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Sunday, October 3, 2004
Rembember, and recall 
| | Friends, I return to where I started: We're in trouble in Iraq. We have to immediately get the Democratic and Republican politics out of this policy and start honestly reassessing what is the maximum we can still achieve there and what every American is going to have to do to make it happen. If we do not, we'll end up not only with a fractured Iraq, but with a fractured America, at war with itself and isolated from the world. |
| | I'm sorry, but this makes no sense. America is already deeply fractured -- just look at the polls, or talk to your neighbors; at war with itself -- look at how insanely close this election is likely to be; and isolated from the world. The nation's leaders gave Bush bipartisanship in the days after 9/11, and again in the leadup to the Iraq war, and Bush abused and insulted those foolish enough to think he is actually the "uniter" he once claimed to be. |
| | There are just about 30 days to the presidential election. Politics cannot, will not, should not stop at such a moment. Anyone who believes all the points Friedman makes in his column has no choice but to demand that Bush be booted out of office. |
| | Many Americans are ready to vote for Bush because they think it's a bad idea to "change horses in the middle of stream." |
| | But this horse is talking bubbles. And this isn't a stream. It's a flood. When John Kerry says "help is on the way," he may not be right, but he can't be more wrong than Bush. |
| | My sister, a retired Navy commander with a Master's from the Navy War College, nailed it back when Howard Dean, alone among the Democrats, had the vision and the balls to call this war a mistake, and appealed to voters to "take back" the country from the mandate-less minority that took it over after Bush was (in only the most narrow sense of the term) elected. |
| | She said this presidential election was something new: something like what recently elevated Arnold Schwartzenegger to governor in California. She said this was a "recall." |
| | It's time to recall George W. Bush. |
| | The Commander in Chief isn't unaccountable. He isn't an emperor, though his metaphorical clothes are finally starting to fall off. He reports to the American people. We must terminate his command. The only way to do that is by electing John Kerry in November. |
| | And I say this as somebody who has voted Libertarian for the past several elections, and who has carefully avoided getting caught up in, and taking sides, in political arguments. |
| | But I also say this as somebody who rembembers the Vietnam war. The Iraq war is different in many ways, but in a few terribly important ways it is creepily similar. |
| | What we did by going to war in Iraq, and by the way we did it, shows that this administration learned approximately nothing from our failures in Vietnam. John Kerry did. His opponents in this election seek to smear him for his opposition to the Vietnam war, but he was on the right side of that issue, and he's on the right side of the same issue today. |
| | War is a terribly complicated subject. But choices about commanders in chief are not, when an election is at hand. This country needs to be relieved of George W. Bush's command. Now is the time. It will help us do that if we remember the lessons we were taught thirty years ago. |
| | And four years from now may be way too late. |
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