"This President, and his misguided policies, have put this country through the longest and worst economic crisis we have ever suffered."
"This President was sitting around in Washington, probably reading childrens' books, without a care in the world, when Pearl Harbor was attacked."
"This President has recklessly invaded the European continent, at the cost of countless American lives, to attack a country that posed no threat to us. Let me remind you, it was Japan, not Germany, that perpetrated 12/7."
"This President, through inept diplomacy, has our forces fighting nearly alone in the Pacific."
"This President has wastefully sacrificed the lives of thousands of Marines in order to gain a small foothold on minor pieces of rock in the middle of the Pacific Ocean."
"This President has thrown away our limited resources to fund a white elephant he calls the Manhattan Project."
"This President has no plan to win the peace after the war."
"Many foreign leaders hope I win."
"My opponent was AWOL during WWI."
"Why hasn't the President gotten our French allies on board with us?"
Please submit more likely Kerry quotes from sixty years ago...
Article comments
1 - Evilwhiteguy
I can't believe you didn't mention racial profiling...
2 - RJ
"This President has consistently discriminated against decent German and Japanese citizens..."
3 - Evilwhiteguy
"This President has lead us into a quagmire in both the Pacific and the European theaters."
4 - Evilwhiteguy
"I voted for the war before I voted against it."
5 - Evilwhiteguy
"This President has had the worst economic record since Herbert Hoover."
6 - Evilwhiteguy
And since there basically were no entitlement programs before the New Deal, there is always, "My opponent has ran up the deficit more than any other President in history."
7 - Shark
Cool.
A Right Wing Circle Jerk!
8 - Shark
What if Bush were Der Fuhrer in 1944?
Herr Bush: "There's likely to be more violence before the transfer of sovereignty and after the transfer of sovereignty to the new Vichy Government.
The terrorists and French loyalists like DeGaulle would rather see many French die than have any live in freedom.
But terrorists will not determine the future of France.
The Vichy Government is moving every week toward free elections and a permanent place among free nations.
Like every nation that has made the journey to democracy, the French will raise up a government that reflects their own culture and values.
I sent German troops to France to defend our security, not to stay as an occupying power. I sent German troops to Frace to make its people free, not to make them German.
The French will write their own history and find their own way.
As they do, French people can be certain a free Frnace will always have a friend in Germany.
In the last 32 months, history has placed great demands on our country and events have come quickly.
We did not seek this war on terror, but this is the world as we find it. We must keep our focus.
We must do our duty.
--Seig Heil!"
{from a speech in May 04 at the "War College"}
9 - Big Time Patriot
If George Bush ran for President in 1944 he would say, "Why are we fighting the Germans? They have been good family friends of the Bush's for years. If elected I will just redact any reports of connections between Germany and the Holocaust and instruct the intelligence forces not to follow up on anything to do with my families good friends in the German industrial industries."
10 - Big Time Patriot
Also, George Bush would run in 1944 on a policy of resisting any investigation into Pearl Harbor.
11 - Bob A. Booey
I never thought I'd see the day right-wingers use FDR as an icon.
The irony of most of all of your relatively inane comments in this discussion is that Bush has managed both the largest deficits in history and his ardent mission to dismantle the legacy of FDR and the New Deal, any semblance of a social safety net still remaining after Reagan and Clinton.
RJ, I think you're implying some analogy between WWII and this Iraq war. That's a really weak argument, morally and substantively. Perhaps everyone's too eager to use Vietnam as the frame of reference, but Iraq is not Japan in WWII. The offensive against Iraq would have been more like attacking China after Pearl Harbor. Germany's a poor analogy since Hitler was perhaps the greatest example of someone with militaristic, imperial ambitions (which we knew about for quite some time) in the 20th century. Iraq's military capability after the Gulf War simply didn't allow it to be irredentist. Saddam was no realistic threat to invade other nations, the WMD issue aside. Yes, he did it once to Kuwait, and in the process, saw any military means he once possessed to fight the Kurds or Iran destroyed in the process. All indications were that he had no real interest in territory, either, after the first Gulf War.
