They both seem much angrier this time. The format is certainly different...
-------------------- "Warfare is the greatest affair of state, the basis of life and death, the Tao to survivial or extinction. It must be thoroughly pondered and analyzed."
"...attaining one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the pinnacle of excellence. Subjugating the enemy's army without fighting is the true pinnacle of excellence."
-Sun Tzu, The Art of War, 6th century B.C.E.
Registered: May 1999
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Charles Capps
We appreciate your concern. It is noted and stupid.
Member # 9
posted
Much angrier, yes. Bush seemed to lose it a few times against Charlie very early on.
The beginning was much worse than the end... both are still beating the same drums, saying the same things over and over... dodging questions, going back to different issues other than what the question asked in the first place.
A few REALLY good questions were asked.. most were dodged.
I think that the abortion question at the end underlines one of my beefs with Bush. Bush seems to see the world in shades of black and white, with no grey area in between. You're either for us or against us. Something is either perfectly right or perfectly wrong. But that isn't the way the world works, Mister President....
Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
Well, he said he made a mistake with several appointments. I would read that as Paul O'Neil. I think what that questioner wanted to hear was whether he thinks he has made any major foreign policy mistakes. He obviously doesn't think he made the wrong decisions on the major issues he's faced.
[ October 08, 2004, 08:50 PM: Message edited by: David Sands ]
-------------------- "Warfare is the greatest affair of state, the basis of life and death, the Tao to survivial or extinction. It must be thoroughly pondered and analyzed."
"...attaining one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the pinnacle of excellence. Subjugating the enemy's army without fighting is the true pinnacle of excellence."
-Sun Tzu, The Art of War, 6th century B.C.E.
Registered: May 1999
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"Bush seems to see the world in shades of black and white, with no grey area in between. You're either for us or against us. Something is either perfectly right or perfectly wrong. But that isn't the way the world works, Mister President...."
Bush made his inability to see the color grey about as clear as he possibly could tonight. Kerry said this:
"Well, again, the president just said, categorically, my opponent is against this, my opponent is against that. You know, it's just not that simple. No, I'm not.
"I'm against the partial-birth abortion, but you've got to have an exception for the life of the mother and the health of the mother under the strictest test of bodily injury to the mother.
"Secondly, with respect to parental notification, I'm not going to require a 16-or 17-year-old kid who's been raped by her father and who's pregnant to have to notify her father. So you got to have a judicial intervention. And because they didn't have a judicial intervention where she could go somewhere and get help, I voted against it. It's never quite as simple as the president wants you to believe."
And Bush responded:
"Well, it's pretty simple when they say: Are you for a ban on partial birth abortion? Yes or no?
"And he was given a chance to vote, and he voted no. And that's just the way it is. That's a vote. It came right up. It's clear for everybody to see. And as I said: You can run but you can't hide the reality."
So Bush is explicitly stating that, in his mind, if you vote for or against something, it unequivocally means you are for or against every single conceiveable aspect of it.
Obviously, that explains why he can't understand the lack of contradiction between Kerry's vote to give him the right to start a war, but now saying that Bush's actual prosecution of the war was a cock-up. In Bush's mis-wired brain, saying "President, you have the authority to go to war" automatically includes the qualifier "and any manner in which you choose to do so is now, by definition, infallible".
Just remember, everyone: a vote for Bush means you agree with everything he does, with zero exceptions.
Registered: Mar 1999
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-------------------- Justice inclines her scales so that wisdom comes at the price of suffering. -Aeschylus, Agamemnon
Registered: Aug 2002
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posted
After sleeping on it, a few comments on the debate. A lot of my comments are going to seem critical of Bush, but I am going to try to make up for it by saying what I think he means, but knows it is too unpopular to say.
The first thing that I thought was good was the questioning format. I thought the questions were far more straightforward than those Jim Lehrer or Gwen Iffil gave. There weren�t that many dependent clauses to imply evil motives. Examples of how it could have been are, �Mr. Kerry, since you have voted more times that I can count to raise taxes on every American, rich and poor, would you be willing to say you won�t raise taxes as President?� and �Mr. Bush, since rumor has it that you eat Spotted Owl every morning for breakfast, have you done anything for the environment that ought to make me vote for you?� I wish we could see such questioning more. It also has the side benefit of making the debate easier for someone to follow and gives the candidates more time to talk.
