adam.oliner.net

If you ever notice that my blog is down, you should probably go check the news. Whenever this site is out of commission, shit tends to travel downward, as the saying goes. For example, while Eddie moved back to this side of the country, aquatica was offline. During that time you missed: a day in The City with Heather; dinner and drinks with Hung and Erik; the RNC; Anna, Alice, Andrew, and Yuuai the dog; a disturbing massacre at a Russian school; and, lest I forget, you missed me being attacked in the shower by the very spawn of Shelob herself. Most of these deserve extensive elaboration, particularly the Shelob-Spawn Incident, which could be extended to form the 7th and perhaps even 8th books of the increasingly-misnamed Lord of the Rings trilogy.

For the first time in two decades, I will not be going to classes this fall. Instead, I am remaining at IBM, presumably working on my M.Eng. thesis and applying to grad schools. There’s a lot to be done, and I am writing this from work, in fact.

I watched Bush’s speech at the RNC with Erik and Hung at a bar in NYC, which meant that my drunken commentary was complimented by the drunken heckling of everyone else in the bar. Erik had trouble sitting still for it, so offensively stupid did he find the rhetoric. It was what we all expected: he didn’t talk about the huge costs of the Iraq war, the squandering of the budget surplus into the biggest deficit ever, or job loss, yet he proposed many new and expensive spending initiatives that sometimes sounded quite nice, but that Bush can’t possibly fund without raising taxes, which he promised to cut. All hail Bush, the magical money-making machine! Or, maybe, he’s just full of it.

I’ve missed much in the way of juicy political news, so I’ll end with a bit of an editorial medley. And… go. I don’t particularly care about Bush’s military record, but is it any wonder that Bush’s supporters are desperately lying about Kerry’s military service when Bush’s looks like this? On the subject of flip-flopping, I won’t go into how many times a change of position in light of new information has been misrepresented by the Bush camp as a Kerry flip-flop. How many times must Kerry say that he originally voted for the war because Bush lied about the immediate threat and how he would pay for it, but then voted against it when there was no way to pay for it and it turned out Bush had no proof that Iraq was a threat? It’s simple, people. And now, somehow, Bush would have you believe that Kerry speaking out against Iraq using the phrases of his fellow Democrat Howard Dean is somehow a change of position. No, George, just a change of phrasing.

But let’s not think that Kerry is special, here. Recently, Bush made a verbal oopsie by claiming that the war on terror isn’t winnable. This, of course, is a reversal of all previous policies, and the Bush camp has since gone to extraordinary efforts to explain away the faux pas as an honest mistake. And just today, Cheney implied that voting for John Kerry would make you responsible for a future terrorist attack. His spokeswoman immediately backpedaled and clarified the statement, saying that his words were misunderstood and out of context; what he really meant was what she was saying, not what he said. Sound familiar?

Things change, and sometimes the smart thing to do is to change your mind. People make mistakes, and sometimes the only thing to do is retract your statement, apologize, and move on. But this is a two-way street. Bush has attacked Kerry on these points far too many times, and they have no choice but to retaliate in kind. Fire with fire. Kerry has been working really hard to keep the campaign a positive one, letting Edwards and his crew throw the punches.

The most bothersome bit about everything that I said above is that I agree with Bush’s accidental characterization of the War on Terror as unwinnable. Of course it’s unwinnable; there is no political body that can surrender to us, no person who we can kill, or government we can replace such that the battle is over. And with every bomb we drop on a civilian house in Iraq, we give birth to another potential terrorist. This is a subtlety beyond the reach of most people, and so Bush and Kerry have both taken the stance that victory is within our grasp. So, what to do?

There is an expression, that I regettably cannot cite, which says, “If your opponent is determined to take off your nose, get ready to lose your nose.” If a terrorist is determined to kill people, no matter what the price to himself, he will succeed. This so-called war is a war of hearts and ideas. It requires economics and diplomacy and communication. John Kerry is the only candidate who understands this. Bush has made it clear in the last four years and in his rhetoric that war is his solution. War should be a last resort, and will not bring us “victory against Terror,” if anyone even knows what that means. Register to vote now. Tell your friends why Kerry is the best man for the job. This is not a war that I wish to pass on to my children.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 7th, 2004 at 5:33 pm and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.