Maybe you could make the moral argument about Saddam's treatment of his people, but Hitler, really? I mean, come on. Then we're talking dozens of regimes that deserve ass-kicking before you ever considered Iraq.
That is all.
12 - Shark
Best line of the day (that was NOT mine)
Booey: "The offensive against Iraq would have been more like attacking China after Pearl Harbor."
Ahaha. Good one.
13 - Eric Olsen
actually, it would have been more like invading Japan after Pearl Harbor, kicking the fascist nationalist militarists out on their asses, ushering in a transitional democratic goverment, then invading Italy - all part of the same fucking war
14 - Bob A. Booey
Olsen, I addressed some of this on the other topics, but swearing a lot and sounding really pissed off doesn't make a historical analogy true. If you really want to take your counterfactual analogy to its logical extreme, adding a third front to WWII and taking on Italy would have almost guaranteed defeat in Western Europe. Maybe you'd even be writing that last comment in German talking about how we need to "kick the fucking asses of those fucking pansy democracy assholes who want to destroy our way of life in German America ... same fucking war."
I consider you a reasonable man and you've written in previous discussions that Iraq didn't have anything to do with 9/11, as a majority in this country have finally come around to understanding (if too late for Kerry's electoral prospects). Are you backtracking on this because of your newfound support for Bush in this election? That'd be some kind of cognitive dissonance at work there.
Is everything OK? You seem to have taken a noticeably harsher far-right turn in your last few political comments.
No, I'm not comparing our current militarism toward Nazism, and it's ridiculous that a post like RJ's original post compares all our enemies in the world today to Hitler. There are very different forces and ideologies at work and to continue these anachronistic comparisons only illustrates how we continue to be slow in adapting to the challenges of a changing world. We're talking about a world that is more complicated than the Cold War's Us vs Them domino game, no matter how attractive that black-and-white simplicity is in affording us opportunities for indiscriminate violence even as we face the threat of indiscriminate violence ourselves.
Talking tough (and unrealistically) and opening ourselves up to being vulnerable to threats from all over the globe through military over-stretch are two different things. Most military planners pre-9/11 concluded we could not fight two major wars at once and that the military needed to be re-shaped to be able to fight two small-scale wars or possibly one large war and a small escalation elsewhere. Today's situation, where the military is stretched to its limits far short of that stipulation, demonstrates that these naive fantasies about "kicking everyone's ass" invites more trouble than we bargain for. Right now, we could not manage any realistic response to a developing situation in North Korea, Russia, or elsewhere with our current commitment in the Middle East, much less another offensive war. We're already withdrawing our troops from Europe and Asia in order to redeploy and circulate new troops to the Middle East. A big part of "big stick" diplomacy has always been making people more afraid of force rather than having to actually use force and demonstrate your weaknesses -- we're currently in that position with our military. Short of extreme total war situations that no one (no matter how hawkish) should ever hope to see in their lifetime, we're stretched to our limit. Yes, we're the biggest, baddest kid on the block. But we can't take on all comers at the same time -- that's how empires become part of history books.
Yet another reason Iraq was a bad idea -- in an uncertain world, we need to have the resources, political will, and public support to go to war when absolutely necessary against an aggressive foe in the worst-case scenario possibility. Iraq was NOT that foe and our security is weakened by the fact that we're exhausting much of our military manpower and resources on a war we didn't need to fight when we live in an unstable world where we don't know when we will need to fight. Traditionally, we've always been vigilant and hedged against possible escalation in hot spots of the world. That's one reason Bush the Elder and his security team and former advisors, i.e., the conservative foreign policy establishment, opposed this war along with the long-haired hippies and Howard Dean. The war on Iraq makes us appear less like a strong leader every day.
That is all.
15 - Bob A. Booey
For all you history geeks, any engagement with Italian forces was small-scale at best. Northern Africa and the Mediterranean never formed a significant simultaneous third front in WWII. Plus, war was different then.
That is all.