Speaking of time to talk, I also loved how the moderator ran the format. I seldom heard him precisely laying out the amount of time each candidate had when responding (at least compared to Gwen Iffil). It made it move much faster.
I think Kerry sidestepped a few important issues. Abortion was one. Charles is right that most Americans don�t see abortion in black or white, all or nothing, terms. There are probably about four groups along the spectrum of how illegal abortion ought to be. However, there was an important quote from Kerry: �you don't deny a poor person the right to be able to have whatever the constitution affords them if they can't afford it otherwise.� That�s a very radical statement if he meant it precisely as I�m reading it. He seems to be saying that if someone has a right to an abortion, then because there is inequality of people�s means, the government should equalize those means by paying for them to exercise their rights. That sounds suspiciously like public financing of abortions to me. As for the partial birth abortion exception Kerry gave, he said there needed to be one for the life and health of the mother �under the strictest test of bodily injury to the mother.� If he is abandoning the exception of harm to the psychological health of the mother, I wish he would have said so. But it that�s what he really meant, that would be an unequivocal move away from NARAL�s policy. That said, I still think Kerry is ultimately inconsistent since he has said that life begins at conception. If it really does, and you believe all lives are equally worthy, then your policies ought to reach more than just your coreligionists. TSN said�
quote: So Bush is explicitly stating that, in his mind, if you vote for or against something, it unequivocally means you are for or against every single conceiveable aspect of it.
I would disagree. The question that was asked did not refer to any exceptions for the life or health of the mother. Some room has to be given for common sense exceptions on most issues in a debate, but on an issue that has become so technical at its margins, like abortion, I think the better policy is to take a question like that at face value. Kerry�s yes or no answer to that question was he thought you should be able to have one. But he was being a smart debater by not playing into the questioner�s hands by saying yes or no because people would not have listened to his qualifications afterwards.
Bush did surprisingly well on the environmental question. I was not expecting him to know so many programs that his administration had done. I doubt that answer is going to change many votes, but it was a trap laying wide open for him and he jumped clean over it. The drug reimportation answer was a good justification for not opening the floodgates to Canadian medicine. I don�t think it�s the most important justification (just like WMDs), but it�s the one that easiest to understand (again, like WMDs) and therefore was made the frontmost reason.
On foreign policy, Bush followed up on a lot of lines of attack that I had been expecting during the first debate. He used the Duelfer report to make the point that the sanctions were not working, that Saddam was building a knowledge base for a WMDs program, with the intent of getting them eventually. While Saddam did not have them already, in time he would have. Bush made it clear (without using the word �preemption�) we had to stop him before he got his hands on him. He also went after Kerry�s vote to cut the intelligence budget in the early 1990s.
One thing I wish Bush had said about foreign policy that he just can�t without sounding like a cold-hearted robot: in response to the question about protecting the homeland, what would each candidate do. I�ll admit Kerry is right that we�re not doing enough to be scanning containers. There are a lot of things we�re not doing. On the other hand, has anyone ever thought about how expensive it would be to plug every hole like that? People say they want economic growth, but a homeland security program that hit every vulnerability would plunge us into a recession! The better solution is to work on the worst vulnerabilities here and drain the swamps overseas of despotism. Plus, it has the added benefit of bringing the American Way (along with truth and justice, I hope) to a part of the world that has seen too little of it.
There was one answer Bush couldn�t give to another foreign policy question. One person asked about North Korea and Iran and asked what he was doing about them. Ideally, Bush would have said that Iraq was the most doable of the three, and we were hoping to scare others into submission with a show of force. Moreover, we don�t have the manpower to do all three at once. We have to choose our battles. Instead, Bush went with While we were handling Iraq we would keep the pressure on them with diplomacy (on Iraq, through the EU, France and Germany being prominent members of that team; on North Korea, through us, Russia, South Korea, China, and Japan).
