Marril said:
This, quite frankly, is fallacious. Why respect a leader regardless of what he does? Regardless of the actions he takes? If Bush's actions do not deserve respect (and oh, does Bush need to be tried for war crimes), then Bush should not get respect for them.
Respect is one thing. Criticism is another. You can respect somebody, and still criticize his or her work. In fact, the criticisms look a lot better coming from a position of respect, rather than from a position of disrespect.
Bush has a LOT to answer for right now. The entire country is still reeling from his "Axis of Evil" speech, which is probably a large part of why North Korea and Iran are building their nuclear programs. Bush basically sold out his entire Presidential agenda with that speech, and hasn't been able to deliver it. Not to say that the goals were necessarily good. They weren't then, and they aren't now. However, there would have been a lot more respect for Bush if he had been able to carry out his entire Presidential agenda while he still had the power.
About Iraq. We won't be getting out before Bush is out of office. It will take at least a year before a motion to get out of Iraq reaches the Senate floor; another 6 months before it reaches the House floor; and at least a year afterwards before it's actually carried out. Bush simply cannot see that his "Daddy's Little War" effort is failing miserably, and is turning into another Vietnam, or at least Korea. I'm not saying that the Dems have a good exit plan either. However, something needs to be done to get us out of there. Right now, we are in the middle of a civil war of another country. That civil war must be played out. We cannot just go in and enforce our will upon those that are unwilling to listen to us. Nobody in the Middle East (save Israel, and possibly Jorden) likes us. We are trying to "save" a country that doesn't want to be saved and is surrounded by about a dozen other countries that likewise don't want to be saved, and don't want to see any country in the region be saved either.
Also, the domestic and economic problems in America are getting worse. The new and secondary housing market recently plummeted, and that was essentially the basis of the entire US economy for the past 5 years. We need some sort of plan so that the last recent recession doesn't happen again, and most certainly not so quickly. Invest in new energy sources. Hell, invest in oil if you have to. Just do something so that the economy doesn't crash and burn like it did earlier this century.
Our borders are swiss cheese. I'm not talking about Canada or Mexico, though those are pretty unguarded to begin with. I'm talking about the sea ports, even the airports with all their new security. It's all too easy to smuggle something into the country without anybody noticing. Case in point: when my family went to South Africa about a year and a half after 9/11, we brought back about 1.5 pounds of biltong (essentially South African beef jerkey). It's technically illigal to bring meat of any sort into the country. The meat was inside a brown paper bag insice a clear essentially Ziploc bag. Nobody caught us, not even the sniffer dogs, and we walked into the country with 1.5 pounds of "illigal" meat. This is not a bash on a law. It's a bash on how "secure" we think we are. If I can get away with 1.5 pounds of meat, who'se to say that I can't get away with 1.5 pounds of coke? Or weed? Or TNT? That's what makes our borders unsafe.
OK, enough rambling from me right now. Enjoy!
