Democrats Can't WinWritten by Ed Howes
The only chance they had from beginning of this campaign to win 2004 presidential election has been to advance their best candidate and hope that President beat himself. This is a fifty- fifty bet at any given time. Instead, they chose an anybody but Bush strategy that proclaims they don't care how qualified their candidate is, or how capable. They want to win a popularity contest. They want to nominate a candidate they hope will take votes from President. This cockeyed strategy will also lose them majorities in House and Senate for many elections to come. They have told American people they are not for anything. They are simply against what is. They have done this down to grassroots and we hear it in comments of ordinary Democratic voters. America will now tell them if they do not care what is best for America, which is not anyone but Bush, they have no business in government. They had a front running candidate nobody really knew. They liked things he said. When he slipped from number one to number three in Iowa and then embarrassed them, they went looking for a new front runner - another one that nobody knows. Democrats prefer to elect strangers and hope things work out. They do not have a clue what is going on. Every Democratic candidate who says he can beat George Bush is lying and knows it. Only George Bush can beat George Bush as Al Gore beat Al Gore in 2000 election. He conceded it before election was over and showed America that Democrats would support a quitter, if they thought he could win an election. The lesson has not been lost on rest of America. To further demonstrate their loyalty to a quitter, Democrats then claimed he was robbed by a partisan court decision. Fact is, Al Gore lost election when he admitted fact to George Bush on telephone and not when court made it official. So when Democrats say they will have anybody but George Bush, we can take them at their word. Anybody will do for them. The rest of us can be more discriminating. I personally resonate with Dennis Kucinich. Both party and major media have written him off as an also ran. Democrats want instant gratification and to win at any cost, they won't support Dennis now and bring him back in 2008. They want Hillary Clinton then and she will lose too. I doubt Democrats will ever be in power at national level again. Dennis' plan for disengagement in Iraq is best I have seen proposed. The only one that would restore credibility to United States and accomplish what should have been intended from beginning. Other candidates assure us they will never get us into another mess like this one, as though such things are only decided by presidents. They are not. But Dennis says we can create a Department of Peace to provide some balance to war mongers in Congress and Department of Defense. Democrats don't care about a Department of Peace and they make no attempt to hide fact.
| | Everything's All Right in the Middle EastWritten by Robert Levin
Can we, just for a minute, dispense with hand-wringing and acknowledge that problem Israel and Palestinians have with one another is actually their mutual solution to problem of being mortal? Of course to understand what I mean it is first necessary to recognize that it's not love or sex or money that makes world go around but fact of death; that what drives virtually everything we believe and do is need to reduce, to at least a manageable degree of fear, terror and panic anticipation of death causes us. (If you can't quite grasp this notion, if you have to be reminded that terror and panic constitute human default condition, then whatever you're believing and doing is working for you.) Of myriad subtle and blatant ways we've come up with to make living with an impossible reality tolerable, one example would be symbolic immortality we assure ourselves of by leaving behind a scientific discovery, or a work of art, that will continue to have an influence on world. Another is accumulation of inordinate wealth. The god-like trappings great sums of money buy enable us to feel not just superior to common man, but less vulnerable to common fate. Still another is getting high, which is about getting above body that we know will one day be our undoing. And then there's our invention of an afterlife. Presenting us with a chance to survive death—if we honor pronouncements and follow dictates we've assigned to deities of our own fashioning—it's this immortality illusion that's at heart of Arab-Israeli conflict. The Arabs are qualifying for eternity by doing what they've determined to be God's work, which is to make war on those who, ignoring or questioning His authority, are undermining His plan for planet. And Israel, dropped in Arab's midst, its diverse culture implicitly challenging validity of Arab beliefs, provides Arabs with infidel they need to carry out their mission. For Arabs, it's not about killing Jews, per se. Jews are simply a fortuitously placed means to a purchase on heaven. (You could say that—their culture being, by all appearances, limited in its repertoire of immortality illusions to resources of Islam—suicide is only instrument of self-perpetuation available to Palestinian terrorists.)
|