Bush I thought lightened up a lot this time. Body language was much more fluid. No looks of annoyance at having to put up with inanity. He made only two gaffes I noticed in the debates, �internets,� as Sol System pointed out, and a military that is more �facile.� Fortunately, there didn�t seem to be any disasters he felt compelled to attend to during the day. He was rested. And he made the audience audibly laugh twice. No such humor from Kerry. It�s a nitpicky point, but lots of people base their decisions on such features.
The one question where both candidates made my skin crawl was Charlie Gibson�s followup about neither saying specifically what they would do to reduce the deficit. For me, it would have been sufficient for Bush to say he would lower taxes, stimulate growth, and let the economy grow itself out of the deficit a la the nineties. Bush mentioned tax cuts to stimulate consumer spending. But I guess supply-side economics has just gotten too pejorative a feel to say it explicitly. Kerry was caught between a rock (looking into the camera for no new taxes) and a hard place (Gibson�s followup) and tried to deflect the question by talking about tax cuts for the rich and Enron. Not the most cohesive message. I would give Kerry a slight edge on this question because Bush didn�t veto the farm bill, the steel tariffs, and the prescription drug benefit. Maybe he�s saving that for Term 2.
Still though, Bush seems to have edged Kerry out on the debate. Realclearpolitics.com is saying the debate was probably a tie (being within the margins of error), but the pundits were much more impressed with Bush. The state-by-state polls won�t be out until after the weekend, but I would predict that Bush will bring the race back to the uncomfortably close lead he enjoyed before the first debate. Of course, I saw one poll saying that the number of undecideds was actually 0%. (!) By that they mean that the people leaning to, but not committed to, one candidate of the other now takes up the remainder of voters. If that�s the case, these debates would actually take on a very different dynamic, since debates reinforce perceptions in those who are leaning, seldom changing them. But trying my best to look at this debate realistically, I would put it as Bush by a lock of hair, as opposed to a mere shaft. The race has tightened once again.
-------------------- "Warfare is the greatest affair of state, the basis of life and death, the Tao to survivial or extinction. It must be thoroughly pondered and analyzed."
"...attaining one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the pinnacle of excellence. Subjugating the enemy's army without fighting is the true pinnacle of excellence."
-Sun Tzu, The Art of War, 6th century B.C.E.
Registered: May 1999
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posted
I might have something to say about all that, but I'm busy packing for our move.
Then I'll be busy moving...
Then I'll be busy unpacking...
BUt I did find Keith Olbermann's boxing style of scoring the debate amusing. He scored it Kerry 16, Bush 6.
-------------------- Great is the guilt of an unnecessary war. ~ohn Adams
Once again the Bush Administration is worse than I had imagined, even though I thought I had already taken account of the fact that the Bush administration is invariably worse than I can imagine. ~Brad DeLong
You're just babbling incoherently. ~C. Montgomery Burns
Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
Speaking of Mr. Bush and the Supreme Court...I could hardly believe he said this:
quote:Plus, I want them all voting for me.
And I would imagine that even David has a problem with Mr. Bush's interpretation of the Dred Scott case.
quote:Another example would be the Dred Scott case, which is where judges, years ago, said that the Constitution allowed slavery because of personal property rights.
That's a personal opinion. That's not what the Constitution says. The Constitution of the United States says we're all -- you know, it doesn't say that. It doesn't speak to the equality of America.
Despite his Yale education, the man seems to know very little about the history of the United States.
-------------------- Great is the guilt of an unnecessary war. ~ohn Adams
Once again the Bush Administration is worse than I had imagined, even though I thought I had already taken account of the fact that the Bush administration is invariably worse than I can imagine. ~Brad DeLong
You're just babbling incoherently. ~C. Montgomery Burns
Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
Well, I would imagine some of them, if not picked, might vote for the other side! Especially the more libertarian ones who don�t like to see new and expanded spending programs.
Since Jay was nice enough to mention me, I thought I would chime in. I�m not sure what about that interpretation was wrong, but let me see if I can tease out the meaning. If I�m missing something huge you�re seeing, feel free to respond. What follows is my rough understanding of what President Bush was trying to get at. I want to be very clear here that this is a tentative analysis and that it�s been a long time since I�ve really thought about this case. It might be 180 degrees in the wrong direction.
