The president's home town newspaper, The Lone Star Iconoclast, endorsed him for his first run but, facing up to reality, now endorses Kerry.
They have a lot of valid reasons:
Kerry Will Restore American Dignity
Few Americans would have voted for George W. Bush four years ago if he had promised that, as President, he would:
- Empty the Social Security trust fund by $507 billion to help offset fiscal irresponsibility and at the same time slash Social Security benefits.
- Cut Medicare by 17 percent and reduce veterans’ benefits and military pay.
- Eliminate overtime pay for millions of Americans and raise oil prices by 50 percent.
- Give tax cuts to businesses that sent American jobs overseas, and, in fact, by policy encourage their departure.
- Give away billions of tax dollars in government contracts without competitive bids.
- Involve this country in a deadly and highly questionable war, and
- Take a budget surplus and turn it into the worst deficit in the history of the United States, creating a debt in just four years that will take generations to repay.
The publishers of The Iconoclast endorsed Bush four years ago, based on the things he promised, not on this smoke-screened agenda.
Today, we are endorsing his opponent, John Kerry, based not only on the things that Bush has delivered, but also on the vision of a return to normality that Kerry says our country needs.
Kerry has remained true to his vote granting the President the authority to use the threat of war to intimidate Saddam Hussein into allowing weapons inspections. He believes President Bush rushed into war before the inspectors finished their jobs.
Kerry also voted against President Bush’s $87 billion for troop funding because the bill promoted poor policy in Iraq, privileged Halliburton and other corporate friends of the Bush administration to profiteer from the war, and forced debt upon future generations of Americans.
Kerry’s four-point plan for Iraq is realistic, wise, strong, and correct.
The publishers of the Iconoclast differ with Bush on other issues, including the denial of stem cell research, shortchanging veterans’ entitlements, cutting school programs and grants, dictating what our children learn through a thought-controlling “test” from Washington rather than allowing local school boards and parents to decide how young people should be taught, ignoring the environment, and creating extraneous language in the Patriot Act that removes some of the very freedoms that our founding fathers and generations of soldiers fought so hard to preserve.
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Article comments
1 - David Flanagan
...but also on the vision of a return to normality that Kerry says our country needs.
Sorry, there is no road back to "normality," whatever that is. 9/11 is an exclamation point in history and everything afterward is different.
I realize that Kerry was quite popular in this VVAW days, calling his fellow soldiers war criminals, but it's different today based solely on the fact that we were attacked on our own soil, with 3000 civilians murdered in just a couple of hours, with tens of billions of dollars of damage to our economy, 1.5 million jobs lost in the 90 days following the attack, and ongoing promises by al Qaeda and other organizations to commit more "9/11s".
Thats the new normality.
David
2 - Hal Pawluk
If it is, David, why did Bush abandon the war against terrorism, and instead go on to create an even greater threat than existed before 9/11? As I said in another post:
[links open in new windows]
3 - kuros
the general pouplace tires of all the "schtick"
4 - Hal Pawluk
? Could you explain that, Kuros?
5 - Forrest
I guess the local newspaper there in Crawford has a readership of what, eight or nine hundred...
Hal probably reaches more readers than that.
6 - Taloran
I am far from a Bush supporter, or even admirer, but there is a misstatement in the Iconoclast article that I think deserves notice.
"Few Americans would have voted for George W. Bush four years ago if he had promised that, as President, he would... raise oil prices by 50 percent."
Bush's camp on occasion has intimated that high oil prices are good for the economy (though they have now done an about-face) and they have seemingly done nothing to stop the oil price hikes, but OPEC sets the price, not Bush.
I am largely in agreement with the rest of the article, however.