I'm afraid of 4 more years of further erosion of our international reputation.

By Jack the Vote (12.150.68.150) on Tuesday, November 02, 2004 - 2:25 pm: Edit Post

I voted for Kerry because Bush lied to hustle us into a war with Iraq. As I've studied this controversy I am beginning to understand he wasn't the first president to lie about international affairs to sway public opinion and try to build support for a war. That doesn't make it right. In the debates Bush looked unprepared and stupid in debate 1, acted like a shouting bully in debate 2 and obviously was well schooled and corrected all of his mistakes in debate 3. Still, Kerry won all of those debates although it could be argued Bush won the 3rd by a narrow margin.

What truly upset me was the way Bush misused and cherry-picked intelligence to argue and PROMOTE a war with Iraq and then had the gall to blame our intelligence professionals with giving him bad information. Yeah, the information is bad when you filter out all the data that argues against going to war without a well-planned and viable exit strategy.

I understood the war in Afghanistan, didn't like it, but understood it.

The Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse also angered me, especially that this administration is hanging the whole thing on low-ranking soldiers instead of where the real responsibility lies, with the chain of command, probably with CIA agents and with the Secretary of Defense and political appointees in the Department of Defense.

I also have a problem when administration officials knowingly lie to Congress about the true cost of a prescription drug benefit and they order public employees to lie to Congress.

I disagree with parts of the so-called Patriot Act.

Having said all this I think our two-party system is seriously flawed if not completely broken. And that's not even counting the dictatorship that Tom Delay has engineered in Texas to rig the election and stack Congress with conservatives. I don't know how parliamentary governments work or governments that require coalitions of parties to form a government, but we should look at some kind of fix to get more participation and not this either/or, us against them mentality we have now. At the least we should get rid of the electoral college and just use a majority vote.

By Jeanette Goss (adsl-69-210-111-25.dsl.milwwi.ameritech.net - 69.210.111.25) on Thursday, November 04, 2004 - 4:19 pm: Edit Post

Bush is ignorant & doesn't believe he has to learn. He doesn't recognize his mistakes & therefore can't fix them. He thinks God has ordained him to be President. His tax policies favor the very rich at the expense of the poor & middle class. He's defunding what was left of the social safety net. He favors industry interests over environmental protection. For him, ideology trumps scientific fact. His foreign policy approach is bellicose & off-putting, & if not downright insulting. He & his administration are dishonest (the "Clear Skies Initiative," the "Healthy Forests Initiative," hiding the real cost of the Medicaid bill, "the President has no war plan on his desk," "British intelligence has learned" about Saddam & plutonium from Nigeria, "we have no idea how much the war going to cost" 3 weeks before they requested $87 bil., etc.). I'm not finished but I'm out of time.