As for Scott v. Sanford, 19 U.S. (How.) 393 (1856), there are several levels on which one could evaluate that case. First there was the procedural holding (which is very important later on to what I think Bush was getting at).
The procedural issue was whether Scott had standing to bring his case. This is a critical issue in any litigation. Someone without standing is not permitted to argue the merits of the case. There are important reasons for this. It ensures that someone with sufficient stake will vigorously argue the merits. Because there is also another doctrine called res judicata, standing ensures that only someone who is palpably affected by a decision will argue it, and that someone who has no real interest can�t bind future litigants on the issue before they have a chance to intervene on their own behalf.
Chief Justice Taney decided (along with the majority) that states did not have the right to bring into their political communities those who had not been citizens before the adoption of the Constitution, and they had no rights to force the federal government to accept as citizens it had not accepted as such. Moreover, the existence of two clauses in the Constitution referring to those held in servitude implied a legal accommodation to the existence of slavery. While the Declaration of Independence said that all men had been created equal, the later of the two documents accepting slavery, and the creation of both documents by the same class of men, implied that slaves were not of the same class as whites. Therefore, Scott had no rights to sue for his freedom in a federal court.
However, Chief Justice Taney didn�t stop with a procedural ruling (which good judicial practices would have counseled him to do). He put forth a substantive holding as well.
There had been a principle that slavery was not supposed to exist in states that had not approved of such ownership within their territory. Also, the Missouri Compromise was a national statement that the territories, held by the United States in trust, could legislate on the topic where it has the same kind of jurisdiction as states normally had, the police power. On the other hand, there was the constitutional principle embodied in the Privileges and Immunities Clause in Article IV that said that the right to move freely around the United States could not be fettered by any state. Part of being a citizen of the United States was being able to freely enjoy one�s property wherever in the nation. A citizen�s property may not be taken from him by the operation of the federal government unless he is afforded �due process of law� under the Fifth Amendment. These principles were in direct conflict. Taney rested on the P&I Clause and said that, not only could Scott not sue in court for his freedom, any slave could be take anywhere in the territories.
This was a radical step beyond the issue framed in the pleadings. The case was in principle supposed to be only about whether Scott could get a hearing in court. The case turned into the Supreme Court�s attempt to settle the issue to what lengths slavery could operate throughout the United States. This was ultimately a political question, not a legal question. To put it simplistically, legal questions are typically about the operation of an established legal principle. Political questions are about how people prioritize the core set of about 3-5 values (depending on how you divide them) that this country was founded upon.
What I think President Bush was trying to say was that the Supreme Court decided that, �the Constitution allowed slavery as a legal institution beyond the borders of slave states because of personal property rights.� What he dislikes about that case was that the decision was a case of (get ready for loaded phrase) judicial activism. It could have stopped with one ruling but the Court decided to try the entire socio-political issue on its own.
OK, now what does this have to do with where we are today? Ever since the Warren Court (and ultimately found in footnote 4 of Carolene Products, 304 U.S. 144 (1938)), there has been an increasing mindset among many judges that the judiciary is supposed to override the will of political majorities to protect political minorities. Now, I won�t spill much more ink here on this issue. People more learned and more intelligent than I am have spent (literally) lifetimes trying to figure out if this is the �right� way to construct the mechanisms by which we protect constitutional rights.
President Bush is trying to say he has taken one side of this issue. He believes that legislators, as the directly elected will of the people, are (at least) entitled to more deference than the various Supreme Courts around the nation have given them. Moreover, he (probably) believes that the Court should interpret the Constitution as it was commonly understood at the time of its adoption. When he said that he does not want judges using their personal views as benchmark legal principles, he means that he does not want current fads to be inalterably sheltered under the rubric of assorted clauses. He believes that if you want to make major changes to how society�s law is structured and understood, you need to work through means other than democratically untouchable officials housed in the courts.
-------------------- "Warfare is the greatest affair of state, the basis of life and death, the Tao to survivial or extinction. It must be thoroughly pondered and analyzed."
"...attaining one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the pinnacle of excellence. Subjugating the enemy's army without fighting is the true pinnacle of excellence."
-Sun Tzu, The Art of War, 6th century B.C.E.
Registered: May 1999
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