“I just think an electoral defeat of Bush will be seen worldwide as a rejection of the War on Terror.”

WHO CARES what the world might think about what our election might mean for the War on Terror? The world would be wrong to see it the way Simon says it would, and even if the world was right, it’s not their call.

Its OUR democracy, OUR election, OUR White House and it’s OUR call.

Hearing this idiotic logic from the same type of scum who complain that Kerry would require Chirac’s opinion before fighting a war just makes it all doubly ridiculous.

RE: Why We Are the Way We Are

dear Mr. Simon-

I am impressed with your clarity and balance in regards to the WAR we are now in. I have a theory about the global implications of this cleansing, and wish to share it with you. I will not, however, post it publicly on this site. If you forward me a secured e-mail address, I will forward my theory to you, and I am sure it will be of interest. My contact information is available to you through Type Key.

namaste-

Wolfgang Faust

Welcome to the Math Wars! It is really amazing what they are trying to use to teach children simple arithmetic. You’ve seen first hand with your son.

What you have probably escaped, maybe without realizing it since you obviously love to read and probably taught your children to read (you homeschooled them even if you didn’t do so purposefully), is Whole Language. When you’ve had all your stomach can stand researching the gibberish they are teaching our children for math, have a look at how they are handling reading. Then wonder what happens to the kids who don’t have mom and dad reading to them and, slowly but surely, teaching them to read. Johnny can’t read because they aren’t teaching reading in many schools.

Maybe you didn’t know but Woodward’s “Plan of Attack” is favorable to the President. Its recommended reading on the Bush Website.

Here is something you also don’t seem to know… The military always is planning for contingencies. We have been planning for Desert Storm II since Desert Storm I. This planning went on during the Clinton administration.

Here is something else you haven’t appeared to pick up on over the past few days. The Senate Intelligence Committee report vindicates the Bush Administration and reveals several prominent critics to be liars.

And I suppose you probably don’t know that there have been significant residual finds of undeclared chemical munitions during the past several weeks.

Your ignorance of current events is matched by your ignorance of Baseball. All real Chicagoans support the White Sox. Just ask Mayor Daley.

Jerry the White Sox fan.

You say that Kerry won’t cut and run. If you are basing that on what he is saying now you should remember how quickly he can change his mind when faced with a difficult decision.When the decision on the 87 billion funding bill came up he tried to get it funded with a reversal of the Bush tax cuts, You can argue that Kerry’s proposal was good and that he made an effort to fund the troops and keep the deficit down. When his bill was defeated he was asked if he was still going to vote to fund the troops. Kerry stated that to vote against the funding would be “irresponsible” and I thought now there is a statesman, who could get past his own political goals and do the right thing for the troops. But what happened when he had to voice his vote? He voted no! The very action that Kerry himself said would be “irressponsible” suddenly became the thing to do. Why? Because he was getting his butt kicked around by Dean and Kerry, for purely political considerations, decided that his race for the President was more important then whether or not our soldiers would have the weapons and equipment to defend themselves. When asked to explain his rapid turnaround this great intellectual giant stated, “well you know I voted for the bill before I voted against it” Remember, the question of how the 87 billion would be funded was over and the question was only whether or not the troops could would be funded or not. It was a simple yes or no question.Kerry put his finger in the wind, he saw that Dean was going to beat him if he voted yes so of course this man of vision and integrity decided that the troops could make do with what they had and that his own political future was far more important.

On his VP pick of Edwards. We all know that during any primary candidates of the same party attack each other and disagree on policy issues.That is the purpose of any primary, Rep. or Dem.But when JFK was asked about Edwards qualifications to be President he stated that the oval office was to important a position to rely on “on the job training”. What did he mean. He was saying that Edwards was not ready to run this country and that we need someone who is prepared NOW,not years down the road. In todays climate, where the possibility of the VP having to take over the #1 job at any moment who does that great “intelect” Kerry pick.The man who in Kerry’s own words is simply too inexpierenced to handle the job!Why? Because Edwards polled better.Once again Kerry puts his political interests ahead of what is good for the country.Mr. Cub, if you can give a good defense of these two Kerry flip flops I will consider switching my vote.Explain how a man who will take a , and these are Kerry’s words not mine, make a “irresponsible” vote on the troops and pick a “unqualified” man for Vice President.

—————-

Hey, look at all the chickencommenters who have dropped by. I call them chicken because they drop their misinformation on dead threads in the belief that nobody will drop by to counter their silliness.

