Jesse at Pandagon:
I look at something like that Saudi deal..., and I can't help but feel that we're being charitable. We've been saying Bush lied about the war (and he did) - but it turns out he lied about the war, compromised national security, and struck a deal with a terrorist-supporting state, a real one, for cheap oil prices near election time. The darkly insinuated (and stated) reason for offense at Kerry's "foreign leaders" remark was that Kerry was going to somehow sell out our national security for their support, that he'd promised them things if they'd just do things to support his presidential run.I think there are two kinds of people who still support Bush. The hard-core cynics who put their own interests above those of the nation first, last and always. And those who, for whatever reason, simply can't accept, despite all the evidence, that the President of the United States is part of the first group.Bush has done exactly that.
... [D]uring the Bush years, I feel as if we're almost running behind the true political depravity. We find out Bush lied, and we say it, and by the time that the full-throated denunciations of anyone who dares advance that rather obvious truth begin, we find out something worse. ...
We don't have to peer in the dusty corners for dark secrets these days. Every time we turn around, there's something new, bright and shiny and just plain wrong in our face. I'm a liberal because I support what government can do and what America can become. I'm also a liberal because I despise what the people in charge of our government are doing with the tools we gave them, and what they're making America into.
Assuming the above is all true you are leaving out the possibility that the Left's lack of answers, or at least appealing ones to problems that the mainstream deems relevant, leaves the field to Bush.
Bush is not that strong of a candidate, fundraising excepted but he has grasped a strategic truth - the US is at war with radical Islamists. You can argue he's screwing up everything as many do but that's a question of *tactics*. The Left is deeply divided over whether or not there is a " real war ", whether Iraq is part of that war or a distracting misadventure or part of the war but wrongly executed. A majority of the public is not divided - they're certain - and therefore they show what must seem to you be incomprehensible tolerance for Bush's performance because he has the big picture right.
His opponents might seem smarter but that doesn't help if they are also perceived as conflicted or heading in the wrong direction. If Kerry was known to the public as a dissenting hawk I think Bush would be in big trouble in the polls
Posted by: mark safranski | April 20, 2004 at 01:20 PM