Bush vs. Kerry: The Reality Behind the Rhetoric
October 31, 2004
I take our right to vote seriously. I have been party to the blood sacrifice that bought and paid for our freedoms generation after generation. Voting is not just a hallowed right to me but a duty to be exercised wisely. It is how we empower those who govern us for a limited term, and it is how we give our consent to the actions they take in our name. It is how we shape that part of the world we pass on to our grandchildren and theirs.
I have opened my mind and searched my heart for the right way to cast my ballot in this election. I have tried to do so looking to facts found other than in the campaign speeches of the candidates, and I urge others to do the same.
I acknowledge that others who have done likewise may reach different conclusions, and I do not besmirch anyone’s good faith or patriotism simply for reaching opposite conclusions. After all, to vote wisely, we may need to weigh hundreds of considerations, but our choice still comes down to Column A or Column B.
It goes without saying both campaigns lie, but the Bush campaign seems much better at it and so plays to this strength far more extensively. Lying just does not seem to come naturally to Kerry, though a well-told fib might prove necessary and valuable in dealing with foreign countries. On the other hand, foreign countries have not shown nearly as much inclination to believe President Bush as we have here in the States.
I have tried to believe President Bush—I gave him my trust for many months—but when I check his facts and consider the options or alternatives he ignores, he has disappointed me all too often. So, if anybody thinks they know something about Kerry because Bush said so, they should check for slippery slope underfoot. It may be that Kerry does not lie as much about President Bush merely because he doesn’t have to. He can simply point to the news—the facts.
But does the news report “the facts”? To me the claim that there is a widespread liberal bias in the mainstream media is both short-sighted and self-serving. One need only recall the much-deserved bashing President Clinton took from the mainstream media over his personal indiscretions. To protect ourselves from media bias, we need to seek our news from many sources and do the hard work of sorting it out.
If there is a bias to the mainstream media, it is ethnocentric. It looks at the world only through a distorted lens shaped by America’s needs and wants. In so doing, it blinds us to many realities of the world we live in. Certainly, there was little enough criticism in the mainstream press of our rush to war in Iraq. Today, it is nearly impossible to find statistical reporting on the extent of Iraqi civilian casualties from this war. Just as conspicuous, I should add, is the lack of follow-up on American non-fatal casualties: How many are there? How extensive are their wounds? How are they doing?
If the Bush campaign feels the sting of the mainstream media, it has less to do with bias than the fact that this Administration is out of the mainstream. Media bias is a canard, a rationalization for those who will believe only what they want regardless of the facts. In our work and private lives, don’t we want to hear the bad news right away? The media confronting us with unpleasant facts is like a hospital nurse bringing us our medicine. It is good for us. If there is a proper criticism of the media regarding this war, it is that they were late with the meds.
It is not a liberal bias, but a factual disadvantage that has beset President Bush, given the nation’s current state of affairs. Does anyone doubt how the Bush campaign would eat Kerry alive if their roles were reversed, that is, if Kerry had to defend Bush’s situation?
We should not, though, lose sight of the fact that the President’s vulnerabilities are of his own making. He charted the course to war, and he chose to deficit finance the government in order to preserve tax cuts that directly benefited a minority more than the majority.
President Bush is certainly right that his “War on Terror” should be the overriding issue in voters’ minds, but not for the reason he suggests. 9/11 is proof enough of the potency of foreign terrorists and of our paramount need to respond appropriately. No special genius should be claimed for recognizing that. The problem we face now is that President Bush’s response was inappropriate, and more of that type of leadership is apt to sink our nation in a way the terrorists could only dream of doing.
However compelling the case for going to war in Iraq may have been, it was based on false assumptions and it failed to take into full account the risks and requirements of such an intervention. There is much evidence that a group within the Bush administration was lobbying for intervention in Iraq long before 9/11 and used it to pull the President into their scheme. A different group in the Defense Department, bent on streamlining the military to cut costs, tried to implement the policy on the cheap contrary to the advice of senior military officials.
In word and deed, the Bush Administration scoffed at the lessons of Vietnam embodied in the Weinberger-Powell Doctrine. The result is the quagmire we find ourselves in today with no exit strategy in sight. We took down Saddam, but little else has been accomplished to better the lives of Iraqis. It has become a breeding ground for international terrorism, and Muslims everywhere—like the rest of the world—more than ever are alarmed by, if not alienated from, America.
The appropriate response to 9/11 should have been to accomplish our mission in Afghanistan in a way to make sure we do the job right the first time, so we don't have to go back. At the same time we should have leveraged more effective UN inspections in Iraq. As soon as Afghanistan was stable, we should have worked alongside President Musharraf policing terrorists in the mountains between Pakistan and Afghanistan in order to buttress moderate Pakistanis, so Pakistan and its present nuclear arsenal does not fall sway to Islamist extremists. At the same time our State Department, intelligence services and Special Forces teams should have worked with other countries to detect, deter and pre-empt terrorist movements abroad. We also should have hardened our defenses at home to a far greater degree.
The Bush Campaign spent $100 million to propagate the view that Senator Kerry was “unfit” to serve as President. Without regard to how they would vote, a wide margin of Americans who saw the Presidential debates reportedly were convinced otherwise. A part of the Bush attack was that John Kerry did nothing in the US Senate for twenty years. It is ironic because Kerry spent a major part of his Senate career chairing a Senate terrorism sub-committee, created for him in the mid-80's, that investigated international drug lords, money-laundering operations, gun-running and the like-all the cracks and corners that terrorists frequent. Few members of the US government better understand how international terrorists really operate and how they must be combated.
Brad Kennedy is the author of BETRAYAL: Will Stone in Vietnam. Austin, TX: Plain View Press, 2008.