Anyone who posts “Much of Iraq has also regressed to a state of terrorist-friendly anarchy” is simply asserting a belief..not facts.

Your time would be better served looking up information than hunting for dead threads.

The steady drumbeat of ex-administration officials, the president’s own words, and books such as “Plan of Attack” clearly demonstrate that while W was on vacation, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Franks and others were cooking up an Iraq war plan before 9/11 even happened. Was Iraq unfriendly to the U.S.? Absolutely. Were they somehow unique in that regard? Not in the slightest.

It’s the responsibility of American citizens to think critically about issues, and to let our elected representatives know how we feel. Frankly, I’m angry that people I know have been needlessly injured in Iraq, and that we’ve spent nearly $200B so far prosecuting this conflict.

For all the anti-Kerry folks out there, I don’t recall him ever saying we’d pull back and take a break. He’s said he will continue to push for a positive resolution in Iraq. However, he has also demonstrated a willingness to look for another solution that doesn’t require the U.S. to shoulder nearly 100% of the financial and personnel burden. Bush should have been doing this from the outset, but unfortunately he has neither the experience nor the intellect to understand issues in such a way that we can expect anything other than a good vs. evil, black vs. white, for us or against us, mentality.

It’s time for someone new. George Bush in the Oval Office is not remotely critical to prosecuting the war on terrorism. If the cause is right, it can transcend one person, and in this case the cause is just, but the execution is horrific. It will be interesting to see how the Republican Congress supports a new president. I’m guessing we’ll see more of the same stonewalling we saw when Clinton worked to halt ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. Unfortuntately the recent history of the Republican party demonstrates that supporting the troops is only important when a Republican is in the executive office, and payment of any expenses can be pushed to future generations.

1. http://www.nrdc.org/legislation/rollbacks/rr2004.pdf

2. http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story?id=5939345&pageid=rs.PoliticsArchive&pageregion=mainRegion&rnd=1089702841433&has-player=true&version=6.0.11.847

3. http://www.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,12374,1153530,00.html

Thanks for having an open mind and remembering that economy, war and gay marriage are not all that matter!

I’d like to ditto everything Eric Deamer said in his first post, apart from the idea that Americans fold at the news of casualties. I’m with Ledeen and others that Americans back away from casualties only when they are asked to lose soldiers without winning the conflict, or when the goals and objectives of a conflict are not clear.

Eightteen deaths in Somalia is eightteen too many when the public doesn’t know what we’re doing there. (\Which, of course, is why an administration’s ability to explain itself to the public is so critical.

Apart from that, Eric has said what I’ve been trying say for a while now, only better.

I’ve planned to vote for Bush on WOT all along, but in the past week I’ve stumbled onto a new reason to vote for Bush, which is education.

I’ve just discovered the “Math wars,” and my brain is set on stun. Having to fight a war on terror and a war on math at the same time may just be the End. Talk about your two-front conflict.

I’d been feeling for a while that Democrats are hopeless on education, but now that I’ve discovered fuzzy math I feel the Dems are actively bad. Ted Kennedy is trying to gut the No Child Left Behind Act, which is pretty much our only defense against math “reform.” John Kerry hasn’t been sounding much better.

I should add that many, many liberals loathe “constructivist math” as much as conservatives do. Brookings has terrific White Papers posted on the subject, and the main anti-constructivist math organizations are bipartisan.

it’s worth checking Brookings for a report called “Computation Skills, Calculators, and Achievement Gaps: An Analysis of NAEP Items.” In this report you can watch black and Hispanic kids making big gains in math scores throughout the 80s, then losing those gains when constructivist math takes over. The data isn’t quite that clean, but it’s close.

It doesn’t matter: the Democratic Party is too beholden to the teachers’ unions to ride herd on the education establishment.

We have the Clinton administration to thank for fuzzy math. Clinton’s Secretary of Education pushed it, and actually went so far as to create a list of Clinton-approved math textbooks, all of them exemplars of constructivist math. Mathematicians from all over the country, including 4 Nobel Prize winners, formally petitioned the administration not to take this step.

To make a long story short, I am now in the position of having to homeschool my son in math.

He’ll still be in public school, taking public school math.

But every day he’ll come home and we’ll work our way through Saxon Math (as well as, probably, Singapore Math.) The time he would have spent finally learning to play a musical instrument and read music, or getting exercise, or reading books, will go to learning the math he’s not learning in school.

I could go on, but I won’t. For me, a vote for Bush is a vote for education.