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REUTERS/Brian McDermott
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I often wonder where we would be today if Kerry or even Al Gore had won the presidency. I think we would have made Afghanistan into a democracy because all of our resources would have been invested there and Iraq would have been contained and isolated without going to war.
Although I like some of the things our Prez has done, we can't deny that Iraq has become a mess in more ways than one, no need for me to count the ways. The Iraq war was a colossal grand experiment that went to "hell in a handbasket"; and, still, we don't have a clue how to get out and our soldiers and Iraqis continue to die.
Last night on Fox as I was quickly "flipping," I saw Bill O'Reilly interviewing Lynn Cheney. Although he was giving her "softballs," you could even hear in his voice and in the tone of his questions, "Well, you will have to admit that it has not gone the way we thought..." Well, Bill, even in our own history...(she recounted history from the Revolutionary War, Civil War, etc.) Mrs. Cheney has been to all the schools, no doubt about it; she never answered the question asked, or answered the question that you wished had been asked.
I still don't have much faith in the American electorate, even to vote; and, so in the final analysis, I think Republicans will continue on in charge and we will be in for at least two more years of more of the same. The President appears only at rallies where he's widely supported and has announced that Rumsfeld and Cheney have "no cut" contracts(they should stay in office). What's with that???????????
As Of 6:30am eastern standard time Wednesday. Democrats control the House of Representatives with 227 to Repubs 191. Democrats might be on their way to controlling the Senate at least by the end of the day. Waiting for results from Virginia and Montana. Some pundits are predicting a Democratic senate, others predicting a 50-50 senate. Maybe we will know at least by the end of the day.
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Election Day November 7, 2006
Cast your Ballot
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| SUPPORT THE TROOPS
The legacy of the Vietnam vet is the fact that no American will put the "bad mouth" on soldiers. Plain and simple, everyone at least says they support the troops.
The latest controversy has the Repubs after John Kerry for a gaft in mentioning Iraq ( John Kerry: "You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don't, you get stuck in Iraq").
If you think about it, Kerry's statement, although he probably could have rephrased to sound better, rings true.
The voluntary military is a product, and a good one, I might add, of working class Americans.
The vast majority of members of the Armed Forces are not representative of the upper socioeconomic class by any stretch of the imagination. No one, least of all, Congress, wants to admit this. And, the Army surely will not; they equate numbers with success and nothing is further from the truth.
Poor kids are fighting our wars and we need to admit and face it. And, in a sense, it has always been this way, but more so now than every before.
The litmus test of our policy in Iraq, our "gone haywire policy", if there ever was one, is "Support the Troops". We do, everyone does, at least with words.
But, John Kerry, unwittingly, recognized the elephant in the room; supporting the troops is more than words. It is making hard decisions; it is having a policy that makes sense; it is having an exit strategy that is going to work.
Based on the chaos now in Iraq, we better have an exit strategy, i. e., remember the lasting picture of Vietnam and helicopters on the roof of the American embassy. Fall Of Saigon
(Photo Above: US soldiers stand on a roadside as they patrol the outskirts of Kabul. Italian photojournalist Gabriele Torsello has been released in southern Afghanistan after being held three weeks by abductors who demanded the withdrawal of Italian troops from the country.(AFP/Shah Marai) )
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