Joe Conason at Salon.com

[TexasEditor]

http://www.salon.com/opinion/conason/2003/09/05/iraq/

Joe Conason's Journal
Political prediction: The Bush White House will succeed in leading Americans in uniform away from the Republican Party.

----

<excerpt> The problem facing the neocons, of course, is that their plans have gone terribly wrong. No doubt the troops and their commanders are doing the best they can under very bad circumstances, and achieving some successes amid all the chaos. Unfortunately, there isn't much that our soldiers can do to remedy the inherent dishonesty, arrogance and incompetence of the Bush administration's Iraq policy.

Continued

[CatWoman]

1. I posted this in Editorials

But the more the merrier :hi:

It's a good read :D

[TexasEditor]

9. Sorry...

You'd have to read this site 24/7 not to duplicate something. I think Joe Conason is a great writer, he researches everything meticulously. Cheers to Joe Conason and Al Franken for what they do.

[dolstein]

2. Bush won't push them away, but Clark could lead them away

Sorry, but no matter how pathetic a commander in chief is, military voters aren't going to defect to the Democrats regardless of who their choice is. But nominating General Clark could change the Democratic Party's image overnight. After all, if a career military man says he's proud to be a Democrat, then perhaps these people will conclude that the Democratic Party is worth a second look after all.

[Julien Sorel]

3. No!

The Democratic image must remain intact, as the party that despises all things military, and is soft, even limp, on defense. That's the key to making voters realize that Democrats are different than Republicans. If Democrats aren't different, why should anyone vote for them? We need a candidate who will attack the military, not one who came from the military.

[grasswire]

6. hoo boy...

...Zinni's comments are good.

[edward]

8. Doesn't matter to the Republicans.

Why attack the Democratic party. Reagan-too busy making movies.
Bush-too busy drinking.
Sounds right, Democrats are weak in this area.

[dfong63]

4. good thinking! but why stop there?

let our next nominee be a military man, to win the military vote... but better yet, a hispanic military man, to lock in the latino vote... better still, a hispanic military transsexual man/woman, to pick up the women's vote too. let him have one blue eye and one brown, to get both the blue-eyed and brown-eyed vote. he'll be a shoo-in! who cares if he has no political track record, can't make up his mind, and only recently learned to say the word "democrat"?

[WillyT]

7. LOL !!! --- Good One !

:bounce::hi::bounce:

Yeah, lets show the rest of the country that we can goosestep with the best of 'em!!!

:eyes:

[TexasEditor]

10. WRONG!

My stepdad is a vet of WWII and Korea and he's planning to vote for the Dem nominee, after a lifetime of voting for Republicans. So are many of his friends at the VFW and the VA hospital. My nephew is in Iraq, he's Army. He was gung ho to go, but now he's fed up with it all, and he's not voting GOP this time around.

[TexasEditor]

11. I wonder...

how re-enlistment rates are doing these days?

[haele]

13. Plummetting like rocks down K-2....

I haven't seen or heard of a new "golden anchor" (over 75% retention/re-enlistment at the command over the fiscal year) yet this year on any of the Navy ships or Navy shore commands in San Diego - usually there's at least five by this time - and we've just got a month to go before next FY starts.

And there's a lot of very upset reservists wandering about town; seems they might as well have done a regular active duty enlistment.

The upside is that with the reservists being called up, local employment keeps looking upbeat - that is, until the 10K+ or so activated and deployed reservists are finally released back to their old guarenteed jobs in the civilian sector and the hundreds of extra employment for the community support services to familes where a member is in the military that goes along with a large deployment dry up.

There's looking to be a lot of unemployed people when the military force juggling act finally blows up in the administration's face.

There's only so much a military force that's not engaged in activities directly protecting the interests of family and community can do.
That particualr instinctive justification - which the majority of those who aren't inherantly sociopathic in the US military mentally use to be able to deploy and fight - is not present in this war.
Unlike WWII, there is absolutly no truly patriotic reason to be in Iraq - Iraq never posed a danger to the US, or to US commerce and travel - and that rankles the majority of those who are facing injury, mental terror, and death on the front lines.
When all one is doing is fighting to stay alive so someone else can get rich, especially when it seems that those in charge are doing their damn'dst to incite those fighting against you to fight even harder - there's no sense of honor.
It's a losing battle - and no grunt soldier or sailor wants to be on the recieving end of a bullet just so some CEO can get a few hundred thousand extra in their bonus check next year or fat pencil pusher in the Pentagon can get a cushy job when s/he goes out into the civilian sector in a year or so.

This adminstration is rapidly losing the support of the majority of it's military with the hardships it's putting them through for it's own profit. And all the flag wavin' and Toby Keith songs in the world can't mask it when your buddy's on the street in Bagdad bleeding to death from having his or her legs blown off while clearing the way for some minor Brown and Root suit on his way to some bar across town.
Lucky for them, this isn't ancient Rome - the average "Guard" isn't stuck in the military for life and is more likely to just up and go AWOL if he or she can't just leave when the enlistment is up, than group together to take out Cesaer and his corrupt minions and Senate.

Haele

[Grins]

5. Remember the Florida re-count in 2000...

I wonder if Bush/Baker & Co. will be as demanding of counting the military absentee ballots in 2004, as they were in 2000.

[tom_paine]

12. I think their disenfranchisement/stuffing/blocking/touchscreen-locking

methods are quite a bit more sophisticated.

I believe in order to "win" in the Stalinist Farce that will be 2004, the Democrats will have to literally win at least 60-40%.

Given what happened in Minnesota and Georgia in 2002, I'm not sure even that is certain.

[SharonAnn]

14. There's new "Internet Voting" for the military this time. Of course,

it's going to be at least as secret as the current "Black Box Technologies" and even more hackable.

What that means is that however the members of the military vote, the count will show (SURPRISE) that they overwhelmingly voted for GWB.

Remember, votes don't matter. Only the counting of the votes matters.