articles have been written, and I'm sure the second intelligence report which comes out after the election (coincidence?) will show, that your people kept asking the CIA to go back to the trough until they gave you something you liked. And when that didn't work completely you went through Mr. Chalabi, who of course had no vested interest in the facts...
But we were convinced, we went to war, we took out Saddam Hussein, and you were a great hero. Very Macho by the way.
Then things began to unravel didn't they? Turns out that there was no WMD program. Turns out that there was no connection between Al Queda and Iraq. These are not my accusations Mr. President, these are the findings of committees whom you first opposed, and then stacked with conservatives. Still they found that the entire basis of your argument to the American people was false. Though they didn't blame you of course.
In the mean time, you inherited the biggest economic hangover in many decades, from the go go years of the 90's. The tech boom had bust before you became President, and it was laid in your lap. Not your fault.
So what did you do with the biggest federal surplus in modern history? Did you put it away for a rainy day?
No you spent it. And you spent it. And you spent it. Your spin-doctors like to call the Democrats the Tax and Spend party. At least they create funding for new iniatives, even if it is out of the pockets of the American People.
You however have a whole new idea. The deficit doesn’t matter. Tax-cut and spend is the new way of the nation! So you created the biggest handout out to the rich in modern history, and then began to create more bureaucracy and spending programs. And lo and behold the economy was mired in one of the longest recessions in the last 35 yrs.
So here we are, 3.5 yrs into your Administration, involved in a war, that however justifiable, you lied about to get us into. Mired in a recession that, though you like to say otherwise, economic data suggests is going to last quite a bit longer. And you want us to return you to office for another four years?????
Ah but we fought the terrorists you say. Did we Mr. President? Where is Mr. Bin Laden Mr. President? You say 75% of the leaders of Al Queda are captured or dead, but you don’t talk about how they have been replaced already by new blood.
I do think it's just wonderful that Mr. Hussein is rotting in a jail somewhere. I think a large majority of Americans do. If you read my blog you would know that I called for his removal by violent means long before you went to war. But I called it for reasons that were justifiable, not created out of forged intel.
So with this, we come to your speech last night. Would you apologize for anything? Would you have a plan for the next four years? And you know what I got?
Aside from your chest thumping about what you did around 9/11 I got a speech that you could have done in 2000.
First let me get something off my chest. You were expected to go to ground zero and support the emergency workers. You were expected to hunt down and find the perpetrators of this horrid deed. You were expected to give moral support to the families of the lost. You are our President. It’s your job Mr. President! So don't expect a pat on the back for doing your job Sir.
Don't have your minions spend four days thumping their chests as to how great you were because you did your job. Don't expect the American people to make you some sort of hero because you did the job you were elected to do.
In your speech one of the first things you said was that you would be "restraining federal spending, reducing regulation and making the tax relief permanent." All well and good. But then we got a laundry list of promises nearly identical to the ones you made us four years ago under the umbrella of the oxymoron "compassionate conservatism". Very few of these points have you accomplished in four years. And this with a Senate and a House under the control of your party. Good God man! How much more help do you need exactly to accomplish your goals?
Fact is that they are just empty promises. Talking points for you to convince people that you have a plan, and that you are a moderate. What is more disturbing is you then turned, after promising in effect to make the deficit even larger (this after promising to cut it in half in five years on the campaign trail leading up to the convention) and accused your opponent of the very things you are promising the American people. Promising Again. Four years later having promised them in 2000. Having not accomplished much of your "conservative compassion" agenda.
"No, wait a minute, wait a minute - to be fair, there are some things my opponent is for. He's proposed more than $2 trillion in federal spending so far, and that's a lot, even for a senator from Massachusetts. And to pay for that spending, he is running on a platform of increasing taxes, and that's the kind of promise a politician usually keeps. His taxes - his policies of tax and spend, of expanding government rather than expanding opportunity, are the politics of the past. We are on the path to the future, and we're not turning back."
So what are the politics of the future Mr. President?? Tax cut and spend? Your proposals outstrip the Democratic' nominees spending. Your figure of $2 trillion is of course made up out of thin air. All you have to do is actually read the democratic platform to know that he is in no way running on a platform of tax increases.
Unless you call rolling back the tax cuts to the rich and powerful and applying that to the middle class a tax increase. Well I guess you and your backers would call it a tax increase. But for the other 98% of America it will be a tax cut.
Mr. President I could probably go on for another five pages on a point by point with what you said last night, but that would be tedious.
I want to conclude with a few thoughts.
Your Party's pandering to New York and 9/11 emotions to get you re-elected borders on the revolting. To take such a tragic event and politicize it so completely is an insult to the memory of the people who died. And if you hadn't noticed, your actual monetary promises to New York State and City go woefully un fulfilled. So you come to my State, act like the returning hero, and then leave, the State none the better for security against the very thing you are claiming credit for.
ALL AMERICANS are patriots Mr. President. Because you simply did your job as our leader and President in your moral support of the people, and your military retaliation on Al Queda does not give you the moral high ground to claim your party has the corner on the ability to fight terrorism. In fact you gave up the moral high ground by doing something so heinous to the American Tradition that it alone calls for your removal. That of course is by lying to the American People about Iraq.
Your party tried to impeach the last President for lying about having consensual sex with another adult in the White House out of Wedlock. Can you imagine if the same standard was applied to your lies about Iraq, which have cost thousands of young American lives?
So I will be honest with you, though you were not wholly honest with us, I will be voting for Mr. Kerry come November. But I'm not just voting for Mr. Kerry, but against you and yours.
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